‘I’m thinking McAvoy. No, wait, he already did Filth. I feel your story might be a little too close to that one. Though you’re... you’re better than that. More complex, what d’you think? And you don’t need to be Scottish, it’s not the Scottishness that defines you. We don’t need to think about Ewan or Gerard, though neither would be bad, of course. But we could put you in the States somewhere, or Canada maybe. Why not? Might as well think big. Ryan Reynolds, I mean he can do... Ryan can do everything. He’s funny, tragic, bombastic, cripplingly melancholic. Ryan’s tremendous. Might as well dream cast at this stage, am I right?’
Jesus fucking Christ.
‘What are you doing? Seriously, are you trying to distract me with this movie bullshit? I don’t care. I gigantically, explosively, on so many levels there isn’t a Burj Kalifa tall enough to take them all, don’t give a fuck. Ryan Reynolds... Why, when you’ve had this career, and you’ve got all this, and you’ve worked with all these people, did you end up making some tiny, shitty little Scottish movie?’
She takes another sip of coffee, and now puts one of the pain au chocolat on a plate, which she first offers to me, then takes for herself when I shake my head. Pushing back at my annoyance with her equally robust and determined insouciance.
Yes, insouciance.
‘You’re no fun, Sergeant.’
‘It doesn’t sound like fun,’ I say, ‘it sounds like you’re avoiding answering the question. Keep at it and I’ll be suspicious enough to suggest you come back to the station with me, and you can speak to the inspector.’
‘And what’s he like? Even more terrifyingly damaged? Wait, he could be played by Matthew McConaughey.’
I won’t even bother with the gender thing.
‘Tell me about the movie.’
She takes a small bite, an LA diet-sized bite, of the chocolate croissant, then lays down the plate, shaking her head as she does so.
‘Very well, very well. All this, glorious and wonderful and exciting as it is, is rather old now. Wearing at the edges, wearing thin, wearing away. Little to say for itself. You may have just been betraying your age with your Blockbuster Video line, but it’s not entirely inaccurate. The Blockbuster Video days were my heyday.’
‘What happened?’
She shrugs, takes her time over the answer, lifts the plate, takes another bite of pastry, lays the plate back down.
‘A bit of everything, really. I’d made it up the ladder, from Bargeddie to Hollywood, a long climb, but fast. Did I fuck my way up there?’ She shrugs. ‘I suppose I did. Ruined a couple of perfectly good men along the way. Got to the top, made movies, lived the dream, the Hollywood dream. Movie stars, drugs and sex. And then... everything comes in cycles, doesn’t it? You go up, you get to the top, from there there’s only one way you can go. If you want to stay there, when you see the start of the decline, and everyone sees the decline, you have to be able to fight it. You have to want to fight it. I didn’t have the energy. But I’d lived the dream, twenty years and more. Decided to come home.’ She wafts an airy hand around the room, and towards the great outdoors, the whole of Scotland her playground. ‘I can do whatever I want now, just so long as it’s not expect someone to give me a hundred million bucks to make a movie. And so I fritter away the days. Yoga and reading, and walking in the hills, and having drinks with friends, and occasionally speaking to one of my daughters on FaceTime. All terribly dull.
‘I knew David Cowal from way back, and he asked me to help him out with the movie, and I thought, why not? It filled a gap in my schedule, you might say.’
‘And it didn’t bother you that it was never going to be released?’
‘Not me, darling, of course not. Business is business. I mean, when one starts, when a project is mentioned, one always wonders... will this small, seemingly insignificant thing turn into The Full Monty or Slumdog or whatever. It’s an industry of dreamers, after all. But I knew as soon as I read the script. It didn’t really have anything about it.’
‘Why make it then?’
‘They needed a movie to meet their quota, they had money to spend, it was going to be a quick and easy shoot. And it was. Business, like I said, is business...’
‘So, what, everyone bought into the programme? Everyone on the movie knew they were making this thing no one would ever see?’
