Blue Genes (16 page)

Her words might have been cool, but her voice remained warm. ‘You haven’t asked what she was doing with your identity,’ I pointed out.

That wry smile again. ‘I presumed you’d get round to that.’

There was something irritatingly provocative about Helen Maitland. It undid all my good intentions and made my interview techniques disappear. ‘Did you know she was a lesbian when you offered her your spare room?’ I demanded.

A small snort of laughter. ‘I presumed she was. It didn’t occur to me she might have changed her sexuality between arriving in Leeds and moving in here.’

She was playing with me, and I didn’t like it at all. ‘Did she have a lover when she was living here?’ I asked bluntly. Games were over for today.

‘She never brought anyone back here,’ Dr Maitland replied, still unruffled. ‘And as far as I know, she did not spend nights in anyone else’s bed, either in Leeds or elsewhere. However, as I have said, I can’t claim to have exhaustive knowledge of her acquaintance.’

‘Don’t you mind that she was using your name to carry out medical procedures?’ I demanded. ‘Doesn’t it worry you that she might have put you at professional risk by what she was doing?’

‘Why should it? If anyone ever claimed that I had carried out inappropriate medical treatment on them, they would realize as soon as we came face to face that I had not been the doctor involved. Besides, I can’t imagine Sarah would involve herself, or me, in anything unethical. I never thought of her as a risk taker.’

‘Why else would she be using your identity?’ I said forcefully. ‘If it was all above board, she wouldn’t have needed to pretend to be someone else, would she?’

Dr Maitland suddenly looked tired. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘So what exactly was she doing that was so heinous?’

‘She was working with lesbian couples who wanted children,’ I said, picking my words with care. If I’d learned anything about Helen Maitland, it was that it would be impossible to tell where her loyalties lay. The last thing I wanted was to expose Alexis and Chris accidentally.

‘Hardly the crime of the century,’ she commented, turning to put her cup in the sink. ‘Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you,’ she continued, facing me and running her hands through her curls, giving them fresh life. ‘It’s three years now since Sarah moved out of here. I don’t know what she was doing or who she was seeing. I have no idea why she chose to fly under false colours in the first place, nor why she chose to impersonate me. And I really don’t know what possible interest it could be to anyone. According to the newspapers, Sarah was murdered by a burglar whom she had the misfortune to interrupt trying to find something he could sell, no doubt to buy drugs. That had nothing to do with anything else in her life. I don’t know what your client has hired you to do, but I suspect that he or she is wasting their money. Sarah’s dead, and no amount of raking into her past is going to come up with the identity of the crackhead who killed her.’

‘As a doctor, you’ll appreciate the burdens of confidentiality. Even if I wanted to tell you what I’ve been hired to do, I couldn’t. So I’ll have to be the judge of whether I’m wasting my time or not,’ I said, staking out the cool ground now I’d finally raised Helen Maitland’s temperature a degree or two.

‘Be that as it may, you’re certainly wasting mine,’ she said sharply.

‘When did you see Sarah last?’ I asked, taking advantage of the fact that our conversation had become a subtlety-free zone.

She frowned. ‘Hard to say. Two, three weeks ago? We bumped into each other in the lab.’

‘You didn’t see each other socially?’

‘Not often,’ she said, biting the words off abruptly.

‘What? She shared your house for the best part of a year because the two of you got along just fine, then she moves out and the only time you see each other is when you bump into each other in hospital corridors? What happened? You have a row or what?’

Helen Maitland glowered at me. ‘I never said we were friends,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘All I said was that we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. After she moved out, we didn’t stay in close touch. But even if we had fallen out, it would still have nothing to do with the fact that Sarah Blackstone was murdered by some junkie burglar.’

I smiled sweetly as I got to my feet. ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that score,’ I said. ‘What it might explain, though, is why Sarah Blackstone was hiding behind your name to commit her crimes.’

I started for the door. ‘What crimes?’ I heard.

Half turning, I said, ‘Obviously nothing to do with you, Dr Maitland, since you had nothing to do with her. Thanks for the tea.’

