Boiling Point

by Frank Lean

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I want the boys in blue poking round here again.’

  ‘You gave them your key last week. It might have been them.’

  ‘So why did they shin up the drainpipe?’

  ‘Or perhaps it’s that Brandon Carlyle.’

  ‘I don’t think burglary’s his style.’

  ‘Who then?’

  I shrugged. I tried to put my best face on things. I went to the freezer. That had been done over too, but my frozen assets were intact. Janine had started putting cushions back on the sofa.

  ‘Leave it,’ I said. I couldn’t face having all my useless pieces of memorabilia gone through again, even by someone as close to me as Janine.

  ‘Come next door,’ she suggested. ‘I don’t want to sleep on my own after this.’

  Before following her, I set the alarm.

  There are burglars by the hundred in South Manchester but I’d only heard of one who’d leave cash lying around. The same one who’d left Leah Levy’s pearls.

  Janine greeted me at the door of her bedroom with two tumblers of whisky in her hands. I almost snatched mine off her. The harsh taste in the back of my throat was a comfort.

  ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re in the shit again, aren’t you? It’s something to do with that Marti, isn’t it?’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ I insisted. ‘I’m expanding the business. There could be any number of people whose noses are of joint.’

  ‘Dave, be serious! Are you saying some rival detective agency has turned over your place for spite?’

  ‘Not spite, information. They might want to know why Northern Mutual are so keen to favour me . . . it could be blackmail . . . anything.’

  ‘But Dave . . .’

  ‘It’s possible. They’d have access to the expertise.’

  ‘I hope to God it is a rival business. I don’t think I could survive another experience like last time. I was in intensive care for almost a month.’

  ‘That was because you didn’t listen to my advice. You’ve got me with you now and we don’t know that whoever did this even knows your name.’ The words sounded unconvincing even as I said them.

  They say there aren’t many atheists in foxholes, and whatever Janine White’s feelings about me and the whole male sex were, she took a very firm grip on my arm before settling down to an uneasy sleep.

  33

  NO ONE’S INDISPENSABLE, they say. I wasn’t. If I’d had more prescience I’d have seen all the signs on that Thursday morning after my flat was done over.

  Celeste was already installed at her desk with the phone pressed to her ear when I arrived.

  Organising the expanded Pimpernel Investigations operation had been simpler than I expected. There were plenty of experienced former police wishing to supplement their pensions with a little surveillance work.

  All I had to do was to recruit them as self-employed and pay them when I got paid. The hard part was providing the vans, the video cameras, the phones and the other surveillance gear.

  Managerial skill came in keeping my investigators’ noses to the grindstone. All my ex-coppers knew a hundred different ways to skive. It was hard to blame them.

  I should have got an inkling of how Celeste was coping when I overheard her talking to one team on an estate in Salford – men who’d worked for me before, not part of the Northern Mutual intake: ‘Listen, if you don’t stay where you are I can’t be responsible for you getting home in one piece,’ she said.

  ‘Trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Right,’ I said vaguely. I should have twigged then that I was the one Celeste was threatening them with, but I didn’t. The truth was that my mind wasn’t on the job. I was thinking about burglars.

  ‘What we need is someone calling them every few minutes to check that they’re on station and get reports,’ Celeste observed.

  ‘Yes, but who and from where?’

  ‘We’ve got that storeroom at the back. That’s big enough for a table and a switchboard or even more,’ she said eagerly. ‘Or we could put up a partition in your office and then we could advertise, perhaps for two people, then there’d always be someone free for an emergency.’

  ‘The storeroom sounds like a good idea.’

  Celeste flashed her perfect teeth at me.

  ‘Then I’d have more time out here to sell the firm and get us more clients,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed before turning towards my own secluded desk. I intended to think bitter thoughts about Clyde Harrow but Celeste hadn’t finished.

  ‘Another idea is that we could use the Internet and laptop computers,’ she said. ‘We could get these cameras and make them download pictures of themselves actually doing the job. I mean, why should we pay them for doing nothing? It isn’t as if they’re still in the fuzz.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Celeste.’

  ‘No, Mr Cunane, why should we pay them to sleep?’

  Celeste was right about us needing more staff, but where was all the extra work coming from? I only knew one businessman powerful enough to cause such a sudden change, but if Brandon Carlyle thought he had me bought and paid for, he’d have to think again. I told myself it might not be him.

  ‘You’re a hard woman,’ I said to Celeste with a laugh and departed.

  I couldn’t help noticing that my office was large. It wouldn’t be difficult to put another couple of desks in and leave plenty of room to spare. My reverie was interrupted by a loud knocking on the door, which was then flung open by an Afro-Caribbean youth who was struggling to carry two very large boxes of A4 paper.

  ‘Where do you want these?’ he gasped.

  I nodded towards a vacant corner and he dumped them there just as another youth came in the door carrying a similar burden. I recognised the contents of my storeroom. I staggered to the door. A third burdened youth was making his way forward.

  ‘Isn’t it good?’ Celeste asked. ‘I got them from this youth scheme in Hulme. They’re going to do out the storeroom.’

  ‘Oh, that was quick,’ I gulped.

