‘Let me ask you something. When you were wee, and your mother was alive, was he close to your family?’
She took a few seconds to answer. ‘Yes, I suppose he was. He did have a sort of special place; I called him Uncle Joe when I was a kid, and every time he came to the house he’d give me pocket money. I was closer to him than my real Auntie; and I saw much more of him than I did of her. Truth is, I never could stand her.’
‘And how was he with your parents?’
‘He was my Dad’s best pal. The three of them always got on together. My Mum was very fond of him, I remember.’ She paused and stared at me. ‘Here, you’re not suggesting that he and my Mum had an affair are you? That’s ridiculous; she loved my Dad. He was the only man in the world as far as she was concerned.’
‘Not always,’ said Prim gently. ‘Joe Donn was your mother’s first husband.’
Susie stared across the table at us, in sheer disbelief, her eyes moistening. ‘You’re kidding,’ she protested, at last. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Joe did. And his sister-in-law confirmed it. It seems to be true, Susie.’
She was crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘But why didn’t they tell me? Why keep something like that from me?’
‘It was your father’s idea, apparently,’ I told her.
‘We could speculate all night about his motives,’ said Dylan, grimly, ‘and never get anywhere. The Devil alone knows some of the things that have been hatched in his mind.’
‘But I wouldn’t have cared,’ Susie wailed.
‘No, but clearly your father did,’ I told her. ‘I reckon the easiest way for you to look at this is for you to accept that he thought that keeping your mother’s past and her relationship with Joe Donn from you was in your best interests.’
She shot me a quick scornful look. ‘Then it must have been in his too, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it. No one’s interests ever ranked above my Lord Provost’s, not even mine.’
She paused. ‘Mike,’ she asked. ‘Would you be okay to drive home if you stopped drinking now?’
Dylan nodded. ‘In a couple of hours, yes. Why?’
Susie drained her mineral water and held out her glass. ‘Guess,’ she said. ‘I’ll have some of that Austrian stuff, Oz, if I may. No, on second thoughts, I’ll have a lot.’
I filled her glass as she asked, right up to the top. ‘I’m sorry, Susie,’ I offered. ‘Maybe we should have kept the secret, like your old man wanted.’
She shook her head, firmly. ‘No way. The very fact that he wanted it that way is reason enough for you to tell me. And I’d have expected no less of friends.’
‘So where does this leave us with the letters, Oz?’ asked Dylan.
‘Unless you’ve come up with another suspect, I’d say it leaves us wanting to speak to the boy Stephen, wherever he is.’
‘What d’you mean, wherever?’
‘I mean that no one bloody knows. Young Mr Donn seems to be a night person. His Uncle Joe cast him out after the Myrtle incident, and he only goes to see his Mammy every so often. He’s not on the phone anywhere, and he doesn’t seem to have a known address.’
‘A real mystery man, this. Does no one know anything about him?’
‘His mother said something vague about him having interests in nightclubs. That could mean anything, though. Susie’s cousin; that’s another connection we have. Myrtle said that they were in the same racket. . and we know what that was.’
The Detective Inspector growled. ‘That gives me an excuse to lift the boy when he shows. Meantime I’ll run a PNC check; that might come up with something.’
‘But why, Oz?’ Susie moaned, her glass empty already. ‘Why should he pick on me?’
‘Maybe he’s still fighting what he sees as his Uncle Joe’s battle. Who knows? Listen, you haven’t had any letters since the last one, have you?’
‘No. Fingers crossed, they’ve dried up.’
‘Yes,’ Mike chipped in. ‘Let’s not get this out of proportion; it’s long odds that this is a crank thing and that the guy’s got bored with it, having caused a degree of alarm.’
‘And everything at work is normal?’
‘Too right, with the new office manager around.’
‘Ach, well. It’s probably all over, like you say. Prim and I have taken it as far as we can, that’s for sure.’
‘Yes,’ said Susie, ‘and thank you both very much. I’m grateful for everything you’ve found out. . and I mean everything.’
I opened another bottle of the fine Austrian; and then another. For most of the next three hours or so, Susie agonised over whether she should approach Joe Donn to bring their unorthodox connection into the open.
‘Wha’d’y’ think, Mike?’ she asked him over and over again. ‘Nothing, love,’ he replied consistently. ‘You have to work that one out for yourself.’
Finally, at around the twelfth time of asking, he slipped an arm round her waist and lifted her out of her seat. ‘I think, my dear,’ he announced at last, ‘that it’s time for you to go to bed.’
‘Yesh pleashe,’ she giggled. Night had fallen as we drank and talked. The moon shone down upon us, and the lights of Sauchiehall Street shone up at us.
‘Why don’t you crash out here?’ I suggested.
Dylan shot me a look. ‘If you think I’ve spent the last three hours drinking Strathmore and watching the Wee One get pished, only to decide to stay the night, you have another think coming, pal.’
So we saw them to the door and all the way down to the main entrance. Susie’s car was backed into one of our block’s visitor places, off-street and hidden from those entrepreneurs who make their living through dealing in expensive alloy wheels. The term ‘Hot Wheels’ has a different meaning in Glasgow.
We followed, watching with some amusement as Mike walked the love of his life down to the front door, then strode across to their car and slid behind the wheel, thinking that she was on his heels. But Susie had stayed put, saying her extended goodbye to us.
‘So sorry,’ she slurred, as she threw her arms around Prim’s neck, for support as much as affection. ‘So sorry. We’ve spent all fuckn’ night talkin’ ’bout me, ’n it sh’d have been your night all along. You two be happy now.’
I couldn’t help grinning as I looked across at Dylan, as he switched on the car’s ignition, then left the engine running as he jumped out and came across to retrieve his scooshed girlfriend.
He was halfway towards us, when the car exploded. There was no big bang as such, just a soft ‘crrummmp’ sound, followed by a fireball, and then another so violent that it threw all four of us off our feet, and so hot that it seemed to draw all the air from our lungs.
Chapter 13
By some miracle, none of us was seriously hurt. The only casualty was Mike’s red Lacoste wind-cheater, the back of which was melted by the heat.
No longer just a foursome, we sat upstairs in our apartment, with medics buzzing around us, fire officers asking us questions about the sequence of events, and uniformed policemen hanging around in the background.
Downstairs, in the car park, the sleek silver sports coupe in which Susie and Dylan had arrived was now a blackened skeleton, as was the vehicle next to it, a Mazda owned by a ground floor neighbour. Prim and I were lucky; our cars, a BMW Z3 and a Freelander, had been far enough away to escape the flames.
It would have been an exaggeration to say that the experience had sobered Susie, but it had quietened her, that’s for sure. She sat on our two-seater with her head on Mike’s shoulder, looking totally confused and whimpering quietly. The ambulance team had wanted to take her to the Royal, but she had panicked when they produced a wheelchair so, for the sake of peace and quiet, they had left her in Mike’s care.
None of us said much, not for a while. We just sat there, sipping black coffee, exchanging looks. It was as if we were waiting for something to happen. When it did, it came in the form of a middle-aged Chief Inspector and a slightly older man, a Divisional Fire Officer, both of them wearing the heavy uniforms and looking as if they owned the place, as they burst into our living room.