So as she answered, I concentrated hard on wincing, and on not cracking an involuntary smile.

"I'm sorry," she told me. "I just can't do that. I don't love you any more, Oz."

"You never did love me," I murmured, with an Oscar-winning edge of bitterness in my voice.

"Maybe not; and maybe that cut both ways. Listen, I have to go. You do what you have to do, see a lawyer; I want a fair split, that's all.

Just don't hurt Nicky, please."

"That'll be difficult, but for you, okay; I won't touch him." I decided that I'd leave that piece of business until she'd signed the divorce settlement. "Take care; just don't trust that guy."

"As if I would, after you," she replied. "Goodbye."

I looked across at Miles, just as Dawn appeared at the poolside, and shook my head, slowly, and ... I hoped ... sadly. "You heard me," I said.

"Yes, mate, I did. I don't know if I could have done that in your shoes."

"You'll never be in his shoes," exclaimed his wife, indignantly. She looked at me. "You called her after all?"

"Yes, more fool me."

Miles opened yet another beer and handed it to me. I took it, but made a mental note to slow down. I didn't want to get pissed, not there, not then.

"Bruce has gone down for the night," Dawn said. "I thought we might cook steaks and bake potatoes on the barbecue, if that's all right with you boys."

"Couldn't be better," I told her.

We threw a few chunks of Texas beef on the outdoor grill and sat down to eat them with the spuds and a salad, at the big oval table at the shallow end of the pool. I was starving, but I made a show of shoving my food around the plate, and sipping morosely at my Long Flat Red ...

Miles imports most of his booze from his home country.

He watched me for a while, until eventually he leaned across towards me and punched me lightly on the shoulder. "I can see this has blown you right out of the water, mate," he began. He was speaking slowly; the Tyrrell's is heavy stuff. "Me too, I don't mind telling you. I always thought Primavera was a straight arrow.. . and for her to go off with an arse hole like Johnson, that just makes it worse.

"But you must not let it get you down." He rapped the table with his knuckles, hard enough to make him wince. "You have a future in our business, buddy. You were good in your first movie, and better in the one we've just finished. You're a natural actor, Oz Blackstone, and you could be a big star. My advice is, concentrate on your career and use it to get over what Prim's done to you."

I felt myself frown. "What career, man?" I asked him. "Okay, I've made a couple of movies for you, and I'm very grateful for the chance .. . not to mention the money.. . but my agent in London hasn't exactly been bombarding me with projects."

"Fuck him," Miles drawled, earning a nod of disapproval from Dawn.

"We'll get you a real agent, out here in California. But even before that, I've got a proposition to put to you. I was going to talk to you about it in a couple of days, but now's as good a time as any.

"I'm making a sack of money from the last Scottish project." I knew this for myself; I was on one per cent of the gross and up to that point I'd made one and a half million dollars. "So much, in fact, that I'm going back there for my next movie. I'll direct, not act, but Dawn will have the female lead. I want you in the second-guy role."

"Oh yeah?" I felt my ears prick up, and my eyebrows rise. "What is it?"

"It's a cop story, based on one of a series of novels. If it works out right it might even be the first in a series of movies."

"Where's it set?"

"This is the bit you'll like most of all. It's set in your old home town; in Edinburgh."

in

Two.

I made a show of thinking over Miles's offer of the Edinburgh part; I was even pretentious enough to ask to look at the script. Because of my grief, he humoured me, and I spent a few days at Malibu reading it between teleconferences with Greg McPhillips, my lawyer in Scotland,"

and meetings with Roscoe Brown, my brand new Hollywood agent.

I briefed Greg to draw up a legal separation from Prim, and a property settlement that was fair to us both, yet left me well fixed financially. He was gob-smacked when I told him, of course; he'd known us both when we lived in Glasgow and had played a significant part in our interesting lives. His shock didn't stop him giving me some pretty sharp advice, though, and promising me his personal loyalty in the event that my ex decided to cut up rough. I knew quite a bit about Greg's practice, having worked for him in the past, and I reckoned that I was on my way to becoming his biggest private client.

