Clean Break (15 page)

I was in Leeds before ten, nervously navigating my way through the subterranean tunnels of the inner ring road, emerging somewhere near the white monolith of the university. The roads were quiet out through Headingley, but every now and again, a beam of light split the night from on high as the police helicopter quartered the skies, trying to protect the homes of the more prosperous residents from the attentions of the burglars. Burglary has reached epidemic proportions in Leeds these days; I know someone whose house was turned over seven times in six months. Every time they came home with a new stereo, so did the burglars. Now, their house is more secure than Armley jail and their insurance premiums are nearly as much as the mortgage.

I slowed as I approached the Weetwood roundabout, scanning houses for their numbers. 679A looked like it might be one of an arcade of shops, so I parked up and stretched my legs. I can't say I was surprised to find there was no 679A. There was a 679, though, a small newsagent's squeezed between a bakery and a hairdresser. I walked round the back of the shops, checking to see if the flats above had entrances at the rear. A couple did, but 679 wasn't one of them. I walked back to the car, with plenty to think about. Whoever Dennis's fence was, he was determined to cover his tracks. Using an accommodation address for his phone bills was about as careful as you could get without actually being sectioned for paranoia.

I decided to check out the directors' addresses while I was in the
city, but I held out little hope of finding any of them at home. James Connery's alleged residence was nearest, back in Headingley proper. It was number thirty-nine in a street of ten houses. On to Chapel Allerton, where Sean Bond apparently lived in a hostel for the visually handicapped. Penny Cash was even worse off. According to Companies House, she was living on a piece of waste ground in Burmantofts. I doubled back through the city center, passing the new Health Ministry building up on Quarry Hill, spotlit to look like a set from Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
. Apparently, the place contains a full-size swimming pool, Jacuzzi and multi-gym. Nice to know our hard-earned taxes are being spent on the health of the nation, isn't it?

It was nearly midnight when I got home. Richard's car was parked outside, though I didn't need that clue to know he was home as soon as I touched the front door. It was vibrating with the pulse of the bass coming through the bricks from next door. As I shoved my key in the lock, I could feel exhaustion flow through me, settling in a painful knot at the base of my skull.

I walked through the house to the conservatory. Richard's patio doors were open, revealing half a dozen bodies in varying states of consciousness draped over the furniture. Techno dance music drilled through my head like a tribe of termites who have just discovered a log cabin. The man himself was nowhere to be seen. I picked a path to the kitchen, where I found him taking a tray of spring rolls out of the oven. “Hi,” he said. His eyes were as stoned as the woman taken in adultery.

“Any chance of the volume coming down? I need some sleep,” I said.

“That's cool,” he said, a lazy smile spreading across his face. “Want some company?”

“You've already got some.”

“They can be out of here in ten minutes,” he said. “Then I'm all yours.”

He was as good as his word. Eleven minutes later, he crawled into my blissfully silent bed. Unfortunately, I'm not into necrophilia.

The buckle got to the office before I did, which gave Shelley something to puzzle over. I arrived to find her using it as a paperweight. “OK,” she said. “I give in.”

I don't often find myself one up on Shelley, so I decided to drag it out a bit. “If you can guess, I'll buy lunch,” I said.

“What makes you think you're going to have time for lunch?” she asked sweetly. “Besides, I told you yesterday, I don't do imagination. You want me to learn how, you're going to have to pay me a lot more.”

I should know better. The woman is the mother of two teenagers. What chance do I have? “It's a replica of an Anglo-Saxon ceremonial belt buckle,” I said. “Also known as a honey pot.” Mustering what was left of my dignity, I scooped up the buckle and marched through to my office.

This time Dennis's mobile was switched on. “I want you to set up a meet for me with your man,” I said. “Tell him you vouch for me, and that I've got something really special for him.”

“I'm not sure if he'll go for it,” Dennis tried. “Like I told you, we have to wait for a yes or a no before we lift stuff. He's very picky, and he likes to be in control.”

“Tell him there's only two in the world. I've got one and the British Museum's got the other one. Tell him it's from the collection at High Hammerton Hall. And it's gold. He should be able to work it out himself from that. Believe me, Dennis, he'll want this.”