She didn’t follow me down the hall. I opened the door and nearly walked into a key stabbing towards me at eye height. I jumped backwards and so did the woman wielding the key. She was the original of the photograph in the kitchen. With her cascade of dark hair, skin pale as marble and a long cape-shouldered coat, she looked as extreme as a character in an Angela Carter story. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

No, just an extra from Francis Ford Coppola’s
Dracula
, I thought but didn’t say. ‘You startled me,’ I said, putting a hand on my pounding heart.

‘Me too!’ she exclaimed.

From behind me, I heard Helen Maitland’s voice. ‘Ms Brannigan was just leaving.’

The other woman and I skirted round each other, swapping places. ‘Bye,’ I said brightly as the door closed behind me. Trotting down the stone steps leading to the garden, I told myself off for being childish enough to give away my secrets to Helen Maitland just to score a cheap point because she’d made her way under my skin. It was hard to resist the conclusion that she had learned more from our interview than I had.

I didn’t think she had lied to me. Not in so many words. Over the years, I’ve developed a bullshit detector that usually picks up on outright porkies. But I was fairly sure she wasn’t telling me anything like the whole story. Whether any of it was relevant to my inquiries, I had no idea. But I had an idea where I might find some of the facts lurking behind her smoke screen of half-truths. When I got back to the car, I switched on my mobile and left a message for Shelley on the office answering machine. An urgent letter needed to go off to the Land Registry first thing in the morning. The reply would take a few days, but when it came, I had a sneaky feeling I’d have some bigger guns in my armoury to go after Helen Maitland with.

In these days of political correctness, it’s probably an indictable offence to say it, but Sean Costigan didn’t have to open his mouth to reveal he was Irish. I only had to look at him, even in the sweaty laser-split gloom of the nightclub. He had dark hair with the sort of kink in it that guarantees a bad hair life, no matter how much he spent on expensive stylists. His eyes were dark blue, his complexion fair and smooth, his raw bones giving him a youthful, unformed look that his watchful expression and the deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth denied.

I’d got home around nine after fish and chips in Leeds’s legendary Bryan’s, making the mistake I always do of thinking I’m hungry enough for a jumbo haddock. Feeling more tightly stuffed than a Burns Night haggis, I’d driven back with the prospect of an early night all that was keeping me going. I should have known better, really. Among the several messages on my machine—Alexis, Bill, Gizmo and Richard, just for a kickoff—there was one I couldn’t ignore. Dan Druff had called to say he’d set up a meet at midnight in Paradise. Why does nobody keep office hours any more?

I’ve never been able to catnap. I always wake up with a thick head and a mouth that feels like it’s lined with sheep-skin. I don’t mean the sanitized stuff they put in slippers—I mean the stuff you find in the wild, still attached to its smelly owner. I rang Alexis, but she didn’t want to talk in front of Chris, whom she was keeping in the dark about Sarah Blackstone’s murder on account of her delicate condition. Richard was out—his message had been to tell me he wouldn’t be home until late. We’d probably meet on the doorstep as we both staggered home in the small hours. Bill I still wasn’t talking to, and Gizmo doesn’t do conversation. So I booted up the computer and settled down for a serious session with my football team. Not many people know this, but I’m the most successful manager in the history of the football league. In just five seasons, I’ve taken struggling Halifax Town from the bottom of the Conference League up through the divisions to the Premier League. In our first season there, we even won the Cup. This game, Premier Manager 3, is one of my darkest secrets. Even Richard doesn’t know about my hidden nights of passion with my first-team squad. He wouldn’t understand that it’s just fantasy; he’d see it as an excuse to buy me a Manchester United season ticket for my next birthday so I could sit next to him in the stands every other week and perish from cold and boredom. He’d never comprehend that while watching football sends me catatonic, developing the strategies it takes to run a successful team is my idea of a really good time. So I always make sure he’s out when I sit down with my squad.

Around half past eleven, I told the boys to take an early bath and grabbed my leather jacket. When I stepped outside the door, I discovered the rain had stopped, so I decided to leave the car and walk to the Paradise. It’s only fifteen minutes on foot, and the streets of central Manchester are still fairly safe to walk around late at night. Especially if you’re a Thai boxer. Besides, I figured it wouldn’t do me any harm to limber up for looking chilled out.

