Kick Back

Chris groaned. ‘Don’t, Kate. I know you’re right, but I really don’t want to think about it, we’d set our hearts on that site, it was just perfect, and I’d already got this really clear picture in my mind’s eye of what the houses were going to look like.’ I could imagine. Eat your heart out, Portmeirion.

‘I’ll take a look at it tomorrow, promise. But I need something from you. You’ll have to give me a couple of letters of authority so that your solicitor and anybody else official will talk to me. Could Alexis drop them off on her way to work tomorrow morning?’

We sorted out the details of what the letters should say, and I only had to listen to the tale once more before I managed to get off the phone. Then, of course, I had to go through it all for Richard.

‘Somebody’s been bang out of order here,’ he said, outraged. He summed up my feelings exactly. It was the next bit I wasn’t so happy about. ‘You’re going to have to get this one sorted out double urgent, aren’t you?’

Sometimes, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the whole world’s ganging up on you.

5

I gave Alexis her second shock of the week next morning when she dropped off the letters of authority. It was just before seven when I heard her key in my front door. Her feet literally left the floor when she walked through the kitchen doorway and saw me sitting on a high stool with a glass of orange juice.

‘Shit!’ she yelled. I thought her black hair was standing on end with fright till I realized I was just unfamiliar with how untamed it looks first thing. She runs a hand through it approximately twice a minute. By late afternoon, it usually manages to look less like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards then sideways.

‘Ssh,’ I admonished her. ‘You’ll wake Sleeping Beauty.’

‘You’re up!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not only are you up, your mouth’s moving. Hold the front page!’

‘Very funny. I can do mornings when I have to,’ I said defensively. ‘I happen to have a breakfast meeting.’

‘Excuse me while I vomit,’ Alexis muttered. ‘I can’t take yuppies without a caffeine inoculation. And I see that being conscious hasn’t stretched to making a pot of coffee.’

‘I’m saving myself for the Portland,’ I said. ‘Help yourself to an instant. It’s still better than that muck they serve in your canteen.’ I plucked the letters from her hand, tucked them in my bag and left her deliberating between the Blend 37 and the Alta Rica.

Josh was already deep in the Financial Times when I got to the Portland, even though I was four minutes early. Eyeing him up across the restaurant in his immaculate dark blue suit, gleaming white shirt and strident silk tie, I was glad I’d taken the trouble to get suited up myself in my Marks & Spencer olive green with a cream high-necked blouse. Very businesslike. He was too engrossed to notice till I was standing between the light and his paper.

He tore himself away from the mating habits of multinational companies and gave me the hundred-watt smile, all twinkles, dimples and sincerity. It makes Robert Redford, whom he resembles slightly, look like an amateur. I’m convinced Josh developed it in front of the mirror for susceptible female clients, and now it’s become a habit whenever a woman comes within three feet of him. The charm comes without patronage, however. He’s one of those men who doesn’t have a problem with the notion that women are equals. Except the ones he has relationships with. Them he treats like brainless bimbos. This makes for a quick turnover, since the ones who have a brain can’t take it for more than a couple of months, and the ones who haven’t bore him rigid after six weeks.

In spite of keeping his emotions in his underpants, when it comes to business he’s one of the best financial consultants in Manchester. He’s a walking database on anything relating to insurance, investments, trust funds, tax shelters and the Financial Services Act. Anything he doesn’t know, he knows where to find out. We met when I was still a law student, eking out my grant by doing odd jobs for Bill. My first ever undercover was in Josh’s office, posing as a temp to track down the person who was using the computer to divert one pound out of each client account into his own unit trust account. Because our relationship started on a professional footing, Josh never came on to me and it’s stayed that way. Now, I take him out for a slap-up dinner every couple of months as a thank you for running credit checks for me. The rest of the work and advice, like this, he bills us for at his usual extortionate hourly rate, so I got straight to the point.

