by Val McDermid
‘Denzel Williams,’ Dennis said. ‘Garibaldi’s. Mention my name.’
‘Thanks.’ I hadn’t been to Garibaldi’s, but I’d heard plenty about it. If I’d had to guess where to find someone I could talk to about so dodgy a game, that’s probably the place I’d have gone for.
‘Anything else?’
I shook my head. ‘Not in the way of business. Not unless you know somebody with a wad of cash to invest in a private-eye business.’
Dennis’s eyebrows lowered. ‘What’s Bill up to?’
I told him. Debbie tuned back in to the conversation and the subject kept us going for the remainder of the visit. By the time I’d dropped Debbie back at the house, I had a list of a dozen or so names that Dennis reckoned had the kind of money to hand that they could invest in the business. Somehow, I didn’t think I’d be following any of them up. I’m unpopular enough with the Old Bill as it is without becoming a money laundry for the Manchester Mafia.
Come five o’clock, I was parked down the street from Sell Phones. All I needed was a name and address on this pair of con merchants and I could hand the case over to the police as I’d already agreed with my clients. We had the names and addresses of nearly a dozen complainants, some of whom were bound to be capable of picking Will Allen or his female sidekick out of a line-up. I looked forward to handing the whole package over to Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice, head honcho of the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. It wasn’t exactly her bailiwick, but Della’s one of the tightknit group of women I call friends, and I trusted her not to screw it up. There are coppers who hate private enterprise so much they’d let a villain walk rather than let a PI take an ounce of credit for a collar. Della isn’t one of them. But before I could have the pleasure of nailing these cheap crooks, I had to attach names and addresses to them. And I was damned if they were going to defeat me two nights running.
This time I was ready for them. When Allen swung left down the hill, I was right behind him. I stayed in close touch as we threaded through back streets flanked by decaying mills half filled with struggling small businesses and vacant lots turned into car parks, across the Rochdale Road and the Oldham Road, emerging on Great Ancoats Street just south of the black glass facade of the old Daily Express Building. I slipped into the heavy traffic with just one car separating me from the silver Mazda, and stayed like that right across town, past the mail-order warehouses and through the council estates.
In Hathersage Road, the car pulled up outside a general store opposite the old Turkish Baths, closed down by the council on the grounds that it cost too much to maintain the only leisure facility within walking distance for the thousands of local inner-city residents. As one of those locals, it made me fizz with fury every time I paid an instalment of my council tax. So much for New Labour. I carried on past the parked car as the woman jumped out and headed into the shop. I pulled into a parking space further down the street, hastily adjusting my rear-view mirror so I could see what was going on. A few minutes later, she emerged carrying a copy of the Chronicle and a packet of cigarettes.
As the Mazda passed me and headed for the traffic lights, I hung back. The lights were on red, and I wasn’t going to emerge till they changed. On green, the Mazda swung left into Anson Road, the overhanging trees turning daylight to dusk like a dimmer switch. They turned off almost immediately into a quiet street lined with large Victorian houses. About halfway down on the left, the red brick gave way to modern concrete. Filling a space equivalent to a couple of the sprawling Victorians was a four-storey block of flats in a squared-off U. The Mazda turned into the block’s car park and stopped. I cruised past, then accelerated, swung the car round at the next junction and drove back in time to see Allen and the woman from Sell Phones disappear through the block’s entrance door. Even from this distance, I could see the entry phone. There must have been close on fifty flats in the block.
A whole day had trickled through my fingers and I didn’t seem to be much further forward with anything. Maybe I should follow Shelley’s advice and put my share of the business on the market. And not just as a ploy.
Chapter 9
It was too early in the evening for me to have anything better to do, so I decided to keep an eye on the gravestone grifters. I figured that since they’d both gone indoors, the chances were that they were going to have a bite to eat and a change of clothes before heading out to hit the heartbroken, so I took fifteen minutes to shoot back to my house, pick up my copy of that night’s Chronicle from the mat and throw together a quick sandwich of Dolcelatte and rocket that was well past its launch-by date. It was the last of the bread too, I mentally noted as I binned the wrapper. So much for a night of chopping and slicing and home-made Chinese. I tossed a can of Aqua Libra into my bag along with the film-wrapped sandwich and drove back to my observation post.
