Kickback

by Val McDermid

  Alexis Lee is probably my best friend. She's the crime reporter on the Manchester Evening Chronicle. I guess the fact that we're both women who've broken into what is traditionally a male preserve helped build the bond between us. But apart from our common interest in things criminal, she's also saved me more money than anyone else I know. I can think of at least a dozen times when she's prevented me from making very costly mistakes in expensive dress shops. And, at the risk of making her sound like a stereotype, she's got that wonderful, rich Liverpudlian sense of humour that can find the funny side in the blackest tragedy. I couldn't think of anything that would cheer me up faster than a half-hour pit stop.

  The earlier rain had turned the fallen leaves into a slick mush. As I braked gently to pull up outside Alexis's, I swear my Vauxhall Nova went sideways. Cursing the Highways Department, I slithered round the car and on to the safer ground of the driveway. I grabbed at a post to steady myself, then realized with a shock that this particular post wasn't a permanent fixture. It was supporting a For Sale sign. I was outraged. How dare they put the house on the market without consulting me? Time I found out what was going on here. I walked round to the back door, knocked and entered the kitchen.

  Alexis's girlfriend Chris is a partner in a firm of community architects, which is why their kitchen looks like a Gothic cathedral, complete with flagged floor and vaulted ceiling with beams like whales' ribs. The plasterwork is stencilled with flower and fruit motifs, and there are plaster bas-relief bosses at regular intervals along the roof truss. It's an amazing sight.

  Instead of the Quasimodo I always half-expect, Alexis was sitting at the pitch-pine table, a mug of tea at her elbow, some kind of catalogue open in front of her. As I came in, she looked up and grinned. 'Kate! Hey, good to see you, kid! Grab yourself a cuppa, the pot's fresh,' she said, waving at the multi-coloured knitted tea cosy by the kettle. I poured myself a mug of strong tea as Alexis asked, 'What brings you round here? You been doing a job? Anything in it for me?'

  'Never mind that,' I said firmly, dropping into a chair. 'You trying to avoid me? What’s with the For Sale sign? You put the house on the market and you don't tell me?'

  'Why? Were you thinking of buying it? Don't! Don't even let it cross your mind! There's barely enough room for me and Chris, and we agree on what's an acceptable degree of mess. You and Richard would kill within a week here,' Alexis parried.

  'Don't try to divert me,' I said. 'Richard and I are fine as we are. Next door neighbours is as close as I'm ever going to let it get.'

  'And how is your insignificant other?' Alexis interrupted.

  'He sends you his love too.' Alexis and the man I love have a relationship that seems to me to consist entirely of verbal abuse. In spite of appearances, however, I suspect they love each other dearly; once I actually came upon the two of them having a friendly drink together in a corner of the Chronicle's local. They'd both looked extremely sheepish about it. “Now, about this For Sale board?'

  'If s only been up a couple of days. If s all been a bit of a rush. You remember Chris and I talking about how we wanted to buy a piece of land and build our own dream home?'

  I nodded. I could more easily have forgotten my own name. 'You're planning on doing it as part of a self-build scheme; Chris is going to design the houses in exchange for other people giving you their labour, yes?' They'd been talking about it for as long as I'd known them. With a lot of people, I'd have written it off as dreaming. But Alexis and Chris were serious. They'd spent hundreds of hours poring over books, plans and their own drawings till they'd come up with their ideal home. All they'd been waiting for was the right plot of land at the right price in the right location. The land?' I asked.

  Alexis reached along the side of the table and pulled a drawer open. She tossed a packet of photographs at me. 'Look at that, Kate. Isn't it stunning? Isn't it just brilliant?' She pushed her unruly black hair out of her eyes and gazed expectantly at me.

  I studied the pictures. The first half-dozen showed a selection of views of an area of rough moorland grass that had sheep grazing all over it. That’s the land,' Alexis enthused, unable to stay silent. I continued. The rest of the pictures were views of distant hills, woods and valleys. Not a Chinese takeaway in sight. 'And those are the views. Amazing, isn't it? That's why I'm going through this.' She waved the catalogue at me. I could see now it was a building supplies price list. Personally, I'd have preferred a night in with the phone book.

