Instead, Charlotte had been all over her in the bar: hugs and kisses and oh-my-Gods.
‘I read all about you in the papers. God, how amazingly exciting. I mean, dangerous, of course, sure, you must be so brave. I couldn’t believe it, though. I was, like, so telling everybody I knew you. And then I remembered I saw you one time and you walked right past and I thought you maybe had headphones on or were in a daydream, but I realised you must have been actually tailing somebody, like in a film. I mean, wow. That is so cool.’
‘I was on a foot-follow,’ Jasmine was relieved to be able to explain at last.
‘God, that is so amazing. It’s, like, being in character, except you’re really, really deeply in character. That’s major.’
‘Not really,’ Jasmine corrected, but only by way of taking the opportunity to tell Charlotte about the aspects of the job that truly did require acting. She had surely never sounded so enthusiastic about her job, but she couldn’t help it. Charlotte was lapping it up, and Jasmine was basking in the light of her enthusiasm. Impressing Charlotte was like a drug: you just wanted more and more and more. It was why she got so much out of people, on stage and off.
‘So you’re, like, a real detective?’
Jasmine could hear those commas, but knew that if she edited them out it would still be an unearned accolade. Like a real detective? No. Not even close.
As it turned out, Charlotte’s production of The Tempest wasn’t going to happen anyway. She had dropped the idea in favour of a revival of Liz Lochead’s Scots-dialect translation of Tartuffe by Molière, having heard through the grapevine that the Scottish government were planning a series of events aimed at both celebrating and cementing artistic ties with France. In her ability to combine vision, ambition, networking and sheer opportunism, it showed just why Charlotte had come a long way in a short time and was destined to go a great deal further. The play was scheduled to run both in Edinburgh and Paris, under the imprimatur of the Scottish government and therefore financially assisted by Arts Council Scotland.
This had predictably rankled with a lot of people; more so than even the usual grumbling that followed the awarding of grants to anybody other than oneself. Fire Curtain was perceived to be well down the list of companies in need of public funding: it was believed that, as the daughter of Hamish Queen, Charlotte had been the beneficiary of more hand-outs and hand-ups than anybody else in Scottish theatre.
The roots of this resentment lay in artistic snobbery as much as financial jealousy. Hamish Queen had made millions putting on big, flashy musicals in London’s West End. To a certain constituency, it wasn’t ‘proper’ theatre, just ultra-commercial flummery aimed at fleecing tourists and philistines, so it stung all the more that his money and influence were facilitating his daughter’s rise to prominence – ignoring, of course, the fact that Charlotte was very much about putting on ‘proper’ theatre.
‘I’d still love to work with you some time,’ she told Jasmine in the Tron bar. ‘I think if the part was right, with your real-life experience, it would be electric.’
If the part was right. A hypothetical among hypotheticals, a throwaway remark, one fleeting thought amid millions that must pass through a capricious mind such as Charlotte’s, always looking for the next idea. But to Jasmine, it was enough to tantalise and to torment, keeping that door open just enough to let in a chink of light that kept distracting her from the here and now.
‘Tessa was a born performer,’ Mrs Petrie went on. ‘I don’t think she was out of nappies before she’d learned that she could get attention from Mum and Dad by putting on a show. She was a prodigious mimic. She would impersonate the voices she heard on the radio, and of course that would get the praise raining down upon her about how clever she was. I don’t mean that it made her conceited, because she wasn’t. Precocious, certainly, but not self-centred. I just mean that she took a lot of encouragement from it. A lot of confidence. She wasn’t egotistical, but she knew what she was worth, so it didn’t surprise me when I learned she was actually on the stage.’
‘And when she was at the Pantechnicon,’ Jasmine said. ‘What years would she have been there? What did you see her in?’
At this, Mrs Petrie’s face darkened somewhat. Jasmine feared she had said the wrong thing, but she soon saw that it was more self-reproach.
‘I never saw her on stage,’ she confessed, and clearly a confession it was.
‘Well, of course, if you were down in Cornwall …’ Jasmine suggested.
‘That didn’t make it easy, true, but I should have made the effort. To be honest, I didn’t want to.’
‘Why not?’
Mrs Petrie swallowed and her mouth went thin, pinched.
‘I was jealous.’
‘You wanted to be an actress too?’ Jasmine asked, hoping she wasn’t being granted a glimpse of herself fifty years into the future, eaten away by bitterness and regret.
‘No. It would never even have occurred to me. But that’s the point. I could just imagine my parents’ faces if I’d said I wanted to be an actress. The same way they instilled in Tessa a confidence that she could do anything and the desire to spread her wings, they instilled in me a sense of responsibility and a need to keep my feet on the ground. If by some whim I had decided that I wanted to be an actress, or a dancer, or whatever, I’d simply never have had the confidence, the nerve, to go out there and try.
