Dangerous Pursuits

by Quintin Jardine

Genres: General Fiction; City Life; Hard-Boiled; Private Investigators; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

DANGEROUS PURSUITS: The Deluxe Edition. Enjoy the first title in Quintin Jardine's Oz Blackstone series - BLACKSTONE'S PURSUITS - plus the brand-new Author's Cut, updated with new material, exclusive to ebook. When private enquiry agent Oz Blackstone takes on the job of finding an insurance company's missing half million, he's hoping for a healthy finder's fee, not a life-changing experience. But when he finds the corpse of the would-be embezzler with a knife in his back and no sign of the missing money, what had seemed like a routine job begins to look distinctly dodgy. Until the captivating Primavera 'Prim' Phillips arrives on the scene, wondering why she's been greeted not by her sister Dawn, but Dawn's dead boyfriend and a rather nervous-looking private eye. For Oz, things are looking up. This is the kind of girl who's definitely worth pursuing. Especially if she knows where to get her hands on half a million pounds...

Release date: March 13, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 433

Sample

It’s all in the dim and distant now, back in the last century, and I can’t be exactly sure of the sequence, but my recollection is that somewhere between the completion of Skinner’s Trail, my third novel, and its publication, I paused for breath.

In those days of introspective relaxation, I asked myself a few questions about my future, and about the level of my commitment to my craft. One of those addressed my limits as a writer. ‘Okay, QJ, you are on the road, with a series of tough police procedural novels that growing numbers of people seem to enjoy. But is that it? Are you a one-trick show pony, or is there more to you than that?’

And so, on the basis that I would never know until I found out, I took a short holiday from Bob Skinner and set out in another direction. The project was still crime-based, but in most ways it was the antithesis of my work to that date. Where my first three books were third-person, this was first-person, narrated by the central character. Where Skinner was hard-boiled, it would be much cosier, lighter in tone, and maybe even with a little humour. Whereas Skinner was my age when first I wrote about him, my new characters would be closer in age to my son and daughter, who were by that time in their mid-twenties. (NB: their mother and I started young.)

Out of this musing a character evolved; for no reason I can offer you, I called him Oz Blackstone. (Oz, short for Osbert; if I was cursed with a forename I’ve never liked, that would be sauce for him too.) He was a lad-about-town in Edinburgh, making a comfortable living, after a short unsatisfactory post-university police career, as a self-styled private inquiry agent, which until the start of my novel had involved nothing more exciting than taking precognitions from witnesses on behalf of his solicitor clients.

The commission that changed his life came from a stockbroker whose firm was on the edge of a nasty financial scandal; Oz was hired to head it off at the pass. His investigation led him swiftly to a flat in a fictional Edinburgh street (although anyone with half a brain and a basic knowledge of RLS can figure out which it really is), in which he found his client’s absconded colleague as dead as dead could be.

In almost the same moment, he also encountered the flat’s owner, a feisty and at the time travel-worn blonde named Primavera Phillips. (Her name came from a line in a Pavarotti album, and from my electric shaver.) Together they found themselves in possession of two halves of a five-pound note that led them across Scotland in pursuit of Primavera’s sister, and ultimately to a confrontation in Geneva, with a messy but satisfactory conclusion.

Along the way, they also discovered each other, and before I knew it I had another series on my hands.

The work that emerged from my holiday project was called Blackstone’s Pursuits. (Since ‘Primavera’ means ‘Spring’ in Spanish and Italian, the working title was Springtime and Oz, but that didn’t stick.)

I liked it then, and I still do. Incidentally, it was published in hardback under a pseudonym, Headline being nervous about the prospect of a relatively new author with two series on the go. The sales figures proved this to have been a mistake and every edition of every Oz book since has my name on the cover. However, if you do happen to possess a first-edition hardback (I doubt if there was a second edition) then cherish it, for it’s worth a right few quid to a collector.

The Oz series flowed from there, and the central character developed in ways that I had never imagined at the outset. In the course of eight subsequent books, Oz became rich and famous, financially powerful and utterly ruthless. The cosy stories he told at the outset became very dark indeed. When I finished the ninth, I became aware of something that gave me pause for thought. There are sixteen classic indicators of a sociopathic personality; I did a quick count and realised that Oz ticked fifteen of those boxes.

