Blue Genes (11 page)

‘He’ll have been papering somebody else’s sites. If the person whose site he’s been nicking doesn’t know which chancer is behind the pirate flyposting, he’ll go for the band or the venues the chancer’s promoting. So your band are getting picked on as a way of warning off their cowboy promoter that he’s treading on somebody else’s ground.’

I understood. ‘So if they want to get out from under, they need to get themselves a new promoter?’

He nodded. ‘And they want to do it fast, before somebody gets seriously hurt.’

I gave a sardonic smile. ‘There’s no need to go over the top, Dennis. We’re talking a bit of illegal flyposting here, not the ice-cream wars.’

His genial mask slipped and he was staring straight into my eyes in full chill mode, reminding me why his enemies call him Dennis the Menace. ‘You’re not understanding, Kate,’ he said softly. ‘We’re talking heavy-duty damage here. The live-music business in Manchester is worth a lot of dosh. If you’ve got a proper flyposting business up and running with a finger in the ticket-sales pie, then you’re talking a couple of grand a week tax free for doing not a lot except keeping your foot soldiers in line. That kind of money makes for serious enforcement.’

‘And that’s what my clients have been getting. Skinheads on super lager breaking up their gigs, their van being set on fire,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m not taking this lightly.’

‘You’ve still not got it, Kate. You remember Terry Spotto?’

I frowned. The name rang vague bells, but I couldn’t put a face to it.

‘Little runty guy, lived in one of the Hulme crescents? Strawberry mark down his right cheek?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Sure you do. They found him lying on the bridge over the Medlock, just down from your office. Somebody had removed his strawberry mark with a sawn-off shotgun.’

I remembered now. It had happened about a year ago. I’d arrived at work one Tuesday morning to see yellow police tapes shutting off part of the street. Alexis had chased the story for a couple of days, but hadn’t got any further than the official line that Terry Spotto had been a small-time drug dealer. ‘That was about flyposting?’ I asked.

‘Terry was dealing crack but he decided he wanted a second profit centre,’ Dennis said, reminding me how expertly today’s intelligent villains have assimilated the language of business. ‘He started flyposting, only he didn’t have the nous to stay off other people’s patches or the muscle to take territory off them. He got warned a couple of times, but he paid no never mind to it. Since he wouldn’t take a telling, or a bit of a seeing to, somebody decided it was time to make an example. I don’t think anybody’s seriously tried to cut in since then. But it sounds like your lads have made the mistake of linking up with somebody who’s too new on the block to remember Terry Spotto.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Hell of a way of seeing off the competition. Dennis, I need to talk to somebody about this. Get the boys off the hook before this gets silly. Gimme a name.’

‘Denzel Williams,’ Dennis said. ‘Garibaldi’s. Mention my name.’

‘Thanks.’ I hadn’t been to Garibaldi’s, but I’d heard plenty about it. If I’d had to guess where to find someone I could talk to about so dodgy a game, that’s probably the place I’d have gone for.

‘Anything else?’

I shook my head. ‘Not in the way of business. Not unless you know somebody with a wad of cash to invest in a private-eye business.’

Dennis’s eyebrows lowered. ‘What’s Bill up to?’

I told him. Debbie tuned back in to the conversation and the subject kept us going for the remainder of the visit. By the time I’d dropped Debbie back at the house, I had a list of a dozen or so names that Dennis reckoned had the kind of money to hand that they could invest in the business. Somehow, I didn’t think I’d be following any of them up. I’m unpopular enough with the Old Bill as it is without becoming a money laundry for the Manchester Mafia.

Come five o’clock, I was parked down the street from Sell Phones. All I needed was a name and address on this pair of con merchants and I could hand the case over to the police as I’d already agreed with my clients. We had the names and addresses of nearly a dozen complainants, some of whom were bound to be capable of picking Will Allen or his female sidekick out of a line-up. I looked forward to handing the whole package over to Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice, head honcho of the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. It wasn’t exactly her bailiwick, but Della’s one of the tightknit group of women I call friends, and I trusted her not to screw it up. There are coppers who hate private enterprise so much they’d let a villain walk rather than let a PI take an ounce of credit for a collar. Della isn’t one of them. But before I could have the pleasure of nailing these cheap crooks, I had to attach names and addresses to them. And I was damned if they were going to defeat me two nights running.

