Blue Genes

by Val McDermid

  Something approaching a smile cracked his face. ‘Attitude, eh? Well, Cory, attitude is no bad thing in its place.’ Then he leaned forward and the smile died faster than a fly hitting a windscreen at ninety. ‘This is not the place. I’m not in the habit of dealing directly with people. It wastes time I could be using to make money. So the least, the very least, I demand from you is respect.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said. ‘So can we stop wasting your time? What can you do for us that makes you the one we should do business with?’

  ‘Why don’t you have a manager?’ he demanded.

  ‘We never found anybody we trusted enough. Believe it or not, I’m a qualified accountant. I can tell a good deal from a bad one.’

  ‘Then we’re not going to have any problems. I’m offering the only good deal in town. This is my city. In exchange for forty per cent of your earnings, including any record deals you sign, I can place you in the key venues. I can make sure your tickets get sold, I can get you media coverage and I can paper the whole city with your tits.’ Lovell leaned back as Della approached with our drinks on a tray. Sensibly, she served Lovell first, then me, then Tony. As she walked away, Lovell said, ‘Since when did you start employing pensioners?’

  ‘All she does is sort the glasses and stock the bar. She’s out of here before the punters start coming in. The girlfriend’s auntie,’ Tony said dismissively.

  ‘I hear on the grapevine that there’s been a bit of bother lately. Posters getting covered up, bands having their gigs wrecked, that kind of shit. What’s to stop that happening to us?’ I asked.

  Lovell drummed his fingers on his brandy bowl. ‘Signing with us, that’s what. You stupid cow, who do you think has been handing out the aggravation? I told you, this is my city. Anybody who thinks different has to take what’s coming to them. You stick with me and nothing bad will happen to you. Ask Tony. He pays his taxes like a good ’un. You never have any bother, do you, Tone?’

  ‘No,’ Tony said tonelessly, reaching for his cigarettes and lighting up. ‘No bother.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, then. You’re saying if we pay you forty per cent of everything we make, you’ll sort it for us. But if we choose somebody whose prices are more in line with the rest of the planet, we’ll live to regret it? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Lovell picked up his glass and wasted the brandy in one swallow. ‘Sixty per cent of something’s a lot better than a hundred per cent of fuck all. There’s a lot of things can go wrong for a band trying to make a break in this town. Posters that never make it onto walls. Tickets that mysteriously don’t sell. Riots at the few crappy gigs they manage to pick up. Vans full of gear burning up for no obvious reason.’

  ‘You saying that could happen to us if we don’t sign up with you?’

  He replaced the glass on the table with infinite care. ‘Not could. Will. It was you asked for this meeting,’ he reminded me, stabbing his finger towards the centre of my chest. ‘You need what I can do for you. Otherwise you might as well fuck off back to Germany.’

  I jerked back from his finger. I could relax now. Lovell had just nailed himself to the wall. ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘No reason why we can’t do business. I was just checking.’

  Lovell got to his feet. ‘Well, you’ve done your checking and now you know what the score is. You don’t ever get smart with me, bitch, you hear? I tell your poxy band where they play and when; you do no deals without consulting me first.’ He put a hand in his pocket and tossed a small mobile phone on the table. ‘Keep it on you. My number’s programmed in at number one. That’s the only number you call, you hear? I get any bills that say otherwise and you pay a service charge I guarantee you won’t like. You can buy a charger unit anywhere that sells phones. I’ll let you know when your first gig is.’

  Whatever he was going to say next was lost. The door to the club crashed open again and two men piled in, shouting, ‘Police. Don’t move.’ The door to the ladies’ toilet opened and the other two rushed into the room, heading for the minders. A fifth cop jumped over the DJ’s turntables as Della ran out from behind the bar towards Lovell. Everybody was screaming, ‘Police. Don’t move.’ The acoustics of the club had a strange effect on their voices, almost swallowing them in the vastness of the space.

