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by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Tell me. Did the Gantry daughter ever find out about her mother?’

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ I said. ‘We’re friends of Susie, so now we’re in a bit of a quandary. We don’t know whether to tell her or not.’

  ‘I would tell her. It was Jack’s idea to keep it a secret; he bullied Margaret and Joe into agreeing.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked at me and made a face. ‘Who knows for sure, young man? But Jack always had to be seen in new things. New suits, crisp shirts, the latest model car; and he insisted on the same for Susie when she was a child. I always suspected that he was trying to gloss over the fact that his wife was secondhand.’

  ‘Does Stephen know that Susie’s mother was his Auntie?’

  ‘Not from me,’ Mira Donn answered, shaking her head. ‘Since Tom died, I’ve barely even thought of the Gantrys. I had no reason to tell him, and I’m sure Joseph wouldn’t; Jack’s word was law to him.’

  ‘How can we get in touch with your son?’ Prim asked quietly.

  ‘Why do you want to?’

  ‘Because someone’s been sending Susie threatening letters.’

  ‘Threatening?’

  ‘Threatening her life.’

  ‘A lunatic, surely.’

  ‘Quite possibly, but there are a number of people we need to talk to, just to be on the safe side, and Stephen’s one of them. Can you give us his address, or a phone number?’

  ‘No, my dear, I can not. Stephen flies in and out of my life like a migrating bird. Right now he’s off with the flock.’

  ‘What does he do for a living these days?’ I asked her. ‘He worked as a book-keeper at Gantry’s, we understand.’

  ‘He only did that as a favour to Joseph. Stephen has a book-keeping qualification from FE College, but he never wanted to do that for a living. Instead he chooses what he sees as the glamorous life. He travels the world; every so often I will have a postcard from an exotic place. He tells me that he has interests in nightclubs, and such things, but I never hear any details. One day he will grow up, I’m sure, but there’s no sign of it yet.’

  ‘When did you hear from him last?’

  ‘Around two months ago.’

  I handed her a business card. ‘Perhaps you’d ask him to call us next time he gets in touch with you.’

  ‘I’ll do so, but I make no promises. Stephen is a law unto himself.’

  ‘I hope he can carry on like that, Mrs Donn. So far this isn’t a police matter, but if these letters don’t stop, I can’t see it staying that way.’

  Chapter 12

  We cut it fine, that night. On the way back to Glasgow, Prim called Susie and invited her and Mike for supper. But, once we were home, we caught up with celebrating our engagement and rather lost track of the time.

  Fortunately, like many independent young people, we are fairly accomplished high speed cooks. ‘Dab hands wi’ a Wok,’ as they say in Glasgow and Shanghai. We had just finished preparing our ingredients when the buzzer sounded.

  Naturally, Susie clocked Prim’s diamond as soon as she opened the door. If she was miffed that it was bigger than hers, she didn’t show it at all. ‘Congratulations,’ said Mike as he shook my hand. ‘I didn’t realise you were pregnant.’ Entirely the wrong thing to say to me, but once it had escaped from his mouth there was no hauling it back, so I laughed it off. If anything showed in my eyes, he didn’t notice.

  We spent the best part of the next hour drinking champagne. . or three of us did, since it was Susie’s turn to drive. . and looking out on the city below.

  Eventually, Prim and I disappeared into the kitchen and set to work with the wok. We dished up our stir-fry with a couple of interesting bottles of Austrian red wine. . guaranteed free of anti-freeze. . which Prim had found in our local off-licence. She has a great eye for these things.

  ‘When are you getting married?’ Susie asked, as she cleared the last prawn from her bowl.

  As Prim looked at me, I could only shrug. ‘This year,’ I supposed. ‘Once I’m through with Miles Grayson’s movie.’

  Dylan’s mouth dropped open. ‘Once you’re what?’ he gasped. Susie looked as flabbergasted as he did. ‘You mean Miles wasn’t kidding at Rogano’s the other night?’ she squealed.

  ‘No, he wasn’t as it turned out. Och it’s nothing, though,’ I protested, with a show of modesty that was completely fake. ‘It’s nepotism, really. What I’m doing is just an extension of the work I do with the GWA, and from the voice-overs.’

