Star Struck

He gave me the wary look of a person who’s drunk enough to notice their other half isn’t giving them the hard time they deserve. ‘I could come back tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ I said repressively. ‘Like the song says, tonight will be fine.’

Dennis gave me a quick sideways look and reached for his cigarettes. ‘You never finished your law degree, did you?’

I shook my head. It was a sore point with my mum and dad, who fancied being the parents of the first graduate in the family, but all it brought me was relief that business could never be so bad that I’d be tempted to set up shop as a lawyer. Two years of study had been enough to demonstrate there wasn’t a single area of legal practice that wouldn’t drive me barking within six months.

‘So you couldn’t charge me for legal advice,’ Dennis concluded triumphantly.

I raised my eyes to the heavens, where a few determined stars penetrated the sodium glow of the city sky. ‘No, Dennis, I couldn’t.’ Then I gave him the hard stare. ‘But why would I want to? We’ve never sent each other bills before, have we? What exactly are you up to?’

‘You know I’d never ask you to help me out with anything criminal, don’t you?’

‘’Course you wouldn’t. You’re far too tight to waste your breath,’ I said. Richard giggled again. I revised my estimate. Sixth bottle, fifth joint.

Dennis leaned across to pick up his jacket from the nearby chair, revealing splendid muscles in his forearm and a Ralph Lauren label. It didn’t quite go with the jogging pants and the Manchester United away shirt. He pulled some papers out of the inside pocket then gave me a slightly apprehensive glance. Then he shrugged and said, ‘It’s not illegal. Not as such.’

‘Not even a little bit?’ I asked. I didn’t bother trying to hide my incredulity. Dennis only takes offence when it’s intended.

‘This bit isn’t illegal,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s a lease.’

‘A lease?’

‘For a shop.’

‘You’re taking out a lease on a shop?’ It was a bit like hearing Dracula had gone veggie.

He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Only technically.’

I knew better than to ask more. Sometimes ignorance is not only bliss but also healthy. ‘And you want me to cast an eye over it to see that you’re not being ripped off,’ I said, holding a hand out for the papers.

Curiously reluctant now, Dennis clutched the papers to his chest. ‘You do know about leases? I mean, it’s not one of the bits you missed out, is it?’

It was, as it happened, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Besides, since I’d quit law school, I’d learned much more practical stuff about contracts and leases than I could ever have done if I’d stuck it out. ‘Gimme,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to argue with that tone of voice,’ Richard chipped in like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Dennis screwed his face up like a man eating a piccalilli sandwich, but he handed over the papers.

It looked like a bog standard lease to me. It was for a shop in the Arndale Centre, the soulless shopping mall in the city centre that the IRA tried to remove from the map back in ’96. As usual, they got it wrong. The Arndale, probably the ugliest building in central Manchester, remained more or less intact. Unfortunately, almost every other building within a quarter-mile radius took a hell of a hammering, especially the ones that were actually worth looking at. As a result, the whole city centre ended up spending a couple of years looking like it had been wrapped by Christo in some bizarre pre-millennium celebration. Now it looked as if part of the mall that had been closed for structural repairs and renovation was opening up again and Dennis had got himself a piece of the action.

There was nothing controversial in the document, as far as I could see. If anything, it was skewed in favour of the lessee, one John Thompson, since it gave him the first three months at half rent as a supposed inducement. I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t Dennis’s name on the lease. He’s a man who can barely bring himself to fill in his real name on the voters’ roll. Besides, no self-respecting landlord would ever grant a lease to a man who, according to the credit-rating agencies, didn’t even exist.

What I couldn’t understand was what he was up to. Somehow, I couldn’t get my head round the idea of Dennis as the natural heir of Marks and Spencer. Karl Marx, maybe, except that they’d have had radically different views of what constituted an appropriate redistribution of wealth. I folded the lease along its creases and said, ‘Looks fine to me.’

Dennis virtually snatched it out of my hand and shoved it back in his pocket, looking far too shifty for a villain as experienced as him. ‘Thanks, love. I just wanted to be sure everything’s there that should be. That it looks right.’

I recognized the key word right away. Us detectives, we never sleep. ‘Looks right?’ I demanded. ‘Why? Who else is going to be giving it the once-over?’

Dennis tried to look innocent. I’ve seen hunter-killer submarines give it a better shot. ‘Just the usual, you know? The leccy board, the water board. They need to see the lease before they’ll connect you to the utilities.’

‘What’s going on, Dennis? What’s really going on?’