‘Of course, not everyone. It’s the movies. People dream, and those dreams are big. Gigantic,’ and she makes an exploding star gesture.
I take another drink of coffee. Even though we’re coming to it, my concentration dips for a second, mind going in and out, realise as I lift the cup that the shake in my hand is obvious, which it must have been earlier, and now that I notice it, I notice her noticing it, though she will have already done so.
I stare at the floor for a moment, head somewhere else, then finally manage to look at her, and she’s watching me with peculiar fascination, and she kind of smiles curiously, and it brings me back, and I say, ‘Tell me.’
‘Tell you what? You were away for so long there, I quite forget what it was we were talking about.’
‘Who was upset about the movie not happening?’
‘Ah, yes. A couple of the actors, of course. One of them’s still bothering me. That little shit, Marvin. He’s a creep. Making a movie with me that’s never getting released, is about all the career he deserves.’
‘We’ll speak to Marvin.’
‘Well, I don’t know that you need to go that far. Anyway, I can... I’ll get Marcie to fill you in on any information you need. The principal... perhaps, the one you should be most interested in, was the writer. Young woman, name of Leia Fisher. And yes, her parent’s real surname is Fisher, and they named her after Princess Leia. Cheesy doesn’t cover the half of it.
‘It was her first script, it got optioned for sweetie money, but she was excited. Well, of course she was. Everyone is at that stage. Got her photo in the local paper, maybe even made one of the nationals, she was living the fifteen-minute dream. And then one day on set, one day when she was excitedly talking about film festivals and distribution and Netflix and award ceremonies, someone told her how it was actually going to be. And she had... she had a cow. She had a good old-fashioned movie set strop. It was like the ghost of Bette Davis. How wonderful!’
And she claps with delight at the memory of it.
‘Doesn’t sound wonderful,’ I say.
‘Oh, it was. I mean, I was there one day when Angelina Jolie ripped a poor AD to death on set. It was absolute murder. But she’s Angelina, there’s a reason she thinks she’s queen of the world. But young Leia? Everyone thought it was hilarious.’
‘How did it play out?’
‘Well, she stormed off set and we never saw her again. There were only a few days filming left at the time, and of course, we hadn’t actually needed her on set in the first place. The writing was done, it wasn’t as though we had Russell Crowe demanding rewrites to his dialogue before every scene.’
‘Did you hear from her again?’
‘Did I? Quite the campaign she tried to mount. Spoke to people, wrote blogs, wrote e-mails, tweeted. You’ll need to look her up. Now, I have to say, before you go sending round the SWAT team, body-slamming her into the dirt, and doing all that police shit that you do, I really don’t think she’d have done all that, and then started murdering people.’ She pauses, stares off to the side, and then continues, ‘Well, maybe she’d have murdered David I suppose, she was really, really pissed at him. And if it is her, I should be looking over my shoulder. But this man Lord, and the bit part actor lady? That seems peculiar.’
‘We spoke to James Crawford yesterday, he didn’t mention anything about her.’
‘Well, that’s because he fucked her and was embarrassed. Ever since she went loco, he’s been panicking she’ll contact his wife.’
‘She wasn’t mad at him?’
‘I think he was scared of her. When she found out the plan for the movie – or, rather, the total lack of a pl
an – James faked outrage so he could stay onside. It was hilarious.’
‘What about you? Are you worried? D’you want to speak to someone about getting protection in place?’
‘How sweet. I’ll be fine. I have alarms, I’ll make sure they’re on, and I have Bobby.’ A beat, then she smiles. ‘But if you feel you have to move in here to protect me for the next week or so, I could put up with that.’
And then, naturally, she leans forward to pour some more coffee, even though she doesn’t need to.
Must be on the lookout for husband number six.
37
I came away with a copy of the film burned to a CD. That’ll be a fun eighty-seven minutes for us this afternoon at some point. Or maybe we can have a station movie pizza night.
