Kick Back

Round the back, there was more evidence 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.

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.

4

And that’s exactly what I got. Nothing like a quiet night in. I’d gone back to the office after a quick hit on Sainsbury’s and dropped off my cassette for Shelley to input in the morning. I was sure the thought that it was for Ted Barlow would make her fingers fly. Then I’d finally managed to find the peace and quiet to develop my surveillance films from PharmAce Supplies. As I stared at the film, I wished I hadn’t. On the other hand, if you’re going to have a major downer, I suppose it’s as well to have it at the end of a day that’s already been less than wonderful, rather than spoil a perfectly good one.

Where there ought to have been identifiable images of PharmAce’s senior lab technician slipping in and out of the building in the middle of the night (timing superimposed on the pictures by my super-duper Nikon), there was only a foggy blur. Something had gone badly wrong. Since the commonest cause of fogged film is a camera problem, what I then had to do was to run a film through the camera I’d been using that night, and develop it to see if I could pinpoint the problem. That took another hour, and all it demonstrated was that there was nothing wrong with the camera. Which left either a faulty film or human error. And the chances were, whether I liked it or not, that human error was the reason. Which meant I was stuck with the prospect of another Saturday night in the back of the van with my eye glued to a long lens. Sometimes I really do wonder if I did the right thing when I gave up my law degree after the second year to come and work with Bill. Then I look at what my former fellow students are doing now, and I begin to be grateful I made the jump.

I binned the useless film, locked up and drove home in time to listen to The Archers on the waterproof radio in the shower. It was a birthday present from Richard; I can’t help feeling there was a bit of Indian giving involved, considering how often I have to tune it back to Radio 4 from Key 103. I don’t know why he can’t just use his own bathroom for his ablutions. I’m not being as unreasonable as that sounds; although we’ve been lovers for over a year now, we don’t actually live together as such. When Richard first crashed into my life – or rather, my car – he was living in a nasty rented flat in Chorlton. He claimed he liked a neighbourhood where he was surrounded by students, feminists and Green Party supporters, but when I pointed out that for much the same outlay he could have a spacious two-bedroomed bungalow three minutes’ drive from his favourite Chinese restaurant, he instantly saw the advantages. The fact that it’s next door to my own mirror-image bungalow was merely a bonus.

Of course, he wanted to knock the walls down and turn the pair into a kind of open-plan ranch-house. So I persuaded Chris to come round and deliver herself of the professional architect’s opinion that if you removed the walls Richard wanted rid of, both houses would fall down. Instead, she designed a beautiful conservatory that runs the length of both properties, linking them along the back. That way, we have the best of both worlds. It removes most of the causes of friction, with the result that we spend our time together having fun rather than rows. I preserve my personal space, while Richard can be as rowdy as he likes with his rock band friends and his visiting son. It’s not that I don’t like Davy, the six-year-old who seems to be the only good thing that came out of Richard’s disastrous marriage. It’s just that, having reached the age of twenty-seven unencumbered (or enriched, according to some) by a child, I don’t want to live with someone else’s.

I was almost sorry that Richard was out working, since I could have done with a bit of cheering up. I got out of the shower, towelling my auburn hair as dry as I could get it. I couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it. I pulled on an old jogging suit which was when I remembered my shopping was still in the car. I was dragging the carriers out of the hatchback of my Nova when a hand on my back made my heart bump wildly in my chest. I whirled round, going straight into the ‘ready to attack’ Thai boxing position. In inner-city neighbourhoods like ours, you don’t take chances.

‘Hang about, Bruce Lee, it’s only me,’ Richard said, backing off, raising his palms in a placatory gesture. ‘Jesus, Brannigan, hold your fire,’ he added, as I moved menacingly towards him.

I bared my teeth and growled deep in my throat, just the way my coach Karen trains us to do. Richard looked momentarily terrified, then he gave that Cute Smile of his, the one that got me into this in the first place, the smile that still, I’m ashamed to admit, turns me into a slushy Mills and Boon heroine. I stopped growling and straightened up, slightly sheepishly. ‘I’ve told you before, sneak up on me outside and you risk a full set of broken ribs,’ I grouched. ‘Now you’re here, give me a hand with this.’

