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4

And that’s exactly what I got. Nothing like a quiet night in. I’d gone back to the office after a quick hit on Sainsbury’s and dropped off my cassette for Shelley to input in the morning. I was sure the thought that it was for Ted Barlow would make her fingers fly. Then I’d finally managed to find the peace and quiet to develop my surveillance films from PharmAce Supplies. As I stared at the film, I wished I hadn’t. On the other hand, if you’re going to have a major downer, I suppose it’s as well to have it at the end of a day that’s already been less than wonderful, rather than spoil a perfectly good one.

Where there ought to have been identifiable images of PharmAce’s senior lab technician slipping in and out of the building in the middle of the night (timing superimposed on the pictures by my super-duper Nikon), there was only a foggy blur. Something had gone badly wrong. Since the commonest cause of fogged film is a camera problem, what I then had to do was to run a film through the camera I’d been using that night, and develop it to see if I could pinpoint the problem. That took another hour, and all it demonstrated was that there was nothing wrong with the camera. Which left either a faulty film or human error. And the chances were, whether I liked it or not, that human error was the reason. Which meant I was stuck with the prospect of another Saturday night in the back of the van with my eye glued to a long lens. Sometimes I really do wonder if I did the right thing when I gave up my law degree after the second year to come and work with Bill. Then I look at what my former fellow students are doing now, and I begin to be grateful I made the jump.

I binned the useless film, locked up and drove home in time to listen to The Archers on the waterproof radio in the shower. It was a birthday present from Richard; I can’t help feeling there was a bit of Indian giving involved, considering how often I have to tune it back to Radio 4 from Key 103. I don’t know why he can’t just use his own bathroom for his ablutions. I’m not being as unreasonable as that sounds; although we’ve been lovers for over a year now, we don’t actually live together as such. When Richard first crashed into my life – or rather, my car – he was living in a nasty rented flat in Chorlton. He claimed he liked a neighbourhood where he was surrounded by students, feminists and Green Party supporters, but when I pointed out that for much the same outlay he could have a spacious two-bedroomed bungalow three minutes’ drive from his favourite Chinese restaurant, he instantly saw the advantages. The fact that it’s next door to my own mirror-image bungalow was merely a bonus.

Of course, he wanted to knock the walls down and turn the pair into a kind of open-plan ranch-house. So I persuaded Chris to come round and deliver herself of the professional architect’s opinion that if you removed the walls Richard wanted rid of, both houses would fall down. Instead, she designed a beautiful conservatory that runs the length of both properties, linking them along the back. That way, we have the best of both worlds. It removes most of the causes of friction, with the result that we spend our time together having fun rather than rows. I preserve my personal space, while Richard can be as rowdy as he likes with his rock band friends and his visiting son. It’s not that I don’t like Davy, the six-year-old who seems to be the only good thing that came out of Richard’s disastrous marriage. It’s just that, having reached the age of twenty-seven unencumbered (or enriched, according to some) by a child, I don’t want to live with someone else’s.

I was almost sorry that Richard was out working, since I could have done with a bit of cheering up. I got out of the shower, towelling my auburn hair as dry as I could get it. I couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it. I pulled on an old jogging suit which was when I remembered my shopping was still in the car. I was dragging the carriers out of the hatchback of my Nova when a hand on my back made my heart bump wildly in my chest. I whirled round, going straight into the ‘ready to attack’ Thai boxing position. In inner-city neighbourhoods like ours, you don’t take chances.

‘Hang about, Bruce Lee, it’s only me,’ Richard said, backing off, raising his palms in a placatory gesture. ‘Jesus, Brannigan, hold your fire,’ he added, as I moved menacingly towards him.

I bared my teeth and growled deep in my throat, just the way my coach Karen trains us to do. Richard looked momentarily terrified, then he gave that Cute Smile of his, the one that got me into this in the first place, the smile that still, I’m ashamed to admit, turns me into a slushy Mills and Boon heroine. I stopped growling and straightened up, slightly sheepishly. ‘I’ve told you before, sneak up on me outside and you risk a full set of broken ribs,’ I grouched. ‘Now you’re here, give me a hand with this.’

