VAL McDERMID

KICK BACK

DEDICATION

To Lavender Linoleum Lovers Everywhere

EPIGRAPH

‘Property is theft’

Pierre Joseph Proudhon

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

KEEP READING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

1

The Case of the Missing Conservatories. Sounds like the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle didn’t get round to writing because it was too boring. Let me tell you, I was with Conan Doyle on this one. If it hadn’t been for the fact that our secretary’s love life was in desperate need of ECT, there’s no way I’d have got involved. Which, as it turned out, might have been no bad thing.

I was crouched behind the heavy bulk of the elevator machinery, holding my breath, desperately praying I’d pick the right moment to make my move. I knew I wouldn’t get a second chance with a nasty bag of works like Vohaul’s hit man. I caught sight of him as he emerged from the stairwell. I leaped to my feet and threw myself at one of the pair of heavy pulley attachments suspended from the ceiling. It shot across the room towards my relentless opponent. At the last minute he turned, spotted it and ducked, letting it whistle over his head. My mouth dried with fear as he caught sight of me and headed menacingly in my direction. I dodged round the elevator machinery, trying to keep it between us so I could make a dash for the stairs. As he rushed after me, I desperately swung the other pulley towards him. It caught him on the side of the head, the momentum plunging him over the lip of the lift shaft into the blackness below. I’d done it! I’d managed to stay alive!

I let my breath out in a slow sigh of relief and leaned back in the chair, hitting the key that offered me the ‘Save Game’ option. A glance at my watch told me it was time to leave Space Quest III for the day. I’d had the half-hour lunch break that was all I could spare in my partner Bill’s absence. Besides, I knew that our secretary Shelley would be returning from her own lunch break any minute now, and I didn’t want her wandering in and catching me at it. While the cat’s away, the mouse plays Space Quest, and all that, which isn’t very businesslike behaviour for a partner in a security consultancy and private investigation agency. Even if I’m only the junior partner.

That particular week, I was the only show in town. Bill had abandoned ship for the fleshpots (or should that be lobster pots?) of the Channel Islands to run a computer security course for a merchant bank. Which meant that Kate Brannigan was the only functioning half of Mortensen and Brannigan, as far as the UK mainland was concerned. Say it fast like that and we sound like major players instead of a two-operative agency that handles a significant chunk of the white-collar crime in the North West of England.

I headed for the cupboard off my office that doubles as the ladies loo and office darkroom. I had a couple of films that needed processing from my weekend surveillance outside a pharmaceutical company’s lab. PharmAce Supplies had been having some problems with their stock control. I’d spent a couple of days working on the inside as a temporary lab assistant, long enough to realize that the problem wasn’t what went on in working hours. Someone was sneaking in when the lab was locked and helping himself or herself, then breaking into the computer stock records to doctor them. All I needed to discover was the identity of the hacker, which had been revealed after a couple of evenings sat cramped in the back of Mortensen and Brannigan’s newest toy, a Little Rascal van that we’d fitted out specifically for stake-out work. Hopefully, the proof that incriminated the senior lab technician was in my hand, captured forever on the fastest film that money could buy.

I was looking forward to half an hour in the darkroom, away from phones that didn’t seem to have stopped ringing since Bill left. No such luck. I’d barely closed the blackout curtain when the intercom buzzed at me like that horrible drill dentists use to smooth off a filling. The buzzing stopped and Shelley’s distorted voice came at me like Donald Duck on helium. ‘Kate, I have a client for you,’ I deciphered.

I sighed. The Tooth Fairy’s revenge for playing games on the office computer. ‘I was playing in my own time,’ I muttered, in the vain hope that would appease the old bag. ‘Kate? Can you hear me?’ Shelley honked.

‘There’s no appointment in the book,’ I tried.

‘It’s an emergency. Can you come out of the darkroom, please?’

‘I suppose so,’ I grumbled. I knew there was no point in refusing. Shelley is quite capable of letting a full minute pass, then hammering on the door claiming an urgent case of Montezuma’s Revenge from the Mexican taco bar downstairs where she treats herself to lunch once a week. She always varies the days so I can never catch her out in a lie.

Still grumbling, I let myself back into my office. Before I’d taken the three steps back to my chair, Shelley was in the room, closing the door firmly behind her. She looked slightly agitated as she crossed to my desk, an expression about as familiar on her face as genuine compassion is on Baroness Thatcher’s. She handed me a new-client form with the name filled in. Ted Barlow. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said, resigning myself.

‘He owns a firm that builds and installs conservatories and his bank are calling in his loans, demanding repayment of his overdraft and refusing him credit. He needs us to find out why and to persuade his bank to change their minds,’ Shelley explained, slightly breathlessly. Well out of character. I was beginning to wonder just what had happened to her over lunch.

‘Shelley,’ I groaned. ‘You know that’s not our kind of thing. The guy’s been up to some fiddle, the bank have cottoned on and he wants someone to pull him out of the shit. Simple as that. There’s no money in it, there’s no point.’

‘Kate, just talk to him, please?’ Shelley as supplicant was a new role on me. She never pleads for anything. Even her demands for raises are detailed in precise, well-documented memos. ‘The guy’s desperate, he really needs some help. He’s not on the fiddle, I’d put money on it.’

‘If he’s not on the fiddle, he’s the only builder that hasn’t been since Solomon built the temple,’ I said.

Shelley tossed her head, the beads woven into her plaits jangling like wind chimes. ‘What’s the matter with you, Kate?’ she challenged me. ‘You getting too high and mighty for the little people? You only deal with rock stars and company chairmen these days? You’re always busy telling me how proud you are of your dad, working his way up to foreman from the production line at Cowley. If it was your dad out there with his little problem, would you be telling him to go away? This guy’s not some big shot, he’s just a working bloke who’s got there the hard way, and now some faceless bank manager wants to take it all away from him. Come on, Kate, where’s your heart?’ Shelley stopped abruptly, looking shocked.

