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  ‘What, in Motherwell?’

  She give me her ‘Daft bastard’ look. ‘I was thinking of Florida, actually.’

  ‘We’ve got two houses already.’

  ‘But neither of them has a garden.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  It’s a thing about Prim. She’d really love to have green fingers, but in fact she’s death to anything with roots. Last December, my sister Ellie gave us a poinsettia, and Prim announced that she would look after it. A week before Christmas, the one remaining red leaf fell off.

  We were so busy admiring the place, we didn’t notice or care that Joe Donn’s minute had stretched out to fifteen. It was only when he coughed behind us that I glanced at my watch and realised how long he had been gone.

  ‘That’s a funny thing,’ he said, looking slightly puzzled. ‘I thought I’d plenty of photos of Stephen, and yet I can’t find one. Come back through here though; there’s one thing I do have. After we both left Gantry’s, I took him on a golfing trip to Portugal. I had my video camera with me and I shot some footage, with Stephen in it. If I lend it to you, maybe you could have a print taken off that.’

  We followed him back into the study, where he opened a cupboard, revealing rows of neatly labelled Super 8 tape cassette boxes. I watched him as he pointed his way along the second row, until he came to a box labelled Portugal. He took it out, and flipped it open; it was empty.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Could it still be in the camera?’ Prim asked.

  ‘No chance. I never took out the tape I used last time I was in Spain. It’s still there. I’m meticulous about my tapes. This one’s been pinched.’

  ‘In that case, Mr Donn,’ I told him, ‘it looks as if your Stephen’s a shy lad. He doesn’t want anyone to have his photograph. I appreciate that you’ve fallen out with him, but does he have a key to your house?’

  ‘Yes he has. I never bothered to have it off him; he’s my own flesh and blood all said and done. He could have nipped in any time I was at golf.’

  I glanced at Prim. ‘Only one thing for it then, love. We’re going to have to go back to Barassie.’

  Chapter 22

  As it happened, she had to go to see Mira Donn on her own. The Global Wrestling Alliance circus was in London that weekend, and I had to head for Hillington to join up with the team before we caught the plane south. The Barassie trip was no problem for us, though, since I was travelling alone for once, Prim having decided that she had too much work on her hands.

  I was looking forward to the trip, since Daze was back. Everett Davis, the Big Man himself, had signed himself off from the States for a few weeks to appear in the European shows.

  He was at the front door of the headquarters building when my taxi arrived, all seven feet, two inches of him, supervising the loading of our team bus. ‘Hey, Oz, my man,’ he boomed in his deep, dark chocolate voice. ‘So how’s the movie business?’

  ‘Fascinating,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been shot at once this week already.’

  ‘You’ll have a quieter time this weekend,’ he promised me. ‘You got no action this time.’ I was relieved about that. A few weeks before, Darius Henke and I had staged a mock confrontation in the ring, which had ended with me being choke-slammed by the Black Angel of Death, as the marks knew him. There is a public belief that when wrestlers are slammed down hard on to the ring floor, or when they slam other people, somehow it doesn’t hurt. This is wrong: it does.

  As usual, the roadies had gone ahead of us. When we arrived at the London Arena just before six p.m., it was set up and ready for us. The dressing-room accommodation there isn’t bad, better than most in fact, but for a troupe as big as ours it’s a long way short of one for one.

  So when the doorman brought in the bouquet as the guys were changing for the Friday evening run-through, and brought it straight to me, I didn’t half take some razzing, I can tell you. At first, I assumed that it was Prim’s way of telling me she wished she was there, but I was wrong. When I glanced at the label I saw that it read, ‘For Oz, love Ronnie.’

  Mrs Barowitz, the blonde toy doll who had started me on my voice-over career. I had arranged to send her the tickets I had promised her, and then I had forgotten all about her; ungrateful sod that I am.

  ‘Hey Mr Announcer,’ Bret Austin called out. He was one half of the current tag team champions. ‘Whatcha going to do wiff them?’ Bret’s a Londoner and his real name is Phil Mitchell; but he could hardly use that for wrestling, could he.