I outlined the problem facing Ted Barlow while we scoffed our bowls of fruit and cereal. Josh asked a couple of questions, then the scrambled eggs and bacon arrived. He frowned in concentration as he ate. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was thinking about Ted’s problem or appreciating the subtle pleasures of the scrambled eggs, but I decided not to interrupt anyway. Besides, I was enjoying the rare pleasure of hot food so early in the day.

Then he sat back, mopped his lips with the napkin and poured a fresh cup of coffee. ‘There’s obviously some kind of fraud going on here,’ he said. With anyone else, I’d have made some sarcastic crack about stating the obvious, but Josh did his degree at Cambridge and he likes to establish the ground under his feet before he builds up the speculation, so I managed to keep my mouth zipped.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘I would say that the chances are the bank has a pretty shrewd idea of what that fraud is. They obviously think, however, that your Mr Barlow is the villain of the piece, and that is why they have taken the steps they’ve taken, and why they are refusing to discuss their detailed reasons with him. They don’t want to alert him to the fact that they have worked out for themselves what he is up to, so they have shrouded it in generalizations.’ He paused and spread a cold triangle of toast thickly with butter. The way he was chugging the cholesterol, I didn’t feel at all confident he’d live long enough to retire at forty. I don’t know how he stays so trim. I suspect there’s a portrait of an elephant in his attic.

‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ I admitted.

‘Sorry. I’ll give you an example I came across a little time ago. I have a client who owns a double-glazing firm. They had a similar experience to that of your Mr Barlow – the bank closed down their credit and a few days later, the police were all over them. It turns out that there had been a spate of burglaries around the North West that all followed the same pattern. They were all houses that had a drive at the side with access to the rear of the house. The neighbours would see a double-glazing firm’s van turn up. The workmen would start removing the ground floor windows, while one of them was removing the household valuables through the back or side of the house and loading them into the van. The neighbours, of course, thought the family were simply having replacement windows installed. They might wonder why the workmen disappeared at lunchtime and failed to return, leaving plastic sheeting over the window holes and the old windows sitting in the drive, but no one wondered enough to do anything about it.

‘The common factor that all those houses shared, it eventually transpired, was that they had all been canvassed by the same double-glazing firm in the weeks previous to the burglary. And of course, the canvassers had established whether both husband and wife were working, thus uncovering which houses were empty during the day. The police suspected my client and paid a visit to his bankers. They, of course, were only too aware that after a grim spell my client’s account had started to look very healthy again, and that much of his recent incomings had been in cash. After the police visit, they put two and two together and regrettably made a pig’s ear of it. Partly the fault of my client, who had omitted to mention his recent investment in a couple of amusement arcades.’ Josh’s sardonic tone told me all I needed to know about his opinion of slot machines as investments.

‘It was, of course, all sorted out in the fullness of time. The burglaries were the brainchild of a couple of former employees, who paid backhanders to unemployed youths of their acquaintance to go and get jobs as canvassers with this double-glazing firm and report back to them. However, my client had an extremely sticky time in the interim. That experience leads me to suspect the bank think your Mr Barlow is the brains behind whatever is going on here. You said they mentioned a high default rate on remortgages?’

‘That’s about all they did say,’ I replied. ‘More toast?’ Josh nodded. I waved the toast rack plaintively at a passing waitress and waited for Josh’s next pearl of wisdom.

‘If I were you, that’s where I’d start looking.’ He sat back with the air of a conjuror who has just completed some amazing feat. I wasn’t impressed, and I guess it showed.

He sighed. ‘Kate, if I were you, I’d ask my friendly financial wizard to run a credit check on all those good people who have taken out remortgages and whose conservatories have now vanished.’

I still wasn’t getting it. ‘But what would that show?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Josh admitted. He didn’t know? I waited for the sky to fall, but incredibly it didn’t. ‘But whatever happens, you’ll know a lot more about them than you do now. And I have that curious tingling in my stomach that tells me that’s the right place to look.’

