Poisoned Cherries (39 page)

in this building, none at all’

Fifty-Six.

The Capperauld scandal hit the fan twenty-four hours later, when Margaret was charged with the murders of David, Anna and Uncle James.
 
Natalie was released; the crown office was going to need her as a prosecution witness.

Ewan was devastated; he really had known nothing about it, and, like the rest of us, suspected nothing.

With Miles’s agreement he withdrew from the project, and the boss himself took over the part of Skinner.
 
Okay, he’s a bit short for it, but he has the charisma to carry anything off.

We finished the production on time; an achievement considering everything that had happened.
 
Liam and I were even able to sleep easy in our beds, once Ricky had obliged us by sending Mandy O’Farrell on a temporary assignment as security chief on an oil terminal in the Orkney Islands.

We had a big close-down party of course.
 
Everyone was there, even Nula, Liam’s air stewardess, who fixed her schedule to accommodate it.
 
Prim was not.
 
She paid me one brief visit in Edinburgh to tell me, to my great relief and to confound Susie’s suspicions, that she’d put her signature alongside mine on the divorce petition, and had it lodged with the court.

She surprised me then by telling me that she’d taken my advice, and decided to go back to basics.
 
She had signed a six-month contract as a senior staff nurse in Ninewells Hospital, in Dundee, and she was planning to move back into Semple House, in Auchterarder, beside her parents, to draw breath, and do some serious thinking about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

She told me that although we’d been rotten at marriage, we’d been good at being friends, and hoped that would still be the case.
 
I told her that as far as I was concerned, it would.
 
Her new spirit of openness didn’t extend to owning up to having it off with Mike Dylan, but I let that go.
 
That, and he, were both history.

I was happy at closing off that chapter, but it didn’t mean that there was nothing but roses in my garden.
 
I had some serious thinking of my own to do.
 
I was due in Vancouver in less than a month, and the central question of my life was still unresolved.

I was pondering hard, in my last few days in the apartment, about what it really meant to be my own man.
 
When it came to it, there was only one place I could find an answer to that.
 
So I went back to life, back to Enster, to see my Dad.

I told him what was at the core of it all.
 
I reckoned that I loved Susie as much as I could ever love another woman, and that wee Janet was all my Christmases come at once.
 
But I was scared, I said, plain scared about taking a chance on marriage again; even if my heart told me to do it, my head asked whether I could ever give up even a part of my independence.

Mac the Dentist thought about this for a while, and then he pronounced.

“Son,” he said, “I’m a fucking backwoodsman, as you well know.
 
I have a backwoodsman’s simple attitudes to life, and his simple beliefs.
 
And the way I see it is this.
 
When you and the right woman have kids, you’re not your own man any more; you’re theirs and you’re each other’s, and that’s how it should be.

“You don’t actually have this independence that you talk about, not any more.
 
Janet will be dependent on you, for the next twenty years and more.
 
And Susie is now too, as you are on her.
 
Whether you live together as a couple or not, you have a duty to bring that baby up together, unless death takes one of you out of the equation.
 
So no, you are not independent, either of you; you ceased to be so the moment you made that child.

“What you are talking about is freedom.
 
It’s being the centre of your own universe, giving yourself the licence to do what you like, say what you like, go where you like, fuck who you like, without a thought to the consequences for anyone but yourself.

“Maybe you’ve done that for long enough, Oz.
 
If you want to continue down that road, now that you’re rich and famous, the opportunities to indulge yourself in such pleasures will be endless.
 
But compared to the love that flows into you from your children, when you come home at night and sit them in your lap, the rewards of such a life are ashes, just ashes.

“What you’re afraid of, son, is of finding out about yourself.
 
You’re

asking yourself, and now me, whether if you choose family life,

you’ll

be able to stay the course.
 
I’m not a fucking fortune teller; some do, some don’t.
 
In my judgement, I’d say that you and Susie will make a go of it.
 
Still, as you and I both know, nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, and a skilled accountant can avoid a good chunk of the latter.

“The last couple of years have made you a fatalist, Oz.
 
They’ve developed a side in you that was latent, but lurking, before things went sour on you.
 
And along the way, you’ve lost your belief in your own inherent goodness.

“Well, I haven’t.
 
Trust me if you don’t trust yourself, and do what I would do if I was standing in your shoes right now.”

I looked into my Dad’s coal fire, and for some reason I thought of wee Anna Chin, and her bowl of cherries.
 
Maybe it is, I thought.
 
Maybe life is just that.

I leaned over my father as he sat in his big comfy chair, and for the first time in around twenty-five years, I kissed him on the cheek. Then I climbed into my nice, shiny Mercedes and headed off to Glasgow to find out for myself whether, indeed, it is.

After an eventful career as a spin doctor to the powerful, rich and notorious, Quintin Jardine found that his talents were equally well fitted to the world of crime fiction.
 
Now he is the author of six Oz Blackstone mysteries as well as twelve Bob Skinner crime novels.

His interests are playing football, watching football, talking about football and watching golf.
 
He lives, as quietly as his nature will allow, in Scotland and in Spain.

All his novels are available from Headline.