Blackstone's Pursuits Read Free

keeping some odd hours. They’ve been married for twelve years, and she could set her watch by him. But all of a sudden he started working late at the office on pretty much a nightly basis, and having to go off and see clients at the weekend.
    ‘Like any sensible wife she started to go through his pockets on the quiet, and found the usual. Ticket stubs for two at UCI, credit-card slips for hotel bills in Inverness when he was meant to be in London and so on. She fronted him up but he just told her she was being silly. Then one day she got home from the shops and there was a “Dear Joan” note on the kitchen table, telling her that he had met this wonderful girl called Dawn, and sorry as he was, that was it.
    ‘To cut it short, Mrs Archer told Mr Archer and he had Kane into his office. He confronted him with the sale order and told him the story about the Swiss account. Kane admitted the lot. He told him that he had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with your sister, and that he had come up with this daft scheme because he knew his wife would cut the nuts off him financially. His idea was to leave her to it and to shoot the craw with Dawn and the nine hundred thou.
    ‘Archer reckoned that he was completely off his trolley. He told him to bail out while he thought up Plan A, but to leave an address where he could be contacted, and a telephone number. He did. Yours.’
    Prim puffed up with indignation. ‘The cow! I let her use this place while I was away on the basis that I didn’t want any bloke’s shaving tackle in my bathroom.’
    ‘That’s the least of your worries. Those sheets of yours are definitely a goner, and I don’t think the mattress’ll be too clever either.’
    She wrinkled her nose. ‘Ugh! Thanks, Oz. I was trying not to think about that.’ Wrinkled or not, as noses go it was a right wee cracker. It set her brown eyes off a treat, and didn’t bully her perfect mouth either. I realised that I was beginning to feel myself again.
    ‘So what happened next?’ she asked. ‘What brought you here?’
    ‘Archer sent me. He called me as soon as Kane was out of the office. By that time he was shitting himself about the good name of the firm. You know what a village Edinburgh is. One whiff of the unsavoury and his client list would disappear like snow off a dyke in August. He’d decided that the only thing for it was to get that nearly million back into the client’s account and to spin him a line about crystallising capital gains for him, or some such stuff like that.
    ‘He told me to go and see Kane, to get both halves of the fiver from him, then to get my arse over to Switzerland with some close-mouthed helper, and bring back the lolly. He promised me a five per cent success fee. To spare you the mental arithmetic, that’s forty-five grand. For me, more than a year’s wages in one hit.
    ‘I phoned your number last night. A woman answered; I guessed it must have been Dawn. She put me on to Kane, I told him what the score was and he said “Yes sir, very good, sir. Come here at ten tomorrow morning, and I’ll give you the bank-note.” That’s us up to date.
    ‘I’ve never seen Kane, not even a photograph, but I’m assuming that’s him through there on your bed. Unless your sister’s lying under it in the same condition, then it looks as if you’re in for a family scandal.’ Her face twisted in pain, and I bit my tongue, to punish it for running away with itself, like always.
    ‘That’s your theory, Mr Detective, is it?’
    ‘Prim,’ I said, ‘I’m a private enquiry agent, not a detective. I interview witnesses in court cases for lawyers, and that sort of stuff. I was a policeman for six months, once upon a time, and I turned it in because I couldn’t stand the Clever Bastards in the CID, and the bullying sergeants in uniform who’d spent the best part of their service sitting on their brains.
    ‘But what I said there, I’m sorry, but it’s the first thing they’ll think. No,