  'Where on earth is it?' I asked. It looks so... rural.' That was the first word I could come up with that was truthful as well as sounding like I approved.

  'It's really wild, isn't it? It's only three minutes away from the M66. If s just above Ramsbottom. I can be in the office in twenty minutes outside rush hour, but if s completely isolated from the hassle of city life.'

  If that had been me, I'd have ended the sentence six words sooner. If you're more than ten minutes away from a Marks & Spencer Food Hall (fifteen including legal parking), as far as I'm concerned, you're outside the civilized world. 'Right,' I said. That's just what you wanted, isn't it?'

  'Yeah, it's the business. As soon as we saw it advertised, we called a meeting of the other people we'll be building with, and we all went off to see it. We've agreed a price with the builder, but he wants a quick completion because someone else is interested. Or so he says, but if you ask me, he's just on the make. Anyway, we've put down a deposit of five thousand pounds on each plot, and it's looking good. So it's time to sell this place and get our hands on the readies we'll need to build the new house.'

  'But where are you going to live while you're building?' I asked.

  'Well, Kate, it's funny you should mention that. We were wondering ...' I nearly panicked. Then I saw the smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. 'We're going to buy a caravan now, at the end of the season when it's cheap, live in it over the winter and sell it in the spring. The house should be just about habitable by then,' Alexis told me cheerfully. I couldn't control the shiver that ran through me.

  'Well, any time you need a bath, you're more than welcome,' I said.

  'Thanks. I might just take you up on that, you being so handy for the office,' she said.

  I drained my mug and got to my feet. 'I've got to run.'

  'Don't tell me, you're off on some Deep Throat surveillance,' Alexis teased.

  'Wrong again. I can see why you just write about crime rather than detecting it. No, Richard and I are going tenpin bowling.' I said it quickly, but it didn't get past her.

  Tenpin bowling?' Alexis spluttered. Tenpin bowling? Shit, Brannigan, it'll be snogging in the back row of the pictures next.'

  I left her giggling to herself. All through history, the pioneers have been mocked by lesser minds. All you can do is rise above it.

  There are probably worse ways to spend a wet Wednesday in Warrington than wandering round modern housing developments talking to the local inhabitants. If so, I haven't discovered them. I got to the first address soon after nine, which wasn't bad considering it had taken me twice as long as usual to get ready that morning because of the painful stiffness in my right shoulder. I'd forgotten you shouldn't go tenpin bowling unless you've got the upper body fitness levels of an Olympic shot putter.

  The first house was at the head of a cul-de-sac that spiralled round like a nautilus shell. I tried the doorbell of the neat semi, but got no response. I peered through the picture window into the lounge, which was furnished in spartan style, with no signs of current occupation. The clincher was the fact that there was no TV or video in sight. It looked as if my conservatory buyers had moved and were renting out their house. Most people who let their homes furnished tuck their expensive but highly portable electrical goods away into storage in case the letting agency don't do their homework properly and let the house to people of less than sterling honesty. Strangely, a couple of the houses I'd visited the previous evening had had a similar air of absence.

  Round the back, there was more evid
ence of the missing conservatory than in the others I'd seen, where the concrete bases they'd been built on had simply looked like unfinished patios. Here, there was a square of red glazed quarry tiles extending out beyond the patio doors. Round the edge of the square was a little wall, two bricks deep, except for a door-sized gap. And the walls showed the now familiar traces of the mortar that had attached the extension to the house.

  I'd noticed a car parked in the drive of the other half of the semi, so I made my way back round to the front and rang the doorbell, which serenaded me with an electronic 'Yellow Rose of Texas'. The woman who opened the door looked more like the Dandelion Clock of Cheshire. She had a halo of fluffy white hair that looked like it had been defying hairdressers for more than half a century. Grey-blue eyes loomed hazily through the thick lenses of gold-rimmed glasses as she sized me up. 'Yes?' she demanded.

