Deadly Business (3 page)

They went on their way, and wee Jonathan and I continued on ours. There’s a simple cold shower at the side of the house. I made him stand under it for a minute or so, not as a penance, but to wash the sand off: standard practice. When it was done, I towelled him half dry and then we went inside. He would have headed straight for the room he was sharing with Tom, but I wouldn’t let him. Instead, I took him into the kitchen, gave him a glass of Activia pouring yoghurt, vanilla flavour, and sat him at the table. I’d seen enough of him by that time to know that always gets his attention.

‘Now,’ I began, ‘now that everyone’s tempers have cooled, tell me again why you think your mother won’t be missing you.’

‘Because she didn’t take me,’ he repeated, quietly, but stubbornly.

‘She couldn’t. Your mother’s a businesswoman. Sometimes she has to be away.’

‘She’s never left me before, only this last year. Any time she’s had to go to Scotland before she’s always taken Janet and me.’

‘And Conrad and Audrey.’

‘Yes.’

‘And those times I’ll bet she worked a lot and you didn’t see much of her.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded, grudgingly.

‘In that case, do you think she might have decided that now you’re old enough for her to leave you for a while, that’s best for you?’

He avoided the question by attacking his glass.

‘Jonathan,’ I continued, ‘I know how I feel when Tom visits you and I’m not there. I promise you, I miss him every day he’s away, but still I let him go, because it’s good for all you kids that you spend time together when you’re growing up. Your mum feels the same way.’

‘She can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I saw her plane ticket in her office. She’s gone to America.’

He was right about that. Susie’s consultant had sent her to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, for her treatments.

‘I think she’s gone with Duncan,’ he whispered.

Duncan. That was a name that I thought had been consigned to the past. There’s a significant difference between Susie and me in the way we’ve dealt with life after Oz. It may have had something to do with the fact that while I was around halfway through the journey between forty and fifty, Susie had seven years fewer on the clock than I did, but as single women, I’ve always found that I managed perfectly well without a man in my bed, while Susie usually had an ‘escort’ somewhere or other in her vicinity.

I’m still fertile, although the menopause can’t be far away, but I was having trouble remembering the last time I looked at a bloke and thought,
‘I’d really like to fuck you.’
No, sorry, I lie. It was eight years in the past, the man in question was Oz, and I did, regardless of the small detail that he was married to Susie at the time. Biter bit, and all that.

Susie’s Duncan had been around for longer than most of her consorts, almost two years from start to what she had told me was the finish. His surname was Culshaw, and he was the nephew of her managing director. They were introduced at a company meeting in Glasgow, and before long, he was making regular visits to Monaco. He was a few years younger than her, but not so many that he could be classed as a toy boy. I’d met him a couple of times on visits to Monaco during his ‘tenure of office’, so to speak.

He was a good-looking bastard, I’ll give him that, not tall for a man, about my height when I’m in high heels, taller than Susie without towering over her, with fairish hair that wasn’t quite blond, pale blue eyes and a narrow waist. He scrubbed up well enough, and I’ll admit he looked not bad in swim gear around the pool, although he was a bit on the bony side and had unsightly clumps of hair on his back. When Susie asked me what I thought of him, I pointed this out. She couldn’t argue otherwise, but she assured me that his best feature was hidden from view. I didn’t ask for specifics, but I wasn’t sure I believed that; my scepticism was based on several years’ nursing experience, when I saw a lot of skinny guys … or a little, as was mostly the case.

I did ask about his profession, though, over dinner one night at her place when the kids had gone to bed and Duncan wasn’t in residence. ‘He’s a writer,’ she told me.

‘What does he write?’

‘Newspaper articles, magazine articles, that sort of stuff.’

There was a vagueness about her answer that was very un-Susie-like. ‘Who pays him to do this?’ I murmured.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you born cynical?’

‘I’m not cynical,’ I insisted. ‘But I don’t take a single fucking thing for granted either, least of all when it comes to men.’

‘That’s why you don’t have one,’ she chuckled.

‘Maybe … but I prefer to believe that since my boy’s going to start shaving in a couple of years, I don’t want him to have to compete for the bathroom mirror. So,’ I went on, ‘who does your guy work for?’

She laughed. ‘Your boy has an en-suite bathroom, so don’t give me that one. Duncan’s freelance,’ she continued. ‘He gets stuff in the Scottish papers, mostly their weekend magazines, but he says that his best clients are airlines. You know, those flight mags that you read then forget as soon as you step on to the air bridge.’

‘Your wild weekend in Shagaluf? Great European stag night venues? That sort of stuff?’

She nodded. ‘You’ve got it. Pays well, he says. He does other stuff, though; corporate. For example he’s going to write the text for the Gantry Group’s next annual report.’

‘How about books?’

‘He says he’s working on a manuscript. He won’t let me read it yet, but he says it’s a thriller. He’s looking for an agent just now. He says you can’t get published without one.’

‘How about Oz’s old agent? What was his name again?’

