'Whatever I've done, I didn't mean it.'
'Och, don't be daft.' Her tone changed, but the laugh was still missing; what I heard was that vulnerable wee girl.
'Come and get me, Oz,' she said. 'As fast as you can.'
'What's up?'
'I'll tell you later. Just get to the office.'
'Will I bring Jay?'
'No, leave him with Janet. Just you.'
'Susie, is this about last night? About that paint thing?'
'No. Nothing to do with it. Now get the finger out.'
I hung up the kitchen phone and looked at Jay. 'Sorry mate,' I told him. 'I've just had an order I can't refuse. Meantime…' I handed him the photo I had printed out from my computer. 'Last night's paint-chucker.'
'You know her?'
'Yeah. I'll tell you later. For now, the only thing that matters is that she doesn't get anywhere near Susie or Janet. Understood?'
I wasn't quite sure what I'd just told him to do, but he nodded anyway.
'Police?' he asked.
'Under no circumstances.'
I grabbed my pitta and my Gatorade and headed for the three-car garage that had probably once been a several-horse stable. The advertising says that the BMW 7 series is a new way to drive, but my attitude's just the same. I just point it and go like shit. There isn't usually a lot of traffic out our way, and there's never any traffic on the Erskine Bridge, so I was across the Clyde in no time at all, bombing along the M8, past the airport and towards Susie's South Side office, with one eye out for day-glo motors with blue lights on top.
Happily there were none to hold me back; I took the M77 turn-off, headed west, and pulled up at the office in Thornliebank in what must have been a record time from the house. For all that, Susie had an impatient look on her face as she stood at the door, fidgeting from one foot to the other.
I'll swear that as she slid her trim little body, with its bump, in beside me, she was about to ask me what had kept me, but I forestalled her by telling her to take a deep breath, calm down and explain to me why she'd made me do the David Coulthard bit. I mean, shit, I'm a valuable property these days, to be tearing around like that.
'We have to go to Joe's,' she replied.
'Joe Donn's?'
'Yes. Come on, get moving.' There was a strange, slightly desperate tone in her voice.
I set the car in motion… you don't put these things in gear, you programme them… and headed off. 'Tell me, love,' I said, gently.
The engine's so quiet you can almost whisper over it.
'He didn't turn up for the board meeting,' she said. 'I couldn't start without him, so I called him to ask where the hell he was, but I only got the answering machine. I tried his mobile, but that was switched off. After that I called his golf club, thinking that he'd got the dates mixed up and was playing a medal or something. But the secretary said that he hadn't been there since Saturday.'
We were at Eastwood Toll by this time; Joe's house was in Mother well, so I headed through Clarkston for East Kilbride, rather than risk getting snarled up in Glasgow.
'Finally,' Susie continued, 'I did the only thing I could think of. I phoned the woman next door and asked her to check on him.' I knew what was coming by this time. 'Twenty minutes later I had a call from the police.' She covered her face with her hands, pushing her fingers into her eyes as if she could keep back the tears that way. You can't; I know, because I've tried that myself. 'They said he was dead, Oz.
Joe's dead. My…'
She lost the battle. Her shoulders shook as she started to sob. I pulled the car into a lay-by and hugged her. 'I'm sorry, love,' I murmured into her ear. 'I'm so sorry.'
It's a hard old world in business, and I can't think of too many chief executive officers who'd be as crushed as Susie by the death of a non executive director. But she had an excuse. You see, Joe Donn was Susie's dad.
When Susie's mother fell for… no, I'll use an old-fashioned word, because I'm sure it was literally true… when she was seduced by the charisma of Jack Gantry, builder, developer, entrepreneur, power player and future Lord Provost of Glasgow, she was actually married to someone else. Yes, Joe Donn. Their break-up was civilised. In fact it was so lacking in acrimony that Joe gave Margaret a going-away present:
Susie.
It turned out that for all his outward potency, Jack Gantry only shot blanks, although he didn't know that at the time. The divorce was through by the time Susie was born, and Jack's name went on her birth certificate. She was raised as his daughter and no one was any the wiser for several years without Susie siblings, until a full-scale medical showed that the Lord Provost's sperm count was lower than East life's away goals tally. Even then, the trio kept the facts to themselves, and Susie didn't find out until after her mum was dead and Jack was off in the laughing academy, pronounced crazy as a loon. Gone but not forgotten, though. The gold chain of office has had a couple of wearers since him, but to this day if anyone in Glasgow says, 'The Lord Provost', ten to one on it's Jack Gantry who comes to mind.
Susie and Joe were never close, until he went away. He had been finance director of the Gantry Group when she took over its day-today management from Jack, and she had grown up with him as a sort of unofficial uncle, but that didn't save his bacon. He had been absolutely duff as an accountant… ideal for the Lord Provost, since it allowed him to get away with all sorts of illegal activity… and Susie had fired him at the first opportunity, then had done it again after Jack had tried to reinstate him. But once she discovered the truth, she had him back, not with any hands-on financial responsibilities, but as a non-executive director, someone she could trust alongside her. The Gantry Group runs very smoothly, but Susie liked the extra insurance of having Joe and me alongside her. With a five-person board, the others being Gerry Meek, the new finance director, and Gillian Harvey, the bank's appointee, it gave her a built-in majority should she ever need it.
I let her cry it out by the side of the road from Busby to East Kilbride, and when she was ready, we set off on our way once again. It didn't take long until we reached Mother well, a town that grew up at the close of the nineteenth century on the backs of the coal and steel industries, then ended the twentieth having to reinvent itself after the former had been worked out and the latter destroyed by a Tory Cabinet four hundred miles away. I never saw the strip and plate mills in their heyday, but from the way Joe described them they must have been a sight to behold, if not to live near.
Naturally, being a well-heeled bloke, his house was as far away from that part of town as you could get. It was in Crawford Street, no more than two or three minutes from the M74 exit, a chunky red-brick detached villa with more than a hint of art deco about it. An ambulance and two cars, one of them a police patrol vehicle, were stationed outside when we got there. The green-suited paramedics were sitting in their cab, talking to two police officers, a man and a woman, who stood on the pavement.
I parked short of them, just down the gentle slope, and took Susie's hand as she climbed out. The older of the two coppers, a sergeant, saw us and turned towards us, quietly crushing a cigarette under a large foot. 'Are you Miss Gantry?' he began.
'Only at work,' she replied, curtly. 'Everywhere else I'm Mrs.
Blackstone. This is my husband.'
The sergeant barely gave me a glance. Clearly the chap was neither a film fan nor a tabloid reader. 'Fine, but you reported Mr. Donn missing?'
'No,' I interrupted. 'When he failed to turn up for a meeting and couldn't be contacted, my wife called his neighbour and asked if she would check on him. The next thing she heard was from you guys, that he was dead.'
'Aye,' the uniform replied. 'It was me that phoned. I'm Sergeant Kennedy.'
'So why did you want us here so fast?' I asked him.
'We needed your wife to identify him, since Mrs. Cameron, the neighbour, was in no state to do it. We gather that Mr. Donn had no living relatives, so we got back to you.'
'As a matter of fact, he has a sister-in-law, but they haven't spoken in years. But why the rush?'
'We just wanted it done quickly, so we could move him.'
