Kickback

by Val McDermid

  I thought about it for a moment, then I jumped to my feet. 'Hold everything,' I said on my way through to my spare room, which doubles as study and computer room. I pulled out a book on forensic medicine written for the popular market that Richard had bought me for my birthday as a kind of joke. I ran my finger down the index and turned to the section on body temperature. 'Got it!' I shouted. Richard appeared in the doorway, looking crestfallen. I pointed to the relevant sentence, "The rule of thumb applied by pathologists is that a clothed body will cool in air at between two and five degrees Fahrenheit per hour", it says here,' I said. 'And, when I touched him, he was the same temperature as I was, near as dammit. No way was he between four and ten degrees colder than me, which he should have been if he'd died when you suggested.'

  Richard took the book from me and read the relevant section. As usual, the journalist in him took over and he found all sorts of fascinating things he simply had to read about. Leaving him to it, I started to clear up the debris of dinner. I'd just dumped the tinfoil containers in the bin when he reappeared, brandishing the book with a look of pure triumph.

  'You should have kept reading,' he said sanctimoniously. That way, you wouldn't have given me half a tale. Look,' he added, pointing to a paragraph on the following page.

  "Typically, death by asphyxiation raises the body temperature. This must be taken into account in estimates of the time of death, and is known to have caused confusion in some historical cases,'" I read. 'Bollocks,' I said. 'OK, you win,' I sighed. 'I'm letting my imagination run away with me.'

  'So you accept my theory?' Richard asked, a look of total disbelief on his face.

  'I guess so,' I admitted.

  There's one good thing about it,' he said. 'I mean, I know I've just deprived you of all the excitement of chasing a murderer, but look on the bright side. It puts Alexis in the clear.'

  'I never thought for a moment she wasn't in the clear,' I lied frostily.

  'Course you didn't,' Richard said, with a broad wink. 'Anyway, now I've saved you all the work of a murder hunt, do I get a reward?'

  I checked my body out for bruises and stiffness. I was beginning to heal, no doubt about it. I leaned into Richard's warmth and murmured, 'Your place or mine?'

  19

  The bulging eyes stared fixedly at me, the blue lips twitching some message I could neither hear nor read. I moved back, but the face kept following me. I shouted at it, and the sound of my voice woke me up with the kind of staring-eyed shock that sets the adrenalin racing through the veins. The clock said six, Richard was lying on his stomach, breathing not quite heavily enough to be called snoring, and I was wide awake with Martin Cheetham's face accusing me.

  Even if he hadn't been murdered, Nell and Lomax had behaved unforgivably, always supposing there was anyone still around to forgive them. Nell's actions in particular sickened me. I know I couldn't behave like that if someone I'd been lovers with was hanging dead in the hall. There must have been a lot at stake for Nell and Lomax to have had the nerve to carry off their cover-up and, although the voice of reason said it was none of my business, I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  Since I was awake anyway, I decided to do something useful. I slipped out of Richard's bed and cut through the conservatory to my house. A steaming shower banished the morning stiffness that still lingered in my muscles, and a strong cup of coffee kick-started my brain. I chose a pair of bottle green trousers and a matching sweater to go under the russet padded silk blouson that I'd picked up for a song on Strangeways market.

  It was a quarter to seven when I parked outside Alexis's house. As I'd expected, her car was still in the drive. I knew her routine of old. Up at six, in the bath with a pot of coffee, the phone and her notebook at five past. Morning calls to the cops, then out of the bath at half past. Then toast and the tabloids. I estimated she'd be finishing her second slice of toast about now. Unfortunately, she wouldn't be in the office at seven this morning.

  I looked through the kitchen window as I knocked on the door. Alexis dropped her toast at the sound of the knock. I waved and grinned at her. With a look of resignation, she opened the door.

  'I have a question for you,' I announced.

  'Come in, why don't you?' Alexis said as I walked across the kitchen and switched the kettle on.

  'When you left Tamarind Grove yesterday afternoon, did you already know that Martin Cheetham was dead?' I asked conversationally, spooning coffee into a mug.

  Alexis's face froze momentarily. Always pale, she seemed to go sheet white. 'How the hell did you know about that?' she asked intensely. If she used that tone of voice professionally, she'd get all sorts of confessions she wasn't looking for.

  'I don't suppose you remember a red Little Rascal van that you nearly drove into, but that was me. I remember it particularly because for a brief moment, I wondered what Bill would say if I wrote off a second company vehicle inside a week,' I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere a bit.

  'I might have known,' Alexis sighed. 'If you're brewing up, I'll have another cup.'

  I made the coffees and said, 'I'm listening.'

  Alexis lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags before she spoke. I sometimes think it must be lovely to have an instant trank permanently to hand. Then I think about my lungs.

  'I'd had a couple of drinks at lunchtime. I wasn't pissed, just a bit belligerent. So I bought a can of spray paint. I was going to spray some rude graffiti on Cheetham's house,' she said, looking as embarrassed as she must have felt. 'Anyway, I got there and there was his car in the drive. I thought about spraying "You dirty rat" on the bonnet, then I realized if he was home I might as well give him a piece of my mind. So I rang the doorbell. There was no reply, so I looked through the letter box. And I saw these feet, legs, just dangling there.'

