Alarm Call Read online

  Acknowledgements

  The author’s thanks go to:

  Jeff Hatfield, of Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore, Minneapolis, for having a certain fictional lady on his mailing list, and giving Oz her address.

  Steve Horwitz, for preventing Oz from committing several traffic violations.

  Ken Howey, for coming up with a great, if entirely unwitting, line one night in the Mallard, which I was too slow to hit on when it happened, but up with which I’ve caught here.

  Alma Lee, the tireless director of the Vancouver International Writers’ (and Readers’) Festival, for her local knowledge.

  The profusely illustrated Sheldon McArthur, of the Mystery Bookstore, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, for letting Oz and Prim hide out there for a while.

  The Palmer Family, entrepreneurs extraordinary.

  San Francisco Police Department, with the reminder that this is a work of fiction, and complete acceptance that the scene at the end of chapter 21 is in no way representative of the behaviour of any actual member of that fine force.

  Eileen, for the duck . . .

  Prologue

  Well, hello again; I’ve been expecting you. . .

  It’s been a while, a year and more, since you made me let you in on my last dark secret.

  Thinking back, I probably left you wondering whether I was kidding myself in believing that I had put it all behind me, and that nothing would bubble up to the surface and spoil my party.

  If I did, you can relax, or curse, depending on how you really feel about me. There has been no fall-out from that business, and having come this far down the road, there ain’t going to be any.

  I suppose that, once I’d told you all about it, you might have made some pretty damning moral judgements about me. If you did . . . well, all I can say is that it’s your call. I’m not sorry about what I did; my only regret is that I was left with no other choice.

  Has it given me nightmares? No, not a single one; not a new one, at any rate. Do I feel remorseful? No, not in the slightest.

  Actually, since all that stuff happened, I’ve been too busy even to think about it. As always, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been exactly conventional . . .

  Chapter 1

  Nobody’s luck holds good for ever . . . or so they say. Personally, I have no evidence to prove that assertion, but plenty to disprove it. Every morning I waken . . . yes, okay, I concede that occasionally I don’t waken till the afternoon, but only if I have an extra big lump of jet-lag, an occupational hazard in my business, to work off; some movie actors may make a virtue of boogieing all night, but not this happy family man. Anyhow, as I was saying . . .

  Christ, that brings something back, and a tear to my eye in the process. In my callow(-er) years, after I’d flown the family nest and embarked upon that determined shagathon known as university education, I made a point of phoning my mother every couple of days. (If I’d known how long she had left to live I’d have gone home to see her every other day, but there’s no point in dwelling on that.)

  I didn’t call her about anything in particular, not to beg extra funds or anything like that . . . she and my dad spoiled me in that respect . . . but simply because I missed her more than I’d ever imagined I would when I set off from Anstruther into the real world outside, the Happy Wanderer with my metaphorical knapsack on my back. (Actually, in those days I really didn’t know what missing her was like; I found out after she died.)

  We didn’t talk about anything in particular; she’d ask me if I was feeding myself properly, and I’d ask her if she was feeding my dad properly, just joking around, that sort of stuff. My mum was a great listener; she humoured my homesickness (I’d never have admitted it then, but that’s what it was) but she had a wonderful way of bringing my ramblings to an end, and . . . she thought . . . of sending me back to work.

  We all have our habits and foibles in speech, those little things we say as conversation shifters, pauses for thought. The most common among mine was that great nonsense word of the Scottish language, ‘anyhow’. She was always chiding me about it when I was a kid; she was afraid that my sister Ellie and I would grow up with impenetrable East Neuk accents, and took great pains to ensure that we didn’t. Shoddy language was not allowed, period. However, that’s not to say it didn’t happen.

  In those long conversations with her, sooner or later, I would fall from grace. It usually happened when I’d run out of things to say, but wasn’t ready for ‘Cheerio’; there would be a silence, which, once I’d worked out what to say next, I would break with a deep breath, and an ‘Anyhow’. When I did, she would give that incredibly warm chuckle of hers and say, ‘Oz, if we’re down to the “anyhow”s, it’s time you got on with your life,’ and that would be that, for another couple of days.

  For all the crazy stuff that’s happened to me over the last five years, since I stumbled into acting, I like to think I’ve kept my feet on the ground, and that my boots . . . or shoes more often these days . . . still fit me. It would be easy to believe my press cuttings . . . the favourable ones, that is; I never have any trouble accepting the bad . . . and getting altogether too pleased with myself.

  While I might get a bit showbiz from time to time, it never gets out of hand, for one simple reason: my mum’s always around when it happens. She’s my safety valve; she comes into my mind with a gentle smile and a shake of her head to bring me back to being the boy she brought up and to make sure that I’m not getting too big for my footwear.

  Okay, after some of the things I’ve told you, you may say that if she’s been good for my ego, there’s another side of me she’s ignored. That’s not true, because not even she knew all of me, and everything of which I’ve shown myself capable from time to time.

  But mothers are love, and love is blind.

