Blue Genes

‘“The final decision as to the reasonableness or otherwise of that ground to be taken by the partners in consultation with any employees of the firm,”’ I quoted from memory. I’d written most of the agreement; it wasn’t surprising I knew by heart what the key parts of it said. ‘It’s academic, Bill. You know I can’t afford to buy you out. And you also know damn well that I’m far too fond of you to stand in the way of what you want. So pick your buyer.’

I jumped to my feet and wrenched the door open. ‘I’m out of here,’ I said, hoping the disgust and anger I felt was as vivid to him as it was to me. Sometimes, the only things that make you feel good are the same ones that worked when you were five. Yes, I slammed the door.

I sat staring into the froth of a cappuccino in the Cigar Store café. The waitress was having an animated conversation with a couple of her friends drinking espressos in the corner, but apart from them, I had the place to myself. It wasn’t hard to tune out their gossip and focus on the implications of what Bill had said. I couldn’t believe what he planned to do to me. It undercut everything I thought I knew about Bill. It made me feel that my judgement wasn’t worth a bag of used cat litter. The man had been my friend before he became my business partner. I’d started my career process-serving for him as a way of eking out my student grant because the hours and the cash were better than bar work. I’d toiled with him or for him ever since I’d jacked in my law degree after the second year, when I realized I could never spend my working days in the company of wolves and settled for the blond bear instead.

There was no way I could afford to buy him out. The deal we’d done when I’d become a partner had been simple enough. Bill had had the business valued, and I’d worked out I could afford to buy thirty-five per cent. I’d borrowed the money on a short-term loan from the bank and paid it back over four years. I’d managed that by paying the bank every penny I earned over and above my previous salary, including my annual profit shares. I’d only finished paying the loan off three months previously, thanks in part to a windfall that couldn’t be explained either to another living soul or to the taxman without risking the knowledge getting back to the organized criminals who had inadvertently made me the gift. It had been a struggle to meet the payments on the loan, and I had no intention of standing under the kind of trees that deliver such dangerous windfalls ever again.

I had to face it. There was no way I could raise the cash to buy out Bill’s sixty-five per cent at the prices of four years ago, never mind what the agency would now be worth, given the new clients we’d both brought in since then. I was going to be the victim of anyone who decided a two-thirds share in a profitable detective agency was a good investment.

A second cup clattered on to the table in front of me. Startled, I looked up and found myself staring into Shelley’s amber eyes. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said, tossing her mac over a chair and sitting down opposite me. Her face looked like one of those carved African ceremonial masks, all polished planes and immobility, especially now she’d abandoned the beads she used to wear plaited in her hair and moved on to neat cornrows. I couldn’t tell from looking at her if she’d come to sympathize or to tell me off for my tantrum and plead Bill’s case.

‘And we thought Lincoln freed the slaves,’ I said bitterly. ‘How do you feel about being bought and sold?’

‘It’s not as bad for me as it is for you,’ Shelley said. ‘I don’t like the new boss, I just walk out the door and get me another job. But you’re tied to whoever Bill sells his share to, am I right?’

‘As usual. Back on the chain gang, Shell, that’s what I am. Like Chrissie Hynde says, circumstance beyond our control.’

Shelley’s eyebrows flickered. ‘Doesn’t have to be that way, does it?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘This behaviour from Bill is not what we’re used to.’

‘Of course it’s bloody not,’ I interrupted petulantly. ‘It’s this Sheila, isn’t it? Like the man said, when you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. And there’s no doubting which part of Bill’s anatomy Sheila’s got a grip on.’

‘Doesn’t matter who’s behind it, the end result is the same,’ Shelley pointed out. ‘Bottom line is, Bill is not behaving like your friend, and in my book that absolves you from behaving like his friend.’

‘And?’

‘You own thirty-five per cent of the business, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Free and clear.’

‘So you put your share on the market. Either as an independent entity, or as part of the whole package.’

I frowned. ‘But that would devalue the business quite a lot. It’s a different kettle of fish buying into an established agency where one of the partners is staying on to maintain the existing clients and another thing altogether to go for something that’s nothing more really than a name and a bunch of office equipment.’

‘My point exactly,’ Shelley said.

‘But I’d lose a lot of the money I’ve put in,’ I said.

