Dead Beat

  Dead Beat

  Val McDermid

  1

  I swear one day I'll kill him. Kill who? The man next door, Richard Barclay, rock journalist and overgrown schoolboy, is who. I had stumbled wearily across the threshold of my bungalow, craving nothing more exotic than a few hours' sleep when I found Richard's message. When I say found, I use the term loosely. I could hardly have missed it. He'd sellotaped it to the inside of my glass inner door so that it would be the first thing I saw when I entered the storm porch. It glared luridly at me, looking like a child's note to Santa, written in sprawling capitals with magic marker on the back of a record company press release. 'Don't forget Jett's gig and party afterwards tonight. Vital you're there. See you at eight.' Vital was underlined three times, but it was that 'Don't forget' that made my hands twitch into a stranglehold.

  Richard and I have been lovers for only nine months, but I've already learned to speak his language. I could write the Berlitz phrasebook. The official translation of 'don't forget' is, 'I omitted to mention to you that I had committed us to going somewhere/doing something (that you will almost certainly hate the idea of) and if you don't come it will cause me major social embarrassment.'

  I pulled the note off the door, sighing deeply when I saw the sellotape marks on the glass. I'd weaned him off drawing pins, but unfortunately I hadn't yet got him on to Blu-Tak. I walked up the narrow hall to the telephone table. The house diary where Richard and I are both supposed to record details of anything mutually relevant lay open. In today's space, Richard had written, in black felt-tip pen, 'Jett: Apollo then Holiday Inn'. Even though he'd used a different pen from his note, it didn't fool the carefully cultivated memory skills of Kate Brannigan, Private Investigator. I knew that message hadn't been there when I'd staggered out an hour before dawn to continue my surveillance of a pair of counterfeiters.

  I muttered childish curses under my breath as I made my way through to my bedroom and quickly peeled off my nondescript duvet jacket and jogging suit. 'I hope his rabbits die and all his matches get wet. And I hope he can't get the lid off the mayo after he's made the chicken sandwich,' I swore as I headed for the bathroom and stepped gratefully under a hot shower.

  That's when the self-pitying tears slowly squeezed themselves under my defences and down my cheeks. In the shower no one can see you weep. I offer that up as one of the great twentieth-century aphorisms, right up there alongside 'Love means never having to say you're sorry'. Mostly, my tears were sheer exhaustion. For the last two weeks I'd been working on a case that had involved driving from one end of the country to the other on an almost daily basis, staking out houses and warehouses from the hours before dawn till past midnight, and living on snatched sandwiches from motorway service stations and greasy spoons my mother would have phoned the environmental health inspectors about.

  If that sort of routine had been the normal stock in trade of Mortensen and Brannigan it might not have seemed so bloody awful. But our cases usually involve nothing more taxing than sitting in front of a computer screen drinking coffee and making phone calls. This time, though, my senior partner Bill Mortensen and I had been hired by a consortium of prestigious watch manufacturers to track down the source of high-quality copies of their merchandise which had been flooding the market from somewhere in the Greater Manchester area. Surprise, surprise, I'd ended up with the sticky end while Bill sat in the office moodily staring into his computer screens.

  Matters had come to a head when Garnetts, the city's biggest independent jewellers', had been broken into. The thieves had ignored the safe and the alarmed display cases, and had simply stolen the contents of a cupboard in the manager's office. What they had walked away with were the green leather wallets that are presented free to purchasers of genuine Rolex watches, the luxury market's equivalent of a free plastic daffodil with every packet of soap powder. They'd also taken the credit card wallets that Gucci give to their customers, as well as dozens of empty boxes for Cartier and Raymond Weil watches.

