by Val McDermid
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. I could feel the brick rough against my fingertips. ‘Dear God,’ I breathed. I’d asked her to find out who had given her kids drug-laced transfers. And two days later, Cherie Roberts was on her way to the mortuary, stamped with the familiar hallmarks of a drug-related murder. Suddenly, my eyes snapped open. ‘Davy!’ I gasped. I turned on my heel and ran down the alley, panic pumping the blood till my ears pounded with the drum of my heartbeat.
I rounded the corner, imagination painting scenes of bloodshed and violence that even Sam Peckinpah would draw the line at, making all sorts of ridiculous bargains with a god I don’t believe in. I skidded to a halt by the car, feeling deeply foolish as Davy waved at me and mouthed. ‘Hi,’ through the glass. Alexis rushed up behind me, slightly breathless. ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘What did you ask Cherie on Sunday?’
‘The wrong question, obviously,’ I said bitterly. ‘I asked her to ask the kids who they got the transfers from. That’s all. She must have taken it further than that. Shit, Alexis, I need a drink. Are you finished here, or do you need to talk to some more people?’
‘I’m too late for the final edition anyway. I’ve got the eyewitness stuff for tomorrow’s paper. It’ll be a while now before the police issue a full statement. Let’s go back to your place, eh?’ She squeezed my arm sympathetically. ‘It’s not your fault, KB. It wasn’t you that pulled the trigger.’
So why did I feel so guilty?
It took less than a minute to drive round to my house. I parked in the bay outside Richard’s house and walked towards mine. Davy hung behind, bouncing up and down at the end of the path, waiting for Alexis to get out of the car so he could show her the videos we’d chosen. You can’t see my porch from the parking bays. There’s a six foot, gold and green conifer in the way. I’d never thought much about it before. But that afternoon, I was more glad than I can say that the tree was there.
I passed the tree and glanced towards my house. What I saw made me stumble and nearly fall. I regained my balance and took a couple of steps closer to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Then I felt sick. The white UPVC of the lower half of the door was pocked with hundreds of little black puncture holes. The glass in the upper half was crazed and starred, no match for the close-range blast it had sustained. Whoever had terminated Cherie Roberts had left me their calling card.
21
I wheeled round as fast as I could and nailed a smile on my face as I headed back towards Alexis and Davy, in a huddle looking at videos. ‘We might as well go in through Richard’s,’ I said, trying to sound breezy. ‘I’ve got some paperwork to do later, and that way you won’t have to worry about disturbing me.’
It didn’t entirely work. Alexis looked up sharply at the cracked note in my voice. ‘All right,’ she said casually. ‘His video’s just as good as yours, and we’re nearer the ice-cream there.’
I steered them up the path, carefully using my body to shield Davy from the sight of my front door. I needn’t have bothered; he was so engrossed in his chatter with Alexis that he didn’t even glance in that direction. She did, though, and I could see from the momentary tightening of her lips that she’d spotted the damage. I unlocked the door and Davy ran into the house ahead of us. ‘What the hell’s going on, KB?’ Alexis demanded.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I hissed. ‘You think this happens all the time?’
Alexis put her arm round my shoulders and squeezed. ‘OK, sorry. But we need to get him out of here,’ Alexis murmured. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘You think I don’t know that? What can we do? Where can we take him?’ I asked.
‘I’ll pitch him into coming to the pictures, then I’ll take him back to our house. Fill him up with burgers and popcorn and let him crash out with us while you get this sorted out,’ she said softly.
‘Gee thanks,’ I said, my frustration bubbling up to the surface. ‘And how exactly do you suggest I go about that?’
‘Calm down, girl,’ Alexis protested. ‘I was talking about getting the door fixed, not solving the mysteries of the universe.’
I sighed. ‘Sorry. I’m kind of edgy, you know?’