And so he went, off into limbo. (I killed him, off-page, but there are still many people who don’t believe me.) I’ve never lost my lingering affection for him, though, and I found myself thinking of him often, even as Primavera was striking out on her own successful first-person adventures.

One day, a strand floated into my contemplation.

‘What if,’ I asked myself, ‘the bright cheery lad in Blackstone’s Pursuits was actually a screen for the dark troubled soul that Oz was later revealed to be, by personal tragedy?

‘What if the story he told was a watered-down version of what really happened, presented with a sugar coating to cover some truths that were, at the time, too harsh for him to admit?

‘What story would the later, darker, and yet more honest Oz have told?’

That was too much for me to resist, and so I set about finding out. This unexpurgated version of the original work is the result. It is significantly different, much harder in tone than the original, but both versions are still authentic.

One of the differences is that in the new version, Jan, the love of Oz’s life, is no longer bisexual. She never was; that was Oz’s fiction, put about to cover his own guilt at chucking her cynically so that he could play the Edinburgh field.

Another variation relates to Oz and Primavera’s physical relationship. The book’s original editor, the great Peter Lavery, felt that this should evolve, and not be consummated until very close to the end. But Peter didn’t realise how horny the pair of them were, so in this version, they get down to it fairly early on.

Finally there are the subtleties of the pair’s overall relationship, which developed, often dramatically, through the nine books, and beyond, in Primavera’s memory, in her own series. My footnote to that aspect is for addicts, and is as follows: remember, what they describe is how each one saw the other at the time of the telling, not necessarily how they really were.

Now go and read; I hope you enjoy Dangerous Pursuits as much as you enjoyed Blackstone’s Pursuits. If you enjoy either version even half as much as I enjoyed its creation, that will do for me.

QJ

22 August 2013

Okay, we’re here, out in the middle of nowhere as I insisted. Nobody knows you’re here? You’re sure? Okay, okay, I’ll take
your word for it.


So what more do you want from me? Haven’t I told you enough already? Haven’t I shown you enough of the real Oz Blackstone,
the man most people envy, the man nobody in the world, apart from you, really knows.


What do you mean, you want honesty from me? What story? The one I told you nine years ago; the one about how it all got started?

What’s your problem with it? That was how I saw it at the time. Okay, maybe I was a bit rosy-eyed when I spun it to you then.
Maybe I was blinded by what I thought was love, and by the thrill and excitement of it all. Okay, maybe, at the time, I was
taking irresponsibility to new levels. But so what? Who are you to call me a liar?


Mmm. You reckon?

Okay, I admit that I see that episode differently now. And yes, I admit that there were times in that first version of the
story when I bent the truth a little, twisted things around to make them sit easier on the ear, and maybe on my conscience.
Like the way I portrayed Jan, for example; that was not how she was. She was my victim, my prey, nobody else’s . . . and yet
in a sense I was prey too, in a way, to someone who spotted my weaknesses, pandered to them and used them. In truth she was
the only person in all my life who’s ever been able to use me . . . other than you, that is . . . and that’s just what she did
from the moment she stepped into my life until finally she went crashing out of it: Primavera.


Is that enough of a confession? For it’s the only one I plan to make.

God, you’re persistent. Okay, okay, okay! I admit that the Oz Blackstone who told you that story was a fake. He wasn’t the
sunny guy I made him out to be, not all of him at any rate. The darkness was rising in me even then, the darkness which, just
as much as any talent I may have for pretending, has made me what I am today.


It’s been pointed out by those movie critics who are now taking me seriously . . . the great majority of the breed, I may tell
you . . . that what I really do best are the bad guy roles. After some of the truths I’ve told you, does that surprise you?


No, I didn’t think it would.

Will you stop looking at me like that, please? You’re doing my head in. Understand this: the last thing I want to do is tell
you what really happened. You’re carrying enough of my secrets around with you as it is.


You would, would you? You’d spill the beans? You’re bluffing . . .

