Screen Savers

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘They were told to leave it there.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the police could put me in the frame for the job, eventually. If Liam had been done, they’d have been bound to search the hotel for a weapon. No way could they have proved I’d smuggled it out of the hotel in the middle of the night, especially if I hadn’t. But if they’d found it in Liam’s room . . .

  ‘Later on, in the context of a string of charges against the mad serial killer Blackstone, the very fact that the bat and I were in the same hotel might have been enough.’

  ‘Not for the Crown Prosecution Service, surely.’

  ‘Oh no? Given my history with Liam? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we submit that Mr Blackstone, with a long memory for an old insult, had opportunity, access, and oh look, there’s the weapon. You tell me they wouldn’t have run with that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mike conceded. ‘They’d have given you some trouble over it, that’s for sure.’ He spooned some Lamb Madras on to his boiled rice. ‘So what’s the next move, maestro?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the trouble, I don’t have one. This guy’s paralysed my life, man - or he’s trying to. I could make myself safe, I suppose, by hiring a bodyguard and hiding in my flat, but if I do that I might as well be in Perth nick.

  ‘There’s only one positive thing I can do: get back out there and try to smoke the bastard out. I’m off to Cardiff tonight with the GWA: I spoke to Everett before I came here and put him in the picture. I offered to pull out of the show, but you know the Big Man. He told me that chances are I’m imagining the whole thing, but that even if I’m not, there’s no way he’ll back off from any maternal fornicator. So it’s business as usual, but he’s going to treble security at the arena and in the hotel, just in case.

  ‘Then on Monday, I’m due in London to complete my stint on Miles’ movie. I called him as well, although Prim had already been in touch with Dawn. They have on-site security too, so there should be no risk there.’

  Dylan nodded. ‘There’s not much else you can do. I’ll make sure that your folks, Ellen, Prim and her parents are all under police observation. How’s Mr Phillips, by the way?’

  ‘SuperDave? He’s recovering well. His brain was pretty fried by the atropine, but they don’t reckon there’ll be any lasting damage; they’re letting him home this afternoon. Prim’s staying up there for the weekend.’

  ‘Best place for her. When she gets back to Glasgow, tell her to travel everywhere by taxi. That car park of yours is vulnerable, as we all know too well.

  ‘Mind you, Oz,’ he continued, ‘my guess is that the man may have played himself out. If he’s watching you as closely as you think, he’ll know that you spent Tuesday with the police and that you were released. He’ll know as well that you’ve been to London with Matthews, and even if he didn’t follow you there, he’ll have guessed why.

  ‘So chances are, he’ll have worked out by now that you’ve rumbled his strategy.’

  I liked his reasoning. ‘That’s good news, then.’

  ‘For your nearest and dearest, maybe; for you maybe not. This guy’s been prepared to kill or maim your relatives and friends just to make you suffer. He may not be inclined to walk away, simply because he can’t do that easily any more. He may decide instead to finish it all with a direct attack on you.

  ‘So I would watch it, Oz. I’d be very careful. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to hire that bodyguard.’

  Having cheered me up for a second, he’d dropped me right back in it. I waited until he was chewing on his next mouthful of our shared Madras, before I said, ‘Don’t you think I should hire a food taster as well?’

  Chapter 41

  I really did think about hiring that minder; but eventually I decided that since the most vulnerable part of my weekend was going to be the time I spent standing in the middle of a Welsh wrestling ring in front of thousands of spectators, he wouldn’t have been much good to me when it really mattered.

  So partly for that reason, partly out of pride, and partly because, despite the lottery cash and all the other money in which I was wallowing, I was at heart still a parsimonious Fifer, I decided that I would do without close personal protection.

  I met the GWA crowd as usual that afternoon, having first called my Dad to explain to him what I believed had been happening, and having phoned Noosh Turkel, to tell her - without going into too much detail - that the chances were that the Russian Mafia did not, in fact, have a price on her head.

  Understandably, Liam was still slightly worked up by our discovery that he had been the original target of the bungling brothers. To reassure him, I called Dylan and persuaded him to check to confirm that there was no Irish intelligence to suggest that he was on anyone’s hit list.

