For The Death Of Me ob-9

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Why don’t you get it yourself?’

  ‘Because I like watching you in the buff.’

  ‘Oh. That’s fair enough, then.’ She got up from the bed, skipped across the room, fetched the bag, then sat back down beside me.

  ‘Open it.’

  She did, and looked inside. ‘Oz! What’s this?’

  ‘Fifty thousand of Uncle Sam’s dollars,’ I told her, ‘drawn from Amex to give to Maddy, only she sent Tony Lee, her renegade Triad boyfriend instead. They must have been watching him, for his account got closed off before we got there.’

  ‘We? You mean Mike went with you to that bar, and him in danger there?’

  ‘He insisted, but it wasn’t a risk for him. Only one guy in Singapore knows about his Interpol work, and he’s on our side. Thank Christ, I might add, because he cleaned up the mess.’

  She sat for a while, frowning as she took it all in. ‘So Harvey’s ex is on the run from these diehards. .’

  ‘Triads.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She took a photograph of their top man, and they found out. His identity’s the biggest secret in South East Asia, apparently.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘She thought Tony was shagging him. As it turned out, he worked for him.’

  ‘So she’s out there, with these desperadoes after her, and you’re back here? You’re her only hope and you’ve abandoned her.’

  ‘That’s how it looks, but we’d nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Bollocks! There’s always somewhere else to go; you’re always telling me that. Get out there and find her.’

  I smiled at her. There is no greater motivator than my lovely wife. ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ I told her.

  35

  Where do you begin looking for a woman you don’t really know who’s missing on the other side of the world? At home seemed to me to be a good place to start. Next morning I called Harvey: there was no answer from his mobile, so I had him paged at the Advocates’ Library.

  ‘Oz,’ he said, slightly breathlessly, when he came on line, ‘where are you?’

  I told him. ‘But I’m empty-handed,’ I added.

  ‘She wouldn’t co-operate?’

  ‘No, to be fair to her, it’s more a case of not being able to. Remember I told you that things had gone sour for her out there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that was maybe understating it a little. She’s got herself mixed up with some very bad people and now she’s on the run.’

  ‘Where?’ Harvey’s a naturally unflappable guy, but this time he was flapping good style. He’d forgotten about photographs, and everything else. I’d guessed right about his reaction: Maddy was a bitch, but for a while she’d been his bitch.

  ‘Her last known location was an island off Malaysia. From there she headed back to the mainland, but that’s it.’

  ‘What do these people want from her?’

  ‘Same as you, some photographs, but I don’t think they exist any more. Now they just want her.’

  ‘But what are they going to do with her?’ He sounded bewildered; this was a man who had spent part of his career prosecuting and occasionally defending a succession of fairly vicious criminals. . if Sammy Goss hadn’t escaped, he might well have been on the list. . yet he didn’t get it.

  ‘They’re going to kill her, Harvey.’

  ‘My God! Oz, what can I do? Have you reported this to the police out there?’

  ‘The police know about it, but there’s nothing they can do. If she gets out of the region she’s got a better chance, but we still need to find her. Once we’ve done that we can keep her safe. . or try to.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘Through the other side of her life. Sooner or later she’ll contact someone she knows. Friend, relative, maybe even you. Tell me what you can about her family, her friends, those you can remember at any rate.’

  ‘Her father’s dead; his name was Luke Raymond. He was quite an eminent photo-journalist, but he was killed in the Lebanon twenty-five years ago. Madeleine takes her adventurous side from him. Janine, her mother, is the opposite, a vicar’s daughter from Uxbridge. I’m still on her Christmas-card list, but I doubt if Madeleine is. There’s one sister, Theresa, three years older. She was a career academic, a reader in philosophy at Cambridge when Madeleine and I were married. And there’s a younger brother, Trevor, who was in the army last I heard.’

  ‘Did the sister have a husband?’