  Lovell’s face went deep red from the neck up, like a glass filling with coloured liquid. ‘Fucking bitch,’ he yelled. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  But before he could go anywhere Della’s sergeant, a rugby prop forward from Yorkshire, misjudged his run from the DJ’s platform and cannoned into him. Seeing their boss floored and themselves outnumbered, the muscle decided that the game that had been keeping them in made-to-measure suits was over. Lovell was dead in the water. But that didn’t mean Tweedledum and Tweedledee had to sink with him. In perfect sync, two right hands disappeared inside their jackets and emerged holding a matching pair of semiautomatic pistols.

  Suddenly, everything went quiet.

  22

  It’s not just the immediate prospect of being hanged that concentrates the mind wonderfully. Staring down the barrel of a gun does the trick just as well. For a long minute, nobody moved or said a word. Then Tweedledum gestured with his pistol towards Della. ‘You, bitch. Over here.’

  At first she didn’t move. I knew what she was thinking. The more spread out we were, the harder it would be to keep us all covered. ‘I said, over here,’ the gunman screamed, dropping the nose of his pistol and firing. A chunk of wood from the dance floor leapt into the air inches from Della’s feet and frisbeed away across the room. ‘Fucking do it,’ he shrieked. I’ve never understood why it is that the guys with the guns always sound more scared than those of us without them.

  Slowly, cautiously, Della moved towards him. As soon as she came within reach, he pulled her to him by the hair, back against his chest, gun muzzle jammed into her neck. I knew then that these guys were the real thing. The neck is the professional’s option. Much more sensible than holding it to the temple. The muzzle buries itself in the flesh of the neck rather than sliding on bone covered by sweating skin. Guns to temples are amateur city, a mark of someone who’s watched more movies than they’ve committed crimes.

  The man holding Della turned so that he and his companion were almost back to back. ‘Nobody fucking move,’ the other one screamed.

  ‘Get this fucker off me,’ Lovell yelled.

  ‘I said nobody fucking move, and that means you.’

  ‘You fucking work for me, shithead,’ Lovell screeched, his face purpling now with sheer rage.

  ‘We just handed in our notice, OK?’ the gunman shouted, his gun pointing at Lovell and the cop still sprawled on top of him. ‘OK, Let’s go.’ He took a step backwards as his buddy moved forwards. Awkwardly they made their way over to the fire exit. Given that only two cops had burst in the main door, I guessed that the remaining two men were outside the fire door. I sincerely hoped neither of them was the heroic type.

  The gunmen had nearly made it to the fire door when Tony Tambo suddenly erupted into action. I don’t know if he was playing at knights in shining armour or if it was just sheer rage at seeing his club abused like this, but he jumped up on the seat, ran straight across the table, leapt to the floor and went for the heavies. The one facing us didn’t even pause for breath. He just let off two shots. The first caught Tony in the thigh, his leg bursting into shattered fragments of flesh and bone in a spray of blood. The second caught him in the abdomen as he fell, the exit wound bursting out of his back like someone had used a morphing program on his suit. His scream was like every nightmare you hope you’ll never have. The groans that followed it weren’t a whole lot better.

  ‘I fucking warned you,’ the gunman shrieked, sounding like he was about to burst into tears. ‘Let’s get the fuck out,’ he added.

  His companion kicked the bar on the fire exit, which sprang open. I could just see the corner of the basement stairs that led up to the street. Then he shouted, ‘Get the fu
ck down here now, or the bitch gets it, you hear?’ He stepped back, yanking Della with him. Nothing happened, so he sidestepped her, still holding her hair, leaned into the doorway and fired. I heard the singing whine of a ricochet against the stone walls of the stairway. Then he hauled Della in close again. ‘Get them down here,’ he snarled.

  ‘Come down quietly,’ Della shouted. ‘That’s an order.’

  By now, Tony had stopped groaning, so I was able to hear the sound of heavy feet on the steps. Two men edged through the door into the club. They followed the gestures of the man with Della and the gun and moved round the walls until they were almost parallel to Lovell and Della’s sergeant. ‘OK. Nobody follow, you hear? Or the bitch dies,’ he screamed, rushing the door, followed by his companion.

