‘Oh no!’ he exclaimed, ‘not at all.’ Then he chuckled. ‘Maybe it’s the hot climate. Why,’ he bellowed, ‘I remember back when she and I were in Madrid …’
And that was as far as he got. I turned round, grabbed him by the lapels of his navy-blue blazer and nutted him.
When a pro wrestler fake-butts another, either he stops just short of contact or the other guy gets a hand up to take the impact. There was none of that when I stuck the head on Steve Miller. I heard the crack as his nose broke, and heard a satisfying crunch of gristle. He squealed and his knees buckled, but I didn’t let him fall. Instead, as the blood and snotter erupted from him and drenched his shirt front, I lifted him clear of the surrounding terrace, held him out at arm’s length over the deep end of the swimming pool, and dropped him in. He went straight under, nice and clean with hardly a splash, then bobbed to the surface, spluttering and thrashing his arms about. I waited until he reached the side; when he grabbed the edging, I stood on his fingers, just for luck.
‘What the ’ell’s all this about?’ Frank Barnett’s voice boomed from the other side.
‘Don’t ask, Frank,’ I told him.
He looked at me, then he saw who was in the pool. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I won’t.’ Then he turned on his heel and went back indoors.
I reached down, grabbed Miller by the scruff of the neck and hauled him out. He flopped on the terrace like a beached porpoise, blood still running freely from his bent beak.
I crouched down beside him, taking care not to let the bastard bleed on me. ‘If I ever hear you, or hear of you,’ I warned him, ‘boasting again about having my wife, I’ll hold you under until the bubbles stop coming up. You better believe that, pal.’
The British abroad can be remarkable sometimes. A very nice black-haired lady, a retired doctor, someone told me, took charge of the wounded. She led him off to pack his nose with cotton wool, or string, or whatever, and a minute or so later it was as if the whole thing had never happened. The normal buzz of conversation resumed, golf matches were arranged, more ‘punsh’ was poured. Eventually, they drew the raffle. Lionell won my champagne, I won a bottle of Moscatel, which I donated there and then to the next raffle, Shirley won a fluffy parrot which repeats whatever anyone says to it. . hours of fun around the pool, pity she has no grandchildren. . and Susie won dinner for two at El Roser II, also known as Roser Dos, in which the King of Spain once ate.
Miller didn’t appear again, I had a fleeting worry that he might vandalise my car on his way out, but I decided fairly quickly that not even he would be so stupid.
The party was starting to break up when Shirley took me aside. ‘That was pretty vicious, you know,’ she murmured. ‘Steve’s dad’s an ex-copper. You might hear more of it.’
‘I don’t think so, Shirl. I don’t think I’ll ever hear from him again.’
She slipped an arm around my waist; she’s as tall as me, so she had no trouble whispering in my ear. ‘You’ve changed, Oz. I noticed it as soon as you came back. It’s no bad thing, mind you; I think I prefer the later model. Just don’t go too far in the new direction, eh.’ She nodded imperceptibly towards Susie, who was just coming back from the toilet. ‘And be very careful of your little friend there.
‘She’s absolutely deadly, that one. I reckon if she wanted something, she’d go to extremes to get hold of it: and even if you haven’t realised it, it’s obvious to me she wants you.’
26
I thought of Shirley’s warning as we drove home; I wondered what she’d have said if I’d told her that she’d already had me. I decided not to let it fester. As soon as we were inside the house, I took Susie by the hand and turned her to face me.
‘Shirl reckons you’re after me.’
She looked up at me. ‘She’s a perceptive lady, then.’
She paused for just long enough for me to feel a frown ridge my forehead. ‘But don’t worry,’ she swept on, ‘I’ve told you what my game plan is, and it doesn’t include breaking up you and Prim. I’m Scotland’s most eligible spinster, but that’s not a title I plan to keep for long.’
‘So what do you want me for?’
‘I want you to be my minder,’ she said.
‘Your minder?’ I laughed, even although I could see that she was dead serious.
‘Sort of. Over the last couple of days I’ve found out that what I’ve always suspected about you and me is true, right enough. We’re two peas from the same pod. We’re cloned from the same animal. Put it anyway you like, but what I’m really saying is that we’re natural partners, you and I. If it turned out that you were my long-lost brother, like Shirley told Geraldine, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.’
I smiled, and jerked my thumb in the direction of the bedroom. ‘But that would make all that stuff …’
‘So what? “The game the whole family can play”, like someone said.’ For a fleeting second I wondered about her and the monstrous Lord Provost, then put the thought out of my mind.
‘Oz,’ she continued, ‘not once have I told you that I love you; because I don’t. I don’t love, period. . any more than you do.
‘What I have done is take shameless advantage of Prim being away to get close to you, and to make you more honest about yourself, and less naive about other people …’
‘You mean Prim?’ I interrupted.
‘Okay, yes, about her; but you’d already found out some of it.’
‘Aye,’ I said bitterly, ‘and now I’ve found out that when she wasn’t keeping the truth from me, she was twisting it to suit herself.’
‘That’s as may be, but it’s between you two. Just don’t let it break you up.’
I frowned at her. ‘Hey, you’re the one who told me she hated me.’
‘Past tense. She was right to, and all. I think she hated herself too, though, when she slept with that creep.’
‘Speaking of Miller, don’t you go thinking I don’t realise you set him up this afternoon. You engineered it so that I’d fill him in. Did it give you a buzz, was that it?’
Susie looked up at me, with a delicious spark of triumph in her eyes. ‘It did, as a matter of fact. But that’s not why I did it. I saw the look in your eyes when he appeared, slapping you on the back like that, and I knew that sooner or later you were going to do him some damage. I reckoned to myself that if you came across him when there was no one else around, that you might have really hurt him, but that if you squared him up in a crowd, you’d be stopped before you got carried away.
‘So I egged him on until he stepped over the line. Mind you, I thought you’d only punch him; I never realised you were so good at the Glasgow kiss!’
I had to laugh. ‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘So you kept him out of hospital and me out of jail. Thanks from us both. Now back to what you were on about before. Your minder, you said? Explain.’
Susie led me across to the big sofa, spread herself on it and pulled me down beside her. All of a sudden she looked vulnerable again, as she had when she’d arrived, two days earlier. I wondered if it was real, or if she was trying to lead me on too.
‘It’s like this,’ she began. ‘I feel closer to you, Oz, than I do to anyone else in the world. You think the way I do, you’re as cunning as me, so I can’t pull the wool over your eyes, and you’re afraid of nothing, because the worst has happened already. On top of that, I reckon you care for me. I trust you like I can’t trust anyone else, not even dear old Joe. The fact that he’s my natural father doesn’t make his business judgement any better.’
She put my hand to her lips and kissed it. ‘I want you to look out for me, Oz. I want you to watch my back. I want to be able to come to you whenever I have a problem that I don’t think I can handle on my own.’
‘For example?’
‘For example that Castelgolf business. I did that almost entirely off my own bat, but not quite. I went to Joe for advice; maybe he was dazzled by the notion of having his own golf course, but he was taken hook line and sinker just like me.