Val McDermid - Kickback

I waited till he rounded the corner before I set off in pursuit. The height of his van made it easy for me to keep him in sight as he threaded his way through the afternoon traffic. We headed down through Swinton and cut across to Eccles. Lomax turned into a street of down-at-heel terraced houses and stopped in front of one whose ground floor windows were boarded up.

Lomax unlocked the door, then returned for the bulky box. He slammed the door behind him and left me sitting watching the outside of a different house.

I gave it half an hour then decided I wasn't getting anywhere. I decided to swing round via Cheetham's house to see if anything was happening, then head back to my other stake-out to see if the tapes were running with anything interesting. As I turned into the street that Cheetham's road led off, I nearly collided with a Peugeot in too much of a hurry. To my astonishment, I realized as I passed that it was Alexis. Unaccustomed to seeing me driving the van instead of my usual car, she obviously hadn't noticed the driver she'd nearly hit was me. I hoped she hadn't been round at Cheetham's house, giving him a piece of her mind. That was the last thing I needed right now.

More likely, she was hot on the trail of some tale to titillate her readers. There was nothing unusual in her driving as though she were the only person on the road. Like most journos, she operates on the principle that the hideous road accidents they've all reported only ever happen to other people.

The Golf had gone from outside the house in Tamarind Grove. Cheetham's BMW was still sitting outside the garage, but there were no lights on in the house, though it was dark enough outside for the street lights to be glowing orange. Chances were Cheetham had been driven off somewhere by the lovely Nell. Which meant there was probably no one home.

To make doubly sure, I got his number from Directory Enquiries. The phone rang four times, then the answering machine cut in. 'I'm sorry, I can't take your call right now…' And all the rest. It wasn't proof positive that the house was unoccupied, but I figured Cheetham was too stressed out just now to ignore his phone.

I couldn't resist it. Within minutes, I'd changed from my business clothes into a jogging suit and Reeboks from the holdall I'd removed from my wrecked Nova. I added a thin pair of latex gloves, just in case. Out of my handbag, I took my Swiss Army knife, my powerful pocket torch, an out-of-date credit card, a set of jeweller's tools that double as lock-picks, and a miniature camera. All the things a girl should never be without. Checking the street was empty, I slipped out of the van and down the flagged path that ran by the side of Martin Cheetham's house. Fortunately, although the bell box on the front of the house indicated he had a burglar alarm, he hadn't invested in infra-red activated security lights, as recommended by Mortensen and Brannigan.

The back garden was enclosed by a seven foot fence, and the gloom was compounded by thick shrubs that cast strange shadows across a paved area which featured the inevitable brick-built barbecue. There was no sign of light through the pair of patio doors that led into the garden so I cautiously turned on my torch. I peered in at a dining room with a strangely old-fashioned air.

I switched the torch off and moved cautiously across the patio to the kitchen door. It was the solid, heavy door of someone who takes their security precautions seriously. So I was rather surprised to see the top section of the kitchen window ajar. I carried on past the door and glanced up at the window. It was open a couple of notches, and although it was too small to allow anyone to enter, it offered possibilities.

I shone my torch through the window, revealing an unadventurous pine kitchen, cluttered with appliances, a bowl of fruit, a rack of vegetables, a draining board full of dry dishes, a shelf of cookery books, a knife block and an assortment of jars and bottles. It looked more like a table at a car boot sale than a kitchen.

The door leading from the kitchen to the hall was ajar, and I shifted slightly to let the beam from my torch play across the room. Caught between the beam of my torch and the gleam of the street light out front, I could see the body of a woman twisting slowly round and round, round and round.

Next thing I knew, I was crouched down on the patio, my back pressed against the wall so hard I could feel the texture of the brickwork against my scalp. I didn't know how I'd got there. My torch was turned off, but the sight of the dangling corpse still filled my vision. I squeezed my eyes closed, but the image of the body hanging in mid-air was still vividly there. It sounds callous, but I felt outraged. I don't do bodies. I do industrial espionage, fraud and white-collar theft. The desire to curl up in a tight little ball was almost overwhelming. I knew I ought to get the hell out of there and call the police, but I couldn't get my limbs to move.

It looked like an open and shut case. The woman called Nell had arrived earlier in the afternoon; now there was a woman's corpse in the house, and her car was missing. What it meant to me was that Cheetham would be facing a murder charge rather than one of fraud. Either way, he wouldn't be practising as a solicitor again in a hurry. But Lomax, on the other hand, would almost certainly live to defraud another day. All he had to do was deny everything and blame it all on Cheetham.

I struggled to my feet. I wished Richard was with me. Not because he'd be any practical use, but because he'd be talking me out of what I was about to do. I knew it was crazy, knew I was taking the kind of stupid chance that Bill would seriously fall out with me over. But I'd come this far, and I couldn't stop now. If there was any proof of what had been going on, I wanted to have a good look at it before the police sequestrated it. As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of language; I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy-parker.

I took a deep breath and studied the kitchen window, carefully averting my eyes from the doorway leading into the hall. If I could get up to it, I thought I might be able to reach through the open window and slip open the catch on the side section, which would be big enough to let me climb in. Unfortunately, the sill wasn't wide enough to stand on, and there was no conveniently placed ladder. The only things that were remotely portable were the carefully arranged bricks of the circular barbecue. They weren't mortared together, merely assembled like a child's building bricks.

With a sigh, I started shifting the bricks to build a platform beneath the window. I was grateful for the latex gloves; without them, my hands would have been in shreds. It didn't take long to construct a makeshift set of steps that brought me high enough to slide my arm inside the unfastened window. My fingertips could barely brush the top of the window catch. I withdrew and opened the blade of my Swiss Army knife that looks as if its only purpose is to remove Boy Scouts from horses' hoofs. It has a sort of hooked bit on the end and almost certainly has some quaint name like 'cordwangler's grommet disengager'.

With the blade extended, I was able to flick the catch upwards. I pushed the window towards me, and it swung open. I stepped into the kitchen sink and closed both windows behind me. I searched the draining board for a cloth then carefully wiped the sill and the sink to remove any obvious traces of my entry. The last thing I wanted was to be lifted for murder. What I was really doing was putting off the moment when I'd have to confront Nell's dangling body. She must be suspended from the banister, I realized as I braced myself to go through the doorway.