  As they disappeared, Lovell made a superhuman effort that caught the sergeant unawares. Suddenly he was wriggling free. I jumped onto the table and launched myself in a flying kick that would have got me suspended for life in any legitimate Thai boxing club. I hit Lovell in the side, and as we crashed to the ground together, I heard the satisfying crunch of snapping ribs and his simultaneous squeal of pain before the wind was completely knocked out of him. I rolled free and left him to Della’s sergeant. I ran for the fire exit, along with one of the cops. The others were already out of the main door and heading for the street in a desperate bid to cut off the gunmen.

  We reached the door at about the same moment the gunmen, slowed by an uncooperative Della, reached the street. With a roar that King Kong wouldn’t have been ashamed of, the one trying to control her picked her up bodily and threw her down the flight of narrow stairs.

  No amount of training in how to fall drills you for that sort of experience. Della tumbled down the steps in a loose ball, head defended by her forearms, bouncing off the walls. The cop and I stepped forward to break her fall. It was probably the worst thing we could have done. As she hit us, her leg shot out and snagged the wall. I heard the crack as bone snapped. Then we were a tumble of limbs. We settled with her face a couple of inches from mine. ‘What a fuck-up,’ she breathed. Then she fainted. I managed to free one arm from under her in spite of the excruciating pain that ran like a flame up to my shoulder. When I saw the tattered sleeve of my jacket drenched in blood I fainted too.

  It had been a quiet night in Casualty until we hit the infirmary. Tony Tambo was on the critical list, having blood pumped into him and hanging onto life by sheer willpower, according to the nurse strapping up the wrist I’d merely sprained in the crush at the foot of the fire stairs. The blood had been Tony’s. I’d landed in it when I’d rolled free of Lovell. Mr Big Promo was under arrest with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and I was half expecting one of Della’s zealots to charge me with assault. Della herself had been sent down to the plaster room to have her ankle set and immobilized. The cop whom we’d both landed on was being kept in for observation with a double concussion, two unlovely black eyes and a missing front tooth. You couldn’t get near the coffee machine in Reception for uniformed cops.

  When the nurse had finished with the bandages, I walked down to the plaster room, taking it slowly to avoid jolting any part of my protesting body. I’d only just pushed the swing doors open when I heard a familiar Scouse accent. Alexis’s cheerful raucousness was to my headache what Agent Orange is to house plants. Della’s head swung round with all the belligerence of a punch-drunk boxer who’s gone one round too many and we chorused, ‘Go away.’

  ‘Well, that’s a charming way to greet your friends. Soon as the newsdesk hears there’s a bit of a fracas involving DCI Prentice and a private eye called Brannigan, I say to them, “I’ll take care of this, the girls need to see a friendly face,”’ Alexis said self-righteously.

  ‘If you’re here as a journalist, go away, Alexis,’ I said wearily. ‘If I said this has not been a good night, it would be the understatement of my life. Things have gone so wrong in the last hour that I’m desperate to hit somebody. Now, we might be in the right place for the aftermath of that sort of thing, but I really don’t want it to happen to you.’

  ‘Me, I’d just settle for somebody to arrest,’ Della said, her voice sounding as emotionally exhausted as she had every right to feel. ‘So, as Kate said, Alexis the journalist can take a hike. Alexis the friend, however, is welcome to stay provided she has a set of wheels that can take us all home after this little fiasco has run its course.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Della shook her head. ‘It really wasn’t your fault. I should have had the sense to realize he’d be walking around with armed minders. We should have let them all walk out of there then picked Lovell up in the middle of the night when he was on his own. I misjudged it.’

  That should have made me feel better. Instead, I felt infinitely worse. Della was on the point of being promoted to superintendent and an operation like this that could be painted as a screw-up wasn’t going to help. Add to that the pariah status automatically granted to any police officer who puts other cops away, and it looked like my bright idea might have put Della’s next promotion into cold storage. ‘You’d better come back and stay with me,’ I offered as the first stage in what was going to be a long apology. ‘You won’t be able to manage the stairs at your place for a few days.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re probably right. Won’t Richard mind?’

