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Chapter 35

‘Are you going to give me any argument about it now?’ I asked her. ‘Maybe you’re right; maybe I’m paranoid. But that doesn’t mean that they ain’t out to get me.’

Prim shook her head. ‘No,’ she acknowledged. ‘I give in. It is crazy, but you’ve got a stalker all right, Oz. Someone either knows your movements or is following you around; someone with a very sick mind too, to be targeting your friends and family.’

‘But not me,’ I pointed out. ‘Not me. Why?’

‘What about the London incident? That was aimed at you.’

‘The London incident doesn’t fit the pattern. That was a direct attack on me, with nothing subtle about it. Those guys were paid to ambush me and kick my fucking head in.’

I looked at her, as she sat there, slumped in her Dad’s armchair, back at Semple House It was almost midnight; Elanore was upstairs, having been given a very large brandy as a sedative, after finally cracking up completely at David’s bedside. By the time they finally let us see him, he was much calmer, but he was still dazed and confused, still rambling incoherent nonsense.

‘How’s it going, Dave?’ I had said as I sat beside him. He had gazed back at me solemnly, and replied, ‘Rosebud,’ pronouncing the word with great care, so gravely that I wouldn’t have been surprised if a snow-scene had fallen from his limp fingers.

As I had promised the aggressive consultant, I had indeed called the police. Two detective constables had come to the infirmary and had taken a statement from me. They had tried to interview Dave too.

‘Can you tell us what happened, Mr Phillips?’ the older DC had asked.

‘The cows are in the broccoli patch,’ the victim had replied.

‘Are they now. Maybe we’d better wait till tomorrow, and talk to you then.’

‘No, no!’ Dave had shouted. ‘They’ll have eaten all the fucking broccoli by then.’

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t help smiling at the memory as I looked at Prim. ‘If there’s a good side to this it’s that nobody’s been killed,’ I told her.

‘So far,’ she retorted. ‘But that’s more by accident than design. Colin could have broken his neck, Dad could have died, Mike and Susie almost did, and Noosh Turkel almost caught a bullet in the head. We’ve got to warn everyone close to us, Oz. They’re all in danger.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so; not unless I’m actually there with them. That’s been the pattern.’

‘Except in London. There you were the target.’

‘Yes, and I have to find out why.’ I frowned at her. ‘I have to do it on my own, too. I want you to stay here with your mother. Look after her, and after old David when he gets home. You’ll be safer here too; well away from me.’

‘But what about the business?’

‘You’ve been saying you reckon Lulu could run it on her own. I guess it’s time to find out if you’re right.’

Prim sat in silent thought for a minute or two. Finally, she nodded. ‘All right. Mum and Dad could use me here, that’s true. But what are you going to do?’

‘Well, tomorrow, I’m going back to Glasgow and I’m going to have a talk with Mike. After that I’m going to find those two guys in London.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘And how exactly are you going to do that?’ she asked.

At that moment, I didn’t have an answer for that one, so all I could do was smile at her. ‘Maybe I’ll hire a private detective,’ I said.

She didn’t see the funny side. ‘Maybe you should do just that. Maybe you should even do the same as Susie and hire a bodyguard.’

‘Honey, the way things have been happening I’m the only person who doesn’t need one. But maybe I should hire the whole bloody SAS and place them with all my family and friends.’

Prim screwed up her face, as she has a way of doing when something is really getting to her. ‘Oz,’ she said. ‘Think about this. Who hates you so much that they would do all those things? What man, or woman, has it in for you that badly?’

‘Forget women,’ I told her. ‘Assuming that Elanore doesn’t use deadly nightshade as a herb in her steak and kidney pudding, someone doctored your Dad’s drink in that bar — and there were no women in there, none at all.

‘Who could my enemy be? It’s a funny old world out there, love; the GWA programming pulls a big television audience. There are bound to be a few nutters among them. It could be that someone out there has taken a deep and pathological dislike to me.’

‘Hardly,’ she protested. ‘You’re only the bloody announcer, for Christ’s sake. This has to be someone with a more personal grudge.’

‘But who? I lived a very uneventful life until I met you. I didn’t upset people, and they didn’t upset me; I was just an ordinary twenty-something, enjoying himself. Since then, out of all the things that you and I have done together in the last three years, I can think of three people who might have reason to hate me. . and you know who I mean.

‘Of them, two are dead and the other one has to feed himself with a rubber spoon, when he isn’t whistling, “When I rule the world”, or just plain howling at the moon.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ Primavera countered, ‘I know who you mean. But there’s a man you’ve forgotten, isn’t there? Someone that you did think, once, was trying to get you — to get both of us, in fact. If you think about it, he has a far better reason to do you now than he had then.’

It had been a hard day; I had faced down my future mother-in-law and lived to tell the tale, then rushed her poisoned husband to hospital. After all that it was little wonder that my normally razor-sharp powers of deduction weren’t quite at their sharpest. Otherwise how could I have forgotten Ricky Ross? Once a high-flying detective with his eye on a Chief Constable’s uniform, knighthood and all the rest, his career had ended in disgrace, a turn of events for which he was inclined to blame Osbert Blackstone, Esquire, and no one else.

Still. .

‘Naw,’ I exclaimed. ‘I know he’s a nasty bastard, but he wouldn’t. .’

‘Not so long ago you were prepared to accept that he would. You and I travelled a thousand miles believing all the way that he was on our trail. He wasn’t then, but maybe he is now. Revenge is a dish best served cold, like they say.’

‘Naw,’ I repeated; but I knew she had a point. My known enemies currently at liberty made up a very short list: a list of one, in fact, and it was him.