‘But Bill would stand to lose a hell of a lot more,’ Shelley said. ‘And he needs the cash a lot more than you do right now. What it would do is buy you a bit of time and a lot of say-so on the deal. It gives you a bargaining chip.’

Slowly, I nodded. ‘Shelley, you are one mean mother,’ I said, admiration in my voice. ‘And I thought Bill was your blue-eyed boy.’

Shelley’s lips tightened. I noticed that between her nose and mouth, a couple of creases were graduating to lines. ‘Listen, Kate, when I was growing up, I saw a lot of women doing the “my kids, right or wrong” routine with teachers, with cops. And I see their kids now, running drugs, living behind bars. I’ve seen the funerals when another one gets shot in some stupid gang war. I don’t like the end result of blind loyalty. Bill has been my friend and my boss a long time, but he’s behaving like an arsehole to us both, and that’s how he deserves to be treated.’

I admired her cold determination to get the best result for both of us. I just didn’t know if I could carry it through as ruthlessly as Shelley would doubtless demand. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him I want to sell too.’

Shelley smiled. ‘I bet you feel better already,’ she said shrewdly. She wasn’t wrong. ‘So, haven’t you got any work to do?’

I told her about the previous evening’s adventures, and, predictably enough, she had a good laugh at my expense. ‘So now I need to see Dennis,’ I finished up. ‘Richard might know all there is to know about the music side of the rock business, but when it comes to the criminal side, he thinks seedy is something you listen to on your stereo. Whereas Dennis might not know his Ice T from his Enya, but he could figure out where to make a bent earner in the “Hallelujah Chorus”.’ The only problem was, as I didn’t have to remind Shelley, my friend and sometime mentor Dennis wasn’t quite as accessible as normal, Her Majesty the Queen being unreasonably fussy about keeping her guests to herself.

When I met Dennis, like so many people in their late thirties, he’d just gone through a major career change. After a stretch in prison, he’d given up his previous job as a professional and highly successful burglar to the rich and famous and taken up the more demanding but less dangerous occupation of ‘a bit of ducking and diving’ on the fringes of the law. Which included, on occasion, a bit of consultancy work for Mortensen and Brannigan. Thanks to Dennis, I’d learned how to pick locks, defeat alarm systems and ransack filing cabinets without leaving a trace.

Unfortunately, a little enterprise of Dennis’s aimed at separating criminals from their cash flow had turned sour when he’d inadvertently arranged one of his handovers in the middle of a Drugs Squad surveillance. Instead of grabbing a couple of major-league traffickers and one of those cocaine hauls that get mentioned in the news, the cops ended up with a small-time villain and the kind of nothing case that barely makes three paragraphs in the local paper. Inevitably, Dennis paid the price of their pique, seeing his scam blown sufficiently out of proportion in court to land him with an eighteen-month sentence. Some might say he got off lightly, given his CV and what else I happened to know he’d been up to lately, but speaking as someone who would go quietly mad serving an eighteen-day sentence, I wouldn’t be one of them.

‘When can you get in to see him?’ Shelley asked.

Good question. I didn’t have a Visiting Order nor any immediate prospect of getting one. Once upon a time, I’d have rung up and pretended to be a legal executive from his firm of solicitors and asked for an appointment the next day. But security had grown tighter recently. Too many prisoners had been going walkabout from jails that weren’t supposed to be open prisons. Now, when you booked a brief’s appointment at Strangeways, they took the details then rang back the firm you allegedly represented to confirm the name of the person attending and to give them a code consisting of two letters and four numbers. Without the code, you couldn’t get in. ‘I thought about asking Ruth to let me pose as one of her legal execs,’ I said.

Shelley snorted. ‘After the last time? I don’t think so!’

The last time I’d pretended to be one of Ruth Hunter’s junior employees it had strained our friendship so severely it had to wear a truss for months afterwards. Shelley was right. Ruth wasn’t going to play.

‘I don’t mean to teach you to suck eggs,’ Shelley said without a trace of humility or apology. ‘And I know this goes against the grain. But had you thought about doing it the straight way?’

5

I pivoted on the ball of my right foot, bending the knee as I straightened my left leg, using the momentum to drive me forward and round in a quarter-circle. The well-muscled leg whistled past me, just grazing the hip that moments before had been right in its path. I grunted with effort as I sidestepped and jabbed a short kick at the knee of my assailant.