  ‘How many careers are you planning to have?’ asked Mike.

  ‘After this, just one: husband.’ I found myself smiling. ‘Okay, I might keep on the GWA stuff because I like the people so much; and the money for these commercials is just too silly to turn down.’

  ‘Jesus, man, how much more do you want?’

  I looked at him, severely. ‘Money is money, Michael. You ask Susie. I could do these jobs for free, but the advertising people wouldn’t understand. Neither would Sly Burr: he knows that twenty per cent of anything is better than one hundred per cent of fuck all.

  ‘One thing, although I haven’t talked this through completely with Prim. There’ll be no more sitting in grubby rooms interviewing people to help bloody lawyers get even richer than us. It’s time to move on from the Private Enquiry business.’

  I sensed my fiancee grinning at me. ‘I was getting to like it.’

  ‘Then you keep it on, my dearest, if that’s what you want. As you say, you and wee Lulu virtually run it between you already. But I’m going to concentrate on the things I enjoy most. . I might even play a bit more golf.’

  ‘And what about the Private Eye-ing?’ Susie gave me a mischievous look over her glass of sparkling mineral.

  ‘I gave that up a couple of years back,’ I assured her. ‘The stuff I’ve been doing for you two is strictly a one-off, with Prim’s permission.’

  ‘So how’s that going?’ asked Mike, serious all of a sudden.

  ‘That’s the other thing on tonight’s agenda. We’ve been looking at everyone on your list, spoken to them all, and, we think, eliminated them all. We’re left with one name, though, the one you didn’t include: Stephen Donn. He was behind the bother you had with his uncle. Joe was angry with you at the time, and Stephen seems to have taken advantage of that. The old fella swears blind that he didn’t know about Myrtle copying those documents.

  ‘Joe has nothing against you, Susie. He was very hurt when you fired him, but for a reason that you couldn’t help.

  ‘Let me ask you something. When you were wee, and your mother was alive, was he close to your family?’

  She took a few seconds to answer. ‘Yes, I suppose he was. He did have a sort of special place; I called him Uncle Joe when I was a kid, and every time he came to the house he’d give me pocket money. I was closer to him than my real Auntie; and I saw much more of him than I did of her. Truth is, I never could stand her.’

  ‘And how was he with your parents?’

  ‘He was my Dad’s best pal. The three of them always got on together. My Mum was very fond of him, I remember.’ She paused and stared at me. ‘Here, you’re not suggesting that he and my Mum had an affair are you? That’s ridiculous; she loved my Dad. He was the only man in the world as far as she was concerned.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Prim gently. ‘Joe Donn was your mother’s first husband.’

  Susie stared across the table at us, in sheer disbelief, her eyes moistening. ‘You’re kidding,’ she protested, at last. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Joe did. And his sister-in-law confirmed it. It seems to be true, Susie.’

  She was crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘But why didn’t they tell me? Why keep something like that from me?’

  ‘It was your father’s idea, apparently,’ I told her.

  ‘We could speculate all night about his motives,’ said Dylan, grimly, ‘and never get anywhere. The Devil alone knows some of the things that have been hatched in his mind.’r />
  ‘But I wouldn’t have cared,’ Susie wailed.

  ‘No, but clearly your father did,’ I told her. ‘I reckon the easiest way for you to look at this is for you to accept that he thought that keeping your mother’s past and her relationship with Joe Donn from you was in your best interests.’

  She shot me a quick scornful look. ‘Then it must have been in his too, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it. No one’s interests ever ranked above my Lord Provost’s, not even mine.’

  She paused. ‘Mike,’ she asked. ‘Would you be okay to drive home if you stopped drinking now?’

  Dylan nodded. ‘In a couple of hours, yes. Why?’

  Susie drained her mineral water and held out her glass. ‘Guess,’ she said. ‘I’ll have some of that Austrian stuff, Oz, if I may. No, on second thoughts, I’ll have a lot.’

  I filled her glass as she asked, right up to the top. ‘I’m sorry, Susie,’ I offered. ‘Maybe we should have kept the secret, like your old man wanted.’

  She shook her head, firmly. ‘No way. The very fact that he wanted it that way is reason enough for you to tell me. And I’d have expected no less of friends.’

