"You're not listening. You'll lose your anonymity."
Finally the real Jack Gantry looked at me; I don't know whether he'd ever really been mad, but I do know he'd always been evil. "If I do, Susie will lose everything, not just the holding, but all the benefit she's derived from it. If you and she defend in court, you'll lose the bulk of your fortune in costs, plus you'll be so tangled up in hearings, your career will go down the pan… unless you decide to sail off in the lifeboat and let poor wee Susie drown."
The corners of his mouth turned up in something that was not a smile.
"You've got the weekend to decide… Mr. Chairman. I'd say I'll see you in court, but somehow, I don't think I will."
Forty.
When I got out of there, at first I headed for my car; then, on the spur of the moment, I turned and headed straight for the woman in the Rover. As I neared her she looked at first startled, then confused, but when I motioned her to lower her window she did so.
"It's okay," I told her. "I'm the guy you're working for. Call Ricky and tell him that he's bound for Barcelona and that he can pull the operation as of now." She nodded, and I left her keying a number into her mobile.
Wylie Smith was waiting for me when I got back to the Lotus. "If you think I'm taking you back to Edinburgh," I told him, 'you're fucking joking."
"No," he said, 'but I'll settle for Queen Street station."
He didn't say much as we headed through Charing Cross, but he'd had an even harder job getting into the car than before. As it turned out, though, he wasn't breathless, only thinking.
"I can't do this any more, Oz," he exclaimed, as we drove past the Tron Church and into George Square.
I swung into the station entrance and braked. "Next time I'll bring the BMW," I said, icily.
"I'm serious," he protested. "I cannot work with Duncan Kendall for one day longer, not after he's kept me deliberately in the dark about matters that affect the firm. I'm a partner being treated like a junior assistant. And I'm not working for that man Gantry either. He's an associate of gangsters… and that valet of his scares the shit out of me."
"Jack's not an associate of anyone," I countered. "People associate with him as and when he allows it. He's very rich, very powerful and very ruthless; the nastiest and most dangerous man you're ever likely to meet. All the more so since he's been through the machine and come out the other side. His behaviour and his actions are completely under control, and God help anyone who gets in his way. I think you're dead right to want to quit, but before you do, you should ask yourself: do you know anything that could prove dangerous to him?"
Wylie shuddered.
"But let's suppose you did chuck it," I went on, 'and you were advising me. Would you agree with Duncan Kendall's assessment of Jack's action to regain control of the Gantry Group? It's true, by the way: Susie isn't his daughter. I believe he knew that when he transferred the business to her control, but I'll never prove it."
"To be honest," the lawyer replied, '… and don't laugh at that please… I would say that such an action would almost certainly succeed."
I started the car again. "Come on," I told him. "This might not be ethical, but I want you to meet someone."
I drove straight to Greg McPhillips' office. We arrived unannounced, but he aborted a meeting with another client and saw us when I told his secretary it would not wait. I began to introduce Wylie, but they'd met at university, and on occasions since then, so I went ahead and gave Greg a run-down of my interesting day, and my meeting with the spider at the centre of the web.
"What do we do?" I asked him, when I was finished.
He looked at me dolefully. "The best deal you can." I know about the old axiom that fifty per cent of lawyers must be wrong, but I had the feeling that neither of my chums was in this case.
Wylie took a taxi to the station this time, while I headed back to the estate, to break the worst news that Susie had ever had in her life.
But when I got there I just couldn't. I thought of her blood pressure, sure, and of the effect that the news might have, but I thought also of the sheer misery it would cause her, and I just couldn't bring myself to make her that unhappy.
So instead I told her to get ready for the road, I told Ethel she could go and visit her sister for the weekend, and not to bother coming back till Monday afternoon, and I told Jay that he was coming with us when we headed for Anstruther in the morning, a day early for the posh frock and black tie dinner in the Old Course Hotel.
Susie, of course, was over the moon. Instead of telling her that the arse was about to fall out of her entire world, I told her that the Torrent bid had collapsed, that the Three Bears had gone away, and that I had taken an executive decision on her behalf to fire Sir Graeme Fisher and replace him, pro tern, with her most trusted lieutenant.