The effort of carrying two carrier bags and a case of Miller Lite was clearly too much for the poor lamb, who immediately slumped on one of my living-room sofas. ‘I thought you were doing your brains in to the sound of young black Manchester tonight?’ I said.

‘They decided they weren’t ready to expose themselves to the fearless scrutiny of the music press,’ he said. ‘So they’ve put me off till next week. By which time, I hope one of them’s had a brain transplant. You know, Brannigan, sometimes I wish the guy who invented the drum machine had been strangled at birth. He’d have saved the world a lot of brain ache.’ Richard shrugged his jacket off, kicked off his shoes and put his feet up.

‘Haven’t you got someone else to mither,’ I asked politely.

‘Nope. I haven’t even got any deadlines to meet. So I thought I might go and pick up a Chinese, bring it back here and litter your lounge with beansprouts out of sheer badness.’

‘Fine. As long as you promise you will not insinuate a single shirt into my ironing basket.’

‘Promise,’ he said.

An hour and a half later, I pressed my last pair of trousers. ‘Thank God,’ I sighed.

No response from the sofa. It wasn’t surprising. He was on his third joint and it would have been hard to hear World War Three over the soundtrack of the Motley Crue video he was inflicting on me. What did penetrate, however, was the high-pitched electronic bleep of my phone. I grabbed the phone and the TV remote, hitting the mute button as I switched the phone to ‘talk’. That got a reaction. ‘Hey,’ he protested, then subsided immediately as he registered that I was using the phone.

‘Hello,’ I said. Never give your name or number when you answer the phone, especially if you’ve got an ex-directory number. In these days of phones with last number re-dial buttons, you never know who you’re talking to. I have a friend who discovered the name and number of her husband’s mistress that way. I know I’ve got nothing to fear on that score, but I like to develop habits of caution. You never know when they’ll come in necessary.

‘Kate? It’s Alexis.’ She sounded the kind of pissed off she gets when she’s trying to put together a story against the clock and the news editor is standing behind her chair breathing down her neck. But the time was all wrong for her deadlines.

‘Oh, hi. How’s tricks?’ I said.

‘Is this a good time?’

‘Good as any. I’ve eaten, I’m still under the limit and I still have my clothes on,’ I told her.

‘We need your help, Kate. I don’t like to ask, but I don’t know who else would know where to begin.’

This was no pick-your-brains business call. When Alexis wants my help with a story, she doesn’t apologize. She knows that kind of professional help is a two-way street. ‘Tell me the score, I’ll tell you if I can help.’

‘You know that piece of land we’re supposed to be buying? The one I showed you the pics of yesterday? Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I soothed. She sounded like she was about to explode.

‘Well, you’re not going to believe this. Chris went up there today to do some measurements. She figured that if she’s going to be designing these houses, she needs to have a feel for the lie of the land so the properties can blend in with the flow of the landscape, right?’

‘Right. So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is, she gets up there to find a couple of surveyors marking out the plots. Well, she’s a bit confused, you know, because as far as we know none of the other self-builders we’re working with have asked anyone to start work yet, on account of we haven’t completed on it yet. So, she parks up in the Land Rover and watches them for half an hour or so. Then it dawns on her that the plots they’re marking out are different altogether from the plots we’ve been sold. So she goes over to them and gets into conversation. You know Chris, she’s not like me. I’d have been out there gripping them by the throat demanding to know what the hell they thought they were up to.’ Alexis paused for breath, but not long enough for me to respond.

‘But not Chris. She lets them tell her all about the land and how they’re marking out the plots for the people who have bought them. Half a dozen have been bought by a local small builder, the rest by individuals, they tell her. Well, Chris is more than a little bewildered, on account of what they are telling her is completely at odds with the situation as we know it. So she tells them who she is and what she’s doing there and asks them if they’ve got any proof of what they’re saying, which of course they don’t have, but they tell her the name of the solicitor who’s acting for the purchasers.’

This time, I managed to get in, ‘I’m with you so far,’ before the tide of Alexis’s narrative swept back in. Richard was looking at me very curiously. He’s not accustomed to hearing me take such a minor role in a telephone conversation.

