Unnatural Justice ob-7

by Quintin Jardine

  "Dead certain. It'd get out for sure… and think of those headlines when it did. "Film star's dentist dad in sex smear scandal"."

  "You've missed your true vocation," my bodyguard chuckled. "You should have been a tabloid sub-editor. But you're right: that's how they'd treat it, and since half their customers don't read past the headline …"

  I nodded, feeling the anger begin to swell again. I reached under the desk for a switch I knew was there, to make dead certain that Susie's private taping system, a hold-over from the Jack Gantry days that she hadn't bothered to remove, was switched off. "I can't go near them again, Jay," I said. "I wouldn't trust myself. But I want this stopped in its tracks. No more incidents, no more threats."

  "No questions asked?" That was the key question in itself.

  I looked him straight in the eye for more than a few seconds. "None."

  Thirteen.

  As it turned out, Susie's series of meetings at the New Bearsden project took up the whole of her working day. When I called her on her mobile just after lunch, she told me she'd be coming straight home.

  When I told her what had happened at the office, her first thought after she came down off the ceiling was for Denise Scott. It didn't occur to her that she herself might have been lying in a burns unit somewhere, wondering if she'd be able to see again when they took the bandages off her face, and if she could, whether she'd be able to live with what was in the mirror.

  It was only after she had called her secretary at home and satisfied herself that she was okay, that I was able to give her the rest of the story, and tell her how we had handled the police and the press. She didn't disagree with any of it; I was pleased that she accepted what I offered her as my reasons for playing it down. Given her early days as Gantry Group managing director, she was hyper-sensitive about its public image.

  I'd thought about it, and if she'd really pressed me, I'd been prepared to tell her the truth, the whole story about the Neiportes and their attempt to blackmail my Dad, but it didn't get that far. The only thing she asked was why we hadn't told Goodchild Capperauld, the group's retained PR company, to handle it. "There's public relations and there's crisis management," I pointed out. "Alison and her people are good at what they do on the positive side, but I've got no idea what they're like at scraping shit off walls."

  She accepted that analysis. Happily she didn't seem even to consider the idea that the incident might have been linked to the paint affair.

  She asked how the package had made it through to her office. I was able to tell her that. Daniel, the commissionaire, had recalled it being delivered by a skinny cyclist messenger in a skin-tight suit, a plastic crash hat and wrap round sunglasses. The description fitted any one of a couple of thousand kids pedalling around the city. I knew that our chances of finding him amounted to zero, but I promised her that Jay and I would trawl round all the listed courier firms to see if we could trace the one that had made the drop.

  I played it poker-faced, and went through the motions of beginning to trace the culprit. I asked her if she had had trouble with anyone recently, if she'd sacked any employees for misconduct, or incompetence, but nothing and nobody came to mind. "It's probably just a one-off," she pronounced, finally, 'but we'll have to increase security at the office from now on, for everyone's sake."

  "That's being taken care of," I told her. "Gerry's going to ask our security firm to supply a mail scanner. It'll be Daniel's job to put everything through it before it's distributed."

  "What about here?" she asked. I was pleased to see that she was beginning to show a degree of concern for her own security.

  "We'll have one here too. Jay or I will screen everything. You don't touch it, okay?"

  She snorted. "We'll see about that."

  As I'd feared, the story did make the press next day, but it was the Herald, rather than one of the tabloids, and so it was written up as a hoax call, rather than a genuine emergency; happily the police confirmed that. "Maybe you should go into the crisis management business," Susie suggested, as she read it over breakfast. She had a real point there, had she only known it, but I chose to laugh it off.

  The mail scanner arrived next morning, but Jay wasn't there to set it up. He had gone off on what I had told Susie was a couple of days' leave, to deal with a family emergency. I didn't tell her that the family in question was mine. She said something pointed about bad timing, but she liked Jay as much as I did, so she didn't push it. When I said I'd told him to take as long as he liked, just to make sure that he got the problem sorted, she nodded agreement.

