Val McDermid - Crack Down

I drove systematically down the streets and back alleys for a good couple of hours without spotting a single red-and-white trade plate. If I’d been working for a client, I’d have given up right then. But this was different. This was personal, and the man lying in a cell worrying about the charges he was facing was the man I’d chosen to share my life with. I might not be getting anywhere out on the streets, but I could no more jack it in and go home to bed than I could set Richard free with one mighty bound.

Just before midnight, I realized I was ravenous. I’d been so hyped up on adrenaline all evening that I was suddenly right on the edge of a low blood sugar collapse. I phoned an order through, then drove back through Chinatown, double parked outside the Yang Sing and picked up some salt and pepper ribs, paper wrapped prawns and pork dumplings. I couldn’t help a pang of guilt, thinking about prison food and Richard’s conviction that if it didn’t come out of China or Burger King it can’t be edible.

I drove back to the Lousy Hand. If the car thief plied a regular patch, I might just catch him at it. It was as good a place to eat my takeaway as any. I drove slowly up the culde-sac, looking for a space. Nothing. I turned round in the dead end and drove back down. I got lucky. Someone was pulling out just as I passed. I tucked the car in against the kerb and opened the sun roof so the smell of the Chinese wouldn’t linger in the car for the next six months. I started on the prawns, wanting to polish them off before they became soggy.

I looked around as I ate. Nothing much was moving. There was a short queue outside the Lousy Hand, but it seemed to be static. The only car I could see worth stealing was a new Ford Escort Cosworth, but its ridiculous spoiler, like the tail of a blue whale, was so obvious that I couldn’t imagine many thieves having the bottle to go for it. Besides, it was bright red and you know what they say about red cars and male sexual problems…

In my wing mirror, I noticed the man mountain bouncer emerging from the Lousy Hand again. Clearly time for another walkabout. As he reconnoitred the street, I thought he still looked nigglingly familiar, but I couldn’t think where from, unless we’d had a brief encounter one night when I’d been on the town with Richard. After all, bouncers shift around the clubs about as fast as cocktail waitresses, and I wasn’t always one hundred per cent compos mentis when we crawled out of clubs in the small hours.

He headed in my direction. Instinctively, I slid down in my seat till I was below window level. I heard his footsteps on the pavement, then, when he was level with me, he stopped. I held my breath. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t the familiar bleating of a mobile phone being dialled. I inched carefully up till I could just see him. He had his back to me and a slimline phone to his ear.

‘Hiya,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Ford Escort Cosworth. Foxtrot alarm system. Been in about ten minutes…No problem.’ The phone beeped once as he ended the call. I slid back down below eye level as he turned back towards the club. Valet parking I’d heard of. But valet stealing?

I watched in the wing mirror till he was safely back indoors, then I pulled off the dayglo cap and got out of the Peugeot, still clutching my Chinese. I melted into the shadows of one of the railway arches which had a deep door recess. I could hardly believe it wasn’t already occupied by one of the city’s cardboard-box kids. I didn’t have long to wait. I still had half my spare ribs left when a black hack coughed up the cul-de-sac. It stopped outside the Lousy Hand, and a man got out. In the lights of the club entrance, I got a quick look. Thirtyish, medium height, slim build. He walked into the club, fast, like a man with a purpose other than a dance, a drink and a legover.

He was out again in seconds, carrying a small holdall. He walked briskly towards the Cosworth. As he came closer, I clocked a heavy thatch of dark hair, high cheekbones, hollow cheeks, surprisingly full lips, a double-breasted suit that hung like it was made to measure. He stopped a few feet away from the Cosworth, flashed a quick, penetrating glance around him then crouched down. Through the gap between cars, I could just see him take something out of the holdall. It looked a bit like an old-fashioned TV remote, bulky, with buttons. I couldn’t see any details, but he seemed to be hitting buttons and moving a slider switch on the side. This routine lasted the best part of a minute. Then, three sharp electronic exclamations came from the Cosworth, the hazard lights flashed twice and I heard the door locks shift to ‘open’. He dropped the black box back into the holdall and took out a pair of trade plates.

The man stood up and gave that quick, frowning glance round again. Still clear, he thought. One plate went on the back of the car, hiding the existing number. He fastened the other over the front plate, then almost ran to the driver’s door. He was in the car in seconds. It took less than a minute for the engine to roar into life. The car shot out of the parking space. Rather than drive to the end of the cul-de-sac and do a time-wasting three-point turn, as I’d expected, he simply shot back down the street in reverse.

Caught flat-footed, I leapt for the Peugeot. By the time he’d reversed on to the main drag and headed off towards Oxford Road, I was behind him, just far enough for him not to get twitchy. Interestingly, he didn’t drive the Cosworth like a boy racer. If anything, he drove like my father, a man who has never had an accident in twenty-three years of driving. Mind you, he’s seen dozens in his rear-view mirror…The speedo didn’t rise above twenty-eight, he stopped on amber and he didn’t even attempt any traffic-light grand prix stuff. We crossed Oxford Road and carried on sedately down Whitworth Street, into Aytoun Street and past Piccadilly station. Then it was time for a quick whizz through the back doubles before he pulled up outside Sacha’s nightclub and blasted the horn. Luckily I was far enough behind him to stay tucked away on the corner. I cut my lights and waited.

Not for long. If the speed of her response was anything to go by, patience wasn’t her boyfriend’s strong suit. Depressingly, she looked like she’d walked straight off the bottle-blonde production line. Expensive bimbo, but bimbo nevertheless. Bimbos are the last women in the world wearing crippling high heels and make-up that could camouflage a Chieftain tank. This one must have had enough hair spray on her carefully tumbled locks to lacquer a Chinese cabinet, since it didn’t even move in the chill wind that had sprung up in the last hour.

She jumped into the waiting Cosworth and we were off again. He was still driving like a pursuer’s dream. I dumped the Pet Shop Boys and let Annie Lennox entertain me instead. Round Piccadilly, down Portland Street, down to Deansgate, out along Regent Road. I had to hang well back now, because there wasn’t a lot of traffic around, and the thief was driving so law-abidingly that any reasonable driver would have overtaken him long ago. At the end of the dual carriageway, instead of heading straight on down the motorway, he hung a left, heading towards Salford Quays. I can’t say I was totally surprised. He looked the sort.

The Quays used to be, unromantically, Salford Docks. Then the eighties happened, and waterfronts suddenly became trendy. London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester. They all discovered how easy it was to part fools and their money when you threw in a view of a bit of polluted waterway. Salford Quays was Manchester’s version of greed chic. It’s got it all: the multi-screen cinema, the identikit international hotel for jet-set business people, more saunas per head of population than Scandinavia, it’s very own scaled-down World Trade Centre for scaled-down yuppie losers and more Penthouses than penthouses. The only thing it lacks is any kind of human ambience.