She was still elated when we headed off for life… early next afternoon as it turned out… in a small convoy, Jay driving the BMW with the girls in the back, and me in the Lotus. I took it just in case we needed a second car up there, but there was this also; away from Susie's presence I could drop my act and set free all my concerns and anxieties.
I would have to tell her, of course, before the weekend was out. The lawyers' opinions had been firm and convincing. She was going to lose the company, and she would have to be made to face up to it, and to the need to deal with the Devil. I switched on Clyde One, if not to cheer me up, then at least to take my mind off things for a while. At first, Coldplay and Travis did the business, but then came the top of the hour news bulletin.
It began with the latest bickering in the Scottish Executive, went on to a report on the latest bickering in Glasgow City Council, and moved into a story about bickering between a football manager and his star player. After the sport, the usual formula is the latest weather and then a hand-over to the disc-jockey, but the news reader went on in a glossy, tabloid radio voice, "And this just in. Strathclyde Police have confirmed that the man found shot dead in a car outside a betting shop in Crow Road was Jock Perry, Glasgow businessman and alleged underworld figure. Detectives refused to speculate on the motive behind Perry's murder, but it is thought it may be linked to the death of Aidan Keane, a Broomhill man found dead in the River Clyde a few days ago."
I switched the radio off and thought back twenty-four hours, replaying my conversation with Jack Gantry. "Jock Perry will live to regret that." Unless I was very much off target, he had more or less told me that he had ordered an execution. I had dealt with a couple of serious people in my life before, but never anyone nearly as bad as him. I found myself fearing for Wylie Smith, who had gone back to Edinburgh the day before still determined to resign from Kendall McGuire. If Jack decided that he couldn't afford him outside the tent pissing in… We reached my Dad's just as he finished work for the week: come four o'clock on Friday he's usually seen enough teeth for a while. I had warned him that we were coming, of course, and that we'd want a room for Jay as well. I wasn't sure how I'd find him after our last meeting, but he was fine, seeming to be back to his old self.
"Good to see you all," he greeted us. "You canna' have enough family.
Your sister's bringing the boys later; it's rare that we all get the chance to eat together, so I thought I'd push the boat out and take us all to the Craw's Nest."
Enster means just two things to my daughter: the harbour and the ice-cream shop. We were hardly unloaded when she began demanding to be taken to both. My Dad has always been a sucker for a smile, and pretty soon she was heading off in her push chair with her grandparents in charge and Jay going along with them, because Susie wanted to rest up for the evening and I wanted some space to carry on thinking.
We went up to our room and hung in the wardrobe the fancy gear we'd be wearing on the following evening: a voluminous white evening gown, and a white tux and black trousers. Still buoyed by her victory over the hated Natalie, Susie was determined to put on a show at the dinner, so she had brought her best jewellery, which isn't bad at all, and
worth more than all our fancy cars put together.
It's so valuable, in fact, that as she undressed and slipped under the duvet, I took it, in its red leather box, downstairs to put it in my Dad's safe. Like most dental or medical practitioners, he keeps one, and always has. It's a big thing, bolted to the floor although it weighs a ton, and it sits in the corner of his surgery, hidden beneath a table which always has a white cloth over it.
I've known the combination since I was a boy, so I threw back the cover and dialled it: at the last click, the door swung open, and I reached in to deposit Susie's valuables.
I actually didn't see it in the shadows, but my hand brushed against it, a flat object with a plastic feel. I fumbled around until I had a grip of it, then drew it out: a Shoei laptop computer, looking top of the range and pretty new. There was a modem port in the rear, and a cable dangled from it.
I stared at it, bewildered. What the hell was my self-confessed computer hater of a father doing with a seriously fast laptop in his safe?
And then I remembered Joe Donn, and his missing top of the range Shoei.
Was this it, and if it was, then again, what was it doing in my Dad's safe? Had Joe given it to him as a present? No, any time they'd met I'd been there too. And anyway, why would he? Well if not, had…?