The Paradise Factory considers itself Manchester’s coolest nightclub. The brick building is on the corner of Princess Street and Charles Street, near Chinatown and the casinos, slightly off the beaten track of clubland. It used to house Factory Records, the famous indie label that was home to Joy Division and lots of other bands less talented but definitely more joyful. When Factory failed, a casualty to the recession, an astute local businesswoman took over the building and turned it into a poser’s heaven. Officially, it’s supposed to be an eclectic mix of gay and hetero, camp and straight, but it’s the only club where I’ve been asked on the door to verify that I’m not a gender tourist by listing other Manchester gay and lesbian venues where I’ve drunk and danced.

As soon as I went through the door, I was hit by a bass rhythm that pounded stronger in my body than my heart ever had. It was hard to move without keeping the beat. I found Dan and Lice propped against a wall near the first bar I came to as I walked into the three-storey building. The guy I knew without asking was Sean Costigan stood slightly to one side, his wiry body dwarfed by his fellow Celts. His eyes were restless, constantly checking out the room. He let me buy the drinks. Both rounds. That wasn’t the only way he made it plain he was there on sufferance. The sneer was another dead giveaway. It stayed firmly in place long after the formal introductions were over and he’d given me the kind of appraising look that’s more about the labels and the price tags on the clothes than the body inside them.

‘I don’t know what the boys have been saying to you, but I want to make one thing absolutely plain,’ he told me in a hard-edged Belfast whine. ‘We are the victims here, not the villains.’ He sounded like every self-justifying Northern Irish politician I’d ever heard. Only this one was leaning over me, bellowing in my ear, as opposed to on a TV screen I could silence with one blast of the remote control.

‘So how do you see what’s been happening?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been in this game a very long time,’ he shouted over the insistent techno beat. ‘I was the one put Morrissey on the map, you know. And the Mondays. All the big boys, I’ve had them all through my hands. You’re talking to a very experienced operator here,’ he added, wetting his whistle with a swig of the large dark rum and Coke he’d asked for. Dan and Lice nodded sagely, backing up their man. Funny how quickly clients forget whose side you’re on.

I waited, sipping my extremely average vodka and bottled grapefruit juice. Costigan lit a Marlboro Light and let me share the plume of smoke from his nostrils. Sometimes I wonder if being a lawyer would really have been such a bad choice. ‘And I have not been trespassing,’ he said, stabbing my right shoulder with the fingers that held the cigarette. ‘I am the one trespassed against.’

‘You’re telling me that you haven’t been sticking up posters on someone else’s ground?’ I asked sceptically.

‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Like I said, we’re the victims here. It’s my ground that’s getting invaded. More times than I can count in the past few weeks, I’ve had my legitimate poster sites covered up by cowboys.’

‘So you’ve been taking revenge on the guilty men?’

‘I have not,’ he yelled indignantly. ‘I don’t even know who’s behind it. This city’s always been well regulated, you know what I mean? Everybody knows what’s what and nobody gets hurt if they stick to their own patch. I’ve been doing this too long to fuck with the opposition. So if you’re trying to lay the boys’ trouble at my door, you can forget it, OK?’

‘Is there any kind of pattern to the cowboy flyposting?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean, a pattern?’

‘Is it always the same sites where they’re taking liberties? Or is it random? Are you the only one who’s being hit, or is it a general thing?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s all over, as far as I can tell. It’s not the sort of thing you talk about, d’you understand? Nobody wants the opposition to think they’re weak, you know? But the word on the street is that I’m not the only one suffering.’

‘But none of the other bands are getting the kind of shit we’re getting,’ Dan interjected. God knows how he managed to follow the conversation. He must have trained as a lip-reader. ‘I’ve been asking around. Plenty other people have had some of their posters covered up, but nobody’s had the aggravation we’ve had.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s nothing to do with me, OK?’ Costigan retorted aggressively.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I told Dan and Lice I’d be in touch, drained my drink and walked home staring at every poster I passed, wondering what the hell was going on.