I was too slow. Next thing I knew, my right leg was swept from under me and I was lying on my back, lungs screaming for anything to replace the air that had been slammed out of them. Christie O’Brien stood above me, grinning. ‘You’re slowing down,’ she observed with the casual cruelty of adolescence. Of course I was slow compared to her; she was, after all, a former British under-fourteen championship finalist. But Christie – Christine until she discovered fashion and lads – was above all her father’s daughter. She’d learned at an early age that nothing succeeds like kicking them when they’re down.

One of the other things I’d learned thanks to Dennis was Thai kick boxing, a sport he insisted every woman should know. The theory goes, a woman as small as I am is never going to beat a guy in a fair fight, so the key to personal safety is to land one good kick either in the shins or the gonads. Then it’s ‘legs, don’t let me down’ time. Kick boxing teaches you how to land the kick and keeps you fit enough to leg it afterwards.

When he’d been sent down, Dennis had asked me to keep an eye on Christie. She’d inherited her mother’s gleaming blonde hair and wide blue eyes, but her brains had come from a father who knew only too well the damage a teenage girl can wreak when the only adult around to keep an eye on things has a generous spirit and fewer brain cells than the average goldfish. Because she’d always been accustomed to seeing me around the gym, Christie had either failed to notice or decided not to resent the fact that I’d been spending a lot more time with her recently.

She filled me in on the latest school dramas of who was hanging out with whom and why as we showered next to each other – our club’s strictly breeze block. You want cubicles, go somewhere else and pay four times as much to join. By the time we were towelling ourselves dry, I’d managed to swing the conversation round to Dennis. ‘You told your dad about this Jason, then,’ I asked her casually. She’d mentioned the lad’s name once too often.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. ‘Tell him about somebody he can’t check out for himself and have the heavy mob kicking Jason’s door in for a reference? No way. When he comes out’ll be well soon enough.’

‘When you seeing him next?’ I asked.

‘Mum’s got a VO for Thursday afternoon. I’m supposed to be going with her, but I’ve got cross-country trials and I don’t want to miss them,’ she grumbled as she pulled a sweatshirt over her head. ‘Dad wouldn’t mind. He’ll be the one giving me a go-along if I miss getting on the team. But Mum gets really depressed going to Strangeways on her own, so I feel like I’ve got to go with her.’

‘I could go instead of you,’ I suggested.

Christie’s face lit up. ‘Would you? You don’t mind? I’m warning you, it’s a three-hankie job coming home.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see your dad. I miss him.’

Christie sighed and stared at her trainers. ‘Me too.’ She looked up at me, her eyes candid. ‘I’m really angry with him, you know? After he came out last time, he promised me he’d never do anything that would get him banged up again.’

I leaned over and gave her a hug. ‘He knows he’s let you down. It’s hard, recognizing that your dad’s not perfect, but he’s just like the rest of us. He needs you to forgive him, Christie.’

‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Mum you’ll pick her up dinner time Thursday, then.’ She got to her feet and stuffed her sweaty sports clothes into one of the counterfeit Head holdalls Dennis had been turning out the previous spring. ‘See ya, Kate,’ she said on her way out the door.

Knowing I was doing her a favour made me feel less like the exploitation queen of South Manchester. But not a lot less. So much for doing it the straight way.

When I emerged from the gym, I decided to swing round by Gizmo’s to see if he’d got anywhere with my earlier request. If the old axiom, ‘If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here,’ didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it for the journey from Sale to Levenshulme in mid-morning traffic. I knew before I started it was going to be hell on wheels, but for once, I didn’t care. Me, reluctant to face Bill?

I crawled along in second while Cyndi Lauper reminded me that girls just wanna have fun. I growled at the cassette deck and swapped Cyndi for Tanita Tikaram’s more gloomy take on the world. I knew exactly what she meant when she accused someone of making the whole world cry. I sat in the queue of traffic at the lights where Wilbraham Road meets Oxford Road in the heart of undergraduate city, watching them going about their student lives, backpacked and badly barbered. I couldn’t believe it when the fashion world created a whole industry round grunge as if it was something that had just happened. The rest of us knew it wasn’t anything new: students have been wearing layers against the cold, and workmen’s heavy-duty checked shirts for cheapness, ever since I was a student a dozen years ago. Shaking my head, I glanced at the wall alongside the car. Plastered along it were posters for bands appearing at the local clubs. Some of the venues I recognized from razzing with Richard; others I knew nothing about. I hadn’t realized quite how many live music venues there were in the city these days. I looked more closely at the posters, noticing one that had peeled away on the top right corner. Underneath, I could see, in large red letters, ‘UFF’. It looked like Dan and Lice hadn’t been making it up as they went along.

