Poisoned Cherries

Chapter 2

I made a show of thinking over Miles’s offer of the Edinburgh part; I was even pretentious enough to ask to look at the script. Because of my grief, he humoured me, and I spent a few days at Malibu reading it between teleconferences with Greg McPhillips, my lawyer in Scotland, and meetings with Roscoe Brown, my brand new Hollywood agent.

I briefed Greg to draw up a legal separation from Prim, and a property settlement that was fair to us both, yet left me well fixed financially. He was gob-smacked when I told him, of course; he’d known us both when we lived in Glasgow and had played a significant part in our interesting lives. His shock didn’t stop him giving me some pretty sharp advice, though, and promising me his personal loyalty in the event that my ex decided to cut up rough. I knew quite a bit about Greg’s practice, having worked for him in the past, and I reckoned that I was on my way to becoming his biggest private client.

Roscoe Brown was positive too. Miles sent him along to see me the day after Prim dropped her bombshell. He was a young black guy, and he was offered to me as the coming player in the game. I figured out why, straight away; the reek of sharpness coming from him was as strong as his Eau Sauvage. I wasn’t sure who was interviewing who. . sorry, whom. . at our first meeting, but whatever the truth of it was, we both passed.

It took him three days to make me realise that I didn’t have to go back to Scotland. He came back to see me on the following Tuesday with offers of parts in three different projects, two of them to be shot in the States and the third back in Canada, in Vancouver this time.

He also brought with him an offer of a voice-over in a golf ball ad. I admit that I went a bit Hollywood when he tabled that one; I thought it was a step back down the ladder, until he showed me the money on offer. It was enough to change my mind. ‘If it’s good enough for Jack Nicholson,’ I told him, ‘it’s good enough for me.’

When it came to choosing a movie, Roscoe was all for me staying in the States. He told me what I knew already, that sooner or later I had to cut the string that tried me to Miles. I heard him out but I decided that it would be later. I would take the Vancouver movie, I said, but first, since the schedules allowed it, I was going back home to shoot Miles’s cop flick.

What I didn’t tell him, or anyone else. . least of all Dawn and Miles. . was that I had another reason for going back to Scotland.

I had a promise to keep.