Okay, I see it. I see it in your eyes; you’re not. Ah shit, I’ll tell you, but on your own head be it. You’d better take a
seat; come and join me under this tree, out of the sun, for this is going to take a while.


The way we were, eh?

Today, I’m a movie star, a genuine international celebrity. Look at the posters in any multiplex in the western world . . .
and a good chunk of the eastern hemisphere too, especially, for some reason, Singapore . . . and up there in lights you’re likely
to find the name Oz Blackstone, and the face as well, its blue eyes staring out at you, portraying whatever emotion or persona that I’ve been asked to fake
for the occasion.


You know that I have it made.

•    I have a beautiful and wealthy wife, and three amazing children . . . but your own kids always are amazing, aren’t they?

•    In my recent past there was also a beautiful ex-wife, after whom, secretly, I never stopped lusting. What? Okay, damn it,
I have misled you (not to mention Susie) in the past . . . Jesus! this candour . . . in fact, to be blunt, I’ve lied to you both.
Primavera and I did sleep together that time in New York, in the Algonquin Hotel, after she’d got over her period of irrational
(another lie; it was entirely rational) hatred of me. I will offer a flimsy excuse; she was the mother of one of my children,
after all.


•    I have homes in Scotland, in Monaco and in Los Angeles.



•    I am extremely fit; I use alcohol and caffeine only lightly, and narcotics not at all.

•    And my great regret in life is that there are only twenty-four hours in my days, same as everyone else’s.

So why am I . . . no, I won’t say bored: it’s impossible to be married to Susie, have the lifestyle I have, and be bored. So
why am I . . . no, I won’t say unsettled: I love what I have, I’m content with what I’ve achieved, and if there are still a
few movie people, critics and the like, who decry me and insist that I’m not a real actor because I didn’t earn my spurs by
going to RADA then starving through a few years of bit parts in ‘The Theatre, dahling’ and on telly, well, to be frank, they
can all talk to my accountants, then go and fellate themselves in some dark corner.


So why am I . . . slightly apprehensive about the future?

For this very simple reason: at no point in any of the last decade have I ever had a bloody clue about what was going to happen
to me next.


But that’s true of everyone, I hear you protest.

Well, maybe it is to an extent, but since all this started happening to me I have never been able to say, ‘Okay, Oz, this
is what you’re going to be doing for the next year,’ and have it come off as planned, uninterrupted by some drama, crisis,
crime, upheaval or other type of major incident, all of them involving members of my immediate circle, and most of them life-threatening.


It’s got to the point when I can hardly cross the street for fear that I’m going to be whacked out of existence by a bus I
never saw or heard.


Jesus, where did that one come from?

Wherever it was, it’s taken me back in an instant to where you wanted to go, to where it all began, back ten years. When I’ve
finished this tale, you’ll understand just how much I misled you before. But understand this also: no way am I going to apologise
for it.


The first time I told this story, it was in the first flush of excitement after it all happened. I’m not saying I was naive,
but I was a hell of a lot less experienced. Today, when I look back at it, now that I know myself a lot better than I did
then, now that I’ve chucked away the rose-coloured sunglasses through which I looked at life, and now that I can afford to
be completely honest with myself, I see things rather differently.


All of that stuff happened in the days when I was just an ordinary guy . . . or at least I thought I was.

To any casual onlooker, and indeed to most of my circle of friends, I was one of those people who seemed to have been born
without an ambition gene. My life had involved a minimal amount of forward planning. All of my decisions, career, financial
and emotional, had been taken on the basis of instinct alone, yet most of them seemed to have worked out okay in the end.
I’d made it to the brink of my thirties without taking too much trouble over it, and without getting into any at all.


My secondary school in Anstruther . . . that’s its Sunday name; to us locals it will always be Enster . . . had a very good career
guidance set-up. I was a bright boy . . . as everybody expected of the son of a comfortably-off family. I scored high in the
IQ tests . . . although they never actually told any of us how high . . . and did well enough in my leaving certificate exams
for one of my teachers to suggest at a parents’ night that I apply for a place at Oxford.


