Blackstone's Pursuits (6 page)

‘Dinosaur!’ I said sternly. I stood up and jumped up on to the sleeping area. Prim was propped up on her right elbow. Her left breast had rolled out over the edge of the Downie, but she hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care. I sneaked the briefest of glances. It fulfilled earlier promise, bigger than a handful, but not so large that it was heading rapidly south. I perched myself on the edge of the bed as she sat up, pulling the Downie right under her chin and in the process dislodging Wallace. He shot her a look filled with bale, and reached for the first wooden rung of the ladder to the belvedere.

‘Feel better for that?’ I asked. I reached out and touched her hand, tentatively. She took mine and gave it a quick squeeze. ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘The “yes” part is that you’re still the guy I thought you were before I went to sleep, if you know what I mean.’ I thought I did, and the hamster who lives in my stomach at such moments did another quick lap of the track. ‘What’s the “no” bit?’ I asked.

‘That what happened this morning isn’t a movie any more. I have to start treating it as real, and I can’t go on blanking Dawn from my mind.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Prim, it’s after six. I’ve got some work to finish off, then I have to get it on the fax. While I do that, why don’t you get dressed, then we’ll go out somewhere. A drink and a pizza maybe. In the process, partner, we can talk about Dawn, I’ll tell you about Archer, and we can decide what we’re going to do next.’

She dragged herself along the bed on her bum, until she was right alongside me, the Downie still up to her chin. Then she leaned over and kissed me, on the lips again, and not quite so chastely this time. ‘You’ve just said the magic words, Osbert. I have spent most of the last twelve months dreaming about a drink and a pizza. Now here I am, back home, about to make it all come true, and with a bloke I quite fancy at that.

‘I warn you now though: never on the first date, and I mean
never
!
’

I didn’t know what to say, so she said it for me. ‘Sometimes you meet someone and you’re attracted right away,’ She grinned. ‘Like you’re attracted to me. So far you’re winning: it cuts both ways. Just remember! First date?
Never!’

I took a hell of a chance. I kissed
her,
on the lips. ‘You know the trouble with women?’

‘Whssat?’

‘You just assume that all us guys are easy lays! I have to go out at least
twice
with a girl before I decide whether she’s worthy of my body!’

She dipped her shoulder and shoved me off the bed. ‘Go!’ she demanded. ‘Finish your work, while I turn myself into a human being again.’ I did as I was told. Behind me I heard the riffling sound of the Downie being shaken up and spread over the bed. Then Prim’s feet sounded lightly on the staircase.

I refocused myself on my reports and finished them off, neat and tidy, set out in question and answer form, with a summary attached. I fed each into the fax then slipped confirmatory copies into envelopes. Quick, experienced and thorough, that’s Oz Blackstone, Prince among Private Enquiry Agents, the man most wanted by Edinburgh’s legal community, even if much of his work does bore him out of his scone.

I pride myself that on each day of my life I try to learn something new.
‘So what’s today’s lesson, Blackstone?’
I asked myself, out loud, as I stamped the two envelopes.

‘Stick to the boring stuff,’
I answered,
‘and forget the Philip Marlowe dreams. Dead people don’t look attractive close up, even if the money is good, and the work’s exciting.’

I turned around, and there she was, Primavera, Springtime in Spanish, standing beside the bed, fastening a single string of pearls around her neck. The jeans and tee-shirt had gone, to be replaced by a close-fitting grey skirt and a sleeveless white blouse. Her sun-bleached hair had been teased into order, carefully but casually, and she was made up with blue eye shadow, a touch of blusher and a vivid red lipstick which sat on her perfect mouth like country wine on a summer evening. She was so beautiful that she made me breathless.

I stood there, dumbstruck for a while, until the inevitable nonsense sprang to my tongue. ‘Springtime,’ I said, holding out a hand in invitation, ‘would you care to join me in my garden?’

My loft opens out on to a tiny terrace, on which a few geraniums and a woebegone palm struggle for survival in the heart of my Scottish city. I threw open the double doors, and held out my hand for her as she approached across the big room, passing through a beam of light from one of the four Vellux windows set on each side of the sloping ceiling.

