Deadly Business Read online

  Once I heard a Brit expat describe San Juan as ‘like Guy Fawkes night. You know.’ That’s akin to describing the Spanish Civil War as ‘a little local dispute’. San Juan has fireworks too, but it’s much, much more. It’s more like the bombing and rocket campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq at the start of the second Gulf War. If it’s explosive and they can get their hands on it, the locals will set it off, and by that I mean locals all across Spain. L’Escala, the municipality of which St Martí is a part, is a big enough community to make some serious noise, and we were about an hour away from the usual kick-off time. They don’t wait for dark; thunderflashes make their point twenty-four hours a day.

  That was why the party was starting to break up, and why Tunè was trying to offload the sandwiches. I scoffed mine and jumped down off the wall ready to help with the clear-up. In fact there was little to clear; Cher and Mustard are very effective in that respect, with anything that’s edible.

  We were finished, the party guests and their parents had all gone home, and Tom was fitting a reluctant Lily into her pushchair … if I’d tried that there would have been trouble, but she’s his girl … when Janet reappeared. She looked at her half-brother. ‘Did you ask?’ I heard her say.

  ‘Ask what?’ I said.

  Tom replied. ‘Can Janet and I go to the concert?’ His voice had begun to deepen over the winter; I’ve noticed that the more serious he is, the lower the register.

  I frowned at him, as if I meant it. ‘Which one?’ I retorted.

  He gave me his exasperated sigh; I’m told that’s something else that comes with puberty. ‘You know which one, Mum. The one tonight, on the beach, for San Juan.’

  I kept my frosty face on. ‘Do you know when it starts?’

  ‘Yes, round about midnight.’

  ‘Remind me. How old are you two?’

  ‘You know how old; twelve.’

  ‘Then I rest my case.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ he protested. ‘It’s happening three hundred metres away from our house. Do you think we’re going to sleep through it? Never mind the concert, the rockets and the bangers will go on till one o’clock, earliest. Please, Mum. We won’t be drinking, or smoking dope or anything like that. You can send Conrad to look after us, if you like.’

  As he spoke, I saw the man in question, and his sandy charge, crest the hill behind him.

  ‘I don’t send Conrad anywhere,’ I pointed out. ‘He’s responsible to Susie Mum for Janet and Jonathan; he decides where they go.’

  ‘So I can go, but not Janet?’

  ‘Did I come close to saying that?’ I exclaimed. ‘Conrad,’ I called out, ‘these two want to go to the reggae concert on the beach tonight. What do you think of that?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Definitely not without a minder,’ he said. ‘And that’s a problem ’cos for all my West Indian heritage, I can’t stand reggae.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well for everybody,’ I told him, grinning, ‘that I’ve been waiting for a few years for Tom to be old enough for us to go.’ I pointed at him, and his half-sister. ‘There’ll be a curfew, mind,’ I warned them. ‘Two o’clock, latest.’

  ‘Three o’clock?’ my boy shot back.

  ‘Two thirty. You’ll have had enough by then, trust me. Janet, it’ll probably be cool during the night, so make sure you dress warm enough.’

  ‘I will do, Auntie Primavera,’ she promised. ‘But what about Jonathan?’

  I was about to tell her that he was just too young, when he beat me to the punch. ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t like loud music and I don’t like big crowds.’ He spoke French, as if he was trying to cut the rest of us out of an argument between him and his sister, but I knew by that time that it went deeper. Wee Jonathan made a point of speaking French almost exclusively in Monaco, and would do the same when he’s at mine if I let him get away with it. I will only speak English to him there, and won’t acknowledge his reply unless it’s in the same language. I have no idea what goes on inside the kid’s head, but I can only guess that he’s rejecting something, possibly his entire family.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Tom said to him, in the same language. ‘I hadn’t thought about you. I’m sorry. I’ll stay with you if you want, Jonathan.’

  ‘You will not!’ Janet snapped. ‘He’s the baby of this family and he’s not going to decide what we do.’

  ‘No more are you,’ Tom murmured, in Catalan.

  ‘I don’t want anyone to stay in with me!’ Jonathan shouted, exploding into English. ‘Go to your fucking concert and enjoy yourselves!’

  ‘Hey,’ Conrad barked, grasping the child by the shoulder. ‘That settles it. You are grounded, boy. You don’t leave the house till Monday, earliest.’ He glanced at me. ‘I’m sorry about that, Primavera. I don’t know where he picked that up.’

  I laughed. ‘You don’t? His father and I used to have conversations just like that. For all that Oz and Susie were happy, I’m sure they had their moments too.’ I went over to the kid. His eyes had more life in them than I’d ever seen before, but it was the wrong sort. I took his hand; he tried to pull it away but I didn’t let him. ‘Come on, Jonathan, let’s you and I go home. Would you like to phone your mum? You haven’t spoken to her for a couple of days.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Send her an email, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’ll be missing you,’ I ventured as we started to walk towards the house.

  His bottom lip trembled. ‘She won’t, or she’d have taken me with her.’

  ‘Mum,’ Tom called, from behind me, ‘can Janet and I go down to the beach bar for a Fanta?’

  ‘Okay, but be home before eight, so you can get cleaned up for dinner.’

  ‘I’ll go with them,’ Conrad said. ‘I fancy a beer.’ And he didn’t fancy letting Janet out of the sight of an adult. Oz was rich and famous, and he had been obsessive about his kids’ security. He and his minder had been very close, and Conrad still heard and obeyed his master’s voice, even from beyond the grave.

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

  Two

  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.

  ‘My wee brother?’ she began, then paused, as if she was framing every word in her eventual reply.

  ‘He was like a loch on a fine summer’s day. Not a mark, not a ripple on his surface. You looked at
him and you thought, he’s one of the fairest things I’ve ever seen. And he was, the boy I grew up with.

  ‘But then life took a hold of him and the water was disturbed, choppy at first, and then rougher, till it was storm-tossed, white-crested. He was still beautiful, but in a different way, darker, ominous, and you knew that not far below that surface there was another man, someone different, someone dangerous, like the monsters of legend given form.’

  As she spoke, Lady Doreen March’s plain but strong face seemed to change, to weaken, to crumple, and her voice began to crack. And as she finished, there were tears running down her cheeks, cutting ravines in her make-up.

  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.