When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He led her through a side door out of the stalls and up a back stair, from which they emerged into the dress circle. They made their way to the bar, which was deserted, but even as Hamish pulled a seat out for her a member of the theatre staff entered briskly and ducked beneath the bar-top. Jasmine didn’t know if Melanie had facilitated this or whether the Playhouse staff were simply on standby for such courtesies, but either way it communicated that this was a man used to things quietly being arranged for his convenience. She was almost embarrassed now to consider the absurdity of believing she could make a lasting impression that might one day serve her well if she was ever to audition. Once this meeting was over he was as likely to remember her as he was the bloke who had sped in to serve them cappuccinos.

  ‘Charlotte told me you were at the Academy together.’

  ‘That’s right. She was a couple of years ahead of me. A couple of light-years, actually.’

  Hamish liked this. A man of his success was probably inured to flattery, but Jasmine doubted he’d ever tire of hearing his daughter being praised.

  ‘Forgive me, I’ve been travelling and the old memory is still on New York time. Charlotte said something about you researching the early days of Glass Shoe. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. Jasmine had phrased it very precisely too, saying she wanted to ask about ‘Glass Shoe’: not Glass Shoe Productions or the Glass Shoe Company. The ambiguity was intended to protect her by Hamish being the one who misinterpreted rather than her being the one who misled. She was aware that the Glass Shoe Company must have been a failure: that somewhere back in the day Hamish Queen’s attempt to create a stridently artistic and distinctly Scottish repertory company, his dreams of being an actor-director and his aesthetic idealism had all crashed and burned. Glass Shoe Productions had risen in its place, but Jasmine was aware that rich, powerful and successful people preferred to talk about the phoenix rather than the flames.

  Hamish demonstrated that he was no exception by quickly turning the subject of the early days into a conduit for discussing his present concerns.

  ‘I’m going to need the caffeine then, if I’m rifling through the dustier reaches of the memory vaults,’ he said, having a sip of cappuccino. Then it was back to the future. ‘It’s certainly been quite a journey, though I do have to ask myself whether I’ve come all that far when I’m putting on a musical based on an eighties TV show. It’s taken me aback, though, truly. I was always very wary about whether I could make it fly. When I first came up with it, I remember thinking to myself that it was either the best idea I’d ever had or by far the worst, and I don’t think I’d made my mind up until I saw the first month’s receipts.’

  He was being modest, in the way one can afford to be when discussing the origins of an enterprise that delivered vindication in such bounteous measure. The Grange Hill musical was typical of his alchemical touch. As Dot Prowis had said, he had the vision and sometimes outright audacity to gather elements that didn’t make sense until he’d put them together, then in retrospect they seemed so obvious that every other producer was asking themselves why they never thought of it first.

  Other commentators Jasmine had read suggested he had signed a deal with the devil whereby all his naff ideas somehow turned to hits. The implied price, of course, was his artistic soul.

  Making a musical out of Grange Hill was a perfect example of an apparently base idea rendered gold, but to appreciate Hamish Queen’s true acumen you had to look at how he’d packaged it, paying particularly close attention to the soundtrack albums. Plural. Instead of cherrypicking all the best-known (and thus over-familiar) hits of the eighties, he had bucked the West End singalong trend in pursuit of evoking what he called ‘genuine nostalgia’.

  ‘You don’t feel nostalgic when you hear the big hits of the eighties,’ he explained to Jasmine, relaxing into his subject, ‘because you’ve been hearing them throughout every decade since. You feel genuine nostalgia when you hear something you haven’t heard since then, something in the background that you weren’t aware you were noticing at the time.’

  To this end, he had scoured old playlists to find songs that had been in high rotation on radio stations during the eighties, but which had not been hits: songs such as ‘See That Glow’ by This Island Earth, ‘Day and Night’ by Balaam and the Angel, ‘Swallow Glass’ by The Flaming Mussolinis and ‘Glasshouse’ by The Promise. Not only did this give him the ‘overheard’ nostalgia effect he was looking for, but he picked up the track licensing rights for next to (and in some cases precisely) nothing. Then the true sprinkling of fairy dust came in casting a host of beautiful young teens, each already known to the public by being TV talent show runners-up, and getting them to record modern versions of the songs.

