Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

‘Call yourself my friend, and you want me to go up against an animal like Lovell with his army of hard cases?’

Della shrugged. ‘You know you’ll have all the back-up you need. Besides, from what you tell me, there’s been a lot of mouth but not a lot of serious action. Nobody’s been killed, nobody’s even had a serious going-over. Mr Lovell’s merry men seem to specialize in violence against property. When it comes to sorting people out, he seems to go for remarkably law-abiding means. He calls the police. I think you’d be perfectly safe.’

‘Gee thanks,’ I said.

Della put a hand on my arm. Her eyes were serious. ‘I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I’ll handpick the back-up team.’

‘You think that makes me feel any better? Everybody knows you’re an even madder bastard than I am!’ I pointed out bitterly, knowing I was beaten.

‘So you’ll do it?’

‘I’ll call you when I’ve got the setup sorted,’ I said resignedly. ‘I’m not a happy camper, I want you to know that.’

‘You won’t regret this,’ Della said, pulling me into a hug.

‘I better not.’

Della paid for the Kit Kat on the way out.

I thought it was about time I showed my face in the office lest Bill got to thinking he could start the revolution without me. With luck, he would still be busy showing Sheila the delights of the North West.

I don’t know why I indulged myself with the notion that luck might be on my side. It had been out of my life so long I was beginning to think it had run off to sea. When I walked in Bill was sitting on Shelley’s desk, going through a file with her. Given that I wasn’t speaking to Bill and Shelley wasn’t speaking to me, it looked like an interesting conversation might be on the cards. ‘Kate,’ Bill greeted me with a cheerful boom. ‘Great to see you.’ And I am Marie of Romania.

‘Hi,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘Has anything come for me from the Land Registry?’

‘If you checked your in-tray occasionally, you’d know, wouldn’t you?’ Shelley said acidly. It probably wasn’t the time to tell her I’d gone through it at one that morning. Not if I wanted to keep my office manager.

‘Have you thought any more about the implications of my move?’ Bill asked anxiously.

I stopped midway to my office door, threw my hands up in mock amazement and said, ‘Oh dearie me, I knew there was something I was supposed to be thinking about. Silly me! It just slipped my mind.’ I cast my eyes up to the ceiling and marched into my office. ‘Of course I’ve bloody thought about it,’ I shouted as I closed the door firmly behind me. People who ask asinine questions should expect rude answers.

The letter from the Land Registry was sitting right on top of my in-tray. Their speed these days never ceases to amaze me. What I can’t work out is why it still takes solicitors two months to convey a house from one owner to another. I flipped through the photocopied sheets of information that came with the covering letter. It confirmed the suspicion that had jumped up and down shouting, ‘See me, Mum, I’m dancing!’ when I’d interviewed Helen Maitland.

I might have been warned off talking to Sarah Blackstone’s former patients. But Alexis hadn’t said anything about her former lover.

I’d gone into my first interview with the real Dr Helen Maitland without enough background information. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. After a late lunch in a Bradford curry café that cost less than a trip to McDonald’s, I parked up in a street of back-to-back terraced houses that spilled down a hill on the fringe of the city centre. Half a dozen Asian lads and a couple of white ones were playing cricket on a scrap of waste ground where one of the houses had been demolished. When I didn’t get out of the car at once, they stopped playing and stared curiously at me. I wasn’t interesting enough to hold their attention for long, and they soon returned to their game.

I sat staring at a house halfway down the street. It looked well kempt, its garden free of weeds and its paintwork intact. It was a door I hadn’t knocked on for a few years, and I had no idea what kind of welcome I’d get. Even so, it still felt like a more appealing prospect than quizzing Sarah Blackstone’s medical colleagues. I’d first come here in search of a missing person. Not long after I’d found her, she ended up murdered, with her girlfriend the prime suspect. My inquiries had cleared the girlfriend, but in the process, I’d opened a lot of wounds. I hadn’t spoken to Maggie Rossiter, the girlfriend, since the trial. But she was still on the office Christmas card list. Not because I ever expected her to put work our way, but because I’d liked her and hadn’t been able to come up with a better way of saying so.

Maggie was a social worker and a volunteer worker at a local drug rehab unit, though you wouldn’t suspect either role on first encounter. She could be prickly, sharp tongued and fierce. But I’d seen the other side. I’d seen her tenderness and her grief. Not everyone can forgive that sort of knowledge. I hoped Maggie was one who could.

I sat for the best part of an hour, listening to the rolling news programme on Radio Five Live to fight the boredom. Then an elderly blue Ford Escort with a red offside front wing drew up outside Maggie’s house. As the car door opened, a small calico cat leapt from the garden to the wall to the pavement and wove itself round the legs of the woman who emerged. Maggie had had her curly salt-and-pepper hair cropped short at the back and sides, but otherwise she looked pretty much the same as when I’d seen her last, right down to the extra few pounds round the middle. She bent to scoop up the cat, draped it over her shoulder and took a briefcase and an armful of files out of the car. I watched her struggle into the house and gave it five more minutes.

One of my rules of private investigation is, always try to leave an interviewee happy enough that they’ll talk to you a second time. I was about to find out how well I’d practised what I preached. When the door opened, hostility replaced interested curiosity so fast on Maggie’s face that I wondered whether I’d imagined the first expression. ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘If it isn’t Kate Brannigan, girl detective. And whose life are you buggering up this week?’

‘Hello, Maggie,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I was just passing?’

‘Correct,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’d also tell you that next time you’re passing, just pass.’

‘I know you blame me for Moira’s death…’

‘Correct again. You going for three in a row?’

‘If I hadn’t brought her back, he’d just have hired somebody else. Probably somebody with even fewer scruples.’

‘It’s hard to believe people with fewer scruples than you exist,’ Maggie said.

‘Don’t you ever listen to Yesterday in Parliament ?’

In spite of herself, Maggie couldn’t help cracking a smile. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t close the door,’ she said.

‘Lesbians will suffer?’ I tried, a half-grin quirking my mouth.

‘I don’t think so,’ she sighed. The door started to close.

‘I’m not joking, Maggie,’ I said desperately. ‘My client’s a lesbian who could be facing worse than a murder charge if I don’t get to the bottom of the case.’

The door stopped moving. I’d hooked her, but she wasn’t letting me reel her in too easily. ‘Worse than a murder charge?’ she asked, her face suspicious.

‘I’m talking about losing her child. And not for any of the conventional reasons.’

Maggie shook her head and swung the door open. ‘This had better be good,’ she warned me.