  I plugged the scanner in and gave it a test run with an envelope loaded with coins; in the instant that it slid down the shelf of the machine and through its sensor beam, the alarm went off with a clang.

  I found the volume control and turned it down, then switched it off.

  The truth was I didn't expect to have to use it in earnest. I was damn sure who the pyromaniacs were and that they were about to receive the sort of warning that they really would take seriously.

  With that done, it looked as if I was in for a long solitary day.

  Having decided that our daughter should prepare for the arrival of her brother by learning to mix with other kids, we had found a play group in Rhu that looked ideal for the purpose. She and Ethel had headed off there just after nine for what the head teacher… if that's what they're called in kiddie corrals… had called 'enrolment and indoctrination'. Our nanny had snorted at that one, but Janet hadn't batted an eyelid. All she was focused on was the word 'play'.

  Left with only old Willie, the gardener, for company, I did the obvious thing and phoned the golf club to check whether there was a tee time available. There was indeed, provided I was prepared to share it with an overseas member, newly arrived from the south of France and hungry for action. I gave him all that he could handle, and a little more besides; he took his three and two cuffing in good part, and proved to be an entertaining lunch companion as well.

  When I got back, I checked my e-mail, finding the few spam messages that had made it through my filter… "No, sir, I don't need emergency finance." "No, sir, I don't want to see people who look something like famous people in unusual sexual positions." (I'm a bloody actor for Christ's sake; I've seen real famous people in unusual sexual positions)… and a "How's it going, buddy?" message from Miles Grayson.

  I've become such an e-mail nerd, I almost didn't bother to check my voice-mail. It was almost by accident that I saw the light flashing on my telephone. There were two messages. One of them was from some enthusiastic girl telling me that I'd won a voucher worth a thousand pounds towards the cost of a luxury fitted kitchen… The first time an enterprising company decides to cold-call people and say, "We've got this really good product that we're prepared to sell you at a fair price," they'll make a bloody fortune… and the other was from Ewan Maltbie, asking if I could call him back.

  It was either him or the fitted kitchen girl, so Maltbie won… if only narrowly.

  Although I was returning his call, his secretary made me hold on for five minutes, listening to "Sultans of Swing'… could there ever be a better choice of telephone music for a law firm than something by a band called Dire Straits?… before he came on the line himself.

  "Mr. Blackstone," he began.

  "I never imagined you could play guitar like that," I said.

  "Pardon?" he replied, sounding bemused. Solicitors? Getting the joke? Forget it.

  He went on. "I want to talk to you about Joe's personal effects. I'll be putting the house on the market this week. However I expect a quick sale. I've already had two notes of interest from other firms in the town, and once it's advertised I expect a lot more. As you know, I'm bound to sell all the furniture… all that is sell able that is.

  However I wondered whether you and Mrs. Blackstone might like to go through it first, to see whether there's anything you'd like to buy privately, before it goes to auction."

  I couldn't imagine that there would b
e, but I decided to accept the invitation anyway. "We'll take you up on that, Mr. Maltbie. There's one thing that I'd certainly like to look at, and that's Joe's computer. It's just possible that he had items on it that relate to the Group. If that's the case then I'd like them erased… or I suppose the company might buy it, as an indirect contribution to the charities that will benefit from the sale."

  "Mmm," I heard Maltbie mutter, "I don't recall Joe ever saying anything about having a computer, but if you'd like to check, I have no problem with that. When would you like to visit?"

  "Gimme a minute," I told him. Susie and I keep a master diary on our computers: I was still switched on, so I was able to consult it quickly. "If you don't hear to the contrary," I said, 'we'll make it tomorrow afternoon, say two thirty. That seems to be the only opening this week."

  "That will suit me. I'll arrange for a member of my staff to meet you at the house."

  "Not necessary; we'll collect the keys from your office."