  I returned to my desk watching out of the corner of my eye as the entire contents of the storeroom were piled into my office. Shortly after boxes stopped coming in, hammering and banging commenced.

  ‘What’s that?’ I demanded, putting my head round the door.

  ‘Oh, they’re just running extra power cables in there,’ Celeste explained.

  ‘Is all this coming out of your wages?’ I asked.

  ‘You did say to use the storeroom so I just got on with it,’ she said.

  I nodded and retreated to my den. By lunch time BT engineers had installed the phone lines.

  ‘So what are we doing about the extra staff?’ I asked.

  ‘I know some people,’ she said tentatively.

  I remembered the story of Sam Levy and Angelina’s relatives.

  ‘No, I think if you phone an agency you might get some people down here today,’ I suggested.

  ‘Who’d be in charge of them, like?’ she asked intently.

  ‘I would,’ I said. ‘This place is too small for an office manager, but I might think of giving someone a bonus for showing the new girls the ropes.’

  She smiled.

  I went back to my planning and worrying. I looked at the books stacked on top of the filing cabinets. Something seemed wrong. They were in a different order than when I’d left them. I asked Celeste: she hadn’t moved them. I got that horrible sinking feeling that had hit me last night. I wanted to be sick. Instead I phoned a friend, Mark Ross, an expert on alarms and passive security.

  Ross was round in half an hour.

  ‘Yeah, I’m afraid your alarms have been by-passed, Dave, and it was an expert who did it,’ he said, replacing the cover on the circuit box. ‘I can repair it for now but if you want to be secure you need to get the alarms reinstalled, otherwise whoever did this can walk in here an
ytime he chooses. This is what you get for moving into the big-time.’

  ‘What have I got in here that would be worth anyone’s trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Dave, but you appear to have insect infestation as well.’

  He laughed when I pulled a face.

  ‘Electronic insects, Dave. There were two bugs in your room. Expensive little beggars too, state of the art they are. Do you mind if I keep them? It’ll save you the call-out fee.’

  When he’d gone I tried to make sense of what had been going on. Sam Levy had been tortured, presumably to make him reveal something. My flat and now my office had been thoroughly searched, but what for?

  The only certainty was that all this madness started when I began poking around in the affairs of Vince King. Marti must be the one with the answers.

  I left the office to check out the wine bar again. If Marti had been expecting that my mail would be searched that might explain her odd method of correspondence. It only took me ten minutes to stride along to the end of Deansgate.

  ‘Ah, Mr Cunane,’ the waiter I’d christened Manuel said, in broadest Mancunian, ‘that letter you’ve been waiting for, it’s come.’

  I snatched it out of his hand.

  All it contained was a blank sheet of note paper with a flimsy piece of Rizla paper folded inside. There was a North London address pencilled on the tissue, but no telephone number. I screwed the paper into a tiny ball, walked out of the bar and crossed the road. I stood on the bridge over the canal basin. Why did this always happen to me? I looked down at the scummy, oil-stained waters below. Dark and impenetrable, they were. I flicked the paper into the air and watched it land on the dirty surface. It floated for a moment and then sank.

  If I was going to keep my head above the murky waters then I needed some answers.

  Celeste met me with a disapproving frown when I got back to the office.

  ‘Two girls have come from the agency,’ she said. ‘I’ve started them on the phones but there’s not enough work for them yet.’

  ‘Fine!’ I barked. ‘You’re in charge for now.’ I dashed into my room and slammed the door.

  ‘Pops!’ I said as soon as he picked up the phone.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ came the familiar waspish tones, ‘I’m not a bleeding Yankee.’

  ‘Are you OK, no trouble or anything?’

  ‘No trouble, unless you call stopping Jake Carless fly-tipping trouble.’

  My sigh of relief must have been audible.

  ‘You’ve landed us in it again, haven’t you? You stupid . . .’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ I begged. ‘The last old timer who told me I was stupid has ended up dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sam Levy.’

  ‘So you have got your nose in that? I heard a whisper.’

  ‘Dad, do you know any reason . . . Is there any way someone might think that you’d passed some information on to me that might cause serious embarrassment . . .’

  ‘Who’s been talking?’ There was an unfamiliar note of anxiety in his voice.

  ‘No one, it’s just something Levy said – that it was because I’m your son that somebody might be upset.’

  ‘Bloody old lady, that’s what Levy was. He should have kept his mouth shut.’

  ‘Tell me what you know. What’s the connection? What am I missing that everyone else seems to know about?’

  There was a very long pause. So long, that I began to wonder if he was still on the line.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he muttered eventually. ‘You’re not in the Force. Anything I know is official.’

  ‘Dad, are you listening? This is your son here?’

  ‘I can’t say anything . . . official secrets.’ His voice sank to a whisper.

  I came close to pleading with him after that but he wouldn’t open up. All he said was that he’d take Mum on an early holiday. He wouldn’t tell me where. When he rang off I held the phone in my hand for a moment and looked at it in horror. How could I tell if it was bugged? I couldn’t.

  My next call was to Janine.

  ‘The holiday,’ I said, ‘something’s come up.’

