"The can of paint at the premiere; that was a message for you, not me?"
"That's right. When she called me again, the day after, she said that the time scale had shortened. They wanted the money in three days, or Mary got the photos."
"So," I said, 'finally, you plucked up the courage and you killed them.
And that show of outrage on the golf course afterwards, that was all a sham."
"No!" he shouted, violently, vehemently. "No, I did not kill them! I wasn't kidding that day. I really thought you killed them, or you had your man Jay do it. If you want to know the truth, I still do."
"Well you're wrong," I told him, 'although you might have been on the mark. I sent Jay up to life to put them off for good, and I gave him an open ticket. Our deal was that we wouldn't talk about it when he got back, and when the bodies were found, I will admit that I thought the same as you. But then the police published the date and time of death, and I knew it couldn't have been him."
"And that's how I can prove it wasn't me," my father exclaimed, with a sudden exultation that struck me as shameless, given the circumstances.
"When it happened, Mary and I were in Kirkcaldy, at a life Rotary and Inner Wheel joint fundraiser. I have a couple of hundred witnesses to say I didn't do it."
I looked at him for a while. I knew that my life wasn't the same any more, and that it never would be. My Dad… I always thought of him with a capital letter, like God… didn't exist any more, not as such. I could never think of him in that light again, in the special way I always had until then. I realised that I had suffered a bereavement as real as I had when Jack Gantry's overenthusiastic messengers had killed Jan.
Is there no forgiveness in me, do I hear you ask? Truly I wish that there could be. I wish that I could excuse him by rational ising that every one of us has a weakness, something that's beyond our control.
But I can't, not completely: for there were people on that computer, victims, who were no more than kids, and I'm a father myself.
"What would you have done?" I asked him.
"I don't know," he replied. "I sat at home waiting for a phone call but it never came. If it had, I might have called you again, or I might just have paid them."
"And hoped that it was over?"
"Yes," he whispered.
"Just as you think it's over now?" He frowned up at me, puzzled. "The website's still open," I pointed out. "I just logged on to it, using your woefully insecure passwords. It'll stay open until the unscrupulous service provider who maintains it stops getting paid and shuts it down. Then there's the police investigation. You're not fucking special you know, other than having a rich son; the Neiportes were probably blackmailing other people, one of whom had them done. life CID will be looking through their database right now for suspects, and sooner or later they'll come to you. When they do, coppers being as they are, some detective constable or uniformed PC in the know will phone the Sun or the Record and tell them that Oz Blackstone's father's a suspect in a porn ring murder, and you'll be all over the fucking papers anyway. And when that happens, and they come to me for a quote, you know what? I may well disown you. I'll have trouble finding anything sympathetic to say, that's for sure."
"Son," he began. I knew that a plea was on the way, but I wasn't in the mood to listen.
"I'm not sure that I am," I retorted, 'not any more. I don't know if I have a father any more. I'll need to work that out over time. But for now, let me show you something."
I picked up his two grand laptop, the sturdily built top of the range Shoei, and I broke it to pieces with my bare hands. I ripped the screen off, easily, and threw it away, then I took the base and twisted it as hard as I could. It buckled, and character pads started to fly from the keyboard, until finally it cracked and split open. I wrenched at it, furiously, until the inner workings were exposed and I could see the hard disk, where all that filth was stored. I pulled it out, slipped it into my pocket and threw the debris into the surgery waste bin.
"There. You'll feel better for that, once you think about it. I won't, though."
I walked towards the door. "A couple more things," I said, before I left. "That ice-cream's made you sick. You're not going to be able to face the Craw's Nest tonight. I just can't sit at the same table as you and pretend this didn't happen, so I'll take everyone out and you'll stay home. And there's this too. I'm not going to shop you; if the police come to you, that's your tough luck. But when you think about it, you may decide that you'll never be a man again until you've told Mary about this, and Ellen. Apart from that, they might appreciate hearing of your sins directly from you, rather than from a string of tabloid reporters."
As far as I know, he's still thinking about that.
Forty-One.
I found Jay in the kitchen, making himself coffee. "Change of plan," I told him. "We're going to stay at Ellie's tomorrow night, after the dinner, and Sunday. We'll put you up in Rusack's Hotel, so you can enjoy the exciting nightlife of St. Andrews. Who knows, maybe you'll find a nice American coed. The place is dripping with them, especially since Thingummy went there."
"I should be closer to you, boss."
"No need. There's only two Bears left now, and they'll be too busy dividing up Jock Perry's bit of the empire to bother with the likes of us." He looked at me, surprised. Clearly, Jay hadn't been listening to the radio on the drive through.
"Make an extra coffee and come with me for a minute, though." When he was finished we picked up our mugs and I led him out of the kitchen and into the long garden of my father's house. There's a bench seat at the foot, looking out over the Firth of Forth, and we sat there. I laid down my coffee, took out my mobile and called Mark Kravitz, on a number he gave me once. He filters all his calls, so I left a message and he called me back a minute later.
"Hi Oz," he said, cheerily. "What is it this time? Another favour or a job?"
"The latter, if you can do it." I gave him the web address of King Neptune's Sea of Pleasure. "I want the ISP traced and I want the site shut down, whatever the cost."
"The proprietors might want a lot."
"The proprietors have become part of cyberspace itself."
"Should be easy, then."
"Today if you can. Send the bill to Jay, not directly to me."
"Sure. Take care up there." He hung up. That last part was a big speech for Mark.
I turned to my minder. "Jay, I need to know," I told him. "My whole fucking world's gone pear-shaped here. When you came back from your trip to Pittenweem, you said I wouldn't want to know what you'd done. I went along with that because I put the wrong interpretation on it. But now I really do have to know what happened."
He nodded. "If you've had a face-to-face with your old man, and I heard some of it, I guess you do." He took a sip from his mug. "I did as you asked; went to the Neiportes' cottage. I had a game plan all worked out; you don't need to know the details but I have certain calling cards that imply I'm officially connected, if you understand me. I intended to put on a small show for them and to convince them that by messing with your family they had stepped on some very sensitive toes, and that if they didn't desist, Walter would find himself deported and back in the States faster than you could say "Elvis". This could have been awkward for him, since there are a couple of small cases of internet fraud that the FBI wanted to discuss with him."
Jay looked at me. "I didn't anticipate any problems. That sort of approach never fails with small-timers like these were. But the big difficulty was, they weren't home. It was seven thirty in the evening, and the house was empty. So I went in, through a back window, easy as you like. I could tell they hadn't been home for a while, a day at least. The breakfast dishes in the sink were not from that morning, and the mail, and the newspaper, were still in the hall."