Wearing Purple ob-3

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘What’s that bright light over to the west?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s Ibrox. Rangers have a UEFA Cup tie tonight. I thought the whole city knew that.’

  ‘Not me. I’m a rugby man.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘An atheist.’

  ‘Who did the conversion of this building?’ he asked.

  ‘Need you ask?’ Susie interrupted in her high, brittle voice, from the kitchen doorway. ‘This is one of Gantry Developments’ finest achievements. Six years ago we won a Saltire Society award for this project.’

  ‘How come you live in a semi-detached in Clarkston, then?’ Dylan shot back at her.

  She laughed. ‘I couldn’t afford one of these at the time. But we’ve got another big conversion on the drawing board at the moment, a big redundant church at the top of St Vincent Street. It’s grade A listed, but it’s derelict. If we get planning permission, I’m having the best of those.’

  ‘If you get planning permission. .’ I didn’t try to hide my incredulity.

  ‘Come on, Oz. My dad can’t pull any strings for his own company, or we’d get crucified. But we’ve consulted the City planning officials, and the Historic Scotland people about all the things we’d need to do for the conversion to be acceptable. We think we can meet all their conditions and still have a viable development.’

  ‘Make sure you put a lift in it, will you?’ said Jan, emerging from the kitchen with a tray loaded with plates of toast and pate, our first course. ‘That’s the one drawback about this place.’

  Susie nodded. ‘I know.We couldn’t do that in here because of the layout of the building. This is listed too. But in the new one, we’ll be able to build a lift-shaft inside the main tower without the machinery being seen from outside.’ She took her seat at the table, facing Dylan. ‘I’ll show you the plans next time you’re in the office. When will that be?’

  ‘I’ve got other things to do tomorrow afternoon and Thursday, standing commitments to other clients,’ Jan replied, ‘and I want to work here on Friday. I could come in to see you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Can’t do morning, I’m afraid. I’m doing my Lady Provost act, accompanying my dad to an official opening, and there’s a lunch afterwards.’

  ‘Oh well, I’ll just have to hold on to my patience until Monday.’ She shot our guest a sudden, meaningful glance. ‘I can barely wait, I tell you.’

  Susie’s eyebrows shot up in one of her classic nervous gestures. ‘What! Are you on to something?’ she burst out.

  ‘Could well be,’ said my wife, pausing before biting into a piece of toast, layered thick with pate. ‘I’m looking into the health care division, the last on my list, and I’ve found something which is beginning to look very interesting. I’ll need to go over it again, and then I’ll need to consult a few people.’

  ‘What is it?’ Susie demanded, eagerly.

  ‘I don’t want to say just across the dinner table, so please don’t press me.’ Dylan was attacking his starter, so he didn’t notice her quick gesture, the tiny nod of her head in his direction. But Susie and I did. ‘I expect to be absolutely sure of my ground by Monday. After that, you’ll have to decide where we go.’

  ‘Anything I can do in the meantime?’

  Jan nodded. ‘You could look out the personnel files of everyone employed at management level in that part of the business. Now please, don’t let’s discuss it any more.’

  Dylan reached across and tapped me on the arm. ‘Let’s talk about you then, Oz. What the hell’s all this wrestling stuff about? How did you get into it? All that big Davis said at the City Chambers was that a mutual friend introduced you.’

  I decided that the tall grass of the truth was my best hiding place. ‘That’s right. Greg McPhillips, an old university mate. He’s Everett’s lawyer.’

  ‘But why did he put you in the frame for that job? You’re a detective, for Christ’s sake, not a fairground barker.’

  The tall grass was on fire. I found fresh cover in a total fabrication. ‘When we were at university, Greg and I worked on Sundays for a guy who had a market stall. I was good at it; when Everett told him about the announcing job, Greg remembered that.’

  I looked him in the eye and waited for his comeback line. There was always one with him. He gave me a big, slow, cheesy grin. ‘What did you sell, then?’

  ‘Lucky knickers.’

  All three, Mike, Susie and Jan, stopped eating and looked at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘Lucky knickers?’ said Dylan.

