Unnatural Justice

Fourteen.

After I thought about it some more, though, I didn't buy into the lawyer's suggestion. There was no threat to the Gantry Group: we were major employers and well up there among the business flavours of the month. On the other hand, there had been a threat to my Dad, a physical attack of sorts against Susie and me, and we knew who was behind both of them.

I did give a moment's thought to calling Jay on his mobile and telling him to go easy on the Neiportes, but I decided to let him get on with it. I didn't know what he was going to do, but I guessed that it would be along the lines of my own call on Walter, only a bit more scary. We hadn't discussed what to do if our bluff was called, but I had worked it out for myself. I was going to pay them, but I was going to set it up so that the exchange was filmed, and so that it was made very clear that it was an extortion payment.

I half-expected Jay to be back before we left for Mother well. He wasn't, but I gave it no thought. Susie had come home for lunch with me and our daughter, now a fully enrolled and indoctrinated pupil at the Daybreak Nursery, and loving every minute of it.

When we left for Mother well, with Susie at the wheel this time, we took a more direct route, crossing the lonely Erskine Bridge to avoid the west of Glasgow, then picking up the M8 and heading for Edinburgh, although we wouldn't get anywhere near it.

The Kingston Bridge was busy, as it always is during the working day, but at least the traffic was moving, albeit slowly. As we rolled across, I found myself glancing up towards the skyline on my left, to the distinctive building where Susie and I had lived. Prim and I had lived there too, for a while, and before that, Jan and I had died there … or at least she had, although part of me, maybe the good part, had gone with her. Now that I had cut that place from my life, I realised how badly I had needed to do it, but that something had held me back for too long. Closure is a word used by many people who don't really know what it means. I only came to understand myself, when I turned my back on that cursed place.

I gazed up at the familiar floor to ceiling windows that looked down on me and the rest of the city centre. As we came as close as we would, before the bridge dipped down and took us out of its sight, I could just make out the figure of a man standing where I had stood so often, looking down as I had done. For all I knew he could have been looking at Susie and me. I had no idea who he was, whether he was a good or a bad man, a happy or a sad man, and as I looked up at him, tiny in the distance, I realised that I didn't give a fuck, either.

We rolled on under the Charing Cross fly over when we emerged into the daylight on the other side, the traffic, as it always does there began, to pick up speed. By the time we passed the great forbidding bulk of Barlinnie Prison, one of the most famous divisions of what is known to some as the Windsor Hotel Group, we were pushing the limit.

Ewan Maltbie's office junior was waiting for us when we arrived at Crawford Street. She said that she'd been told to wait with us and lock up after we were done, but I wasn't having that. I told her that we'd lock up and drop the keys off. She left, a little doubtfully, but the proud possessor of an Oz Blackstone autograph, which I'd scrawled on the back of a photo she'd brought with her.

I could tell right away that Susie felt strange to be alone… husbands don't count as company… in her father's house, for the first time in her life. "Do you really want any of the furniture, Oz?" she asked.

"I don't give a toss," I replied, honestly. "If you see anything you'd like, make a note and we'll buy it from the estate, but to be truthful, I said we'd come simply because I thought it was something you'd want to do."

She smiled up at me. "You're a big softie, you know: but you were right. Even though there's nothing here I'm going to want, other than the crystal Joe left me, it's something I needed to do. It's important that I feel like someone's daughter. Understand?"

"Sure. You take a wander around, and I'll go and look for Joe's computer." As I walked into the living room, I noticed that the display cabinets that had housed the crystal were empty, and that two big tea-chests marked 'fragile' stood in the middle of the room. Two golf bags, their hoods zipped up, lay on the floor beside them; our legacies, Susie's and mine, from father and father-in-law.

But no computer. There was a table under the window that looked out in to the back garden, but there was nothing on it. I thought back to the last time I'd been in the house, before Joe's death. No, it hadn't been there then either. Somewhere else, then. "Phone lines, Osbert,"

I said to myself. lIt must be near a phone point for the modem."

There was a phone in the hall. An extension lead ran from the jack point. I followed it upstairs to Joe's bedroom, where a phone sat on the bedside table. Another cable, a DIY effort this time, ran from that point. I traced it round the skirting and back to the door, but there it disappeared under the carpet. I went out to the landing and looked around, but I saw no wire resurface. I opened the nearest door, but that was the bathroom, so I tried the one next to it. Sure enough, just inside that door, the phone cable ran up the skirting and along the top, loosely, for Joe had been stingy with the staples.

No doubt the room had once been a bed-chamber, but its single-man owner had transformed it into a study. One wall was lined with shelving, there was a television set in one corner, with a video beneath, and beside the window, where the phone cable ended, there was a desk with a swivel chair. On the desk there was a phone handset… but no computer. "Don't tell me he used an internet cafe for his e-mails," I whispered to myself. But then I looked at the box where the cable terminated.

It was fitted with an adaptor, turning one output into two. One of the sockets held the plug for the desk phone, but the other was vacant.

The desk had deep drawers on one side, and a cabinet in the other. I opened each in turn, expecting to find a laptop, but all I saw were personal files, assorted stationery items and a collection of movies on video. I looked at the titles: Joe had been a closet Clint Eastwood fan, it seemed.

Still, though, there was no computer. I reckoned that my internet cafe notion must have been right, for all the double socket, and I was about to give up, when my eye was caught by a cardboard container on the lowest of the bookshelves; it was open on one side and I could see the spines of the volumes that it held. I picked it up and shook them out into my hand. They were all soft-covered; one was a registration book for Windows 2000, another was a manual for Microsoft Word, and the third was the owner's handbook for a seriously powerful Shoei laptop, complete with a fifteen-inch LCD screen and the fastest Pentium processor on the market.

I opened every drawer in that room again. I went back into Joe's bedroom and searched it, not once, but twice. Finally I went back downstairs and opened every drawer and cupboard there. Susie came in from the garden as I was going through the sideboard. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Looking for Joe's computer."

"Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he didn't have one after all."

"He had this." I showed her the manual.

"Someone's had it away then," she pronounced. "Someone who's been in the house since Joe died." She paused. "Unless he lent it to someone."

"Get real, love. Would you lend anyone a two thousand quid computer?"

"I suppose not. But maybe he did. You just never know."

I did know something, though. I knew that Ewan Maltbie's throwaway line about a connection between Joe's death and the fire at the office might not have been as far-fetched as I had thought.