Screen Savers

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘What about the money?’ Prim asked. ‘Is it gone for good?’

  ‘No. They’ll get it back. Governments are involved now; ours, the Dutch, the Swiss. Even as we speak, bankers are being leant on very hard. Your brother-in-law has some incredibly powerful friends, you know.’

  ‘I know that, my love, just as you’ve had an extremely dangerous enemy. That’s still the big unanswered question, isn’t it. Why the hell did Stephen Donn have such a hatred of you?’

  I smiled at her; the sort of grin that leaves smugness way behind and climbs to the upper reaches of self-satisfaction. ‘Oh, I know that,’ I told her, as casually as I could.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that from the very start; and I’ve had a wild idea about it. Thanks to a check that the MI5 man made for me tonight, I know for sure now. I’m not going to do anything about it though, not yet.

  ‘The real life Oz Blackstone movie isn’t over yet. There’s still one last scene to be shot.’ Primavera gasped with astonishment as I outlined the script.

  Chapter 57

  The next few days were spectacular. The news blackout was lifted at two o’clock that afternoon, at a press conference in Whitehall no less, at which the star performers were Miles, Dawn, me . . . and the Prime Minister, determined to milk every last drop of publicity from the story.

  He took the lead in telling the story of the kidnapping, of our turning to Detective Inspector Michael Dylan, a rogue Scottish policeman, only to be betrayed by him, of Miles turning in desperation to his Friend in a High Place, and of our insistence on being involved in the rescue mission ourselves.

  He ended with an account of the confrontation in Amsterdam Airport, of the two fugitives’ attempt to use human shields to escape, and of their being shot by a Dutch Special Forces officer.

  A few of the details were a bit fudged up; I didn’t like Mike’s name being blackened any further, but I knew that the PM could hardly tell the world that he’d been executed, on his orders, to save embarrassment. I was pleased though, that no mention was made of earlier events.

  As you can imagine, the media went absolutely apeshit. Questions flew at us from all corners of the room. Miles was asked about his feelings when he realised that his wife had been taken, and his relief when we found her safe. He dealt with them with dignity and with eloquence . . . although he said nothing about almost blowing Dawn’s brains out, or even about shooting the shit out of the galley kitchen.

  They asked me about Dylan, and about what happened in Amsterdam. I told them that he had been a good friend to me, that there had been many times in my past when he had been there for me when I had needed him, and that his betrayal of us all for nothing other than money was one of the saddest things I had ever known. I also asked everyone to spare a thought for his girlfriend, who was at that moment under sedation in Glasgow.

  I went along with the official version of the events in the airport restaurant as best I could. I didn’t say outright that Mike had threatened anyone, simply that ‘they’ had attempted to take a woman hostage, and that my Dutch companion had been left with no choice but to shoot them.

  They asked me about Stephen Donn too; I told them that I had only ever known him as Stu Queen, movie electrician. I resisted the urge to add that Miles was disappointed that we hadn’t found him on the rig, since he would have taken great satisfaction from shooting his lights out himself.

  Dawn didn’t take any questions. Miles told the crowd that she was still unable to speak about her ordeal, and they respected that. As our limo drove across Westminster Bridge on the start of the journey back to Surrey, he told me that their agent had sold the rights to a world exclusive interview to CNN for three million dollars.

  Prim was with us in the car; she had stood at the back of the room during the press conference, unnoticed and anonymous.

  ‘Poor Susie,’ she said at last, as we headed south. ‘I can’t imagine what this will do to her.’

  I looked at her. ‘At a time like this,’ I told her, ‘a girl needs her father. Why don’t you tell that to old Joe Donn?’

  We drove back up to Scotland next morning. I had to team up with the GWA - for a trip to Amsterdam. You wouldn’t believe the pop I got from those Dutch fans when I stepped up for my first announcement - and Prim wanted to spend the weekend with Susie.

  Then on the following Monday, I was back at work on the movie. Miles did re-shoot the ending to make it more like our real-life adventure; we got into wetsuits again and filmed some scenes in a big tank. But Dawn and I were still the surprise bad guys, he still got zapped, and I still went to my fiery doom in the blazing chopper. All in a day’s work - or in this case, a week, for by Friday we were finished, and Snatch, subject to editing, special effects, and adding the music score, was a wrap.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked Miles, as he drove me to Heathrow to catch the shuttle to Glasgow. ‘How’s the movie going to do? Will I ruin it?’

  He chuckled. ‘Nothing and no one could ruin that now,’ he said. ‘You remember that half-point of yours.’

  ‘How could I forget it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a point now. I owe you; that was a big thing you did, backing me up on that rig. In money terms, you can start thinking two million dollars and work up from there. Just one thing, though. Take my advice and don’t say anything to that money-grabbing bastard of an agent of yours!’