Alexis put the other arm round my shoulders and gave me a quick hug. ‘I’ll go and get Davy before he gets stuck into one of those videos.’ She headed down the hall. I leaned against the wall and took some deep breaths, doing the mental relaxation exercises my Thai boxing coach taught me. I heard her say, ‘Hey, soft lad, you can’t watch a film without popcorn. Tell you what, why don’t we go to the proper pictures? Then we can go to the McDonald’s drive-in near my house and take the burgers back and watch your videos there.’
‘What are we going to go and see?’ Davy demanded.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Alexis said. She emerged from the living room and said, ‘Did I see the local freesheet scrunched up in the porch? They’ve got the multi-screen listings in, haven’t they?’
‘I think so,’ I said, exhaling the last of the twenty breaths.
Alexis moved past me and picked up the crumpled newspaper that had been stuffed gratuitously through Richard’s letter box some time over the weekend. ‘You know, I really object to trees being cut down so that rubbish can be dumped in my porch without my permission or invitation,’ I grumbled.
‘I hate freesheets too,’ Alexis said, flicking through the pages. ‘Because they get distributed to so many homes, advertising managers just lie about how many people read the bloody things, so local businesses spend their limited budgets advertising in wastepaper rather than taking an ad in the Chronicle. So the number of pages we print decreases, so we don’t hire as many journalists. And the freesheets don’t take up the slack on account of they’re crap editorially,’ she added for good measure.
‘Not that you’re biased or anything,’ I muttered. ‘Found the listing yet?’ As I spoke, a rumpled sheet of blue writing paper slid out from between the newspaper’s pages and fluttered to the floor.
‘Mmm,’ Alexis said, frowning in concentration as she moved back down the hall.
Absently, I bent down and picked up the paper. It was a sheet from a writing pad, folded in half. On the outside, in unfamiliar writing, I read: ‘Kate Brannigan’. Before I opened it, I knew what it was. I closed my eyes until the wave of nausea passed, then, slowly, apprehensively I unfolded it.
The hand was uncertain but perfectly legible. ‘Kate – I came round Monday afternoon but there was nobody in. I asked the boys where they got the transfers from, and they told me who’s handing them out. I spoke to the lad and found out where he’s getting them from, and there’s more to it than the drugs. You’re right, it shouldn’t be going on, and I’m going round tonight to tell him so. If you want to come with me, come to my flat about seven o’clock. Yours sincerely, Cherie.’
I slid down the wall till I was crouching in a tight bundle. I’d let Cherie down. I’d been so busy running around being a hero for Richard that I hadn’t made the time to check back with her. And now she was dead, all because I hadn’t managed to prevent her from sticking her head into a hornet’s nest.
I’d probably have stayed like that forever if I hadn’t heard wagons roll from the living room. Davy was shrieking with delight over some movie or other, Alexis’s rumble of enthusiasm a lower counterpoint. ‘Come on then, I’ll race you to the car,’ I heard her say. I forced myself into an upright position and I’d managed to find something approximating a smile by the time Davy was close enough to notice.
‘See you later, super troopers,’ I said as they passed at a run.
‘We’ll be at our house,’ Alexis said. ‘Phone Chris and tell her, would you? Only, don’t tell her why, she’ll only get fear of loss. I’ll tell her when she gets home.’
I watched them drive off in the car. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sorry to see Alexis leave. I pulled myself together with the assistance of a strong vodka and grapefruit juice and cut through the conservatory to my house. I didn’t t
hink I was up to approaching from the front. What amazed me was that the place wasn’t crawling with police. But then, my bungalow’s on the end of the row. No one overlooks the front of it, and even though it’s got a postcode that whacks my insurance up into the stratosphere, it’s still the kind of area where people assume a loud bang is a backfire from one of the MOT failures that sit on bricks all over the council estate, and not the shoot-out at the OK Corral.
From the inside, the front door looked just about as lethal. Time to call in a favour. I rang the office, and told Shelley I was on my way in. ‘Oh, and Shelley? I’d like to make a contribution to your household budget.’
‘You what?’
