by Val McDermid
Helen Maitland glowered at me. ‘I never said we were friends,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘All I said was that we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. After she moved out, we didn’t stay in close touch. But even if we had fallen out, it would still have nothing to do with the fact that Sarah Blackstone was murdered by some junkie burglar.’
I smiled sweetly as I got to my feet. ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that score,’ I said. ‘What it might explain, though, is why Sarah Blackstone was hiding behind your name to commit her crimes.’
I started for the door. ‘What crimes?’ I heard.
Half turning, I said, ‘Obviously nothing to do with you, Dr Maitland, since you had nothing to do with her. Thanks for the tea.’
She didn’t follow me down the hall. I opened the door and nearly walked into a key stabbing towards me at eye height. I jumped backwards and so did the woman wielding the key. She was the original of the photograph in the kitchen. With her cascade of dark hair, skin pale as marble and a long cape-shouldered coat, she looked as extreme as a character in an Angela Carter story. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
No, just an extra from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, I thought but didn’t say. ‘You startled me,’ I said, putting a hand on my pounding heart.
‘Me too!’ she exclaimed.
From behind me, I heard Helen Maitland’s voice. ‘Ms Brannigan was just leaving.’
The other woman and I skirted round each other, swapping places. ‘Bye,’ I said brightly as the door closed behind me. Trotting down the stone steps leading to the garden, I told myself off for being childish enough to give away my secrets to Helen Maitland just to score a cheap point because she’d made her way under my skin. It was hard to resist the conclusion that she had learned more from our interview than I had.
I didn’t think she had lied to me. Not in so many words. Over the years, I’ve developed a bullshit detector that usually picks up on outright porkies. But I was fairly sure she wasn’t telling me anything like the whole story. Whether any of it was relevant to my inquiries, I had no idea. But I had an idea where I might find some of the facts lurking behind her smoke screen of half-truths. When I got back to the car, I switched on my mobile and left a message for Shelley on the office answering machine. An urgent letter needed to go off to the Land Registry first thing in the morning. The reply would take a few days, but when it came, I had a sneaky feeling I’d have some bigger guns in my armoury to go after Helen Maitland with.
Chapter 13
In these days of political correctness, it’s probably an indictable offence to say it, but Sean Costigan didn’t have to open his mouth to reveal he was Irish. I only had to look at him, even in the sweaty laser-split gloom of the nightclub. He had dark hair with the sort of kink in it that guarantees a bad hair life, no matter how much he spent on expensive stylists. His eyes were dark blue, his complexion fair and smooth, his raw bones giving him a youthful, unformed look that his watchful expression and the deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth denied.
I’d got home around nine after fish and chips in Leeds’s legendary Bryan’s, making the mistake I always do of thinking I’m hungry enough for a jumbo haddock. Feeling more tightly stuffed than a Burns Night haggis, I’d driven back with the prospect of an early night all that was keeping me going. I should have known better, really. Among the several messages on my machine — Alexis, Bill, Gizmo and Richard, just for a kickoff — there was one I couldn’t ignore. Dan Druff had called to say he’d set up a meet at midnight in Paradise. Why does nobody keep office hours any more?
I’ve never been able to catnap. I always wake up with a thick head and a mouth that feels like it’s lined with sheep-skin. I don’t mean the sanitized stuff they put in slippers — I mean the stuff you find in the wild, still attached to its smelly owner. I rang Alexis, but she didn’t want to talk in front of Chris, whom she was keeping in the dark about Sarah Blackstone’s murder on account of her delicate condition. Richard was out — his message had been to tell me he wouldn’t be home until late. We’d probably meet on the doorstep as we both staggered home in the small hours. Bill I still wasn’t talking to, and Gizmo doesn’t do conversation. So I booted up the computer and settled down for a serious session with my football team. Not many people know this, but I’m the most successful manager in the history of the football league. In just five seasons, I’ve taken struggling Halifax Town from the bottom of the Conference League up through the divisions to the Premier League. In our first season there, we even won the Cup. This game, Premier Manager 3, is one of my darkest secrets. Even Richard doesn’t know about my hidden nights of passion with my first-team squad. He wouldn’t understand that it’s just fantasy; he’d see it as an excuse to buy me a Manchester United season ticket for my next birthday so I could sit next to him in the stands every other week and perish from cold and boredom. He’d never comprehend that while watching football sends me catatonic, developing the strategies it takes to run a successful team is my idea of a really good time. So I always make sure he’s out when I sit down with my squad.