  This theft told the manufacturers that the counterfeit business -known in the trade as schneids - was moving up a gear. Till now, the villains had been content to sell their wares as copies, via a complicated network of small traders. While that had infuriated the companies, it hadn't kept them awake at night because the sort of people who part with forty pounds in a pub or at a market stall for a fake Rolex aren't the sort who've got a few grand rucked away in their back pockets for the real thing. But now it looked as if the schneid merchants were planning to pass their clever copies off as the genuine article. Not only might that take business away from straight outlets, it could also affect the luxury watchmakers' reputation for quality. Suddenly it was worth spending money to knock the racket on the head.

  Mortensen and Brannigan might not be up there in the top ten of Britain's major private investigation companies, but we'd landed this job for two good reasons. Although our main area of work is in computer fraud and security systems, we were the first people who sprang to Garnetts' minds, since Bill had designed their computerised security system and they had ignored his suggestion that the cupboard in question be linked in to the overall system. After all, they'd argued, there was nothing in there worth stealing . . . The second reason was that we were one of the few firms of specialist private investigators operating out of Manchester. We knew the territory.

  When we took the job on, we anticipated clearing it up in a matter of days. What we hadn't grasped was the scale of the operation. Getting to grips with it had worn me into the ground. However, in the last couple of days, I'd started to feel that warm glow of excitement in the pit of my stomach that always tells me I'm getting close. I had found the factory where the schneid watches were being produced, I knew the names of the two men who were wholesaling the merchandise, and who their main middle men were. All I had to do was establish the pattern of their movements and then we could hand over to our clients. I suspected that some time in the next couple of weeks, the men I had been following would be on the receiving end of a very unwelcome visit from the cops and Trading Standards officials. Which would ultimately mean a substantial reward for Mortensen and Brannigan, on top of our already substantial fee.

  Because it was all going so well, I had promised myself a well-deserved and much-needed early night after I had followed Jack 'Billy' Smart, my number one suspect, back to his Gothic three-storey house in a quiet, tree-lined suburban street that evening at six. He'd walked in with a couple of bottles of Moet and an armful of videos from the shop round the corner, and I figured he was all set for a kiss and a cuddle in front of the television with his girlfriend. Come to that, I could have kissed him myself. Now I could go home, have a quick shower, send a cab out for a takeaway from nearby Chinatown and watch the soaps. Then I'd have a face pack and luxuriate in a long, slow bath and beauty routine. It's not that I'm obsessive about personal hygiene, by the way, just that I've always felt that showers are for getting rid of the dirt, while baths are for serious pleasures like reading the adventure game reviews in computer magazines and fantasising about the computer I'll upgrade to when Mortensen and Brannigan's ship comes in. With luck, Richard would be out on the town so I could perform my ablutions in total peace, accompanied only by a long cool drink.

  Well, I'd been right about one thing at least. Richard was certainly going out on the town. What I hadn't bargained for was being there with him. So much for my plans. I knew I was no match for Richard tonight. I was just too tired to win the argument. Besides, deep down, I knew I didn't have a leg to stand on. He'd bitten the bullet and got suited up to escort me to an obligatory dinner party the week before. After subjecting him to an evening with a bunch of insurance executives and their wives, spinach pancakes and all, I owed him. And I suspected he knew it. But just bec
ause it was my turn to suffer didn't mean I had to cave in without a whinge.

  As I vigorously rubbed shampoo into my unruly auburn hair, a blast of cold air hit my spine. I turned, knowing exactly what I'd see. Richard's face smiled nervously at me through the open door of the shower cubicle. 'Hi, Brannigan,' he greeted me. 'Getting ready for a big night out? I knew you wouldn't forget.' He must have registered the snarl on my face, for he quickly added, 'I'll see you in the living room when you're finished,' and hastily shut the door.

  'Get back in here,' I yelled after him, but he sensibly ignored me. It's at moments like this I just don't understand why I broke all the rules of a lifetime and allowed this man to invade my personal space.