  The result was a stage musical that was a massive hit across two generations, each purchasing its own preferred flavour of the official soundtrack. Those raised on The X-Factor bought the ‘original stage cast’ album, while their parents snapped up a compilation of revived subconscious memories, few of which had previously been available on CD, never mind iTunes.

  Jasmine’s mum had bought it. Jasmine thought it was ghastly, strong evidence for why these songs had merely lurked in the background, with two notable exceptions: ‘Send My Heart’ by The Adventures and a track called ‘Stranger on Home Ground’.

  ‘But there I go, babbling about today’s show when you’re here to talk about the past. I have to apologise. I have this “auto-promote” reflex and go into publicity mode whenever I start talking to a journalist. Is it the Stage you’re with? I can’t remember if Charlotte said. I’m sure she told me, but it was a few days ago and I’m a bit jet-lagged.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist, Mr Queen,’ she decided to make clear. ‘I’m a private investigator.’

  She surprised herself by how easy that was to say. It helped that she had briefly contemplated a worse alternative, that of allowing Hamish to persist in his misapprehension.

  His eyes narrowed for a second, then his face lit up in recollection.

  ‘No, of course. I warned you the memory wasn’t firing on all cylinders this morning. Charlotte told me all about you, I’m sure. You’re the girl who was involved in that business over the Ramsay disappearances.’

  ‘That’s me,’ she said, trying to sound professional and conceal the buzz it gave her that he knew about this stuff.

  ‘I remember it from at the time. Spooky business. And yet you got to the bottom of it all these years later. I suppose I should be worrying about what skeletons you might shake out of my closet, especially if you’re talking about the early days. Metropolis at the Dominion, Treasure Island at the Aldwych: there were some corpses strewn around those, let me tell you.’

  He said all this with a little chuckle, benignly patronising. As Dorothy had so frankly confessed, people generally didn’t know what to say when you told them you were a PI, but in Hamish’s case nor had he given any thought to the ramifications, otherwise he might not be sounding so glib.

  ‘I’m actually looking to dig a little further back than that. It’s to do with an actress named Tessa Garrion. I believe she worked with you under the auspices of the Glass Shoe Company, the precursor to Glass Shoe Productions.’

  He stopped mid-sip. Those ramifications were impacting now. I’m a private investigator. That means I’m going to be sticking my nose into the very things you least want anyone to. Such as your failed theatre company.

  ‘Tessa Garrion,’ he said, his eyes widening as he repeated the words. ‘There’s a name I haven’t heard in …’ He did his mental arithmetic. ‘Jesus, is it really thirty years? And the Glass Shoe Company: where did you unearth that little coffin?’

  ‘Tax records,’ Jasmine told him. ‘The Glass Shoe Company paid her a month’s salary.’

  ‘And no more, unfortunately. If you’re trying to find Tessa Garrion, then I’m afraid the history of the Glass Shoe Company is unlikely to constitute a rich seam of information. It
was a stillborn venture, over almost as soon as it began. It’s a testament to the fastidiousness of our tax collectors that they own the only record of the company’s existence. Blink and you’d have missed it. We certainly didn’t do anything so eyecatching as stage a play.’

  ‘But you paid Tessa a month’s salary. What for?’

  ‘She was paid in advance, as much as anything to convince her that the company was the real deal. She wasn’t a person who needed to take some dodgy deferred-payment gig just to get work.’

  ‘I’m told she was very talented.’

  ‘God, yes. A true natural,’ Hamish said, with genuine warmth. ‘When she announced she was leaving the Pantechnicon, I pleaded with her to join my company, even if only for one play. It was like asking a budding superstar to come and play for Elgin City when you knew Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich were waiting with open chequebooks.’

  ‘But she said yes.’

  ‘No, actually, she didn’t. She went to London in search of stages big enough both for her ambitions and her talent.’