So she should have done. She was bang out of order. But she’d caught my attention, though not for the reason she’d thought. I decided I wanted to see Ted Barlow, not because I’d been guilt tripped. But I was fascinated to see the man who had catapulted Shelley into the role of a lioness protecting her cubs. Since her divorce, I hadn’t seen any man raise her enviable cool by so much as a degree.

‘Send him in, Shelley,’ I replied abruptly. ‘Let’s hear what the man has to say for himself.’

Shelley stalked over to the door and pulled it open. ‘Mr Barlow? Miss Brannigan will see you now.’ She simpered. I swear to God, this tough little woman who rules her two teenagers like Attila the Hun simpered.

The man who appeared in the doorway made Shelley look as fragile as a Giacometti sculpture. He topped six foot easily, and he looked as if a suit were as foreign to him as a Peruvian nose-flute. Not that he was bulky. His broad shoulders tapered through a deep chest to a narrow waist without a single strain in the seams of his off-the-peg suit. But you could see that he was solid muscle. As if that wasn’t enough, his legs were long and slim. It was a body to die for.

Nice legs, shame about the face, though. Ted Barlow was no hunk from the neck up. His nose was too big, his ears stuck out, his eyebrows met in the middle. But his eyes looked kind, with laughter lines radiating out from them. I put him in his mid-thirties, and he didn’t seem to have spent too many of those years in an office, if his body language was anything to go by. He stood awkwardly in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a nervous smile not making it as far as the gentle blue eyes.

‘Come in, sit down,’ I said, standing up and gesturing towards the two exquisitely comfortable leather and wood chairs I’d bought for the clients in a moment of uncharacteristic kindness. He moved uncertainly into the office and stared at the chairs as if not entirely certain he would fit in to them. ‘Thank you, Shelley,’ I said pointedly as she continued to hang around by the door. She left, reluctantly for once.

Ted lowered himself into the chair and, surprised by the comfort, relaxed slightly. They always work, those chairs. Look like hell, feel like heaven. I pulled a new-client form towards me and said, ‘I need to take a few details, Mr Barlow, so we can see if we can give you the help you need.’ Shelley might be besotted, but I wasn’t giving an inch without good cause. I got the phone numbers and the address – an industrial estate in Stockport – then asked how he’d come to hear of us. I prayed he’d picked us out of Yellow Pages so I could dump him without offending anyone except Shelley, but clearly, wiping out Vohaul’s hit man was to be my sole success of the day.

‘Mark Buckland at SecureSure said you’d sort me out,’ he said.

‘You know Mark well, do you?’ Foolishly, I was still hanging on to hope. Maybe he only knew Mark because SecureSure had fitted his burglar alarm. If so, I could still give him the kiss-off without upsetting the substantial discount that Mark gives us on all the hardware we order from him.

This time, Ted’s smile lit up his face, revealing the same brand of boyish charm I get quite enough of at home, thank you. ‘We’ve been mates for years. We were at school together. We still play cricket together. Opening batsmen for Stockport Viaduct, would you believe?’

I swallowed the sigh and got down to it. ‘What exactly is the problem?’

‘Well, it’s the bank. I got this from them this morning,’ he said, tentatively holding out a folded sheet of paper.

I put him out of his misery and took it from him. He looked as if I’d taken the weight of the world off his broad shoulders. I opened it up and ploughed through the mangled verbiage. The bottom line was he had £74,587.34 outstanding on a £100,000 loan and an overdraft of £6,325.67. The Royal Pennine Bank wanted their money back pronto, or they’d seize his home and his business. And their associate finance company would be writing to him separately, basically to tell him his punters wouldn’t be stiffing them for any more loans either. And I thought my bank manager wrote stroppy letters. I could see why Ted was looking gutted. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘And do you have any idea why they wrote this letter?’

He looked confused. ‘Well, I rang them up as soon as I got it, like you would. And they said they couldn’t discuss it on the phone, would I come in to see them. So I said I’d go in this morning. It wasn’t my local branch, you see; all the little branches come under the big branch in Stockport now, so I didn’t know the bloke who’d signed the letter or anything.’ He paused, waiting for something.

I nodded and smiled encouragingly. That seemed to do the trick.

‘Well, I went in, like I said, and I saw the chap that signed the letter. And I asked him what it was all about, and he said that if I checked my paperwork, I would see that he wasn’t obliged to give me a reason. Right stuffed shirt, he was. Then he said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the bank’s confidential reasons for their decision. Well, I wasn’t happy with that, no way, because I’ve not missed a single payment on that loan, not in the four months I’ve had it, and I’ve reduced the overdraft by four grand over the last six months. I told him, I said, you’re not being fair to me. And he just shrugged and said he was sorry.’ Ted’s voice rose in outrage. I could see why.

‘So what happened then?’ I prompted.

‘Well, I’m afraid I lost my rag a bit, you know? I told him he wasn’t bloody sorry at all, and that I wasn’t going to leave matters there. Then I walked out.’

I struggled to keep a straight face. If that was Ted’s idea of losing his rag a bit, I could see that someone like Shelley was just what he needed. ‘You must have some idea of what’s behind this, Mr Barlow,’ I prodded.

He looked genuinely baffled as he shook his head. ‘I haven’t a clue. I’ve always given the bank what they were due when it were due. This loan, I took it out so I could expand the business. We’ve just moved into a new industrial unit at Cheadle Heath, but I knew business was going well enough to pay back the loan on time.’

‘Are you sure your orders haven’t dropped back because of the recession and the bank’s not just taking safety precautions?’ I hazarded.

He shook his head, his hand nervously heading for his jacket pocket. He stopped, guiltily. ‘Is it all right if I smoke?’ he asked.

‘Go right ahead,’ I responded. I got up to fetch him an ashtray. ‘You were saying? About the effects of the recession?’