  He dropped me off at terminal one, and I rushed for the plane. In the lounge and en route for Glasgow, I must have signed thirty autographs. Was this what life was going to be like from now on, I wondered? If so, I decided, it might be time for a sharp exit.

  As I stepped off the 757, and out into the grey, drizzly Glasgow night, where Prim was waiting for me, I found, to my total surprise, that I was whistling Bali Hai - a bloody sight more tunefully than Dylan ever did, I might add.

  Chapter 58

  Life was quiet for a few weeks after that. Just as well, for Primavera Phillips and I had a wedding to plan, with one enforced change in the cast; I needed a new best man. I wasn’t sure what he would say when I asked him, but for the first time in over ten years, Miles Grayson agreed to accept a supporting role.

  There was another change to the guest list too. We added Joe Donn. The old guy had taken Prim’s advice and told Susie, who was left as bereaved as any widow by Mike’s death, that he was her natural father, whatever the position was legally. She didn’t believe him at first, but finally, when he offered to take a DNA test to prove it, she accepted that he was telling the truth. Just as well, for apart from a hated aunt, her father’s sister, he was the only relative she had left in the world.

  I stuck to my plan to spend the night before the wedding in a suite at Gleneagles. Miles and Dawn had elected to sleep at Semple House, but he and I arranged an impromptu stag night, in the very pub in which Stephen Donn had slipped his Mickey Finn into SuperDave’s Guinness. To our surprise, Dad Phillips insisted on joining us; to our even greater surprise, Elanore didn’t say a word.

  Even although Mac the Dentist, who was stopping overnight at Gleneagles with Mary, Ellie and the boys, was there, it was a quiet do. Miles and Dave knew what their lives would be worth if I turned up for my wedding with a major hangover, so they made damn sure that I didn’t step over the line.

  My Dad, on the other hand, was halfway to being rat-arsed when our taxi dropped the two of us back at the hotel. He got a bit sentimental when I tried to put him into the lift.

  Instead of stepping inside, he grabbed my shoulder. ‘This has got to work this time, son,’ he slurred. ‘All your life you’ve been the luckiest bugger in the world, in every respect but one. But there’s nothing you deserve more than a happy marriage, ’cos you know what? Son or no son, you’re the best fucking man I know.’

  I felt myself getting sentimental too, so I shoved him into the lift, pushed the button for his floor, then stepped out before the doors closed and walked up to my own.

  I had been back in my suite for no more than
five minutes when there was a soft knock at the door. I knew who it was even before I opened it.

  ‘Come on in, Noosh,’ I said to the slim figure in the corridor. ‘I wish I could say I was sorry about your brother, but I’m not. I saw him die, and he bloody deserved it.’

  She took a small silver automatic from her handbag as she stepped inside. I’ve no doubt she’d have shot me there and then, had Mark Kravitz not moved up behind her and ripped it from her hand.

  ‘You don’t know my friend,’ I told her. ‘It’s time you did, though; he’s had you under observation for weeks.’ There was a sofa in the suite’s sitting room. I pushed her gently down on to it. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I can guess the story, but let’s have it anyway.’

  She looked up at me, and her narrow face took on the look of the purest hatred I have ever seen. ‘How did you know?’ she hissed.

  ‘Through your mother,’ I told her.

  ‘No one ever found out much about your brother; he was two people, Stephen Donn and Stu Queen, and he covered his tracks very well by moving from one personality to another. When he died, I thought at first that I’d never get to know why he held such a vicious grudge against me. As far as I could see the trail was as dead as him.

  ‘Then I thought of his mother; she was the only link with him I had left. So I asked someone, one of the spooks who was around in Amsterdam, if they could find out more about her. It didn’t take long at all. She’s a naturalised British subject, so she has a file at the Home Office.

  ‘That told me that she entered the UK in 1968, having escaped from Czechoslovakia a day or two before the Soviet invasion. In those days, her name was Mira Turkel, and she brought with her a five-year-old daughter, Anoushka.’

  Her poisonous glare only made my smile wider. ‘Sometimes, I’m as thick as two short planks, you know, Noosh.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, in a voice so acid that it should have melted her teeth.

  ‘I should have smelled a rodent straight away up in Aberdeen, when you showed up in the Treetops, acting reasonably pally. But no, I’m loveable Oz, am I not? No one can stay mad at me for ever, so I fell for it, and I got you into that movie crowd scene next day. No wonder the Grampian police couldn’t find a bullet. There never was one, was there? Stephen fired a blank from the back of that bloody motorcycle.

  ‘If my brain had been working, I might have twigged it right then. A series of attacks on people close to me; okay, vicious, twisted, but with a mad logic to it. But why were you one of the targets? Who could have known about the connection between you and me, unless they had heard it from you?

