‘Have you got the message?’
‘No, he’ll have stored that on his own terminal; it’s been wiped from Hotmail. His log’s there, though, and it shows the time of transmission and collection. You don’t have to be a computer genius to work out what it said, though. “Dear son, Why is this man Blackstone and his girlfriend asking after you, and why did you nick all your photos from my house and from your Uncle Joe’s?” Or words to that effect.’
‘Do we know where he was when he collected it?’
‘No, it couldn’t tell me that.’
‘Still,’ I said, ‘now you can monitor his e-mail traffic, wherever he is.’
Dylan shook his head, even as he ripped a chunk off one of his rolls. ‘Not exactly,’ he replied, when he could. ‘I’ll have left a trace on the log this morning myself. If I go in regularly, he’ll twig for sure. Even doing it just once, there’s a chance he’ll notice the entry and know from the time that it wasn’t him. If he does that, then straight away he’ll change the password to something we’ll never guess.’
I had to agree with this. Finding the mailbox was a bonus, but it wasn’t going to unlock the secrets of Stephen Donn’s world, or even tell us where he was.
‘So, Oz,’ Mike asked, once we had finished breakfast, ‘what’s your interest in all this?’
He was so chuffed with himself over his computer trickery that he’d missed the bloody obvious.
‘Remember the naked lady I mentioned earlier? The one I found in my bath? As the Sunday tabloids say, I declined her offer and left — well actually I told her to bugger off. When those two hard men showed up twenty-four hours later I assumed straight away that she or her husband was connected to it.
‘But suppose, just suppose, Stephen Donn was sufficiently annoyed by his mother’s message to want to put me out of business for a while. Even if he was in Amsterdam he’d have had time to get over to London, source some hired muscle and put it on my trail.’
‘Why should he even know about you?’ Mike protested.
‘For openers, my surname must be familiar to him; Jan worked at Gantry’s before him, remember. Also he blew up Susie’s motor in my car park. If he’s been stalking her, there’s every chance he knows me and how I relate to her.’
‘But how would he know where to find you?’
‘Anyone who’s watched the GWA in the last couple of years knows I’m part of their set-up. Anyone who’s watched satellite sports promotions in the last month would have known I was due in London last weekend. Anyone who can read a newspaper could have known I’m in Miles’s movie, as did the person who hired those gorillas. They said that my pulling out of the film was to be the trigger for the second half of the payment for the job.
‘I tell you, mate, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Stephen Donn put me on the spot, rather than Richard Barowitz or his wife.’
‘So where are these heavies now? Have the police got them?’
‘No, they were a bit damaged, so we let them go. The GWA doesn’t need that sort of publicity.’
‘Great! That’s another possible lead to Donn gone down the pan. This guy’s trying to kill my girlfriend, Oz. You have a couple of guys who might have met him and you let them swan off into the bloody night!’
His sudden show of irritation took me by surprise, but I had to admit that it was justified. ‘I’m sorry man,’ I said. ‘The Donn connection didn’t occur to me at the time.’ Then I had an afterthought. ‘You could always check the hospitals. One of them had damage to his throat and a lacerated tongue, and the other had a broken forearm, or wrist.
‘Even if you do find them, though, you won’t get much of a description out of them. All they could tell us was that the bloke who paid them was ordinary looking and that he wore Raybans.’
‘Fuck the description. The next time Donn sees you on telly and realises that you’re in one piece, he might go looking for his money back. If he does that I’d like to have some people of my own there to meet him, as well as your two damaged Cockney pals.’
Chapter 25
Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t too bothered about the London episode being repeated. If Stephen Donn had sent me a message, effectively it had been received, since Prim and I were no longer involved in the search for him, and wouldn’t be visiting either his uncle or his mother again. If Richard Barowitz had been behind it — well, I’d already decided that I wouldn’t be doing any more voice-overs for Roxy Matrix and their alternative bloody humanoids.
Happily, my schedule for the rest of the week was so busy that I was able to forget all about the London experience. The Edinburgh voice-over was a piece of cake — literally; it was an ad for a Scots bakery chain — but my two days on Deeside introduced me to some new aspects of movie-making.
Miles had said that my scenes would be simple, and he was good as his word. The most difficult thing I had to do was to walk in on an argument between him and Dawn, and deliver the deathless line, ‘Hey, leave me out of this!’ — with style, mind you. All the same, it was fascinating to watch, in another setting, the care and precision with which the operation was run. There were close-ups, two-shots, three-shots, and the positioning and backgrounds had to be right for every one of them.
The mansion was even bigger than I had expected, with a long, south-facing drawing room which was big enough to accommodate actors, production crew and equipment; a major cost saver as opposed to replicating it on a set, Miles assured me.
My first three-way scene took up a whole day; Miles and Dawn had always struck me as a happy relaxed couple, but there, in the office as it were, sparks flew all day as he fought for perfection in the scene. They were meant to be arguing on screen, but there were moments off-camera when I wondered if they were keeping it up simply to preserve the mood, or were really going at it.
I had a room in the house for the three nights I was up there. At the end of that difficult, but ultimately rewarding, day’s shooting, Dawn went off for a bath while Miles and I sloped off to the study for a soothing gin and tonic. ‘I didn’t realise you could be such a bastard on set,’ I told him, settling back into a big, over-stuffed armchair. ‘If I talked to Prim like that I’d have the imprint of her engagement ring in the middle of my forehead.’
‘I’m a perfectionist, mate,’ he said, his accent becoming noticeably more Aussie, as it always did in private. ‘I direct most of my own movies because I’m lousy at taking direction myself. I could name half-a-dozen people in Hollywood — and you’d know them all — who won’t work with me. If I see something that I know would make a movie better, then I tell them; most LA egos can’t take that.
‘Dawn’s made the same way. She has her own ideas and won’t keep them to herself; that’s why I fell for her in the first place. When she was cast in Kidnapped, she had only a tiny little part, no more than a week’s work. Yet on her second day on set when I was laying down the way I wanted the scene played she said in her little Scots voice, “Excuse me, but don’t you think it would be better if. .”
‘If she wasn’t so fucking gorgeous I might have fired her there and then — my ego’s as well-developed as any of those guys I mentioned. Instead, I thought about what she had said, and took part of it on board. We never looked back from that moment on; now when we work together I know that she’s going to say what she thinks. I might not always agree with it, and when I don’t we go at it hammer and tongs, yet at the end of the day she makes me a better director and I make her a better actor.’
He grinned as he got up to mix us two more G and Ts. ‘If it didn’t work that way we’d have gone the way of most movie couples long ago. As it is, we’ll last for ever. She doesn’t know this — don’t you tell her, either — but when this project is wrapped up, the director credits will be Miles Grayson and Dawn Phillips.’