Screen Savers ob-4

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘When we do make them, we’ll have two objectives in mind. First and foremost, getting Dawn back safe, and, eventually if not at the same time, getting our hands on Stephen Donn.’

  Miles stared at the ground in front of him as we walked. ‘I don’t know if I want to get my hands on Stephen Donn, Oz. I wouldn’t trust myself not to kill him.’

  ‘Well I’m going to catch up with him, sunshine. That’s the only picture I have in my mind at the moment. The bastard has chosen me as the focal point of all this mayhem, and I’m going to find out why. At the very least, I owe him a real doing for a wee hurt boy up in Fife, and he’s going to get it. You can hold my jacket if you like.’

  ‘Hey,’ my future in-law looked at me with a strange, sad grin on his lined face. ‘What happened to the harmless, amiable clown I met up in Oban those years back?’

  ‘The amiable clown’s still there, I hope. But he isn’t harmless any more. When Fate stamps on your toes there’s usually nothing to do save learning to live with the pain. But when it’s people who do it to you, then if it’s in your power, you hunt them down and do it right back.’

  ‘What about turning the other cheek?’

  ‘Do that, and you get your arse well kicked.’

  In spite of himself, Miles laughed. ‘I promise you this,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know why but I’m certain of it. This time next week, we’re going to be finishing that movie. And think of the publicity it’s going to get when the telly and the tabloids get hold of the story.’

  ‘In that case we’d better catch Donn,’ he said, grim once more. ‘Otherwise before long folks’ll be saying I set the whole thing up myself.’

  He punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Thanks pal. I know I was wobbling back there; I’m back on track now. I’m even thinking positive. You remember that guy Pep Newton?’

  ‘The sound man? Sure.’

  ‘He seemed to me to be buddies with Stu Queen. How would you and Prim like to go talk to him? I’ll stay here to man the phones.’

  ‘If he calls.’

  ‘Or wait for the mailman.’

  ‘If he writes.’

  ‘Ah, what the hell. If Donn has read the script, he’ll think it takes a couple of days to get serious money together.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay. We’ll go and see Pep if you want. How should we play it, though?’

  ‘Tell him there’s some sound-editing needs doing and we have to find him?’

  ‘Do feature players usually go looking for staff?’ I asked, innocently.

  ‘They do if Miles Grayson sends them. Tell him that Geraldine’s gone off for a few days too. I’ll call her now and get Pep’s address.’

  Chapter 49

  Movie work may not be the most secure way to earn a living, but the top people are paid well and hired pretty well full-time; Pep Newton was one of the best. He was so good in fact that he had picked up, at an hour’s notice, an extra four days’ work on a music video, as we discovered when his fresh-faced blonde wife answered the door of their distinguished-looking apartment in Dolphin Square, not far from the Palace of Westminster.

  Rather than get into a pointless discussion with her on the doorstep, I told her that it was nothing important, but that we’d come back in a couple of hours, at around seven. We killed the time in the Red Lion pub in Whitehall, playing Spot the Politician and listening to the sotto voce sounds of medicinal spin.

  Pep was at home when we went back to the Square. He was surprised to see me, but pleased nonetheless, and he made just the right amount of fuss of Prim.

  ‘Come eat with us, Oz,’ he insisted. ‘Jenny’s done a pasta sauce and there’s always plenty. It’s just ready. Hey Jen,’ he called through to the kitchen. ‘Two more plates, okay, and stick some extra linguini in the pot; we got honoured guests. This is the guy I told you about; the actor who spread that fat bleedin’ Yank all over the control room wall.’

  Mrs Newton’s face appeared round the kitchen door, smiling. ‘You’re the wrestling man? I didn’t realise that before. I read about you in the Mail on Sunday magazine. Didn’t you win the lottery as well?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, putting a hand on Prim’s shoulder. ‘We won the lottery; we picked three numbers each.’

  Jenny whistled. ‘Life’s a bitch and then you’re rich, eh.’

