‘Could well be,’ said my wife, pausing before biting into a piece of toast, layered thick with pate. ‘I’m looking into the health care division, the last on my list, and I’ve found something which is beginning to look very interesting. I’ll need to go over it again, and then I’ll need to consult a few people.’
‘What is it?’ Susie demanded, eagerly.
‘I don’t want to say just across the dinner table, so please don’t press me.’ Dylan was attacking his starter, so he didn’t notice her quick gesture, the tiny nod of her head in his direction. But Susie and I did. ‘I expect to be absolutely sure of my ground by Monday. After that, you’ll have to decide where we go.’
‘Anything I can do in the meantime?’
Jan nodded. ‘You could look out the personnel files of everyone employed at management level in that part of the business. Now please, don’t let’s discuss it any more.’
Dylan reached across and tapped me on the arm. ‘Let’s talk about you then, Oz. What the hell’s all this wrestling stuff about? How did you get into it? All that big Davis said at the City Chambers was that a mutual friend introduced you.’
I decided that the tall grass of the truth was my best hiding place. ‘That’s right. Greg McPhillips, an old university mate. He’s Everett’s lawyer.’
‘But why did he put you in the frame for that job? You’re a detective, for Christ’s sake, not a fairground barker.’
The tall grass was on fire. I found fresh cover in a total fabrication. ‘When we were at university, Greg and I worked on Sundays for a guy who had a market stall. I was good at it; when Everett told him about the announcing job, Greg remembered that.’
I looked him in the eye and waited for his comeback line. There was always one with him. He gave me a big, slow, cheesy grin. ‘What did you sell, then?’
‘Lucky knickers.’
All three, Mike, Susie and Jan, stopped eating and looked at me, wide-eyed.
‘Lucky knickers?’ said Dylan.
‘That’s right,’ I shot back, hitting him between the eyes with the appalling punch line. ‘Every girl who bought them got done.’
Chapter 24
The GWA logistics manager had done a deal with the airline, booking a block of business class seats on the Manchester-Barcelona flight for the price of economy class. The staging had been sent out three days earlier in trucks, the journey planned so that its arrival would coincide with ours.
I didn’t know at the time whether Everett had fixed it, or whether it was just a coincidence, but when we boarded the flight after a three and a half hour coach trip from Glasgow, I found myself in a window seat next to Sonny Leonard.
All the way down on the bus I had been thinking about Jan; how perfectly we had made love the night before, how beautiful she had looked that morning when I kissed her goodbye, how rich in quality our life had become, and how much we were looking forward to being parents. The reality of her pregnancy was just coming home to us both, and it had a strange effect.
‘What are we going to do, Oz,’ she had asked me, dreamily, as the winter moonlight streamed through our bedroom window, ‘when we don’t have anything else to wish for, because we’ve got everything we’ve ever wanted?’
I remembered how I spread my fingers and placed my hand gently on her warm belly, my thumb in her navel and the end of my little finger in her thick mat of dark hair. I had tried to imagine that I could feel the baby move, although of course it was far too early. I gazed down at her and as I did, I realised that something strange was happening to me; something called growing up.
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ I told her. ‘We’ll build a new set of ambitions for this chap, or chapess, in here, and we’ll do our best to make them happen as well. After that’s done. . we’ll still have each other, decrepit old buggers though we may be by then; and who could want for more? Not me.’
I closed my eyes as the bus drove smoothly down the M6: once again, I saw Jan’s beautiful face in the moonlight, heard her throaty laugh, bathed in the warmth of her smile, and sank down once more into her loving arms.
I was still thinking of her as I took my seat beside Sonny Leonard on the aircraft. We had spoken a couple of times in Newcastle and at the SECC, but on a ‘Do this for me, please’, basis rather than personally. I glanced at the American as I fastened my seat belt; he didn’t look to be in a talkative mood, and frankly neither was I.
Show me a man who says that he actually likes travelling by air and I will show you an idiot. Okay, I know that our world has been revolutionised by the invention of the heavier-than-air flying machine, but that doesn’t mean that we can afford to uncross our fingers when we are thirty thousand feet above the ground, our lives depending on an apparatus built and operated by man and subject therefore to human error.
Take-off is the part of the flight I hate most of all. I can cope with landing because the sight of the ground getting closer — not too fast — is comforting in a rocky sort of a way, but I have always loathed the experience of being shoved into the sky by a pair of bloody enormous engines, listening all the way through for the slightest change in their tone which might intimate disaster. It doesn’t do to let it show, though.
I could tell from the whiteness of Sonny Leonard’s knuckles as he gripped the armrests that he felt the same way as me, although he turned his head to look across me and out of the window, as the DC9 broke into the low grey cloud which hung, as predicted, over Manchester. Neither of us spoke, though, until the plane levelled off, and the cabin crew appeared with the bar trolley.
‘Where are the rest of your guys?’ I asked the American, to break the silence. He was a stocky guy in his early forties, with grizzled hair, wide shoulders, a broken nose, and the suggestion of a beer gut.
‘Back in Glasgow,’ he replied. ‘The Spanish are awkward when it comes to foreign labour. They insist on us using local people whenever we can. Don’t know whether it’s their trade unions or their government that’s behind it, but that’s the way it is. I’m essential to the operation, so they accept that I gotta be there, but Gary and all the others are being replaced by locals for this show.’
‘Won’t you have a language problem? As a nation, the Spanish are bloody awful at English.’
Leonard shook his head, then nodded very quickly as an immaculately made up stewardess offered him a small bottle of Freixenet cava. ‘Nah, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘My Spanish is pretty good. It has to be, working in the US. LA and New York are pretty much bilingual.’
He had given me an opening. ‘Have you been with GWA from the start?’
‘Yeah. When Everett first started planning the company he asked me if I’d set up his road crew, and run it for him. He didn’t tell me it would be in Glasgow, though.’
I grinned at him as I took a tin of San Miguel from the stewardess. ‘What’s wrong with our fair city, then?’
‘It’s cold, it’s wet and it’s goddamn miserable — and that’s in the summer. I’m a St Louis boy — I like my summers hot. I tell you, I thank the Lord for this Barcelona gig. I was beginning to freeze to death back in Scotland.’
‘I don’t imagine it’ll be all that hellish warm in Barcelona either at this time of year.’
He pointed towards the ground. ‘Warmer than down there, buddy, bet on it.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said, as I opened my beer.
‘What did you do before GWA?’ I asked him.
‘I was with Triple W. I was number two to the head honcho there.’
‘What’s Triple W like?’
‘It’s a damn good operation. It has the top roster of performers in the US right now. A lot of people thought it would take a ratings nose-dive when Everett and Jerry left, but it’s held up pretty good.’
‘What about the other lot, CWI? Have you ever worked for them?’
He looked at me, sideways from his seat. ‘The company line here,’ he said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper, ‘is that CWI sucks, and that Tony Reilly — the guy who runs it — is an asshole. You don’t have to look too far to figure out why that should be.’