The impatient horn of the suit in the company car behind me dragged my attention away from the posters and back to the road. After the lights, the traffic eased up, and I actually managed to get into fourth gear before I reached Gizmo’s. This time, I reckoned it would be cheaper to take my chances with the traffic wardens than the locals, so I left the car illegally parked on the main drag. Judging by the other drivers doing the same thing, the wardens were about as fond of hanging out in Levenshulme as I was. I hit the hole in the wall for some cash for Gizmo, then I crossed the road and rang his bell.

Gizmo frowned when he saw me. ‘Didn’t you get the e-mail?’ he asked.

‘I’ve not been back to the office,’ I said, holding a tightly rolled wad of notes towards him. ‘Do I take it you’ve had some joy?’

‘Yeah. You better come in,’ he said reluctantly, delicately removing the cash from my hand and slipping it into the watch pocket of a pair of grey flannels that looked as if they’d first drawn breath around the time of the Great War. ‘Somebody dressed as smart as you on the pavement around here looks well suspicious to the local plod. I mean, you’re obviously not a native, are you?’ he added as I followed him up the narrow stairs, the soles of my shoes sticking to the elderly cord carpet. It was the first time he’d let me past his front door, and frankly, I wasn’t surprised.

I followed Gizmo into the front room of the flat. It was a dislocating experience. Instead of the dingy grime and chipped paint of the stairway, I was in a spotlessly clean room. New woodblock flooring, matt grey walls, no curtains, double-glazed windows. A leather sofa. Two desks with computer monitors, one a Mac, one a PC. A long table with an assortment of old computers – an Atari, a Spectrum, an Amiga, an Amstrad PCW and an ancient Pet. A couple of modems, a flat-bed scanner, a hand-held scanner, a couple of printers and a shelf stacked with software boxes. There was no fabric anywhere in the room. Even the chair in front of the PC monitor was upholstered in leather. Gizmo might look like Pigpen, but the environment he’d created for his beloved computers was as near to the perfect dust-free room as he could get.

‘Nice one,’ I said.

He thrust his hands into the pockets of a woollen waistcoat most bag ladies would be ashamed to own and said, ‘Got to look after them, haven’t you? I’ve had that Pet since 1980, and it still runs like a dream.’

‘Strange dreams you have, Giz,’ I commented as he hit some keys on his PC and located the information I’d asked for. Within seconds, a sheet of paper was spitting out of one of the laser printers. I picked up the paper and read, ‘Sell Phones, 1 Beaumaris Road, Higher Crumpsall, Manchester.’ There was a phone number too. I raised an eyebrow. ‘That it?’

‘All I could get,’ he said.

‘No names?’

‘No names. They’re not listed at Companies House. They sound like they’re into mobies. I suppose if you wanted to go to the trouble and expense’ – stressing the last word heavily – ‘I could do a trawl through the mobile phone service providers and see if this lot are among their customers. But –’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I said. Breaking the law too many times on any given job is tempting fate. ‘Once is sufficient,’ I added. ‘Anything more would be vulgar.’

‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ Gizmo said pointedly, staring past my shoulder at the door. I took the hint. Find what you’re good at and stick to it, that’s what I say.

Beaumaris Road was a red-brick back street running parallel to the main drag of Cheetham Hill Road. Unsurprisingly, number one was on the corner. Sell Phones occupied what had obviously once been a corner shop, though it had been tarted up since it had last sold pints of milk at all hours and grossly inflated prices. I parked further down the street and pulled on a floppy green velvet cap and a pair of granny specs with clear glass to complete the transformation from desolate widow to total stranger. They didn’t really go with my Levis and beige blazer, but fashion’s so eclectic these days that you can mix anything if you don’t mind looking like a borderline care-in-the-community case or a social worker.

