‘Oz,’ he said, slightly breathlessly, when he came on line, ‘where are you?’
I told him. ‘But I’m empty-handed,’ I added.
‘She wouldn’t co-operate?’
‘No, to be fair to her, it’s more a case of not being able to. Remember I told you that things had gone sour for her out there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that was maybe understating it a little. She’s got herself mixed up with some very bad people and now she’s on the run.’
‘Where?’ Harvey’s a naturally unflappable guy, but this time he was flapping good style. He’d forgotten about photographs, and everything else. I’d guessed right about his reaction: Maddy was a bitch, but for a while she’d been his bitch.
‘Her last known location was an island off Malaysia. From there she headed back to the mainland, but that’s it.’
‘What do these people want from her?’
‘Same as you, some photographs, but I don’t think they exist any more. Now they just want her.’
‘But what are they going to do with her?’ He sounded bewildered; this was a man who had spent part of his career prosecuting and occasionally defending a succession of fairly vicious criminals. . if Sammy Goss hadn’t escaped, he might well have been on the list. . yet he didn’t get it.
‘They’re going to kill her, Harvey.’
‘My God! Oz, what can I do? Have you reported this to the police out there?’
‘The police know about it, but there’s nothing they can do. If she gets out of the region she’s got a better chance, but we still need to find her. Once we’ve done that we can keep her safe. . or try to.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘Through the other side of her life. Sooner or later she’ll contact someone she knows. Friend, relative, maybe even you. Tell me what you can about her family, her friends, those you can remember at any rate.’
‘Her father’s dead; his name was Luke Raymond. He was quite an eminent photo-journalist, but he was killed in the Lebanon twenty-five years ago. Madeleine takes her adventurous side from him. Janine, her mother, is the opposite, a vicar’s daughter from Uxbridge. I’m still on her Christmas-card list, but I doubt if Madeleine is. There’s one sister, Theresa, three years older. She was a career academic, a reader in philosophy at Cambridge when Madeleine and I were married. And there’s a younger brother, Trevor, who was in the army last I heard.’
‘Did the sister have a husband?’
‘No. A wife would be more likely. As for friends. . Maddy didn’t have any close female friends that I knew of. She hung around the theatre company in Edinburgh, at the expense, eventually, of our marriage, but you know that. She may have had some there.’
‘She met Primavera there; Dawn was with the company at the time.’
‘Did she indeed? Yes, I can imagine those two would get on. Things in common.’
I chuckled quietly. ‘Shagging actors, you mean?’
‘I wouldn’t have been so blunt.’
‘No, but you’re a lawyer: you’re trained to bring out responses like that one. Do you have an address for your former mother-in-law, better still a telephone number?’
He had both: he read them out and I noted them on the pad I keep on my desk. ‘Will you start with her?’
‘Yes. I’ll look everywhere, don’t worry. I’ll even go back to Rosebud.’
‘When you find her, what will you do? From what you’ve said I surmise it’s organised crime that’s on her tail. How can we protect her from people like that, in the long term?’
‘Harvey, right now, I don’t have a clue, but that question won’t arise till we find her.’
I hung up and looked across at Susie, who had come into my study half-way through the conversation. (I know: it sounds pretentious, a bloke from Fife having a study, but it’s my quiet room. I use it to read scripts and to do the sort of business that doesn’t allow for kids yelling in your ear.)
‘Needle in a haystack, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘I wish it was that easy; you could find that with a big enough magnet. A crumb in a biscuit factory might be a better analogy. And speaking of crumbs. .’
I turned to my computer and opened the AOL search engine. Two minutes later I had a number for Pitlochry Festival Theatre and three minutes after that a very helpful director had given me the number of the small hotel where Rory Roseberry was living during the run of Death of a Salesman. He was there. Good start, I thought.
‘Rosebud? Oz Blackstone.’
‘Oh, no, fuck off, please.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want to speak to you, Blackstone. Leave me alone, or I’ll. .’ I could hear him searching for a threat. ‘I’ll complain to Equity.’
‘Listen to me quake in my sandals. You’re fifty million euros too late for that.’
‘Oz, please, leave me alone. First it’s you thumping me, now it’s this other bloke.’
‘What other bloke?’
‘Trevor, Maddy’s brother. He was waiting for me after the show last night; crazy man. He wanted to know if I had spoken to you about her. When I said I had he beat me up. You should see my face: Makeup won’t have a chance with it. I’m out of the run.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘What? And have him come back again some time?’
‘What did he say, this guy? Anything other than that?’
‘He was yelling at me so much I can hardly remember, but this one sticks. As he was kicking me, on the ground, he said, “Putting him on her trail nearly got her killed. He’s a fucking hitman for his brother-in-law.” Don’t tell me what he meant; I don’t want to know.’
‘Anything else, Rory? Did he say anything else?’
‘I don’t know. Wait, he said, “And he’s next.” Yes, that was it. Now please, Oz, get off the line.’
He didn’t have to tell me that. I cut the call then redialled the Advocates’ Library. ‘Page Mr January again, please.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the operator replied. ‘Mr January is unavailable.’
‘I spoke to him ten minutes ago. I know he’s there.’
‘That may be, sir, but he’s unavailable.’
‘This is his brother-in-law, Oz Blackstone, and it’s urgent. Now make him available.’
‘Hold, please, sir.’
I held, as patiently as I could. After a minute or so, the operator returned. ‘I’m connecting you now, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Harvey. .’
‘It’s not Harvey, I’m afraid,’ a smooth Edinburgh voice replied. ‘This is the Dean of Faculty. Harvey has just been attacked in the Great Hall while promenading with an instructing solicitor. It only happened five minutes ago but from what I can gather it was completely unprovoked. The man burst into the hall, saw Harvey and went for him.’
‘With a weapon?’
‘No, his bare hands, but that was bad enough. He was still unconscious when I left him to take your call.’
‘And the man?’
‘He was restrained by other advocates and eventually by the police. We have officers in attendance in the vicinity of the court all the time, as you can imagine. I don’t know anything about him, though.’
‘I do. His name’s Trevor Raymond and he used to have the same job description as me: Harvey’s brother-in-law. You can tell the police that.’
‘Thanks, I will. CID are on their way from Gayfield Square.’
‘Good, because I’m on my way too.’
The decision was made pretty much there and then: Susie and I were going into the jet-charter business. I told her what had happened, asked her to call Ellie before the Dean or the police did, then tasked Audrey with booking me another Citation flight to Edinburgh. I was in the air by eleven thirty, and in Edinburgh before one, British Summer Time.
By that time Harvey was out of whatever danger he’d been in. He’d been rushed to the Western General, but had come round in the ambulance. The neurologists were satisfied that he’d sustained nothing more sinister than severe concussion. That would wear off in a couple of days, but the broken nose and three cracked ribs would take rather longer to heal. In my relief, I found myself wondering if a Supreme Court judge had ever been installed before while wearing a couple of black eyes.