by Val McDermid
I draw it at passing Gizmo’s info on to clients. I use him either when I’ve hit a dead end or I know he can get something a lot faster than I can by official routes, which means the client saves money. I know I can be trusted not to abuse that information. I can’t say the same about the people who hire me, so I don’t tell them. I’ve had people waving wads of dosh under my nose for an ex-directory phone number or the address that goes with a car licence plate. Call me a control freak, but I won’t do that kind of work. I know there are agencies who do, but that doesn’t keep me awake at night. The only conscience I can afford to worry about is my own.
Gizmo had recently moved from a bedsit in the busiest red-light street in Whalley Range to a two-bedroomed flat above a shop in Levenshulme, a stretch of bandit country grouped around Stockport Road. The shop sells reconditioned vacuum cleaners. If you’ve ever wondered where Hoovers go when they die, this is the place. I’ve never seen a customer enter or leave the place, though there’s so much grime on the windows they could be running live sex shows in there and nobody would be any the wiser. And Gizmo reckons he’s moved up in the world.
I was going against the traffic flow on the busy arterial road, so it didn’t take me long to drive the short distance to Levenshulme and find a parking space on a side street of red-brick terraces. I pressed the bell and waited, contemplating a front door so coated with inner-city pollution that it was no longer possible to tell what colour it had originally been. The only clean part of the door was the glass on the spyhole. After about thirty seconds, I pressed the bell again. This time, there was a thunder of clattering feet, a brief pause and then the door opened a cautious couple of inches. ‘Kate,’ Gizmo said, showing no inclination to invite me in. His skin looked grey in the harsh morning light, his eyes red-rimmed like a laboratory white rat.
‘All right, Giz?’
‘No, since you ask.’ He rubbed a hand along his stubbled jaw and scratched behind one ear with the knuckle of his index finger.
‘What’s the problem? Trouble with the Dibble?’
His lips twisted in the kind of smile dogs give before they remove your liver without benefit of anaesthetic. ‘No way. I’m always well ahead of the woodentops. No, this is serious. I’ve got the bullet.’
‘From Telecom?’
‘Who else?’
I was taken aback. The only thing I could think of was that someone had got wise to Gizmo’s extra-curricular activities. ‘They catch you with your hand in somebody’s digital traffic?’
‘Get real,’ he said indignantly. ‘Staff cuts. The section head doesn’t like the fact that I know more than anybody else in the section, including him. So it’s good night Vienna, Gizmo.’
‘You’ll get another job,’ I said. I would have found it easier to convince myself if I hadn’t been looking at him as I spoke. As well as the red-rimmed eyes and the stubble, a prospective employer had to contend with a haircut that looked like Edward Scissorhands on a bad hair day, and a dress sense that would embarrass a jumble sale.
‘I’m too old.’
‘How old?’
‘Thirty-two,’ he mumbled with a suspicious scowl, as if he thought I was going to laugh. I didn’t have enough years on him for that.
‘You’re winding me up,’ I said.
‘The guys who do the hiring are in their forties and scared shitless that they’re going to get the tin handshake any day now, and they know nothing about computer systems except that someone told them it’s a young man’s game. If you’re over twenty-five, twenty-seven if you’ve got a PhD, they won’t even look at your CV. Believe me, Kate, I’m too old.’
‘What a bummer,’ I said, meaning it.
‘Yeah, well. Shit happens. But it’s nicer when it happens to somebody else. So what did you come round for? Last orders before I have to put my rates up?’
I handed him the piece of paper where I’d noted Will Allen’s licence plate. ‘The name and address that goes with the car.’
He didn’t even look at it. He just said, ‘Some time this afternoon,’ then started to close the door.
‘Hey, Giz?’ He paused. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. He nodded and shut the door.
I walked back towards the street where I’d parked the zippy Rover 216 that Mortensen and Brannigan had bought for me a couple of months before. Until then, I’d been driving a top-of-the-range sports coupé that we’d taken in part payment for a long and complicated car-finance fraud case, but I’d known in my heart of hearts it was far too conspicuous a set of wheels for the kind of work I do. Given how much I enjoy driving, it had been a wrench to part with it, but I’d learned to love the Rover. Especially after my mate Handbrake had done something double wicked to the engine which made it nippier than any of its German siblings from BMW.