He dabbed his cigarette nervously at his lips. ‘Well, to be honest, we’ve not seen it. I think what’s happening is that people who’ve been trying to sell their houses have kind of given up on the idea and decided to go for some improvements to the places they’re in already. You know, loft conversions for extra bedrooms, that kind of thing? Well, a lot of them go for conservatories, to give them an extra reception room, especially if they’ve got teenage kids. I mean, if a conservatory’s double-glazed and you stick a radiator in, it’s as warm as a room in the house in the winter. Our business is actually up on this time last year.’

I dragged out of him that he specialized in attaching conservatories to newish properties on the kind of estates where double-glazing salesmen used to graze like cattle. That way, he only ever had to produce a handful of designs in a few standard sizes, thus cutting his overheads to a minimum. He also concentrated on a relatively compact area: the south-west side of Manchester and over to Warrington new town, the little boxes capital of the North West. The two salesmen he employed brought in more than enough orders to keep the factory busy, Ted insisted.

‘And you’re absolutely positive that the bank gave you no idea why they are foreclosing?’ I demanded again, reluctant to believe they had been quite so bloody-minded.

He nodded, uncertainly, then said, ‘Well, he said something I didn’t understand.’

‘Can you remember exactly what that was?’ I asked in the tone of voice one uses with a particularly slow child.

He frowned as he struggled to remember. It was like watching an elephant crochet. ‘Well, he did say there was an unusual and unacceptably high default rate on the remortgages, but he wouldn’t say any more than that.’

‘The remortgages?’

‘People who can’t sell their houses often remortgage to get their hands on their capital. They use the conservatory as the excuse for the remortgage. But I don’t understand what that’s got to do with me,’ he said plaintively.

I wasn’t altogether sure that I did. But I knew a man who would. I wasn’t excited by Ted Barlow’s story, but I’d wrapped up the pharmaceuticals case in less time than I’d anticipated, so the week was looking slack. I thought it wouldn’t kill me to play around with his problem for a day or two. I was about to ask Ted to let Shelley have a list of his clients over the last few months when he finally grabbed my attention.

‘Well, I was that angry when I left the bank that I decided to go and see some of the people who had done a remortgage. I went back to the office and picked up the names and addresses and went over to Warrington. I went to four of the houses. Two of them were completely empty. And the other two had complete strangers living in them. But – and this is the really weird bit, Miss Brannigan – there were no conservatories there. They’d vanished. The conservatories had just disappeared.’

2

I took a deep breath. I have noticed that there are some people in this world who are congenitally incapable of telling a story that runs in a straight line from the beginning through the middle to the end, incorporating all the relevant points. Some of them win the Booker Prize, and that’s fine by me. I just wish they didn’t end up in my office. ‘Disappeared?’ I finally echoed, when it became clear Ted had shot his bolt.

He nodded. ‘That’s right. They’re just not there any more. And the people that are living in two of the houses swear blind there’s never been a conservatory there, not since they moved in a few months ago. The whole thing’s a complete mystery to me. That’s why I thought you might be able to help.’ If Shelley had been in the room, she’d have rolled over on her back at the look of trusting supplication on Ted Barlow’s face.

As it was, I was hooked. It’s not often I get a client with a genuine mystery to solve. And this gave me the added bonus of getting my own back on Ms Supercool. Watching Shelley jumping through hoops for Ted Barlow was going to be the best cabaret in town.

I leaned back in my chair. ‘OK, Ted. We’ll take a look at it. On one condition. I’m afraid that, since the bank’s stopped your line of credit, I’m going to have to ask you for a cash retainer.’

He’d been one step ahead of me. ‘Will a grand do?’ he asked, pulling a thick envelope from his inside pocket.

It was my turn to nod helplessly. ‘I thought you’d want cash,’ he went on. ‘Us builders can always lay hands on a few bob in readies when we have to. Rainy day money. That way, you always make sure the important people get paid.’ He handed the envelope over. ‘Go ahead, count it, I won’t be offended,’ he added.

I did as he said. It was all there, in used twenties. I pressed the intercom. ‘Shelley? Can you give Mr Barlow a receipt for one thousand pounds’ cash on his way out? Thanks.’ I got to my feet. ‘I’ve got one or two things to sort out here, Ted, but I’d like to meet you later this afternoon at your office. Four o’clock OK?’

‘That’s great. Shall I leave the directions with your secretary?’ He sounded almost eager. This could get to be a lot of fun, I thought to myself as I showed Ted out. He headed for Shelley’s desk like a homing pigeon.

Much as I’d taken to Ted, I learned very early on in this game that liking someone is no guarantee of their honesty. So I picked up the phone and rang Mark Buck-land at SecureSure. His secretary didn’t mess me about with tales of fictitious meetings since Mark’s always pleased to hear from Mortensen and Brannigan. It usually means a nice little earner for him. SecureSure supply a lot of the hardware we recommend in our role as security consultants, and even with the substantial discount he offers us, Mark still makes a tidy profit.

‘Hi, Kate!’ he greeted me, his voice charged with its normal overdose of enthusiasm. ‘Now, don’t tell me, let me guess. Ted Barlow, am I right?’

‘You’re right.’

‘I’m glad he took my advice, Kate. The guy is in deep shit, and he doesn’t deserve it.’ Mark sounded sincere. But then, he always does. That’s the main reason he can afford to drive around in seventy grand’s worth of Mercedes coupé.

‘That’s what I was ringing you about. No disrespect, but I need to check out that the guy’s kosher. I don’t want to find myself three days down the road with this and some bank clerk giving me the hard word because our Mr Barlow’s got a track record with more twists and turns than a sheep track,’ I said.

‘He’s kosher all right, Kate. The guy is completely straight. He’s the kind that gets into trouble because he’s too honest, if you know what I mean.’

‘Oh, come on, Mark. It’s me you’re talking to. The guy’s a builder, for Christ’s sake. He can lay his hands on a grand in cash, just like that. That’s not straight, not in the normal definition of the word,’ I protested.

‘OK, so maybe the taxman doesn’t know about every shilling he makes. But that doesn’t make you a bad person, now does it, Kate?’