If I was an aesthete I would say that sunlit May evenings are my favourite time of the year in Edinburgh. Those few days, as the year shakes off the dying grip of winter, can be sublime. They are moments not to be missed, yet all too fleeting, before the Scottish summer asserts itself in all its wet, windy drabness.

As Prim stepped out on to my south-facing terrace, I felt suddenly full up, and it came to me that this was one of those times in my life that I’ll remember on my dying day.

My fifth birthday, when my Mum baked a cake, I had a party, and my Dad gave me my first set of real football boots. My first day at primary school. My first Hearts-Hibs game. My first day at secondary school. Sneaking in among my sister’s crowd one night to watch a bootleg video of The Exorcist, and being chucked out for laughing at the bit where Linda Blair’s head spins all the way round. My first, and last, cigarette. My first fumbling, incompetent but affectionate shag with Jan at a party in her house while her folks were away. My Mother’s death. A weekend my Dad and I spent walking in Derbyshire, eating wholesome food and drinking a different beer every night, as part of his emergence from our bereavement.

Seminal moments all of them; now here she was, this woman I had met in the most bizarre circumstances a few hours earlier, taking her place, perhaps at the head of them all.

She looked out across the southern aspect of Edinburgh, across Arthur’s Seat, up the ragged line of the Old Town’s rooftops, up to the craggy Castle on its flat-topped hill. She breathed deeply of the evening air. She took my arm, and squeezing it, leaned against me, laying her head on my shoulder. ‘It’s good to be back, partner,’ she said, softly and musically. ‘If only for now.’

There was nothing I could say to add to the moment, and so, for once in my life, I said nothing. Instead, I eased her gently into one of the two green wooden folding chairs on the balcony. I stepped back into the house and trotted down to the kitchen, re-emerging from the loft a couple of minutes later with two glasses and my prize bottle of reasonably good champagne. It had been a present from a lawyer client, and had been languishing in my fridge since Christmas, awaiting an appropriate moment. I balanced the glass on the balcony’s broad wooden rail and filled them carefully. Handing one to Prim I raised the other in a toast. ‘You’re back; so welcome,’ I said. ‘I hope that it’s for good.’

She looked at me for a long time, the glass pressed to her lips. ‘We’ll see,’ she said at last. ‘When I left a year ago, it was because I didn’t have anything to stay for. For now though, as I say, I’m glad I’m back.’ She sipped the champagne and nodded in polite approval. We drank in silence, looking out over the park, watching the joggers on the Radical Road, until the sun slipped round the comer of the loft, and the balcony, and my shivering palm tree, fell into shade.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go on a pizza hunt. D’you fancy a walk first? Along Princes Street?’ She nodded. I left her outside for a minute or two while I changed into my pub-going gear, then, locking up everything but Wallace’s cage, we headed out and up towards the old High Street. ’You got that fiver?’ I asked as we left.

‘Too damn right!’

‘Well look after it. Don’t spend it, or anything daft like that.’

She gave me a woman’s smile which made it clear that there was no chance of that happening.

It was Thursday, and so, although it was evening, the city was bustling with shoppers. We walked arm-in-arm, up towards St Giles, turning on to the Mound and down the long flight of steps which led down to the National Gallery and to Princes Street beyond. The pavement outside the record shops and bookstores towards the West End was thick with people and so we turned up Castle Street and along Rose Street, until it opened out into Charlotte Square.

‘Drink first?’

She nodded. ‘I could slaughter a pint.’
‘Oh Jesus,’
I thought, ‘this
woman gets better and better!’

We walked along the square’s south side and down the few steps to Whigham’s. As usual it was thronged. I excused my way up to the high counter and ordered a pint of lager for the lady, bartender if you please, and the same of the day’s guest beer, Old Throgmorton’s Embalming Fluid or something similar, for me. We found elbow space at a shelf beside the bar. Prim closed her eyes and took a deep swallow. ‘Not the same as champagne, but not too damn bad either,’ she said. ‘Okay, Osbert. Out with it. Tell me about your life.’

I jammed my knuckles against my forehead. ‘Where shall I begin?

