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."
"What do you mean move him? We'll take care of him. We're Joe's family." It came to me that there was something wrong with the picture; Kennedy's attitude was wrong in some way. "Look," I demanded, 'what's happened here? Where is Joe, and how did he die? Was it a heart attack?"
The sergeant shook his head. "No, it was not. Look, you were acquainted with the deceased and you're prepared to identify him, yes?"
"Yes, on both counts. Joe and I are colleagues; I've known him for years. Let's do it." I turned and reached out to open the garden gate, but Kennedy put a hand on my arm.
"No, sir," he said. "Not that way; he's through here." It seemed to dawn on him that being customer-friendly was in his remit. "While we do this, maybe PC Money here can look after your wife, make her a cup of tea, like."
"I want to come with you," Susie protested.
I put my hands on her shoulders. "It doesn't need us both," I told her. "Now please, humour me, and humour wee Mac in there. Do as he suggests and go with the constable. And ask her to make one for me while she's at it."
For once in her life, Susie allowed herself to be persuaded.
As PC Money, whose first name, it emerged, was Cassandra, offering an extra reason to call her Cash for short, led her up the path to the front door, I followed the sergeant to the side of the house and up the driveway. At once I knew where Joe was. The garage had double doors; they were open and his Jaguar was inside. He was always a Jag man. It was like a badge of office to him. There was a rear door, leading to the back garden. It was open too, and the afternoon breeze was blowing through, but I could still smell the fumes.
"Mrs. Cameron rang the doorbell after your wife called her," Kennedy said as we approached. "She was waiting on the doorstep when she heard the motor. It was just ticking over, very quiet. You had to be that close to hear it. She had the good sense not to try to open the garage herself; she went rushing back to her own house and called the station.
Cash and I got here a couple of minutes after the shout, but it was too late, well too late. The doctor reckons he's been dead for several hours." He stopped. "It's quite a tight fit in there. Could you go in and take a look?"
From the doorway, I could see the figure in the driver's seat. I edged my way up the side of the Jag and looked through the open window. No surprises. It was Joe all right, and he was dead all right. His face was a funny pink colour. In fact he looked like a guy who's had a couple of bevvies and is sleeping it off. Except I knew that even if he had been a big drinker, which he wasn't, he would never have done anything so stupid as to go to sleep in his car, in a closed garage, with the engine running.