  I can’t deny that I was nervous as the lights went up for our live Saturday show in the Cardiff National Arena. There I was, in a red tuxedo no less, standing in mid-ring booming out my usual welcome to GWA Battleground, to a crowd which for all I knew might have included a crack shot with a sniper’s rifle. I was out of there as fast as I could; I hoped that the punters wouldn’t notice, but Everett did.

  As I settled back into my ringside seat, I heard his voice in my earpiece, from his position up in the production tower. ‘Buddy,’ he said. ‘I told you I didn’t mind if you did your announcements from ringside rather than up there in full view. But if you’re gonna do it like usual, you do it like usual; you don’t bolt out of there like the Roadrunner with Wiley E Coyote on his ass.’

  I glanced up into the gloom, in his general direction, and nodded.

  As it turned out, no one shot me, or blew me up or anything else. After the show, Liam walked me out to the bus and, back at the hotel, he insisted on sharing a room with me. All through the weekend I kept in touch with Prim, Ellie and my Dad, but I was reassured. None of them had seen anything unusual. Back at Auchterarder, David was recovering well from his poisoning. He was quiet, and not a little embarrassed. ‘I offered to take him for a pint,’ Prim told me. ‘You should have seen the look on his face.’

  ‘Ask him if he’s started on his new range of models yet.’

  I didn’t fly back to Glasgow with the team on Sunday. Instead I caught a train to London where I was met by Miles’ and Dawn’s assistant, Geraldine Baker. It’s no myth; movie stars, when they’re working, really do have people to do everything but think for them - although, in the case of one or two who come to mind, thinking is virtually the only thing they’re not capable of handling personally.

  She wasn’t alone; waiting with her on the platform as I jumped out of the train was a slim dark-haired bloke, a newcomer to the team. ‘Hello Oz,’ she greeted me. ‘This is Mark Kravitz, he’s just joined the production team. Come on, the car’s just outside.’

  The studio scenes of our movie were being shot on a massive sound stage just south of London, in Surrey. For the duration, Miles and Dawn had rented another mansion, this time near Farnham. It wasn’t quite as big as the one on Deeside, but it was pretty tasty nonetheless. It was big enough to accommodate them plus, from the cast, Scott Steele, Nelson Reed, who played the bad guy, and me, plus Frank Gilet, the director of photography, Weir Dobbs, the assistant director, Kiki Eldon, the PR lady and Geraldine. Some of the grafters on the production crew were accommodated in hotels close to the studio, but most, I gathered, could commute from London.

  We got there just in time for dinner. Dawn had hired a chef from a London agency, a big black guy who appeared in the drawing room while we were sipping sherry, to run through the menu for us. Once he had finished, my future sister-in-law took my arm and pulled me into a corner. ‘Miles and I flew up to see Dad yesterday,’ she said, quietly. ‘He’s okay, thank God, but he’s had a bit of a shake. Oz, it scares me just to think about it.

  ‘We’re taking no chances with this character. For as long as you’re with us, Mark will be going everywhere with you. We’ve hired him from a firm of security consu
ltants.’

  I’d have appreciated being consulted myself about that, but I wasn’t of a mind to protest. I didn’t want to leave any more casualties lying in my wake. So I simply nodded and said, ‘Fair enough. I’ll pick up his tab though; this is my problem, after all.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Dawn insisted. ‘We’re all involved. Mark’s fee is part of the production costs; we’ve even done a deal with his firm. They get billing in the end titles.’

  I had to laugh. ‘I can see it now: bodyguard to Mr Blackstone, Mark Kravitz.’

  ‘Not quite. Personal assistant to Mr Blackstone, actually.’

  ‘Bugger me,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll be getting a star on my door next.’

  She gave me a funny wee smile. ‘You never know . . .’ she whispered, turning and walking over to the bar on the sideboard.

  ‘How you doin’, son?’ Scott Steele bore down on me, hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you again.’ I noted that he was not one of nature’s sherry-sippers. The old boy was straight into the straight malt.

  ‘Not bad, actually. Glad to be back with the team.’

  ‘Aye, I heard you had a difficult time last week.’