‘So give me the truth, not the advertising copy.’

Mark sighed. ‘You’re a hard woman, Brannigan.’ Tell me about it, I thought cynically. ‘Right. Ted Barlow is probably my oldest friend. He was my best man, first time round. I was an usher at his wedding. Unfortunately, he married a prize bitch. Fiona Barlow was a slut and the last guy to find out was Ted. He divorced her five years ago and since then he’s become a workaholic. He started off as a one-man-band, doing a bit of replacement windows stuff. Then a couple of friends asked him if he could do them a conservatory. They lived in real punter property, you know, Wimpey, Barratt, something like that. They got Ted to create this Victorian-style conservatory, all stained glass and UPVC. Of course, monkey see, monkey want. Half the estate wanted one, and Ted was launched in the conservatory business. Now, he’s got a really solid little firm, a substantial turnover, and he’s done it the straight way. Which, as you know, is pretty bloody unusual in the home improvement game.’

In spite of my natural scepticism, I was impressed. Whatever was going on with Ted Barlow’s conservatories, it looked like it wasn’t the man himself who was up to something. ‘What about his competitors? Would they be looking to put the shaft in?’ I asked.

‘Hmm,’ Mark mused. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. He’s not serious enough to be a worry to any of the really big-time boys. He’s strictly small, reputable and local. Whatever’s going down here needs someone like you to sort it out. And if you do clear it up, because he’s such a good friend, I’ll even waive my ten per cent commission for sending him to you!’

‘If I wasn’t a lady, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, Buckland. Ten per cent!’ I snorted. ‘Just for that, I’m putting the lunch invitation on hold. Thanks for the backgrounder, anyway. I’ll do my best for Ted.’

‘Thanks, Kate. You won’t be sorry. You sort him out, he’ll be your friend for life. Pity you’ve already got a conservatory, eh?’ He was gone before I could get on my high horse. Just as well, really. It took me a good thirty seconds to realize he’d been at the wind-up and I’d fallen for it.

I wandered through to the outer office to give Shelley the new-client form and the cash, for banking. To my surprise, Ted Barlow was still there, standing awkwardly in front of Shelley’s desk like a kid who’s hung behind after class to talk to the teacher he has a crush on. As I entered, Shelley looked flustered and quickly said, ‘I’m sure Kate will have no trouble following these directions, Mr Barlow.’

‘Right, well, I’ll be off then. I’ll be seeing you later, Miss Brannigan.’

‘Kate,’ I corrected automatically. Miss Brannigan makes me feel like my spinster great aunt. She’s not one of those indomitable old biddies with razor-sharp minds that we all want to be when we’re old. She’s a selfish, hypochondriacal, demanding old manipulator and I have this superstitious fear that if I let enough people call me Miss Brannigan, it might rub off on me.

‘Kate,’ he acknowledged nervously. ‘Thank you very much, both of you.’ He backed through the door. Shelley was head down, fingers flying over the keyboard, before the door was even halfway closed.

‘Amazing how long it takes to give a set of directions,’ I said sweetly, dropping the form in her in-tray.

‘I was just sympathizing with the man,’ Shelley replied mildly. It’s not always easy to tell with her coffee-coloured skin, but I’d swear she was blushing.

‘Very commendable, too. There’s a grand in this envelope. Can you pop down to the bank with it? I’d rather not leave it in the safe.’

‘You do right. You’d only spend it,’ Shelley retorted, getting her own back. I poked my tongue out at her and returned to my own office. I picked up the phone again. This time, I rang Josh Gilbert. Josh is a partner in a financial services company. They specialize in providing advice and information to the kind of people who are so paranoid about ending up as impoverished senior citizens that they cheerfully do without while they’re young enough to enjoy it, just so they can sit back in comfort in their old age, muttering, ‘If I had my youth again, I could be waterskiing now …’ Josh persuades them to settle their shekels in the bosoms of insurance companies and unit trusts, then sits back planning for his own retirement on the fat commissions he’s just earned. Only difference is, Josh expects his retirement to begin at forty. He’s thirty-six now, and tells me he’s well on target. I hate him.

Of course, he was with a client. But I’d deliberately made my call at ten minutes to the hour. I figured that way he’d be able to call me back between appointments. Three minutes later, I was talking to him. I briefly outlined Ted Barlow’s problem. Josh said, ‘Mmm,’ a lot. Eventually, he said, ‘I’ll check your guy out. And I’ll do some asking around, no names, no pack drill. OK?’

‘Great. When can we get together on this?’

Over the phone, I could hear the sound of Josh turning the pages in his diary. ‘You hit me on a bad week,’ he said. ‘I suppose you need this stuff yesterday?’

‘Afraid so. Sorry.’

He sucked his breath in over his teeth, the way plumbers are trained to do when they look at your central-heating system. ‘Today’s Tuesday. I’m snowed under today, but I can get to it tomorrow,’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘But my time’s backed up solid Thursday, Friday I’m in London … Listen, can you do breakfast Thursday? I meant it when I said it was a bad week.’

I took a deep breath. I’m never at my best first thing, but business is business. ‘Thursday breakfast is fine,’ I lied. ‘Where would you like?’

‘You choose, it’s your money,’ Josh replied.

We settled on the Portland at seven-thirty. They have this team of obliging hall porters who park your car for you, which in my opinion is a major advantage at that time of the morning. I checked my watch again. I didn’t have time enough to develop and print my surveillance films. Instead, I settled for opening a file on Ted Barlow in my database.

Colonial Conservatories occupied the last unit before the industrial estate gave way to a sewage farm. What really caught the eye was the conservatory he’d built on the front of the unit. It was about ten foot deep and ran the whole thirty-foot width of the building. It had a brick foundation, and was separated into four distinct sections by thin brick pillars. The first section was classic Victorian Crystal Palace style, complete with plastic replica finials on the roof. Next was the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady school of conservatory, a riot of stained panels whose inaccuracies would give any botanist the screaming habdabs. Third in line was the Spartan conservatory. A bit like mine, in fact. Finally, there was the Last Days of the Raj look – windows forming arches in a plastic veneer that gave the appearance, from a considerable distance, of being mahogany. Just the place to sit on your rattan furniture and summon the punkah wallah to cool you down. You get a lot of that in South Manchester.