‘Tessa did, though. She was all passion and impulse. She didn’t look before she leapt, and I used to think she’d end up in trouble because what if something goes wrong? I forgot to ask myself: what if it goes right? Tessa didn’t let worrying about what might go wrong hold her back, and I think that’s what I was jealous of most. I felt I had lived a life of cause and effect, of always being mindful of consequences.’
‘I’m informed it’s a common complaint of the oldest child in most families,’ Jasmine told her. ‘They need to be the responsible one, while their wee brothers and sisters get to have their heads in the clouds.’
‘That’s as may be, but it doesn’t make it any easier to sit here knowing I never saw Tessa act, and now I never will.’
She began choking up again, her voice failing her.
‘You don’t know that,’ Jasmine stated, going for matter-of-fact rather than consolatory, as though reining in self-pity. She realised it sounded a little harsh, so followed it up with something a little more ameliorative. ‘She could be in some wee provincial rep in British Columbia for all we know.’
Mrs Petrie had staunched her tears, but she was shaking her head with grave certainty.
‘No. She gave up the stage a long time ago.’
‘How do you know?’
‘When I decided I should try to find Tessa, one of the first things I thought to do was to contact Equity. I spoke to a very helpful man there who checked into the archives for me. He could only access files going back twenty-five years, but he had no record of her in all that time. He told me her membership must have lapsed prior to 1986.’
Mrs Petrie sighed reflectively, as though trying to see a good side to this.
‘I suppose it’s possible she met some rich admirer who saw her on stage and whisked her away to a life of luxury,’ she said, not sounding like she believed it. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure that any amount of luxury would have made Tessa quit the stage, but I can’t think of any other reason why she would give up on what had been her dream for so long. Can you?’
‘No,’ lied Jasmine, who could think of one or two.
Trail of the Sniper
Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod didn’t think her husband would have made much of a criminal, or a card player for that matter. All it had taken was for her to make her overture – not even to broach the subject – and he was already wearing his ‘Oh God, do we have to?’ face.
It was generally one of the things she loved about him: that what you saw was what you got. He had the emotional honesty of a Labrador puppy and a reluctance to put on masks o
ut of deference or decorum. It once amused her to observe that the only thing that could be more out of place than Drew in a Merchant Ivory movie or a Henry James novel would be a spaceship. On the downside, this boyish openness could make him seem terribly vulnerable and cause Catherine to feel every one of the nine years between them, and a good few more besides.
The look he wore now suggested he was afraid of being scolded. She already knew that she would get her way, but also that the outcome was not the most important aspect of the discussion. Actually having it would be more of a result.
She had chosen her moment carefully: not just bringing it up when he was trying to watch the Wimbledon highlights earlier, or the moment she was in the door from work, but during a late dinner, with both the boys long since tucked up in bed.
‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she had said.
That wasn’t when he made the face, but it had probably put him on alert.
‘It’s about Duncan, and that money we gave him for his report card.’
Duncan was the older of their two sons, his brother Fraser two years his junior. Duncan’s interim report back in November had indicated he was falling behind in maths; his teacher suggested he wasn’t paying as much attention as he should, perhaps because he was finding the subject a struggle. Mindful of this becoming a vicious circle, Duncan had been encouraged by his parents to do a little extra maths at home until he was more comfortable with the day-to-day classwork and therefore better able to keep pace. It had been a grind at first, for child and parents alike, but all three of them had stuck it out. It had borne results, with his teacher singling out his improvement for special comment ahead of parents’ evening.
In order to reward this they had given Duncan money to spend on ‘something for the summer holidays’, having listened to him prattle on with promiscuously fickle enthusiasm about everything from goalie gloves to NERF guns.
(Fraser got money for his report too, following a philosophical discussion around the breakfast table over whether his consistent high standards should merit any less recognition than Duncan’s fall and recovery. No firm consensus was agreed, but Duncan was privately given twenty pounds more than Fraser on the understanding that he kept the information to himself.)
‘Has he blown it all on hookers and ice-lollies?’ Drew asked, trying, and perhaps just hoping, to keep the tone light.
‘He wants to buy a new game for his Xbox.’
Drew had rolled his eyes, but that wasn’t when he got the look. He laughed a little.
‘I’ll have a word,’ he said. ‘Remind him about all the stuff he was planning to do when he couldn’t get outside for the rain. Mind you, this does mean I’ve officially turned into my mum. I remember her wanting to shunt me outdoors all the time during the summer holidays when all I wanted was to watch videos and play computer games. I could never understand why she did it, but now I’m a parent I’m exactly the same.’
‘I’ve already tried. He said he would still be outdoors plenty, but reminded me that we had said he could spend the money on whatever he liked.’
‘Apart from hookers, obviously. It’s true, though. We did say it was his money, and choosing what to spend it on was part of the reward. We can’t really go back on that. To be fair, it’ll probably rain all summer anyway.’
‘I agree. It’s not buying another computer game that’s the issue. The problem is, the game he wants is Trail of the Sniper. It’s got a fifteen certificate, but he says all his friends have got it.’