  I should have known better. It had all started so inauspiciously. I'd been tailing a young systems engineer whose employer suspected him of selling information to a rival. I'd followed him to the Hacienda Club, breeding ground for so many of the bands that have turned Manchester into the creative centre of the nineties music industry. I'd only been there a couple of times previously because being jammed shoulder to shoulder with a sweating mass of bodies in a room where conversation is impossible and the simple act of breathing gets you stoned isn't my idea of the perfect way to spend what little free time I get. I have to confess I'm much happier playing interactive adventure games with my computer.

  Anyway, I was trying to look unobtrusive in the Hassy - not an easy task when you're that crucial five years older than most of the clientele - when this guy appeared at my shoulder and tried to buy me a drink. I liked the look of him. For a start, he was old enough to have started shaving. He had twinkling hazel eyes behind a pair of large tortoiseshell-framed glasses and a very cute smile, but I was working and I couldn't afford to take my eyes off my little systems man in case he made his contact right before my eyes. But The Cute Smile didn't want to take no for an answer, so it was something of a relief when my target headed for the exit.

  I had no time for goodbyes. I shot off after him, squeezing through the press of bodies like a sweaty eel. By the time I made it on to the street, I could see his tail lights glowing red as he started his car. I cursed aloud as I ran round the corner to where I'd parked and leapt behind the wheel. I slammed the car into gear and shot out of my parking place. As I tore round the corner, a customised Volkswagen Beetle convertible reversed out of a side alley. I had nowhere to go except into the nearside door. There was a crunching of metal as I wrestled my wheel round in a bid to save my Nova from complete disaster.

  It was all over in seconds. I climbed out of the car, furious with this dickhead who hadn't bothered to check before he reversed out into a main street. Whoever he was, he'd not only lost me my surveillance target but had also wrecked my car. I strode round to the driver's door of the Beetle in a towering rage, ready to drag the pillock out on to the street and send him home with his nuts in a paper bag. I mean, driving like that, it had to be a man, didn't it?

  Peering out at me like a very shaken little boy was The Cute Smile. Before I could find the words to tell him what I thought of his brainless driving, he smiled disarmingly up at me. 'If you wanted my name and phone number that badly, all you had to do was ask,' he said innocently.

  For some strange reason, I didn't kill him. I laughed. That was my first mistake. Now, nine months later, Richard was my lover next door, a funny, gentle divorce with a five-year-old son in London. I'd at least managed to hang on to enough of my common sense not to let him move in with me. By chance, the bungalow next to mine had come on the market, and I'd explained to Richard that that was as close as he was going to get to living with me, so he snapped it up.

  He'd wanted to knock a connecting door between the two, but I'd informed him that it was a load-bearing wall and besides, we'd never manage to sell either house like that. Because I'm the practical one in this relationship, he believed me. Instead, I came up with the idea of linking the houses via a huge conservatory built on the back of our living rooms, with access to both houses through patio doors. Erecting a partition wall to separate the two halves would be a simple matter if we ever move. And we both reserve the right to lock our doors. Well, I do. Apart from anything else, it gives me time to clear up after Richard has been reducing the neat order of my home to chaos. And it means he can sit carousing with his rock buddies till dawn without me stomping through to the living room in the small hours looking like a refugee from the Addams family, chuddering sourly about some of us having to go to work in the morning.

  Right now, as I savagely towelled my hair and smoothed moisturiser into my tired skin, I cursed my susceptibility. Somehow he always manages to dig himself out of his latest pit with the same cute smile, a bunch of roses and a joke. It shouldn't work, not on a bright, streetwise hard case like me, but to my infinite shame, it does. At least I've managed to impress upon him that there are house rules in any relationship. To break the rules knowingly once is forgivable. Twice means me changing the locks at three in the morning and Richard finding his favourite records thrown out of my living room window on to the lawn once I've made sure it's raining. It usually is in Manchester.