Inside the conservatory, I could see Colonial Conservatories’ offices. I sat in the car for a moment, taking in the set-up. Just inside the door was a C-shaped reception desk. Behind it, a woman was on the phone. She had a curly perm that looked like Charles I’s spare wig. Occasionally, she tapped a key on her word processor and gave the screen a bored stare before returning to her conversation. Over to one side, there were two small desks, each equipped with a phone and a pile of clutter. No one was at either desk. On the back wall, a door led into the main building. Over in the far corner, a small office had been divided off with glass partitions. Ted Barlow was standing in shirtsleeves in this office, his tie hanging loose and the top button of his shirt open, slowly working his way through the contents of a filing cabinet drawer. The rest of the reception was taken up with display panels.

I walked into the conservatory. The receptionist said brightly into the phone, ‘Hold the line, please.’ She flicked a switch then turned her radiance on me. ‘How may I help you?’ she asked in a little girl’s voice.

‘I have an appointment with Mr Barlow. My name’s Brannigan. Kate Brannigan.’

‘One moment, please.’ She ran a finger down the page of her open desk diary. Her nail extensions mesmerized me. Just how could she type with those claws? She looked up and caught my stare, then smiled knowingly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll just see if he’s ready for you.’ She picked up a phone and buzzed through. Ted looked round him in a distracted way, saw me, ignored the phone and rushed across the reception area.

‘Kate,’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks for coming.’ The receptionist cast her eyes heavenwards. Clearly, in her view, the man had no idea how bosses are supposed to behave. ‘Now, what do you need to know?’

I steered him towards his office. I had no reason to suspect the receptionist of anything other than unrealistic aspirations, but it was too early in the investigation to trust anyone. ‘I need a list of addresses of all the conservatories you’ve fitted in the last six months where the customers have taken out remortgages to finance them. Do you keep track of that information?’

He nodded, then stopped abruptly just outside his office. He pointed to a display board that showed several houses with conservatories attached. The houses were roughly similar – medium-sized, mostly detached, modern, all obviously surrounded on every side by more of the same. Ted’s face looked genuinely mournful. ‘That one, that one and that one,’ he said. ‘I had photographs taken of them after we built them because we were just about to do a new brochure. And when I went back today, they just weren’t there any more.’

I felt a frisson of relief. The one nagging doubt I had had about Ted’s honesty was resolved. Nasty, suspicious person that I am, I’d been wondering if the conservatories had ever been there in the first place. Now I had some concrete evidence that they had been spirited away. ‘Can you give me the name of the photographer?’ I asked, caution winning over my desire to believe in Ted.

‘Yes, no problem. Listen, while I sort this stuff out for you, would you like me to get one of the lads to show you round the factory? See how we actually do the business?’

I declined politely. The construction of double-glazed conservatories wasn’t a gap in my knowledge I felt the need to plug. I settled for the entertaining spectacle of watching Ted wrestle with his filing system. I sat down in his chair and picked up a leaflet about the joys of conservatories. I had the feeling this might be a long job.

The deathless prose of Ted’s PR consultant stood no chance against the smartly dressed man who strode into the showroom, dumped a briefcase on one of the two small desks and walked into Ted’s office, grinning at me like we were old friends.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Jack McCafferty,’ he added, thrusting his hand out towards me. His handshake was firm and cool, just like the rest of the image he projected. His brown curly hair was cut close at the sides and longer on top, so he looked like a respectable version of Mick Hucknall. His eyes were blue and had the dull sheen of polished sodalite against the lightly tanned skin of his face. He wore an olive green double-breasted suit, a cream shirt and a burgundy silk tie. The ensemble looked about five hundred pounds’ worth to me. I felt quite underdressed in my terracotta linen suit and mustard cowl-necked sweater.

‘Kate, Jack’s one of my salesmen,’ Ted said.

‘Sales team,’ Jack put him right. From his air of amused patience, I gathered it was a regular correction. ‘And you are?’

‘Kate Brannigan,’ I said. ‘I’m an accountant. I’m putting together a package with Ted. Pleased to meet you, Jack.’

Ted looked astonished. Lying didn’t seem to be his strong suit. Luckily, he was standing behind Jack. He cleared his throat and handed me a bulky blue folder. ‘Here are the details you wanted, Kate,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything that’s not clear, just give me a call.’

‘OK, Ted.’ I nodded. I had one or two questions I wanted to ask him, but not ones that fitted my exciting new persona of accountant. ‘Nice to meet you, Jack.’

‘Nice. That’s a word. Not the one I would have used for meeting you, Kate,’ he replied, a suggestive lift to one eyebrow. As I walked back across the reception area and out to my car, I could feel his eyes on me. I felt pretty sure I wouldn’t like what he was thinking.

3

I pulled up half a mile down the road and had a quick look through the file. Most of the properties seemed to be over in Warrington, so I decided to leave them till morning. The light was already starting to fade, and by the time I’d driven over there, there would be nothing to see. However, there were half a dozen properties nearby where Ted had fitted conservatories. He’d already visited one of them and discovered that the conservatory had gone. On my way home, I decided I might as well take a quick look at the others. I pulled my A-Z out of the glove box and mapped out the most efficient route that included them all.

The first was at the head of a cul-de-sac in a nasty sixties estate, one of a pair of almost-detached houses, linked only by their garages in a bizarre Siamese twinning. I rang the bell, but there was no response, so I walked down the narrow path between the house and the fence to the back garden. Surprise, surprise. There was no conservatory. I studied the plan so I could work out exactly where it had been. Then I crouched down and scrutinized the brickwork on the back wall. I didn’t really expect to find anything, since I wasn’t at all sure what I should even be looking for. However, even my untrained eye noticed a line of faint markings on the wall. It looked like someone had given it a going over with a wire brush – enough to shift the surface grime and weathering, that was all.