Around half past eleven, I told the boys to take an early bath and grabbed my leather jacket. When I stepped outside the door, I discovered the rain had stopped, so I decided to leave the car and walk to the Paradise. It’s only fifteen minutes on foot, and the streets of central Manchester are still fairly safe to walk around late at night. Especially if you’re a Thai boxer. Besides, I figured it wouldn’t do me any harm to limber up for looking chilled out.
The Paradise Factory considers itself Manchester’s coolest nightclub. The brick building is on the corner of Princess Street and Charles Street, near Chinatown and the casinos, slightly off the beaten track of clubland. It used to house Factory Records, the famous indie label that was home to Joy Division and lots of other bands less talented but definitely more joyful. When Factory failed, a casualty to the recession, an astute local businesswoman took over the building and turned it into a poser’s heaven. Officially, it’s supposed to be an eclectic mix of gay and hetero, camp and straight, but it’s the only club where I’ve been asked on the door to verify that I’m not a gender tourist by listing other Manchester gay and lesbian venues where I’ve drunk and danced.
As soon as I went through the door, I was hit by a bass rhythm that pounded stronger in my body than my heart ever had. It was hard to move without keeping the beat. I found Dan and Lice propped against a wall near the first bar I came to as I walked into the three-storey building. The guy I knew without asking was Sean Costigan stood slightly to one side, his wiry body dwarfed by his fellow Celts. His eyes were restless, constantly checking out the room. He let me buy the drinks. Both rounds. That wasn’t the only way he made it plain he was there on sufferance. The sneer was another dead giveaway. It stayed firmly in place long after the formal introductions were over and he’d given me the kind of appraising look that’s more about the labels and the price tags on the clothes than the body inside them.
‘I don’t know what the boys have been saying to you, but I want to make one thing absolutely plain,’ he told me in a hard-edged Belfast whine. ‘We are the victims here, not the villains.’ He sounded like every self-justifying Northern Irish politician I’d ever heard. Only this one was leaning over me, bellowing in my ear, as opposed to on a TV screen I could silence with one blast of the remote control.
‘So how do you see what’s been happening?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been in this game a very long time,’ he shouted over the insistent techno beat. ‘I was the one put Morrissey on the map, you know. And the Mondays. All the big boys, I’ve had them all through my hands. You’re talking to a very experienced operator here,’ he added, wetting his whistle with a swig of the large dark rum and Coke he’d asked for. Dan and Lice nodded sagely, backing up their man. Funny how quickly clients forget whose side you’re on.
I waited, sipping my extremely averag
e vodka and bottled grapefruit juice. Costigan lit a Marlboro Light and let me share the plume of smoke from his nostrils. Sometimes I wonder if being a lawyer would really have been such a bad choice. ‘And I have not been trespassing,’ he said, stabbing my right shoulder with the fingers that held the cigarette. ‘I am the one trespassed against.’
‘You’re telling me that you haven’t been sticking up posters on someone else’s ground?’ I asked sceptically.
‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Like I said, we’re the victims here. It’s my ground that’s getting invaded. More times than I can count in the past few weeks, I’ve had my legitimate poster sites covered up by cowboys.’
‘So you’ve been taking revenge on the guilty men?’
‘I have not,’ he yelled indignantly. ‘I don’t even know who’s behind it. This city’s always been well regulated, you know what I mean? Everybody knows what’s what and nobody gets hurt if they stick to their own patch. I’ve been doing this too long to fuck with the opposition. So if you’re trying to lay the boys’ trouble at my door, you can forget it, OK?’