  ‘I haven’t a bloody clue, mate,’ I told him, honestly. ‘Why don’t you give them to your wife?’

  ‘I was ’oping you’d say that,’ he grinned. ‘I could use the brownie points.’

  I handed him the flowers. ‘Don’t forget to bin the card.’

  He glanced at it and frowned. ‘Who the ’ell’s Ronnie? You got a poofter admirer, Oz?’

  ‘Very far from it, my friend,’ I assured him. Even then I didn’t quite realise the truth I spoke. I found out, though, when I checked into my hotel suite after the rehearsal. I took my bag straight into the bedroom, and unpacked it carefully, hanging my ring suit in the wardrobe and putting the rest of my things in a drawer. I was closing it when I heard a sound from the bathroom; a soft, splashing sound.

  Even then, I really did think when I opened the door, that Prim had decided to surprise me. But no, there she was in the bath, all of her, none of it covered discreetly by bubbles like you see on telly; Ronnie Barowitz.

  ‘Hello Oz,’ she simpered. ‘Surprise, surprise.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I exclaimed. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’

  She smiled. ‘It’s amazing what you can do with fifty quid and a porter. Even in a place like this.’ And then she stood up.

  Most people look far better with their clothes on, no doubt about that. No doubt either that Ronnie belongs in the minority, even though she’s a fake blonde. She stood there, Venus risen, and I have to admit that I felt myself rising too.

  She beckoned to me. ‘Come on in—’

  ‘Don’t say it, Mrs Barowitz - the water’s lovely.’ She laughed, but I heard it die in her throat as I turned and walked out of the bathroom. I was in the small sitting room, looking out over the Thames when she appeared in the doorway, draped in a hotel dressing-gown; it was unfastened.

  She stepped close to me. ‘I’m sorry, Oz. Maybe this was too much of a surprise for you.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Okay.’ She looked up at me, blatantly, and let the dressing-gown fall to the floor. ‘But now you’ve got over it, what do you say?’

  I bent, taking care not to bump into any part of her pink body, picked up the robe, and draped it around her once more.

  ‘I say thanks for fixing me up with that voice-over, Ronnie; but now I’m going to dinner. Please don’t be here when I get back.’

  I turned as I reached the door. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Any other weekend, my fiancée would have been with me. If she’d walked in there and found you in the bath, she’d have fucking drowned you in it.

  ‘Give my regards to Richard.’

  Before I joined the team in the bar I paid a call on the duty manager and told him that it would be a good idea if he fired one of his porters. When I went back upstairs two-and-a-half hours later she was gone; save for a small present in the toilet, she might never have been there.

  I said nothing to anyone about my groupie. Actually, they aren’t unusual around the GWA. Quite a few of the lads have girlie fan clubs, and Sally Crockett, the ladies champ, used to have hordes drooling after her before she married big Jerry. Everett has a simple rule on job-related sex; don’t do anything that could draw down flak on the GWA; I didn’t think for a moment that Ronnie could have, but I was quietly pleased with myself for the way I’d handled it. The truth is that the old Oz Blackstone, the one from three or four years back, would have been right in there. Noosh was right; I’d grown up.

  I looked for R
onnie at ringside next night. just before our live event went on air. There was no sign of her in the block where she should have sat, although all the places seemed to be taken. The show itself made me forget all about her. The GWA is a very professional outfit and its standards are consistently high, but the London Arena show was a cracker, highlighted by the return of Daze Everett in his new-look gold outfit, reclaiming the European Title after a spectacular battle with the Black Angel, one of the very few guys in the business who is big enough to look convincing against him.

  As always, the crowd was pumped up to a frenzy by the end, and took a while to clear the Arena. We have a cute way of helping them. As the house lights go up, several of the performers appear in the foyer, and invariably are surrounded by autograph hunters, speeding the flow out of the hall. Sometimes I join them, but that night, all I wanted to do was get on to the bus and back to the hotel for dinner.

