Even before it was released I knew I had made it in my own right as a performer, finally and irreversibly. I knew how good I'd been, especially in Andy's huge emotional scene at the end. I was pretty sure that the old, cold, angry Oz wouldn't have been able to do that.
I'd like to say that there wasn't a trace of him left, but, in my new spirit of honesty, I can't. In a few months he would make a return appearance, angrier, more ruthless and a lot more calculating. But I'll get to that in due course.
Two.
For that time, though, life continued as what passed for Susie and me as normal. I went back to work shooting Skinner's Festival, Miles Grayson in the lead, Dawn typecast as his wife, Scott Steele as the old chief constable, randy Rhona Waitrose as Miles's screen daughter, Alexis, and Liam Matthews, my wrestler buddy, following up his debut in the first Skinner movie, as one of the detective team.
There were a couple of additions, though: the story called for two villains, who turn out at the end to be brother and sister. My character, Andy, was to fall for the girl, while the other would get off with Alexis/ Rhona all with disastrous consequences. Miles cast a genuine brother and sister team in these parts, Jose and Roxanne Benali. Roxanne was pretty tempting, I have to admit. We had a couple of scenes where there was a lot of skin involved, and she didn't hold anything back in either of them. That made it difficult, because it meant that I could not allow myself to appear any less enthusiastic than her. In the end I just imagined that she was Susie, and gave her my best simulated shot, thanking my stars that it was a closed set, with only Miles and essential crew around. (A couple of years earlier and… given Roxanne's 'commitment to her part', as she put it, and under the duvet her interest in mine… it might not have been simulated.) We shot the thing, start to finish, in a total often weeks. Most of the schedule was in Edinburgh, but we had a couple of trips south to a big sound stage for disaster scenes which could not have been filmed in their actual locations… it would have meant blowing them up.
Normally, once we were finished I would have looked forward to my usual lazy month between projects, but Susie had my dance-card well filled.
Right at the top of our list of things to do was moving house.
We liked where we lived in Glasgow, our city centre apartment in an award-winning conversion, but now that I was becoming a bit famous, it was less and less practical. Our neighbours were nice people, and they never once complained about the punters hanging around the place, or the photographers who never seemed to be too far away. After a while, though, we decided that we couldn't inflict the inconvenience on them any longer. So we looked around Scotland and found a country house set in a small estate within sight of Loch Lomond, with plenty of room for us, for Janet, for any more Janets who might come along, for Ethel Reid, our nanny, and with a small lodge house to accommodate Jay Yuille, our chauffeur.
Actually, Jay was a bit more than a chauffeur, although driving Susie to the office and me to the airport was in his job description. He was our minder, an ex-soldier recruited by my eventually trusted friend Ricky Ross, whose consultancy handles nearly all the security work for Miles Gray son's UK movie projects. As my star began to get bigger, Miles had taken pains to impress upon me that famous people with children can't be too careful. He and Dawn employed a children's nurse for Brucie; she was ex-LAPD, and she took it ill out when they came to the UK and she couldn't pack her.38 S amp;W special. Our guy Jay had fought in Afghanistan and was formidable enough without firearms.
The house move went off with barely a hitch… not that we were moving much. Susie had hired an interior designer who had charged us a fee, then compounded the cost by furnishing almost all of the place from scratch. The only things we took with us were Janet's familiar things from the nursery and our big partners' desk, where we used to sit and work while looking down on the City of Glasgow, its traffic flowing beneath us. We found a spot for that in our new home, setting up our shared office in one of the big conservatories built on either side of the house, each having a panoramic view of the loch below. The other one enclosed a heated swimming pool, but its door was always locked; our Janet was into everything and in no time at all she would be big enough to reach the handle. Even though she's a water-baby, she wasn't to be trusted on her own.
The old apartment was sold, after a little soul-searching. We had considered keeping it as a pied-a-terre, but decided eventually to give the neighbours a complete break by moving it on. Barney Farmer, the Gantry Group lawyer, put it on the market at an exorbitant figure and had an unconditional offer next day. The buyer, he said, was a company, not an individual; slightly strange in Scotland, but in fact, so was the seller, and for the money that was offered Susie and I weren't bothered. The deal was signed off and we waved it a fond goodbye.
Life was idyllic again; there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and even my career was conspiring to keep it that way. We enjoyed Christmas with the family at home: my nephews, Jonny and his brother Colin, dry-nosed for once, and showing signs of becoming sensible, took to the new place, and especially to the pool.
I had to marvel at the change in Jonathan. To me it seemed to have happened overnight, but actually it had taken place when I was away on one of my projects. When I got home I'd called Ellie to catch up.
Everyone was out, so the answer machine cut in. "Hello," I heard myself say. "You've reached the Sinclair residence. I'm afraid we can't take your call just now, but if you leave a message we'll call you back." I left a message, but I was seriously puzzled. I couldn't remember ever recording an answer message for my sister. I knew that my Dad hadn't done it. He and I sound almost identical on the phone, but not quite.
She laughed when I asked her about it. "Time moves on, young brother," she said.
I let my mouth fall open. "You don't mean…"
"I do. That was our Jonny."
I'd been curiously disturbed by that. Since Ellen and her husband split up, the boys have seen very little of their father, an irredeemable workaholic. My Dad's always been close, but he's their grandfather, and that's different. In search of a father substitute, Jonathan in particular has always drifted to me. I felt that I'd missed an important part of his life, and I was sorry.
After our family Christmas we brought in the New Year in Florida, taking Janet to Disney World; Susie had decided that she had gone long enough without sunshine. Once the festivities were over, I had to endure the hardship of a three-month film shoot in the Caribbean, and on the horizon after that, Roscoe Brown's finest achievement to date, my first top billing part.
I was to play the title role in Mathew s Tale, a drama set in pre-Victorian Scotland, and directed by the eminent Frenchman Paul Girone, about the adventures of a Napoleonic War veteran who returns home to discover that he has been given up for dead and that his intended has married someone else. I was to co-star, my name headlining, with Louise Golding, an American hot ticket, and with the formidable Ewan Capperauld, who had been cast originally as Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner in my first Miles Grayson cop movie, only for personal problems to force his late withdrawal. I was glad that Ewan had decided to come out of his self-imposed exile. For all that he could be a bit of a lovey, I had found myself liking the guy.
Scott Steele was in it too, of course. These days you can't cast a movie in Scotland without finding a part for old Scott. He gets pissed off when reviewers call him 'the Finlay Currie of his generation', but it's easy to see what they mean. If they still made movies with Moses in the cast, he'd be the guy parting the Red Sea every time.