Deadly Business

by Quintin Jardine

  I nodded agreement; the wound was very high on the inner thigh and the whole femoral arterial structure seemed to have been severed. A tourniquet wouldn’t have done much good.

  ‘He bled out in a couple of minutes,’ Conrad concluded.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Less than a quarter of an hour ago.’

  ‘Where’s Janet now?’ I asked.

  ‘Where I left her, I hope. I asked Audrey to stay with her.’

  I assumed she’d taken Tom there too. ‘Have you done anything?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not yet. There hasn’t been time. I suppose we should call the police.’

  ‘And have this little boy stigmatised for the rest of his life?’ I retorted. ‘He might be below the age of criminal responsibility, but I don’t care. I’m not having him mauled by the media.’ Wee Jonathan made a snuffling sound, which I took to be agreement. ‘He’s just lost his mother. What’s happened here stays here, just like Vegas. You’re the fixer, Conrad; so fix it.’

  ‘Primavera.’ Liam spoke from the doorway. ‘Miles can’t be involved in this.’

  ‘The hell I can’t,’ my brother-in-law protested.

  ‘No,’ I said, firmly. ‘He’s right. It’s best all round for you to leave. You’ve got too much to lose. Whatever we do to clean this up it’s going to be stupid, and it’s going to be illegal. Our Dawn would kill both of us if I let you get involved then we got caught.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ he insisted, ‘I have to do something to help.’

  ‘Then take the kids, Tom as well, and get them out of here on your posh new plane. Take Susie’s car, leave it in a car park at the airport and once you’ve got where you’re going, text me the bay number and I’ll have it collected.’

  ‘Okay,’ he agreed, ‘but where? I’d head for California, but the kids would need visas.’

  ‘Then go back to Scotland. Take them to Mac Blackstone. Better him than my dad, since he’s only Tom’s grandfather, and the two Js have nothing to do with him, and don’t know him. I promised Tom he’d see his granddads this week, and Mac hasn’t seen the other two in a long time. Then you go home; I’ll let you know later how this all pans out.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he agreed. ‘But hold on a minute. What about the chauffeur who brought us here? Won’t he talk?’

  ‘Miles,’ I sighed. ‘This is the south of France. As far as black car companies are concerned, we were invisible.’

  ‘In that case, it sounds like a plan,’ he conceded. ‘But what about the little guy?’ He nodded in the general direction of my bundle, who had quietened down. ‘Isn’t he going to need looking after?’

  ‘There’s nobody better to do that than Janet and Tom.’

  Miles came with me as I took wee Jonathan to join his siblings. The other two were quiet, knowing that some serious shit had hit the fan but not quite what. ‘There’s been an accident,’ I began, ‘and Duncan’s dead.’ Janet and Tom were both impassive. At least they didn’t whoop with glee.

  Then I told them the rest as Conrad had explained it. ‘We need you all to go away with Miles, to Grandpa Mac in Anstruther. The rest of us have things to do here, then Liam and I will join you. But one thing,’ I stressed. ‘You don’t talk to anyone else about what happened here. Wee Jonathan needs to try to forget about it and you have to help him.’

  They both nodded. Another year of childhood’s gone in a single day, I thought, and it almost broke my heart.

  ‘What about Mum’s funeral?’ Janet asked, solemnly.

  I looked back at her. ‘Where would you like it to be? Here or in Scotland? It’s your decision, yours and wee Jonathan’s.’

  She considered the question for a while, then replied, ‘Scotland. It’s where she was from.’ Her brother nodded agreement.

  ‘Then so it shall be,’ I promised.

  ‘Won’t someone come looking for Duncan?’ Audrey whispered as I left.

  ‘The Nevada State police might,’ I replied, ‘and possibly Strathclyde. Shame he was never here. I doubt if anyone else will, though.’

  Miles and the three children were gone in less than half an hour. Meanwhile, when I got back to the kitchen, the blood was almost all gone. Liam and Conrad had stripped off their clothes, all of them, to avoid contamination, hosed the bulk of it into a drain in the floor, and were cleaning the remnants with what smelled like industrial-strength bleach.

  Duncan was still there, but he was wrapped in what looked to me like a sail.

  It was. ‘I have a boat,’ Conrad said. ‘I keep it in the marina at Fontvieille. Sometimes I do a bit of night fishing, and tonight’s going to be one of those nights. Once it gets fully dark, I’ll load him,’ he jerked a thumb at the body, ‘into the car and take him down.’

  ‘We will,’ Liam murmured.

  ‘No, just me.’

  ‘All due respect, Conrad, but there are bound to be cameras down there. You might be fit, but looking at what I can see right now tells me that carrying that thing on board, you ain’t going to be able to make it look like it’s nothing more than a sail.’

  ‘But it won’t look any more right with two of us carrying it.’

  Liam grinned, and flexed his musculature for a second. ‘There won’t be two of us carrying it.’

  ‘When you two naked men have finished your pose-down contest,’ I barked at them, ‘get used to the idea that there will be a woman on board.’ Liam opened his mouth but I shut it for him. ‘You guys are not risking everything on your own,’ I decreed. ‘No arguments.’

  And that’s how it was. We were able to park a few metres away from Conrad’s mooring. Liam lifted the sail and its contents out of the trunk and hefted it on board as if it weighed ten kilos or so. On deck the three of us unrolled it so that the body fell into the footwell out of sight of everything, even the sharpest-eyed owl, and we fixed the sail to the mast, as if it had been taken away for maintenance, and returned renewed. Obviously there were no bloodstains on it, since Duncan didn’t have any left.