Richard pushed himself more or less upright and draped an arm over my shoulders. ‘You might as well tell her, Den. You know what they say – it’s better having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.’

I let him get away with the anatomical impossibility and settled for a savage grin. ‘He’s not wrong,’ I said.

Dennis sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘All right. But I meant it when I said it’s not criminal.’

I cast my eyes upwards and shook my head. ‘Dennis O’Brien, you know and I know that “not criminal” doesn’t necessarily mean “legal”.’

‘Too deep for me,’ Richard complained, reaching for another bottle of beer.

‘Let’s hear it,’ I said firmly.

‘You know how I hate waste,’ Dennis began. I nodded cautiously. ‘There’s nothing more offensive to a man like me than premises standing empty because the landlords’ agents are crap at their job. So I had this idea about making use of a resource that was just standing idle.’

‘Shop-squatting,’ I said flatly.

‘What?’ Richard asked vaguely. ‘You going to live in a shop, Den? What happened to the house? Debbie thrown you out, has she?’

‘He’s not going to be living in the shop, dope-head,’ I said sarcastically.

‘You keep smoking that draw, you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,’ Dennis added sententiously. ‘Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.’

‘Take me through it,’ I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the Evening Chronicle about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.

‘You want to know how it works?’

Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. ‘Was Georgie Best?’

‘First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.’

‘What?’ Richard mumbled.

Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. ‘That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,’ he explained patiently.

‘Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the Dibble can’t touch you for it, on account of you’ve broken no laws.’

‘What about criminal damage?’ I asked. ‘You have to bust the locks to get in.’

Dennis winked. ‘If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?’

‘Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?’ Richard asked. It was an amazingly sensible question given his condition.

Dennis shrugged. ‘Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.’ Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. ‘I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.’

‘I can imagine,’ I said drily. ‘Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?’

‘Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?’ He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.

‘Profitable, is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.’

‘You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,’ I sighed.

He shook his head, rueful. ‘Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?’

He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I dressed it up with the excuse of doing it for the clients and my own version of justice. It had led me into some strange places, forced me into decisions that I didn’t like to examine too closely in the harsh light of day. Once upon a time, I’d have had no doubt whether it was me or Dennis who could lay claim to the better view from the moral high ground.

These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.

4

MOON SQUARES MARS

An accident-prone aspect, suggesting she can harm herself through lack of forethought. She is far too eager to make her presence felt and doesn’t always practice self-control. Her feelings of insecurity can manifest themselves in an unfeminine belligerence. She has authoritarian tendencies.

From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

Anyone can be a soap star. All you need is a scriptwriter who knows you well enough to write your character into their series, and you’re laughing all the way to the BAFTA. I’d always thought you had to be an actor. But two hours on the set of Northerners made me realize that soap is different. About ten per cent of the cast could play Shakespeare or Stoppard. The rest just roll up to the studios every week and play themselves. The lovable rogues are just as roguish, the dizzy blondes are just as empty-headed, the salts of the earth make you thirst just as much for a long cold alcoholic drink and the ones the nation loves to hate are every bit as repulsive in the flesh. Actually, they’re more repulsive, since anyone hanging round the green room is exposed to rather more of their flesh than a reasonable person could desire. There was more chance of me being struck by lightning than being star struck by that lot of has-beens and wannabes.

They didn’t even have to learn their words. TV takes are so short that a gnat with Alzheimer’s could retain the average speech with no trouble at all. Especially by the sixth or seventh take most of the Northerners cast seemed to need to capture the simplest sentiment on screen.

The main problem I had was how to do my job. Gloria had told everyone I was her bodyguard. Not because I couldn’t come up with a decent cover story, but because I’d weighed up both sides of the argument and decided that if there was somebody in cast or crew who was out to get her it was time for them to understand they should back off and forget about it. Gloria had been all for the cloak and dagger approach, hoping I could catch the author of her threatening letters in the act of extracting vengeance, but I pointed out that if I was going to stay close enough to protect her, I’d be an obvious obstacle to nefarious doings anyway.

Besides, members of the public weren’t allowed on the closed set of Northerners. The storylines were supposed to be top secret. NPTV, the company who made the soap, were so paranoid they made New Labour look relaxed. Everyone who worked on the programme had to sign an agreement that disclosure of any information relating to the cast characters or storylines was gross misconduct, a sacking offence and a strict liability tort. Even I had had to sign up to the tort clause before I was allowed into the compound that housed the interior and exterior sets, as well as the production suite and admin offices. Apart from location shooting to give the show that authentic Manchester ambience, the entire process from script conference to edited master tapes took place behind the high walls that surrounded NPTV’s flagship complex.