  I changed quickly and stepped out of the stage door, my suit bag over my shoulder. The bus was parked at the top of an alley: a long dark alley. I was about halfway towards it when a man stepped out of the shadows, looking right at me; somehow I knew he wasn’t going to ask me for a light - not that he’d have been on; I don’t smoke.

  He stood there blocking my way, then began to move towards me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw, fleetingly, that there was another guy behind me, with the same determined expression on his face. I realised that I was the meat in a particularly nasty sandwich. I backed off from the first man, letting my bag slip to the ground, trying to think myself out of this situation. No one said anything; we all knew what was on the agenda.

  I kept backing off, until I felt the man behind me grab my arm. Still I didn’t turn, but dropped my right shoulder, leaned back into him, and swung my elbow into his gut as fast and as hard as I could. I felt as much as heard his gasp, and had a good look at him for the first time as he started to double up.

  I had been taught several wrestling moves by the guys, but I had never used any of them for real. In a more confined space, I’d have been dead, but there was room to move in the alley. I picked the first hold to come to mind; clasping my hands behind the guy’s head as it came down, I jammed my shoulder up under his throat and dropped into a sitting position on the ground, pulling him down with me. That is the patented finishing manoeuvre of a very famous wrestler. He knows how to do it without hurting people: I don’t. My sudden stop and the man’s momentum drove the hard corner of my shoulder into his windpipe, putting him out of action for the foreseeable future.

  The heavy in front of me hesitated for a second. I guess he’d been told that this job would be a milk run. While he was thinking, I ran at him and smashed a stiff-arm across his chest. He was a bit bigger than me, but then so is Liam Matthews and I knocked him over with that move once. The difference was that Liam meant to fall; this bloke slipped and sat down hard, but he bounced straight back up. I sensed trouble, for I was running out of tricks. He didn’t know that, though, so, while he was still trying to size me up, I poked my fingers into his eyes, then dropped my right shoulder and hit him with another stiff-arm, upwards, straight in the balls this time.

  As the bloke hit the deck with a whimper, I felt another hand on my shoulder; God, I hadn’t noticed the third one. I had worked through my repertoire, so I simply spun round and threw a punch. Fortunately, Liam Matthews has seen my right-hander before and he has good reflexes, so he swayed out of the way.

  ‘Christ, Oz, we should have had the cameras out here,’ he drawled. ‘That was pretty impressive.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I demanded.

  ‘Long enough so’s you wouldn’t have been hurt. Who are these guys anyway?’

  I looked blankly at him. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Let’s find out then.’ The guy with the sore throat had also bitten into his tongue. Given that he was choking and had blood pouring from his mouth, he wasn’t going to be saying anything for a while, so Liam stepped up to his pal, who was on his knees trying to think about legging it, and kicked him in the ribs. ‘What’re you doin’ here?’

  ‘Just lookin’ for someone to mug, mate,’ the heavy wheezed.

  Liam thought this was hilarious. He roared with laugher, then slapped the man hard across the face. ‘As a general rule, friend, muggers tend to avoid GWA shows.’ He dug his thumb hard into the side of his neck. ‘Now, who sent you after my friend Oz here? Tell me and you can walk away from here. Any more bullshit and you won’t.’

  ‘I don’t know who sent us,’ the man protested. ‘It was a bloke in a pub, this lunchtime.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I dunno. Just an ordinary bloke. About thirty, I s’ppose; wore a black shirt and jeans . . . sunglasses, a pair of them Rayban jobs.’

  ‘So what did he say to you?’

  ‘He told us that a pal of his wanted this geezer duffed up, ’cos ’e’d done something ’e shouldn’t. He’d heard we ’andle that sort of stuff. He gave us two hundred quid, and promised us another two once the job was done.’

  ‘And how was he going to know that?’

  ‘He’d have known when the guy didn’t show up on the telly. We were meant to break both ’is arms, like.’

  ‘Sure, ’n you mean like this?’ Quick as a flash, Liam grabbed his right wrist, pulled it up, and twisted it, hard; I heard a crack. The man screamed in pain, as the muscular wrestler pulled him to his feet by his collar. ‘That’s the hardest two hundred you’ve ever earned, pal,’ he murmured, then amazingly, took a ten pound note from his pocket and shoved it into his good hand. ‘You and your mate, get yourselves a taxi to the hospital, and don’t even dream about my pal again.’