  ‘So where does this leave us with the letters, Oz?’ asked Dylan.

  ‘Unless you’ve come up with another suspect, I’d say it leaves us wanting to speak to the boy Stephen, wherever he is.’

  ‘What d’you mean, wherever?’

  ‘I mean that no one bloody knows. Young Mr Donn seems to be a night person. His Uncle Joe cast him out after the Myrtle incident, and he only goes to see his Mammy every so often. He’s not on the phone anywhere, and he doesn’t seem to have a known address.’

  ‘A real mystery man, this. Does no one know anything about him?’

  ‘His mother said something vague about him having interests in nightclubs. That could mean anything, though. Susie’s cousin; that’s another connection we have. Myrtle said that they were in the same racket. . and we know what that was.’

  The Detective Inspector growled. ‘That gives me an excuse to lift the boy when he shows. Meantime I’ll run a PNC check; that might come up with something.’

  ‘But why, Oz?’ Susie moaned, her glass empty already. ‘Why should he pick on me?’

  ‘Maybe he’s still fighting what he sees as his Uncle Joe’s battle. Who knows? Listen, you haven’t had any letters since the last one, have you?’

  ‘No. Fingers crossed, they’ve dried up.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mike chipped in. ‘Let’s not get this out of proportion; it’s long odds that this is a crank thing and that the guy’s got bored with it, having caused a degree of alarm.’

  ‘And everything at work is normal?’

  ‘Too right, with the new office manager around.’

  ‘Ach, well. It’s probably all over, like you say. Prim and I have taken it as far as we can, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Susie, ‘and thank you both very much. I’m grateful for everything you’ve found out. . and I mean everything.’

  I opened another bottle of the fine Austrian; and then another. For most of the next three hours or so, Susie agonised over whether she should approach Joe Donn to bring their unorthodox connection into the open.

  ‘Wha’d’y’ think, Mike?’ she asked him over and over again. ‘Nothing, love,’ he replied consistently. ‘You have to work that one out for yourself.’

  Finally, at around the twelfth time of asking, he slipped an arm round her waist and lifted her out of her seat. ‘I think, my dear,’ he announced at last, ‘that it’s time for you to go to bed.’

  ‘Yesh pleashe,’ she giggled. Night had fallen as we drank and talked. The moon shone down upon us, and the lights of Sauchiehall Street shone up at us.

  ‘Why don’t you crash out here?’ I suggested.

  Dylan shot me a look. ‘If you think I’ve spent the last three hours drinking Strathmore and watching the Wee One get pished, only to decide to stay the night, you have another think coming, pal.’

  So we saw them to the door and all the way down to the main entrance. Susie’s car was backed into one of our block’s visitor places, off-street and hidden from those entrepreneurs who make their living through dealing in expensive alloy wheels. The term ‘Hot Wheels’ has a different meaning in Glasgow.

  We followed, watching with some amusement as Mike walked the love of his life down to the front door, then strode across to their car and slid behind the wheel, thinking that she was on his heels. But Susie had stayed put, saying her extended goodbye to us.

  ‘So sorry,’ she slurred, as she threw her arms around Prim’s neck, for support as much as affection. ‘So sorry. We’ve spent all fuckn’ night talkin’ ’bout me, ’n it sh’d have been your night all along. You two be happy now.’

  I couldn’t help grinning as I looked across at Dylan, as he switched on the car’s ignition, then left the engine running as he jumped out and came across to retrieve his scooshed girlfriend.

  He was halfway towards us, when the car exploded. There was no big bang as such, just a soft ‘crrummmp’ sound, followed by a fireball, and then another so violent that it threw all four of us off our feet, and so hot that it seemed to draw all the air from our lungs.

  Chapter 13

  By some miracle, none of us was seriously hurt. The only casualty was Mike’s red Lacoste wind-cheater, the back of which was melted by the heat.

  No longer just a foursome, we sat upstairs in our apartment, with medics buzzing around us, fire officers asking us questions about the sequence of events, and uniformed policemen hanging around in the background.

