Poisoned Cherries

Chapter 50

It had been a while since I had drunk Eighty at all, let alone shifting three pints of the stuff in under an hour, so my brain was even fuzzier than it had been after the Oxford when I got back to the apartment and pushed the entry button.

‘Whozzat?’ Liam asked, through the speaker.

‘Santa Fucking Claus.’

‘You can come in down the chimney, then.’ But he pushed the button, anyway; just as well, by that time my bladder was feeling the pressure.

He gave me an appraising look when I re-emerged from the bathroom. ‘Where the hell have you been then?’ he enquired. It’s a funny thing about mates, is it not; when you share a flat with them, they can be worse than wives in some ways.

‘Thinking,’ I told him.

‘Thinking about how fast you can get to the bottom of the glass?’

‘That, among other things. Come on, superstar of wrestling, let’s go get that Chinese.’

We grabbed a cab on the hill outside; by chance, it was the legendary white taxi, the one with the tartan-lined interior, and Jock and Roll music playing from the moment you step in until the moment you close the door behind you. It is to Edinburghers what the great white buffalo is to Native Americans. There is a theory that the driver is long dead, and that it is but his shade that cruises the city streets bringing eternal delight to tourists. Whatever the truth of it, he took us straight to the Kwei Linn.

The crispy duck was as I remembered it from a few years back, and so was the chicken in black bean sauce. We walloped them down, with a beef dish and a mild prawn curry. I stuck to fizzy water. . Okay, I admit it. We shared a bottle of Lambrusco, but it’s much the same. . and by the time we got to the coffee stage, I could see clearly again.

‘You back in the land of the fully conscious, then?’ Liam asked. I nodded.

‘Where did you go tonight?’ He was still doing the ‘pal as old woman’ routine. It’s instinctive with blokes; we can’t help it.

‘I had to meet someone.’

‘Male or female?’

‘Male. Someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.’

‘Let me guess. You found the guy who’s been stalking you.’

‘No. I let him find me.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. We had a talk and he’s gone.’

He frowned. ‘Oz, you didn’t hurt him, did you?’

I laughed, quietly. ‘Nah. All that communing with my peaceful side’s done me good. I only hit him once, and not very hard at that.’

‘So what did he want?’

‘He only wanted to say hello. He came a long way to do it, and had a funny way of working up to it, but he got to it eventually.’

‘You sure that’s it?’

‘Absolutely. We won’t see him again.’

He looked at me for a while, then grinned. ‘Thanks for helping me out this afternoon. I was having trouble until you came up with that suggestion. You got any more tips for the bedroom scene with the lady detective sergeant?’

‘Yeah. All the time, as she’s getting her togs off, keep a picture of Tony Blair in your mind. No way can you think of him and still get a hard-on.’

Liam laughed out loud. A quartet of women, who’d recognised us when we came in, looked back in our direction. ‘That’s quite an occupational hazard, when you think about it. In my game, you worry about your knees, or your back, or springing a rib cartilage. It’s odd to think of getting a boner as a workplace accident.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, leaning back in my chair so the women across the restaurant could hear. ‘Like I said, there’s the stuff they put in your tea as well. It hardly has any after-effects.’

He gasped, and held the pose. . long enough for the girls at the other table to latch on to his surprise. A natural actor, indeed.

We got talking to them after that; it turned out that they were a hen party, from the Standard Life office in Lothian Road. One of them, a pretty brunette called Serena, was being married on the following Saturday. Funnily enough, she was the one who made the biggest eyes at Liam. . so, why should women be any different from men? A couple of years before, he’d have been right in there, but since he found his air stewardess, he’s flown straight as an arrow.

The taxi that picked us up was one of the ordinary black kind. . or it would have been if it hadn’t been painted like a mobile phone. It dropped us back at the Mound at around eleven-thirty. There’s a pub beside the door to the apartment block. We thought about going in, but were hit by a double blast of self-discipline, being due on set at eight-thirty next morning. Plus, I reckoned that if I had any more to drink I might start to think of Dylan again, and I didn’t want to do that.

So instead, we went straight up to the penthouse, where I got myself a bottle of still water from the fridge and headed straight for bed, I was almost ready to crash, when my eye was caught by something on the dressing table. At first I thought it was a postcard, or a piece of junk mail. . that stuff gets everywhere. . until I realised it was Susie’s menu, the one she’d had signed the night before by everyone at the table, bar me.

‘Daft bat.’ I smiled as I picked it up. ‘Forget your head next.’ I glanced at the signatures on the white card. ‘Miles Grayson’, clear and confident; ‘Dawn Phillips’, scrawled and spidery, but legible; ‘Margaret Capperauld’, traditional primary-school style, joined-up writing; ‘Liam Matthews’, as quirky and flamboyant as the man himself; and one other.

I couldn’t read it; not a snowball’s chance in hell of that. It didn’t look like a signature at all; more like an ECG printout. It was more than familiar, though; it was an exact match of the unidentified scrawl in Anna Chin’s notebook. And now, by a simple process of elimination, I knew that it was the autograph of Ewan Capperauld.

All of a sudden I wasn’t tired any more. All of a sudden I didn’t care what time it was. I grabbed the bedside telephone, found Ricky Ross’s home number from his business card, and called him.

‘Oz,’ he moaned. He sounded slightly breathless. ‘Do you know what fucking. .’

‘No, but I can guess who. This is your lucky bastard calling. I need to see you, now.’

‘So come out to my place.’

‘I’ve had a drink; you come here. And bring Anna’s autograph book with you.’

‘But what about Alison? I can’t leave her.’

‘Bring her. There’s a fair chance we might need her anyway.’