"Just hold on there, Blackstone," I said aloud, and realised that my heart was pounding. "Get your imagination in check."
All the same, I picked up the phone, pulled Ewan Maltbie's number from directory enquiries and called him. Happily he was not an early finisher on a Friday. "Mr. Maltbie," I began, when his secretary connected us. "Remember Joe's computer?"
"I do indeed," he replied at once. "I meant to tell you; sorry I haven't got round to it. A letter arrived yesterday, redirected from the house to my office. It was from the Shoei Computer Company and it said that the laptop which he had returned to the company under warranty had been repaired and would be returned by Parcel Force, within the next few days. It said that the fault had been in the CD rewriter, and that the recordable disks which he had sent with it were perfectly all right. We only checked the supplier and local dealer. It never occurred to us or the police that Joe might have returned it directly to the maker. Oh yes," he added. "There was a letter from Laing, the jeweller. The carriage clock and the Piaget watch have been with them being serviced."
I felt a mixture of relief and guilt. "Did you tell Fallon?" I asked.
"Yes. He was annoyed at first, but then happy that his people were off the hook."
"Me too. Cheers."
I hung up and looked at the Shoei. So it wasn't Joe's. So that meant almost certainly that Joe's death had indeed been an accident, untimely for him, and for Jack Gantry, with Plan B in mind. So was it my Dad's after all?
I flipped it open, took a look at the keyboard layout and pressed what looked like the 'on' key, in the far right corner. It was powerful, all right: it booted up nearly as quickly as my desktop at home.
Before long, the screen displayed an array of icons; some of them were shortcuts to the standard word processing and spreadsheet software that you get with every machine, but others I didn't recognise.
I looked at one. The tag under it was "Chesty'. I clicked on it, and gasped in astonishment. The screen was filled with the image of a blonde: but this was not your average pin-up. This woman had the biggest breasts I had ever seen.
I closed it and selected another. This had no file name, only an asterisk. I opened it, and saw another blonde, although there was clear evidence that her hair colouring was not natural. There was nothing spectacular about this one's bosom. What made her different was the fact that she was on all fours, side-on to the camera, and was being penetrated from the rear by a large black man. If he had as much inside her as was still showing outside, he was a very large man indeed.
I closed it quickly and flicked through some others. Those with names were not engaged in any field sports, but some of them looked so young that I felt as if ice, not blood, was running through my veins. Those with asterisks were the action shots; some were stills, others were movies, but none were what you called routine porn.
"The old bastard's been downloading," I whispered to myself.
I opened his programme folders and searched through them. Again, most were standard, but there was one called "Neptune' that caught my eye. I tried to open it, only to discover that it was not a routine programme, but a link to a website. I took the modem cable, disconnected the surgery phone and plugged it into the jack point, then found an icon marked "Free internet with Shoei'. I double-clicked; an indicator told me that I was dialling, that my password was being checked, and finally that I was online. Then it vanished, and the Shoei home page appeared.
I selected 'favourites'. A list of web addresses appeared, and none of them looked like Amazon.com. The Neptune icon was among them, and I hit it. The first web page cleared and another appeared. It showed the old sea-king, trident in hand, only the three prongs on its end looked unsubtly different from the norm. He seemed to be winking too.
Below him, there was a line of asterisks, and I knew it was for a password. I thought about it; if this was my naive old Dad, what would he do? I keyed in 'osbert' and got it right first time.
A door opened and Neptune's trident waved me through; a banner appeared across the screen: ' Welcome to the Sea of Pleasure, member Mac'
Below it there was an index, a veritable shopping list of kinks, from A for Anal to Z for Zoological. I left that alone and looked at two lines at the foot of the screen. One read "Interactive', but I left that and clicked on "Mac's private room'. I was asked for another password. Taking a logical approach, I keyed in 'ellen', and it let me in.
