Unnatural Justice ob-7

by Quintin Jardine

  I didn't like my word or my intelligence being questioned. "I'm sure Joe had a spare telephone jack point in his study upstairs. I'm sure I've received e-mail from him in the past. I'm sure this was in his bookcase." I tossed the owner's manual on to his desk. Then I reached into my jacket's inside pocket. "Even you can be sure about this," I told him, as I unfolded a sheet of pink paper and laid it in front of him. "I found it among Joe's personal files." The solicitor picked it up and peered at it through his half-moon glasses. It was a receipt, from PC World, for the purchase around eighteen months before of a Shoei 1900 laptop computer, with optional extended warranty.

  "Damn," he said, earnestly. "What am I going to do with this?"

  "You're the bloody lawyer," I replied, amiably. "You tell me." He frowned at me. "But if you want a hint," I continued, 'there's a detective superintendent called Tom Fallon up at police headquarters.

  You might report it to him."

  "You really think so?"

  "Too right. This isn't a box of paper-clips that's missing; it's a valuable piece of kit."

  He made a small tut ting sound. "Do you want to report it, then?"

  "Bugger that," I exclaimed sincerely. "I'm not the beneficiary here, the nominated charities are, and you're the executor, so you do it."

  "But he'll want to question my staff. It'll be very inconvenient."

  "He's as likely to question his own bloody staff. They've had more opportunity than your people. But the first thing he'll do is something I didn't have time to. He'll check with PC World, to see whether the machine's in for repair, and if they don't have it, he'll go through Joe's papers for a receipt from another specialist. It's only after he's exhausted those possibilities that he'll start a theft investigation."

  "You really think I should inform him?"

  "No, Mr. Maltbie. I insist that you do." As I looked at him I realised that his imagination didn't stretch beyond the walls of his own office. The absence of the computer changed everything. Yes, it was possible that the machine was in a repair shop. Or maybe, as Susie had suggested, Joe had lent it to a friend. But neither of those explanations solved the riddle of the missing CDs.

  According to the PC World receipt, Joe's laptop had been fitted with a CD rewriter, with which he'd have been able to copy files, music, and the like. When I'd gone back upstairs after searching the living room, I'd found in the cupboard in his desk a box of blank Sony CD-RW data storage disks. The trouble was, there were only four in the box, and there should have been ten. More than that, the four were all still in their plastic wrappers, not just unused but unopened.

  I had looked for the missing six disks as carefully as I'd looked for the computer; they were nowhere to be found. I'd even checked his CD collection, in case he'd been downloading or copying music. Sure, maybe Joe had lent those to a pal as well… and maybe not. And sure, maybe a bent copper had nicked the laptop… but almost certainly not.

  The theft of the computer shone a completely different light on Joe's death. Fallon couldn't overlook it, but the trouble was, a few days before we'd sent the old boy up the chimney at Daldowie, so any reopened investigation would be hamstrung from the off.

  Of course there was another angle. If Joe's death was to say the least suspicious, as I thought it was, did it connect in some way to Susie's letter-bomb, that I'd been so quick to lay at the feet of the Neiportes? Clearly, that was another line of investigation for Fallon … only I'd covered the bloody thing up. Perhaps I'd have been able to talk my way out of it, but I had a feeling that telling porkies to the police might not be all that good for my career.

  Sixteen.

  When we got back from Mother well, just after five, I saw that Jay's car was parked outside his cottage. I wanted to speak to him, urgently, but it had to wait, for Janet was demanding quality time with her parents, and Ethel was showing signs, for once, of being run off her feet.

  So the three of us changed into swim gear and jumped into the pool.

  Susie and I are both strong swimmers, and we had made a point of teaching Janet, even before she could walk. She was a natural, with no fear of water, and although we still made her wear flotation armbands, she didn't really need them. She and her mother splashed about, while I did a few lengths, then climbed out and pressed some serious weights on the exercise machine in the corner of the pool-house.