Roscoe Brown was positive too. Miles sent him along to see me the day after Prim dropped her bombshell. He was a young black guy, and he was offered to me as the coming player in the game. I figured out why, straight away; the reek of sharpness coming from him was as strong as his Eau Sauvage. I wasn't sure who was interviewing who ... sorry, whom ... at our first meeting, but whatever the truth of it was, we both passed.

It took him three days to make me realise that I didn't have to go back to Scotland. He came back to see me on the following Tuesday with offers of parts in three different projects, two of them to be shot in the States and the third back in Canada, in Vancouver this time.

He also brought with him an offer of a voice-over in a golf ball ad. I admit that I went a bit Hollywood when he tabled that one; I thought it was a step back down the ladder, until he showed me the money on offer.

It was enough to change my mind. "If it's good enough for Jack Nicholson," I told him, 'it's good enough for me."

When it came to choosing a movie, Roscoe was all for me staying in the States. He told me what I knew already, that sooner or later I had to cut the string that tried me to Miles. I heard him out but I decided that it would be later. I would take the Vancouver movie, I said, but first, since the schedules allowed it, I was going back home to shoot Miles's cop flick.

What I didn't tell him, or anyone else .. . least of all Dawn and Miles .. . was that I had another reason for going back to Scotland.

I had a promise to keep.

Three.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel, walking back into my old flat in Glasgow.

It was part of a conversion of a classic nineteenth-century building: Jan and I had bought it on a whim, lured by its spectacular views across the heart of the city; but it had brought us only a few months of happiness, before it all went to rat-shit.

I should have moved on straight after Jan's death, but I didn't. I was pretty numb at the time, so I stayed there, until it became home to Prim and me as we renewed our ruptured relationship, drifting eventually into our brief, rancorous and disastrous marriage.

When I did sell it. I had misgivings about the buyer; call me superstitious if you like, but if the fucking place was cursed, as I thought, I wasn't sure if I should take the risk of passing it on to her.

But she had insisted, and when Susie Gantry digs in her heels it would take a pretty strong guy to deny her what she's after. Besides, she offered me twenty-five per cent over valuation.

"You cut it bloody fine!" she exclaimed as she opened the door that fair Saturday morning, but she was smiling, big white teeth, tan and freckles, all framed by lustrous red hair.

She was right too. Although we'd spoken about business a couple of times .. . I'm a non-executive director of her company... and exchanged a few text messages I hadn't seen Susie since January, eight months before. She'd been in fine shape then; she still was, only that shape was different. For all she was wearing a big white housecoat, you could tell she'd filled out a bit.

"So it seems," I agreed as I stepped inside. "Have you been hanging on for me?"

"Not quite," she answered, 'but if you hadn't turned up this weekend I was going to get in touch with you. Officially, I'm due a week on Wednesday, but when I saw my consultant last Tuesday, he was talking about inducing her a few days early."

"Her?"

"That's right, Pops. The heir to the Gantry empire's going to be an heiress."

I wasn't sure how I felt about Susie G. When I'd first met her she'd been going out with my copper pal Mike Dylan, and her old man had been in his pomp as Lord Provost of Glasgow. Neither of them were around any more; Mike had succumbed to a terminal case of greed, and a policeman's bullet, while Jack Gantry had succumbed to several men in white coats, who'd taken him away to a place in the country, with a very high fence topped off with razor wire.

After those misfortunes, Susie was left to rescue the family construction group from potential disaster, which she did with a skill that made a nonsense of Darwin and his theories. Not many people knew that Jack wasn't her real father, and many of those who didn't insisted that his business skills were in her blood. (The same sycophants passed over the fact that he was barking mad, and that by their logic Susie might have been too.)

The business was all she had, though; that apart, she had been a lonely wee lass when she'd turned up on my doorstep in Spain, on the very day that Prim had gone off to be with her sick mother. She didn't stay lonely for long, mind you.