  Downstairs, in the car park, the sleek silver sports coupe in which Susie and Dylan had arrived was now a blackened skeleton, as was the vehicle next to it, a Mazda owned by a ground floor neighbour. Prim and I were lucky; our cars, a BMW Z3 and a Freelander, had been far enough away to escape the flames.

  It would have been an exaggeration to say that the experience had sobered Susie, but it had quietened her, that’s for sure. She sat on our two-seater with her head on Mike’s shoulder, looking totally confused and whimpering quietly. The ambulance team had wanted to take her to the Royal, but she had panicked when they produced a wheelchair so, for the sake of peace and quiet, they had left her in Mike’s care.

  None of us said much, not for a while. We just sat there, sipping black coffee, exchanging looks. It was as if we were waiting for something to happen. When it did, it came in the form of a middle-aged Chief Inspector and a slightly older man, a Divisional Fire Officer, both of them wearing the heavy uniforms and looking as if they owned the place, as they burst into our living room.

  ‘A word in private, DI Dylan,’ barked the policeman.

  ‘No.’ My friend Mike is rank conscious, normally, but a fiery enema is liable to make anyone unco-operative. The Chief Inspector, clearly not programmed for that response, stared at him, his mouth hanging slightly open and his heavy moustache twitching.

  ‘I’m not leaving Susie. You want to talk to me, you do it here.’

  Mr Senior Plod glanced at Prim and me, in an attempt to be meaningful.

  ‘What’s your name, Sir,’ asked Dylan.

  ‘Chief Inspector Brown,’ he replied, then nodded towards the fireman. ‘This is Mr Callaghan.’

  ‘Well, Mr Brown, this is Mr Blackstone and Miss Phillips. They’re friends and they’ve had their eyebrows singed too, so they have an interest in this. We’ll talk here.’

  Chief Inspector Brown folded his cards. ‘Pull up a chair from the table,’ I offered.

  They settled themselves in front of us, but Brown managed still to behave as if Prim and I weren’t there. ‘What are you working on just now, Inspector?’ he began.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  For the second time in as many minutes, the policeman was stuck for a word. So he simply repeated the question, more emphatically this time. Dylan repeated his answer.

  ‘Look,’ snapped Brown. ‘Do I have to get your senior offi
cer to order you to tell me?’

  As I looked at Mike, I saw something in his face I’d seen only once or twice before. ‘Just you fucking try it,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’ll do just that. Where d’you work from?’ The Chief Inspector’s mouth was set in a tight line.

  ‘Headquarters. Pitt Street.’

  ‘Right. Use your phone, Mr Blackwood?’

  ‘There’s one in the kitchen, Mr Brown,’ I told him. He stood and stomped off, leaving Divisional Officer Callaghan sitting in an awkward silence.

  When he returned, almost five minutes later, his face was distinctly red. I always feel sorry for people who blush. It’s like wearing a sign round your neck reading, ‘I’ve been a dickhead.’

  Brown settled awkwardly on to his dining chair. ‘You might have told me you were Special Branch,’ he mumbled.

  I stared across at my pal. ‘You might have told me too,’ I said. ‘If I’d known that our nation’s security was resting in your buttery grip I might have felt differently about staying in this country.’

  Dylan grinned. ‘Need to know, Oz. Need to know. I was transferred four months ago.’ He turned to Brown. ‘Now, can we forget about all that silver braid on your uniform and assume that I’m in charge here?’

  Not waiting for a reply he turned to the fireman. ‘What have you got, Mr Callaghan?’

  ‘Someone doesn’t like you, Mr Dylan,’ the DO replied. ‘There were two seats to this fire; the car’s petrol tank and another source. I think someone followed you here and when you were inside, secured a firebomb device close to the fuel tank, beside the exhaust. It had a small explosive charge, and a quantity of petrol in a plastic container. I’d say it had a trembler trigger and that the vibration from the silencer was enough to set it off.

  ‘The heat from the first blast was enough to blow the vapour and fuel in the main tank. If you’d still been in that motor, son,’ said the grizzled fireman, grimly, ‘you’d have been done to a fuckin’ crisp.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Mike nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’ He looked at Callaghan, then at Brown. ‘But as far as your reports go, it was a wiring failure. A tragedy averted, but an accident nonetheless.’