‘Is there any kind of pattern to the cowboy flyposting?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, a pattern?’
‘Is it always the same sites where they’re taking liberties? Or is it random? Are you the only one who’s being hit, or is it a general thing?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s all over, as far as I can tell. It’s not the sort of thing you talk about, d’you understand? Nobody wants the opposition to think they’re weak, you know? But the word on the street is that I’m not the only one suffering.’
‘But none of the other bands are getting the kind of shit we’re getting,’ Dan interjected. God knows how he managed to follow the conversation. He must have trained as a lip-reader. ‘I’ve been asking around. Plenty other people have had some of their posters covered up, but nobody’s had the aggravation we’ve had.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s nothing to do with me, OK?’ Costigan retorted aggressively.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I told Dan and Lice I’d be in touch, drained my drink and walked home staring at every poster I passed, wondering what the hell was going on.
I dragged my feet up the stairs to the office just after quarter past nine the next morning. I felt like I was fourteen again, Monday morning before double Latin. I’d lain staring at the ceiling, trying to think of good excuses for not going in, but none of the ones that presented themselves convinced either me or Richard, which gave them no chance against Shelley or Bill.
I needn’t have worried. There was news waiting that took Bill off the front page for a while. I walked in to find Josh Gilbert perched on the edge of Shelley’s desk, one elegantly trousered leg crossed casually over the other. I could have paid my mortgage for a couple of months easily with what the suit had cost. Throw in the shirt, tie and shoes and we’d be looking at the utility bills too. Josh is a financial consultant who has managed to surf every wave and trough of the volatile economy and somehow come out so far ahead of the field that I keep expecting the Serious Fraud Office to feel his collar. Josh and I have a deal: he gives me information, I buy him expensive dinners. In these days of computerization, it would be cheaper to pay Gizmo for the same stuff, but a lot less entertaining. Computers don’t gossip. Yet.
Shelley was looking up at Josh with that mixture of wariness and amusement she reserves for born womanizers. When he saw me, he broke off the tale he was in the middle of and jumped to his feet. ‘Kate!’ he exclaimed, stepping forward and sweeping me into a chaste embrace.
I air-kissed each cheek and stepped clear. The older he got, the more his resemblance to Robert Redford seemed to grow. It was disconcerting, as if Hollywood had invaded reality. Even his eyes seemed bluer. You didn’t have to be a private eye to suspect tinted contacts. ‘I don’t mean to sound rude,’ I said, ‘but what are you doing here at this time of the morning? Shouldn’t you be blinding some poor innocent with science about the latest fluctuations of the Nikkei? Or persuading some lucky Lottery winner that their money is safe in your hands?’
‘Those days are behind me,’ he said.
‘Meaning?’
‘I am thirty-nine years and fifty weeks old today.’
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Ever since I’ve known him Josh has boasted of his intention to retire to some tax haven when he was forty. Part of me had always taken this with a pinch of salt. I don’t move in the sort of circles where people amass the kind of readies to make that a realistic possibility. I should have realized he meant it; Josh will bullshit till the end of time about women, but he’s never less than one hundred per cent serious about money. ‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Josh has come to invite us to his fortieth birthday and retirement party.’ Shelley confirmed my bleak fear with a sympathetic look.
‘Selling up and selling out, eh?’ I said.
‘Not as such,’ Josh said languidly, returning to his perch on Shelley’s desk. ‘I’m not actually selling the consultancy. Julia’s learned enough from me to run the business, and I’m not abandoning her entirely. I might be going to live on Grand Cayman, but with fax machines and e-mail, she’ll feel as though I’ve only moved a few miles away.’
‘Only if you don’t have conversations about the weather,’ I said. ‘You’ll get bored, Josh. Nothing to do all day but play.’
The smile crinkled the skin round his eyes, and he gave me the look Redford reserves for Debra Winger in Legal Eagles. ‘How could I be bored when there are still beautiful women on the planet I haven’t met?’
I heard the door open behind me and Bill’s voice said, ‘Are we using “met” in the biblical sense here?’