  ‘You shouldn’t have involved yourself, Noosh. I was too dumb to work it out until it was too late, but it was a huge risk.’ To my complete surprise, I felt a gusher of rage blast up inside me. I had meant to play that final scene as Mr Cool; superior, dismissive, more in sorrow than in anger. But I wasn’t that good an actor, nor will I be, ever. I hated that woman as much as she hated me, and I could not keep it from showing.

  ‘You had to do it, though, hadn’t you. You’re better than the rest of us aren’t you, and you have to let us know it. It’s not enough for you to be in command of your own destiny, is it; you have to control other people, too. You’re good at it too. God, you fooled Jan for long enough.’

  ‘No, she fooled me,’ Anoushka snarled, her accent becoming thicker. ‘Both of you did. I loved her, I was good to her, and she said she loved me too. But all the time, all the time she lived with me, all the time I thought that we were a couple, you were playing with me, both of you.’

  ‘Wrong,’ I shouted at her. ‘You’re totally wrong. For a while Jan believed all that too; you had her fucking mesmerised. I’ll tell you this, though. All that time, I hated you; I knew that inside yourself, you were an evil, corrupting influence. Jan never saw you that way; but she did realise eventually that she couldn’t let you run her life any longer.’

  She jumped up and spat in my face. I lost it; I hit her, back-handed, across the cheek, sending her sprawling back across the couch, as Mark Kravitz stepped between us.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ she shouted. ‘You used me, both of you, and you thought you could get away with it. But Jan didn’t, did she? I punished her, just as I am punishing you.’

  I yelled back at her. ‘What the fuck do you mean, you crazy bitch?’

  When she smiled at me, I wanted the hatred back, pronto. She really was crazy, and that look scared me stiff. ‘You didn’t really think that thug could have set such a trap on his own, did you?’ she sneered. My blood ran cold. ‘Stephen did that; he was with him, and he wired that machine. He made it lethal because he knew who Jan was, he knew what she had done to me, and he knew how much I wanted to punish her.’

  I knew that I daren’t touch the woman again, ever. But I wanted to mark her, in any way I could. ‘And now he’s fucking dead,’ I said, sounding cold, and I admit it, as vicious as her. I touched the middle of my forehead. ‘Right there, the Dutchman shot him; his brains were all over the carpet, and he pissed himself.

  ‘Know what? Right now I feel just a bit sorry for the bastard. Because I’m sure you controlled your half-brother all his life, and that you turned him into your creature, the way you tried to turn Jan. Poor Stephen probably never had a chance.’

  Finally, I got to her. ‘No,’ she protested. ‘That’s not true. I’ve loved two people in my life - Jan and my brother. No one else. My mother was always a weak woman, and when she married that pitiful Scotsman I gave up on her. My father, I never knew.

  ‘They were my only two. Jan betrayed me, but Stephen never did. It was really me who brought him up; his parents would have held him back, but I showed him what he could be. He was my treasure and when he was older, my little secret. None of my acquaintances knew about him, not even Jan. But he has always been there for me, whenever I’ve needed him.’

  And then the madness was back. ‘He and I planned together how we would make you suffer; we had hoped that you would be arrested for poisoning that man, as almost you were. When you talked your way out, we knew we had to do more. Originally Stephen was simply going to kill Dawn Phillips, but then he saw the script, and had the wonderful idea of acting it out, and making himself rich.

  ‘Your policeman friend was a big help, all the way along. He was corrupt; you know that, don’t you. Stephen was supposed to be his informant, but it was the other way around. From time to time Dylan would give him money that was supposed to be for tips, but Stephen would give it back to him, and lots, lots more.

  ‘He was included in the kidnap, because I thought it would be too dangerous to leave him behind in Glasgow. He would never have seen any of the money, of course. That was for Stephen . . . and eventually for me.’

  She sneered at me again. ‘You think now that it is over, Oz? No, it is not. Noosh will always be around. When you and your little Prim are married, I will always be there in your nightmares. When you have children, you will always be afraid that one day—’

  Kravitz killed her then; he stepped up behind her and broke her neck. More orders, you see. Stephen had left nothing behind him, nothing to prove that Noosh was behind it all. But when I knew who she was, I knew she had to be. The powers that be decided that they couldn’t pull her in and confront her with it, just in case I was wrong; so instead, they let me run with it, they set me up as live bait to see if she would bite.

  What they didn’t tell me was that she was going to die too, jumping off a cliff just south of Aberdeen in a grief-stricken suicide. But what the hell; she’s best off with her murderous wee bastard of a brother.

  She was right about one thing, though, was Anoushka Turkel. I still see her in my dreams; keep this to yourself but, occasionally, I wake up screaming.

 

 

 
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