A fat lot of good it did them. Northerners generated more column inches than any other TV programme in the country. The fuel for the flames had to come from somewhere, and tabloid papers have always had deep pockets. There’s not a tabloid journalist I’ve ever met who couldn’t explain in words of one syllable to a nervously dithering source that the NPTV legal threat of suing for civil damages was about as solid as the plyboard walls of Brenda Barrowclough’s living room.

But NPTV insisted on their power trip, and I’d persuaded Gloria it would be simpler all round if we were upfront. The downside of being out in the open was that everyone was on their guard. Nobody was going to let anything slip accidentally. If my target was a member of the Northerners team, they’d be very careful around me.

In order to be effective protection for my client, I had to be visible, which meant that I couldn’t even find a quiet corner and catch up with my e-mail and my invoices. If Gloria was in make-up, I was in make-up. If Gloria was on set, I was hovering round the edges of the set, getting in everybody’s way. If Gloria was having a pee, I was leaning against the tampon dispenser. I could have made one of those video diary programmes that would have had any prospective private eye applying for a job as a hospital auxiliary.

I was trying to balance that month’s books in my head when a hand on my shoulder lifted my feet off the floor. Spot the alert bodyguard. I spun round and found my nose level with the top button of a suit jacket. I took a step back and looked up. The man must have been six-three, wide shouldered and heavy featured. The suit, whose tailoring owed more to Savile Row than to Armani, was cut to disguise the effects of too many business lunches and dinners, but this guy was still a long way off fat. On the other hand, he looked as if he was still only in his early forties and in the kind of trim that betrays a commitment to regular exercise. In a few years, when his joints started complaining and his stamina wasn’t what it had been, he’d swiftly slip into florid flabbiness. I’d seen the type. Greed was always a killer.

The smile on his broad face softened the stern good looks that come with a square jaw, a broad brow and deep-set eyes under overhanging brows. ‘You must be Kate Brannigan,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m John Turpin.’

For a man who’d gone out of his way to try to persuade Gloria to keep her problems in the family, he seemed amazingly cordial. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said.

‘How are your investigations proceeding?’ he asked, smiling down on me benevolently.

‘I could ask you the same question.’ If the guy was trying to win me over with his affable helpfulness, the least I could do was take advantage and trawl for some information.

His smile curved up at one corner, suddenly turning his expression from magnanimous to predatory. ‘I’m afraid I’m more of a guardian of company confidentiality than Ms Kendal,’ he said, with a note of acid in his voice.

‘But you expect me to share with you?’ I asked innocently.

He chuckled. ‘Not really, but it never hurts to try. As you yourself so ably demonstrated. I had hoped we could keep Ms Kendal’s little problem in-house, but if she insists on wasting her money on services we can provide more effectively and for free, I can’t stop her.’

‘Can I tell her when to expect the results of your internal inquiry?’ I wasn’t playing the sweetness and light game any more. It hadn’t got me anywhere so I figured I might as well turn into Ms Businesslike.

Turpin thrust one hand into his jacket pocket, thumb sticking out like Prince Charles always has. ‘Impossible to say. I have so many calls on my time, most of them rather more serious than the antics of some poison-pen writer.’

‘She had her car tyres slashed. All four of them. On NPTV premises,’ I reminded him.

‘It’s a bitchy business, soap,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m far from convinced there’s any connection between the letters and the car tyres. I can’t believe you find it hard to credit that Ms Kendal could annoy a colleague enough for them to lose their temper and behave so childishly.’

‘You’re really not taking this seriously, are you?’ I said, struggling to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

‘That’s what you’re being paid for, Ms Brannigan. Me, I’ve got a television production company to run.’ He inclined his head and gave me the full charm offensive again. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’

I said nothing, just watched his retreating back with its double-vent tailoring that perfectly camouflaged the effects of too many hours sitting behind a desk. If our conversation was par for the course around here, the only surprise was that it had taken Gloria so long to get round to hiring me.

In spite of Turpin’s intervention, by lunchtime I was more bored than I’d been in the weeks before I finally managed to jettison A level Latin. If anyone had asked, I’d have admitted to being up for any distraction. I’d have been lying, as I discovered when my moby rang, right in the middle of the fifth run-through of a tense scene between my client and the putative father of her granddaughter’s aborted foetus.