Intrigued, I stood up and headed for the next destination. 6 Wiltshire Copse and 19 Amundsen Avenue were almost identical. And they were both minus conservatories. However, the next two remortgages I visited still had their conservatories firmly anchored to the houses. I trekked back to my car for the fifth time, deeply depressed after too much exposure to the kind of horrid little houses that give modern a bad name. I thought of my own home, a bungalow built only three years before, but constructed by a builder who didn’t feel the need to see how small a bedroom you could build before the human mind screams, ‘No!’ My lounge is generous, I don’t have to climb over anything to get in and out of bed and my second bedroom is big enough for me to use as an office, complete with sofa bed for unavoidable visitors. But most of these overgrown sheds looked as if they’d have been pressed to provide one decent-sized bedroom, never mind three.

The irony was that they were probably worth more than mine because they were situated on bijou developments in the suburbs. Whereas my little oasis, one of thirty ‘professional person’s dwellings’, was five minutes from every city centre amenity. The downside was that it was surrounded by the kind of inner-city housing they make earnest Channel 4 documentaries about. The locale had brought the price down far enough for me also to afford the necessary state-of-the-art alarm system.

I decided home was where I should head for. Darkness was falling, so I wouldn’t be able to continue my fascinating study of late-twentieth-century bricklaying. Besides, people were getting home from work and I was beginning to feel a little conspicuous. It was only a matter of time before some overzealous Neighbourhood Watch vigilante called the cops, an embarrassment I could well do without. I drove out of the opposite end of the estate to the one I’d come in by, and suddenly realized I was only a couple of streets away from Alexis’s house.

Alexis Lee is probably my best friend. She’s the crime reporter on the Manchester Evening Chronicle. I guess the fact that we’re both women who’ve broken into what is traditionally a male preserve helped build the bond between us. But apart from our common interest in things criminal, she’s also saved me more money than anyone else I know. I can think of at least a dozen times when she’s prevented me from making very costly mistakes in expensive dress shops. And, at the risk of making her sound like a stereotype, she’s got that wonderful, rich Liverpudlian sense of humour that can find the funny side in the blackest tragedy. I couldn’t think of anything that would cheer me up faster than a half-hour pit stop.

The earlier rain had turned the fallen leaves into a slick mush. As I braked gently to pull up outside Alexis’s, I swear my Vauxhall Nova went sideways. Cursing the Highways Department, I slithered round the car and on to the safer ground of the driveway. I grabbed at a post to steady myself, then realized with a shock that this particular post wasn’t a permanent fixture. It was supporting a For Sale sign. I was outraged. How dare they put the house on the market without consulting me? Time I found out what was going on here. I walked round to the back door, knocked and entered the kitchen.

Alexis’s girlfriend Chris is a partner in a firm of community architects, which is why their kitchen looks like a Gothic cathedral, complete with flagged floor and vaulted ceiling with beams like whales’ ribs. The plasterwork is stencilled with flower and fruit motifs, and there are plaster bas-relief bosses at regular intervals along the roof truss. It’s an amazing sight.

Instead of the Quasimodo I always half-expect, Alexis was sitting at the pitch-pine table, a mug of tea at her elbow, some kind of catalogue open in front of her. As I came in, she looked up and grinned. ‘Kate! Hey, good to see you, kid! Grab yourself a cuppa, the pot’s fresh,’ she said, waving at the multi-coloured knitted tea cosy by the kettle. I poured myself a mug of strong tea as Alexis asked, ‘What brings you round here? You been doing a job? Anything in it for me?’

‘Never mind that,’ I said firmly, dropping into a chair. ‘You trying to avoid me? What’s with the For Sale sign? You put the house on the market and you don’t tell me?’

‘Why? Were you thinking of buying it? Don’t! Don’t even let it cross your mind! There’s barely enough room for me and Chris, and we agree on what’s an acceptable degree of mess. You and Richard would kill within a week here,’ Alexis parried.

‘Don’t try to divert me,’ I said. ‘Richard and I are fine as we are. Next door neighbours is as close as I’m ever going to let it get.’

‘And how is your insignificant other?’ Alexis interrupted.

‘He sends you his love too.’ Alexis and the man I love have a relationship that seems to me to consist entirely of verbal abuse. In spite of appearances, however, I suspect they love each other dearly; once I actually came upon the two of them having a friendly drink together in a corner of the Chronicle’s local. They’d both looked extremely sheepish about it. ‘Now, about this For Sale board?’

‘It’s only been up a couple of days. It’s all been a bit of a rush. You remember Chris and I talking about how we wanted to buy a piece of land and build our own dream home?’

I nodded. I could more easily have forgotten my own name. ‘You’re planning on doing it as part of a self-build scheme; Chris is going to design the houses in exchange for other people giving you their labour, yes?’ They’d been talking about it for as long as I’d known them. With a lot of people, I’d have written it off as dreaming. But Alexis and Chris were serious. They’d spent hundreds of hours poring over books, plans and their own drawings till they’d come up with their ideal home. All they’d been waiting for was the right plot of land at the right price in the right location. ‘The land?’ I asked.

Alexis reached along the side of the table and pulled a drawer open. She tossed a packet of photographs at me. ‘Look at that, Kate. Isn’t it stunning? Isn’t it just brilliant?’ She pushed her unruly black hair out of her eyes and gazed expectantly at me.

I studied the pictures. The first half-dozen showed a selection of views of an area of rough moorland grass that had sheep grazing all over it. ‘That’s the land,’ Alexis enthused, unable to stay silent. I continued. The rest of the pictures were views of distant hills, woods and valleys. Not a Chinese takeaway in sight. ‘And those are the views. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s why I’m going through this.’ She waved the catalogue at me. I could see now it was a building supplies price list. Personally, I’d have preferred a night in with the phone book.