I trust Josh’s tingle. The last time I had personal experience of it, I quadrupled my savings by buying shares in a company he had a good feeling about. The truly convincing thing was that he told me to offload them a week before they crashed spectacularly following the arrest of their chairman for fraud. So I said, ‘OK. Go ahead. I’ll fax you the names and addresses this morning.’

‘Splendid,’ he said. I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or the waitress placing a rack of fresh toast in front of him.

As he attacked the toast, I asked, ‘When will you have the info for me?’

‘I’ll fax it across to you as soon as I get it myself. Probably tomorrow. Mark it for Julia’s attention when you send the details over. I’m hopelessly tied up today, but it’s just routine, she can do it standing on her head. What I will also do is have a quiet word with a guy I know in Royal Pennine Bank’s fraud section. No names, no pack drill, but he might be able to shed some light as to the general principle of the thing.’

‘Thanks, Josh. That’ll be a big help.’ I gave my watch a surreptitious glance. Seven minutes till we got into the next billable hour. ‘So how’s your love life?’ I hazarded.

Martin Cheetham’s office was in the old Corn Exchange, a beautiful golden sandstone building that, in aerial photographs, looks like a wedge of cheese, the windows pocking the surface like dozens of crumbly holes. The old exchange floor is now a sort of indoor flea market in bric-à-brac, antiques, books and records, while the rest of the building has been turned into offices. There are still a few of the traditional occupants – watch menders, electric razor repairers – but because of the unusual layout, the rest range from pressure groups who rent a cubbyhole to small legal firms who can rent a suite of offices that fit their needs exactly.

The office I was looking for was round the back. The reception room was small to the point of poky, but at least the receptionist had a fabulous view of Manchester Cathedral. I hoped she was into bullshit Gothic. She was in her late forties, the motherly type. Within three minutes, I was clutching a cup of tea and a promise that Mr Cheetham would be able to squeeze me in within the half-hour. She had waved away my apologies for not having an appointment. I couldn’t understand how she kept her job, with all this being polite to the punters.

One of the reasons I wasn’t sorry to quit my law degree was that after two years, I began to realize I’d stand all the way from Manchester to London rather than sit next to a lawyer on a train. There are, of course, notable exceptions, lovely people upon whose competence and honesty I’d stake my life. Unfortunately, Martin Cheetham wasn’t one of them. For a start, I couldn’t see how anyone could run an efficient practice when their paperwork was stacked chaotically everywhere. On the floor, on the desk, on the filing cabinets, even on top of the computer monitor. For all I could tell, there could be clients lurking underneath there somewhere. He waved me to one of the two surfaces in the room that wasn’t stacked with bumf. I sat on the uncomfortable office chair, while he headed for the other, a luxurious black leather all-singing, all-dancing swivel recliner. I suppose that since most conveyancing specialists see very little of their clients he didn’t place a high priority on their comfort. He obviously wasn’t a fan of the cathedral either, since his chair faced into the room.

While he took his time with Alexis’s letter, I took the chance to study him. He was around 5’ 8”, slim without being skinny. He was in shirtsleeves, the jacket of a chain-store suit on a hanger suspended from the side of a filing cabinet. He had dark, almost black hair, cut short but stylish, and soulful, liquid dark eyes. He had that skin that looks sallow and unhealthy if it goes without sun for more than a month or so, though right now he looked in the peak of health. He obviously lived on his nerves, for his neat, small feet and hands were twitching and tapping as he read the letter of authority. Eventually, he steepled his fingers and gave me a cautious smile. ‘I’m not exactly sure how you think I can help, Miss Brannigan,’ he said.

‘I am,’ I told him. ‘What I have to do in the first instance is to track down T. R. Harris, the builder. Now, it was through you that Miss Lee and Miss Appleby heard this land was available. So, I think you must know something about Mr T. R. Harris. Also, I figure you must have an address for him since you handled the matter for Miss Lee and Miss Appleby and presumably had some correspondence with him.’