I walked back to the corner, noting the heavy grilles over the window of Sell Phones. I paused and looked through to an interior that was all grey carpet, white walls and display cabinets of mobile phones. A good-looking black guy was leaning languidly against a display cabinet, head cocked, listening to a woman who was clearly telling the kind of lengthy tale that involves a lot of body language and lines like, ‘So she goes, “You didn’t!” and I go, “I did. No messing.” And she looks at me gone out and she goes, “You never!”’ She was a couple of inches taller than me, but slimmer through the shoulders and hips. Her hair was a glossy black bob, her eyes dark, her skin pale, her cheekbones Slavic, scarlet lips reminding me irresistibly of Cruella De Vil. She looked like a Pole crossed with a racehorse. She was too engrossed in her tale to notice me, and the black guy was too busy looking exquisite in a suit that screamed, ‘Ciao, bambino.’

I peered more closely through the glass and there, at the back of the shop, sitting behind a desk, head lowered as he took notes of the phone call he was engrossed in, was Will Allen in all his glory. I might not know his real name, but at least now I knew where he worked. I carried on round the corner and there, in the back alley behind the shop, was the Mazda I’d last seen parked outside my house the night before. At last something was working out today.

Now for the boring bit. I figured Will Allen wouldn’t be going anywhere for the next hour or two, but that didn’t mean I could wander off and amble back later in the hope he’d still be around. I reckoned it was probably safe to nip round the corner to the McDonald’s on Cheetham Hill Road and stock up with some doughnuts and coffee to make me feel like an authentic private eye as I staked out Sell Phones, but that was as far away as I wanted to get.

I moved my Rover on to the street that ran at right angles to Beaumaris Road and the alley so that I had a good view of the end of Allen’s car bonnet, though it meant losing sight of the front of the shop. I slid into the passenger seat to make it look like I was waiting for someone and took off the cap. I kept the glasses in place, though. I slouched in my seat and brooded on Bill’s perfidy. I sipped my coffee very slowly, just enough to keep me alert, not enough to make me want to pee. By the time I saw some action, the coffee was cold and so was I.

The nose of the silver Mazda slipped out of the alleyway and turned left towards Cheetham Hill Road. Just on five, with traffic tight as haemoglobin in the bloodstream. Born lucky, that’s me. I scrambled across the gear stick and started the engine, easing out into the road behind the car. As we waited to turn left at the busy main road, I had the chance to see who was in the car. Allen was driving, but there was also someone in the passenger seat. She conveniently reached over into the back seat for something, and I identified the woman who had been in Sell Phones talking to the Emporio Armani mannequin. I wondered if she was the other half of the scam, the woman who went out to chat up the widowers. They don’t call me a detective for nothing.

The Mazda slid into a gap in the traffic heading into Manchester. I didn’t. By the time I squeezed out into a space that wasn’t really there, the Mazda was three cars ahead and I was the target of a car-horn voluntary. I gave the kind of cheery wave that makes me crazy when arseholes do it to me and smartly switched lanes in the hope that I’d be less visible to my target. The traffic was so slow down Cheetham Hill that I was able to stay in touch, as well as check out the furniture stores for bargains. But then, just as we hit the straight, he peeled off left down North Street. I was in the right-hand lane and I couldn’t get across, but I figured he must be heading down Red Bank to cut through the back doubles down to Ancoats and on to South Manchester. If I didn’t catch him before Red Bank swept under the railway viaduct, he’d be anywhere in a maze of back streets and gone forever.

I swung the nose of the Rover over to the left, which pissed off the driver of the Porsche I’d just cut up. At least now the day wasn’t a complete waste. I squeezed round the corner of Derby Street and hammered it for the junction that would sweep me down Red Bank. I cornered on a prayer that nothing was coming up the hill and screamed down the steep incline.

There was no silver Mazda in sight. I sat fuming at the junction for a moment, then slowly swung the car round and back up the hill. There was always the chance that they’d stopped off at one of the dozens of small-time wholesalers and middlemen whose tatty warehouses and storefronts occupy the streets of Strangeways. Maybe they were buying some jewellery or a fur coat with their illgotten gains. I gave it ten minutes, cruising every street and alley between Red Bank and Cheetham Hill Road. Then I accepted they were gone. I’d lost them.