‘I need a new front door. Pronto monto. I mean tonight. Can you get Ted to see to it?’ Ted Barlow is the man Shelley strenuously insists she’s not actually, technically, living with. They fell in love when he turned up in our office looking forlorn, with the bank about to foreclose on his conservatory business. While I was busy sorting out the mess, the pair of them gazed into each other’s eyes and whispered sweet nothings. Now Shelley’s got a conservatory that takes up a good half of her back garden, and Ted tends to answer her phone first thing in the morning.
‘What’s happened? Have you had a burglary?’
‘I wish,’ I said with feeling. ‘Unfortunately, it’s a little bit more personal than that. I’ll tell you all about it when I come in.’
‘What about a key? Shall I get him to come by the office and pick one up?’
I pictured the door. ‘I think a key’s a bit academic,’ I said. ‘If I can get the key in, I’ll leave the outside door unlocked, OK? So if it’s still locked, he’ll know just to kick it in.’ I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. I was instructing someone to kick my door in? Sooner or later, somebody was going to pay for all this. For scaring me, for killing Cherie, for giving drugs to little kids.
I felt safer in the office. Illogical, I know, but fear and logic are hardly ever on speaking terms, never mind pals. I perched on the edge of the leather sofa in Bill’s office and told him all about the latest crisis. ‘I’m sorry to lay it all on you,’ I apologized, ‘but I need to talk it through.’
His blue eyes smiled. ‘We’re partners, aren’t we? In my book, that makes this as much my business as yours.’
‘I know, but, I feel like it’s always me that’s in the shit up to the neck. I seem to be accident-prone these days. I remember when this agency never did anything more dramatic than prowling through somebody else’s database. Now I seem to spend half my life in a state of panic.’
Bill chewed his beard and shrugged. ‘So walk away from it.’ He saw my look of instant outrage and grinned. ‘You see?’ he teased. ‘You like answers too much, Kate. But this time, I think we really should walk away from it. This is one for the cops.’
I shook my head vehemently, my nervous fingers plaiting the streamers from the waste basket of his shredder. ‘No can do, Bill. Sorry.’
Bill prowled the room like a huge blond bear who’s forgotten where he left the honey jar. ‘It’s too much of a risk,’ he insisted. ‘These people are serious, Kate. They’ve given you a warning. If they think you’re ignoring that, then they won’t hesitate to give you the same treatment they dished out to that poor woman. And frankly, I haven’t got the time to find another partner right now.’
‘I can’t go to the police, Bill. I’m not just being bloody-minded!’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ he said, a wry smile counteracting the bitter edge to his voice.
I stood up, his restlessness infecting me. I walked across to his desk and perched on the edge of it and explained. ‘Bill, the Drugs Squad are supposedly checking out the info I handed over to them, and if it stands up, Richard will be released on bail on Thursday morning. If I go to the bizzies now and say, “Excuse me, some drug dealer’s hit man’s just taken a shotgun to my front door, but it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you’ve got my partner locked up on drugs charges,” they’re going to fall about. There’s no way they’re not going to connect it to what’s happened to Richard, and that’ll be the end of any chance he’s got of being turned loose.’
Bill stopped pacing and threw himself down on the sofa. He breathed out deeply through his nose. ‘Kate, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but hadn’t you considered the possibility that it just might be connected to Richard’s case rather than Cherie’s death?’
‘It’s hard for me to get my head round the idea that there were two lunatics with shotguns wandering round Ardwick at the same time. The only credible explanation is that when Cherie fronted up whoever is pushing these drugs to kids, she mentioned my name. She might even have used me as an insurance policy. You know–“if anything happens to me, Kate Brannigan knows where to come looking”. If that’s what happened, then hiring some psycho with a sawn-off to kill Cherie gets even more cost-effective. It not only gets rid of someone who knows more than the dealer wants her to, it also serves as a warning to me to keep my nose out and to stay away from the cops investigating the shooting. And it lets everybody else who’s involved with the racket know just what’s coming to them if they step out of line. A real bargain, when you think about it,’ I added angrily.