  Jesus, I wondered, how much does he know?

  He answered my silent question at once. ‘Dawn says her father’s on the mend, though,’ he said. ‘I was glad to hear it. Food poisoning can be a real leveller, especially for us older guys.’

  As well as a chef, Miles had hired a butler. He brought our conversation to an abrupt halt with a call from the doorway, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.’

  Prim and I don’t regard ourselves as super-rich, only ordinary rich. So it would be pretentious for us even to think about hiring a private chef. But if we ever did, I wouldn’t look past the guy who cooked for us in that Surrey mansion. His menu was at first sight robust, lobster, followed by a mango sorbet freshener, then medallions of beef in a rich port-enhanced sauce, but he had the touch and sensitivity of a true artist. By the time the crème brûlée arrived, all the movie talk had subsided, and we were discussing nothing but our chef and his talents. He chose the wines too, a nice white Rioja and a rare but very interesting light German red.

  We were well into the coffee and Sambucca before I remembered why we were there. ‘So what’s the schedule for the week, Miles? I asked, across the table.

  ‘Easy for you tomorrow, mate,’ he replied. ‘You’re in the sound studio beginning your narration sequences. That’s where you’ll be all this week, in fact. Next week though, you’re on set.’

  I frowned at him, my curiosity stirred; I hadn’t been expecting that. At once, he answered the question which was written on my face. ‘We’ve been playing around with the ending, Oz. One of my few virtues as a movie-maker is my flexibility. If I think something will work, I’ll go with it. I’ve never been completely sold on the way the script finished, neither has Dawn. So when she suggested an extra twist, I had the screen-writer work it up. It involves you.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘I’m stretched to my limit as it is.’

  ‘No you’re not, Oz. You’re still finding your limit. We’ve all been watching you work, Dawn and I, and Weir; you’re never going to play Hamlet, old son, but you can do this.’ He reached under the table, picked up a sheaf of paper, and tossed it across to me.

  ‘That’s the revise; read it, learn it and get ready to rehearse it. We shoot it next week.’

  I picked it up and began to read, as conversations continued around me. There wasn’t a lot of it, but I studied every line slowly and carefully. The deeper into it I got, the further removed I seemed to become from everyone in the room. As the implications of the changes dawned on me, the only sound I could hear was my own heavy breathing. As I finished and looked up, I realised that was because everyone was watching me.

  ‘What the hell’s this?’ I asked. ‘I’m the villain?’

  Miles nodded. ‘That’s right. You and Dawn are the bad guys.’ He laughed. ‘Shit man, anyone can make a rich-girl-snatched-for-ransom-rescued-from-the-jaws-of-death-by- heroic-boyfriend type of movie. But I like my endings to have zing. So in the end, you and I land on the deserted rig carrying the access documents to the Lugano bank where Scott, your father, has lodged the ten million pounds ransom money. We expect to find Dawn, your sister in the movie, and the bad guy we’ve been tracing all through. Only we don’t. There’s no one there but her.

  ‘I realise that she’s planned the whole thing, but what I don’t twig at first is that you’re in on it too. The twist is that Scott has remarried and has changed his will to leave everything to your new stepmother; you and Dawn don’t like it. You know also that he has an illness which will kill him inside two years, so you dream up this kidnap scam to claim your inheritance, sort of in advance.

  ‘Like you can see from the script, it works.’

  I stared at him. ‘But I’m not qualified for this,’ I protested.

  ‘Sure you are. You’re a natural, Oz. I suspect that you’ve been a bit of a play-actor all your life.’

  I thought about that. It’s certainly true that when I was a kid I had so many imaginary friends that I wasn’t sure at times what I was doing and with whom. Christ, thinking back, I almost had to keep a diary. In those times too, Jan and I used to plan adventures and act them out. But still . . .

  ‘Isn’t it a risk, though? Okay, you’re happy with what I’ve done so far, but every step forward is into unknown territory.’