As I rounded the corner, I couldn’t believe what I saw. There was a spray of glittering glass chunks like hundreds of tiny mosaic tiles all over the pavement by the driver’s door of the Rover. The car was twenty yards from the main road, it was half past eight in the morning and I’d been gone less than ten minutes, but someone had had it away on their toes with my stereo.
4
It took mean hour and a half round at Handbrake’s backstreet garage to get a new window and stereo cassette. I knew the window had come from a scrapyard, but it would have been bad manners to ask about the origins of the cassette. I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if my own deck had arrived in the bike pannier of one of the young lads who supply Handbrake with spare parts as an alternative to drug-running round Moss Side, but it clearly wasn’t my lucky day and I had to settle for a less sophisticated machine. While that might increase the shelf life of my new driver’s-door window, it wouldn’t improve the quality of my life in Manchester’s orbital motorway traffic jams, so I wasn’t in the best of moods when I finally staggered through the door of the office just after ten.
I knew at once that something was badly wrong. Shelley, our office manager, made no comment about my lateness. In all the years I’ve been working with her, she’d never before missed the opportunity to whip me into line like one of her two teenage kids. I’d once found her son Donovan, a six-foot three-inch basketball player, engineering student and occasional rapper with a local band, having to give up a weekend to paint my office because he hadn’t come home till four in the morning. After that, I’d always had a good excuse for being late into work. But this morning, she scarcely glanced up from her screen when I walked in. ‘Bill’s in,’ was all she said.
Worrying. ‘Already? I thought he only flew in yesterday afternoon?’
Shelley’s lips pursed. ‘That’s right,’ she said stiffly. ‘He said to tell you he needs a word,’ she added, gesturing with her head towards the closed door of my partner’s office. Even more worrying. Shelley is Bill’s biggest fan. Normally when he returns from one of his foreign security consultancy trips, we all sit around in the outside office and schmooze the morning away over coffee, catching up. Bill’s a friendly soul; I’d never known him to hide behind a closed door unless he needed absolute peace and quiet to work out some thorny computer problem.
I tapped on the door but didn’t wait for an answer before I opened it and walked in on the sort of scene that would have been more appropriate in the new Dancehouse a few doors down Oxford Road. Bill Mortensen, a bearded blond giant of a man, was standing behind his desk, leaning over a dark woman whose body was curved back under his in an arc that would have had my spine screaming for mercy. One of Bill’s bunch-of-bananas hands supported the small of her back, the other her shoulders. Unlike the ballet, however, their lips were welded together. I cleared my throat.
Bill jumped, his mouth leaving the woman’s with a nauseating smack as he straightened and half turned, releasing his grip on the woman. Just as well her arms were wrapped round his neck or she’d have been on the fast track to quadriplegia. ‘Kate,’ Bill gasped. His face did a double act, the mouth smiling, the eyes panicking.
‘Welcome bac
k, Bill. I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning,’ I said calmly, closing the door behind me and making for my usual perch on the table that runs along one wall.
Bill stuttered something about wanting to see me while the woman disentangled herself from him. She was a good six inches taller than my five feet and three inches. Strike one. Her hair was as dark as Bill’s was blond, cut in the sort of spiky urchin cut I’d recently abandoned when even I’d noticed it was getting a bit passé. On her, it looked terrific. Strike two. Her skin was burnished bronze, an impossible dream for those of us with the skin that matches auburn hair. Strike three. I didn’t have the faintest idea who Bill’s latest companion was, but I hated her already. She grinned and moved towards me, hand stuck out in front of her with all the enthusiasm of an extrovert teenager who hasn’t been put down yet. ‘Kate, it’s great to meet you,’ she announced in an Australian accent that made Crocodile Dundee sound like a BBC newsreader. ‘Bill’s told me so much about you, I feel like I know you already.’ I tentatively put out a hand which she gripped fervently and pumped up and down. ‘I just know we’re going to be mates,’ she added, clapping her other hand on my shoulder.