This time I was ready for them. When Allen swung left down the hill, I was right behind him. I stayed in close touch as we threaded through back streets flanked by decaying mills half filled with struggling small businesses and vacant lots turned into car parks, across the Rochdale Road and the Oldham Road, emerging on Great Ancoats Street just south of the black glass facade of the old Daily Express Building. I slipped into the heavy traffic with just one car separating me from the silver Mazda, and stayed like that right across town, past the mail-order warehouses and through the council estates.

In Hathersage Road, the car pulled up outside a general store opposite the old Turkish Baths, closed down by the council on the grounds that it cost too much to maintain the only leisure facility within walking distance for the thousands of local inner-city residents. As one of those locals, it made me fizz with fury every time I paid an instalment of my council tax. So much for New Labour. I carried on past the parked car as the woman jumped out and headed into the shop. I pulled into a parking space further down the street, hastily adjusting my rear-view mirror so I could see what was going on. A few minutes later, she emerged carrying a copy of the
Chronicle
and a packet of cigarettes.

As the Mazda passed me and headed for the traffic lights, I hung back. The lights were on red, and I wasn’t going to emerge till they changed. On green, the Mazda swung left into Anson Road, the overhanging trees turning daylight to dusk like a dimmer switch. They turned off almost immediately into a quiet street lined with large Victorian houses. About halfway down on the left, the red brick gave way to modern concrete. Filling a space equivalent to a couple of the sprawling Victorians was a four-storey block of flats in a squared-off U. The Mazda turned into the block’s car park and stopped. I cruised past, then accelerated, swung the car round at the next junction and drove back in time to see Allen and the woman from Sell Phones disappear through the block’s entrance door. Even from this distance, I could see the entry phone. There must have been close on fifty flats in the block.

A whole day had trickled through my fingers and I didn’t seem to be much further forward with anything. Maybe I should follow Shelley’s advice and put my share of the business on the market. And not just as a ploy.

It was too early in the evening for me to have anything better to do, so I decided to keep an eye on the gravestone grifters. I figured that since they’d both gone indoors, the chances were that they were going to have a bite to eat and a change of clothes before heading out to hit the heartbroken, so I took fifteen minutes to shoot back to my house, pick up my copy of that night’s
Chronicle
from the mat and throw together a quick sandwich of Dolcelatte and rocket that was well past its launch-by date. It was the last of the bread too, I mentally noted as I binned the wrapper. So much for a night of chopping and slicing and home-made Chinese. I tossed a can of Aqua Libra into my bag along with the film-wrapped sandwich and drove back to my observation post.

Just after seven, the woman emerged alone with one of those expensive anorexic girlie briefcases that have a shoulder strap instead of a handle. She made straight for the car. I waited until she was behind the wheel, then I started my engine and swiftly reversed into the drive of the house behind me. That way I could get on her tail no matter which direction she chose. She turned left out of the car park, and I followed her back to Anson Road and down towards the bottom end of Kingsway, past rows of between-the-wars semis where the vast assortment of what passes for family life in the nineties happened behind closed doors, a world we were completely cut off from as we drifted down the half-empty roads, sealed in our separate boxes.

Luckily we didn’t have far to go, since I was acutely aware that there wasn’t enough traffic around to cover me adequately. Shortly after we hit Kingsway, she hung a left at some lights and headed deep into the heart of suburban Burnage. Again, luck was on my side, a phenomenon I hadn’t been experiencing much of lately. Her destination was on one of the long, wide avenues running parallel to Kingsway, rather than up one of the narrow streets or cul-de-sacs built in an era when nobody expected there would come a day when every household had at least one car. In those choked chicanes, she couldn’t have avoided spotting me. When she did slow down, obviously checking out house numbers, I overtook her and parked a few hundred yards ahead, figuring she must be close to her target. I was right. She actually stopped less than twenty yards in front of me and walked straight up the path of a three-bedroomed semi with a set of flower beds so neat it was hard to imagine a dandelion with enough bottle to sprout there.