Just after seven, the woman emerged alone with one of those expensive anorexic girlie briefcases that have a shoulder strap instead of a handle. She made straight for the car. I waited until she was behind the wheel, then I started my engine and swiftly reversed into the drive of the house behind me. That way I could get on her tail no matter which direction she chose. She turned left out of the car park, and I followed her back to Anson Road and down towards the bottom end of Kingsway, past rows of between-the-wars semis where the vast assortment of what passes for family life in the nineties happened behind closed doors, a world we were completely cut off from as we drifted down the half-empty roads, sealed in our separate boxes.
Luckily we didn’t have far to go, since I was acutely aware that there wasn’t enough traffic around to cover me adequately. Shortly after we hit Kingsway, she hung a left at some lights and headed deep into the heart of suburban Burnage. Again, luck was on my side, a phenomenon I hadn’t been experiencing much of lately. Her destination was on one of the long, wide avenues running parallel to Kingsway, rather than up one of the narrow streets or cul-de-sacs built in an era when nobody expected there would come a day when every household had at least one car. In those choked chicanes, she couldn’t have avoided spotting me. When she did slow down, obviously checking out house numbers, I overtook her and parked a few hundred yards ahead, figuring she must be close to her target. I was right. She actually stopped less than twenty yards in front of me and walked straight up the path of a three-bedroomed semi with a set of flower beds so neat it was hard to imagine a dandelion with enough bottle to sprout there.
I watched her ring the bell. The door opened, but I couldn’t see the person behind it. Three sentences and she was in. I flicked through my copy of that evening’s Chronicle till I got to the death announcements and read down the column. There it was.
Sheridan. Angela Mary, of Burnage, suddenly on Tuesday at Manchester Royal Infirmary after a short illness. Beloved wife of Tony, mother of Becky and Richard. Service to be held at Our Lady of the Sorrows, Monday, 2 p.m., followed by committal at Stockport Crematorium at 3 p.m.
With that information and the phone book, it wouldn’t be hard to identify the right address. And you could usually tell from the names roughly what age group you were looking at. I’d have guessed that Tony and Angela were probably in their middle to late forties, their kids late teens to early twenties. Perfect targets for the con merchants. Bereft husband young enough to notice an attractive woman, whether consciously or not. Probably enough money in the pot to be able to afford a decent headstone. The thought of it made me sick.
What was worse was the knowledge that even as I was working all this out, Will Allen’s accomplice was giving the shattered widower a sales pitch designed to separate him from a large chunk of his cash. I couldn’t just sit there and let it happen. On the other hand, I couldn’t march up the path and unmask her unless I wanted her and her sleazy sidekick to cover their tracks and leave town fast. I couldn’t call the cops; I knew Della was out of town at a conference, and trying to convince some strange officer that I wasn’t a nutter fast enough to get them out here in time t
o stop it was way beyond my capabilities. I racked my brains. There had to be a way of blowing her out without blowing my cover.
There was only one thing I could come up with. And that depended on how well the Sheridans got along with their neighbours. If they’d had years of attrition over parking, teenage stereos and footballs over fences, I’d had it. Squaring my shoulders, I walked up the path of the other half of the Sheridans’ semi. The woman who answered the door looked to be in her mid-thirties, thick dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, a face all nose, teeth and chin. She wore a pair of faded jeans, supermarket trainers and a Body Shop T-shirt demanding that some part of the planet should be saved. When she registered that it was a stranger on the doorstep, her cheery grin faded to a faint frown. Clearly, I was less interesting than whoever she’d been expecting. I handed her a business card. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I started apologetically.
‘Private investigator?’ she interrupted. ‘You mean, like on the telly? I didn’t know women did that.’