I'm not going to describe in detail the contents of my father's private chamber in King Neptune's Sea of Pleasure. It featured all the usual sexual gymnastics, with a few animal assistants thrown in, and it was without doubt one of the saddest, seediest things I've ever seen in my life. But it all clicked into place when I opened one folder and saw a couple having fairly brutal sex. They were unmasked in this clip, where before they had been wearing various disguises. Like the fake blonde and the fit black man, they were side-on to the camera so that the viewer, sorry, voyeur, could see everything that was going on, and in.
However, they were both looking sideways at the lens, with expressions of a level of rapture that just had to be fake. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the images were those of the late Andrea and Walter Neiporte.
I looked into "Interactive' after that, and I will regret doing that to my dying day. All I will tell you is that my father had somehow managed to operate the free digital camera that comes with every Shoei, and had been able to upload head and shoulder images of himself. These had been digitally grafted on to someone else's… Walter Neiporte's, I guessed, and when I compared the 'interactive' chest hair, and other, more private features, I saw that I was right… so that he appeared to be a participant in a sexual orgy.
"You stupid old man," I shouted out loud. I killed the image and turned off the laptop without bothering to log off from the Shoei home page then walked steadily across to the surgery sink and threw up.
I had rinsed out my mouth and was wiping my face when my father came into the room. He stared at the open computer, still connected to the phone line, and his face contorted with rage in a way that I could never have imagined. It filled me with a horror greater than had anything I'd seen on his computer. "What have you done?" he hissed, seeming to scream and whisper at the same time.
Try to imagine that you've known someone all your life, and loved them as much as you could ever love anyone in the world, in a special way that was unique unto them. Then imagine that their secret soul, the one that we all possess, is laid open to you, and you see that it is weak and corrupt, that the idol you worshipped has feet not merely of clay, for who hasn't, but of vile slime. Try to imagine how you'd feel.
You can? Well that's how I felt when I saw the other side of my father
. He came towards me, looking far crazier at that moment than Jack Gantry ever had. He might have tried to hit me, but I thrust out a hand and seized his collar, holding him at bay.
"No. Not me," I said, quietly. "What have you done?"
I looked at him, but I couldn't see anyone I knew.
He seemed to break down then; he sagged in my grasp and his face crumpled. "I've been a fool, son," said this antithesis of my Dad, in a pathetic, whining voice that filled me with disgust, yet also with a sadness that it pains me to recall.
"You've been a dirty old swine," I told him, quietly, 'that's what you've been. You have actually fed your face on to that site. You've seen the disgusting things they've done with them, but do you really believe that it was just for your own gratification? Fat chance. How many perverts like you do you think there are out there leering at you right now? But forget about you and think about this. If I'm reacting like this, how the hell do you think Mary, and Ellie, and Susie, and even Jonathan will feel if it ever goes public?"
I didn't need to wait for an answer. "When did you buy the computer?"
I asked.
"A few months ago," he replied, in something like his normal voice.
"Jonny and Colin were on at me so much that I decided I'd better join the twenty-first century. I didn't tell anyone, though; after all the fuss I'd made about it I was too embarrassed. I tried it out, and I used it at night in the surgery, after Mary had gone to bed."
He looked down at his feet. He was calmer now so I released him from my grasp. "It all got out of hand," he whispered, but I wasn't in the mood to take anything that resembled an excuse.
"Did it fuck get out of hand!" I snapped at him. "This is what happened. You set yourself up an e-mail address, yes?" He nodded.
"But before you even learned to use it, the spam started to arrive."
"Spam?"
"You must know what that is. It means junk e-mail: Viagra by post, debt management, and most of all, the porn sites. You get e-mails asking, for example, if you'd like to see someone who looks like someone famous sucking someone's cock. Normal e-mail users filter these things out, so that hardly any of them reach them. Not you, though, you stupid old sod; you let them come through, and more than that, when they did, you opened them. Am I on the case?" He nodded again, mute. "But you did even more than that, didn't you. You clicked on the links, you visited the sites, and… you… were… hooked." I felt my lip curl with distaste. "All that indescribable shagging, at your fingertips; I mean how could you resist?"
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