When The Devil Drives (7 page)

Which, Jasmine knew, obviated the need for her to ask ‘why now?’.

Mrs Petrie had been sipping politely at her tea, but now she pushed it away with a grimace, as though it had turned cold.

‘I don’t have time,’ she said, working very hard to keep her voice steady. ‘Do you understand?’

Jasmine nodded.

‘My mother died of pancreatic cancer. It was very late-presenting. Months. I’m hoping for a little longer than that. It’s my colon. I could have three years, five, seven. I could live longer than you, for all we both know, but even at my age you never accept life is finite until you get something like this. It changes everything, when you no longer have forever. Once the doctor has shown you your best-before date, the world never looks the same. Drastic change in priorities, in what’s important. In what
matters
. Family matters. Nothing matters more.’

Mrs Petrie began filling up.

‘Years I’ve wasted,’ she went on. ‘Thinking my own wee world was complete. Thinking she ought to be the one to get in touch: I’ve never moved house. Decades. She could have kids of her own, kids I’ve never met.’

Now she broke down, the composure of her neatly made-up face cracking in a contortion of grief.

Jasmine got up from her chair and moved around the desk, tissues proffered in her fingers.

Mrs Petrie waved her away, cradling her head in her right hand but holding up her left, her index finger aloft. A teacher’s gesture.

‘I’ll be okay. I just need a moment.’

Mrs Petrie produced a hanky of her own and dabbed delicately at her nose and eyes. True enough, in a short while she was composed enough to speak steadily once again.

‘I realise there’s a possibility that I’m starting this too late,’ she admitted, before betraying that she wasn’t
really
admitting it. ‘But I have to assume that if she’d died, then I’d have heard. We drifted apart, but it’s not like we had some feud that meant I’d be barred from her funeral. Someone would have been in touch.’

Not necessarily, Jasmine thought but didn’t say. Instead she moved Mrs Petrie on to practical matters, the ‘can do’ part. She wasn’t in the business of selling false hope, but she understood that in these cases all hope was sacrosanct until it was gone.

‘The more you can tell me about her, the more I’ll have to work with. What was the last address you had for her?’

‘I’m sorry. That’s long gone from the memory. I very much doubt I’d have it written down anywhere after all this time.’

‘That’s okay. I really just want to know where she went after she left home.’

‘Glasgow,’ Mrs Petrie replied. ‘That’s why I came here to hire somebody. That and …’

She looked sheepish, clearly feeling a little stupid and slightly embarrassed by this, which was far more self-conscious than most of Jasmine’s previous clients.

‘That and the fact that I’d read about you. Well, rather, a friend of mine did. When I mentioned I was thinking of hiring an investigator she told me about what you’d done.’

‘Cornwall is a long way to travel on spec. You could have rung ahead.’

‘Oh no, it’s not like that. I’m staying here for a few days. My son lives in Paisley. I was visiting my friend there at the weekend. I think the cowardly part of me was hoping you wouldn’t be in, so that I could dismiss the idea, but now that I’m here I realise I should have done this years ago, done everything in my power.’

‘Well, you’re here now,’ Jasmine said, trying to head off any further self-recrimination. ‘And you were telling me Tessa was living in Glasgow.’

‘Yes. She went to college there, and stayed on when she got a job.’

‘What did she do for a living?’

‘She was an actress.’

Jasmine skipped a beat, hoping her moment of mild gaping passed unnoticed. It was a daft reflex she couldn’t quite shake. Whenever she heard about someone being an actress, she felt this unsettling mix of envy and curiosity: what kind of work, how did she get there, where did she train?

Mrs Petrie could have read her thoughts.

‘She studied drama in Glasgow, at the SATD. Sorry, that’s the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance,’ she explained, assuming Jasmine would never have heard of it. ‘Then, after that, she got a job in the Pantechnicon. I remember when my mother told me, I thought she meant a part, but it turned out the theatre was something called a rep, which means they put on several plays a year and so the same people act in each show.’

Jasmine said nothing, nodding politely as Mrs Petrie so helpfully explained the practice of a repertory company.