Cheetham’s smile flickered again. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I know very little about Mr Harris. I knew about the land because I saw it advertised in one of the local papers. And before you ask, I’m sorry, I can’t remember which one. I see several every week and I don’t keep back numbers.’ It looked like they were the only bits of pulped tree he didn’t keep. ‘I have a client who is looking for something similar,’ he continued, ‘but when I made further inquiries, I realized this particular area was too large for him. I happened to mention it to Miss Lee’s colleague, and matters proceeded from there.’

‘So you’d never met Harris before?’

‘I’ve never met Mr Harris at all,’ he corrected me. ‘I communicated with his solicitor, a Mr Graves.’ He got up and chose a pile of papers, seemingly at random. He riffled through them and extracted a bundle fastened with a paper clip. He dumped them in front of me, covering the body text of the letter with a blank sheet. ‘That’s Mr Graves’ address and phone number.’

I took out my pad and noted the details on the letterhead. ‘Had you actually exchanged contracts, then?’

Cheetham’s eyes shifted away from mine. ‘Yes. That’s when the deposits were handed over, of course.’

‘And you were quite convinced that everything was above board?’

He grabbed the papers back and headed for the haven behind his desk. ‘Of course. I mean, I wouldn’t have proceeded unless I had been. What are you getting at, exactly, Miss Brannigan?’ His left leg was jittering like a jelly on a spindryer.

I wasn’t entirely sure. But the feeling that Martin Cheetham wasn’t to be trusted was growing stronger by the minute. Maybe he was up to something, maybe he was just terrified I was going to make him look negligent, or maybe he just had the misfortune to be born looking shifty. ‘And you’ve no idea where I can find Mr Harris?’ I asked.

He shook his head and said, ‘Absolutely not. No idea whatsoever.’

‘I’m a bit surprised,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought that his address would have appeared on the contracts.’

Cheetham’s fingers drummed that neat little riff from the ‘1812 Overture’ on the bundle of papers. ‘Of course, of course, how stupid of me, I didn’t even think of that,’ he gabbled. Again, he flicked through his papers. I waited patiently, saying nothing. ‘I’m sorry, this shocking business has really unsettled me. Here we are. How foolish of me. T. R. Harris, 134 Bolton High Road, Ramsbottom.’

I wrote it down, then got to my feet. I didn’t feel like someone who’s had a full and frank exchange of views, but I could see I wasn’t going to get any further with Cheetham unless I had specific questions. And at least I could go for Harris and his solicitor now.

I took a short cut down the back stairs, a rickety wooden flight that always makes me feel like I’ve stepped into a timewarp. My spirits descended as I did. I still had some conservatories to check out south-west of the city, and I was about as keen on that idea as I was on fronting up T. R. Harris’s brief. But at least I was getting paid for that. The thought lifted my spirits slightly, but not as much as the hunk I clapped eyes on as I yanked open the street door. He was jumping out of a Transit van that he’d abandoned on the double yellows, and he was gorgeous. He wore tight jeans and a white T-shirt – on a freezing October day, for God’s sake! – stained with plaster and brick dust. He had that solid, muscular build that gives me ideas that nice feminists aren’t supposed to even know about, never mind entertain. His hair was light brown and wavy, like Richard Gere’s used to be before he found Buddha. His eyes were dark and glittery, his nose straight, his mouth firm. He looked slightly dangerous, as if he didn’t give a shit.

He sure as hell didn’t give a shit about me, for he looked straight through me as he slammed the van door shut and headed past me into the Corn Exchange. Probably going to terrify someone daft enough not to have paid his bill. He had that determined air of a man in pursuit of what’s owed to him. Ah well, you lose some and you lose some. I checked out the van and made a mental note. Renew-Vations, with a Stockport phone number. You never know when you’re going to need a wall built. Say across a conservatory …

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