Read Online Deadly Business by Quintin Jardine - Free Book Online Page B

decided that if I was going to introduce them to adulthood, I might as well go all the way. Also, I’d skipped coffee after dinner and I felt like a fix, and so, instead of heading straight for the beach, I took us down instead to the square. The four café restaurants there can seat over three hundred people at their outside tables, and I knew that earlier, punters would have had to queue until one became free. As midnight approached, they were all still busy, but the frenzy was over and we found a vacant spot in Can Coll. I asked for an Americano with a little cold milk on the side, and a glass of the decent house white. The kids each copied my coffee order, but didn’t push their luck by asking for wine as well.
    ‘I liked the linguine sauce, Auntie Primavera,’ Janet ventured as the waiter returned with a laden tray.
    ‘Yeah, Mum,’ Tom chipped in. ‘Top form.’ He paused. ‘Can we cook tomorrow night, Janet and me?’
    ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ I pointed out. Our norm is to eat out on weekend evenings, and I’d kept up the habit while the Monaco Three had been with us. ‘Do it one night next week, if you like.’
    ‘We might not be here then,’ Janet said. ‘I’d a call on my mobile from Mum, just before dinner. She said she’s coming back early and that she’s going to ask Conrad to take us home, on Monday or Tuesday.’ She frowned. ‘She said she wasn’t sure when their flight would land, since it was a long way, but that she’d let me know as soon as she did, and she knew for sure when we could come. I don’t understand that. It’s not a long flight from Scotland to Nice Airport. Has she really been in Scotland?’
    ‘Isn’t that what she told you? That she had to go there to run her business for a month?’
    ‘Yes,’ she conceded. ‘It’s just funny, that’s all.’
    ‘Maybe something came up in the business,’ I suggested, ‘and she had to go somewhere else. Life isn’t always predictable.’
    ‘Ours is,’ Tom commented, as he added some milk to his coffee.
    I laughed. ‘Does that concern you?’ I asked, changing the subject swiftly. ‘If it does we could always do unpredictable things.’
    ‘Could we go to America to see Jonny play on the tour next week?’ he shot back.
    Jonny Sinclair (Big Jonathan) is his cousin, his Aunt Ellie’s older son from her first marriage. He’s a promising young pro golfer, and he’d lived with us for a while a couple of years earlier, while he was starting out on tour. He’d won his first tournament, made some very decent money in Europe since then, some of it from a second win, in Italy, played all four rounds in the US Open, finishing in the top fifteen, and was teeing up again in a week’s time in Pennsylvania, on a sponsor’s invitation secured for him by Brush Donnelly, his reclusive but very effective agent.
    ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘It would be a lot of cost and a lot of hassle, and if we did go there, Jonny would be too busy to spend any time with us. Maybe next year we’ll go to the Masters, if he gets an invitation, and if it fits with the school holidays.’
    ‘Auntie Primavera.’ Janet’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. ‘There’s a man at a table in the next restaurant and he’s looking at you.’
    ‘Should I be pleased?’ I asked. ‘Does he look like a rock star?’
    Tom covered his mouth with his hand. ‘Yes, but think Steven Tyler,’ he muttered. We’d watched a DVD of
Be Cool
a few weeks before, and Tom had been amazed that anyone could look like the Demon of Screamin’ and still be alive. ‘Next time they film a Terry Pratchett book,’ he’d suggested, ‘he should play Death.’
    Casually, I looked around the square, then over my left shoulder. Yes, there was a dude not far away and he had been looking at me. I knew this by the intensity with which he was examining the façade of the church. It happens if you’re a woman on her own, or even with a couple of kids. Men sometimes eye you up