  ‘Only if you try to arrest him for possession.’

  Della managed a tired smile. ‘I think I can manage to restrain myself.’

  ‘So what actually happened?’ Alexis chipped in, unable to restrain herself indefinitely.

  ‘Gun battle in Manchester’s clubland,’ I said. ‘Police officer held hostage. Man helping police with inquiries, two gunmen sought. Club owner seriously injured, two police officers with minor injuries. One private investigator who wasn’t there.’

  Alexis grinned. ‘I hate it when you come home with half a tale.’

  Later, a lot later, when Della was asleep in my bed and Richard in his, I sat in the dark in the conservatory with a strong mixture of Smirnoff Black Label and freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and contemplated the capital D of the moon. Tony Tambo hadn’t made it; one of Della’s colleagues had rung to tell her not ten minutes after we got home. I sipped my drink and thought about how far reality had diverged from the simple little sting I’d envisaged. I’d gone in all gung ho and full of myself, and now a man was dead. He’d had a girlfriend and an ex-wife and a little daughter who was the apple of his eye, according to Richard. He wasn’t supposed to behave like a hero, but then, I hadn’t imagined there was going to be any need for heroics.

  If my life was like the movies, my character would be planning vengeance, putting the word out in the underworld that she wanted those guys so bad she could taste it. And they would be delivered to her in such a way that she could decide their fate. But my life isn’t like the movies. I knew I’d be doing nothing to discover the identities of the gunmen, where they hung out or who they ran with. That was the police’s job, and I couldn’t do it without placing more lives in danger. After what had happened to Tony Tambo, I was through with setting myself up against the major players.

  I took a long cool swallow and tried not to think about Tony’s daughter. Tried not to despise myself too much. Tried desperately to remember why I’d been working so hard to find a way to stay in this destructive game.

  I woke around half past seven, just as the sun climbed over my back fence and hit the end of the wicker settee where I’d finally lost consciousness. I was still wearing the T-shirt and jogging pants I’d put on after the shower I’d needed to get the last of Tony Tambo’s blood off me. If there’s a female equivalent of unshaven, I felt it. I rubbed the grit out of my eyes, wincing at the arrow of pain in my left wrist, and stumbled through to the kitchen. I was just filling the coffee maker with water when I heard Della call me. ‘Be right there,’ I said, finishing the job.

  Della was propped up on my pillows looking ten years older than she had d
one the day before. According to my wardrobe mirror, that still gave her a few on me. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘You see it all.’

  ‘That bad? Shit, I’d better take your shoelaces and belt then.’

  Della reached out and limply patted my hand. ‘Do I smell coffee?’

  ‘You do. Life-support systems will be available shortly.’

  Ten minutes later, we were sharing the first pot of coffee of the day. I even relaxed the house rules enough to let her smoke in my bed. ‘What have you got on today?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I thought I might go down to the university and see if I can sign up to finish my law degree this autumn.’

  Della was suddenly alert. ‘Part time?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Full time.’

  ‘Tony Tambo’s death was not your fault,’ she said firmly.

  ‘I know that. I just don’t know if I want to do this job any more. I didn’t think it was going to be like this. Come to that, it didn’t use to be like this. I don’t know if it’s the world that’s turning nastier or if it’s just that I’ve had a run of cheesy luck, but some days I feel like there should be a task force of counsellors, undertakers and paramedics in the car behind me.’

  Della shook her head, exasperated. ‘My God, you are feeling sorry for yourself this morning, aren’t you? Listen, I’m the one who screwed up royally last night. A man died, and other people could have. The only way I could feel worse than I do now is if it had been you lying there on the mortuary slab. I’ve also probably kissed goodbye to my next promotion. But I’m not about to hand in my resignation. Even though I make mistakes, the police service needs people like me more than I need to gratify my guilt. I don’t have to tell you about the dozens of sleazy, creepy exploitative PIs there are out there. Your business needs you, just like the police needs me. What about all the times when you’ve changed people’s lives for the better? You got Richard out of jail, didn’t you?’