That was when Drew made the face.
Drew worked for a games development firm, so was several times bitten and consequently very shy of finding himself being held accountable for the evils and excesses of the entire industry, but this was only part of the reason for his wincing expression.
‘He’s starting Primary Five,’ she added. ‘He’s ten, and as far as I can ascertain this game revolves entirely around shooting people in the head with graphically realistic consequences.’
Drew let out a very quiet sigh, one he was perhaps hoping she wouldn’t hear.
‘If it’s a fifteen, then he can’t have it,’ he said. ‘He’ll just have to accept that. His pals are probably lying anyway.’
‘So you’ll tell him?’ she asked. ‘It’s just, you let him have that wrestling game that’s a fifteen.’
‘Yeah, but on those WWE games the certificate is actually an upper limit on who should be playing it,’ he replied with a smile. Catherine wasn’t in the mood for joking.
‘I’m just saying, he’s got his heart set on this and I don’t want it to always be me that gets painted as the killjoy.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ he said. ‘It should come from me. He’ll not be happy, but the fact that I did let him play the wrestling game should mean he understands this isn’t capricious. I’ll explain to him that there’s content that’s inappropriate. It’s a fifteen and he’s ten.’
And there it was, the moment Catherine had predicted. Drew was ostensibly agreeing with her, but in reality he was merely acquiescing. She could tell from his choice of words: he sounded like he was quoting rather than thinking out loud, and his rationale that ‘it’s a fifteen and he’s ten’ was in complete contrast to his previously stated opinions about each child’s comprehension and maturity being too complex and individual to categorise by age bands. He was agreeing with her to keep the peace, in the short term possibly because it might improve his chances of the evening ending with a shag, and in the long term because … well, that was complex.
For one thing, Drew was sensitive about ever being considered irresponsible as a father, primarily because he was a lot younger than her, but partly also because he worked in an industry largely built on exploiting the more emotionally retarded aspects of the male psyche.
Catherine, in turn, was sensitive about being the one who always said no, who was risk-averse, disapproving, a killjoy.
The bad cop.
She didn’t like to admit it to herself, but sometimes Catherine suspected Drew was a little scared of her. It could allow her to get her own way, as in this case, but prevailing because her husband was too cowed to stand up to her was a long way from what she wanted.
She knew she was on shaky ground complaining that Drew didn’t want to discuss how he really felt about something, as he had frequent cause to lament how there was so much that his wife wouldn’t reveal about herself. Partly it was derived from determination not to bring the job home; her resolve that her family should not live under a shadow of gloom cast by a wife and mother who often spent her working hours mired in the detritus of the worst things that human beings could do to one another. But Drew’s complaint was not born of ingratitude at being spared regular, vivid and graphic insights into her caseload. It was something more, something other, something she wouldn’t, couldn’t share.
‘There’s this dark place you go,’ he once put it. ‘You’re angry on the road to that place and you’re unreachable when you get there. But what’s hardest is you’re numb for days afterwards.’
Drew refilled her wine glass and topped up his own. She could tell he was trying to think of something else to talk about: something light, that would indicate the previous matter was closed and there were no lingering issues about it, which only served to underline how the opposite was true.
They had to be adults about this. She wanted to know how he really felt, and why.
‘You disagree, though, don’t you,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to pretend, Drew. In fact, you can’t, not to me. There’s very few can lie to me across a short table and get away with it. If it was up to you, you’d let him play it, wouldn’t you?’
Drew looked flustered and defensive, and not a little put-upon, like he was resentful at receiving precisely the scolding he had feared.
‘I haven’t seen the game in question, so I couldn’t say.’
‘Yes, but in general you don’t think playing these games is inappropriate for Duncan. You just go along wi
th me because you know I don’t like them.’
‘That’s not fair,’ he replied. ‘There are plenty of games I wouldn’t want the boys seeing, let alone playing. I’ve never shown them anything from our Hostile series, despite the added curiosity of them being the games Daddy makes.’
‘But you let them play other violent games, not just the wrestling one. Even Fraser gets to play that Serious Sam thing.’
Fraser was the factor that upped the stakes for Catherine on this issue, because she knew that any game Duncan got, he would be watching over his shoulder and asking for a shot. She knew it was not fair on Duncan that everything he played or watched should be acceptable for his wee brother, at an age when two years of maturity was practically a generation. But equally she didn’t want Fraser growing up too fast, and certainly didn’t want him exposed to anything so disturbing that it had been given a fifteen certificate.
‘It’s set so that the monsters spray flowers instead of blood when you shoot them. It’s the equivalent of shooting wooden ducks at the fairground.’
‘But don’t you think the violence itself is the issue?’
Drew sighed more loudly this time, looking all the more like he didn’t want to get into this, because he was aware it was a fight he couldn’t win.
When the Devil Drives Page 6
