Blue Genes (6 page)

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 grant 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.

‘And we thought Lincoln freed the slaves,’ I said bitterly. ‘How do you feel about being bought and sold?’

‘It’s not as bad for me as it is for you,’ Shelley said. ‘I don’t like the new boss, I just walk out the door and get me another job. But you’re tied to whoever Bill sells his share to, am I right?’

‘As usual. Back on the chain gang, Shell, that’s what I am. Like Chrissie Hynde says, circumstance beyond our control.’

Shelley’s eyebrows flickered. ‘Doesn’t have to be that way, does it?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘This behaviour from Bill is not what we’re used to.’

‘Of course it’s bloody not,’ I interrupted petulantly. ‘It’s this Sheila, isn’t it? Like the man said, when you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. And there’s no doubting which part of Bill’s anatomy Sheila’s got a grip on.’

‘Doesn’t matter who’s behind it, the end result is the same,’ Shelley pointed out. ‘Bottom line is, Bill is not behaving like your friend, and in my book that absolves you from behaving like his friend.’

‘And?’

‘You own thirty-five per cent of the business, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Free and clear.’

‘So you put your share on the market. Either as an independent entity, or as part of the whole package.’

I frowned. ‘But that would devalue the business quite a lot. It’s a different kettle of fish buying into an established agency where one of the partners is staying on to maintain the existing clients and another thing altogether to go for something that’s nothing more really than a name and a bunch of office equipment.’

‘My point exactly,’ Shelley said.

‘But I’d lose a lot of the money I’ve put in,’ I said.

‘But Bill would stand to lose a hell of a lot more,’ Shelley said. ‘And he needs the cash a lot more than you do right now. What it would do is buy you a bit of time and a lot of say-so on the deal. It gives you a bargaining chip.’

Slowly, I nodded. ‘Shelley, you are one mean mother,’ I said, admiration in my voice. ‘And I thought Bill was your blue-eyed boy.’

Shelley’s lips tightened. I noticed that between her nose and mouth, a couple of creases were graduating to lines. ‘Listen, Kate, when I was growing up, I saw a lot of women doing the “my kids, right or wrong” routine with teachers, with cops. And I see their kids now, running drugs, living behind bars. I’ve seen the funerals when another one gets shot in some stupid gang war. I don’t like the end result of blind loyalty. Bill has been my friend and my boss a long time, but he’s behaving like an arsehole to us both, and that’s how he deserves to be treated.’

I admired her cold determination to get the best result for both of us. I just didn’t know if I could carry it through as ruthlessly as Shelley would doubtless demand. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him I want to sell too.’

Shelley smiled. ‘I bet you feel better already,’ she said shrewdly. She wasn’t wrong. ‘So, haven’t you got any work to do?’

I told her about the previous evening’s adventures, and, predictably enough, she had a good laugh at my expense. ‘So now I need to see Dennis,’ I finished up. ‘Richard might know all there is to know about the music side of the rock business, but when it comes to the criminal side, he thinks seedy is something you listen to on your stereo. Whereas Dennis might not know his Ice T from his Enya, but he could figure out where to make a bent earner in the “Hallelujah Chorus”.’ The only problem was, as I didn’t have to remind Shelley, my friend and sometime mentor Dennis wasn’t quite as accessible as normal, Her Majesty the Queen being unreasonably fussy about keeping her guests to herself.

When I met Dennis, like so many people in their late thirties, he’d just gone through a major career change. After a stretch in prison, he’d given up his previous job as a professional and highly successful burglar to the rich and famous and taken up the more demanding but less dangerous occupation of ‘a bit of ducking and diving’ on the fringes of the law. Which included, on occasion, a bit of consultancy work for Mortensen and Brannigan. Thanks to Dennis, I’d learned how to pick locks, defeat alarm systems and ransack filing cabinets without leaving a trace.

Unfortunately, a little enterprise of Dennis’s aimed at separating criminals from their cash flow had turned sour when he’d inadvertently arranged one of his handovers in the middle of a Drugs Squad surveillance. Instead of grabbing a couple of major-league traffickers and one of those cocaine hauls that get mentioned in the news, the cops ended up with a small-time villain and the kind of nothing case that barely makes three paragraphs in the local paper. Inevitably, Dennis paid the price of their pique, seeing his scam blown sufficiently out of proportion in court to land him with an eighteen-month sentence. Some might say he got off lightly, given his CV and what else I happened to know he’d been up to lately, but speaking as someone who would go quietly mad serving an eighteen-day sentence, I wouldn’t be one of them.

‘When can you get in to see him?’ Shelley asked.

Good question. I didn’t have a Visiting Order nor any immediate prospect of getting one. Once upon a time, I’d have rung up and pretended to be a legal executive from his firm of solicitors and asked for an appointment the next day. But security had grown tighter recently. Too many prisoners had been going walkabout from jails that weren’t supposed to be open prisons. Now, when you booked a brief’s appointment at Strangeways, they took the details then rang back the firm you allegedly represented to confirm the name of the person attending and to give them a code consisting of two letters and four numbers. Without the code, you couldn’t get in. ‘I thought about asking Ruth to let me pose as one of her legal execs,’ I said.

Shelley snorted. ‘After the last time? I don’t think so!’

