Blackstone's Pursuits by Quintin Jardine

tried to tell her that part of the story as casually as I could, but that’s a trick I’ve never mastered. I tried to hide it with a swallow of Old Throgmorton’s, but Prim saw through me. She touched my cheek, lightly. ‘Poor thing,’ she said.
    ‘Who? Me or my Mum?’
    ‘All of you. It must have been dreadful for your Dad.’
    ‘Yeah, it was. He was chewed up with guilt. He saw her through to the end, and then he started on a course of serious therapeutic drinking. He’d always liked a bevvy - as I said, he’s a dentist — but this was something he was doing as a punishment. Ellen was at home at the time, I was at university. Eventually she called me about it.
    ‘I went up to Anstruther for a weekend, and watched him at it. He did his regular Saturday morning surgery, as usual, then started into the Bacardi and Coke for lunch. After a while I
    sat him down at the table and I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Dad, this has got to stop. That Coke is murder on the teeth.’ He looked at me and he laughed. Then he began to cry. He cried all day, and all through Sunday. Monday was a holiday, so he and I played golf. Then we went to the cemetery and said hello to Mum. We both sensed the same thing, that she was pleased to see us. He was all right after that. We visit each other a lot now. He comes down here, I go up to Anstruther. He sees a bit of Jan’s mother. She teaches in the same school my Mum did. She’s divorced and they live near each other.
    ‘Ellen’s my sister, by the way. She’s three years older than me. She’s nice, our Ellen, but she’s married to a real chuckie. He’s in Marketing with an oil company. They moved out to France last year. He works in Lyon, and they live a bit outside it, quite close to the Swiss border. It’s funny, when we were kids I thought Ellen was a real tough cookie. No, scratch that, Ellen was a real tough cookie. Now she’s a housewife, with a teaching qualification and no job, waiting on her man and, as far as I can gather being ignored by him most of the time.’
    I looked at her. ‘Bored?’
    ‘No, fascinated. Go on.’
    I sloshed some more of the old T down my neck. ‘Where was I? Grew up in Anstruther, played for the school team, kept myself physically intact by being the fastest thing on two feet in the whole school. Buggery was a playground sport in our place, but none of the guys with low foreheads and trailing knuckles could catch me!
    ‘I left school at eighteen and came to Edinburgh to do an Arts degree. I’ve been here ever since. I came out with a two-two in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I had dreams of getting a job as a researcher for the Labour Party, but I discovered that those jobs were filled by firsts or two-ones, and more often than not by Americans. I also discovered that my Mum’s death had left me feeling that politics isn’t worth a monkey’s anyway. So I joined the police.
    ‘I hated it from Day One, but after I’d been in a few months, I met a pal from university. He was working for an Investigation Agency, and he said that they’d a vacancy. So I hung up my truncheon and went to work for them.’
    ‘I thought you were self-employed?’
    I tilted my head back and sent the last of the Old Throggies on the start of the long journey to the sea. ‘I am. The guys we worked for were a pair of real rat bastards. They were ex-RAF Military Policemen, and they’d taken their talents for persecution into the private sector. They came from the time when there were big bucks to be made from matrimonial work, and they were never happier than when they were photographing a misbehaving couple on the job, or pounding on hotel room doors, shouting “Come out, come out, the game’s a bogey!” I could see that these plonkers were living in the past, and I couldn’t see why they should be doing so on the strength of our honest toil.
    ‘So I hung in there for a year, until the clients got to know me. Then my pal Jimmy and I went round them all,