Poisoned Cherries (35 page)

“You back in the land of the fully conscious, then?”
 
Liam asked.
 
I nodded.

“Where did you go tonight?”
 
He was still doing the ‘pal as old woman’ routine.
 
It’s instinctive with blokes; we can’t help it.

“I had to meet someone.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.
 
Someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.”

“Let me guess.
 
You found the guy who’s been stalking you.”

“No.
 
I let him find me.”

“And?”

“And nothing.
 
We had a talk and he’s gone.”

He frowned.
 
“Oz, you didn’t hurt him, did you?”

I laughed, quietly.
 
“Nah.
 
All that communing with my peaceful side’s done me good.
 
I only hit him once, and not very hard at that.”

“So what did he want?”

“He only wanted to say hello.
 
He came a long way to do it, and had a funny way of working up to it, but he got to it eventually.”

“You sure that’s it?”

“Absolutely.
 
We won’t see him again.”

He looked at me for a while, then grinned.
 
“Thanks for helping me out this afternoon.
 
I was having trouble until you came up with that suggestion.
 
You got any more tips for the bedroom scene with the lady detective sergeant?”

“Yeah.
 
All the time, as she’s getting her togs off, keep a picture of Tony Blair in your mind.
 
No way can you think of him and still get a hard-on.”

Liam laughed out loud.
 
A quartet of women, who’d recognised us when we came in, looked back in our direction.
 
“That’s quite an occupational hazard, when you think about it.
 
In my game, you worry about your knees, or your back, or springing a rib cartilage.
 
It’s odd to think of getting a boner as a workplace accident.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, leaning back in my chair so the women across the restaurant could hear.
 
“Like I said, there’s the stuff they put in your tea as well.
 
It hardly has any after-effects.”

He gasped, and held the pose .. . long enough for the girls at the other table to latch on to his surprise.
 
A natural actor, indeed.

We got talking to them after that; it turned out that they were a hen

party, from the Standard Life office in Lothian Road.
 
One of them, a

pretty brunette called Serena, was being married on the following

Saturday.
 
Funnily enough, she was the one who made the biggest eyes at

Liam ... so, why should women be any different from men?
 
A

couple of years before, he’d have been right in there, but since he found his air stewardess, he’s flown straight as an arrow.

The taxi that picked us up was one of the ordinary black kind ... or it would have been if it hadn’t been painted like a mobile phone.
 
It dropped us back at the Mound at around eleven thirty.
 
There’s a pub beside the door to the apartment block.
 
We thought about going in, but were hit by a double blast of self-discipline, being due on set at eight-thirty next morning.
 
Plus, I reckoned that if I had any more to drink I might start to think of Dylan again, and I didn’t want to do that.

So instead, we went straight up to the penthouse, where I got myself a bottle of still water from the fridge and headed straight for bed, I was almost ready to crash, when my eye was caught by something on the dressing table.
 
At first I thought it was a postcard, or a piece of junk mail..
 
. that stuff gets everywhere .. . until I realised it was Susie’s menu, the one she’d had signed the night before by everyone at the table, bar me.

“Daft bat.”
 
I smiled as I picked it up.
 
“Forget your head next.”
 
I glanced at the signatures on the white card.
 
“Miles Grayson’, clear and confident; “Dawn Phillips’, scrawled and spidery, but legible;

“Margaret Capperauld’, traditional primary-school style, joined-up writing; “Liam Matthews’, as quirky and flamboyant as the man himself; and one other.

I couldn’t read it; not a snowball’s chance in hell of that.
 
It didn’t look like a signature at all; more like an ECG printout.
 
It was more than familiar, though; it was an exact match of the unidentified scrawl in Anna Chin’s notebook.
 
And now, by a simple process of elimination, I knew that it was the autograph of Ewan Capperauld.

All of a sudden I wasn’t tired any more.
 
All of a sudden I didn’t care what time it was.
 
I grabbed the bedside telephone, found Ricky Ross’s home number from his business card, and called him.

“Oz,” he moaned.
 
He sounded slightly breathless.
 
“Do you know what fucking .. .”

“No, but I can guess who.
 
This is your lucky bastard calling.
 
I need to see you, now.”

“So come out to my place.”

“I’ve had a drink; you come here.
 
And bring Anna’s autograph book with you.”

“But what about Alison?
 
I can’t leave her.”

“Bring her.
 
There’s a fair chance we might need her anyway.”

Fifty-One.

My urgency must have got through to Ricky.
 
I had expected him to take half an hour to get to me, but the entry buzzer sounded in just over fifteen minutes.

He stepped out of the lift, wearing jeans and a heavy sweater and needing a shave.
 
Alison followed behind, dressed almost identically to him; she was completely without make-up and her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail.

I led them through to the kitchen.
 
Liam was asleep directly off the living area, and I didn’t want to disturb him.

“So why the alarm call?”
 
said Ross, tersely, as I poured two mugs of coffee from the filter jug.
 
Susie’s menu card was lying on the work-surface.
 
I picked it up and handed it to him.
 
He looked at it, then his eye hit on the cardiac squiggle.

“Jesus,” he murmured.
 
“Whose?”

“Ewan Capperauld.”

“What!”
 
The word came out in an astonished half-shout.
 
I worried that it might waken Liam, and signalled him to be quiet.
 
“But Capperauld’s never been to the Torrent building,” he said.

“In that case he’s the only person in Anna’s book who hasn’t.
 