  When I was finished, so were they, wrapped in to welling robes and looking so cute, the pair of them, that I'd have swelled to bursting point with pride if I hadn't had some very serious matters on my mind.

  I took a quick cold shower then went upstairs to change.

  When I was ready I called Jay from the bedside phone. "I'm going to hit a few golf balls," I told him. "Fancy?"

  Susie was in our bedroom by that time, sorting out her clothes for the evening, while Janet trotted about, still in her robe and flip-flops, chattering happily to herself. I waved to them both on my way out, but they barely noticed me.

  I picked Jay up in the buggy and headed over to my mini course. Neither of us said a word on the way there. I stopped in the middle of the first fairway we reached, dumped a bucket of practice balls on the ground and started hitting nine irons to the nearest green. Jay took a seven iron and began whacking away… he has one of the clumsiest golf swings I've ever seen.

  After a dozen or so shots, I looked across at him. "Well?" I asked.

  "The problem has been resolved," he said.

  "Effectively?"

  "It doesn't get any more effective." He was looking at the green, but I could tell he was seeing something much further away. I felt a chill sweep over me, far, far colder than the pool had been.

  "What are you saying, Jay?"

  "Nothing."

  "Are you telling me those people are dead?" I gasped. "I know I said something along those lines at the office on Monday, but there is such a thing as a figure of speech. Come on, man. What really happened?"

  He glanced at me. "We agreed there would be no questions."

  "I know, but

  "You gave me no specific orders."

  "I know that too."

  "That's how it was and that's how it has to stay. We must not discuss this."

  "But Jay This time he looked me in the eye, dead in the eye. "You don't want to know, boss. Believe me. Just take it from me that your family will have no more trouble."

  I turned away from him and took out my four iron, aimed at a green further away, and let fly. The ball started on the flag, but soon developed an extravagant slice. "Fuck," I cursed, quietly, and not only at my shot.

  "There's been another development," I said. I told him about the missing laptop.

  "Probably the coppers, boss," he murmured, when I was finished.

  "I don't believe that. You might divert a case of whisky from a recovered hijacking, but you don't take a computer from an accident victim's home, knowing that the whole fucking place is going to be inventoried for his estate."

  "You might if you were stupid enough."

  "I don't buy into that." I hit another four iron: this time it stayed straight and landed on the green about ten feet from the flag.

  "Nice shot," Jay conceded. "So you're getting round to telling me you think Joe's death wasn't an accident, and that whoever did it stole the computer?"

  "That's about it."

  "And you're going to suggest that the letter-bomb might have been sent by that person, and not by the Neiportes?"

  "Possibly."

  "That'll come as a great comfort to them, but it won't change anything."

  "What do you think?"

  For the first time, Jay gave me something resembling a smile; it was a pretty grim one, though. "You really want me to tell you?"

  I nodded. "Go on, I can take it."

  "Then I think you're letting the movie business fuck up your head.

  You're treating life like a script. Joe's death was accidental. His laptop was either lost or stolen from his house, or his car… the fucking things
are portable after all… before his death. The Neiportes sent Susie that letter-bomb. End of story."

  I frowned at him, then I made myself laugh, wondering if it sounded as hollow as it felt. "Maybe. Okay, probably. Sod it, yes. You're right."

  All at once, his shoulders seemed a little less tense. He actually hit his next shot more or less towards the green. But as I looked at him, I could not help but wonder whether Jay really believed his version of events, or whether he was making himself believe it, because he needed to.

  Seventeen.

  I've found that the older I get, the more I'm able to compartmentalise.

  If I have worries or troubles, I can isolate them and put them in boxes, to be taken out and looked at every so often. Rest of the time, I show the world my smiley Oz face, the one that looks out from the billboards outside cinemas and moistens the underwear of ladies throughout the English-speaking world… or so a rather overenthusiastic Canadian reviewer wrote after my first Skinner movie.