  ‘Where’s the risk?’ Dawn countered, in her LA-modified Perthshire accent. ‘You take a look at Miles’ record as a film-maker, not just from the critics’ viewpoint, but in financial terms too. He’s always made money on his projects, often very big money, yet he’s always flown by the seat of his pants. If this doesn’t work we’ll go back to the original ending, and the cost of the extra shoot will be all that we’ve lost. Even then, we’ve had good luck with the weather, so that won’t put us over budget.’

  Weir Dobbs leaned over and looked up the table at me. ‘Don’t get carried away here, Oz,’ said the chubby wee New Yorker. ‘We’ve given you a few extra scenes, that’s all. Everyone agrees that this is a better ending, but it’s your character that makes it work, not you. Read the script carefully and you’ll see that it’s Miles and Dawn who have to do the serious acting, not you.’

  I treated him to a mock scowl. ‘That’s you friggin’ movie people all over, isn’t it,’ I told him. ‘First you build a guy up, then you slap him right back down.’

  ‘You better believe it, son,’ Scott Steele chuckled.

  ‘What d’you say then, Oz?’ Miles asked.

  I looked him dead in the eye. ‘Same as I always say. You better talk to my agent.’

  ‘Jeez,’ he said, turning pure Aussie. ‘You are learning this business.’

  Chapter 42

  Voicing over isn’t all that difficult, honest. Ever since I’ve been involved in it, I’ve been amazed at the silliness of the money in relation to the skills required for the work. Maybe I’m down-playing it, but when I was in her class at primary school in Anstruther, Mary taught me not just to read, but to do it with feeling, with expression and with an understanding of the meaning of the words.

  That’s all I’ve ever done whenever I’ve stood in front of a mike with a script in my hand, or stood up in a wrestling ring with a prepared text and a list of circus names in my head. If anyone wants to call it performing, that’s fine by me, but I know what it is; it’s just like being back in Mary’s class, reading or reciting in front of the other kids.

  If the money is silly for television ads, then for movies - especially American projects - it’s positively insane. Late in my first day in studio, most of which I had spent wearing headphones and rehearsing my narration lines, getting them, without too much difficulty, just as Weir Dobbs wanted them, Mark Kravitz called me to the phone.

  It was Sly Burr. ‘Hi kid,’ he oiled down the line. ‘How’s it going in Hollywoodland?’

  ‘It just fee
ls like Surrey to me,’ I told him. ‘You know what I mean. They still have Tory MPs, every dustbin has its own fox, and all the kids belong to the pony club. A bit like Neverneverland; the PR girl here even looks like Tinkerbell.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Sly, almost blankly. Like many showbiz people, unless he is haggling over money - or maybe especially when he’s haggling over money - Sly has no ear for anyone’s voice but his own. ‘To business, kid, to business,’ he went on. ‘I had a call from Miles this morning, about the new scenes he wants you to shoot.’

  ‘Bloody Hell!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was joking when I told him to speak to you.’

  ‘What for? I know you’re going to be brothers-in-law and such, but this is business, serious business - and not just for you. I get a piece as well, remember. Okay, so he calls me and he tells me what he plans to do with you, so I tell him, “Wait a minute there, Miles, this changes the whole deal. You hire my boy as narrator, now you want to give him a key part. It can’t be for the same money.”

  ‘Then he tells me I’m a chiselling bastard and I tell him “Sure, I am; that’s why guys in your business hire guys like me”. Then he laughs and we get down to the nut-cutting. At the end of the day, I’ve got you feature billing below the titles, and you’re in for half-a-point.’

  ‘Fine, Sly,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what that means.’

  ‘It means that in the movie credits, on the posters and in all the promo material, you’ll have separate billing. You’ll come after Miles, Dawn and the guy Steele, and you’ll be billed separately. “Introducing Oz Blackstone”, that’s how it’ll read.’

  ‘Didn’t you think about consulting me on that?’

  ‘Shit no, kid; you do your business and I’ll do mine.’ The old gormer’s good at his business, I have to admit.

  ‘So what’s this half-a-point thing then?’ I asked. ‘Type-size on the posters?’

  ‘You kidding me? You’re a Scotsman and you’re asking me that? Scots and Jews, we’re brothers in the pocket-book. I’ve negotiated us half a percentage point of the gross, on top of the deal we agreed earlier.’