‘No. And I didn’t ask him. Eventually he accepted what I was telling him, that the attack was linked to me rather than him.’
‘Wait a minute, though.’ Dylan paused to munch on a pakora. ‘If someone had broken into your man’s bedroom and caved his head in, why should that have been linked to you?’
‘Because a couple of years ago Liam and I had a very public falling out, in Newcastle. It was my first weekend with the GWA. He came on way too strong to Jan, I got the red mist and banjoed him.’
Dylan stared at me. ‘You thumped Matthews?’ he gasped.
‘Like I said, I didn’t think about it at the time. Fortunately Everett was there, and he stepped in. We’re all fine with each other now, but it was the talk of the town at the time.’
‘Sure, but that was two years ago.’
‘Which tells me that my evil-wisher knows a hell of a lot about me; maybe he’s been watching me for all that time. And what about the baseball bat?’ I added.
‘What about it?’
‘They were told to leave it there.’
‘So?’
‘So the police could put me in the frame for the job, eventually. If Liam had been done, they’d have been bound to search the hotel for a weapon. No way could they have proved I’d smuggled it out of the hotel in the middle of the night, especially if I hadn’t. But if they’d found it in Liam’s room. .
‘Later on, in the context of a string of charges against the mad serial killer Blackstone, the very fact that the bat and I were in the same hotel might have been enough.’
‘Not for the Crown Prosecution Service, surely.’
‘Oh no? Given my history with Liam? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we submit that Mr Blackstone, with a long memory for an old insult, had opportunity, access, and oh look, there’s the weapon. You tell me they wouldn’t have run with that.’
‘Maybe,’ Mike conceded. ‘They’d have given you some trouble over it, that’s for sure.’ He spooned some Lamb Madras on to his boiled rice. ‘So what’s the next move, maestro?’ he asked.
‘That’s the trouble, I don’t have one. This guy’s paralysed my life, man — or he’s trying to. I could make myself safe, I suppose, by hiring a bodyguard and hiding in my flat, but if I do that I might as well be in Perth nick.
‘There’s only one positive thing I can do: get back out there and try to smoke the bastard out. I’m off to Cardiff tonight with the GWA: I spoke to Everett before I came here and put him in the picture. I offered to pull out of the show, but you know the Big Man. He told me that chances are I’m imagining the whole thing, but that even if I’m not, there’s no way he’ll back off from any maternal fornicator. So it’s business as usual, but he’s going to treble security at the arena and in the hotel, just in case.
‘Then on Monday, I’m due in London to complete my stint on Miles’ movie. I called him as well, although Prim had already been in touch with Dawn. They have on-site security too, so there should be no risk there.’
Dylan nodded. ‘There’s not much else you can do. I’ll make sure that your folks, Ellen, Prim and her parents are all under police observation. How’s Mr Phillips, by the way?’
‘SuperDave? He’s recovering well. His brain was pretty fried by the atropine, but they don’t reckon there’ll be any lasting damage; they’re letting him home this afternoon. Prim’s staying up there for the weekend.’
‘Best place for her. When she gets back to Glasgow, tell her to travel everywhere by taxi. That car park of yours is vulnerable, as we all know too well.
‘Mind you, Oz,’ he continued, ‘my guess is that the man may have played himself out. If he’s watching you as closely as you think, he’ll know that you spent Tuesday with the police and that you were released. He’ll know as well that you’ve been to London with Matthews, and even if he didn’t follow you there, he’ll have guessed why.
‘So chances are, he’ll have worked out by now that you’ve rumbled his strategy.’
I liked his reasoning. ‘That’s good news, then.’
‘For your nearest and dearest, maybe; for you maybe not. This guy’s been prepared to kill or maim your relatives and friends just to make you suffer. He may not be inclined to walk away, simply because he can’t do that easily any more. He may decide instead to finish it all with a direct attack on you.
‘So I would watch it, Oz. I’d be very careful. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to hire that bodyguard.’
Having cheered me up for a second, he’d dropped me right back in it. I waited until he was chewing on his next mouthful of our shared Madras, before I said, ‘Don’t you think I should hire a food taster as well?’
Chapter 41
I really did think about hiring that minder; but eventually I decided that since the most vulnerable part of my weekend was going to be the time I spent standing in the middle of a Welsh wrestling ring in front of thousands of spectators, he wouldn’t have been much good to me when it really mattered.
So partly for that reason, partly out of pride, and partly because, despite the lottery cash and all the other money in which I was wallowing, I was at heart still a parsimonious Fifer, I decided that I would do without close personal protection.
I met the GWA crowd as usual that afternoon, having first called my Dad to explain to him what I believed had been happening, and having phoned Noosh Turkel, to tell her — without going into too much detail — that the chances were that the Russian Mafia did not, in fact, have a price on her head.
Understandably, Liam was still slightly worked up by our discovery that he had been the original target of the bungling brothers. To reassure him, I called Dylan and persuaded him to check to confirm that there was no Irish intelligence to suggest that he was on anyone’s hit list.
I can’t deny that I was nervous as the lights went up for our live Saturday show in the Cardiff National Arena. There I was, in a red tuxedo no less, standing in mid-ring booming out my usual welcome to GWA Battleground, to a crowd which for all I knew might have included a crack shot with a sniper’s rifle. I was out of there as fast as I could; I hoped that the punters wouldn’t notice, but Everett did.
As I settled back into my ringside seat, I heard his voice in my earpiece, from his position up in the production tower. ‘Buddy,’ he said. ‘I told you I didn’t mind if you did your announcements from ringside rather than up there in full view. But if you’re gonna do it like usual, you do it like usual; you don’t bolt out of there like the Roadrunner with Wiley E Coyote on his ass.’
I glanced up into the gloom, in his general direction, and nodded.
As it turned out, no one shot me, or blew me up or anything else. After the show, Liam walked me out to the bus and, back at the hotel, he insisted on sharing a room with me. All through the weekend I kept in touch with Prim, Ellie and my Dad, but I was reassured. None of them had seen anything unusual. Back at Auchterarder, David was recovering well from his poisoning. He was quiet, and not a little embarrassed. ‘I offered to take him for a pint,’ Prim told me. ‘You should have seen the look on his face.’
‘Ask him if he’s started on his new range of models yet.’
I didn’t fly back to Glasgow with the team on Sunday. Instead I caught a train to London where I was met by Miles’ and Dawn’s assistant, Geraldine Baker. It’s no myth; movie stars, when they’re working, really do have people to do everything but think for them — although, in the case of one or two who come to mind, thinking is virtually the only thing they’re not capable of handling personally.
She wasn’t alone; waiting with her on the platform as I jumped out of the train was a slim dark-haired bloke, a newcomer to the team. ‘Hello Oz,’ she greeted me. ‘This is Mark Kravitz, he’s just joined the production team. Come on, the car’s just outside.’
The studio scenes of our movie were being shot on a massive sound stage just south of London, in Surrey. For the duration, Miles and Dawn had rented another mansion, this time near Farnham. It wasn’t quite as big as the one on Deeside, but it was pretty tasty nonetheless. It was big enough to accommodate them plus, from the cast, Scott Steele, Nelson Reed, who played the bad guy, and me, plus Frank Gilet, the director of photography, Weir Dobbs, the assistant director, Kiki Eldon, the PR lady and Geraldine. Some of the grafters on the production crew were accommodated in hotels close to the studio, but most, I gathered, could commute from London.