‘Where on earth is it?’ I asked. ‘It looks so … rural.’ That was the first word I could come up with that was truthful as well as sounding like I approved.

‘It’s really wild, isn’t it? It’s only three minutes away from the M66. It’s just above Ramsbottom. I can be in the office in twenty minutes outside rush hour, but it’s completely isolated from the hassle of city life.’

If that had been me, I’d have ended the sentence six words sooner. If you’re more than ten minutes away from a Marks & Spencer Food Hall (fifteen including legal parking), as far as I’m concerned, you’re outside the civilized world. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘That’s just what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s the business. As soon as we saw it advertised, we called a meeting of the other people we’ll be building with, and we all went off to see it. We’ve agreed a price with the builder, but he wants a quick completion because someone else is interested. Or so he says, but if you ask me, he’s just on the make. Anyway, we’ve put down a deposit of five thousand pounds on each plot, and it’s looking good. So it’s time to sell this place and get our hands on the readies we’ll need to build the new house.’

‘But where are you going to live while you’re building?’ I asked.

‘Well, Kate, it’s funny you should mention that. We were wondering …’ I nearly panicked. Then I saw the smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. ‘We’re going to buy a caravan now, at the end of the season when it’s cheap, live in it over the winter and sell it in the spring. The house should be just about habitable by then,’ Alexis told me cheerfully. I couldn’t control the shiver that ran through me.

‘Well, any time you need a bath, you’re more than welcome,’ I said.

‘Thanks. I might just take you up on that, you being so handy for the office,’ she said.

I drained my mug and got to my feet. ‘I’ve got to run.’

‘Don’t tell me, you’re off on some Deep Throat surveillance,’ Alexis teased.

‘Wrong again. I can see why you just write about crime rather than detecting it. No, Richard and I are going ten-pin bowling.’ I said it quickly, but it didn’t get past her.

‘Tenpin bowling?’ Alexis spluttered. ‘Tenpin bowling? Shit, Brannigan, it’ll be snogging in the back row of the pictures next.’

I left her giggling to herself. All through history, the pioneers have been mocked by lesser minds. All you can do is rise above it.

There are probably worse ways to spend a wet Wednesday in Warrington than wandering round modern housing developments talking to the local inhabitants. If so, I haven’t discovered them. I got to the first address soon after nine, which wasn’t bad considering it had taken me twice as long as usual to get ready that morning because of the painful stiffness in my right shoulder. I’d forgotten you shouldn’t go tenpin bowling unless you’ve got the upper body fitness levels of an Olympic shot putter.

The first house was at the head of a cul-de-sac that spiralled round like a nautilus shell. I tried the doorbell of the neat semi, but got no response. I peered through the picture window into the lounge, which was furnished in spartan style, with no signs of current occupation. The clincher was the fact that there was no TV or video in sight. It looked as if my conservatory buyers had moved and were renting out their house. Most people who let their homes furnished tuck their expensive but highly portable electrical goods away into storage in case the letting agency don’t do their homework properly and let the house to people of less than sterling honesty. Strangely, a couple of the houses I’d visited the previous evening had had a similar air of absence.

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.’

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 …

6

I stopped by the house to pick up my sports bag. I figured if I was on that side of town anyway, I might as well stop in at the Thai boxing gym and see if there was anyone around to share a quick work-out. It would be better for me than lunch, and besides, after the breakfast I’d had, I needed to do something that would make me feel good about my body. Alexis was long gone, and Richard appeared to have returned to his own home. There was a message on the answering machine from Shelley, so I called in. Sometimes she really winds me up. I mean, I was going to check in anyway, but she’d managed to get her message in first and make me feel like some schoolkid dogging it.

‘Mortensen and Brannigan, how may I help you?’ she greeted me in the worst mid-Atlantic style. That wasn’t my idea, I swear. I don’t think it was Bill’s either.

‘Brannigan, how may I help you?’ I said.

‘Hi, Kate. Where are you?’

‘I’m passing through my living room between tasks,’ I replied. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Brian Chalmers of PharmAce called. He says he needs to talk to you. Asap, not lad.’ M & B code for ‘As soon as possible, not life and death’.

‘Right. I have to go over to Urmston anyway, so I’ll come back via Trafford Park and see him. Can you fix up for me to see him around two? I’ll call in for an exact time.’

‘Fine. And Ted Barlow rang to ask if you’d made any progress.’

‘Tell him I’m pursuing preliminary inquiries and I’ll get back to him when I have something solid to report. And are you?’

‘Am I what?’ Shelley sounded genuinely baffled. That must have been a novel experience for her.

‘Making any progress.’

‘As I’m always having to remind my two children,’ heavy emphasis on the ‘children’, ‘there’s nothing clever about rudeness.’

‘I’ll consider my legs well and truly smacked. But are you?’

‘That’s for me to know and for you to find out. Goodbye, Kate.’ I didn’t even have time for the goodbye before the line went dead.

It was just before twelve when I managed to find someone who could give me any useful information about my missing conservatories. But when I did, it was worth the wait. Diane Shipley was every private investigator’s dream. She lived at the head of Sutcliffe Court, her bungalow commanding a view of the whole close. With a corner of my brain, I had noted the raised flower beds and the ramp leading up to the front door, but it still didn’t stop me having my eyes at the wrong level when the door opened. I made the adjustment and found myself staring down into a face like a hawk; short, salt and pepper hair, dark beady eyes, deep set and hooded, narrow nose the shape of a puffin’s beak, and, incongruously, a wide and humorous mouth. The woman was in a wheelchair, and it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest.

I delivered my usual spiel about the house next door’s conservatory, and her face relaxed into a smile. ‘You mean Rachel Brown’s conservatory?’ she inquired.

I checked my list. ‘I’ve got Rowena and Derek Brown,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said the woman. ‘Dirty work at the crossroads. You’d better come in. My name’s Diane Shipley, by the way.’