Some days, you’d kill for an original response. Still, I was just grateful not to have the door slammed in my face. I smiled, nodded and ploughed on. ‘I need you help,’ I said. ‘How well do you know Mr Sheridan next door?’
The woman gasped. ‘He’s never murdered her, has he? I know it were sudden, like, and God knows they’ve had their ups and downs, but I can’t believe he killed her!’
I closed my eyes momentarily. ‘It’s nothing like that. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing at all suspicious about Mrs Sheridan’s death. Look, can I come in for a minute? This is a bit difficult to explain.’
She looked dubious. ‘How do I know you’re who you say you are?’
I spread my hands in a shrug. ‘Do I look the dangerous type? Believe me, I’m trying to prevent a crime, not take part in one. Mr Sheridan is about to be robbed unless you can help me here.’
She gasped again, her hand flying to her mouth this time. ‘It’s just like the telly,’ she said, ushering me into a narrow hallway where there was barely room for both of us and the mountain bike that hung on one wall. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded avidly.
‘A particularly nasty team of crooks are conning bereaved families out of hundreds of pounds,’ I said, dressing it up in the tabloid style she clearly relished. ‘They catch them at a weak moment and persuade them to part with cash for cut-price gravestones. Now, I’m very close to completing a watertight case against them, so I don’t want to alert them to the fact that their cover’s blown. But I can’t just sit idly by while poor Mr Sheridan gets ripped off.’
‘So you want me to go and tell him there’s a crook in his living room?’ she asked eagerly.
‘Not exactly, no. I want you to pop round in a neighbourly sort of way, just to see he’s all right, and do what you can to prevent him parting with any money. Say things like, “If this is a respectable firm, they won’t mind you sleeping on this and talking it over with your funeral director.” Don’t let on you’re at all suspicious, just that you’re a cautious sort of person. And that Angela wouldn’t have wanted him to rush into anything without consulting other members of the family. You get the idea?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve got you. You can count on me.’ I didn’t have a lot of choice, so I just smiled. ‘I’ll get round there right away. I was going to pop round anyway to see how Tony was doing. We got on really well, me and Angela. She was older than me, of course, but we played tenpin bowls in the same team every Wednesday. I couldn’t get over it when I heard. Burst appendix. You never know the hour or the day, do you? You leave this to me, Kate,’ she added, glancing at my card again.
We walked down the path together, me heading back to my car and her next door. As we parted, she promised to call me on my mobile to let me know what happened. I was on pins as I sat watching the Sheridans’ house. My new sidekick was definitely a bit of a loose cannon, but I couldn’t think of anything else I could have done that would have been effective without warning off Allen’s partner in crime, particularly since they’d be on their guard after the earlier debacle at Richard’s house. About half an hour passed, then the front door opened and my target emerged. Judging by the way she threw her briefcase into the car, she wasn’t in the best of moods. I’d had my phone switched off all day to avoid communicating with the office, but I turned it back on as I pulled out behind the woman.
She was back inside the block of flats by the time my new confederate called. ‘Hiya,’ she greeted me. ‘I think it went off all right. I don’t think she was suspicious, just brassed off because I was sitting there being dead neg about the whole thing. I just kept saying to Tony he shouldn’t make any decision without the kids being there, and that was all the support he needed, really. She realized she wasn’t getting anywhere and I wasn’t shifting, so she just took herself off.’
‘You did really well. Do you know what she was calling herself?’ I asked when I could get a word in.
‘She had these business cards. Greenhalgh and Edwards. Tony showed me after she’d gone. Sarah Sargent, it says her name is. Will you need us to go to court?’ she asked, the phone line crackling with excitement.
‘Possibly,’ I hedged. ‘I really appreciate your help. If the police need your evidence to support a case, I’ll let them know where to find you.’