  ‘So how come …’ Jasmine prompted needlessly. They both knew he was going to explain, but she could tell that a few oohs and ahs were expected of her in the role of his audience.

  ‘She ended up with Glass Shoe? I’m not entirely sure. There were offers in London, certainly. To return to the footballer metaphor, I think it was like the budding young superstar found his head was spinning as he contemplated the career that lay ahead of him, so he opted to play out the remainder of the season with Elgin City, knowing he could hone his game away from the bright lights.’

  ‘Hadn’t she done that enough at the Pantechnicon?’

  ‘Those lights were still pretty bright. What we were planning was a tour of small Highland venues: community centres, church halls and the like. A few weeks later she called me up at rather short notice and asked if the offer was still open. I couldn’t believe my luck. Turned out it was the only luck that particular venture enjoyed. We barely made it into rehearsal, let alone out.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Oh, just a mishmash of rookie mistakes, naiveté and a large dollop of hubris. Typified by the fact that our debut production was going to be the Scottish play. Height of arrogance, tempting the fates like that. Glass Shoe derives from the Gaelic for Glasgow; I was determined that we be a Scottish company committed to putting on Scottish plays. Thus it was my bold – older heads might say reckless – declaration of intent to start with the Scottish play.’

  ‘You mean Macbeth?’ said Jasmine, committing this small heresy partly for purposes of clarity and partly because she hated both the superstition and the posturing that went along with it.

  Hamish gave her a sour look, like some bourgeois auntie who had just heard her swear. Then he sighed regretfully, his head shaking just a little.

  ‘I used to call it that too,’ he confessed. ‘I thought saying “the Scottish play” was a dreadful affectation, people wearing it like a badge just to show they were fully paid-up luvvies. I’ve learned humility since. It is a dreadful affectation, but experience has taught me to tread lightly regarding its source. Let’s just say there won’t be any light-hearted musicals based on it coming soon from Glass Shoe Productions.’

  ‘So what happened afterwards? Do you know where Tessa went next? When did you last speak to her?’

  Hamish picked up his coffee, saw that the cup was all but empty, put it down and frowned.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea. I didn’t speak to her afterwards. We all abandoned the project, went our separate ways – in my case to lick my wounds. Sent homeward to think again, though in retrospect I was more the Bruce with his spider than proud Edward. I did try again.’

  And back to the phoenix, Jasmine thought.

  She caught him glancing to the side and spied Melanie hovering just outside the bar. She was waiting to haul him away on a made-up pretext if she got the nod, and she’d just received it. Jasmine had time for one last question, if she got it in before Melanie reached the table.

  ‘Who else was in the company?’ she asked, interrupting before he could saddle up to go into auto-promote mode, as he’d described it.

  Hamish glanced to the side again, tracking Melanie’s progress. He wanted to be rescued.

  ‘It’s been such a long time. I really wouldn’t know where to find any of them,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘That’s my area,’ Jasmine replied. ‘I just need names.’

  Melanie made it into range, iPhone in hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the PA began. She was looking at Jasmine, ostensibly in apology for the interruption, but it could equally have been addressed to Hamish for not reacting sooner. ‘Hamish, you’re needed downstairs. It’s Jocelyn. She says it can’t wait.’

  ‘Duty calls,’ Hamish said to Jasmine, getting up from his seat.

  ‘You were going to give me some names.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Queen is needed quite urgently,’ said Melanie, running interference.

  ‘The only name that leaps to mind is Adam Nolan,’ Hamish said. It sounded familiar, possibly from TV, but Jasmine couldn’t place him.

  ‘Beyond that I’m struggling. It was another lifetime. I could tell you a couple of first names I’m barely half certain of, but the surnames are gone.’

  ‘Surely you must be able to remember more than that,’ Jasmine stated, drawing a warning glare from Melanie, who was clearly unused to anyone treating her boss with anything less than deference. Jasmine ignored her. Hamish looked uncomfortable, caught on the back foot, and she had to press while she still could. ‘I realise it was a long time ago, but you worked with these people.’