‘Roscoe Brown?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Primavera, he’s Hollywood; that’s not what he does.’

‘I could always send it to my brother-in-law,’ I suggested. ‘He’d read it if I asked him.’

‘Miles Grayson? I thought he’d retired.’

‘From acting, yes, but he still produces and directs. Although he has so many business interests these days, he insists that films are still his main focus. Everything else is just a sideline.’

‘Including the wine business?’

‘Very much so. It’s only a small part of his portfolio.’

A couple of years ago Miles and my sister visited me in St Martí. I introduced him to some of the better wines from our region and he was so impressed that he bought one of the producers. I’ve been a director for the last two years and it’s doing all right.

‘Well,’ Susie ventured, cautiously, ‘if you think he would read it, I’ll tell Duncan, and ask him to give you a call.’

Tom and I went back home next morning, and I thought no more about it, until last autumn, over a year later, my phone rang, and it was Duncan Culshaw, calling out of the blue. He’d booked himself into the Nieves Mar Hotel, in L’Escala, and he told me that he’d like to see me.

‘You came all this way on spec?’ I asked.

‘Susie said you’d be here,’ he said. ‘She told me that you might be prepared to show my book to your brother-in-law.’

‘I might, that’s true, but you don’t need to throw yourself at my feet for it to happen. If I do it, it’ll be as a favour to Susie, pure and simple.’

‘I appreciate that,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself with him by sending something blind.’ He paused. ‘Have dinner with me tonight, and I’ll give you a copy.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I replied, ‘unless you fancy feeding my son as well. But lunch tomorrow would be okay.’

He had his manuscript with him when we met in the hotel restaurant, not in printed form but on a four gigabyte memory stick. ‘It’s not quite finished,’ he told me. ‘I have a couple of rough edges that I need to smooth out.’ He handed it to me. ‘Read it please, and we’ll meet again, possibly for coffee tomorrow morning. I’ll call you to arrange something.’

‘That’s a tight timescale,’ I observed, ‘for a whole manuscript.’

‘You’ll finish it, I promise you. It’s a page-turner.’

I took the stick from him. ‘Obviously not literally,’ I pointed out, ‘but I’ll do it.’

We had a pleasant enough lunch; most of our conversation was about the Emporda region, its front-line tourist pitches and some of the spots off the beaten track. ‘That was very useful,’ he told me as he signed the bill. ‘I have a piece to write for one of my airline clients; you’ve given me just about everything I need.’

‘That’s handy,’ I remarked. ‘You’ll be able to put me down as a business expense.’

I had a flash of concern that I might have sounded waspish, or been ‘a nippy sweetie’, as my Glaswegian Granny Phillips would have put it, but far from being wounded, Duncan nodded, beamed, and replied, ‘Yes, indeed, Primavera; the whole damn trip in fact, with free air travel and car hire.’

My only reaction was a smile, but I felt that for the first time I’d had a flash of the real Duncan Culshaw.

I drove straight home, dug out the rarely used MacBook laptop that I keep as a back-up for my computer, took it out on to the terrace, with Charlie, our Labrador, for company, and plugged the stick into one of the USB sockets. There was only one document on it, a large PDF file, titled
The Mask
. When I clicked on it, a box came up on the screen advising me that it was read only and that I would not be able to copy or edit it. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, and clicked the button to proceed.

There was no foreword, only the title, author’s name and a copyright declaration. I turned to the first page and started to read.

I sat bolt upright in my chair. ‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted, loud enough for Charlie to bark, his fur rippling, readying himself to defend me from attack, even though he couldn’t see the threat.

‘Doreen March?’ I said, more quietly. ‘Ellie?’

He’d changed a name, but only by a couple of months. ‘My wee brother’ was always how Lady Ellen January referred to Oz. Lady January, wife of a Scottish Supreme Court judge, formerly Ellen Sinclair, born Ellen Blackstone, is my Tom’s aunt, and she remains my good friend.

That surname surely had to be an alias for her, but as for the rest, Ellie is the most down-to-earth woman I’ve ever met. She’s never spoken like that in all the time I’ve known her; moreover, she never wears any make-up to speak of, and the Stone of Destiny is more likely to shed a tear than she is.

I realised that I was shaking, and that my heart and respiration rates were way above normal. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and waited until I had restored myself to a state of calm. When I opened them again, I saw Charlie, looking up at me. If a dog can frown and show concern, that’s what he was doing.

I had slammed the MacBook closed, as if I was running away from its contents, putting it to sleep in the process. I waited for it to come back to life, then read the second chapter.

If Doreen was Ellie, then Michael Greystock had to equal Macintosh Blackstone, a dentist, not a teacher, who had threatened both his kids with fire and brimstone if they ever entertained the idea of following him into his profession. As for frail, the guy’s had a heart-valve replacement but he’s still capable of two rounds of golf a day.

I laughed out loud. This was supposed to be Mac, Tom’s rock-solid Grandpa Mac coming out with all this fanciful shite?