‘Great! Hey, I think your job’s dead exciting, you know. Any time you need a hand again, just call me, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. Anything to get out from under. But she insisted on giving me her name and phone number before I could finally disengage. I wondered how glamorous she’d find the job when she had to do a fifteen-hour surveillance in a freezing van in the dead of winter with a plastic bucket to pee in and no guarantee that she’d get the pictures she needed to avoid having to do the whole thing all over again the next day.
I started my engine. I didn’t think the con merchants would be having another go tonight. But I still had miles to go before I could sleep. A little burglary, perhaps, and then a visit to clubland for a nightcap. Given that I wasn’t dressed for either pursuit, it seemed like a good excuse to head for home. Maybe I could even squeeze in a couple of hours kip before I had to go about my nocturnal business.
Never mind mice and men. Every time I make a plan these days it seems to go more off track than a blindfolded unicyclist. I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps towards my bungalow when I heard another car door open and I saw a figure move in my direction through the dusk. I automatically moved into position, ready for fight or flight, arms hanging at my side, shoulder bag clutched firmly, ready to swing it in a tight arc, all my weight on the balls of my feet, ready to kick, pivot or run. I waited for the figure to approach, tensed for battle.
It was just as well I’m the kind who looks before she leaps into action. I don’t think Detective Constable Linda Shaw would have been too impressed with a flying kick to the abdomen. ‘DC Shaw?’ I said, surprised and baffled as she stepped into a pool of sodium orange.
‘Ms Brannigan,’ she acknowledged, looking more than a little sheepish. ‘I wonder if we might have a word?’ Looming up in the gloom behind her, I noticed a burly bloke with more than a passing resemblance to Mike Tyson. I sincerely hoped we weren’t going to get into the ‘nice cop, nasty cop’ routine. I had a funny feeling I wouldn’t come off best.
‘Sure, come on in and have a brew,’ I said.
She cleared her throat. ‘Actually, we’d prefer it if you came down to the station,’ she said, her embarrassment growing by the sentence.
Now I was completely bewildered. The one and only time I’d met Linda Shaw, she’d been one of Detective Inspector Cliff Jackson’s gophers on a murder case I’d been hired to investigate. There was a bit of history between me and Jackson that meant every time our paths crossed, we both ended up with sore heads, but Linda Shaw had acted as the perfect buffer zone, keeping the pair of us far enough apart to ensure that the job got done without another murder being added to the case’s tally. I’d like
d her, not least because she was her own woman, seemingly determined not to let Jackson’s abrasive bull-headedness rub off on her. What I couldn’t work out was why she was trying to drag me off to a police station for questioning. For once, I wasn’t doing anything that involved tap-dancing over a policeman’s toes. That might change once I got properly stuck in to the investigation of Alexis’s murdered doctor, but even if it did, the detectives I’d be irritating were forty miles away on the other side of the Pennines. ‘Why?’ I asked mildly.
‘We’ve got some questions we’d like to ask you.’ By now, Linda wasn’t even pretending to meet my eye. She was pointedly staring somewhere over my left shoulder.
‘So come in, have a brew and we’ll see if I can answer them,’ I repeated. I call it the irregular verb theory of life; I am firm, you are stubborn, he/she is a pig-headed, rigid, anally retentive stick-in-the mud.
‘Like DC Shaw said, we’d like you to come down the station,’ her oppo rumbled. It was like listening to Vesuvius by stethoscope. Only with a Liverpudlian accent instead of an Italian one.
I sighed. ‘We can do this one of two ways. Either you can come into the house and ask me what you’ve got to ask me, or you can arrest me and we’ll go down the station and I don’t say a word until my brief arrives. You choose.’ I gave the pair of them my sweetest smile, somehow choking down the anger. I knew whose hand was behind this. It had Cliff Jackson’s sadistic fingerprints all over it.
Linda breathed out hard through her nose and compressed her lips into a thin line. I imagined she was thinking about the rocket Cliff Jackson was going to fire at her when she got back to base without me meekly following at her heels. That wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t going to be guilt-tripped into behaving as if it was. When I made no response, Linda shrugged and said, ‘We’d better have that brew, then.’
