Crack Down (2 page)

He smiled and jumped in. “You're right, you know.”

“I usually am,” I said, only half teasing, as I eased the car out into the busy stream of traffic on the Bolton to Blackburn road. “About what in particular?”

“That being a private eye is ninety-five percent boredom coupled with five percent fear. The first time we did that routine, I was really scared. I thought, what if I forget what I'm supposed to say, and they suss that we're setting them up,” he said earnestly.

“It wouldn't have been the end of the world,” I said absently, keeping an eye on the road signs so I didn't miss the turn off for Manchester. “We're not dealing with the Mafia here. They wouldn't have dragged you out kicking and screaming and kneecapped you.”

“No, but you might have,” Richard said. He was serious.

I laughed. “No way. I'd have waited till I got you home.”

Richard looked worried for a moment. Then he decided I was joking. “Anyway,” he said, “now when we do it, I'm not nervous any more. The only danger is that it's so repetitious I'm afraid I'll blow it out of boredom.”

“Well, I'm hoping we won't have to go through it many more times,” I said, powering down the ramp on to the dual carriageway. The little Peugeot I chose has a 1.9 litre engine, but since I got the dealership to take the identifying badges off it, it looks as
innocuous as a housewife's shopping trolley. I'd be sorry to see the back of it, but once I'd finished this job, I'd be in line for a brand new sporty Leo hatchback. Freemans.

“That's a shame, in some ways. I hate to admit it, Brannigan, but I've quite enjoyed working with you.”

Wild horses wouldn't have got me to admit it, but I'd enjoyed it too. In the two years that we'd been lovers, I'd never been reluctant to use Richard as a sounding board for my investigations. He's got one of those off-the-wall minds that sometimes come up with illuminating insights into the white collar crime that makes up the bulk of the work I do with my business partner Bill Mortensen. But the opportunity to get Richard to take a more active part had never arisen before this job. I'd only gone along with Bill's suggestion to involve him precisely because I felt so certain it was a no-risk job. How could I expose to danger a man who thinks discretion is a fragrance by Calvin Klein?

This job was what we call in the trade a straight up-and-downer. The only strange thing about it was the way we'd got the job in the first place. A two-operative agency in Manchester isn't the obvious choice for an international car giant like the Leo Motor Company when they've got a problem. We'd got lucky because the new head honcho at Accredited Leo Finance was the brother-in-law of a high-class Manchester jeweller. We'd not only installed Clive Abercrombie's security system, but we'd also cracked a major gang of counterfeiters who were giving the executive chronometer brigade serious migraine. As far as Clive was concerned, Mortensen and Brannigan were the people to go to when you wanted a slick, discreet job.

Of course, being an arm of a multi-national, ALF couldn't bring themselves to knock on the door and pitch us the straight way. It had all started at a reception hosted by the Manchester Olympic Bid organization. Remember the Olympic Bid? They were trying to screw dosh out of local businesses to support their attempt to kick off the new millennium by holding the Games in the Rainy City. Bill and I are such a small operation, we were a bit bewildered at being invited, but I'm a sucker for free smoked salmon, and besides, I reckoned it would do no harm to flash my smile round a
few potentially lucrative new contacts, so I went off to fly the flag for Mortensen and Brannigan.

I was only halfway through my first glass of Australian fizz (as good a reason as any for awarding the Olympics to Sydney) when Clive appeared at my elbow with a strange man and a sickly grin. “Kate,” he greeted me. “What a lovely surprise.”

I was on my guard straight away. Clive and I have never been buddies, probably because I can't bring myself to be anything more than professionally polite to social climbers. So when the Edmund Hillary of the Cheshire set accosted me so joyously, I knew at once we were in the realms of hidden agendas. I smiled politely, shook his hand, counted my fingers and said, “Nice to see you too, Clive.”

“Kate, can I introduce my brother-in-law, Andrew Broderick? Andrew, this is Kate Brannigan, who's a partner in Manchester's best security company. Kate, Andrew's the MD and CEO of ALF.” I must have looked blank, for Clive added hurriedly, “You know, Kate. Accredited Leo Finance. Leo Motor Company's credit arm.”