  Anyhow, as I was saying: every morning I waken, look at Susie lying there beside me . . . I always surface before she does when I’m not jet-lagged, now that wee Jonathan no longer requires to be plugged into the mains at some ungodly hour . . . and I pinch myself . . . no kidding, I really do give myself a nip . . . just to make sure that I’m still alive, and not observing all this through a celestial telescope.

  In the last few years I’ve come to think of myself as the luckiest man on the planet, and now I reckon I must be one of the happiest as well. Sure, there are dark memories: for a start, there was my mother’s death, and then the loss of Jan, my soulmate from childhood and my first wife. There was all that bad stuff with Primavera Phillips, who beguiled me for a while, and with whom I shared one of the shortest marriages on record, before she pissed off with a B-list actor. And then, as you know, about eighteen months back there was another local difficulty when someone took it into his head to attack Susie’s construction business, the Gantry Group.

  Those things all happened, there’s no hiding from them, but they’re all in their wee mental boxes . . . some with extra heavy padlocks so they don’t break out and they don’t stop me enjoying the incredibly good . . . and incredibly large ... fortune that’s come my way.

  It was after we got back from Australia that the small cloud edged its way over the horizon.

  I had been out there working on another project for Miles Grayson, my friend and former brother-in-law, and I had taken Susie, wee Janet and wee Jonathan with me. We were there making a movie called Red Leather, about England’s Aussie cricket tour in 1932 and 1933, the bodyline series in which the English captain, Douglas R. Jardine (me), came up with an innovative if homicidal way of beating the Aussies, who were inspired at that time by the legendary Don Bradman (Miles). If you don’t know anything about cricket, take some time to look at Bradman’s record and then compare him with anyone else who ever picked up a bat. All of the rest, even the greatest of them, pa
le into insignificance alongside him; that’s how good he was.

  When the project was announced, Hollywood’s collective eyebrows rose and its media exclaimed, ‘What?’ They were convinced that for all Miles’s record of box-office success as a film-maker, a picture about cricket would be doomed. They argued that very few Americans knew anything about the game, and that most of those who did profess to knowing the rules didn’t understand them . . . a bit like Brits and baseball, I suppose.

  It was one of their more spectacular mistakes.

  In fact, the movie isn’t about cricket, it’s about the incredible confrontation that exploded between the two nations, England and Australia, over Jardine’s tactic of bowling not at the wicket (those three bits of wood with two smaller bits of wood on top that the bowlers are supposed to try to hit with the ball) but at the batsmen (batters, if you’re American) themselves. They didn’t wear helmets in those days, so inevitably the row came to a literal head when an unfortunate Aussie named Oldfield had his skull fractured by Harold Larwood, the English speed demon. Larwood actually apologised to his victim as he was being carted off to hospital, but since Oldfield was unconscious at the time, he did not respond.

  All hell broke loose. Jardine came under pressure to change his tactics, but refused; all the arguments were about the spirit of the game, since what he was doing wasn’t against the rules. He even sacked one of his best players, and until then one of his best friends, the Nawab of Pataudi . . . all this took place in the great days of Empire, remember . . . when he sided with the victims.

  The Australian Cricket Board was forced to act. They sent a cable to London asking for the game’s ruling authority, the MCC, to instruct Jardine to change his ‘unsporting’ tactic. But the grandees in London, who hadn’t seen what was happening . . . there was no telly in 1932, was there, never mind satellites . . . took exception to the use of the adjective and a stalemate ensued. The situation became so tense that at one stage an emissary from Buckingham Palace intervened to calm things down.

  Then, when peace looked like breaking out, the dour and inflexible Jardine refused to continue the tour unless the hosts apologised for their accusation of lack of sportsman-ship, and withdrew it. The affair ended with the cowed Australians continuing to act as live bait for Larwood for the rest of the series, and going down to abject defeat. Only it didn’t end there: bad feeling persisted between the two countries for years afterwards, Jardine was put aside as an embarrassment to the London Establishment, and even in Australia there were feuds and grudges over some of the things that had been said and done.

  Forget the game; that was secondary to the plot . . . it had to be, because sports movies, as such, never really work. But take a look at the contemporary accounts of the drama as it played out, and you’ll realise that Miles’s so-called folly was a certain winner, anywhere.

  It was the best script I’d ever worked on, and the best role I’d ever played in my growing career. When the movie was released, timed for the start of a cricket Test series in London, and at the height of the summer sports season in the US, it was a huge hit, and so was I. My reviews were the best I’d ever had, even in the American media. Until then they’d treated me politely, but rarely with anything approaching enthusiasm.

  To be honest, their praise didn’t come as a surprise. I’d found Jardine an easy character to play. Maybe that was because his inflexibility and lack of humour suited my limited range, but none of the critics suggested that. I’d missed out on award nominations for my previous project, Mathew’s Tale, but quite a few suggested that I’d pick up some this time. I was quite happy to bask in their optimism.

  So was Susie. When we got together, she took a pretty sanguine view of my acting career. She never said as much, but I’m pretty sure that she regarded it as lightweight, something not to be taken seriously. The money didn’t impress her either: the family construction business, which she ran, had a massive turnover and its annual profits put my film income in the shade.

