That didn't mean that we had a peaceful night, though. Susie was approaching the really uncomfortable stage of pregnancy, where sleeping with her was like sleeping with a bag of rabbits. (We have a very big bed, but she always seems to drift towards the piece that I'm on.) Add to that the fact that she woke me several times to ask me what I thought of so-and-so on the payroll, and whether he or she might be the mole.
At five minutes to four, when all was still dark outside, even in early summer Scotland, she had convinced herself that Denise Scott was the prime suspect, and that she had set the fire in the office herself, then tried to leak the story to the media. She hadn't convinced me, not by a long chalk, but I grunted and rolled on to the last few square inches of unoccupied space on what I laughingly thought of as my side of the bed.
This was not the ideal preparation for my first day's studio shooting on the Mathew s Tale project. Nor was the news I received in the limo that picked me up from the execrable Heathrow, when I used my WAP mobile to check the Gantry share price. The London Stock Exchange had only been open for a couple of minutes, but in that blink of an analyst's eyelid it had fallen by just over thirty per cent.
I called Susie, because I knew that she'd have beaten me to the punch.
'What do you think?' I asked her.
Her optimism surprised me, especially after her night of paranoia. 'Not too bad,' she replied. 'Fisher said we should expect at least a forty per cent mark-down in value. Apparently the City has a wee bit more faith in me than my chairman; the new price is based on the brokers' assessment rather than on actual trading. I don't expect there to be much, not initially at any rate.'
'When there is I'm buying,' I told her.
'Don't be daft, Oz. I don't want you to do that.'
'You're not going to stop me. I'm going to instruct my brokers to pick up any stock that's offered, and I'm going to have the investor relations consultants let it be known that I'm doing it. I'm going to be seen to support you, honey, whether you like it or not.'
She laughed. 'You'd better be careful, then. If things get worse you could wind up owning all the minority shareholding.' And then she paused. 'Of course if it did get that bad you couldn't lose; as soon as a takeover bid came in the price would go up. You could sell out to Natalie Morgan and make a right killing.' She paused again. 'Here, Oz, you're not the mole, are you?'
When I thought about it, I realised that it wasn't a bad scam, but I protested loudly into the phone until she apologised for her bad taste joke. 'By the way,' I asked casually, after I had allowed myself to be mollified, 'you're not still harbouring dark thoughts about Denise, are you?'
'No,' she admitted, 'I'm not. That was unworthy of me too. Denise is as loyal as they come. But if it was her, it would say a lot; for example that I must be a really crap managing director if my own PA plotted to get rid of me.'
'Which you're not. You're brilliant, even if you are a grumpy wee witch at times. Now you just let Fisher and Harvey earn their exorbitant directors' fees by running their investigation, unimpeded by you. Your job is to see whether you can cancel the house sales to these three hooligans and to their henchmen… assuming that the Record story's true, that is.'
'I'm ahead of you,' she told me. 'I was going to get hold of Greg McPhillips first thing, but he beat me to it. He called just after you left in fact. So did Des Lancaster, the project manager. The story's accurate, okay: Ravens, Perry and Cornwell, the Three Bears, are all purchasers, but in their wives' names, not their own. As for the henchmen, we can't say for certain who they are: the development's been selling very well off the plans and there are a lot of buyers.'
'What did Greg say?'
'Nothing good, but nothing I didn't expect. If we could prove that there was a conspiracy here, we might have a chance of cancelling the contracts, but we'll have the devil's own job doing that. All of the three actually do have more or less respectable front businesses, and none of them have any significant criminal convictions. As for their wives, they all raise money for bloody charities. They've all signed contracts and paid deposits; the next obligations lie on our side now.
They can pull out, on forfeiture of their deposits, but we can't. As things stand, if we just gave them their money back and told them to piss off, they could sue us… unless we cancelled the whole project, which I will not, no, cannot do.'
'So what are you going to do?'
'My instant reaction is to give them their money back, tell them to piss off, and take my chances, but I'll take serious legal advice before I do that. These people may not care to launch a civil court action.'
'No,' I snorted, 'they may just blow up your office instead. These are gangsters, Susie.'
'Ach, they are of a certain level, that's all; there's bigger than them. The Lord Provost was, for a start. I don't give a damn about them, really. Let's try and put it in perspective, now the initial shock's worn off. Think this through with me, Oz. What's happened so far?'
'First, the letter-bomb,' I said, 'leaked to the press.'
'Right. We dealt with that at the time and it did no damage. Next?'
'The Three Bears buy into the New Bearsden project, and that fact is leaked. This time it has done damage to the company.'
'True, but that doesn't need to be a conspiracy at all: the three of them might each have fancied the project separately and bought with no collusion. But someone's come upon the fact and leaked it. I don't think that the McMafia give a bugger about us. They're not our real enemies. The person who's feeding the press is, and the way I read what Jenny Pollock said to you, that wasn't done by a mole within this company, but by someone who's paying them.'
'So how do we deal with the New Bearsden situation?'
She gave me a small laugh. A good sign; when Susie's sense of humour is working, she's on the ball. 'This time we can't do what you did with the letter-bomb, and just lie about it. I see another option, but we use it calmly and quietly. Subject to the legal advice I mentioned earlier, what I intend to do is indeed to give our three dodgy clients their money back. But I don't intend to tell them to piss off. I intend to ask them, through our legal advisers, so that we can't be accused of defaming anyone, how much it would take for them to agree to piss off. What do you think?'
'Good old-fashioned bribery? That usually works, I'll grant you. But remember, love, these guys are among other things in the protection racket. If you give them a bung to go away, what's to stop them pulling the same dodge on every housing project you undertake in the future?'
'We'll see them coming next time.'
'But will you see their cousins, or their mates, or just some punter they've picked up in a pub and paid to front for them?'
'Maybe not, but I'll deal with that as and when it happens. This is today's crisis, and old-fashioned bribery, as you call it, is our best chance of knocking it on the head. Got any better ideas?'
I did, but I doubted whether Everett and Jerry would co-operate. 'No,'
I said, 'if you think that's your best shot, take it.'
'I will, but there's something else: our real enemy. Fisher and Harvey can look for the mole, but we need to do more than that. I want to follow my instincts, Oz. I want Natalie Morgan tailed; I want to know everyone she has contact with. I want her phone tapped if it's possible; I want to know everyone she speaks to. But I don't want the instruction to come from within the company, in case our mole finds out about it. Do you think Ricky would do it?'
'Not the phone-tap. He won't do that because it's illegal. But as for the rest of it, I'm sure he will. He used to work for Torrent, remember, until Natalie's Uncle James sacked him. He's got a long memory, has ex- superintendent Ross. I'm sure he'll take the job.'
'Okay. You instruct him. Tell him we'll pay for it privately.'
'Susie,' I protested, 'I'm working here.'
'Oh? Where are you now? That doesn't sound like film studio noise in the background.' I owned up to my surroundings. 'Okay, call him now.
Get him on the case.'
'If it'll make you happy,' I conceded. 'Kiss our daughter for me, and I'll call you tonight. Go carefully, though.'
