Poisoned Cherries

Chapter 38

The wardrobe mistress gave me a brown leather jerkin for my first scene; it fitted pretty well. As far as I’d been able to tell from the book, Andy Martin rarely wore anything else. She handed me a pair of black Levi’s as well; they were my size and had been washed several times to give them a worn look. I tried to tell her that the pair I was wearing would do fine, but she pointed out that a middle-ranking Edinburgh detective would be unlikely to turn up at a murder scene wearing Gucci.

The production trailers, great articulated things, stretched halfway up Cockburn Street; two of them were split into reasonably spacious dressing rooms. I had my own on this project; a first for me, since I’d had to share with other cast members before. As Miles had promised, there were no stars on any of the doors, only our names.

Make-up didn’t take too long; all they had to do with me was to damp down what was left of my California tan, and replace it with a more authentic Edinburgh pallor. I’ll never like wearing slap, but it’s a small sacrifice for the money, and the stuff they use now is non-allergenic, unlike the make-up Jan and I wore in our drama club days, which brought me out in spots. . or maybe that was just my age.

By the time we were ready, so was the crew. Miles led Ewan, Dawn and me back up the Close. The truncated dummy and the scary false head were in place, and pretty soon, so were we. The first shot was Ewan, in his Skinner coat, steel-grey hair tousled, expression grim; the camera focused tight on his eyes, then panned out, to take in the rest of the scene. I was crouching by the side of the body, and Dawn was a few feet away.

The first line of the movie was down to me, as I stood to greet him, a tired-sounding, ‘Morning, boss.’ It was hardly deathless prose, but I did it in one take. That was it; Miles called ‘Cut’, as directors do, and we moved on to scene two.

As we’d been warned, most of the time was taken up by changing the camera positions; we had a lot of standing around to do, but we did it patiently. Ewan turned out to be a football fan, or at least a Falkirk supporter, the poor sad bastard. He lamented his club’s weekend defeat, and its continuing failure to build itself a ground worthy of the name.

‘Why don’t you build it for them?’ I suggested.

He raised an eyebrow, creasing his make-up. ‘Not all followers of the Bairns are completely stupid,’ he replied.

Eventually, around mid-morning, Miles called a refreshment break. The weather was holding up, so there were no continuity worries on that score. I stopped in at the canteen truck, picked up a mug of coffee and a couple of BLT rolls, loaded them on to a tray, and headed back to my dressing room. . if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Awkwardly, I unlocked the door with my left hand, stepped up and inside and let it swing shut behind me, then went to set the tray down on the table, against the wall.

I only saw the thing because of the mirror, and even then, it only caught a corner of my eye. I couldn’t see what it was, but it hadn’t been there earlier, of that I was sure. At first I thought it was a leaflet, but when I slid the tray to one side, I saw that it was a photograph, an A4 computer printout, lying face up on the table-top.

I picked it up and looked at it, and as I did I felt the blood racing to my head. It was a picture of Susie, and me, pushing Janet in her pram, taken, I guessed from the steps of the Kelvingrove Museum, as we approached the Kelvin Hall.

It was my turn to go ballistic. I jerked the door open again and yelled out into Cockburn Street. ‘Ricky!’

It was Mandy who responded; she jumped out of the canteen wagon and ran up the hill. ‘He’s gone back to his office, Oz,’ she said, barely out of breath. ‘What is it?’

‘What sort of a fucking operation is this?’ I snarled at her. Dawn’s dressing-room door opened as I spoke and she looked out, puzzled and curious. I grabbed Mandy by the arm and hauled her inside.

I waved the photo in her face. ‘Someone’s been in here,’ I told her, making a conscious effort not to shout. ‘He’s left me a calling card. You people are supposed to be trying to trace this guy, you’re all over here, and yet he walked into this closed street, broke into my locked room and left this, and nobody stopped him.’

‘Oz, I’m sorry,’ she said, her face as pale as mine in my make-up. ‘I don’t know anything about this. What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to interrogate everyone on this crew, and I mean everyone, until you find someone who saw this guy getting in here. Then I want you to circulate his description to every one of your people. Then I want you to find the bastard and bring him to me, so that I can find out what his fucking problem is with me and my family.

‘And while you’re at it, you tell that boss of yours that if this is how he protects me, then I’m starting to get seriously worried about Alison.’

I shoved the picture into her hand and stepped into the street to cool down. Miles was waiting outside. ‘What’s the problem, mate?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a stalker,’ I replied, then told him the whole story. His face grew more and more serious as I spoke. Through my still-open door I could hear Mandy on the phone to her boss.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, eventually in that quiet, dangerous tone he has. ‘We’ll find this guy, even if I have to bring in Mark Kravitz to do it.’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go down to the canteen truck and chill out.’

I followed him down the street and climbed up the steps that led into our travelling canteen. When he got to the top, he stopped in his tracks, and I heard him gasp. I stepped up beside him, and gasped just as he had. Facing us was my soon-to-be-ex-wife Primavera, and her new lover, Nicky Johnson.

‘Hi,’ she said, without a trace of uncertainty. ‘We’re passing through, on the way to Auchterarder for Nick to meet Mum and Dad.’

‘Yeah,’ said the former hot-dog vendor, with a greasy smile. ‘I couldn’t be here and not call in to wish you luck with the new movie.’

I’d never actually met the man before; I’d heard of him, seen a couple of his movies, and we’d spoken that one time, but I’d never encountered him in Los Angeles. I knew right there and then that if I had I wouldn’t have liked him, whatever the circumstances. As it was, given what had just happened in my dressing room, he couldn’t have picked a worse moment to introduce himself.

I took a pace towards him, winding up the great big left hook that I’ve honed to perfection on the heavy punching bag, and with the serious intention of knocking his head clean off his shoulders. Then I felt Miles grip my arm, hard. ‘No!’ he shouted, stopping me in mid-stride. Nicky and the catering staff all sighed with relief; especially Nicky, who had gone pale all of a sudden.

What happened next was just a blur. Miles took half a pace forward and hit Prim’s new stud with the fastest right-hander I have ever seen in my life. Johnson’s quite a beefy bloke, but still the force of the punch spun him half round and lifted him right up on his toes. He held that position for a second, almost like a footballer going up for a header, then pitched forward, face down, raising a small cloud of dust from the floor as he landed.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Miles, over his shoulder. ‘I know the son-of-a-bitch was trying to rub your nose in it, but I couldn’t let you hit him. If you’d broken your hand, the delay while it healed would have cost us a fucking fortune.’