Bill said, ‘But I don’t necessarily think that there were two psychos driving round Ardwick with a shooter. Manchester isn’t LA. Having a gun in your glove box or under your car seat so the girls all know you’re a big man and the yobs all know to give you a wide berth is a different kettle of fish from being a hired gun. It could be that while there was only one gunman, there were two paymasters. That would explain why Cherie was killed and you were only warned.’
Suddenly, I saw the flaw in Bill’s theory. ‘It was my front door,’ I said.
‘Yes?’ Bill said.
‘Not Richard’s. It was my front door. Don’t you see?’ I was excited now, banging the desk with my fist. ‘If they’d wanted to warn me off the case, they’d have blasted Richard’s front door. He’s the one that’s vulnerable, he’s the one that’s banged up with a load of villains, he’s the one with the eight-year-old pressure point. Besides, the only people who know there’s any connection between me and Richard are the Drugs Squad.’
Bill slumped in his office chair and chewed a pencil. ‘And we trust the Drugs Squad not to have a leak? We think they don’t have any bent officers who might just be in Eliot James’s golf club?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t exactly trust Geoff Turnbull. Not even on Della’s say-so. But he’s an ambitious man, and self-interest’s one of the most powerful engines there is. I bet the thought of nailing a smooth operator like Eliot James is a bigger aphrodisiac than oysters to a man like Turnbull. And he’ll want all the credit for himself; I doubt very much if he’s told a living soul he got his information from a private eye.’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ Bill said, resignation all over his face. ‘So, what now?’
I told him. And since his only alternative was to betray me by going behind my back to the police, Bill reluctantly agreed to help where he could.
The main problem for me now was that I’d argued myself out of any chance of feeling secure. At least if I’d believed the shooting had anything to do with Jammy James and his merry men, I’d have known that the Drugs Squad were about to rob the gunman of any future playdays from that direction. Now, I had to live with the uncomfortable fact that some complete stranger out there wanted me to give up an inquiry so badly that they’d blown a hole in my front door. If I was going to stop them doing the same thing to me, I’d better find out who they were. And fast.
22
The rush-hour traffic had already started to build by the time I left the office. I sat smouldering in the jam at the top of Plymouth Grove, listening to GMR cheerily telling me where the traffic black spots were. I could have crossed town faster on foot than I was managing by car. I watched the seconds tick past on my watch, muttering darkly about wh
at the transport policy would be when I ruled the world. It was twenty to five by the time I’d inched up Stockport Road and turned off into the car park behind the Longsight District Centre. I parked illegally as near as I could get to the Social Services office. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss my target.
Like the rest of the city’s social workers, the family placement officer theoretically knocks off work at half past four. But like most of her colleagues, Frankie Summerbee knows that the only way to come close to dealing with her workload is to stay at the office long after the town hall bureaucrats have gone home. So, like most of her colleagues, Frankie’s chronically over-tired, over-stressed and prone to making decisions that don’t always look too wonderful in the cool light of day under cross-examination. That’s what I was relying on this afternoon.
I’ve known Frankie almost as long as I’ve known Richard. Before he moved in next door to me, he lived in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, that Manchester suburb whose trendiness quotient rises and falls in tandem with the Green Party’s electoral share. He lived in the downstairs flat of an Edwardian terraced cottage. Frankie had the flat upstairs. Luckily for her, that included the attic. I don’t know if that had always been her bedroom, but after Richard moved in downstairs I suspect that sleeping at least two floors away from his stereo became an imperative.
Of course, as a trained social worker, she couldn’t avoid helping him out; cooking the odd meal, picking up his washing from the launderette, grabbing a stack of pizzas every now and again as she whizzed past the chill cabinet in the supermarket on her weekly shop. I don’t expect she got any thanks, but he did take her out to dinner a few times, and so she became another victim of the Cute Smile.