“Thanks, Tonto,” I said.

Clive looked baffled, but Andrew Broderick laughed. “If I'm the loan arranger, you must be Tonto. Old joke,” he explained. Clive still didn't get it. Broderick and I shook hands and weighed each other up. He wasn't a lot taller than my five feet and three inches, but Andrew Broderick looked like a man who'd learned how to fight his battles in a rugby scrum rather than a boardroom. It was just as well he could afford to have his suits hand-stitched to measure ; he'd never have found that chest measurement off the peg. His nose had been broken more than once and his ears were as close to being a pair as Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But his shrewd gray eyes missed nothing. I felt his ten-second assessment of me had probably covered all the salient points.

We started off innocuously enough, discussing the Games. Then, casually enough, he asked what I drove in the course of business. I found myself telling him all about Bill's new Saab convertible, the workhorse Little Rascal van we use for surveillance, and the nearly fatal accident that had robbed me of the Nova. I was mildly surprised. I don't normally talk to strangers.

“No Leos?” he asked with a quirky smile.

“No Leos,” I agreed. “But I'm open to persuasion.”

Broderick took my elbow, smiled dismissively at Clive and gently steered me into a quiet corner behind the buffet. “I have a problem,” he said. “It needs a specialist, and I'm told that your organization could fit my spec. Interested?”

Call me a slut, but when it comes to business, I'm always open to offers. “I'm interested,” I said. “Will it keep, or do you want to thrash it out now?”

It turned out that patience wasn't Andrew Broderick's long suit. Within five minutes, we were in the lounge of the Ramada, with drinks on their way. “How much do you know about car financing?” he asked.

“They always end up costing more than you think,” I said ruefully.

“That much, eh?” he said. “OK. Let me explain. My company, ALF, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Leo Motor Company. Our job is to provide loans for people who want to buy Leo cars and haven't got enough cash. But Leo dealerships aren't obliged to channel all their customers through us, so we have to find ways to make ourselves sexy to the dealerships. One of the ways we do this is to offer them soft loans.”

I nodded, with him so far. “And these low-interest loans are for what, exactly?”

“Dealerships have to pay up front when they take delivery of a car from Leo. ALF gives them a soft loan to cover the wholesale cost of the car for ninety days. After that, the interest rate rises weekly. When the car is sold, the soft loan is supposed to be paid off. That's in the contract.

“But if a dealership arranges loans for the Leos it sells via a different finance company, neither ALF nor Leo is aware that the car's been sold. The dealer can smack the money in a high-interest account for the remains of the ninety days and earn himself a tidy sum in interest before the loan has to be paid off.” The drinks arrived, as if on cue, giving me a few moments to digest what he'd said.

I tipped the bottle of grapefruit juice into my vodka, and swirled the ice cubes round in the glass to mix the drink. “And you obviously hate this because you're cutting your own margins to supply
the low-interest loans, but you're getting no benefit in return.”

Broderick nodded, taking a hefty swallow of his spritzer. “Leo aren't crazy about it either because it skews their market share figures, particularly in high turnover months like August,” he added.

“So where do I come in?” I asked.

“I've come up with an alternative distribution system,” he said simply. Now, all I know about the car business is what I've learned from my dad, an assembly line foreman with Rover in Oxford. But even that little is enough for me to realize that what Andrew Broderick had just said was on a par with the Prime Minister announcing he was going to abolish the Civil Service.

I swallowed hard. “We don't do bodyguard jobs,” I said.

He laughed, which was the first time I'd doubted his sanity. “It's so simple,” he said. “Instead of having to fill their showrooms with cars they're then under pressure to sell asap, dealers would carry only one sample of the model. The customer would specify color, engine size, petrol or diesel, optional extras, etc. The order would then be faxed to one of several regional holding centers where the specific model would be assembled from Leo's stock.”

“Don't tell me, let me guess. Leo are fighting it tooth and nail because it involves them in initial expenditure of more than threepence ha'penny,” I said resignedly.

