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would take him from me, and from all the other people who loved him, but that she would be the end of him. If I could play that scene again, that first meeting, I’d stab her through the heart, and take the consequences. They’d be worth it.’

    ‘Phyllis?’ I yelled. ‘Fucking Phyllis?’
    ‘Gobsmacked’ didn’t come close to how I felt. No, it didn’t. I tried to define my reaction at that moment, and could only come up with one analogy. I felt raped.
    My mobile was in my hand without any conscious thought, and I was about to hit the button on Mac’s speed dial entry, when I stopped myself. ‘No,’ I told myself ‘let’s read it all.’
    And I did. Chapter three quoted someone called Sheila.
    ‘He was damaged when I met him,’ the widow said. ‘He was still bereaved, but she hadn’t given him time or space to grieve properly over the loss of his precious soul mate. Some people, and by that I mean the odd obsessive fan, but mostly Phyllis’s famous politician sister and brother-in-law, still blame me for taking him from her, but I don’t give a shit about them, for what I was really doing was trying to save his life. She had her claws in him, as deep as she could sink them. I tried, but to be honest I never really could prise them loose.
    ‘I don’t know what happened to his first wife. “A tragic accident in the home”; that was how the papers described it, but I’m not so sure. There was a continuing state of warfare between his two women. At that time, Maureen was on top, but she’d only won a battle. The war ended with her death, the only way it ever could have. Accident? If that’s what “they” say, I’ll have to accept it, but really, “they” have no idea what Phyllis is capable of: she’s done time, for Christ’s sake. That’s why we retreated to Italy, to a house that I insisted should be made as secure as possible. I wasn’t afraid for my children while I had him, although that’s what I let him think. Truth is, I was afraid for myself, afraid of her.
    ‘When they told me he was dead, the first thing I felt wasn’t shock. Before that there was an instant when I felt relief, because finally I’d be free of Phyllis. Afterwards …
    ‘I was furious when I heard that he’d been cremated. They told me it had been necessary because of the heat in Guatemala, where he’d been making a video for his new album when it happened. The unit had a doctor with it; he certified that a congenital heart defect had been the cause of death, and I have no grounds to doubt that, and yet …’

    I had to break off then; I was so angry that I could barely see the words on the screen, far less concentrate on them. I closed the laptop and kept it shut, until our evening had run its course, and Tom had gone to bed. Not for the first time, no, not by a long way, I was glad my boy was there to keep me on an even keel, and possibly to keep me from taking Charlie along to the Nieves Mar and setting him on the son-of-a-bitch Culshaw, although my distraction must have shown through, for he asked me a couple of times whether everything was okay. Although I assured him it was, I reckon he knew it wasn’t, but trusted me to tell him if and when I needed to.
    I rarely drink spirits, but I mixed myself a gin and tonic and took it up to the terrace, back to the manuscript. I scrolled through it before getting down to the detail, and I saw quickly that after the three opening ‘testimonials’, the book became more conventional. When I did start to read again, it was clear that it was a mock biography, the life and times of someone called ‘Al Greystock’, rock star and tragic hero … or rather, anti-hero.
    The book wasn’t warts and all; it was plain fucking warts, pure and simple. Culshaw had done his research on Oz, that was for sure. The story proper began with what purported to be a news article in the
Saltire
, a fictitious Scottish daily newspaper. It said that workmen dismantling an outbuilding on