  ‘That’s how it was for us, right enough.’

  We joined them in their small dining room, at a round table. ‘Pep,’ I said, rolling strands of linguini on to my fork, ‘this is a trivial call, really. Gerrie’s away for a couple of days or she’d be doing this, but we were handy so Miles sent us. We need your mate, Stu Queen the sparks, back at the studio. He was stood down too quick last night; there’s some wiring work needs doing on the big set.

  ‘We’ve tried the only contact number we have for him, but no joy. D’you know where we can find him?’

  The dark Spanish eyes looked at me, a little curiously. ‘I haven’t a bleedin’ clue, mate,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I hardly know the guy. I’ve never worked with him before, and I’d never even heard of him, until he turned up on the production team up in Scotland.’

  He stirred his pasta around on his plate, mixing the sauce through it. ‘What’s all this about, Oz?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, with as much wide-eyed innocence as I could manage. ‘Like I said, we’re just Miles’ errand people.’

  ‘No I don’t mean this, I mean the whole thing. I saw Dawn on set yesterday afternoon; she looked as fit as a fiddle. Virus my bum. What’s up? Have she and Miles had an up-and-downer? I’ve worked with them before. I was there when they met in fact, on that project up in the Highlands a few years back. She’s nice, but she can be a fiery little thing from time to time.’

  ‘She’s the quiet one of the family, mate. She’s Prim’s sister.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten that. It said that in the Mail on Sunday, too.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Dawn,’ said Primavera. ‘Or with her and Miles. She’s just found out that she’s pregnant. It’ll be a first for both of them, and Miles is over the moon. When she told him last night, he insisted that she was taking a week off. The virus thing was a cover story to keep the press at bay. That’s what’s really behind it all.’

  Nice one, girl, I said to myself, as the sound man’s face split into a wide grin.

  ‘Ahhh,’ he exclaimed, as he swallowed hook, line and sinker, ‘I knew it was something big. I know how much a week’s delay costs. I’m part of it.’

  ‘Going back to the boy Queen,’ I ventured, a little later. ‘Do you think he might have picked up some extra work on the fly? We checked with his agency; they haven’t placed him anywhere.’

  ‘Like I said, mate,’ Pep replied. ‘I wouldn’t know. The guy never says much about himself. That’s unusual, for our world’s a bit of a co-operative. We exchange information all the time about projects coming up and stuff, and where there might be work going. He doesn’t. It’s as if he’s only interested in this one job and that’s it.’

  ‘Real mystery man, eh.’

  ‘That’s right. He’s a good enough sparks though. Used to all sorts; high voltage work and everything. He’s worked in the Middle East; he did tell me that, and out of Rotterdam, and Singapore.’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue about that either. You can’t tell from listening to him, that’s for sure. I thought he might have been Scottish like you, then I thought there might be some European in there.’

  ‘How did he get on the project if he’s such an unknown quantity?’

  Pep finished off his linguini. ‘It was a last minute thing. Originally, it was Zoltan Szabo who was booked in for the job; I know ’cause he told me the week before. I work with Zoltan a lot of the time. But he had to pull out, and Stu was handy so the agency slotted him in.’

  ‘What happened to Zoltan?’ Prim asked.

  The sound man frowned, his black brows for
ming a hairy ridge. ‘Bad, that was. There he was going home from the pub the very night before we was due to go up north to start work on the project, when. . Bang.’ The word sounded round the small room.

  ‘He was hit by a car; broke both his legs. And you know what? Bleedin’ driver didn’t even stop.’

  Chapter 50

  ‘This much is certain,’ Miles Grayson growled. He seemed to have taken my advice; he was doing a damn fine job of focusing his anger. ‘I will never use that agency again, and I’ll do my best to see that no one else in this business does either.’

  I had to agree with him. Zoltan Szabo had been knocked down and almost killed by a hit-and-run driver, and next day a new and previously unknown electrician had shown up out of the blue, ready and willing to take his place on the project.