  'Tell me about it,' I said with feeling, remembering my own experience.

  'So I took off like a bat out of hell,” Alexis said, dropping her head so that her haystack of unruly black hair hid her face.

  “You didn't phone the cops?' I asked.

  'How could I? I didn't have any legit reason for being there. I didn't even know who the body was. And I couldn't have done it anonymously, could I? Half the cops in Manchester know who it is on the phone the minute I open my gob.' She was right. Anyone who'd ever spoken to Alexis would remember that smoky Liverpudlian voice.

  'I'm sorry,” I said. 'I should have rung you about it last night. I was just too wiped out. So, when did you realize it was Cheetham?'

  'When I did my calls this morning. They told me about it as a routine non-suspicious death. If he hadn't been a solicitor, I doubt they'd even have mentioned it. It made my stomach turn over, I can tell you.'

  'Any details?' I asked.

  'Not a lot. Unattributed, I got that he was wearing women's clothing and playing bondage games. According to the DI at the scene, he had a proper little torture chamber in his wardrobe. They reckon he died sometime yesterday afternoon. He didn't have any form for sexual offences. Not so much as a caution. He's not even on their list of people they know get up to naughties in their spare time. They don't think there was anyone else involved, and they're not treating it as a suspicious death. They don't even think it was suicide, just an accident. All I can say is thank God he didn't have nosy neighbours, or else the lads might be asking me what exactly I was doing kicking his door in yesterday afternoon.' Alexis managed a faint smile. 'Especially if they knew I had a private eye working on how to recover the five grand he helped to con me out of.'

  'You weren't the only person who was there yesterday,” I said, and went on to fill her in on the events of the afternoon. 'I was convinced they'd killed him,” I added. 'But Richard persuaded me that I was just seeing dragons in the flames.'

  'So what happens now?' Alexis asked.

  'Well, theoretically, we could just ignore the whole thing, and I could still follow Lomax like you asked me to and try to get some money back from him. The problem is that now C
heetham's dead, I'm afraid Lomax might try to deny any criminal involvement in the whole thing and blame it all on Cheetham.'

  'You don't really think he'd get away with that, do you?' Alexis demanded, lighting up another cigarette.

  'I don't honestly know,' I admitted. 'Personally, I think there's been a lot more going down between Lomax and Cheetham than we know about. And if there's any proof of a connection other than the fact that I know I've seen them together, it could be buried in the other stuff. So I want to keep digging.'

  Alexis nodded. 'So how can I help?'

  There are parts of Greater Manchester where it wouldn't be too big a shock to encounter a shop catering for the needs of transsexuals and transvestites. A back street in Oldham isn't one of them. I find it hard to imagine anyone in Oldham doing anything more sexually radical than the missionary position, which only goes to show what a limited imagination I have. The locals clearly didn't have a problem with Trances, since there was nothing discreet about the shopfront, sandwiched rather unfortunately as it was between a butcher's and a junk shop.

  On the way over, Alexis had told me about the shop and its owner. Cassandra Cliff had endured a brief spell of notoriety in the gutter press a few years previously when some muckraking journo had discovered that the actress who was one of the regulars in the country's favourite soap opera was in fact a male-to-female transsexual. In the flurry of 'Sex Swap Soap Star' stories that followed, it emerged that Cassandra, previously Kevin, had been living as a woman for a dozen years, and that no one among cast or production team had a clue that she wasn't biologically of the same gender as the gossipy chip-shop owner she played. Of course, the production company of Northerners denied that the uncovering of Cassandra's secret would make any difference whatsoever to their attitude to her.

  Two months later, Cassandra's character perished in a tragic accident when the extension her husband was building to their terraced house collapsed on her. The production company blandly denied they had dumped her because of her sex change, but that didn't much help Cassandra, on the scrap heap at thirty-seven. 'She didn't let them get away with it,' Alexis said. 'She sold her own inside story to one of the Sunday tabloids, dishing the dirt on all the nation's idols. Then with the money she set up Trances, and a monthly magazine for transvestites and transsexuals. She's got so much bottle, Kate. You can't help respecting Cassie.'

  Alexis skirted the one-way system and cut round the back of the magistrates' court. Modern concrete boxes and grimy red brick terraced shops were mixed higgledy-piggledy along almost every street, a seemingly random and grotesque assortment that filled me with the desire to construct a cage in the middle of it and make the town planners live there for a week among the chip papers blowing in the wind and the empty soft-drink cans rattling along the gutters. I tried to ignore the depressing townscape and asked, 'So how come you know her so well? What's she got to do with the crime beat?'

  'I interviewed her a couple of times for features when she was still playing Margie Grimshaw in Northerners. We got on really well. Then after the dust settled and she set up Trances, I gave her a call and asked if we could do a piece about the shop. She wasn't keen, but I let her have copy approval, and she liked what I wrote. Now, we do lunch about once a month. She's got such a different grapevine from any of my other contacts. It's amazing what she picks up,' Alexis said, parking in a quiet side street of terraced houses. It could have been the set for Northerners.