  ‘No. A wife would be more likely. As for friends. . Maddy didn’t have any close female friends that I knew of. She hung around the theatre company in Edinburgh, at the expense, eventually, of our marriage, but you know that. She may have had some there.’

  ‘She met Primavera there; Dawn was with the company at the time.’

  ‘Did she indeed? Yes, I can imagine those two would get on. Things in common.’

  I chuckled quietly. ‘Shagging actors, you mean?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been so blunt.’

  ‘No, but you’re a lawyer: you’re trained to bring out responses like that one. Do you have an address for your former mother-in-law, better still a telephone number?’

  He had both: he read them out and I noted them on the pad I keep on my desk. ‘Will you start with her?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll look everywhere, don’t worry. I’ll even go back to Rosebud.’

  ‘When you find her, what will you do? From what you’ve said I surmise it’s organised crime that’s on her tail. How can we protect her from people like that, in the long term?’

  ‘Harvey, right now, I don’t have a clue, but that question won’t arise till we find her.’

  I hung up and looked across at Susie, who had come into my study half-way through the conversation. (I know: it sounds pretentious, a bloke from Fife having a study, but it’s my quiet room. I use it to read scripts and to do the sort of business that doesn’t allow for kids yelling in your ear.)

  ‘Needle in a haystack, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘I wish it was that easy; you could find that with a big enough magnet. A crumb in a biscuit factory might be a better analogy. And speaking of crumbs. .’

  I turned to my computer and opened the AOL search engine. Two minutes later I had a number for Pitlochry Festival Theatre and three minutes after that a very helpful director had given me the number of the small hotel where Rory Roseberry was living during the run of Death of a Salesman. He was there. Good start, I thought.

  ‘Rosebud? Oz Blackstone.’

  ‘Oh, no, fuck off, please.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you, Blackstone. Leave me alone, or I’ll. .’ I could hear him searching for a threat. ‘I’ll complain to Equity.’

  ‘Listen to me quake in my sandals. You’re fifty million euros too late for that.’

  ‘Oz, please, leave me alone. First it’s you thumping me, now it’s this other bloke.’

  ‘What other bloke?’

  ‘Trevor, Maddy’s brother. He was waiting for me after the show last night; crazy man. He wanted to know if I had spoken to you about her. When I said I had he beat me up. You should see my face: Makeup won’t have a chance with it. I’m out of the run.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘What? And have him come back again some time?’

  ‘What did he say, this guy? Anything other than that?’

  ‘He was yelling at me so much I can hardly remember, but this one sticks. As he was kicking me, on the ground, he said, “Putting him on her trail nearly got her killed. He’s a fucking hitman for his brother-in-law.” Don’t tell me what he meant; I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Anything else, Rory? Did he say anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wait, he said, “And he’s next.” Yes, that was it. Now please, Oz, get off the line.’

  He didn’t have to tell me that. I cut the call then redialled the Advocates’ Library. ‘Page Mr January again, plea
se.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the operator replied. ‘Mr January is unavailable.’

  ‘I spoke to him ten minutes ago. I know he’s there.’

  ‘That may be, sir, but he’s unavailable.’

  ‘This is his brother-in-law, Oz Blackstone, and it’s urgent. Now make him available.’

  ‘Hold, please, sir.’

  I held, as patiently as I could. After a minute or so, the operator returned. ‘I’m connecting you now, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Harvey. .’

  ‘It’s not Harvey, I’m afraid,’ a smooth Edinburgh voice replied. ‘This is the Dean of Faculty. Harvey has just been attacked in the Great Hall while promenading with an instructing solicitor. It only happened five minutes ago but from what I can gather it was completely unprovoked. The man burst into the hall, saw Harvey and went for him.’

  ‘With a weapon?’

  ‘No, his bare hands, but that was bad enough. He was still unconscious when I left him to take your call.’

  ‘And the man?’

  ‘He was restrained by other advocates and eventually by the police. We have officers in attendance in the vicinity of the court all the time, as you can imagine. I don’t know anything about him, though.’