‘It’s pretty dull really. I’m twenty-nine years old, staring the big Three-Oh in the face. I was born in Cupar. My Dad’s a dentist and my Mum was a teacher, so I’m a real middle-class boy. When I was four, we moved to Anstruther, and my Dad lives there still. I meant it about my Mother being dead. That happened nine years ago. Dad was doing her teeth one Saturday morning, and he took an X-ray He found a shadow on her jawbone. From being perfectly well that day, she was gone in seven months.’ I tried to tell her that part of the story as casually as I could, but that’s a trick I’ve never mastered. I tried to hide it with a swallow of Old Throgmorton’s, but Prim saw through me. She touched my cheek, lightly. ‘Poor thing,’ she said.

‘Who? Me or my Mum?’

‘All of you. It must have been dreadful for your Dad.’

‘Yeah, it was. He was chewed up with guilt. He saw her through to the end, and then he started on a course of serious therapeutic drinking. He’d always liked a bevvy - as I said, he’s a dentist — but this was something he was doing as a punishment. Ellen was at home at the time, I was at university. Eventually she called me about it.

‘I went up to Anstruther for a weekend, and watched him at it. He did his regular Saturday morning surgery, as usual, then started into the Bacardi and Coke for lunch. After a while I

sat him down at the table and I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Dad, this has got to stop. That Coke is
murder
on the teeth.’ He looked at me and he laughed. Then he began to cry. He cried all day, and all through Sunday. Monday was a holiday, so he and I played golf. Then we went to the cemetery and said hello to Mum. We both sensed the same thing, that she was pleased to see us. He was all right after that. We visit each other a lot now. He comes down here, I go up to Anstruther. He sees a bit of Jan’s mother. She teaches in the same school my Mum did. She’s divorced and they live near each other.

‘Ellen’s my sister, by the way. She’s three years older than me. She’s nice, our Ellen, but she’s married to a real chuckie. He’s in Marketing with an oil company. They moved out to France last year. He works in Lyon, and they live a bit outside it, quite close to the Swiss border. It’s funny, when we were kids I thought Ellen was a real tough cookie. No, scratch that, Ellen was a real tough cookie. Now she’s a housewife, with a teaching qualification and no job, waiting on her man and, as far as I can gather being ignored by him most of the time.’

I looked at her. ‘Bored?’

‘No, fascinated. Go on.’

I sloshed some more of the old T down my neck. ‘Where was I? Grew up in Anstruther, played for the school team, kept myself physically intact by being the fastest thing on two feet in the whole school. Buggery was a playground sport in our place, but none of the guys with low foreheads and trailing knuckles could catch me!

‘I left school at eighteen and came to Edinburgh to do an Arts degree. I’ve been here ever since. I came out with a two-two in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I had dreams of getting a job as a researcher for the Labour Party, but I discovered that those jobs were filled by firsts or two-ones, and more often than not by Americans. I also discovered that my Mum’s death had left me feeling that politics isn’t worth a monkey’s anyway. So I joined the police.

‘I hated it from Day One, but after I’d been in a few months, I met a pal from university. He was working for an Investigation Agency, and he said that they’d a vacancy. So I hung up my truncheon and went to work for them.’

‘I thought you were self-employed?’

I tilted my head back and sent the last of the Old Throggies on the start of the long journey to the sea. ‘I am. The guys we worked for were a pair of real rat bastards. They were ex-RAF Military Policemen, and they’d taken their talents for persecution into the private sector. They came from the time when there were big bucks to be made from matrimonial work, and they were never happier than when they were photographing a misbehaving couple on the job, or pounding on hotel room doors, shouting “Come out, come out, the game’s a bogey!” I could see that these plonkers were living in the past, and I couldn’t see why they should be doing so on the strength of our honest toil.

‘So I hung in there for a year, until the clients got to know me. Then my pal Jimmy and I went round them all, offered them the same service for less money than Fagin and Bill Sykes were charging, and signed the lot up. We ran it as a partnership until three years ago, when Jimmy’s Dad retired and he went off to run his pub. Since then I’ve been on my own, although Jimmy still helps me out when I’m on holiday, or over-booked.

‘When I’m not working, I play golf with my Dad, go to the movies, listen to an eclectic collection of music, and pursue women.’