  "No, no, I insist. You're both busy people." I smiled as I thought about my day. "Oh, by the way," he continued, "I was sorry to read about the incident in Mrs. Blackstone's office on Monday. It's a blessing no one was hurt. We can never take too many precautions in our offices these days, you know. It just takes one moment of carelessness…" He paused. "Mind you, I can understand why the papers were prepared to believe that hoax call. There are some funny people around these days."

  "Too bloody right, mate," I muttered, so quietly that I doubt whether he heard me.

  "The Gantry Group's not having the best run of luck just now, is it?" I heard him say.

  "Eh?"

  "I said you're having a hard time just now. First poor Joe, going in such a tragic way. Now a fire in your office. If one didn't know they were both sheer blind bad luck, one might almost think that someone has it in for you."

  I blinked as he said it. I'd been so focused on the paint-chucking incident that I'd gone straight there for a connection. But Ewan Maltbie didn't strike me as a tabloid reader; he probably didn't even know about that. It's amazing what you can see when you're not wearing blinkers.

  Fourteen.

  After I thought about it some more, though, I didn't buy into the lawyer's suggestion. There was no threat to the Gantry Group: we were major employers and well up there among the business flavours of the month. On the other hand, there had been a threat to my Dad, a physical attack of sorts against Susie and me, and we knew who was behind both of them.

  I did give a moment's thought to calling Jay on his mobile and telling him to go easy on the Neiportes, but I decided to let him get on with it. I didn't know what he was going to do, but I guessed that it would be along the lines of my own call on Walter, only a bit more scary. We hadn't discussed what to do if our bluff was called, but I had worked it out for myself. I was going to pay them, but I was going to set it up so that the exchange was filmed, and so that it was made very clear that it was an extortion payment.

  I half-expected Jay to be back before we left for Mother well. He wasn't, but I gave it no thought. Susie had come home for lunch with me and our daughter, now a fully enrolled and indoctrinated pupil at the Daybreak Nursery, and loving every minute of it.

  When we left for Mother well, with Susie at the wheel this time, we took a more direct route, crossing the lonely Erskine Bridge to avoid the west of Glasgow, then picking up the M8 and heading for Edinburgh, although we wouldn't get anywhere near it.

  The Kingston Bridge was busy, as it always is during the working day, but at least the traffic was moving, albeit slowly. As we rolled across, I found myself glancing up towards the skyline on my left, to the distinctive building where Susie and I had lived. Prim and I had lived there too, for a while, and before that, Jan and I had died there … or at least she had, although part of me, maybe the good part, had gone with her. Now that I had cut that place from my life, I realised how badly I had needed to do it, but that something had held me back for too long. Closure is a word used by many people who don't really know what it means. I only came to understand myself, when I turned my back on that cursed place.

  I gazed up at the familiar floor to ceiling windows that looked down on me and the rest of the city centre. As we came as close as we would, before the bridge dipped down and took us out of its sight, I could just make out the figure of a man standing where I had stood so often, looking down as I had done. For all I knew he could have been looking at Susie and me. I had no idea who he was, whether he was a good or a bad man, a happy or a sad man, and as I looked up at him, tiny in the distance, I realised that I didn't give a fuck, either.

  We rolled on under the Charing Cross fly over when we emerged into the daylight on the other side, the traffic, as it always does there began, to pick up speed. By the time we passed the great forbidding bulk of Barlinnie Prison, one of the most famous divisions of what is known to some as the Windsor Hotel Group, we were pushing the limit.

  Ewan Maltbie's office junior was waiting for us when we arrived at Crawford Street. She said that she'd been told to wait with us and lock up after we were done, but I wasn't having that. I told her that we'd lock up and drop the keys off. She left, a little doubtfully, but the proud possessor of an Oz Blackstone autograph, which I'd scrawled on the back of a photo she'd brought with her.

  I could tell right away that Susie felt strange to be alone… husbands don't count as company… in her father's house, for the first time in her life. "Do you really want any of the furniture, Oz?" she asked.