  ‘That’s right,’ I shot back, hitting him between the eyes with the appalling punch line. ‘Every girl who bought them got done.’

  Chapter 24

  The GWA logistics manager had done a deal with the airline, booking a block of business class seats on the Manchester-Barcelona flight for the price of economy class. The staging had been sent out three days earlier in trucks, the journey planned so that its arrival would coincide with ours.

  I didn’t know at the time whether Everett had fixed it, or whether it was just a coincidence, but when we boarded the flight after a three and a half hour coach trip from Glasgow, I found myself in a window seat next to Sonny Leonard.

  All the way down on the bus I had been thinking about Jan; how perfectly we had made love the night before, how beautiful she had looked that morning when I kissed her goodbye, how rich in quality our life had become, and how much we were looking forward to being parents. The reality of her pregnancy was just coming home to us both, and it had a strange effect.

  ‘What are we going to do, Oz,’ she had asked me, dreamily, as the winter moonlight streamed through our bedroom window, ‘when we don’t have anything else to wish for, because we’ve got everything we’ve ever wanted?’

  I remembered how I spread my fingers and placed my hand gently on her warm belly, my thumb in her navel and the end of my little finger in her thick mat of dark hair. I had tried to imagine that I could feel the baby move, although of course it was far too early. I gazed down at her and as I did, I realised that something strange was happening to me; something called growing up.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ I told her. ‘We’ll build a new set of ambitions for this chap, or chapess, in here, and we’ll do our best to make them happen as well. After that’s done. . we’ll still have each other, decrepit old buggers though we may be by then; and who could want for more? Not me.’

  I closed my eyes as the bus drove smoothly down the M6: once again, I saw Jan’s beautiful face in the moonlight, heard her throaty laugh, bathed in the warmth of her smile, and sank down once more into her loving arms.

  I was still thinking of her as I took my seat beside Sonny Leonard on the aircraft. We had spoken a couple of times in Newcastle and at the SECC, but on a ‘Do this for me, please’, basis rather than personally. I glanced at the American as I fastened my seat belt; he didn’t look to be in a talkative mood, and frankly neither was I.

  Show me a man who says that he actually likes travelling by air and I will show you an idiot. Okay, I know that our world has been revolutionised by the invention of the heavier-than-air flying machine, but that doesn’t mean that we can afford to uncross our fingers when we are thirty thousand feet above the ground, our lives depending on an apparatus built and operated by man and subject therefore to human error.

  Take-off is the part of the flight I hate most of all. I can cope with landing because the sight of the ground getting closer — not too fast — is comforting in a rocky sort of a way, but I have always loathed the experience of being shoved into the sky by a pair of bloody enormous engines, listening all the way through for the slightest change in their tone which might intimate disaster. It doesn’t do to let it show, though.

  I could tell from the whiteness of Sonny Leonard’s knuckles as he gripped the armrests that he felt the same way as me, although he turned his head to look across me and out of the window, as the DC9 broke into the low grey cloud which hung, as predicted, over Manchester. Neither of us spok
e, though, until the plane levelled off, and the cabin crew appeared with the bar trolley.

  ‘Where are the rest of your guys?’ I asked the American, to break the silence. He was a stocky guy in his early forties, with grizzled hair, wide shoulders, a broken nose, and the suggestion of a beer gut.

  ‘Back in Glasgow,’ he replied. ‘The Spanish are awkward when it comes to foreign labour. They insist on us using local people whenever we can. Don’t know whether it’s their trade unions or their government that’s behind it, but that’s the way it is. I’m essential to the operation, so they accept that I gotta be there, but Gary and all the others are being replaced by locals for this show.’

  ‘Won’t you have a language problem? As a nation, the Spanish are bloody awful at English.’

  Leonard shook his head, then nodded very quickly as an immaculately made up stewardess offered him a small bottle of Freixenet cava. ‘Nah, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘My Spanish is pretty good. It has to be, working in the US. LA and New York are pretty much bilingual.’