I couldn’t see that far, though; as a matter of fact I couldn’t see further than the other side of the River Forth.

For most of my young life in Fife, I’d wanted to live in Edinburgh. I kept dropping hints to my father, but he failed to catch
on to them, or more likely just ignored them. I even took to reading, casually, the Scotsman classified section, looking out for dental practices for sale, then, even more casually, leaving the paper for him to find,
with casual circles in bright red ink drawn round the ads in question.


It was all a waste of time, of course. There never was the slightest chance of Mac Blackstone leaving the surgery that he’d
inherited from my grandfather for what he called with undisguised contempt, ‘that medieval fucking Disneyland across the river’.


Equally, however, there was never any chance of my older sister Ellen or me being cajoled, bullied or otherwise talked into
following him into the family business. We were indulged as kids in every respect bar one: he told us from our early teens,
and kept on about it, that if either of us wanted to go into his profession we would do so against his wishes and without
a penny of financial support. ‘Two generations of Blackstones have spent their lives looking at uvulas and experiencing other folks’ halitosis close up,’
he declared, vociferously and often. ‘There will be no more.’


I respected his wishes from the start, as did Ellie. Truth was, neither of us found that difficult; the surgery was attached
to our house, so we’d grown up with an endless stream of groaning, swollen punters passing though our lives . . . and that was
on the way out! But seriously, folks . . . my dad was a great dentist, until his belated retirement, and my sister and I have
perfect teeth to show for it.


When the time came for us to make the choice, Ellie chose teaching and I chose . . . Well, that was the trouble, I didn’t know
what to choose. I had no idea what I wanted to be. (Come to think of it, I still don’t; since I was eighteen years old, I’ve
always thought of where I was at the time as a stop along the way, and that hasn’t changed.)


All I knew was how I wanted things to be; all my ambition was focused on lifestyle. I wanted to live in Edinburgh, with my
girlfriend, in a flat of our own . . . it couldn’t be anything ordinary, though, it had to be a bit different . . . and to have
enough money to indulge the few whims that I had.


So I postponed my career choice. I postponed the Oxford choice too, although my dad was quite keen on it. I persuaded him
that it was better to go there from Scotland as a graduate, and that if I went with an arts degree, I’d get more out of it.
I wasn’t just bullshitting him; I really did believe that, but it was a convenient excuse too. So with his agreement, and
my mother’s, I applied to Edinburgh. When I was accepted, I would have been in heaven save for one thing.


You know her name, of course; everyone does, who knows anything about the history of Oz Blackstone. She was called Jan; Janet
More when people were being formal. She was a tall leggy girl, with looks and dark hair that fell off a Jane Russell poster,
and she and I had been inseparable all our lives. We’d played together as toddlers, gone to nursery together, and then to
primary and secondary school.


The only fight I ever had in my growing-up years was over her, when I was sixteen, in my fifth secondary year; I heard some
sixth-year lad I didn’t like telling a crony in some detail what he fancied doing to that Jan More.


I didn’t boil over, though; I was a prefect so that would never have done. Instead, I bided my time: I waited until one Saturday
not long afterwards, and I cornered him, well away from the school, so that no zealous teachers were around to interfere.
I filled that guy in, good style; I left him bloody in the dust, and his crony got some too, when he plucked up the courage
to try and help his mate.


I didn’t train for it, or practise moves or anything. I was a big strong lad, and I just did it. I wasn’t even surprised at
how naturally it all came to me. It’s best that way; best to leave the surprise to the people who underestimate you. (Many
years later, a mugger on Broadway found that out, when he came to and found the butt of the gun he’d pointed at me sticking
out of his arse.)


Jan wasn’t best pleased, though, not even when I told her why I’d done it. ‘He was just fantasising about what you’re getting,’
she told me. ‘You should have felt sorry for him, not angry.’


Yes, Jan and I were sexually active at sixteen; that was one of the presents we gave each other for her birthday, in fact.
We weren’t very good at it, I admit, not then at any rate, but we were nothing if not enthusiastic.