  ‘It’s about last night, isn’t it? If you’ve put my children in danger . . .’

  ‘No one’s in danger . . . just precautions, that’s all. Listen, I’ll not be back till very late. Maybe not till tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But your flat, when are you sorting that?’

  ‘Something’s come up, something I’ve got to see to. I don’t think you’re in any danger or I wouldn’t go.’

  ‘Dave, you’d better be right. I couldn’t go through any of that again.’

  34

  IT WASN’T UNTIL I was on the M6 stuck in a three-lane traffic jam outside Birmingham that I began to relax. Jammed in the stream, there was nothing I could do now except be patient. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do when I got to the address in Finchley. Marti might not even be there. I let my mind go blank, not difficult in the circumstances.

  When I found myself grinding my way along the North Circular Road, I became fully alert again. It was dark; rain was streaming down, visibility was poor. The roads were crowded. I reached the address Marti had supplied only to find that there was no parking space within a quarter of a mile. I drove up and down the crowded streets. Finchley reminded me strongly of the crumbling South Manchester suburbs. Rotting window frames and sagging bays, houses painted every colour of the rainbow, it was all familiar.

  I finally managed to park near Finchley Central tube station. My clothes were soaking before I’d walked for five minutes. I got lost several times, which was just as well, because anyone following me would be hopelessly confused.

  When Marti opened the door it was clear that our thoughts were travelling in the same direction.

  ‘Is there anyone following you?’ she said, looking out into the sheeting rain beyond. Then she almost snatched my arm off, pulling me inside and tugging me along the hall and into her ground-floor flat.

  ‘I knew you’d come when you got the address,’ she crowed. ‘Couldn’t keep away, could you?’ She let go my arm only to wrap herself round every other part of me. She kissed me with every sign of genuine passion.

  ‘Whoa!’ I said pushing her off. ‘I’ve not come here for the sake of your lovely green eyes.’

  ‘Jade eyes,’ she corrected. ‘I prefer jade.’

  ‘Do you? I’d prefer some answers to a few questions.’

  ‘You’ve not come all this way just to collect a few quid off me, have you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Why do you think I’ve come?’ I asked. I looked at her closely. She seemed to have shrunk in size if that was possible. She wasn’t wearing very much, a thin blue silk dressing gown over a negligée.

  ‘You know how to embarrass a girl, don’t you?’ she said coyly. ‘I’ve thought of you every day since Stockport Station.’

  ‘Yes, that was interesting, wasn’t it? Me handing over two grand to a woman who could have bought and sold me.’

  ‘Don’t be so bourgeois, Dave. A girl’s entitled to see if a fella can come up with the readies if needed.’

  ‘Is that what you do now? Are you on the game?’

  For reply she smacked me across the face, hard. I flared up, my muscles stiffened for action, but then I remembered how we met – when Charlie Carlyle was testing his strength. I took a step back.

  ‘That was a shitty thing to say,’ she gasped. She slumped into an armchair.

  ‘Was it? Perhaps you’d like to explain why you needed my money when you were wadded?’

  She reached over to the table and took a cigarette from a pack.

  ‘I’m off the sauce,’ she said brightly as she lit up. ‘I haven’t had a drink since Manchester.’

  ‘That long?’

  ‘Don’t be snide. You’re still in Ms Ironpants’ good books, aren’t you? I thought she might have dropped you judging by the speed you got here. I posted the letter yester
day and it’s only eleven p.m. now.’

  ‘This isn’t about me, Marti, it’s about you.’

  ‘Don’t be such a boy scout, Dave. You can have your money back tomorrow if that’s all that’s interesting you.’

  ‘It’s not all that’s interesting me. For one thing, why did you have to contact me through the wine bar? What’s going on?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Dave, you’re so straight and squeaky clean it makes my eyes sore just looking at you. I suppose that’s why I fancy you . . . attraction of opposites, but you haven’t got a clue about what really devious people get up to.’

  ‘You’re such an expert at back-handed compliments, aren’t you? But I’m not going until you tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said with a pout. ‘Looking up at you’s making my eyes water.’

  ‘I’ve got all night.’

  ‘Are you sure? Does Ms Ironpants know where you are? Will she turn up with the kiddies like she did last time?’

  ‘Forget Janine and tell me what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘If you must stand over me, make us some coffee.’

  ‘You’ve got some irritating little ways,’ I said when I’d made the coffee. My cheek still stung.

  ‘You’re no angel yourself. You led me on, you and your fancy suits. That day you took me to Leeds your tongue was almost hanging out.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ I said, glaring at her. Why did all my conversations with women have to get down to the hormonal level?

  ‘Don’t say you weren’t interested in me. You looked like a starving bloodhound slavering over a raw steak, and why did you go up against Charlie if you didn’t fancy me?’

  I had no answer for that. If I’d said that I’d have stopped Charlie even if she’d looked like a hag from hell she wouldn’t have believed me. I hoped it was true.

  We stared at each other. It looked like game, set and match to Miss King.

  ‘Look at you! You idiot,’ she said eventually. ‘There are clouds of steam rising up from you. Get those wet clothes off before you pass out on the carpet.’