I looked past her at Bill, my eyebrows raised. He moved towards us and the woman released my hand to slip hers into his. ‘Kate,’ he finally said. ‘This is Sheila.’ His eyes warned me not to laugh.
‘Don’t tell me, let me guess,’ I said. ‘You met in Australia.’
Sheila roared with laughter. I could feel her excessive response thrusting me into the role of repressed English-woman. ‘God, Kate, he was right about your sense of humour,’ she said. I forced my lips into what I seemed to remember was a smile. ‘Hey, Bill, you better tell her the news.’
Bill stood chewing his beard for a moment, then said, ‘Sheila and I are getting married.’
To say I was gobsmacked would be like saying Tom Hanks can act a bit. It’s not that Bill doesn’t like women. He does. Lots of them. He also likes variety. As a serial monogamist, he makes Casanova and Don Juan look like absolute beginners. But he’d always been choosy about who he hung out with. While he preferred his girlfriends good-looking, brains and ambition had always been just as high on his agenda. So while Sheila might appear more of a bimbo than anyone I’d ever seen Bill with, I wasn’t about to make a snap judgement on the basis of what I’d seen so far. ‘Congratulations,’ I managed without tripping over too many of the syllables.
‘Thanks; Kate,’ Sheila said warmly. ‘It’s big of you to be generous about losing your partner.’
I looked at Bill. He looked like he’d swallowed an ice cube. ‘I thought that in these situations one said something like, “Not so much losing a partner as gaining a secretary,”’ I said ominously. ‘I have this feeling that there’s something you haven’t got round to telling me yet, William.’
‘Sheila, Kate and I need to have boring business talks. Why don’t you get Shelley to point you in the direction of all the best clothes shops? You can come back at lunch time and we’ll all go to the Brasserie?’ Bill said desperately, one eye on the toe I was tapping on the floor.
‘No problems, Billy boy,’ Sheila said, planting a kiss smack on his lips. On her way past me, she sketched a wave. ‘Can’t wait to get to know you better, Kate.’
When the door closed behind her, there was a long silence. ‘“Why don’t you get Shelley to point you in the direction of the clothes shops?”’ I mimicked as cruelly as I could manage.
‘She owns three dress shops in Sydney,’ Bill said mildly. I might have known. That explained the tailored black dress she’d almost been wearing.
‘This is not a good way to start the day, Bill,’ I said. ‘What does she mean, I’ll be losing a partner? Is she the pathologically jealous type who doesn’t want her man working alongside another woman? Is Shelley getting the bum’s rush from Waltzing Matilda too?’
Bill threw himself into his chair and sighed. ‘Sheila knows I was dreading this conversation, and she said what she did to force me into having it,’ he explained. ‘Kate, this is it. Sheila’s the one I want.’
‘Let’s face it, Bill, you’ve run enough consumer tests to make an informed decision,’ I said bitterly. I wanted to be happy for him. I would have been happy for him if it hadn’t been for the stab of fear that Sheila’s words had triggered in me.
He looked me in the eye and smiled. ‘True. Which means that now I’ve found her, I don’t want to let her go. Marriage seems like the sensible option.’ He looked away. ‘And that means either Sheila moves over here or I move to Australia.’
Silence. I knew what was coming but I didn’t see why I should let him off the hook. I leaned back against the wall and folded my arms across my chest. Bill the Bear was turning from teddy to grizzly before my eyes, and I didn’t like the transformation. Finally, a few sighs later, Bill said, ‘Me moving is the logical step. My work’s more portable than hers. The jobs I’ve already been doing in Australia have given me some good contacts, while she has none in the rag trade over here. Besides, the weather’s nicer. And the wine.’ He tried a pleading, little-boy-lost smile on me.
It didn’t play. ‘So what happens to Mortensen and Brannigan?’ I demanded, my voice surprising even me with its harshness.