I watched her ring the bell. The door opened, but I couldn’t see the person behind it. Three sentences and she was in. I flicked through my copy of that evening’s
Chronicle
till I got to the death announcements and read down the column. There it was.

Sheridan. Angela Mary, of Burnage, suddenly on Tuesday at Manchester Royal Infirmary after a short illness. Beloved wife of Tony, mother of Becky and Richard. Service to be held at Our Lady of the Sorrows, Monday, 2 p.m., followed by committal at Stockport Crematorium at 3 p.m.

With that information and the phone book, it wouldn’t be hard to identify the right address. And you could usually tell from the names roughly what age group you were looking at. I’d have guessed that Tony and Angela were probably in their middle to late forties, their kids late teens to early twenties. Perfect targets for the con merchants. Bereft husband young enough to notice an attractive woman, whether consciously or not. Probably enough money in the pot to be able to afford a decent headstone. The thought of it made me sick.

What was worse was the knowledge that even as I was working all this out, Will Allen’s accomplice was giving the shattered widower a sales pitch designed to separate him from a large chunk of his cash. I couldn’t just sit there and let it happen. On the other hand, I couldn’t march up the path and unmask her unless I wanted her and her sleazy sidekick to cover their tracks and leave town fast. I couldn’t call the cops; I knew Della was out of town at a conference, and trying to convince some strange officer that I wasn’t a nutter fast enough to get them out here in time to stop it was way beyond my capabilities. I racked my brains. There had to be a way of blowing her out without blowing my cover.

There was only one thing I could come up with. And that depended on how well the Sheridans got along with their neighbours. If they’d had years of attrition over parking, teenage stereos and footballs over fences, I’d had it. Squaring my shoulders, I walked up the path of the other half of the Sheridans’ semi. The woman who answered the door looked to be in her mid-thirties, thick dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, a face all nose, teeth and chin. She wore a pair of faded jeans, supermarket trainers and a Body Shop T-shirt demanding that some part of the planet should be saved. When she registered that it was a stranger on the doorstep, her cheery grin faded to a faint frown. Clearly, I was less interesting than whoever she’d been expecting. I handed her a business card. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I started apologetically.

‘Private investigator?’ she interrupted. ‘You mean, like on the telly? I didn’t know women did that.’

Some days, you’d kill for an original response. Still, I was just grateful not to have the door slammed in my face. I smiled, nodded and ploughed on. ‘I need you help,’ I said. ‘How well do you know Mr Sheridan next door?’

The woman gasped. ‘He’s never murdered her, has he? I know it were sudden, like, and God knows they’ve had their ups and downs, but I can’t believe he killed her!’

I closed my eyes momentarily. ‘It’s nothing like that. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing at all suspicious about Mrs Sheridan’s death. Look, can I come in for a minute? This is a bit difficult to explain.’

She looked dubious. ‘How do I know you’re who you say you are?’

I spread my hands in a shrug. ‘Do I look the dangerous type? Believe me, I’m trying to prevent a crime, not take part in one. Mr Sheridan is about to be robbed unless you can help me here.’

She gasped again, her hand flying to her mouth this time. ‘It’s just like the telly,’ she said, ushering me into a narrow hallway where there was barely room for both of us and the mountain bike that hung on one wall. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded avidly.

‘A particularly nasty team of crooks are conning bereaved families out of hundreds of pounds,’ I said, dressing it up in the tabloid style she clearly relished. ‘They catch them at a weak moment and persuade them to part with cash for cut-price gravestones. Now, I’m very close to completing a watertight case against them, so I don’t want to alert them to the fact that their cover’s blown. But I can’t just sit idly by while poor Mr Sheridan gets ripped off.’

‘So you want me to go and tell him there’s a crook in his living room?’ she asked eagerly.

‘Not exactly, no. I want you to pop round in a neighbourly sort of way, just to see he’s all right, and do what you can to prevent him parting with any money. Say things like, “If this is a respectable firm, they won’t mind you sleeping on this and talking it over with your funeral director.” Don’t let on you’re at all suspicious, just that you’re a cautious sort of person. And that Angela wouldn’t have wanted him to rush into anything without consulting other members of the family. You get the idea?’