‘So Chris drives down to this solicitor’s in Ramsbottom. She manages to convince their conveyancing partner that this is urgent, so he gives her five minutes. When she explains the situation, he says the land was sold by a builder and that the sales were all completed two days ago.’ Alexis stopped short, as if what she’d said should make everything clear.

‘I’m sorry, Alexis, I suspect I’m being really stupid here, but what exactly do you mean?’

‘I mean the land’s already been sold!’ she howled. ‘We handed over five grand for a piece of land that had already been sold. I just don’t understand how it could have happened! And I don’t even know where to start trying to find out.’ The anguish in her voice was heartbreaking. I knew how much she and Chris wanted this project to work, for all sorts of reasons. Now, it looked as if the money they’d saved to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder had been thrown away.

‘OK, OK, I’ll look into it,’ I soothed. ‘But I’m going to need some more info from you. What was the name of the solicitor in Ramsbottom that Chris saw?’

‘Just a minute, I’ll pass you over to Chris. She’s got all the details. Thanks, Kate. I knew I could count on you.’

There was a brief pause, then a very subdued Chris came on the line. Her voice sounded like she’d been crying. ‘Kate? Oh God, I can’t believe this is happening to us. I just don’t understand it, any of it.’ Then she proceeded to repeat everything Alexis had already told me.

I listened patiently, then said, ‘What was the name of the solicitor’s you went to see in Ramsbottom?’

‘Chapman and Gardner. I spoke to the conveyancing partner, Tim Pascoe. I asked him the name of the person who had sold the land, but he wouldn’t tell me. So I said, was it T. R. Harris, and he gave me one of those lawyer’s looks and said he couldn’t comment, only he said it in that kind of way that means yes, you’re right.’

I looked at the names I’d scribbled on my pad. ‘So who exactly is T. R. Harris?’

‘T. R. Harris is the builder who was supposedly selling the land to us.’ There was a note of exasperation in her voice, which I couldn’t help feeling was a bit unfair. After all, I’m not a fully paid up member of the Psychic Society.

‘And your solicitor is?’

‘Martin Cheetham.’ She rattled off the address and phone number.

‘He your usual solicitor?’ I asked.

‘No. He specializes in conveyancing. One of the hacks on the Chronicle was interviewing him about how the new conveyancing protocol is working out, and they got talking, and they got on to the topic of builders catching a cold because they’d bought land speculatively and the bottom had fallen out of the market, and this hack said how one of his colleagues, i.e. Alexis, was looking for a chunk big enough for ten people to do a self-build scheme, and Cheetham said he knew of a colleague who had a client who was a builder who had just the thing, so we went to see Cheetham, and he said this T. R. Harris had bought this land and couldn’t afford to develop it himself so he was selling it off.’ Chris talks in sentences longer than the law lords.

‘And did you ever meet this builder?’

‘Of course. T. R. Harris, call me Tom, Mr Nice Guy. He met us all out there, walked the land out with us, divided it up into plots and gave us this sob story about how desperate he was to keep his business afloat, how he had half a dozen sites where the workers were depending on him to pay their wages, so could we please see our way to coughing up five thousand apiece as a deposit to secure the land, otherwise he was going to have to keep on trying to find other buyers, which would be a real pity since it obviously suited our needs so well and he liked the idea of the land being used for a self-build if only because he wouldn’t have the heartache of watching some other builder make a nice little earner out of such a prime site that he’d been really sick to have to let go. He was so convincing, Kate, it never crossed our minds that he was lying, and he obviously fooled Cheetham as well. Can you do something?’ I couldn’t ignore the pleading note in her voice, even supposing I’d wanted to.

‘I don’t really understand what’s happened, but of course I’ll do what I can to help. At the very least, we should be able to get your money back, though I think you’ll have to kiss goodbye to that particular piece of land.’

Chris groaned. ‘Don’t, Kate. I know you’re right, but I really don’t want to think about it, we’d set our hearts on that site, it was just perfect, and I’d already got this really clear picture in my mind’s eye of what the houses were going to look like.’ I could imagine. Eat your heart out, Portmeirion.

‘I’ll take a look at it tomorrow, promise. But I need something from you. You’ll have to give me a couple of letters of authority so that your solicitor and anybody else official will talk to me. Could Alexis drop them off on her way to work tomorrow morning?’