  Whenever the contents of these secret compartments, these emotional safe-deposit boxes, start battering to be let out, I have a routine for handling it. I go into the nearest gym and batter the hell out of myself; if you ever want to gauge how stressed out and worried I am, here's a handy tip. Squeeze my biceps: the harder they are the more there is going on in my head.

  This relationship was actually news to me until Susie drew it to my attention. As I've said, she is the only person alive who can read me like the complex book I have become. It was a couple of weeks after Jay's 'family crisis', and well more than half-way through my break between movies when she asked me, one night as we were in our bathroom, getting ready for bed, "Are you worried about this next project of yours?"

  I looked at her blankly as she removed her eye make-up; she had chosen an inappropriate moment, my Braun toothbrush not quite having finished its two-minute cycle. When I had, and when I'd completed my obligatory anti-plaque mouthwash… once a dentist's son, always a dentist's son … I said, "No. Not at all. What made you ask that?"

  "You've been shifting a hell of a lot of weight lately."

  "Uh?"

  "You're never out of the gym. Every night I've come home from the office lately, you've been in that pool-house working out."

  "I've got to be fit for Mathew's Tale' I reminded her. "It's a pretty arduous part."

  "Oz, you are fit; the way you've been flogging yourself lately, anyone would think you're training to fight Mike Tyson. I'll bet Liam and Darius don't train as hard as you, and they're professional athletes.

  So? What's on your mind?"

  "Why should there be anything on my mind?"

  "Because it's your classic behaviour pattern. You were like that when you came back from Spain, after that thing with the house out there, and the policeman, then when you came back from the States after Prim ran off with that guy, then when there was that problem on your first Skinner movie."

  She was right, of course; it hadn't dawned on me until that moment, but she was right. I remembered one particular session in Edinburgh, when I had gone to the gym with Liam, and he had put me through hell, working all of the anxiety and aggression out of my system.

  "Okay," I told her, finally, as I worked the truth out in my head, 'it's the aftermath of that letter-bomb incident. It's been getting to me. If you hadn't been at Bearsden that morning…"

  "I'd have told Denise to go ahead and open all my mail."

  That hadn't occurred to me at all. I felt a sudden flash of relief, followed by guilt at the thought of what might have happened to the secretary if the thing had flared up in her hands.

  "Maybe, but the mere fact that it happened. Makes me angry, makes me anxious."

  "But we've got security in place now, at the office and here, and there have been no more incidents. We thought the thing was a one-off at the time and that's the way it's been. The only effect was a wee slide in the share price when the story hit the Herald, but that's corrected itself. You know what the stock market's like. Most of these analysts have about as much logic in them as do bloody astrologers."

  She made me smile, as the thought of "Smith and Jones, stockbrokers and fortune-tellers: tarot cards by appointment' ran through my mind. "I suppose. Okay, I promise, from now on, I'll only worry about the next movie, and about the impending arrival of our son." I looked down at her as she stood beside me, naked in front of her mirror. "Speaking of whom, dear, your profile is changing by the day."

  "Don't I know it," she muttered. "This is going to be a big lad. I was nowhere near this size at this stage with Janet."

  "You still look fantastic, though." It was true, she did.

  What was not nearly so certain was the promise I'd just made. I'd said I'd stop worrying about the letter-bomb and its aftermath, but that was going to be a hell of a lot easier said than done.

  As time passed, I'd thought about what Jay had said to me, about my actor's imagination. I had forced myself to think as he did. The police had looked into the disappearance of Joe's computer, but without success. However a check of his insured property had revealed that a Piaget watch and a valuable carriage clock were also missing. The supposition they had reached, as Tom Fallon had explained, was that the thefts had happened not before, but after Joe's death. This was far more likely, since the house had no alarm system, and since PC "Cash'

  Money had admitted to CID colleagues that she might have left the kitchen window open after the house had been locked up on the day Joe's body had been found. Details of the watch and the clock, plus the serial number of the computer, had been circulated with no success at that point, but the underlying, unspoken message was that no way did the police see grounds for reconsidering the official verdict of accidental death.