Straight out of the academy and into a job in rep. It was a dream as common as it was unlikely, such that a friend from the Academy once referred to harbouring such a fantasy as being like masturbation: nobody would admit to it, but everybody did it. It was so improbable as to be a joke, yet for this Tessa Garrion it had apparently been a reality; not just any old rep either, but the Pantechnicon, which begged a number of questions, most of them deeply unworthy.

Catch a grip, girl, Jasmine warned herself. Here she was, impugning the three-decades-past sexual integrity of an actress she’d never even heard of just because she’d got a part in a company. It told her that, for all she was starting to settle into her new career, she still wasn’t quite ready to admit to herself that she’d given up on her first choice. It happened every so often, something that would precipitate a glimpse of her old dreams, enough both to keep the flame burning and to torture her a little over whether she was making the right choice by sticking with Sharp Investigations.

Most recently, the cause had been a chance meeting with Charlotte Queen, whom she bumped into in the Tron Theatre bar when they were both there to see a revival of
Swing Hammer Swing!
Jasmine had feared it would be an uncomfortable encounter: that at best Charlotte would make play of ignoring her, or that she would be subject to much faux-polite sneering with regard to their respective career trajectories. The last time their paths had crossed, just before Jim disappeared, Jasmine was eyeball on a foot-follow of a surveillance subject when she passed Charlotte having coffee at a pavement table outside a West End café. Even though they had seen each other and Charlotte called out to her by name, Jasmine could neither stop nor take her eyes off the subject. Effectively, she had completely rubbered the notoriously egotistical Ms Queen in front of her friends. It had come as no surprise when Charlotte never got back in touch about that mooted production of
The Tempest
.

Instead, Charlotte had been all over her in the bar: hugs and kisses and oh-my-Gods.

‘I read all about you in the papers. God, how amazingly exciting. I mean, dangerous, of course, sure, you must be so brave. I couldn’t
believe it, though. I was, like,
so
telling everybody I knew you. And then I remembered I saw you one time and you walked right past and I thought you maybe had headphones on or were in a daydream, but I realised you must have been actually tailing somebody, like in a film. I mean, wow. That is so cool.’

‘I was on a foot-follow,’ Jasmine was relieved to be able to explain at last.

‘God, that is so amazing. It’s, like, being in character, except you’re really, really
deeply
in character. That’s major.’

‘Not really,’ Jasmine corrected, but only by way of taking the opportunity to tell Charlotte about the aspects of the job that truly did require acting. She had surely never sounded so enthusiastic about her job, but she couldn’t help it. Charlotte was lapping it up, and Jasmine was basking in the light of her enthusiasm. Impressing Charlotte was like a drug: you just wanted more and more and more. It was why she got so much out of people, on stage and off.

‘So you’re, like, a real detective?’

Jasmine could hear those commas, but knew that if she edited them out it would still be an unearned accolade.
Like
a real detective? No. Not even close.

As it turned out, Charlotte’s production of
The Tempest
wasn’t going to happen anyway. She had dropped the idea in favour of a revival of Liz Lochead’s Scots-dialect translation of
Tartuffe
by Molière, having heard through the grapevine that the Scottish government were planning a series of events aimed at both celebrating and cementing artistic ties with France. In her ability to combine vision, ambition, networking and sheer opportunism, it showed just why Charlotte had come a long way in a short time and was destined to go a great deal further. The play was scheduled to run both in Edinburgh and Paris, under the imprimatur of the Scottish government and therefore financially assisted by Arts Council Scotland.

This had predictably rankled with a lot of people; more so than even the usual grumbling that followed the awarding of grants to anybody other than oneself. Fire Curtain was perceived to be well down the list of companies in need of public funding: it was believed
that, as the daughter of Hamish Queen, Charlotte had been the beneficiary of more hand-outs and hand-ups than anybody else in Scottish theatre.

The roots of this resentment lay in artistic snobbery as much as financial jealousy. Hamish Queen had made millions putting on big, flashy musicals in London’s West End. To a certain constituency, it wasn’t ‘proper’ theatre, just ultra-commercial flummery aimed at fleecing tourists and philistines, so it stung all the more that his money and influence were facilitating his daughter’s rise to prominence – ignoring, of course, the fact that Charlotte was very much about putting on ‘proper’ theatre.