Back along the M9, through Cumbernauld, take the cut-off down towards the M8 and the M74, and then off to Cambuslang, and I’m pitching up at the office in less than half an hour.
Took the pain au chocolat in the end. And another two cups of coffee. And some water. Even let her tell me a couple of stories, because she looked like she wanted to talk, and I was aware that the longer I spent there, the more normal I was beginning to feel.
Really liked her in the end. I hope she doesn’t get murdered. If she does, the killer’ll have to take care of Bobby the dog too, which would be a shame. And tricky. Although, when it comes to it, dogs are kind of dumb, and all that brute force can be fairly easily neutered with some aforethought. So, if someone goes there looking to commit murder, it’ll largely depend on whether they’ve planned for the dog.
Walk into the station feeling the best I have so far today. Not as good as I was three days ago, but recovered from last night. No idea if I’m wearing last night’s diet of alcohol, my parfum du jour, but the shakes have passed. Party celebration emojis all round.
Having called ahead, DI Kallas is sitting at Ritter’s desk, looking at her phone, waiting for me.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘How are you?’
‘I am fine,’ says the robot, but the robot, of course, has had no small talk programming done on it, and so she quickly says, ‘What did the producer say?’
‘She has some stories to tell,’ I say, settling down in my seat, turning on the computer, glancing vaguely at it as it whirs into life. ‘And she conveniently laid a suspect in our path, which sounds much too easy. But we do need to look into it.’
‘Who?’
‘The writer of the movie, Leia Fisher. She was aggrieved about the attitude of the filmmakers. Fell out with them all, mounted an online campaign against them. I mean, we’ve looked the movie up already and haven’t seen any of that shit. I’ll get into it now, see how it looks.’
‘You think perhaps the producer was giving us the writer as a diversion?’
‘From herself? Entirely possible, of course, but I don’t think so. Let me chase down the writer, I’ll try to speak to her today, then we’ll see where we are.’
‘OK, that’s good. Thank you.’
‘You conduct any inter –’
‘I spoke to Gill Blair again. I feel it was not a good use of time, but we shall see.’
‘Nothing new?’
‘I did not learn anything new. Did you say to her husband outright that we know she’d been having an affair with Cowal?’
I give that a second or two before answering, then nod at my own utter uselessness, and say, ‘Not, you know, completely outright, but it was pretty obvious it’s what we believe to be the case.’
‘And do you think he already knew?’
‘I would say he did, and he’d been lying to himself.’
‘Wilful blindness?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think Mr and Mrs Blair had a discussion about her unfaithfulness last night. As a consequence, Mrs Blair was very tense, and not at all forthcoming.’
I lower my eyes, get the regular and familiar feeling of ineptitude, and as always seems to happen, Kallas sees right through me and comes to my rescue.
‘You had to speak to him, and it would have been impossible for you to ask questions about David Cowal without awakening his feelings of resentment, regardless of how much he knows. If he did not already know, then we can scrub him from the list of potential suspects. If he did already know, then you do not need to feel bad about discussing it with him.’
Glass half full, eh?
I suppose I ought to take it. I nod, deciding the best course of action is probably to stop talking about it. I spoke to the guy, got nothing, she spoke to his wife, got nothing.
A phone starts ringing on the other side of the office, somewhere two of the guys are talking – still talking, three days later – of the miracle of Scotland winning a penalty shootout.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask, trying to avoid the silence, and asking a question with just enough of a veiled reference to what she told me yesterday evening.
‘Yes, I am fine,’ she says. ‘You do not need to worry about me. You were drinking again last night.’
Nothing to say to that. I look around, thinking about Eileen. Haven’t really been thinking about Eileen, because I’ve been too busy thinking about Kallas. I need to thank Eileen.
‘Where are you on the case?’ I ask, ignoring the alcohol observation.