The effort of carrying two carrier bags and a case of Miller Lite was clearly too much for the poor lamb, who immediately slumped on one of my living-room sofas. ‘I thought you were doing your brains in to the sound of young black Manchester tonight?’ I said.

‘They decided they weren’t ready to expose themselves to the fearless scrutiny of the music press,’ he said. ‘So they’ve put me off till next week. By which time, I hope one of them’s had a brain transplant. You know, Brannigan, sometimes I wish the guy who invented the drum machine had been strangled at birth. He’d have saved the world a lot of brain ache.’ Richard shrugged his jacket off, kicked off his shoes and put his feet up.

‘Haven’t you got someone else to mither,’ I asked politely.

‘Nope. I haven’t even got any deadlines to meet. So I thought I might go and pick up a Chinese, bring it back here and litter your lounge with beansprouts out of sheer badness.’

‘Fine. As long as you promise you will not insinuate a single shirt into my ironing basket.’

‘Promise,’ he said.

An hour and a half later, I pressed my last pair of trousers. ‘Thank God,’ I sighed.

No response from the sofa. It wasn’t surprising. He was on his third joint and it would have been hard to hear World War Three over the soundtrack of the Motley Crue video he was inflicting on me. What did penetrate, however, was the high-pitched electronic bleep of my phone. I grabbed the phone and the TV remote, hitting the mute button as I switched the phone to ‘talk’. That got a reaction. ‘Hey,’ he protested, then subsided immediately as he registered that I was using the phone.

‘Hello,’ I said. Never give your name or number when you answer the phone, especially if you’ve got an ex-directory number. In these days of phones with last number re-dial buttons, you never know who you’re talking to. I have a friend who discovered the name and number of her husband’s mistress that way. I know I’ve got nothing to fear on that score, but I like to develop habits of caution. You never know when they’ll come in necessary.

‘Kate? It’s Alexis.’ She sounded the kind of pissed off she gets when she’s trying to put together a story against the clock and the news editor is standing behind her chair breathing down her neck. But the time was all wrong for her deadlines.

‘Oh, hi. How’s tricks?’ I said.

‘Is this a good time?’

‘Good as any. I’ve eaten, I’m still under the limit and I still have my clothes on,’ I told her.

‘We need your help, Kate. I don’t like to ask, but I don’t know who else would know where to begin.’

This was no pick-your-brains business call. When Alexis wants my help with a story, she doesn’t apologize. She knows that kind of professional help is a two-way street. ‘Tell me the score, I’ll tell you if I can help.’

‘You know that piece of land we’re supposed to be buying? The one I showed you the pics of yesterday? Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I soothed. She sounded like she was about to explode.

‘Well, you’re not going to believe this. Chris went up there today to do some measurements. She figured that if she’s going to be designing these houses, she needs to have a feel for the lie of the land so the properties can blend in with the flow of the landscape, right?’

‘Right. So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is, she gets up there to find a couple of surveyors marking out the plots. Well, she’s a bit confused, you know, because as far as we know none of the other self-builders we’re working with have asked anyone to start work yet, on account of we haven’t completed on it yet. So, she parks up in the Land Rover and watches them for half an hour or so. Then it dawns on her that the plots they’re marking out are different altogether from the plots we’ve been sold. So she goes over to them and gets into conversation. You know Chris, she’s not like me. I’d have been out there gripping them by the throat demanding to know what the hell they thought they were up to.’ Alexis paused for breath, but not long enough for me to respond.

‘But not Chris. She lets them tell her all about the land and how they’re marking out the plots for the people who have bought them. Half a dozen have been bought by a local small builder, the rest by individuals, they tell her. Well, Chris is more than a little bewildered, on account of what they are telling her is completely at odds with the situation as we know it. So she tells them who she is and what she’s doing there and asks them if they’ve got any proof of what they’re saying, which of course they don’t have, but they tell her the name of the solicitor who’s acting for the purchasers.’