  As the two hooligans dragged themselves painfully out of the alley, Liam turned to me. ‘So what have you been up to, Oz?’ he asked, with a smile. ‘What have you been doing that you shouldn’t?’

  At that moment there was only one thought in my mind. I told him about Ronnie Barowitz’s ambush in my hotel room, and about me giving her the bum’s rush. ‘Maybe she told Richard, her old man, and he took offence; got someone from his factory to find those two clowns.’

  ‘What? He sent those guys to cripple you for not shafting his wife?’ He bellowed with laughter again.

  ‘Okay, it sounds weak, I admit. But from what I’ve seen of the two of them, whatever Ronnie wants, Ronnie gets. If she went home and told him that I’d made a pass at her, he’d have believed her, no question. And if she’d said she wanted me sorted, he’d have done it.’ I scowled at him.

  ‘Anyhow, whatever the truth is, we’ve blown the chance of finding out. If we’d got the name of the pub from those two I could have had it staked it out and caught their client if he came back.’

  ‘Fat chance of him coming back. Here, how did that fella know you’re on telly?’

  ‘No trick there. It’s not just kids who watch us.’

  Back at the hotel, I opened the door of my room cautiously, just in case there were any more surprises waiting for me. It was clear, but nonetheless, I spent the rest of my time in London looking over my shoulder. By the time we had finished recording the Sunday show, I was feeling pretty paranoid.

  In fact the Ronnie incident preyed on me so much that it wasn’t until I was almost home that another possibility dawned on me.

  Chapter 23

  At first I hadn’t intended to tell Prim about my exciting weekend, but I have this belief that the first secret in a relationship can be the seed of a disease which can destroy it in time. So I blurted it all out as she drove me home from Glasgow Airport in the Freelander.

  She was far more worried about the two hooligans than about Ronnie. I was pleased at first, until she told me why. ‘She’s a man-eater, dear; I knew that the moment I saw her. She’s a predator, and you’re insecure when it comes to aggressive women.’

  I felt myself pouting. ‘I’d prefer to say that I like to make my own choices rather than being chosen. I chose to think of you and showed her the d
oor.’

  ‘I’ll express my gratitude later,’ she promised. ‘Now about these thugs. Were you hurt at all?’

  ‘I’ve got a bruise on my shoulder, that’s all.’ I laughed. ‘When Liam told Everett about it, he wanted to put me in a match.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I told him to forget it.’

  ‘We won’t see those men again, will we?’

  ‘No danger. They were hospital cases; I’m pretty sure they’ll be retiring from the thugging business. Now, tell me about Mira Donn. Did she give you a photograph of her boy?’

  Primavera grinned. ‘Now that’s an interesting story too. I went to see her on Friday evening, as we agreed; I didn’t tell her about the firebomb, just that we still needed to speak with him. I told her it would help us if we knew what he looked like. She told me that as she was sure he had done nothing, she was quite happy to give me a photo.

  ‘Then, just like Uncle Joseph, she went to look for one, and came back a few minutes later looking puzzled. She said that she couldn’t find any, that all the pictures with Stephen in them had disappeared. I asked if she could lend me a negative so I could make a print; she had another look through her box, but the negs were all missing too.’

  ‘Do you think she was just kidding you along?’ I asked. ‘Trying to get out of giving you one?’

  ‘No, the woman was genuinely surprised, embarrassed and a bit rattled too, I think. I got the impression that she was beginning to believe that her Stephen might have had something to do with Susie’s letters. So at that point, I asked her straight out if she had heard from him. She said that she hadn’t - but of course we know from Mike that he called her last week. She was covering up for him.’

  ‘Was she indeed? Did you tell her that we’d been to Joe’s looking for a picture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case, I reckon she’s figured out that Stephen knows we’re on to him and that he’s been back to her place, and to his uncle’s, to make life a bit more difficult for us.’