  But as time went on, things changed. Our move to the estate overlooking Loch Lomond, and our acquisition of a small staff . . . children’s nurse, housekeeper, gardener and personal assistant (actually, he’s a minder, but we don’t like to call him that) . . . brought her to realise that our lifestyle was changing and that it was my doing as much as hers. It was really brought home to us in April, when we made the Sunday Times Rich List for the first time, and not just the Scottish section either. As the limelight began to shine more brightly on me, Susie even started to enjoy stepping out to the odd showbiz bash . . . ‘if only to keep an eye on you,’ was how she put it, but I knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

  The biggest change in her was her attitude to her own business. When we went to Australia en famille, she left Phil Culshaw, a director, in temporary charge of the Gantry Group, with the understanding that when we got back from Australia, she would pick up the reins and resume her role as CEO, with Phil replacing me as chairman, a job I’d only taken on out of necessity, as a short-term measure. To my surprise, she changed her mind: rather than return full-time, she opted to take the chair herself, with Culshaw continuing as managing director on a permanent basis. Contrary to what was written in one of the Scottish broadsheets, I had no influence on her decision. She didn’t discuss it with me at all, or tell me about it until the deed was done.

  ‘It makes sense,’ she said, when she broke the news. ‘The bankers like Phil, so it’s a good move from their viewpoint. On top of that, Oz, the group needs to expand or it’ll stagnate. That means raising capital by floating the business on the stock exchange, and I don’t fancy driving that through. I’m only just into my thirties: I want to devote more time to the kids, and to you. You need a proper manager, not just an agent, and I’m not letting anyone else do that job.’

  That wasn’t an offer, it was an order. I obeyed.

  From that point on, Susie became as committed to me as she was to the Gantry Group. She ran my life, literally, and I loved it, and her for it.

  So what about that small cloud I mentioned earlier? Actually, it turned out to be more like a monsoon.

  Chapter 2

  You know you’ve made the A list when . . . • The money on offer from the glam mags for exclusive family lifestyle photographs reaches seven figures.

  • The producer of Parkinson phones you at home and invites you to do the show . . . with no other guest stars.

  • Your latest movie is made into a video game, and you’re on a percentage of the gross.

  • You’re asked to front a multi-media advertising campaign for the world’s leading men’s fragrance.

  • Your sister starts to treat you like she did when you were in primary school, just to make sure you don’t get too big for your boots.

  • Your insurance company forbids you to take part in a charity five-a-side football tournament, in case you break something and bugger up a movie schedule.

  • Your agent flies from Hollywood to see you, instead of the other way around. *

  That was where I found myself after the release of Red Leather: if not on top of the tree, then pretty near it.

  Roscoe Brown, my smart guy in LA, didn’t even have to be asked to get on the plane: he proposed it himself. (I hadn’t gone totally showbiz myself, you understand.) We had told the glam mag where to stick their money, and if Roscoe had asked, I’d have gone to the States. But in truth I was more than happy to be picking him up from the airport, rather than the other way around, because it gets seriously hot in southern California in the summer, and because I’d developed a serious antipathy to being away from Susie and the kids.

  I’d gone from the Australian project straight into shooting the few scenes I had in the third Bob Skinner movie, Skinner’s Trail, produced as before by Miles’s company, but directed this time by Ewan Capperauld. Since much of the story takes place in Spain, my character, Andy Martin, had less action than usual and that suited me fine, especially since the money had gone up regardless. Ne
vertheless it involved a month’s work in Edinburgh and another couple of weeks on the sound-stage in Surrey; I made it home as often as I could, but I still spent too many miserable nights in hotel rooms.

  Not that I wasn’t offered alternatives, mind you ... that comes with A-list status too. Randy Rhona Waitrose, who plays Skinner’s daughter in the series, offered me the chance to ‘compare parts’, as she put it, but I knew that she was only trying to live up to her image, and she wasn’t offended when I turned her down . . . again.

  When I said that I picked up Roscoe from Glasgow Airport, I was exaggerating a little. What I actually did was send our personal assistant to collect him. Conrad Kent had joined us in succession to Jay Yuille, who had followed his dick to Washington, after meeting an American girl in St Andrews. The last task he had performed for me was to recruit his replacement, and I have to say that the boy Jay done good. Conrad’s background was similar to Jay’s, something military, but no details offered or asked for.

  At first glance he’s a slightly built guy, but he dresses to give that effect. There’s steel beneath the double-breasted blazer, be in no doubt of that. He has a Jamaican father and a Welsh mother, a degree in geology from Leeds University, he likes Van Morrison, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Bryn Terfel, three of my in-car favourites, and best of all he’s a four-handicap golfer, a status to which I’ve aspired all my life, but never yet attained. When Jay put him forward on a list of three, that was the deciding factor in his favour.

  An added bonus lay in the fact that he came as a matched pair. He’s married to a lady called Audrey: she was an army clerk . . . that’s where they met . . . so she has good typing and IT skills. She didn’t ask for a job, but as soon as we’d had a chance to size her up, Susie and I knew that there was one there for her: thus, she became our secretary.