This time, I managed to get in, ‘I’m with you so far,’ before the tide of Alexis’s narrative swept back in. Richard was looking at me very curiously. He’s not accustomed to hearing me take such a minor role in a telephone conversation.

‘So Chris drives down to this solicitor’s in Ramsbottom. She manages to convince their conveyancing partner that this is urgent, so he gives her five minutes. When she explains the situation, he says the land was sold by a builder and that the sales were all completed two days ago.’ Alexis stopped short, as if what she’d said should make everything clear.

‘I’m sorry, Alexis, I suspect I’m being really stupid here, but what exactly do you mean?’

‘I mean the land’s already been sold!’ she howled. ‘We handed over five grand for a piece of land that had already been sold. I just don’t understand how it could have happened! And I don’t even know where to start trying to find out.’ The anguish in her voice was heartbreaking. I knew how much she and Chris wanted this project to work, for all sorts of reasons. Now, it looked as if the money they’d saved to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder had been thrown away.

‘OK, OK, I’ll look into it,’ I soothed. ‘But I’m going to need some more info from you. What was the name of the solicitor in Ramsbottom that Chris saw?’

‘Just a minute, I’ll pass you over to Chris. She’s got all the details. Thanks, Kate. I knew I could count on you.’

There was a brief pause, then a very subdued Chris came on the line. Her voice sounded like she’d been crying. ‘Kate? Oh God, I can’t believe this is happening to us. I just don’t understand it, any of it.’ Then she proceeded to repeat everything Alexis had already told me.

I listened patiently, then said, ‘What was the name of the solicitor’s you went to see in Ramsbottom?’

‘Chapman and Gardner. I spoke to the conveyancing partner, Tim Pascoe. I asked him the name of the person who had sold the land, but he wouldn’t tell me. So I said, was it T. R. Harris, and he gave me one of those lawyer’s looks and said he couldn’t comment, only he said it in that kind of way that means yes, you’re right.’

I looked at the names I’d scribbled on my pad. ‘So who exactly is T. R. Harris?’

‘T. R. Harris is the builder who was supposedly selling the land to us.’ There was a note of exasperation in her voice, which I couldn’t help feeling was a bit unfair. After all, I’m not a fully paid up member of the Psychic Society.

‘And your solicitor is?’

‘Martin Cheetham.’ She rattled off the address and phone number.

‘He your usual solicitor?’ I asked.

‘No. He specializes in conveyancing. One of the hacks on the Chronicle was interviewing him about how the new conveyancing protocol is working out, and they got talking, and they got on to the topic of builders catching a cold because they’d bought land speculatively and the bottom had fallen out of the market, and this hack said how one of his colleagues, i.e. Alexis, was looking for a chunk big enough for ten people to do a self-build scheme, and Cheetham said he knew of a colleague who had a client who was a builder who had just the thing, so we went to see Cheetham, and he said this T. R. Harris had bought this land and couldn’t afford to develop it himself so he was selling it off.’ Chris talks in sentences longer than the law lords.

‘And did you ever meet this builder?’

‘Of course. T. R. Harris, call me Tom, Mr Nice Guy. He met us all out there, walked the land out with us, divided it up into plots and gave us this sob story about how desperate he was to keep his business afloat, how he had half a dozen sites where the workers were depending on him to pay their wages, so could we please see our way to coughing up five thousand apiece as a deposit to secure the land, otherwise he was going to have to keep on trying to find other buyers, which would be a real pity since it obviously suited our needs so well and he liked the idea of the land being used for a self-build if only because he wouldn’t have the heartache of watching some other builder make a nice little earner out of such a prime site that he’d been really sick to have to let go. He was so convincing, Kate, it never crossed our minds that he was lying, and he obviously fooled Cheetham as well. Can you do something?’ I couldn’t ignore the pleading note in her voice, even supposing I’d wanted to.

‘I don’t really understand what’s happened, but of course I’ll do what I can to help. At the very least, we should be able to get your money back, though I think you’ll have to kiss goodbye to that particular piece of land.’