  ‘I do. His name’s Trevor Raymond and he used to have the same job description as me: Harvey’s brother-in-law. You can tell the police that.’

  ‘Thanks, I will. CID are on their way from Gayfield Square.’

  ‘Good, because I’m on my way too.’

  The decision was made pretty much there and then: Susie and I were going into the jet-charter business. I told her what had happened, asked her to call Ellie before the Dean or the police did, then tasked Audrey with booking me another Citation flight to Edinburgh. I was in the air by eleven thirty, and in Edinburgh before one, British Summer Time.

  By that time Harvey was out of whatever danger he’d been in. He’d been rushed to the Western General, but had come round in the ambulance. The neurologists were satisfied that he’d sustained nothing more sinister than severe concussion. That would wear off in a couple of days, but the broken nose and three cracked ribs would take rather longer to heal. In my relief, I found myself wondering if a Supreme Court judge had ever been installed before while wearing a couple of black eyes.

  I’d called Ricky Ross before leaving Cannes. He was waiting for me at the general-aviation terminal and drove me straight to the police headquarters building at Fettes. Ricky still has a lot of clout with Lothian and Borders Police: he’d dropped a word and the case had been taken over by Special Branch.

  We were met by a guy called Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Coffey; he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He assumed that my interest was straightforward.

  ‘Have you got any idea why Raymond should do this?’ he asked me. ‘Mr January’s been divorced from his sister for ten years, and as far as I can gather they’ve had no contact since then. Is he just a nutter?’

  ‘He may well be, but it’s not as simple as that. I’d like you to do me a favour, and let me speak to him alone.’

  Coffey whistled like a kettle coming to the boil. ‘I don’t know if I can do that, Oz. This guy’s dangerous.’

  ‘So am I,’ I told him. ‘After what he did to Harvey, and to a harmless wee actor up in Pitlochry last night, I’d just love him to have a go at me. But chain him to the floor if it makes you happy. I promise I won’t touch him.’

  The DCI nodded. ‘Okay. Since you were once one of us, you can do it. Have you forgotten that you and I were at the police college together?’

  I placed him then: Ollie Coffey had been on the same new entrants’ course as me at Tulliallan. A couple of years later he’d been selected for an accelerated promotion course and I’d been turned down. That was a close shave, I thought. If they’d picked me I might have wound up interviewing hoodlums in windowless rooms.

  Trevor Raymond was around the same age as me, but about three inches shorter and quite a bit lighter. His hair was close-cropped, he had heavy dark eyebrows and a tattoo on each forearm. His left cheek was red and swollen. I guessed that he had resisted arrest, or that one of Harvey’s brother advocates had got in a good one.

  They hadn’t chained him to the floor, but he was in a restraint belt and his ankles were shackled. As I stepped into the room, his eyes lit up with hatred and he tried to stand up.

  ‘I promised not to touch you,’ I told him. ‘I don’t advise you to make me break my word. You might be good but I’m better, you might be tough but I’m tougher, you might be strong but I’m stronger. Those aren’t boasts, they’re facts. Now, why the vendetta?’

  He spat at me, a good-sized gob, but he wound it up so I was able to dodge it.

  ‘Man, they’re filming this, and they’re angry at you as it is. The police like Harvey; you’re lucky you’ve still got the same number of teeth you woke up with this morning. What did Maddy tell you?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Hey, a response! When did she call you?’

  ‘Go and fuck yourself.’

  ‘Are you still in the army?’ He glared at me, but stayed silent this time. ‘Doesn’t matter, Coffey will have found out by now. Either way, you’re not any more. But you have had a call from her, yes?’

  ‘When I get out of here I’m going to fuck your wife.’