  He had given me an opening. ‘Have you been with GWA from the start?’

  ‘Yeah. When Everett first started planning the company he asked me if I’d set up his road crew, and run it for him. He didn’t tell me it would be in Glasgow, though.’

  I grinned at him as I took a tin of San Miguel from the stewardess. ‘What’s wrong with our fair city, then?’

  ‘It’s cold, it’s wet and it’s goddamn miserable — and that’s in the summer. I’m a St Louis boy — I like my summers hot. I tell you, I thank the Lord for this Barcelona gig. I was beginning to freeze to death back in Scotland.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it’ll be all that hellish warm in Barcelona either at this time of year.’

  He pointed towards the ground. ‘Warmer than down there, buddy, bet on it.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said, as I opened my beer.

  ‘What did you do before GWA?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was with Triple W. I was number two to the head honcho there.’

  ‘What’s Triple W like?’

  ‘It’s a damn good operation. It has the top roster of performers in the US right now. A lot of people thought it would take a ratings nose-dive when Everett and Jerry left, but it’s held up pretty good.’

  ‘What about the other lot, CWI? Have you ever worked for them?’

  He looked at me, sideways from his seat. ‘The company line here,’ he said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper, ‘is that CWI sucks, and that Tony Reilly — the guy who runs it — is an asshole. You don’t have to look too far to figure out why that should be.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Princess was Tony Reilly’s girl, before she met the Boss. Mr Reilly didn’t like it when she left him. The Boss doesn’t like Mr Reilly, ’cause he said a few things about her afterwards. I better say no more than that.’

  I chanced my arm. ‘Do I get the impression that you don’t agree with the company line?’

  ‘Mr Ring Announcer,’ Sonny Leonard drawled, with a smile, ‘I always agree with the company line.’

  I didn’t push it any further. Instead I let our discussion drift on to the logistics of the GWA operation, and on the quality of the Spanish workers who were waiting for us at our venue, up on the Olympic hill of Montjuic. They had been recruited by our hosts, who had promised that they would have all the skills the job required. Finally, after our lunch trays had been cleared away we lapsed into silence, and in Leonard’s case, to sleep.

  Although I had spent some time in Catalunya, and still owned fifty per cent of a property there having agreed with Prim, my ex-partner, that I would cash in my half only when she chose to sell, I had never been to Barcelona Airport until I touched down with the GWA party. The greater part of it was built for the 1992 Olympics, and was designed to foster the illusion that air travel is a pleasant experience. It works; the place looks more like a shopping mall than an air terminal. Its only downside is a crazy system in the baggage hall which requires a 100 peseta coin before a trolley could be freed from the rack. I wonder if the bright spark who introduced it asked himself how many people disembark from an international flight with the local coinage in their pockets.

  We made it through passport control and customs somehow, to the bus which was waiting for us outside. As I was boarding Everett tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the two seats immediately behind the driver. We sat together, silently as Sonny Leonard climbed on board and made his way to the back of the vehicle.

  ‘Did you get anything out of him during the flight?’ the big man asked as we pulled away from the kerb. So the seating arrangement had been no accident.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. As I thought about his question I realised something about myself: I suppose it’s the reason why I’m a very good Private Enquiry Agent but a bloody awful Private Detective. When I’m interviewing someone who knows what the purpose of our conversation is I am completely relaxed, but when I have to resort to any sort of deceit, I am stricken with guilt. ‘I got the impression that Leonard’s a mercenary. He doesn’t care about the rights and wrongs of a situation, he cares about who’s going to give him the best deal. You offered him the chance to be head honcho, as he put it, and I think he was grateful. But I don’t reckon you have his undying loyalty.’

  ‘So you reckon he could be bought?’

  ‘I think that as an operative, he’d go to the highest bidder. But whether he’d get involved in sabotage, I could not possibly say. I do know that he doesn’t see Tony Reilly as a monster, though. He was very respectful, in fact. It was Mr Reilly this, Mr Reilly that.’

  Everett growled. ‘If he is selling GWA out, he’s gonna learn some respect for me — the hard way.’