We sorted out the details of what the letters should say, and I only had to listen to the tale once more before I managed to get off the phone. Then, of course, I had to go through it all for Richard.

‘Somebody’s been bang out of order here,’ he said, outraged. He summed up my feelings exactly. It was the next bit I wasn’t so happy about. ‘You’re going to have to get this one sorted out double urgent, aren’t you?’

Sometimes, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the whole world’s ganging up on you.

5

I gave Alexis her second shock of the week next morning when she dropped off the letters of authority. It was just before seven when I heard her key in my front door. Her feet literally left the floor when she walked through the kitchen doorway and saw me sitting on a high stool with a glass of orange juice.

‘Shit!’ she yelled. I thought her black hair was standing on end with fright till I realized I was just unfamiliar with how untamed it looks first thing. She runs a hand through it approximately twice a minute. By late afternoon, it usually manages to look less like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards then sideways.

‘Ssh,’ I admonished her. ‘You’ll wake Sleeping Beauty.’

‘You’re up!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not only are you up, your mouth’s moving. Hold the front page!’

‘Very funny. I can do mornings when I have to,’ I said defensively. ‘I happen to have a breakfast meeting.’

‘Excuse me while I vomit,’ Alexis muttered. ‘I can’t take yuppies without a caffeine inoculation. And I see that being conscious hasn’t stretched to making a pot of coffee.’

‘I’m saving myself for the Portland,’ I said. ‘Help yourself to an instant. It’s still better than that muck they serve in your canteen.’ I plucked the letters from her hand, tucked them in my bag and left her deliberating between the Blend 37 and the Alta Rica.

Josh was already deep in the Financial Times when I got to the Portland, even though I was four minutes early. Eyeing him up across the restaurant in his immaculate dark blue suit, gleaming white shirt and strident silk tie, I was glad I’d taken the trouble to get suited up myself in my Marks & Spencer olive green with a cream high-necked blouse. Very businesslike. He was too engrossed to notice till I was standing between the light and his paper.

He tore himself away from the mating habits of multinational companies and gave me the hundred-watt smile, all twinkles, dimples and sincerity. It makes Robert Redford, whom he resembles slightly, look like an amateur. I’m convinced Josh developed it in front of the mirror for susceptible female clients, and now it’s become a habit whenever a woman comes within three feet of him. The charm comes without patronage, however. He’s one of those men who doesn’t have a problem with the notion that women are equals. Except the ones he has relationships with. Them he treats like brainless bimbos. This makes for a quick turnover, since the ones who have a brain can’t take it for more than a couple of months, and the ones who haven’t bore him rigid after six weeks.

In spite of keeping his emotions in his underpants, when it comes to business he’s one of the best financial consultants in Manchester. He’s a walking database on anything relating to insurance, investments, trust funds, tax shelters and the Financial Services Act. Anything he doesn’t know, he knows where to find out. We met when I was still a law student, eking out my grant by doing odd jobs for Bill. My first ever undercover was in Josh’s office, posing as a temp to track down the person who was using the computer to divert one pound out of each client account into his own unit trust account. Because our relationship started on a professional footing, Josh never came on to me and it’s stayed that way. Now, I take him out for a slap-up dinner every couple of months as a thank you for running credit checks for me. The rest of the work and advice, like this, he bills us for at his usual extortionate hourly rate, so I got straight to the point.

I outlined the problem facing Ted Barlow while we scoffed our bowls of fruit and cereal. Josh asked a couple of questions, then the scrambled eggs and bacon arrived. He frowned in concentration as he ate. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was thinking about Ted’s problem or appreciating the subtle pleasures of the scrambled eggs, but I decided not to interrupt anyway. Besides, I was enjoying the rare pleasure of hot food so early in the day.

Then he sat back, mopped his lips with the napkin and poured a fresh cup of coffee. ‘There’s obviously some kind of fraud going on here,’ he said. With anyone else, I’d have made some sarcastic crack about stating the obvious, but Josh did his degree at Cambridge and he likes to establish the ground under his feet before he builds up the speculation, so I managed to keep my mouth zipped.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘I would say that the chances are the bank has a pretty shrewd idea of what that fraud is. They obviously think, however, that your Mr Barlow is the villain of the piece, and that is why they have taken the steps they’ve taken, and why they are refusing to discuss their detailed reasons with him. They don’t want to alert him to the fact that they have worked out for themselves what he is up to, so they have shrouded it in generalizations.’ He paused and spread a cold triangle of toast thickly with butter. The way he was chugging the cholesterol, I didn’t feel at all confident he’d live long enough to retire at forty. I don’t know how he stays so trim. I suspect there’s a portrait of an elephant in his attic.

‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ I admitted.

‘Sorry. I’ll give you an example I came across a little time ago. I have a client who owns a double-glazing firm. They had a similar experience to that of your Mr Barlow – the bank closed down their credit and a few days later, the police were all over them. It turns out that there had been a spate of burglaries around the North West that all followed the same pattern. They were all houses that had a drive at the side with access to the rear of the house. The neighbours would see a double-glazing firm’s van turn up. The workmen would start removing the ground floor windows, while one of them was removing the household valuables through the back or side of the house and loading them into the van. The neighbours, of course, thought the family were simply having replacement windows installed. They might wonder why the workmen disappeared at lunchtime and failed to return, leaving plastic sheeting over the window holes and the old windows sitting in the drive, but no one wondered enough to do anything about it.

‘The common factor that all those houses shared, it eventually transpired, was that they had all been canvassed by the same double-glazing firm in the weeks previous to the burglary. And of course, the canvassers had established whether both husband and wife were working, thus uncovering which houses were empty during the day. The police suspected my client and paid a visit to his bankers. They, of course, were only too aware that after a grim spell my client’s account had started to look very healthy again, and that much of his recent incomings had been in cash. After the police visit, they put two and two together and regrettably made a pig’s ear of it. Partly the fault of my client, who had omitted to mention his recent investment in a couple of amusement arcades.’ Josh’s sardonic tone told me all I needed to know about his opinion of slot machines as investments.

‘It was, of course, all sorted out in the fullness of time. The burglaries were the brainchild of a couple of former employees, who paid backhanders to unemployed youths of their acquaintance to go and get jobs as canvassers with this double-glazing firm and report back to them. However, my client had an extremely sticky time in the interim. That experience leads me to suspect the bank think your Mr Barlow is the brains behind whatever is going on here. You said they mentioned a high default rate on remortgages?’

‘That’s about all they did say,’ I replied. ‘More toast?’ Josh nodded. I waved the toast rack plaintively at a passing waitress and waited for Josh’s next pearl of wisdom.

‘If I were you, that’s where I’d start looking.’ He sat back with the air of a conjuror who has just completed some amazing feat. I wasn’t impressed, and I guess it showed.

He sighed. ‘Kate, if I were you, I’d ask my friendly financial wizard to run a credit check on all those good people who have taken out remortgages and whose conservatories have now vanished.’

I still wasn’t getting it. ‘But what would that show?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Josh admitted. He didn’t know? I waited for the sky to fall, but incredibly it didn’t. ‘But whatever happens, you’ll know a lot more about them than you do now. And I have that curious tingling in my stomach that tells me that’s the right place to look.’

I trust Josh’s tingle. The last time I had personal experience of it, I quadrupled my savings by buying shares in a company he had a good feeling about. The truly convincing thing was that he told me to offload them a week before they crashed spectacularly following the arrest of their chairman for fraud. So I said, ‘OK. Go ahead. I’ll fax you the names and addresses this morning.’

‘Splendid,’ he said. I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or the waitress placing a rack of fresh toast in front of him.

As he attacked the toast, I asked, ‘When will you have the info for me?’

‘I’ll fax it across to you as soon as I get it myself. Probably tomorrow. Mark it for Julia’s attention when you send the details over. I’m hopelessly tied up today, but it’s just routine, she can do it standing on her head. What I will also do is have a quiet word with a guy I know in Royal Pennine Bank’s fraud section. No names, no pack drill, but he might be able to shed some light as to the general principle of the thing.’

‘Thanks, Josh. That’ll be a big help.’ I gave my watch a surreptitious glance. Seven minutes till we got into the next billable hour. ‘So how’s your love life?’ I hazarded.