  No one had asked a thing about him, and no one had known a thing about him — other than that he was there and the agency was no longer in a hole.

  ‘Should we go to them tomorrow and ask to see the file they hold on Stu Queen?’ I asked.

  It was Prim who answered. ‘No. They’d be bound to ask why we were so interested in him. We’d have to give them a hell of a strong cover story; they might get nervous and call their lawyers. They might get silly and call the press. The whole thing could blow wide open.’

  She was right too.

  I looked at Miles across the top of my glass, where an ice cube big enough to have been the centrepiece of another movie was fighting to submerge a slice of lemon. ‘So we don’t really know any more than we did before we spoke to Pep,’ I muttered. ‘That Stephen Donn posed as a film sparks to get on set and among us, that he’s a real bad bastard and that he has Dawn.’

  ‘We do,’ said Prim. ‘We know that he’s worked in other places as an electrician. Maybe he was Stu Queen there too.’

  ‘Maybe he has a criminal record as Stu Queen,’ Miles suggested.

  ‘If he has, Mike will find it,’ I countered. ‘But if he has so what? We know already that he’s a fucking criminal. No, we’re back where we were, sat on our hands.’

  ‘And the Goddamned phone hasn’t rung all day, other than once when Kiki Eldon called to tell me that the press have bought our story, without question.’

  ‘So maybe tomorrow, we’ll have mail,’ Prim mused.

  I blinked. ‘Hold the phone,’ I exclaimed. ‘Maybe we’ve got it now. Dawn’s got an e-mail address. You and she talk that way all the time.’ Miles, who had been slumped, sat upright in his chair. ‘Could she access it from here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sure, she has a lap-top.’ He was out of that chair in a second, running out of the room and up the big staircase. Less than a minute later he was back, clutching an Apple Mac Powerbook, with a modem cable flying behind it.

  He crouched beside the telephone jack point and changed cables; Mr Mac was powering up already.

  ‘You do know her password?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘No, it’s unlikely to be that. But why don’t you try P-R-I-M, ’ Prim suggested. ‘They’re usually four letters, and my password is D-A-W-N, so you never know.’ Miles nodded, moved the cursor to the apple symbol in the top left-hand corner of the colour screen and opened the Internet software. A box, with a cursor flashing on an empty line, appeared on screen. We watched as he keyed in P-R-I-M.

  An on-screen dialogue told us what was happening step by step as the modem dialled the Internet provider. After a few seconds, the connection was made, and a soft — and very well-known — voice told us that Dawn had mail.

  ‘What do I do now?’ asked Miles. ‘I don’t use this stuff.’

  ‘Gimme.’ He obeyed at once, and passed the lap-top across to Prim. She pulled down the e-mail section of the menu, gave two quick commands to retrieve the waiting messages, then, when the process was complete, broke the Internet connection.

  There were three new messages in the off-line mailbox when Prim opened it. One was from ‘DPhil’ — SuperDave, I guessed — the second was from someone with an all-numeral Compuserve address, and the third was from ‘stuer@hotmail.com’.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Prim. ‘Funny guy. Stu Queen: S-T-U and then E-R, the Queen.’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Miles.

  ‘There’s a quick way to find out.’ She clicked on the small envelope symbol to open the document. The screen cleared then filled with a new window, containing a page of text. ‘It’s him,’ she cried out. ‘Look there. He sent it this afternoon.’

  She fell silent as Miles and I perched on the couch on either side of her, leaning close so that we could clearly see the message on the flat LCD screen. We read it together.

  It began politely:

  Hello Mr Grayson,

  I hope that you haven’t taken too long to work out how

  I would contact you. That could be bad for Dawn’s health. I assure you that she’s safe and sound for the moment. Whether she remains that way depends on your co-operation.

  I know enough about the film business to be sure that Snatch will make you another fortune at the box office, especially when the news of this incident breaks — I have no doubt you will ensure that it does. What I propose is that to secure your wife’s safe release, you anticipate those profits and send some of them in my direction. Ten million sterling, seems reasonable and achievable in the circumstances.