A moment, then she accepts that this is where we are, and goes on to transmit. ‘We have tracked down the manufacturer of the masks, now we are hoping to establish if a multiple buy was made from anyone in this area. The chances of success could, naturally, be inhibited depending on the amount of selling agents the product has. The company at least, alone in the world it seems, does not sell through Amazon.
‘We are looking at cars that were caught on CCTV in the three areas where the murders took place, in case there is one that repeats. While they are all in Cambuslang, and it is not a large town, still it would be a significant coincidence for the same car to have been seen each time.
‘We spoke, finally, to the director of Garrion Bridge care home. This did not go well, but I feel the conversation has moved on a lot since this item was placed on the to-do list.
‘We have made calls and visits to most others involved in this film, His Grey Return. This is being coordinated by Eileen. She is in the ops room, perhaps you can go there and coordinate an approach to this Leia Fisher. It is possible someone has already spoken to her.
‘So far, we have found no immediate connection between Mrs Malone and anyone dying of the virus, however it does appear that she was a virulent anti-lockdown protestor. She posted thousands of messages, and retweeted and liked messages on various platforms about ending the lockdown, the farce of it, how everyone should be left to make up their own minds. She promoted a lot of inaccurate science. She intimated that if and when a vaccine came, she would not be taking it.’
‘That could be it, then,’ I say. ‘I mean, it’s another strand, right, another way in which someone’s ignorance put people at risk? The first victim put his own father at risk, and by extension possibly killed many others. The second risked the life of his family, and his wife died. And now this one was working against the community, and did who knows how much untold damage?’
‘She had three followers on Twitter,’ says Kallas. Deadpan. God, she’s fucking wonderful. She’d absolutely kill it in a comedy movie.
‘Not what I just said, then.’
‘There is something in it, but for someone who tweeted over a hundred times every day, she can have had little impact. Her Facebook account is similarly deficient in follower numbers. Nevertheless, under the circumstances it still feels significant. We should not lose sight of the fact that this is the person she was.’
‘I thought we should work on the potential next victim. I got the full list of people involved in the movie from Mrs Blake. Not just the cast and crew, who we have, but other subsidiary names, such as accountants and people involved in financing. It’ll be tough, but we need to identify if any of them had a chequered history from the past few months relating to
the virus. The kind of things we’ve seen with the others, basically.’
‘Yes, very good,’ says Kallas. ‘Eileen is already collating that kind of information, but this augmented list with which you have returned should be of use. Perhaps you could take that in to her now.’ She glances at the clock. ‘I have a meeting with the chief inspector in four and a half minutes. Once that is done, I will join you and the sergeant in the ops room.’
We stare at each other, that familiar awkwardness, then she nods and turns away, and I watch her walk across the open plan, and I think of her walking just as easily away from me into the chill waters of the October Clyde.
‘Fucking come on,’ I mutter to myself, then I get up and walk through to the small ops room, where Harrison is sitting alone, her legs up on the table, staring at the information board, where all we know about the three deaths is laid out in a jumble of facts and buzzwords and photographs, and she’s bouncing a small rubber ball off the desk, onto the far wall, back to the desk, back into her hand, with perfect control.
That there is impressive hand/eye coordination.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘I wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘The inspector was worried you would.’
I look at her, as she turns the ball over in her fingers, nodding at the state of play.
‘I don’t deserve either of you,’ I say. ‘I don’t deserve your concern.’
‘Well, too bad you’re cursed with it. We’ll see you through, get you out the other side. Make something of you yet.’
We smile, I shake my head. She bounces the ball off the desk, wall, desk and back into her hand without really looking at it.
‘Sorry, I ruined your evening.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘No?’
‘I told Sasha I had to work late. People are very forgiving of triple murder investigations, I find. Got to her place around midnight.’
I nod. Maybe I haven’t stopped since the last time.
‘Decent sex?’
‘Ten out of ten.’
In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5 Page 20