  ‘Well, that’s just it,’ Hamish said, slightly exasperated. ‘I didn’t; or at least, I only worked with them very briefly before it all imploded. Following something like that, the aftermath is like a really bad break-up. You’re rather raw and you want nothing to do with anyone who was involved or who even reminds you of it. Before you know it, weeks have turned into months and you’re all on new paths that may never cross again.’

  Melanie chose this juncture to remind Hamish once more of the urgency of her made-up crisis, and they both withdrew. Jasmine thanked him for his help and was given a distracted ‘sure’ in return. Most definitely not ‘you’re welcome’.

  She watched him disappear through the door towards the stairs and reflected that Dot was right: Hamish Queen was a competent actor, but he wasn’t good enough. He was lying. He knew more than he was saying; much more.

  If you’re trying to find Tessa Garrion, then I’m afraid the history of the Glass Shoe Company is unlikely to constitute a rich seam of information.

  She’d be the judge of that. So far it was telling her plenty. For one thing, Jasmine never said she was looking for Tessa Garrion. Granted, Hamish could have made this association based on what he knew about Jasmine’s involvement in the Ramsay case, but it was still quite a leap. Why would he assume Tessa couldn’t be found when nobody had said she was missing?

  As soon as they were out of sight, she got out her phone and Googled Adam Nolan. Like Hamish, he had survived the wreckage of their failed venture and built a good career for himself. He had joined the RSC in 1983, but the reason Jasmine remembered his name was that he had been in the regular cast of First Do No Harm, a medical drama series from the late eighties, a favourite of her mum’s that Jasmine had watched with her on DVD box sets. The other reason his name had a certain significance was that there was an Aids charity named after him, Adam Nolan having died from the disease in 1993.

  Tessa Garrion dropped out of existence shortly after working with Hamish Queen’s fledgling theatre company and the only other name he could give her was someone who died eighteen years ago? Aye, right. That meant there were others, and Jasmine was going to find them.

  A Shot in the Dark

  Ideally, of course, this would turn out to be some kind of freak accident. That was the result everybody wanted. Sure,
there would be ramifications for hunting safety and the fall-out would provide soundbite opportunities for those Barbour-clad mutants in the Countryside Alliance, but it was far preferable to a murder hunt. So preferable, in fact, and in so many ways, that Catherine doubted she would be so fortunate.

  ‘What are the chances this was just bad luck?’ she asked the groundskeeper, as they stood on a perfectly manicured but heavily bloodstained lawn before the mobile gantry that had given so many people a perfect view of the fatality.

  The groundskeeper was named Roddy Frail. He was a short man in his fifties, someone she could picture stalking silently through the undergrowth, although the smell of loose tobacco would give him away if he didn’t stay upwind. His hands were rough and callused, conditioned by and to the outdoors, and his fingers were stained by no end of roll-ups. He was used to handling thorny vegetation, but thorny coppers not so much. He looked rattled, the place he’d worked for years suddenly seeming altogether foreign. He had been dragged from sleep and dropped into a milieu far more unfamiliar than that which had confronted any of the Glesca Polis bussed in from the big city.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ he conceded with anxious reluctance, like he was going to have to answer for it personally if it turned out to be so. Here was one person who was probably hoping it was murder.

  ‘A substantial part of the estate’s income is corporate shooting junkets,’ he went on. ‘They pay big money to have exclusive access.’

  ‘Was there hunting taking place last night?’ Catherine asked dubiously, thinking it really would be this guy’s balls if the answer was yes.

  He hit her with a look of apparent consternation that he was being questioned by someone either stupid or quite mad.

  ‘At night? With a play going on?’

  ‘Just wondering whether someone ended up somewhere they shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘Never happen,’ he insisted animatedly. ‘I have very strict safety protocols. There’s no hunting at all during the theatre weeks, never mind by night. The whole place is given over to the plays, every room booked out, so you’ve got people wandering about, exploring, walking woodland trails. See, when people are here to hunt they have the place to themselves. It’s fully escorted, well away from the castle. And I only allow night-time stalking for very experienced hunters, who are very few and far between in this place. Most of the corporate guests barely know one end of a gun from the other when they first get here.’