  We left the small port under the engine, but once we were clear, Conrad went on to wind power. It was a nice night for a sail, less humid on the Med than it had been on land. We headed away from shore until the lowest of the lights of Menton started to disappear below the horizon, when our skipper deemed we had gone far enough.

  Duncan Culshaw didn’t have a coffin, or even a shroud, just the boat’s massive anchor and a few other heavy weights that we had found on board. Liam had never met the man alive, so he said a couple of words as we tipped him over the side. ‘So long, mate.’

  He’ll be well into the aquatic food chain by now.

  Conrad and I shared a bottle of red on the way back. Liam stuck to fizzy water; not even a nautical burial could shake his resolve.

  Conrad was on his second glass when he glanced towards the horizon. ‘It’s funny how life works out, isn’t it?’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloody hilarious,’ I snorted.

  ‘No, seriously,’ he insisted. ‘I had a plan for dealing with Culshaw and that was it, what we’ve just done, only my version was that I was going to persuade him to come night fishing for real, go as far out as we went, then tip him over the side. He couldn’t swim a stroke; never left the shallow end of the pool. I was going to give it ten minutes then make a distress call to the marine patrol. They’d have found him floating somewhere, and a neat line would have been drawn under him.’

  ‘Couldn’t we still do that?’ Liam asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Hardly. We’d have a tough job explaining why three of us couldn’t have managed to save him. Also, the cops would wonder why he didn’t come to the surface. But we couldn’t have that happen, could we, not with that fucking great hole in his leg.’

  As he spoke, my mind went back a few days, to the evening when we’d found out about Susie and Duncan being married. ‘Friday, in my house,’ I said to him, ‘that tune you started whistling, when we were having a drink and talking about it; I know what it was now. It
was “Sailing”, wasn’t it?’

  He grinned, but said nothing.

  As we neared port, and the lights grew brighter and Conrad had to concentrate on steering, I leaned against Liam. ‘What happens next?’ he asked.

  ‘You mean apart from me fucking your brains out when we get home?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he murmured. ‘I was thinking a little beyond that.’

  ‘As far as the company’s concerned, that will be sold; Buddy Beaujean’s the likely buyer. He says he wants to expand his involvement in Britain and Europe. Obviously I have to talk to the kids about it, but I’ll try to persuade them that they need to make lives for themselves and that it would only be an encumbrance to them.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ he agreed. ‘Now go further still.’

  I knew what he meant, and I had an answer ready, one that had been forming since Susie’s death, and maybe even before. ‘Janet and wee Jonathan have no one,’ I said. ‘No blood relatives other than Mac Blackstone, who’s an old man, and Oz’s sister Ellen, who’s a great woman but who hated their mother, and couldn’t hide it from them forever. They’re orphans, Liam. Worse, they’re rich orphans, and at least one of them is bound to be traumatised by what happened tonight. So what do you think happens next?’

  ‘You’ll adopt them,’ he murmured.

  ‘Absolutely. It’s only right that they’re brought up with their half-brother.’ I paused. ‘And that would be a hell of a lot for a lifelong bachelor to take on, more than I could ever ask.’

  ‘Will you live here?’

  ‘Hell no! With the memories of tonight, and Oz haunting the bloody place? No, it gets sold, and the two Js move to St Martí. They’ll be fine with that. They like it there. I’ll try and persuade Conrad and Audrey to come with us. If I can, we’ll buy them a house near mine.’

  He nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ he agreed. ‘So why are you freezing me out?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I just assumed …’

  He kissed me. ‘Assume nothing about me, lover,’ he whispered, ‘other than the best.’

  ‘In that case,’ I sighed, with a smile, ‘let’s just try it on for a while and see if it fits.’

  Eighteen

  That night, when, finally, I fell asleep, I had the strangest dream.

  We were still full of light, Liam and I, when Conrad parked in the garage beneath the house. The two of us climbed the single stair that led to the hall and stepped out.

  Audrey was there, and still she looked anxious, even more than she had a few hours before, if that was possible. ‘It’s okay,’ I reassured her. ‘Deed done, everything fixed.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. Her eyes flickered to her right. I looked over her shoulder and saw a figure, a tall male figure, the garden lights lending him an aura as he stood in the doorway that led to the deck around the pool, silhouetted against the night sky.

  I moved towards him, frowning. He couldn’t be the police, surely.

  Then he stepped into the light; and his aura seemed to come with him.

  He wasn’t the police.

  He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and a check shirt with no sleeves, so that you could see every one of the hard muscles on his arms. In a pose-down with this guy, Liam was a loser.

  We moved closer to each other. His skin was tanned, but not like that of a northern European on holiday; instead, like that of a man who lived and worked under a harder sun.

  He didn’t look like Keanu Reeves any more, that was for sure. His hair was mostly grey, military-style, in what they call a buzz cut, as neatly trimmed as the beard that defined his features. His nose was a little broader than I remembered Keanu’s having been, his cheekbones a little higher, his eyebrows a shade further apart.

  Then he spoke, in an accent that might well have been Scottish in origin but which had become imbued with other influences, mostly west coast American.

  ‘Okay,’ he growled, ‘where is the bastard who’s trying to cheat my kids?’

  And that’s when I fainted in my dream, and in the same moment sprang into full wakefulness, my eyes searching the room in vain then filling with tears as I realised that however good, and true and loyal the sleeping man beside me might prove to be, he would always take second place to a ghost, one that would never let me alone.