Martin Cheetham’s office was in the old Corn Exchange, a beautiful golden sandstone building that, in aerial photographs, looks like a wedge of cheese, the windows pocking the surface like dozens of crumbly holes. The old exchange floor is now a sort of indoor flea market in bric-à-brac, antiques, books and records, while the rest of the building has been turned into offices. There are still a few of the traditional occupants – watch menders, electric razor repairers – but because of the unusual layout, the rest range from pressure groups who rent a cubbyhole to small legal firms who can rent a suite of offices that fit their needs exactly.

The office I was looking for was round the back. The reception room was small to the point of poky, but at least the receptionist had a fabulous view of Manchester Cathedral. I hoped she was into bullshit Gothic. She was in her late forties, the motherly type. Within three minutes, I was clutching a cup of tea and a promise that Mr Cheetham would be able to squeeze me in within the half-hour. She had waved away my apologies for not having an appointment. I couldn’t understand how she kept her job, with all this being polite to the punters.

One of the reasons I wasn’t sorry to quit my law degree was that after two years, I began to realize I’d stand all the way from Manchester to London rather than sit next to a lawyer on a train. There are, of course, notable exceptions, lovely people upon whose competence and honesty I’d stake my life. Unfortunately, Martin Cheetham wasn’t one of them. For a start, I couldn’t see how anyone could run an efficient practice when their paperwork was stacked chaotically everywhere. On the floor, on the desk, on the filing cabinets, even on top of the computer monitor. For all I could tell, there could be clients lurking underneath there somewhere. He waved me to one of the two surfaces in the room that wasn’t stacked with bumf. I sat on the uncomfortable office chair, while he headed for the other, a luxurious black leather all-singing, all-dancing swivel recliner. I suppose that since most conveyancing specialists see very little of their clients he didn’t place a high priority on their comfort. He obviously wasn’t a fan of the cathedral either, since his chair faced into the room.

While he took his time with Alexis’s letter, I took the chance to study him. He was around 5’ 8”, slim without being skinny. He was in shirtsleeves, the jacket of a chain-store suit on a hanger suspended from the side of a filing cabinet. He had dark, almost black hair, cut short but stylish, and soulful, liquid dark eyes. He had that skin that looks sallow and unhealthy if it goes without sun for more than a month or so, though right now he looked in the peak of health. He obviously lived on his nerves, for his neat, small feet and hands were twitching and tapping as he read the letter of authority. Eventually, he steepled his fingers and gave me a cautious smile. ‘I’m not exactly sure how you think I can help, Miss Brannigan,’ he said.

‘I am,’ I told him. ‘What I have to do in the first instance is to track down T. R. Harris, the builder. Now, it was through you that Miss Lee and Miss Appleby heard this land was available. So, I think you must know something about Mr T. R. Harris. Also, I figure you must have an address for him since you handled the matter for Miss Lee and Miss Appleby and presumably had some correspondence with him.’

Cheetham’s smile flickered again. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I know very little about Mr Harris. I knew about the land because I saw it advertised in one of the local papers. And before you ask, I’m sorry, I can’t remember which one. I see several every week and I don’t keep back numbers.’ It looked like they were the only bits of pulped tree he didn’t keep. ‘I have a client who is looking for something similar,’ he continued, ‘but when I made further inquiries, I realized this particular area was too large for him. I happened to mention it to Miss Lee’s colleague, and matters proceeded from there.’

‘So you’d never met Harris before?’

‘I’ve never met Mr Harris at all,’ he corrected me. ‘I communicated with his solicitor, a Mr Graves.’ He got up and chose a pile of papers, seemingly at random. He riffled through them and extracted a bundle fastened with a paper clip. He dumped them in front of me, covering the body text of the letter with a blank sheet. ‘That’s Mr Graves’ address and phone number.’

I took out my pad and noted the details on the letterhead. ‘Had you actually exchanged contracts, then?’

Cheetham’s eyes shifted away from mine. ‘Yes. That’s when the deposits were handed over, of course.’

‘And you were quite convinced that everything was above board?’

He grabbed the papers back and headed for the haven behind his desk. ‘Of course. I mean, I wouldn’t have proceeded unless I had been. What are you getting at, exactly, Miss Brannigan?’ His left leg was jittering like a jelly on a spindryer.