  I appreciate that arrangements like these can’t be made on the instant, so I will allow you twenty-four hours from the receipt of this message to transfer the funds to a new account in the Bank Neder, in Lugano, Switzerland. The money should be cleared for immediate transfer by simple coded instruction, to another account of my choosing.

  Please send me a one-word reply, ‘Yes’, immediately, to confirm that you have received this message and that you will comply. Then, within the twenty-four hours specified, I will expect to receive a second message containing the code word which will allow me to make the next transfer.

  Forty-eight hours after that, when the money and I are no longer traceable, I will send you a further e-mail telling you where Dawn can be found. Be assured, she will be unharmed and will be fed and watered during that two-day period.

  I do not want you to feel, Mr Grayson, that you are simply a random victim. Equally, I hope you will not waste your life in futile pursuit of me when this is over. Think of me as a working man who is taking an opportunity to secure his future. The only person you should blame for what has happened is Oz Blackstone.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Stephen Donn.

  It was only when the message finished that I realised I had been reading aloud.

  ‘Cool son-of-a-bitch,’ Miles hissed. And then he looked at me. ‘Why, Oz?’ he asked, with pain in his voice. ‘Why is all this happening, and what does it have to do with you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I have no idea. I promise you, I have never met Stephen Donn in my life, and I have never done anything to upset him.’

  ‘What about his Uncle? You told me about him getting kicked out of Susie’s company. Could he be blaming you? Could he have sent his nephew on some sort of crazy revenge mission?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Prim, evenly. ‘Especially since Susie was one of the targets.’ Something in her tone made me tense as I looked at her. ‘Joseph Donn is Susie’s real father,’ she continued. ‘He told me that when I went to see him. But she doesn’t know, and she never will because I promised not to tell her. When Susie’s mother left Joe for Jack Gantry, she didn’t know at the time, but she was already pregnant.

  ‘Jack told him when he asked him to come into the business. He confessed to him that he was sterile — that fits, for Susie’s an only child. Old Joe would kill Stephen himself, for that stunt with the car.’

  In my mind, two pennies dropped simultaneously; I couldn’t handle both so I let one roll on the floor for a while.

  ‘He’s read the script,’ I said. Miles stared at me. ‘Think about it,’ I told him. ‘He’s asked for ten million
sterling. He wants it deposited in a secure bank account for onward transfer. Straight out of the Snatch script.’

  ‘Surely he couldn’t be that arrogant?’ Prim asked.

  ‘What’s arrogant about it? He didn’t expect to be identified as Stu Queen; not after removing all those happy family snapshots. He didn’t reckon on Uncle Joe putting one over on him.’

  ‘Okay, Oz,’ said Miles. ‘Maybe you’re right; maybe this guy is using our own plot against him. But he’s got Dawn for real.

  ‘Can you send the first reply message like he says, Prim?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then do it. Give him his “Yes”. I’ll call my accountant and tell him to make the transfer to the Lugano Bank, code word “Elanore”.’ He took out a cellphone, punched in a short-code number, and barked those instructions to the person who answered.

  When he was finished he nodded to Prim. There was a small box beside the message labelled ‘reply’. She clicked it, typed the single word into the new window which appeared, then re-established the connection with the service provider and pressed the ‘send’ symbol. ‘Message sent successfully’ appeared on screen a second or two later.

  ‘Done,’ she pronounced. ‘Now. We’ve got twenty-four hours to find him.’

  ‘Why?’ Miles asked, grimly. ‘Because you think he’s going to kill Dawn anyway?’

  I could tell from the sudden flicker of fright which crossed her face that that possibility hadn’t occurred to her. I answered for her. ‘No. Why should he do that? Stephen’s planning his early retirement on your money. If he kills Dawn, then he will never have a moment’s peace anywhere in the world, for he will know for sure that the three of us will hunt him down, literally to the ends of the earth.’

  ‘Oh yeah. How would we do that? Where would we even start?’