Bill picked up the curly Sherlock Holmes pipe he occasionally smokes when he’s stuck on a problem, and started fiddling with it. ‘I’m sorry, Kate, but I’m going to have to sell my share of the partnership. The problem I’ve got is that I need to realize the capital I’ve got tied up in the business so I can start again in Sydney.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ I said. ‘You think you can just sell us to the highest bidder? Your parents own half the farmland in Cheshire. Can’t you get them to stake you?’
Bill scowled. ‘Of course I bloody can’t,’ he growled. ‘You didn’t go cap in hand to your father when you wanted to become a partner. You funded it yourself. Besides, life’s not exactly a bed of roses in cattle farming right now. I doubt they’ve got the cash to throw around.’
‘Fine,’ I said angrily. ‘So who have you sold out to?’
Bill looked shocked. ‘I haven’t sold to anyone,’ he protested. ‘How could you think I’d go behind your back like that?’
I shrugged. ‘Everything else seems to have been cut and dried without consulting me. Why should that be any different?’
‘Didn’t you bother reading the partnership agreement when we drew it up? Paragraph sixteen. If either of us wants to sell our share of the business, we have to offer first refusal to the other partner. And if the remaining partner doesn’t want to buy, they have the power of veto over the sale to any third party on any reasonable ground.’
‘“The final decision as to the reasonableness or otherwise of that ground to be taken by the partners in consultation with any employees of the firm,”’ I quoted from memory. I’d written most of the agreement; it wasn’t surprising I knew by heart what the key parts of it said. ‘It’s academic, Bill. You know I can’t afford to buy you out. And you also know damn well that I’m far too fond of you to stand in the way of what you want. So pick your buyer.’
I jumped to my feet and wrenched the door open. ‘I’m out of here,’ I said, hoping the disgust and anger I felt was as vivid to him as it was to me. Sometimes, the only things that make you feel good are the same ones that worked when you were five. Yes, I slammed the door.
I sat staring into the froth of a cappuccino in the Cigar Store café. The waitress was having an animated conversation with a couple of her friends drinking espressos in the corner, but apart from them, I had the place to myself. It wasn’t hard to tune out their gossip and focus on the implications of what Bill had said. I couldn’t believe what he planned to do to me. It undercut everything I thought I knew about Bill. It made me feel that my judgement wasn’t worth a bag of used cat litter. The man had been my friend before he became my business partner. I’d started my career process-serving for him as a way of eking out my student gr
ant because the hours and the cash were better than bar work. I’d toiled with him or for him ever since I’d jacked in my law degree after the second year, when I realized I could never spend my working days in the company of wolves and settled for the blond bear instead.
There was no way I could afford to buy him out. The deal we’d done when I’d become a partner had been simple enough. Bill had had the business valued, and I’d worked out I could afford to buy thirty-five per cent. I’d borrowed the money on a short-term loan from the bank and paid it back over four years. I’d managed that by paying the bank every penny I earned over and above my previous salary, including my annual profit shares. I’d only finished paying the loan off three months previously, thanks in part to a windfall that couldn’t be explained either to another living soul or to the taxman without risking the knowledge getting back to the organized criminals who had inadvertently made me the gift. It had been a struggle to meet the payments on the loan, and I had no intention of standing under the kind of trees that deliver such dangerous windfalls ever again.
I had to face it. There was no way I could raise the cash to buy out Bill’s sixty-five per cent at the prices of four years ago, never mind what the agency would now be worth, given the new clients we’d both brought in since then. I was going to be the victim of anyone who decided a two-thirds share in a profitable detective agency was a good investment.
A second cup clattered on to the table in front of me. Startled, I looked up and found myself staring into Shelley’s amber eyes. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said, tossing her mac over a chair and sitting down opposite me. Her face looked like one of those carved African ceremonial masks, all polished planes and immobility, especially now she’d abandoned the beads she used to wear plaited in her hair and moved on to neat cornrows. I couldn’t tell from looking at her if she’d come to sympathize or to tell me off for my tantrum and plead Bill’s case.