“And that's where you come in, Ms. Brannigan. I want to prove to Leo that my system would be of ultimate financial benefit to both of us. Now, if I can prove that at least one of our bigger chains of dealerships is committing this particular fraud, then I can maybe start to get it through Leo's corporate skulls that a helluva lot of cash that should be in our business is being siphoned off. And then maybe, just maybe, they'll accept that a revamped distribution service is worth every penny.”

Which is how Richard and I came to be playing happy newlyweds round the car showrooms of England. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Three weeks into the job, it still seemed like a good idea. Which only goes to show how wrong even I can be.

The following afternoon, I was in my office, putting the finishing touches to a routine report on a fraudulent personal accident claim I'd been investigating on behalf of a local insurance company. As I reached the end, I glanced at my watch. Twenty-five to three. Surprise, surprise, Richard was late. I saved the file to disc, then switched off my computer. I took the disc through to the outer office, where Shelley Carmichael was filling in a stationery supplies order form. If good office management got you on to the Honors List, Shelley would be up there with a life peerage. It's a toss-up who I treat with more respect—Shelley or the local pub's Rottweiler.

She glanced up as I came through. “Late again, is he?” she asked. I nodded. “Want me to give him an alarm call?”

“I don't think he's in,” I said. “He mumbled something this morning about going to a bistro in Oldham where they do live rockabilly at lunch time. It sounded so improbable it has to be true. Did you check if today's draft has come through?”

Shelley nodded. Silly question, really. “It's at the King Street branch,” she said.

“I'll pop out and get it now,” I said. “If Boy Wonder shows up, tell him to wait for me. None of that ‘I'll just pop out to the Corner House for ten minutes to have a look at their new exhibition' routine.”

I gave the lift a miss and ran downstairs. It helps me maintain the illusion of fitness. As I walked briskly up Oxford Street, I felt at peace with the world. It was a bright, sunny day, though the temperature was as low as you'd expect the week before the spring bank holiday. It's a myth about it always raining in Manchester—
we only make it up to irritate all those patronizing bastards in the South with their hose-pipe bans. I could hear the comic Thomas the Tank Engine hooting of the trams in the distance. The traffic was less clogged than usual, and some of my fellow pedestrians actually had smiles on their faces. More importantly, the ALF job had gone without a hitch, and with a bit of luck, this would be the last banker's draft I'd have to collect. It had been a pretty straightforward routine, once Bill and I had decided to bring Richard in to increase the credibility of the car-buying operation. It must be the first time in his life he's ever been accused of enhancing the credibility of anything. Our major target had been a garage chain with fifteen branches throughout the North. Richard and I had hit eight of them, from Stafford to York, plus four independents that Andrew also suspected of being on the fiddle.

There was nothing complicated about it. Richard and I simply rolled up to the car dealers, pretending to be a married couple, and bought a car on the spot from the range in the showroom. Broderick had called in a few favors with his buddies in the credit rating agencies that lenders used to check on their victims' creditworthiness. So, when the car sales people got the finance companies to check the names and addresses Richard gave them, they discovered he had an excellent credit rating, a sheaf of credit cards and no outstanding debt except his mortgage. The granting of the loan was then a formality. The only hard bit was getting Richard to remember what his hooky names and addresses were.

The next day, we'd go to the bank and pick up the banker's draft that Broderick had arranged for us. Then it was on to the showroom, where Richard signed the rest of the paperwork so we could take the car home. Some time in the following couple of days, a little man from ALF arrived and took it away, presumably to be resold as an ex-demonstration model. Interestingly, Andrew Broderick had been right on the button. Not one of the dealers we'd bought cars from had offered us finance through ALF. The chain had pushed all our purchases through Richmond Credit Finance, while the independents had used a variety of lenders. Now, with a dozen cast-iron cases on the stocks, all Broderick had to do was sit back and wait till the dealers finally got round to
admitting they'd flogged some metal. Then it would be gumshields time in the car showrooms.