‘I’d still love to work with you some time,’ she told Jasmine in the Tron bar. ‘I think if the part was right, with your real-life experience, it would be electric.’

If the part was right. A hypothetical among hypotheticals, a throwaway remark, one fleeting thought amid millions that must pass through a capricious mind such as Charlotte’s, always looking for the next idea. But to Jasmine, it was enough to tantalise and to torment, keeping that door open just enough to let in a chink of light that kept distracting her from the here and now.

‘Tessa was a born performer,’ Mrs Petrie went on. ‘I don’t think she was out of nappies before she’d learned that she could get attention from Mum and Dad by putting on a show. She was a prodigious mimic. She would impersonate the voices she heard on the radio, and of course that would get the praise raining down upon her about how clever she was. I don’t mean that it made her conceited, because she wasn’t. Precocious, certainly, but not self-centred. I just mean that she took a lot of encouragement from it. A lot of confidence. She wasn’t egotistical, but she knew what she was worth, so it didn’t surprise me when I learned she was actually on the stage.’

‘And when she was at the Pantechnicon,’ Jasmine said. ‘What years would she have been there? What did you see her in?’

At this, Mrs Petrie’s face darkened somewhat. Jasmine feared she had said the wrong thing, but she soon saw that it was more self-reproach.

‘I never saw her on stage,’ she confessed, and clearly a confession it was.

‘Well, of course, if you were down in Cornwall …’ Jasmine suggested.

‘That didn’t make it easy, true, but I should have made the effort. To be honest, I didn’t want to.’

‘Why not?’

Mrs Petrie swallowed and her mouth went thin, pinched.

‘I was jealous.’

‘You wanted to be an actress too?’ Jasmine asked, hoping she wasn’t being granted a glimpse of herself fifty years into the future, eaten away by bitterness and regret.

‘No. It would never even have occurred to me. But that’s the point. I could just imagine my parents’ faces if I’d said I wanted to be an actress. The same way they instilled in Tessa a confidence that she could do anything and the desire to spread her wings, they instilled in me a sense of responsibility and a need to keep my feet on the ground. If by some whim I had decided that I wanted to be an actress, or a dancer, or whatever, I’d simply never have had the confidence, the nerve, to go out there and try.

‘Tessa did, though. She was all passion and impulse. She didn’t look before she leapt, and I used to think she’d end up in trouble because what if something goes wrong? I forgot to ask myself: what if it goes right? Tessa didn’t let worrying about what might go wrong hold her back, and I think that’s what I was jealous of most. I felt I had lived a life of cause and effect, of always being mindful of consequences.’

‘I’m informed it’s a common complaint of the oldest child in most families,’ Jasmine told her. ‘They need to be the responsible one, while their wee brothers and sisters get to have their heads in the clouds.’

‘That’s as may be, but it doesn’t make it any easier to sit here knowing I never saw Tessa act, and now I never will.’

She began choking up again, her voice failing her.

‘You don’t know that,’ Jasmine stated, going for matter-of-fact rather than consolatory, as though reining in self-pity. She realised
it sounded a little harsh, so followed it up with something a little more ameliorative. ‘She could be in some wee provincial rep in British Columbia for all we know.’

Mrs Petrie had staunched her tears, but she was shaking her head with grave certainty.

‘No. She gave up the stage a long time ago.’

‘How do you know?’

‘When I decided I should try to find Tessa, one of the first things I thought to do was to contact Equity. I spoke to a very helpful man there who checked into the archives for me. He could only access files going back twenty-five years, but he had no record of her in all that time. He told me her membership must have lapsed prior to 1986.’

Mrs Petrie sighed reflectively, as though trying to see a good side to this.

‘I suppose it’s possible she met some rich admirer who saw her on stage and whisked her away to a life of luxury,’ she said, not sounding like she believed it. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure that any amount of luxury would have made Tessa quit the stage, but I can’t think of any other reason why she would give up on what had been her dream for so long. Can you?’

‘No,’ lied Jasmine, who could think of one or two.