I introduced myself as I followed her down the hall. We turned left into an unusual room. It ran the whole depth of the house, with windows on three walls, giving a sensation of light and air. It was painted white, with cork-tiled flooring. The walls were decorated with beautifully detailed drawings of flowers and plants. Across one corner was a draughtsman’s table, set at the perfect height for her chair. ‘I illustrate children’s books for a living,’ she said. ‘The other stuff I do for fun,’ she added, gesturing at the walls. ‘In case you were wondering, I had a riding accident eight years ago. Dead from the waist down.’

I swallowed. ‘Right. Em, sorry about that.’

She grinned. ‘That’s not why I told you. I find that if I don’t, people only concentrate on half of what I’m saying because they’re so busy wondering about my disability. I prefer a hundred per cent attention. Now, how can I help you?’

I trotted out the old familiar questions. But this time, I got some proper answers. ‘When I’m working, I tend to do a fair bit of staring out of the window. And when I see people in the court, I must confess I watch them. I look at the way their bodies move, the shapes they make. It helps when I’m drawing action. So, yes, I noticed quite a lot about Rachel.’

‘Can you describe her?’

Diane wheeled herself across to a set of map drawers. ‘I can do better than that,’ she said, opening one and taking out an A4 file. She shuffled through the sheets of paper inside, extracted a couple and held them out to me. Curious, I took them from her. They were a series of drawings of a head, some quite detailed, others little more than a quick cartoon of a few lines. They captured a woman with small, neat features, sharp chin, face wider across the eyes. Her hair was shoulder-length, wavy. ‘It was streaked,’ Diane said, following my eyes. ‘I wondered a couple of times if it might be a wig. It always looked the same. Never looked like she’d just been to the hairdresser. If it was a wig, though, it was a good one. You couldn’t tell, not even face to face.’

‘How well did you know her?’ I asked.

‘At first, not at all. She didn’t spend that much time here. It was May when she moved in, and really, she was only here perhaps three or four nights a week, Monday to Friday. She was never here at weekends. Then, one evening in June, she came over. It was about half past nine, I’d guess. She said she had a gas leak and she was waiting for the emergency engineers. She told me she was nervous of staying in, especially since they had told her not to turn any lights on. So I invited her in and gave her a drink. White wine. I had a bottle open already.’

I loved it. A witness who could tell me what she’d had to drink four months before. ‘And did she tell you anything about herself ?’

‘Yes and no. She told me her name, and I remarked on the coincidence. She said yes, she had noticed when she exchanged contracts to buy the house that she had the same name as the vendors, but she’d got used to that kind of coincidence with a name like Brown. I was a little surprised, because I had no idea that Rowena and Derek had actually sold the house.’

I had that feeling you get when you walk into a theatre halfway through the first act of a new play. What she was saying made perfect sense, but it was meaningless unless you’d seen the first twenty minutes. ‘I’m sorry, you’re going to have to run that past me a little more slowly. I mean, surely you realized they’d sold the house when they stopped living there and a new person moved in?’

It was her turn to give me the baffled look. ‘But Derek and Ro haven’t lived in the house for four years. Derek is an engineer in the oil industry, and he was away two weeks in four, so Ro and I got to be really good friends. Then, four years ago, Derek was offered a five-year contract in Mexico with a company house thrown in. So they decided to rent out their house over here on a series of short-term lets. When Rachel moved in, I thought she was just another tenant till she told me otherwise.’

‘But surely you must have realized the house was up for sale? I mean, even if there wasn’t an estate agent’s board up, you can’t have missed them showing people round,’ I remarked.

‘Funny you should say that. It’s exactly what I thought. But Rachel told me that she’d seen it advertised in the Evening Chronicle, and that she’d viewed it the next day. Perhaps I was out shopping, or she came after dark one evening when I wasn’t working. Anyway, I saw no reason to doubt what she was telling me. Why lie about it, for heaven’s sake? It’s not as if renting a house is shameful!’ A laugh bubbled up in Diane’s throat.

‘Was she on her own, or was she living with someone?’ I asked.

‘She had a boyfriend. But he was never there unless she was. And he wasn’t always there even if she was. I tended to see him leave, rather than arrive, but a couple of times, I saw him pay off a taxi around eleven o’clock at night.’

‘Did he leave with Rachel in the mornings?’ I couldn’t see how this all fitted together, but I was determined to make the most of a co-operative witness.

Diane didn’t even pause for thought. ‘They left together. That’s why I don’t have any drawings of him. She was always between me and him, and he always got in the passenger side of the car, so I never really got a clear view of him. He was stylish, though. Even at a distance I could see he dressed well. He even wore a Panama hat on sunny mornings. Can you believe it, a Panama hat in Urmston?’

Like cordon bleu in a motorway service station, it was a hard one to get my head round. ‘So tell me about the conservatory.’

This time she did take a moment to think. ‘It must have been towards the end of July,’ she said slowly but without hesitation. ‘I was away on holiday from the first to the fifteenth of August. The conservatory went up a couple of days before I left. Then, when I came back from Italy, they’d all gone. The conservatory, Rachel Brown and her boyfriend. Six weeks ago, a new batch of tenants arrived. But I still don’t know if Rachel has let the house, or indeed if Rachel ever bought it in the first place. All I know is that the chaps in there now rented it through the same agency that Derek and Ro used, DKL Estates. They’ve got an office in Stretford, but I think their head office is in Warrington.’

I was impressed. ‘You’re very well informed,’ I said.

‘It’s my legs that don’t work, not my brain. I like to make sure it stays that way. Some people call me nosy. I prefer to think of it as a healthy curiosity. What are you, anyway? Some kind of bailiff? And don’t give me that stuff about being a representative of the conservatory company. You’re far too smart for that. Besides, there’s obviously been something very odd going on there. You’re not just following up who you’ve sold conservatories to.’

I could have carried on bluffing, but I couldn’t see the point. Diane deserved some kind of quid pro quo. ‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said. ‘My partner and I investigate white-collar crime.’

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