  'I'm sorry to bother you,” I lied. 'But I was wondering if you could help me. I represent the company who sold next door their conservatory ...'

  Before I could complete my sentence, the woman cut in. 'We don't want a conservatory. And we've already got double glazing and a burglar alarm.' The door started to close.

  'I'm not selling anything,” I yelped, offended by her assumption. Great start to the day. Mistaken for a double-glazing canvasser. 'I'm just trying to track down the people who used to live next door.'

  She stopped with the door still open a crack. 'You're not selling anything?'

  'Cross my heart and hope to die. I just wanted to pick your brains, that's all.' I used the reassuring voice. The same one that usually works on guard dogs.

  The door slowly opened again. I made a great show of consulting the file I was carrying in my bag. 'It says here the conservatory was installed back in March.'

  That would be about right,” she interrupted. 'It went up the week before Easter, and it was gone a week later. It just disappeared overnight.' History had just been made. I'd dropped lucky at the first attempt.

  'Overnight?'

  That was the really peculiar thing. One day it was there, the next day it wasn't. They must have taken it down during the night. We never heard or saw a thing. We just assumed there must have been some dispute about it. You know, perhaps she didn't like it, or she didn't pay or something? But then, you'd know all about that, if you represent the firm,” she added with a belated note of caution.

  'You know how it is, I'm not allowed to discuss things like that,” I said. 'But I am trying to track them down. Robinson, my file says.'

  She leaned against the door jamb, settling herself in for a good gossip. It was all right for her. I was between the cold north wind and the door. I jerked up the collar of my jacket and hated her quietly. 'She wasn't what you'd call sociable. Not one for joining in, you might say. I invited her in for coffee or drinks several times and she never came once. And I wasn't the only one. We're very friendly here in the Grove, but she kept herself to herself.'

  I was slightly puzzled by the constant reference to the woman alone. The form in the file was in two names - Maureen and William Robinson. 'What about her husband?' I asked.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. 'Husband? I'd have said he was somebody else's husband, myself.'

  I sighed mentally. 'How long had you known Mrs. Robinson?' I asked.

  'Well, she only moved in in December,' the woman said. 'She was hardly here at all that first month, what with Christmas and everything. Most weeks she was away three or four nights. And she was always out during the day. She often didn't get home till gone eight. Then she moved out a couple of days after the conservatory went. My husband said she probably had to move suddenly, on account of her work, and maybe took the conservatory with her to a new house.'

  'Her work?'

  'She told my Harry that she was a freelance computer expert. It takes her all over the world, you know. She said that's why she'd always rented the house out. There's been a string of tenants in there ever since we moved in five years ago. She told Harry this was the first time she'd actually had the chance to live in the house herself.' There was a note of pride in her voice that her Harry had managed to get so much out of their mysterious neighbour.

  'Can you describe her to me, Mrs.—?'

  She considered. 'Green. Carole Green, with an e, on the Carole, not the Green. Well, she was taller than you.' Not hard. Five three isn't exactly Amazonian. 'Not much, though. Late twenties, I'd say. She had dark brown hair, in a full page-boy, really thick and glossy her hair was. Always nicely made up.

  And she was a nice dresser, you never saw her scruffy.'

  'And the man you mentioned?'

  'There was more than one, you know. Most nights when she was here, a car would pull up in the garage later on, about eleven. A couple of times, I saw them drive off the next morning. The first one had a blue Sierra, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. The next one had a silver Vauxhall Cavalier.' She seemed very positive about the cars and I commented on it. 'My Harry's in the motor trade,' she informed me. 'I might not have noticed the men, but I noticed the cars.'

  'And you haven't seen her since she moved out?'