There was, or should have been at any rate, a problem about that. But you know about the two of us. You know now what we didn’t
know then, what I didn’t know until years after Jan had been taken from me, in a way that ultimately made me all that I am
today, a happening that opened the dark gate within me, so wide that even if I wanted to do so, I could never close it again.


You know, because I told you last time out, that Jan and I were siblings, or half-siblings at any rate, and that she had been
the product of a slightly drunken encounter between her mum, Mary, and my dad after a Round Table do in Enster. (Honest to
God, the stuff that went on under those Round Tables!)


If we had known from the start, would our relationship have remained as it should have? You’d like me to say ‘Yes, of course!’
wouldn’t you, because that’s the way society’s conditioned you to think. Maybe it would. Maybe. But then again, maybe not.


The question’s academic, though, because we didn’t know, and because things had gone too far for Mary to spill the beans.

As it was, I loved Jan in a way that was different from any other relationship I’ve ever known. I loved her on a spiritual
level, I loved her smile, I loved her laugh, I loved her dry and occasionally earthy sense of humour, I loved her hair and
the way it shone in the sun; last year I met a woman who’d spent serious money on hers, but it still wasn’t a patch on Jan’s.
I loved the smoothness of her legs, I loved the curve of her hips, I loved the width of her shoulders, I loved the way her full breasts seemed to turn up at the tips, their
brown nipples looking like the hearts of sunflowers, I loved the way she looked at me, and only me, sharing a secret knowledge
that we were different in a way we didn’t understand or care about. I worshipped the ground on which she walked, and I still
worship, in every waking moment of my life, the ground in which she is buried.


If I’d known the truth from the start, I ask you, since you know me now better than anyone alive, would I have let a little
technicality like incest keep me from her?


But all that aside, Jan was enraged by the fight over her, or massacre, as in truth it was. She really was a sunny, gentle
girl, she had no experience of violence, and she was appalled by its aftermath. She’d never seen that side of me before, and
I made damn sure she never saw it again. (Actually, I failed once. When my eventual friend Liam Matthews met Jan for the first
time, he said something that led immediately to my thumping him. He’s a pro wrestler: I hit him. Nice one, Oz.) For years
afterwards, I tried to pretend that the thing in Enster had never happened, and professed horror that I’d been capable of
it. I made sure I was always happy-go-lucky, everybody’s pal, good old Oz, with a laugh never far from my lips and not an
enemy in the world.


Jan went to university at the same time as me, but she had to opt for Glasgow because they offered an accountancy course there,
and that’s what she wanted to do with her life. As I began to say earlier, that’s what took the gloss off Edinburgh for me;
for a while I gave serious thought to heading west with her. I was all set to apply for a place through in the west until
my dad sat me down for one of our very few ‘man-to-man’ talks. Actually he talked and I listened; that’s the way those sessions
usually worked out.


‘Oz,’ he told me. ‘You and Jan need to spend some time apart. You’ve been each other’s shadows since you were in bloody Pampers,
and the way you’re going you’re going to drift into something without ever giving yourself space to think it through.’


He said a lot more than that, but in the end he convinced me that I should stick to Plan A. While he was doing that, Jan’s
mum was giving her the same treatment, although for a different reason: by that time she knew that Alex More, her husband,
had been sterile. Poor Mary; at first, she couldn’t bring herself to hurt my mother by revealing the truth, but eventually
she kept her secret because she was just plain terrified of it. If I hadn’t found out by the most bizarre accident, she’d
have carried it to her grave.


Jan and I emerged from our university years still a couple. The intercity bus between Edinburgh and Glasgow did well out of
us, since every term-time weekend one of us was on it. She graduated with flying colours, but I didn’t do as well as I might.
You see, all I was doing was pleasing my folks and filling in time on a degree which had no purpose to it. How could it, when
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my working life?


I saw it through, though; eventually I wound up in a hired gown in a line with a load of other people being tapped on the
head with a mortar board and told that I could put the letters ‘MA Hons’ after my name . . . a privilege I have never used from
that day on, although I do occasionally flaunt the honorary doctorate that St Andrews gave me last year.


It was my erstwhile brother-in-law, Alan Sinclair, who was responsible for my becoming a co. . .