  At first, he reacted as if my behaviour were certifiable. Now, he's come to accept that life is much sweeter if he sticks to the rules. He's still a long way from perfect. For example, being colour-blind, he's got a tendency to bring home little gifts like a scarlet vase that clashes hideously with my sage green, peach and magnolia decor. Or black sweatshirts promoting bands I've never heard of because black's fashionable, in spite of the fact that I've told him a dozen times that black makes me look like a candidate for the terminal ward. Now, I simply banish them to his home and thank him sweetly for his thoughtfulness. But he's getting better, I swear he's getting better. Or so I told myself as the desire to strangle him rose at the thought of the evening ahead.

  Reluctantly abandoning the idea of murder, I returned to my bedroom and thought about an outfit for the evening. I weighed up what would be expected of me. It didn't matter a damn what I wore to the concert. I'd be lost in the thousands of yelling fans desperate to welcome Jett back in triumph to his home town. The party afterwards was more of a problem. Much as I hated having to ask, I called through to Richard, 'What's the party going to be like, clothes-wise?'

  He appeared in the doorway, looking like a puppy that's astonished to have been forgiven so easily for the mess on the kitchen floor. His own outfit was hardly a clue. He was wearing a wide-shouldered baggy electric blue double breasted suit, a black shirt and a silk tie with a swirled pattern of neon colours that looked like a sixties psychedelic album cover. He shrugged and gave that smile that still made my stomach turn over. 'You know Jett,' he said.

  That was the problem. I didn't. I'd met the man once, about three months before. He'd turned up on our table for ten at a charity dinner and had sat very quiet, almost morose, except when discussing football with Richard. Manchester United, those two words that are recognised in any language from Santiago to Stockholm, had unlocked Jett as if with a magic key. He'd sprung to the defence of his beloved Manchester City with the ardour of an Italian whose mother's honour has been impugned. The only fashion hint I'd had from that encounter was that I should wear a City strip. 'No, Richard, I don't know Jett,' I explained patiently. 'What kind of party will it be?'

  'Not many Traceys, lots of Fionas,' he announced in our own private code. Traceys are bimbos, the natural successors to groupies. Blonde, busty and fashion-obsessed, if they had a brain they'd be dangerous. Fionas share the same characteristics but they are the rich little upper-crust girls who would have been debutantes if coming out had not become so hopelessly unfashionable with everyone except gays. They like rock stars because they enjoy being with men who lavish them with gifts and a good time, while at the same time shocking their families to the core. So Jett liked Fionas, did he? And Fionas meant designer outfits, an item singularly lacking in my wardrobe.

  I flicked moodily through the hangers and ended up with a baggy long cotton sh
irt splashed with shades of olive, khaki, cream and terracotta that I'd bought on holiday in the Canaries the year before. I pulled on a pair of tight terracotta leggings. That was when I knew the motorway sandwiches had to go. Luckily, the shirt covered the worst of the bulges, so I cinched it in at the waist with a broad brown belt. I finished the outfit off with a pair of high-heeled brown sandals. When you're only 5'3", you need all the help you can get. I chose a pair of outrageous earrings and a couple of gold bangles, and eyed myself in the mirror. It wasn't wonderful, but it was better than Richard deserved. Right on cue, he said, 'You look great. You'll knock them dead, Brannigan.' I hoped not. I hate mixing business with pleasure.

  2

  We didn't have to scramble for a parking place near the Apollo Theatre, since we live less than five minutes' walk away. I couldn't believe my luck when I discovered this development halfway through my first year as a law student at Manchester University. It's surrounded on three sides by council housing estates and on the fourth by Ardwick Common. It's five minutes by bike to the university, the central reference library, Chinatown, and the office. It's ten minutes by bike to the heart of the city centre. And by car, it's only moments away from the motorway network. When I discovered it, they were still building the little close of forty houses, and the prices were ridiculously low, probably because of the surrounding area's less than salubrious reputation. I worked out that if I pitched my father into standing guarantor for a hundred per cent mortgage and moved another student into the spare room as a lodger, I'd be paying almost the same as I was for my shitty little room in a student residence. So I went for it and moved in that Easter. I've never regretted it. It's a great place to live as long as you remember to switch on the burglar alarm.