Mortified, I twisted my face into an apologetic grimace as the actor playing opposite Gloria glared at me and muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake. What is this? Fucking amateur city?’ The six months he’d once spent on remand awaiting trial for rape (according to the front page of the Sun a couple of months back) hadn’t improved his word power, then.

I ducked behind a props skip and tucked my head down into my chest as I grunted, ‘Hello?’

‘Kate? I’ve been arrested.’ The voice was familiar, the scenario definitely wasn’t. Donovan Carmichael was a second-year engineering student at UMIST. He’d just started eking out his pathetic student grant by working part time for me as a process-server, doing the bread and butter work that pays his mother’s wages. Did I mention Shelley the office tyrant was his mother? And that she hated the thought that her highly educated baby boy might be tempted to throw it all away to become a maverick of the mean streets like her boss? That probably explained why said boy was using his one phone call on me rather than on his doting mother.

‘What for?’

‘Being black, I think,’ he said angrily.

‘What happened?’

‘I was in Hale Barns.’ That explained a lot. They don’t have a lot of six-feet-three-inch black lads in Hale Barns, especially not ones with shoulders wider than the flashy sports cars in their four-car garages. It would lower the property values too much.

‘Doing what?’

‘Working,’ he said. ‘You know? Trying to make that delivery that came in yesterday afternoon?’ His way of telling me there were other ears on our conversation. I knew he was referring to a domestic violence injunction we’d been hired to serve. The husband had broken his wife’s cheekbone the last time he’d had a bad day. If Donovan succeeded in serving the paper, there might not be a next time. But there were very good reasons why Donovan was reluctant to reveal his target or our client’s name to the cops. Once you get outside the high-profile city-centre divisions that are constantly under scrutiny, you find that most policemen don’t have a lot of sympathy for the victims of domestic violence. Especially when the guy who’s been doing the battering is one of the city’s biggest football stars. He’d given a whole new meaning to the word ‘striker’, but that wouldn’t stop him being a hero in the eyes of the boys in blue.

‘Are they charging you with anything?’

‘They’ve not interviewed me yet.’

‘Which nick are you in?’

‘Altrincham.’

I looked at my watch. I stuck my head round the side of the skip. They were about to go for a take. ‘I’ll get someone there as soon as I can. Till then, say nothing. OK?’ I said in a low voice.

I didn’t wait for a reply, just ended the call and tiptoed back to the set. Gloria and the idiot boy she was acting opposite went through their interaction for the eighth time and the director announced she was satisfied. Gloria heaved a seismic sigh and walked off the set, dragging Brenda’s beehive from her head as she approached me. ‘That’s me for today, chuck,’ she said. ‘Drop me at home and you can have the rest of the day off.’

‘Are you staying in?’ I asked, falling into step beside her as we walked to the dressing room she shared with Rita Hardwick, the actress who played Thelma Torrance, the good-time girl who’d never grown up.

‘I am that. I’ve got to pick up next month’s scripts from the office on the way out. I’ll be lying in the Jacuzzi learning my lines till bedtime. It’s not a pretty sight, and I don’t need a spectator. Especially one that charges me for the privilege,’ she added with an earthy chuckle.

I tried not to look as pleased as I felt. I could have sent a lawyer out to rescue Donovan, but it didn’t sound as if things had reached the point where I couldn’t sort it out myself, and lawyers cost either money I couldn’t afford or favours I didn’t want to owe.

Two hours later, I was walking Donovan back to my car. The police don’t like private eyes, but faced with me threatening a lawsuit for false imprisonment and racial harassment, they were only too happy to release Donovan from the interview room where he’d been pacing the floor for every one of the minutes it had taken me to get there.

‘I didn’t do anything, you know,’ Donovan complained. His anger seethed just below the surface. I couldn’t blame him, but for all our sakes, I hoped the cycle ride back into town would get it out of his system.

‘According to the copper I spoke to, one of the neighbours saw you sneaking round the back of the house and figured you for a burglar,’ I said drily.

‘Yeah, right. All I was doing was checking if he was in the snooker room round the back, like his wife said he usually is if he’s not training in the morning. I reckoned if he was there, and I walked right up to the French windows, he’d be bound to come over and open up, at least to give me a bollocking. When I saw the place was empty, I came back down the drive and went and sat on a wall down the road, where I could see him come home. It’s not like I was hiding,’ he continued. ‘They only arrested me because I’m black. Anybody black on the street in Hale Barns has got to be a burglar, right?’

‘Or a drug dealer. The rich have got to get their coke and heroin from somewhere,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘Where’s your bike?’