Unnatural Justice

Seventeen.

I've found that the older I get, the more I'm able to compartmentalise.

If I have worries or troubles, I can isolate them and put them in boxes, to be taken out and looked at every so often. Rest of the time, I show the world my smiley Oz face, the one that looks out from the billboards outside cinemas and moistens the underwear of ladies throughout the English-speaking world… or so a rather overenthusiastic Canadian reviewer wrote after my first Skinner movie.

Whenever the contents of these secret compartments, these emotional safe-deposit boxes, start battering to be let out, I have a routine for handling it. I go into the nearest gym and batter the hell out of myself; if you ever want to gauge how stressed out and worried I am, here's a handy tip. Squeeze my biceps: the harder they are the more there is going on in my head.

This relationship was actually news to me until Susie drew it to my attention. As I've said, she is the only person alive who can read me like the complex book I have become. It was a couple of weeks after Jay's 'family crisis', and well more than half-way through my break between movies when she asked me, one night as we were in our bathroom, getting ready for bed, "Are you worried about this next project of yours?"

I looked at her blankly as she removed her eye make-up; she had chosen an inappropriate moment, my Braun toothbrush not quite having finished its two-minute cycle. When I had, and when I'd completed my obligatory anti-plaque mouthwash… once a dentist's son, always a dentist's son … I said, "No. Not at all. What made you ask that?"

"You've been shifting a hell of a lot of weight lately."

"Uh?"

"You're never out of the gym. Every night I've come home from the office lately, you've been in that pool-house working out."

"I've got to be fit for Mathew's Tale' I reminded her. "It's a pretty arduous part."

"Oz, you are fit; the way you've been flogging yourself lately, anyone would think you're training to fight Mike Tyson. I'll bet Liam and Darius don't train as hard as you, and they're professional athletes.

So? What's on your mind?"

"Why should there be anything on my mind?"

"Because it's your classic behaviour pattern. You were like that when you came back from Spain, after that thing with the house out there, and the policeman, then when you came back from the States after Prim ran off with that guy, then when there was that problem on your first Skinner movie."

She was right, of course; it hadn't dawned on me until that moment, but she was right. I remembered one particular session in Edinburgh, when I had gone to the gym with Liam, and he had put me through hell, working all of the anxiety and aggression out of my system.

"Okay," I told her, finally, as I worked the truth out in my head, 'it's the aftermath of that letter-bomb incident. It's been getting to me. If you hadn't been at Bearsden that morning…"

"I'd have told Denise to go ahead and open all my mail."

That hadn't occurred to me at all. I felt a sudden flash of relief, followed by guilt at the thought of what might have happened to the secretary if the thing had flared up in her hands.

"Maybe, but the mere fact that it happened. Makes me angry, makes me anxious."

"But we've got security in place now, at the office and here, and there have been no more incidents. We thought the thing was a one-off at the time and that's the way it's been. The only effect was a wee slide in the share price when the story hit the Herald, but that's corrected itself. You know what the stock market's like. Most of these analysts have about as much logic in them as do bloody astrologers."

She made me smile, as the thought of "Smith and Jones, stockbrokers and fortune-tellers: tarot cards by appointment' ran through my mind. "I suppose. Okay, I promise, from now on, I'll only worry about the next movie, and about the impending arrival of our son." I looked down at her as she stood beside me, naked in front of her mirror. "Speaking of whom, dear, your profile is changing by the day."

"Don't I know it," she muttered. "This is going to be a big lad. I was nowhere near this size at this stage with Janet."

"You still look fantastic, though." It was true, she did.

What was not nearly so certain was the promise I'd just made. I'd said I'd stop worrying about the letter-bomb and its aftermath, but that was going to be a hell of a lot easier said than done.

As time passed, I'd thought about what Jay had said to me, about my actor's imagination. I had forced myself to think as he did. The police had looked into the disappearance of Joe's computer, but without success. However a check of his insured property had revealed that a Piaget watch and a valuable carriage clock were also missing. The supposition they had reached, as Tom Fallon had explained, was that the thefts had happened not before, but after Joe's death. This was far more likely, since the house had no alarm system, and since PC "Cash'

Money had admitted to CID colleagues that she might have left the kitchen window open after the house had been locked up on the day Joe's body had been found. Details of the watch and the clock, plus the serial number of the computer, had been circulated with no success at that point, but the underlying, unspoken message was that no way did the police see grounds for reconsidering the official verdict of accidental death.

The probability was clear. The attack on me at the premiere had been, we knew for sure, the work of Andrea Neiporte. The incendiary had to have been her also; the fact that her husband had worked in a university science lab and so had access to chemicals was a pretty damning pointer. Top that off with the fact that everything had been peaceful since Jay's trip to life.

No, it would not be easy to put all that out of my mind, for it sure as hell hadn't been until then. For the previous few days, I had been looking at the Courier website, the electronic version of the newspaper that covered Tayside and life. I had scrolled through every issue, looking for stories of missing couples, until, just the day before, I had found one. It wasn't much, not the sort that other papers were going to follow up on. All it said was that life police were looking for information on the whereabouts of a Pittenweem couple, Mr. and Mrs.

Walter Neiporte, after Mrs. Neiporte's mother had reported them missing. Subsequent checks had revealed that the couple had both been absent from work for several days. The police spokesman was quoted as saying that there was nothing to indicate suspicious circumstances, and that a number of bills remained unpaid, the implication being that the couple had done an old-fashioned moonlight.

But I knew they hadn't. I didn't know exactly what had happened to them, but I could guess it hadn't been peaceful. I knew also that I was responsible. As Jay had said, I hadn't given him any direct orders; that was his way of telling me that any unfortunate consequences, if they developed, would stop with him. There would be a cost, I supposed, but I was a rich man.

Except… Gerry Meek had been there when I had made a very specific threat in Susie's office, and he had heard it. If the police were to interview him… The plain fact of the matter was that I was more than a little anxious. I didn't give a monkey's dump about the Neiportes.

As I saw it they had tried to ruin my old man's life, and if their own had been trampled as a consequence, that was tough on them. I'm a believer in retribution, make no mistake.

Yet a mistake had been made, and I had made it, when I had allowed things to get out of my direct control. I had come up against bad people before, and on a couple of occasions I'd been forced to do something about them. In each situation, I'd asked myself one question: "What's the downside for Oz?" On each occasion the answer had been, "None', and I'd done what I'd considered to be right at the time.

This was different, though. I'd let someone else do my dirty work, and thus I'd put myself in his power. I trusted Jay, but my life was literally in his hands. And what a life. I looked at how much I had to lose: my career, my marriage, my children, and my wealth, not to mention my liberty for about half of my remaining life expectancy.

No wonder I was knocking ten bells out of my exercise equipment. No wonder my body looked and felt as though it had been carved out of marble. No wonder I had awakened, sweating and on the edge of panic, on each of the last several nights. No wonder the dark edifice of Barlinnie Prison loomed large in my thoughts.

No wonder I was beginning to look at Jay Yuille in an entirely different light. If he ever became a problem to be solved, I was damn certain that he was one I wouldn't delegate.