That’s remarkable, isn’t it?
 
But she told me that was where she’d collected all her autographs, so he must have been.
 
Yet James Torrent clearly didn’t know it.
 
He told me so himself, almost in so many words.
 
“It would be good to have someone as eminent as Ewan Capperauld visit this building.”
 
That’s what he said to me, when I saw him in his office.” I turned to Alison.
 
“Did he ever say or imply to you that Capperauld had been there?”

“No,” she replied.
 
“The opposite in fact; he told me that he wanted every eminent Scot to visit his new headquarters, and that Ewan was at the top of that list.”

I nodded.
 
“And yet when I saw him there, he wasn’t all that bothered.
 
Something happened between him giving you that instruction and my visiting him, to make him change his mind, or at least go soft on the idea.”

“Something,” said Ricky.
 
“Like what?”

“Like maybe he found out that Capperauld had already been to his building.”

“It’s a pity we can’t ask him.”

“Or Anna,” I added.
 
“But there’s someone we can ask.”

“Who?”

“Come on; waken up.
 
Ewan himself.”

Ross looked at me as if he had a wrestling hold on something in his brain.
 
“Easier said than done.
 
Capperauld’s a big name; he’s also Miles Grayson’s star attraction, and Miles is my client.
 
I can’t just go interrogating him.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.
 
Call his minder and have him brought here.”

“Are you crazy?
 
Talk to him in the morning, if you must.”

“Have you got that much time, Ricky?
 
Has Alison?”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“Nice of you to take it for Alison.”

He glared at me but said nothing.

We had been drinking our coffee in silence for almost five minutes when the mobile in Ross’s pocket sounded.
 
He scowled and answered the call.
 
I wouldn’t have thought his face could have got any grimmer, but as he spoke, it did.
 
“You’re kidding,” I heard him snap.
 
“How would I?”
 
He flashed gimlet eyes in my direction.
 
“Do your own fucking job, son!” he growled into the phone at last, and jabbed the red button to end the call.

He told me what I’d guessed already.
 
“That was Ronnie Morrow.
 
They’ve matched some of the prints on the knife.”
 
He looked at Alison.
 
“He’s looking for you, love.
 
You’ve just gone top of the list of people he wants to question.
 
He said he’s been to your flat, but you’re not there.
 
Surprise.
 
Then he tried to say that technically you’re still bailed into my custody so I should help him find you.
 
You heard what I told him.”

“Sure,” I said.
 
“That’ll keep him at bay for a long time, and it’s probably put you second on his list.
 
Now I don’t want to be third, so get that bloody phone out again and call Ewan’s minder.”

Ricky was well beaten.
 
This time he did as he was told.
 
It took Glen Oliver less than a minute to answer; quickly his boss gave him his orders.
 
“What do you tell him?”
 
Ross exclaimed, suddenly.
 
He looked at me, as if for an answer.

“Tell him,” I said, ‘that it’s a very important matter involving his cousin’s murder, and that if he doesn’t get here pronto there’s every chance it’ll be all over the red-tops by the weekend.”
 
He repeated what I had said, almost word for word.
 
After that, there was nothing to do but wait.
 
I tried to imagine what we were going to say to Ewan.
 
I could manage that okay, but when I tried to guess what he might say to us, I came up short; the Case of the Baffled Detective.

It was fifteen minutes short of one when the buzzer sounded again; this time it did wake Liam.
 
He appeared in the bedroom doorway, bollock-naked, drowsy, growling, “What does an Irishman have to do to get some sleep around here?”
 
Then he saw Alison, who had come out of the kitchen.
 
“Fuck,” he said, ‘we could have pulled in the restaurant.
 
Why change your mind now?”
 
At that point he remembered his state of undress, and dived back behind the door.

Ewan came storming out of the lift; I could see that he was in full Skinner mode, locked and loaded, ready for a fight.
 
He blinked when he saw Alison, but his expression stayed hard.
 
I led him through to the kitchen, where Ricky was waiting, and closed the door on Oliver, leaving him in the living room.

“Okay,” Capperauld boomed.
 
“This had better be the story of a lifetime, Ross, or your security career will be over.”

His anger was so impressive that for that important moment Ricky was struck dumb.
 
I wasn’t, though; I had seen him act before.
 
“Come here,” I said, beckoning him over to the work-surface, and pointing towards what lay on it.

“This is the menu you signed for Susie last night.”

“So?”

I took the book from my back pocket, opening it at the place I had marked and laid it beside the card.
 
“And this is Anna Chin’s autograph book.
 
Let me tell you about Anna.
 
She was James Torrent’s front office receptionist, and she had a harmless hobby.
 
Every time a celebrity signed into the building, she asked them to sign her autograph book as well.
 
Nearly all of them did.
 
Every signature in that book is matched by a signature on the Torrent registration sheets ... every one except yours, that is.

“Let me tell you two more things about Anna.
 
Maybe they’re new to you, maybe they’re not.
 
First, she was having it away with your late cousin David; she’s one reason he dumped Alison.
 
Second, last Friday night someone killed Anna in the office, at her desk, and tried to set it up so that the police would find Alison there.”

I looked at Ewan.
 
“That’s appalling, Oz,” he said, ‘but how does it justify you hauling me out of my bed in the middle of the night?
 
It’s just as well Margaret’s gone back to London, by the way, or there would have been an explosion bigger than you can imagine.”

“Have you heard any news bulletins today?”
 
I asked him.

“No.
 
Should I?”