The last time I’d pretended to be one of Ruth Hunter’s junior employees it had strained our friendship so severely it had to wear a truss for months afterwards. Shelley was right. Ruth wasn’t going to play.

‘I don’t mean to teach you to suck eggs,’ Shelley said without a trace of humility or apology. ‘And I know this goes against the grain. But had you thought about doing it the straight way?’

I pivoted on the ball of my right foot, bending the knee as I straightened my left leg, using the momentum to drive me forward and round in a quarter-circle. The well-muscled leg whistled past me, just grazing the hip that moments before had been right in its path. I grunted with effort as I sidestepped and jabbed a short kick at the knee of my assailant.

I was too slow. Next thing I knew, my right leg was swept from under me and I was lying on my back, lungs screaming for anything to replace the air that had been slammed out of them. Christie O’Brien stood above me, grinning. ‘You’re slowing down,’ she observed with the casual cruelty of adolescence. Of course I was slow compared to her; she was, after all, a former British under-fourteen championship finalist. But Christie—Christine until she discovered fashion and lads—was above all her father’s daughter. She’d learned at an early age that nothing succeeds like kicking them when they’re down.

One of the other things I’d learned thanks to Dennis was Thai kick boxing, a sport he insisted every woman should know. The theory goes, a woman as small as I am is never going to beat a guy in a fair fight, so the key to personal safety is to land one good kick either in the shins or the gonads. Then it’s ‘legs, don’t let me down’ time. Kick boxing teaches you how to land the kick and keeps you fit enough to leg it afterwards.

When he’d been sent down, Dennis had asked me to keep an eye on Christie. She’d inherited her mother’s gleaming blonde hair and wide blue eyes, but her brains had come from a father who knew only too well the damage a teenage girl can wreak when the only adult around to keep an eye on things has a generous spirit and fewer brain cells than the average goldfish. Because she’d always been accustomed to seeing me around the gym, Christie had either failed to notice or decided not to resent the fact that I’d been spending a lot more time with her recently.

She filled me in on the latest school dramas of who was hanging out with whom and why as we showered next to each other—our club’s strictly breeze block. You want cubicles, go somewhere else and pay four times as much to join. By the time we were towelling ourselves dry, I’d managed to swing the conversation round to Dennis. ‘You told your dad about this Jason, then,’ I asked her casually. She’d mentioned the lad’s name once too often.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. ‘Tell him about somebody he can’t check out for himself and have the heavy mob kicking Jason’s door in for a reference? No way. When he comes out’ll be well soon enough.’

‘When you seeing him next?’ I asked.

‘Mum’s got a VO for Thursday afternoon. I’m supposed to be going with her, but I’ve got cross-country trials and I don’t want to miss them,’ she grumbled as she pulled a sweatshirt over her head. ‘Dad wouldn’t mind. He’ll be the one giving me a go-along if I miss getting on the team. But Mum gets really depressed going to Strangeways on her own, so I feel like I’ve got to go with her.’

‘I could go instead of you,’ I suggested.

Christie’s face lit up. ‘Would you? You don’t mind? I’m warning you, it’s a three-hankie job coming home.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see your dad. I miss him.’

Christie sighed and stared at her trainers. ‘Me too.’ She looked up at me, her eyes candid. ‘I’m really angry with him, you know? After he came out last time, he promised me he’d never do anything that would get him banged up again.’

I leaned over and gave her a hug. ‘He knows he’s let you down. It’s hard, recognizing that your dad’s not perfect, but he’s just like the rest of us. He needs you to forgive him, Christie.’

‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Mum you’ll pick her up dinner time Thursday, then.’ She got to her feet and stuffed her sweaty sports clothes into one of the counterfeit Head holdalls Dennis had been turning out the previous spring. ‘See ya, Kate,’ she said on her way out the door.

Knowing I was doing her a favour made me feel less like the exploitation queen of South Manchester. But not a lot less. So much for doing it the straight way.

When I emerged from the gym, I decided to swing round by Gizmo’s to see if he’d got anywhere with my earlier request. If the old axiom, ‘If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here,’ didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it for the journey from Sale to Levenshulme in mid-morning traffic. I knew before I started it was going to be hell on wheels, but for once, I didn’t care. Me, reluctant to face Bill?

I crawled along in second while Cyndi Lauper reminded me that girls just wanna have fun. I growled at the cassette deck and swapped Cyndi for Tanita Tikaram’s more gloomy take on the world. I knew exactly what she meant when she accused someone of making the whole world cry. I sat in the queue of traffic at the lights where Wilbraham Road meets Oxford Road in the heart of undergraduate city, watching them going about their student lives, backpacked and badly barbered. I couldn’t believe it when the fashion world created a whole industry round grunge as if it was something that had just happened. The rest of us knew it wasn’t anything new: students have been wearing layers against the cold, and workmen’s heavy-duty checked shirts for cheapness, ever since I was a student a dozen years ago. Shaking my head, I glanced at the wall alongside the car. Plastered along it were posters for bands appearing at the local clubs. Some of the venues I recognized from razzing with Richard; others I knew nothing about. I hadn’t realized quite how many live music venues there were in the city these days. I looked more closely at the posters, noticing one that had peeled away on the top right corner. Underneath, I could see, in large red letters, ‘UFF’. It looked like Dan and Lice hadn’t been making it up as they went along.