Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

He had to stoop slightly to clear the lintel. Six feet and three inches of lithe muscle, the kind you get not from pumping iron but from actually exercising. Lycra cycling trousers that revealed a lunchbox like Linford’s and quads to match, topped with a baggy plaid shirt. He moved lightly down the hall, his Air Nikes barely making a sound. I stepped back to let him precede me into the living room and put my fingers in my ears.

‘Donovan? What you doing here?’ Shelley’s thunderous roar penetrated my defences, no messing. The volume she can produce from her slight frame is a direct contradiction of the laws of physics. Don half turned towards me, his face pleading for help.

‘I’ve hired him to do our process-serving, as and when we need him. We pay him a flat fee of—’

‘No way,’ Shelley yelled. ‘This boy has a career in front of him. He is going to be an engineer. Not a private eye. No child of mine. No way.’

‘I quite agree, Shelley. He’s not going to be a private eye—’

‘You’re damn right he’s not,’ she interrupted.

‘He’s not going to be a private eye, any more than students who work in Burger King three nights a week are going to be stuffing Whoppers for the rest of their working lives. All he’s doing is a bit of work on the side to relieve the financial pressures on his hard-working single mother. Because that’s the kind of lad he is,’ I said quietly.

‘She’s right, Mam,’ Don rumbled. ‘I don’t wanna do what she does. I just wanna make some readies, right? I don’t wanna ponce off you all the time, OK?’ He looked as if he was going to burst into tears. So much for muscle man. Forget valets; no man is a hero to his mother.

‘He’s not a kid any more,’ I said gently. For a long moment, mother and son stared at each other. Hardest thing in the world, letting kids go. This was worse than the first day at school, though. There was nothing familiar or safe about the world she was releasing him into.

Shelley pursed her lips. ‘About time you started acting like a man and took some of the responsibility for putting food on the table,’ she said, trying to disguise the pain of loss with sternness. ‘And if it stops you wasting your time with that band of no-good losers that call themselves musicians, so much the better. But all you do is serve papers, you hear me, Donovan?’

Don nodded. ‘I hear you, Mam. Like I said, I don’t want to do what she does, right?’

‘And you don’t neglect your studies either, you hear?’

‘I won’t. I want to be an engineer, OK?’

‘Why don’t you two discuss the details on the way home?’ I inserted tactfully. I had the feeling it was going to take a while for the pair of them to be reconciled at any level beyond the purely superficial, and I had a life to get on with.

When I said ‘life’, I’d been using the term loosely, I decided as I tagged on to the tail end of a bunch of girl Goths and scowled my way past the door security. If this was life, it only had a marginal edge on the alternative. Garibaldi’s was currently the boss night spot in Manchester. According to the Evening Chronicle ’s yoof correspondent, it had just edged past the Hacienda in the trendiness stakes with the acquisition of Shabba Pilot, the hottest DJ in the north. In keeping with its status, the door crew were all wearing headsets with radio mikes. They’re supposed to make them look high tech and in control; I can never see them without remembering all those old black-and-white movies where little old dears ran old-fashioned telephone exchanges and eavesdropped on all the calls.

I’d dressed for the occasion. I couldn’t manage the paper white, hollow-eyed Interview with the Vampire look adopted by the serious fashion victims, not without a minor concussion. So I’d opted for the hard-case pretentious-philosopher image. Timberland boots, blue jeans, unbleached cotton T-shirt that told the world that Manchester was the Ur-city, and a leather jacket with the collar turned up. Plus, of course, a pair of fake Ray-Bans, courtesy of Dennis’s brother Nick. The look got me past the door no bother and didn’t earn me a second glance as I walked into the main part of the club.

Garibaldi’s belongs to a guy called Devlin. I’ve never met anybody who knows what his other name is. Just Devlin. He materialized in Manchester in the late seventies with a Cumbrian accent and more money than even the resident gangsters dared question. He started small, buying a couple of clubs that had less life in them than the average geriatric ward. He spent enough on the interior, the music and the celebs who could be bought for a case of champagne to turn the clubs into money machines. Since when Devlin has bought up every ailing joint that’s come on the market. Now he owns half a dozen pubs, a couple of restaurants known more for their clientele than their cuisine, and four city-centre clubs.

Garibaldi’s was the latest. The building used to be a warehouse. It sat right on the canal, directly opposite the railway arches that raise Deansgate Station high above street level. When Devlin bought it, the interior was pretty bare. Devlin hired a designer who took Beaubourg as his inspiration. An inside-out Beaubourg. Big, multi-coloured drainage pipes curved and wove throughout the building, iron stairs like fire escapes led to iron galleries and walkways suspended above the dancers and drinkers. The joys of postmodernism.

I climbed up steps that vibrated to the beat of unidentifiable, repetitive dance music. At the second level, I made my way along a gallery that seemed to sway under my feet like a suspension footbridge. It was still early, so there weren’t too many people around swigging designer beers from the bottle and dabbing whizz on their tongues. At the far end of the gallery, a rectangular structure jutted out thirty feet above the dance floor. It looked like a Portakabin on cantilevers. According to Dennis, this was the ‘office’ of Denzel Williams, music promoter and, nominally, assistant manager of Garibaldi’s.

I couldn’t see much point in knocking, so I simply stuck my head round the door. I was looking at an anteroom that contained a pair of battered scarlet leather sofas and a scarred black ash dining table pushed against the wall with a couple of metal mesh chairs set at obviously accidental angles to it. The walls were papered with gig posters. In the far wall, there was another door. I let the door close behind me and instantly the noise level dropped enough for me to decide to knock on the inner door.

‘Who is it?’ I heard.

I pushed the door open. The noise of the music dropped further, and so did the temperature, thanks to an air-conditioning unit that grunted in the side wall. The man behind the cheap wood-grain desk stared at me with no great interest. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, the strong Welsh vowels immediately obvious. Call me a racist, but when it comes to the Welsh, I immediately summon my irregular verb theory of life. In this instance, it goes, ‘I have considered opinions; you are prejudiced; he/she is a raging bigot.’ And in my considered opinion, the Welsh are a humourless, clannish bunch whose contribution to the sum total of human happiness is on the negative side of the ledger. The last time I said that to a Welshman, he replied, ‘But what about Max Boyce?’ QED.

I had the feeling just by looking at him that Denzel Williams wasn’t going to redeem my opinion of his fellow countrymen. He was in his middle thirties, and none of the deep lines that scored his narrow face had been put there by laughter. His curly brown hair was fast losing the battle with his forehead and the moustache he’d carefully spread across as much of his face as possible couldn’t hide a narrow-lipped mouth that clamped meanly shut between sentences. ‘Do I know you?’ he said when I failed to reply before sitting in one of the creaky wicker chairs that faced his desk.