  "I don't give a toss," I replied, honestly. "If you see anything you'd like, make a note and we'll buy it from the estate, but to be truthful, I said we'd come simply because I thought it was something you'd want to do."

  She smiled up at me. "You're a big softie, you know: but you were right. Even though there's nothing here I'm going to want, other than the crystal Joe left me, it's something I needed to do. It's important that I feel like someone's daughter. Understand?"

  "Sure. You take a wander around, and I'll go and look for Joe's computer." As I walked into the living room, I noticed that the display cabinets that had housed the crystal were empty, and that two big tea-chests marked 'fragile' stood in the middle of the room. Two golf bags, their hoods zipped up, lay on the floor beside them; our legacies, Susie's and mine, from father and father-in-law.

  But no computer. There was a table under the window that looked out in to the back garden, but there was nothing on it. I thought back to the last time I'd been in the house, before Joe's death. No, it hadn't been there then either. Somewhere else, then. "Phone lines, Osbert,"

  I said to myself. lIt must be near a phone point for the modem."

  There was a phone in the hall. An extension lead ran from the jack point. I followed it upstairs to Joe's bedroom, where a phone sat on the bedside table. Another cable, a DIY effort this time, ran from that point. I traced it round the skirting and back to the door, but there it disappeared under the carpet. I went out to the landing and looked around, but I saw no wire resurface. I opened the nearest door, but that was the bathroom, so I tried the one next to it. Sure enough, just inside that door, the phone cable ran up the skirting and along the top, loosely, for Joe had been stingy with the staples.

  No doubt the room had once been a bed-chamber, but its single-man owner had transformed it into a study. One wall was lined with shelving, there was a television set in one corner, with a video beneath, and beside the window, where the phone cable ended, there was a desk with a swivel chair. On the desk there was a phone handset… but no computer. "Don't tell me he used an internet cafe for his e-mails," I whispered to myself. But then I looked at the box where the cable terminated.

  It was fitted with an adaptor, turning one output into two. One of the sockets held the plug for the desk phone, but the other was vacant.

  The desk had deep drawers on one side, and a cabinet in the other. I opened each in turn, expecting to find a laptop, but all I saw were personal files, assorted stationery items and
a collection of movies on video. I looked at the titles: Joe had been a closet Clint Eastwood fan, it seemed.

  Still, though, there was no computer. I reckoned that my internet cafe notion must have been right, for all the double socket, and I was about to give up, when my eye was caught by a cardboard container on the lowest of the bookshelves; it was open on one side and I could see the spines of the volumes that it held. I picked it up and shook them out into my hand. They were all soft-covered; one was a registration book for Windows 2000, another was a manual for Microsoft Word, and the third was the owner's handbook for a seriously powerful Shoei laptop, complete with a fifteen-inch LCD screen and the fastest Pentium processor on the market.

  I opened every drawer in that room again. I went back into Joe's bedroom and searched it, not once, but twice. Finally I went back downstairs and opened every drawer and cupboard there. Susie came in from the garden as I was going through the sideboard. "What are you doing?" she asked.

  "Looking for Joe's computer."

  "Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he didn't have one after all."

  "He had this." I showed her the manual.

  "Someone's had it away then," she pronounced. "Someone who's been in the house since Joe died." She paused. "Unless he lent it to someone."

  "Get real, love. Would you lend anyone a two thousand quid computer?"

  "I suppose not. But maybe he did. You just never know."

  I did know something, though. I knew that Ewan Maltbie's throwaway line about a connection between Joe's death and the fire at the office might not have been as far-fetched as I had thought.

  Fifteen.

  I reported the missing computer to Maltbie when we took the keys back.

  I had mentioned its existence in the first place so I felt that I had to. I hadn't seen his self-assurance shaken before. "Are you sure about this?" he asked me, in a tone that said as clearly as words that this was a great inconvenience and that he wished it would go away.