Bill and Josh gave each other the usual onceover, a bit like dogs who have to sniff each other’s bollocks before they decide a fight isn’t worth the bother. They’d never been friends, probably because they’d thought they were competitors for women. Neither had ever realized how wrong they were; Bill could never have bedded a woman without brains, and Josh never bedded one with an IQ greater than her age except by accident. Shelley had her pet theories on their respective motivations, but life’s too short to rerun that seminar.
‘So it’s all change then,’ Bill said once Josh had brought him up to speed on his reasons for visiting. ‘You off to Grand Cayman, me off to Australia.’
‘I thought you’d only just come back,’ Josh said.
‘I’m planning to move out there permanently. I’m marrying an Australian businesswoman.’
‘Is she pregnant?’ Josh blurted out without thinking. Seeing my face, he gave an apologetic smile and shrug.
‘No. And she’s not a rich widow either,’ Bill replied, not in the least put out. ‘I’m exercising free will here, Josh.’
I swear Josh actually changed colour. The thought of a man as dedicated as he was to a turbo-charged love life finally settling down, and from choice, was like suddenly discovering his body was harbouring a secret cancer. ‘So because of this woman, you’re going to get married and live in Australia? My God, Bill, that’s worse than moving to Birmingham. And what about the business? You can keep a finger on the financial pulse from anywhere you can plug in a PC, but you can’t run an investigation agency from the other side of the globe.’
‘The game plan is that I’ll sell my share of the agency here and start up again in Australia.’
Josh’s eyebrows rose. ‘At your age? Bill, you’re only a couple of years younger than me. You’re really planning to start from ground zero in a foreign country where you don’t even speak the language? God, that sounds too much like hard work to me. And what about Kate?’
I’d had enough. ‘Kate’s gotta go,’ I said brusquely. ‘People to be, places to see. Thanks for the invite, Josh. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ I wheeled round and headed back out of the door. I wasn’t sure where I was going, and I didn’t care. I knew I was behaving like a brat, but I didn’t care about that either. I sto
od on the corner outside the office, not even caring about the vicious northeasterly wind that was exfoliating every bit of exposed skin. A giggling flurry of young women in leg warmers and tights accompanied by a couple of well-muscled men enveloped me, waiting for the lights to change as they headed for rehearsals at the new dance theatre up the street, one of the handful of tangible benefits we got from being UK City of Drama for a year. Their energy and sense of direction shamed me, so I followed briskly in their wake and collected my car from the meter where I’d left it less than twenty minutes before. Given that I’d planned to be in the office for a couple of hours, somebody was going to get lucky.
One quick phone call and fifteen minutes later, I was walking round the big Regent Road Sainsbury’s with Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice. When I’d called and asked her if she could spare half an hour, she’d suggested the supermarket. Her fridge was in the same dire straits as mine, and this way we could both stock up on groceries while we did the business. We took turns pushing the trolley, using our packs of toilet rolls as a convenient Maginot line between our separate purchases. I filled her in on the headstone scam in the fruit and veg. department, handing over a list of victims who should be able to pick out Williams and Constable in an identity parade. She promised to pass it on to one of her bright young things.
The outrageous tale of Cliff Jackson’s waste of police time kept us going as far as the chill cabinets. By the time we hit the breakfast cereals, I’d moved on to the problems at Mortensen and Brannigan, which lasted right up to hosiery and tampons. Della tried an emerald green ruffle against her copper hair. I nodded agreement. ‘I can see why Shelley suggested you putting your share of the business on the market too,’ Della said. ‘But that could present you with a different set of problems.’
‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘But what else can I do?’
‘You could talk to Josh,’ she said. Sometimes I forget the pair of them were at Cambridge together, they’re such different types. It’s true that they were both fascinated by money but while Josh wanted to make as much of it as possible, Della wanted to stop people like him doing it illegally. She was too bright for him to fancy, so he gave her his respect instead, and a few years ago he did me the biggest favour he’s ever managed when he introduced us.