  Barcelona Airport isn’t very far from the city centre. The bus pulled up outside our hotel in no more than fifteen minutes. The driver waited as we checked in, then drove the team to the BattleGround venue, a big, elegant upturned bowl. If there is a European city with better sports stadia than Barcelona, I’ve still to find it.

  The GWA trucks were parked at the side, backed into loading bays. As we approached we saw several young men in overalls, some heading into the tall vehicles, others heading into the stadium, carrying items of equipment and scenery. ‘What the. .’ Sonny Leonard exploded, a few rows behind me. ‘I told these guys not to begin unloading until I got here.’

  As the bus drew to a halt he jumped from his seat and tore down the aisle, leaping out onto the tarmac even before the doors were fully open. I heard him swear in heavily Americanised Spanish as he strode towards the labourers.

  ‘Sure and don’t be bursting a blood vessel, Sonny.’ The familiar, laughing shout came from inside the nearest truck as the rest of us followed on his heels; and a second later, Liam Matthews stepped out, onto the unloading ramp.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Everett boomed. ‘You’re supposed to be convalescing. I told the back office to book you and your mom a holiday, starting next week.’

  ‘Sure, so you did,’ the Irishman agreed. ‘In the meantime, all my stitches are out, I’m healing fast and my old lady’s giving me no leeway at all, so I decided to come down here with the trucks and give Sonny the benefit of my experience.’ He beamed at the red-faced foreman. ‘Don’t you worry either, fella. We haven’t broken any of your gear. It’s all inside, ready for you to start setting up.’

  I looked at Everett, then at Diane. He was frowning, like a huge black cloud. She was grinning, from ear to ear.

  Chapter 25

  I had never watched the roadies set up from scratch before. Under Sonny Leonard’s shouted directions — clearly, his Spanish was up to the job — they began in the centre, by raising the ring.

  I stood with Jerry Gradi and watched them work. ‘Why does your ring only have three ropes?’ I asked him.

  ‘Because it always had three ropes,’ he replied. ‘So did boxing rings, until about forty years ago, when a fighter died after being hit back of t
he head by a whipping bottom rope. After that, their authorities switched to four.

  ‘The ropes in a boxing ring are tighter than ours too, so that fighters can’t use them to lever more power into their punches. We like ’em loose, to help us build momentum. The other difference is in the turn-buckle padding.’ He pointed to Leonard, up in the ring. ‘In boxing, the steel rings in the corners that turn the ropes are covered by a single pad, from top to bottom.

  ‘We got separate pads on each turn-buckle, on account of one of our standard moves is to grab the other guy and slam him into the corner, hard. The top pad is the thickest, ’cos that’s where the biggest impact is. It’s the foreman’s job to fix ’em on, to make sure they’re secure.’

  As we watched, Sonny Leonard was working on the corner nearest us, fastening on the pads, which were covered in red leather, and looked a lot like boxing gloves. Jerry pointed at him. ‘You make sure those is tight,’ he called out, meaningfully. ‘Daze is going to be tossing me into that corner tomorrow night, and I don’t want to wind up hittin’ no steel.’

  ‘Check ’em yourself, then,’ Leonard snarled back at him.

  ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ The Behemoth replied, holding up his hands in a mollifying gesture. ‘Don’t get so touchy. It ain’t your ass gonna get stomped in there — unless you screw up those turn-buckle pads, that is!’

  ‘I didn’t know you and Daze were on tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I thought you were keeping that for the next pay-per-view event.’

  ‘We are, really. Tomorrow’s just a warm-up. Rockette and I are taking on Daze in a handicap match.’ He grinned. ‘Tommy’s gonna get stomped again. Ev hasn’t quite forgiven him yet for that guitar stunt.’

  I looked at him. ‘You’re looking happy this week. Are things going all right with Sally?’

  ‘Yeah, great, thanks. Don’t need you to speak for me no more. I’ll need to watch out for looking happy, though. That ain’t The Behemoth’s angle. Gotta do some work on bein’ ferocious again.’