  The probability was clear. The attack on me at the premiere had been, we knew for sure, the work of Andrea Neiporte. The incendiary had to have been her also; the fact that her husband had worked in a university science lab and so had access to chemicals was a pretty damning pointer. Top that off with the fact that everything had been peaceful since Jay's trip to life.

  No, it would not be easy to put all that out of my mind, for it sure as hell hadn't been until then. For the previous few days, I had been looking at the Courier website, the electronic version of the newspaper that covered Tayside and life. I had scrolled through every issue, looking for stories of missing couples, until, just the day before, I had found one. It wasn't much, not the sort that other papers were going to follow up on. All it said was that life police were looking for information on the whereabouts of a Pittenweem couple, Mr. and Mrs.

  Walter Neiporte, after Mrs. Neiporte's mother had reported them missing. Subsequent checks had revealed that the couple had both been absent from work for several days. The police spokesman was quoted as saying that there was nothing to indicate suspicious circumstances, and that a number of bills remained unpaid, the implication being that the couple had done an old-fashioned moonlight.

  But I knew they hadn't. I didn't know exactly what had happened to them, but I could guess it hadn't been peaceful. I knew also that I was responsible. As Jay had said, I hadn't given him any direct orders; that was his way of telling me that any unfortunate consequences, if they developed, would stop with him. There would be a cost, I supposed, but I was a rich man.

  Except… Gerry Meek had been there when I had made a very specific threat in Susie's office, and he had heard it. If the police were to interview him… The plain fact of the matter was that I was more than a little anxious. I didn't give a monkey's dump about the Neiportes.

  As I saw it they had tried to ruin my old man's life, and if their own had been trampled as a consequence, that was tough on them. I'm a believer in retribution, make no mistake.

  Yet a mistake had been made, and I had made it, when I had allowed things to get out of my direct control. I had come up against bad people before, and on a couple of occasions I'd been forced to do something about them. In each situation, I'd asked myself one
question: "What's the downside for Oz?" On each occasion the answer had been, "None', and I'd done what I'd considered to be right at the time.

  This was different, though. I'd let someone else do my dirty work, and thus I'd put myself in his power. I trusted Jay, but my life was literally in his hands. And what a life. I looked at how much I had to lose: my career, my marriage, my children, and my wealth, not to mention my liberty for about half of my remaining life expectancy.

  No wonder I was knocking ten bells out of my exercise equipment. No wonder my body looked and felt as though it had been carved out of marble. No wonder I had awakened, sweating and on the edge of panic, on each of the last several nights. No wonder the dark edifice of Barlinnie Prison loomed large in my thoughts.

  No wonder I was beginning to look at Jay Yuille in an entirely different light. If he ever became a problem to be solved, I was damn certain that he was one I wouldn't delegate.

  Eighteen.

  There was no sign, though, that Jay was looking at me any differently.

  He behaved towards me in exactly the same way he had before the life episode. That had not been mentioned since, or even hinted at. As the days and weeks went by without further mention of the Neiportes in the Courier, or any other newspaper, my bad dreams began to ease, and I began to feel more secure.

  In the last few days before shooting began on Mathew's Tale, I decided to go up to Enster to visit my Dad. I hadn't seen Mac the Dentist since Joe's funeral, or heard from him, and I wondered how he was. So I stuck my clubs in the passenger seat of the Lotus… there's nowhere else for them to go, and headed east.

  As it turned out he was in good form all round, even on the golf course, although my new, home-tuned game was too much for him in the end. After our round, we paid a return visit to the Golf Tavern… it's more my style than the Elie club-house… where the atmosphere was much easier than on our previous visit.