‘You’ve got it wrong, Mr Donn,’ Prim answered. ‘This is about what someone’s doing to Susie. We need to talk to you about it. I’m sorry about my deception when I called you on Monday, but I really didn’t want to get into this over the telephone.’
Donn was a tall man; he was well-dressed, in dark flannel slacks and a green Lacoste shirt, grey hair well cut, and so clean-shaven that his face seemed to shine. As we watched him, he sighed, and shook his head, almost sadly. ‘I suppose you’d better come in. If Susie’s in trouble. .’ He stood aside, ushering us into a big square hall, then through to a study at the back of the house, which opened into a conservatory.
‘Is Mrs Donn in?’ I asked.
He laughed, bitterly. ‘Mrs Donn hasn’t been in for thirty-odd years, son. She left me for someone else; there were no hard feelings, but I gave up marriage as a bad job after that.’
He pointed to a group of heavy bamboo-framed chairs in the sun-room. ‘Sit down.’ Prim and I took seats close together, looking out into an immaculate garden.
‘So what’s wee Susie been up to?’ he asked at last. ‘Who’s doing what to her?’ He chuckled. ‘Trouble follows that lassie, you know. Maybe if her faither had skelped her backside when she needed it, rather than just patting her on the head, she wouldn’t have grown up so wilful. Maybe if her mother had lived, she’d have been a bit readier to see the other side.
‘I wasn’t all that bad at my job, you know, but there was no pleasing Susie, when Jack put her in charge of the Group, then afterwards, when she took over completely.’ I had to bite my tongue at that, for I knew from Jan’s investigative work just how bad he had been. Yet, Lord Provost Gantry was no fool; the strength of his support for his old pal Joe puzzled me at first. Later I realised that the last thing he had wanted was a competent accountant. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if someone was making trouble for her,’ Donn went on. ‘She must have upset a lot of folk in business by now.’
‘You couldn’t be wider of the mark,’ said Prim, evenly. ‘The Gantry Group has better relations with its customers and suppliers than it ever had.’
‘Aye, but not, I’ll bet, with its bankers, dear.’
‘The bank relationship is good too, but the Group is treated like any other business.’
‘Which wasn’t the case in my day. We had a special relationship then.’
No, you daft old goat, I thought. Jack had the special relationship. Like he had with everyone.
‘Be that as it may, as far as we can see, Susie doesn’t have an enemy in business. Yet someone’s been threatening her. . physically. She doesn’t want to make a big fuss over this, since the chances are whoever’s been doing it is just plain sick, so she’s asked us, as friends, to help her find out who it is.’
‘So why did you want to talk to me, Miss Phillips?’
‘We’ve been given a list of people who’ve left Gantry since Susie took over.’
‘People who’ve been fired, you mean,’ said Donn, dryly.
‘Or who’ve left by mutual agreement, let’s say,’ Prim countered. ‘Like you, for example. Over the last three days we’ve spoken to them all, and eliminated them all as suspects.’
‘It’s stretching a point to say that I left,’ the man growled. ‘I was fired to all intents and purposes. . not once, but twice, as I’m sure you’ll know.’
‘What do you do for a living now, Mr Donn?’ I asked.
‘I play golf, son,’ he muttered.
‘So you didn’t walk away penniless from the Gantry Group?’
‘No. To be fair to her, the first time Susie lived up to the terms of my contract and more. When Jack reinstated me, it all happened so fast that there wasn’t time to sign a contract. And I have to admit that when I left the second time, the Wee One was generous. I suspected at the time that it was hush money; even now I’ve no reason to think otherwise.’
‘So, having taken it, why did you contemplate going to the papers?’
Joe Donn looked at me silently for a while. ‘Susie humiliated me, lad. I was angry. I had hoped that there was a closeness between her and me, just as there was between me and Jack. I was fond of her, and when she cut me out, not once but twice, I took it bad.’
‘So you got in touch with your journalist pal,’ said Prim.
‘He wasn’t my pal, Miss Phillips. I don’t know people like that. No, he was my nephew’s mate.’
‘Stephen’s?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Truth be told, it was Stephen’s idea to go to the press. I think he got fed up with me going on about Susie. . I remember him saying once that I cared more about her than about him, my flesh and blood. Anyway, he suggested one day that there must be some dirt to dig. I said there might be, if we could get hold of a few specific letters.
‘Next thing I knew, he’d persuaded poor wee Myrtle Higgins to copy the bloody things. She got caught of course, and she was out too. I put a stop to it there and then. I had a hell of a row with Stephen. We haven’t spoken since, as a matter of fact.’
‘And you haven’t spoken to the press since?’
‘Absolutely not. I’m not really angry with Susie any more; just disappointed, that’s all.’
Suddenly a couple of loose ends began to tie themselves together in my brain. ‘Was Stephen right, about you caring more for Susie than him?’ I asked.
Donn smiled, softly. ‘Aye, maybe he was.’ It was almost a whisper.
‘Why?’
‘Because I loved her poor mother. Margaret was my wife, see, before she left me for Jack Gantry.’
‘Eh?’ Prim and I gasped simultaneously.
‘Yet you went on working for him?’
‘I didn’t work for him then. We were friends at that stage. He and Margaret fell in love. People do; sometimes they just can’t help themselves. Don’t get me wrong, though. I was mad enough at the time. But you couldn’t stay mad with Jack Gantry, not forever. When I saw that he loved Margaret as much as she loved him, I began to see that it was all for the best. Then Susie was born, and everything was complete for them.
‘Not long after that, Jack asked me to be his finance director, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to turn him down.’
‘Does Susie know all this?’ asked Prim.
‘No. I’m sure she doesn’t. Margaret, Jack and I decided when she was a baby that there was no need to tell her. She certainly didn’t know when Margaret died. Jack and I agreed that there would be no mention of a first marriage at the funeral.’
‘And Stephen? Does he know?’
‘I couldn’t say for sure. I told his father, my brother Thomas, not to tell him. He died when Stephen was only ten, so I don’t imagine that he did. I can’t vouch for Myra, though; his mother, that is.’
‘Where can we find Stephen?’
He frowned across the conservatory at Prim. ‘I have no idea: nor do I care after what he did to wee Myrtle. Best ask his mother; most of the time, that is, when he didn’t have a woman in tow, he lived with her.’
‘Okay, but where can we find her?’
‘I’ve no idea. Myra and I never got on that welclass="underline" we don’t keep in touch. After Thomas died she stayed on in their house in Paisley, but Stephen said on one of the last occasions that I saw him that she was in the process of moving to a smaller place.’
He gave us a sudden sour look. ‘You’re the detectives. You find her.’
Chapter 11
There aren’t all that many people in Scotland named Donn, not in comparison with the Smiths or the Macs or the Blacks or even the Patels. But there are enough of them to make finding Stephen Donn and his mother seem like a difficult task.
To cut a few corners, I phoned an Edinburgh pal who worked for Telecom. He did for us what he had done on occasion in the past, but for a few more quid this time — he had heard on the grapevine of our being in the money — and ran a check of telephone subscribers.