  'And she passes stuff on to you, does she?' I asked.

  'I suspect she's highly selective. I know that after what happened to her, she's desperately protective of other people in the same boat. But if she can help, she will.'

  I followed Alexis round the corner into one of those streets that isn't quite part of the town centre, but would like to think it is. I glanced in the window as we entered. The only clue that Trances was any different from a hundred other boutiques was the prominent sign that said, 'We specialize in large sizes. Shoes up to size 12'. The door itself provided the warning for the uninitiated. 'Specialists in supplies for transvestites and transsexuals', was painted on the glass in neat red letters at the eye level of the average woman.

  I followed Alexis in. The shop was large, and had an indefinable air of seediness. The decor was cream and pink, the pink tending slightly too far to the candy floss end of the spectrum. The dresses and suits that were suspended from racks that ran the full length of the shop had the cumulative effect of being over the top, both in style and colour. I suspect that the seediness came from the glass cases that lined the wall behind the counter. They contained the kind of prostheses and lingerie I remembered only too well from Martin Cheetham's secret collection. In one corner, there was a rack of magazines. Without examining them too closely, the ones that weren't copies of Cassandra's magazine Trances had that combination of garishness and coyness on the cover that marks soft porn.

  The person behind the counter was also clearly a client. The size of the hands and the Adam's apple were the giveaways. Apart from that, it would have been hard to tell. The make-up was a little on the heavy side, but I could think of plenty of pubs in the area where that wouldn't even earn a second glance. 'Is Cassie in?' Alexis asked.

  The assistant gave a slight frown, sizing us up and clearly wondering if we were tourists. 'Are you a friend of Miss Cliff, madam?' she asked.

  'Would you tell her Alexis would like a word, if she's got a few minutes?' Alexis said, responding in the same slightly camp vein. I hoped the conversation with Cassie wasn't going to run along those lines. I can do pompous, I can do threatening, I can even do 'OK, yah', but the one style I can't keep up without exploding into giggles is high camp.

  The assistant picked up a phone and pressed an intercom button. 'Cassandra? I have a lady with me called Alexis who would like a moment of your time, if it's convenient,' she said. Then she nodded. 'I'll tell her. Bye for now,' she added. She replaced the handset and said decorously, 'Miss Cliff will see you now. If you'd care to take the door at the back of the shop and follow the stairs ...'

  'It's all right, I know the way,' Alexis said, heading past the clothes racks. Thanks for your help.'

  Cassandra Cliff's office looked like something out of Interiors. It could have been a blueprint for the career woman who wants to remind people that as well as being successful she is still feminine. The office furniture - a row of filing cabinets, a low coffee table and two desks, one complete with Apple Mac -was limed ash, stained grey. A pair of grey leather two-seater sofas occupied one corner. The carpet was a dusty pink, a colour echoed in the Austrian blinds that softened the lines of the room. The walls were decorated with black and white stills of the set and stars of Northerners. A tall vase of burgundy carnations provided a vivid splash of colour. The overall effect was stylish and relaxed, the two adjectives that sprang into my mind when I first met Cassandra Cliff.

  She wore a linen suit with a straight skirt and no lapels. It was the colour of an egg yolk. Her mandarin-collared blouse was a bright, clear sapphire blue. I know it sounds hideous, but on her it was glorious. Her ash blonde hair was cut short but full on top, shaped, gelled and lacquered till it resembled something out of the Museum of Modern Art. The make-up was the kind of discreet job that looks completely natural.

  As Alexis introduced us, Cassie caught me studying her and the corners of her mouth twitched in a knowing smile. I could feel my ears going red, and I returned her smile sheepishly. 'I know,' she said. 'You can't help it. You have to ask yourself, "If I didn't know, would I have guessed?" Everyone does it, Kate, don't feel embarrassed about it.'

  Completely disarmed, I allowed myself to be settled on one of the sofas with Alexis while Cassie ordered coffee then sat down opposite us, crossing a pair of elegant legs that certain women of my acquaintance would cheerfully have killed for. 'So,' Cassie said. 'A private investigator and a crime reporter. It can't be me you're after. The jackals that Alexis hangs out with left me not so much as a vertebra in my cupboard, n
ever mind a skeleton. So, I ask myself, who?'

  'Does the name Martin Cheetham mean anything to you?' Alexis asked.

  Cassie uncrossed her legs then recrossed them in the opposite direction. 'In what context?' she said.

  'In a business context. Your business, not his.'

  Cassie shrugged elegantly. 'Not everyone who uses our services likes to be known by their real name. You could say that their real name is what they're trying to escape from.'

  'He died yesterday,” Alexis said bluntly.

  Before Cassie could respond, a teenage girl came in with coffee. At least, I'm pretty certain it was a girl. The process of pouring our coffee gave Cassie plenty of time to recover from the news. 'How did he die?' she asked. In spite of her conversational tone, for the first time since we'd arrived she looked wary.