Read Online When The Devil Drives by Christopher Brookmyre - Free Book Online Page A

take her eyes off the subject. Effectively, she had completely rubbered the notoriously egotistical Ms Queen in front of her friends. It had come as no surprise when Charlotte never got back in touch about that mooted production of
The Tempest
.
    Instead, Charlotte had been all over her in the bar: hugs and kisses and oh-my-Gods.
    ‘I read all about you in the papers. God, how amazingly exciting. I mean, dangerous, of course, sure, you must be so brave. I couldn’tbelieve it, though. I was, like,
so
telling everybody I knew you. And then I remembered I saw you one time and you walked right past and I thought you maybe had headphones on or were in a daydream, but I realised you must have been actually tailing somebody, like in a film. I mean, wow. That is so cool.’
    ‘I was on a foot-follow,’ Jasmine was relieved to be able to explain at last.
    ‘God, that is so amazing. It’s, like, being in character, except you’re really, really
deeply
in character. That’s major.’
    ‘Not really,’ Jasmine corrected, but only by way of taking the opportunity to tell Charlotte about the aspects of the job that truly did require acting. She had surely never sounded so enthusiastic about her job, but she couldn’t help it. Charlotte was lapping it up, and Jasmine was basking in the light of her enthusiasm. Impressing Charlotte was like a drug: you just wanted more and more and more. It was why she got so much out of people, on stage and off.
    ‘So you’re, like, a real detective?’
    Jasmine could hear those commas, but knew that if she edited them out it would still be an unearned accolade.
Like
a real detective? No. Not even close.
    As it turned out, Charlotte’s production of
The Tempest
wasn’t going to happen anyway. She had dropped the idea in favour of a revival of Liz Lochead’s Scots-dialect translation of
Tartuffe
by Molière, having heard through the grapevine that the Scottish government were planning a series of events aimed at both celebrating and cementing artistic ties with France. In her ability to combine vision, ambition, networking and sheer opportunism, it showed just why Charlotte had come a long way in a short time and was destined to go a great deal further. The play was scheduled to run both in Edinburgh and Paris, under the imprimatur of the Scottish government and therefore financially assisted by Arts Council Scotland.
    This had predictably rankled with a lot of people; more so than even the usual grumbling that followed the awarding of grants to anybody other than oneself. Fire Curtain was perceived to be well down the list of companies in need of public funding: it was believedthat, as the daughter of Hamish Queen, Charlotte had been the beneficiary of more hand-outs and hand-ups than anybody else in Scottish theatre.
    The roots of this resentment lay in artistic snobbery as much as financial jealousy. Hamish Queen had made millions putting on big, flashy musicals in London’s West End. To a certain constituency, it wasn’t ‘proper’ theatre, just ultra-commercial flummery aimed at fleecing tourists and philistines, so it stung all the more that his money and influence were facilitating his daughter’s rise to prominence – ignoring, of course, the fact that Charlotte was very much about putting on ‘proper’ theatre.
    ‘I’d still love to work with you some time,’ she told Jasmine in the Tron bar. ‘I think if the part was right, with your real-life experience, it would be electric.’
    If the part was right. A hypothetical among hypotheticals, a throwaway remark, one fleeting thought amid millions that must pass through a capricious mind such as Charlotte’s, always looking for the next idea. But to Jasmine, it was enough to tantalise and to torment, keeping that door open just enough to let in a chink of light that kept distracting her from the here and now.
    ‘Tessa was a born performer,’ Mrs Petrie went on. ‘I don’t think she was out of nappies before she’d learned