by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER FOUR
I FINISHED dressing and shaved without being conscious of any of it. My mind was working overtime, trying to fix Rory Brand in my memory. He was a bully of a kind—a perfectionist and a quick thinker, an egotist who thought he could charm but was probably as feared as he was admired.
I turned over in my head the thought that he knew there was trouble. He’d sensed something rumbling and churning in the background, but perhaps he’d misunderstood what he felt. He thought it was about the business, but maybe it was about him. He thought it was a commercial challenge, but perhaps it was a personal threat. He was right to be paranoid, but he’d been paranoid about the wrong thing.
And I’d turned him away. I’d got on a high horse that was just passing, saddled up and rode off, declaring that I couldn’t help. I thought I was being reasonable and professional, but perhaps I was just arrogant. There was nothing I could do, I said. Perhaps there was nothing I wanted to do. It was the kind of investigation that I’d done too many of in the past, in Customs & Excise, and had tried to get out of because they bored me. Working the paper trail wasn’t something that I’d ever volunteered for. God knows, there were plenty in C & E who just loved it – tracking the bad guys through their VISA payments and air tickets. Never getting their boots muddy out in the field. But I’d always chafed at the bit when put in that kind of harness. In this instance I’d given up before I’d even got started. Lazy, I told myself, just lazy.
I avoided the motorway and drove the back roads into Waverley, through Holmes Chapel and Great Warford, through the flat Cheshire plain that stretches towards Liverpool and from a distance is distinguished only by the gleaming white saucer of Jodrell Bank’s radio telescope. The A50 was still swarming with commuters heading into Knutsford and south Manchester, so I had time to appreciate the frosted fields and picturesque farmhouses that we passed.
Perhaps appreciate is the wrong word.
There are parts of Cheshire that represent exactly what rural England should be, except that the driveways of the renovated cottages overflow with silver late-model Mercedes and BMWs, and the roads outside the schools groan with Range Rovers and people-carriers driven by blonde second wives with a jewellery fixation. I’d read somewhere that Waverley had the highest percentage of Porsche owners in the country, and I saw most of them that morning. Coming from one of the more deprived areas of Yorkshire, where Thatcherite economics had slapped the community’s face like a vicious bully, I found it hard to stomach the casual acceptance of such extravagance. But that was my problem. It was always my problem. According to my friends, I had an attitude towards money and the moneyed that got me into trouble. In the two years since I’d opened for business, half of my clients had come from this part of the county, the other half being Government work. You would have thought that private clients would be grateful and pay up on time – but they didn’t get to be wealthy and live in Cheshire by giving their money away to private detectives who didn’t account properly for expenses or know how to draw up a VAT receipt. No sum was too small to be haggled over. No invoice so precise that it couldn’t be returned unpaid. No wonder my attitude towards people with cash seemed sour.
So I hadn’t trusted Rory Brand and I didn’t trust Laura Marshall and I didn’t trust any of the other inhabitants of that cold commercial world. Not all the shoplifters in Harvey Nicholls were doing it to feed a drug habit—I’d met the middle-class, upper-income, jewel-encrusted housewives who’d done it for kicks, so I had no illusions about who inhabited the moral high-ground in this landscape. It certainly wasn’t white-collar workers with a bit of an education and a nose for a deal.
Waverley is the poshest of Manchester’s southern satellite towns, once given a sort of industrial grandeur by the self-made textile millionaires who built the mills on which its wealth was based, now made popular again by footballers with money to burn and with wives or girlfriends who had a simple yen to boast a Cheshire address. When you approach Waverley from the south you pass through a suburban wet-dream—broad avenues of detached houses, each individually styled, with pavements sheltered by tall trees through which a dappled sun falls. Pleasant children in clean uniforms run excitedly towards school, and polite builders with letters after their names pull into driveways in white Mercedes vans, ready to extend the kitchen or convert the garage into a games room. It was probably only twenty miles from Crewe, but it was a different planet. Waverley was pashminas; Crewe was scarves.
When I got there it was almost ten o’clock. I parked in the leisure centre and walked to Brands’ offices. From across the road I watched the police work their routine. Several Cheshire police Volvos were already angled in front of the main entrance, their blue and yellow check paintjobs vibrant in the morning air. When the Scene of Crime Officers had processed the building as best they could, they’d set up an incident room back at regional headquarters. Until then, they’d cordoned off the site, blocked the main entrance with cones and begun turning away delivery vans and other tradesmen. An officer stood to one side taking the names of everyone who was allowed in, even other officers. The crime scene manager would be doing his damnedest to protect the integrity of the crime scene for the sake of DNA gathering. The workers already in the building when the police arrived would be questioned, fingerprinted and released to go home one by one. There was nothing I could do or see, so I walked up into Waverley and waited.