  ‘I don’t think so. One, the way you’re going your dick will be withered by the time you get out of here. Two, I employ a better soldier to protect my family than you’ve ever been. Three, you have got all this fundamentally wrong. Okay, I’m not going to ask you any more questions. I’m going to tell you stuff instead. The last time your sister was seen was on Monday, on an island called Dayang, which is, interestingly, and I will quote this fact to bored listeners for the rest of my life, not far from the island that they used as the fictional Bali Hai in my mother’s favourite movie, South Pacific.’ I’d clocked the camera by this time, top right corner facing me: I winked at it.

  ‘While she was there she killed a man called Sammy Goss. It’s technically not correct to say that Sammy was the last person to see her alive, because she shot him in the back of the head as soon as he stepped into the room, so he never saw her. Nobody will ever blame her for that, for Sammy was a very dangerous wee man. So dangerous, in fact, that he killed her boyfriend, Tony Lee, more or less right under my very nose.’ I could picture Coffey and Ross as they listened to this; I nodded towards the watching lens.

  ‘After killing him, she took the boat that he sailed in on, and that’s the last I knew of her, until you stuck your oar in. Now I know that she made it to the mainland and on from there. I know you’ve had a call from her, because last night you showed up in Pitlochry and gave her ex-boyfriend a gratuitous battering just because he admitted having spoken to me about her. Let’s say you spent half a day getting there. That tells me she probably called you yesterday morning. All I don’t know is where she was at that time. And I need to know, Trevor, because I am the only person who can save her life. I have no idea why she resents me, for I had agreed to give her a lot of money, but I don’t care about that. I just want to know where she is, or was yesterday morning.’

  He glared back at me. ‘I don’t know where you dredged all that crap from,’ he hissed, ‘but the only thing I will ever tell you is. . fuck off!’ I was looking in his eyes as he shouted the last two words of advice, and I knew that he meant it.

  I walked behind him and leaned close, then whispered something, so quietly that no mike would have picked it up unless one of us had been wearing it, keeping my face off camera so I couldn’t be lip-read. ‘A promise. If you ever go near any member of my family again, I’ll have you killed.’ He twitched; that was all, but it was enough to tell me that he believed me.

  I straightened up and walked out of the room, waving goodbye as I closed the door behind me.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Coffey asked, when I rejoined him and Ricky.

  �
�The Triads are after Harvey’s ex, for reasons which to them seem pretty solid. Nobody outside this room needs to know that, though.’

  ‘What sort of a world are you living in these days, man?’ asked Ricky.

  I looked at him. ‘Listen, I’m supposed to be on my holidays. These things just happen to me.’

  ‘He had a mobile on him when we brought him in,’ said Ollie Coffey, thinking like a real policeman. ‘If it needs a password we’ll never get it from him, but I can access the information on it, one way or another. You guys go for a pint somewhere; I’ll join you when I’ve got it.’

  36

  In fact we went to the Western General, to check up on Harvey’s condition. Ellen was with him when we got there, having left Jonny in charge at St Andrews. He wasn’t with anyone: he was awake but dazed, and sedated on top of that. When he spoke, it was nonsense.

  At least he knew me when I walked into the small room they had given him. ‘Hello, brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘How are the fish?’

  ‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I fed them before I left.’ That seemed to satisfy him, for he smiled and settled back into his mountain of pillows. I’d been right about the black eyes. They were well puffy already; in a couple of days they’d be prime shiners.

  Our Ellie was less easy to placate. ‘What is this all about, Oz? Why should someone attack Harvey like that? He doesn’t have any clients with a grudge. And how could it happen in there?’

  ‘Parliament Hall is a public room,’ I told her. ‘And it wasn’t a disgruntled client. It was his first wife’s brother.’

  ‘What? Trevor the bloody soldier? What could Harvey possibly have done to upset him?’

  I had hoped, against all hope, that Harvey had taken my advice and told Ellie the whole story. But clearly not: he might have faced up to some serious villains in the witness box, but my sister is a different story. He had bottled it and, in the process, put me right in the firing line. ‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘it’s more me who’s upset him. He just took it out on Harvey. I’m just not sure why he’s gone off like that.’