  The woman shook her head. 'Not hide nor hair. Then the house was rented out again a fortnight after she moved. A young couple, just moved up from Kent. They left a month ago, bought a place of their own over towards Widnes. Lovely couple, they were. Don and Diane. Beautiful baby girl, Danni.'

  I almost pitied them. I bet they'd not thought fast enough to get out of the little social events of the Grove. I couldn't think of anything else to ask, so I made my excuses and left. I considered trying the other neighbours, but I didn't see how anyone could have succeeded where Carole with an e had failed.

  Scarborough Walk was only a mile away as the crow flies. Clearly the crow has never inspired a town planner. Only a Minotaur fresh from the Cretan labyrinth would feel at home in the newer parts of Warrington. I negotiated yet another roundabout with my street map on my knees and entered yet another new development. Whitby Way encircled a dozen Walks, Closes and Groves like the covered wagons pulled up to repel the Indians. It was about as hard to breach. Eventually, second time round, I spotted the entrance to the development. Cleverly designed to look like a dead end, in fact it led straight into a maze that I managed to unravel by driving at 10 m.p.h. with one eye on the map. Sometimes I wonder how I cope with a job as glamorous, exciting and risky as this.

  Again, there was no conservatory. The couple who lived there now had only been renting it for a couple of months, so the harried mother with the hyperactive toddler wasn't able to tell me anything about the people who'd actually bought the conservatory. But the woman next door but one had missed her way. She should have been on the News of the World's investigative desk. By the time I escaped, I knew more than I could ever have dreamed possible about the inhabitants of Scarborough Walk. I even knew about the two couples who had moved out in 1988 after their wife-swapping had turned into a permanent transfer. However, I didn't know much about the former inhabitants of number six. They'd bought the house the previous November, and had moved out at the end of February because he'd got a job out in the Middle East somewhere and she'd gone with him. She'd been a nurse on permanent night duty, at one of the Liverpool hospitals, she thought. He'd been something in personnel. She'd had a blonde urchin cut, just like that Sally Webster on Coronation Street. He'd been tall, dark and handsome. She'd had some kind of little car, he'd had some kind of big car. He often worked late. They went out a lot when they weren't working. The perfect description to put out to Interpol.

  The next house still had its conservatory. It also still had a satisfied customer, which I was grateful for. I really didn't need to be mistaken for the customer services department of Colonial Conservatories. I ploughed on through the list, and when I reached the end, I reckoned I was entitled to a treat for having spent so task-orientated a day. Four o'clock and I was back in Manchester, sitting in my favourite curry shop in Strangeways, tucking into a bowl of karahi lamb.r />
  As I scoffed, I popped the earpiece of my miniature tape recorder in place and played back the verbal notes I'd made after each of my visits. Five out of the eight were victims of MCS (Missing Conservatory Syndrome, I'd christened it). The only common factor I could isolate was that, in each case, the couple concerned had only lived in the house for a few months after buying it, then they'd moved out and let the place via an agency. I couldn't make sense of it at all. Who were all these people? Two brunettes, one auburn, two blondes. Two with glasses, three without. All working women. Two drove red Fiestas, one went everywhere by taxi, one drove a white Metro, one drove 'something small'. All the men were on the tall side and dark, ranging from 'handsome' to 'nowt special'. A description that would cover about half the male population. Again, two wore glasses, three didn't. They all drove standard businessmen's cars - a couple had metallic Cavaliers, one had a red Sierra, one had a blue Sierra, one changed his car from 'a big red one' to 'a big white one'. Not a single lead as to the whereabouts of any of them.

  I had to admit I was completely baffled. I dictated my virtually non-existent conclusions, then checked in with Shelley. I answered half a dozen queries, discovered there was nothing urgent waiting for me, so I hit the supermarket. I fancied some more treats to reward me for the ironing pile that faced me at home. I had no intention of including myself in Richard's plans for the evening. I can think of more pleasurable ways of getting hearing damage than boogying on down to a double wicked hip hop rap band from Mostyn called PMT, or something similar. There's nothing like a quiet night in.