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “But I'm coming with you on the meet.”

“No, you're not,” I told him firmly. “You're in enough trouble as
it is. This is not going to be heavy, Dennis. I can handle one man in a car park. You should know, you train me.”

“I still think you're crazy, chasing this,” he said. “Your client's going to be better off with the insurance company's readies in his bank account than he is with a poxy picture on the wall.”

“Call it professional pride.”

“Call it pig-headedness,” he said. “I'll get back to you.”

I went through to Bill's office and opened the cupboard where we keep our stock of technological wizardry. I found what I was looking for in a cardboard box at the back of the top shelf. It's not something we use very often, reeking as it does of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
, but given that Dennis's fence seemed to be an aficionado of James Bond, it seemed entirely appropriate to use a directional bug. If that conjures up images of chunky metal boxes stuck to the bottom of cars, forget it. Thanks to modern miniaturization technology, the bugs we've got are about the size of an indigestion tablet. The transmission batteries last about a week, and allow the bug to send a signal to a base unit. The range is about fifteen kilometers, provided large mountains don't get in the way, and the screen gives a read-out of direction and distance. Perfect for tracking the buckle back to source, so long as the fence was going to get rid of it sharpish.

Next stop, Clive Abercrombie, with a brief detour via the terraced streets of Whalley Range to stuff Gizmo's used tenners through his letter box. When I got to the shop, Clive was hovering behind a counter, ostentatiously leaving the waiting-on to the lesser mortals he employs to be polite to the rich. When I walked in, he shot forward and had me through the door to the back of the shop so fast my feet didn't even leave tracks in the shag pile. Obviously, he doesn't want proles like me hanging around making the place look like Ratners. “In a hurry, Clive?” I asked innocently.

“I thought
you
would be. You usually are,” he replied acidly. “Now, what was it you wanted?”

I took the buckle out of my handbag. In spite of himself, Clive drew his breath in sharply. “Where did you get that?” he demanded, extending one finger to point dramatically at the twinkling gold lump.

“Don't worry, my life of crime runs to solving it, not committing it,” I soothed. “It's not the real thing. It's a copy.”

If anything, he looked even more disturbed. “Why are you walking around with it in your
handbag
?” he demanded, giving Lady Bracknell a run for her money.

Knowing Clive's weakness for anything reeking of snobbery, I said, “I'm doing a job for the Nottingham Group.”

“Should I know the name?” he asked snottily.

“Probably not, Clive. It's a consortium of the landed gentry, headed by Lord Ballantrae of Dumdivie. Art thefts. Very hush-hush. I'm very close to Mr. Big, and this is a ploy to smoke him out.” I pulled the bug out of my pocket. “What I need is for one of your craftsmen to incorporate this in the piece. Preferably on the outside. I'd thought under one of the stones.” I handed the bug and the buckle to Clive, who already had his loupe out.

He took a few minutes to scrutinize the buckle which was heavy enough to make a useful weapon, especially if it was attached to a belt. “Nice piece of work,” he commented. “If you hadn't told me it was a fake, I'd have had my work cut out to spot it.” Praise indeed, coming from Clive. He unscrewed the loupe from his eye socket and said, “It'll take a few hours. And it will cost.”

“Now there's a surprise,” I said. “Just send us an invoice. Give me a bell when it's ready.” I turned to go back through the shop, but Clive gripped my elbow and steered me further into the nether regions.

“Easier if you pop out the back door,” he said. Half a minute later, I was in the street. I reckoned I deserved a cappuccino made by someone other than me, so I decided to take the scenic route back to the office. For a brief moment, I toyed with the idea of ringing Michael Haroun and suggesting he play truant for half an hour, but I told myself severely that it wouldn't help my pursuit of the art thieves to involve the insurers at this stage. They'd only start muttering about doing things by the book and informing the police. I smacked my hormones firmly on the wrist and drove the length of Deansgate to the Atlas Café, where they claim to make the best coffee outside Italy. I wasn't going to argue. I dumped the car on a yellow line down by the canal basin and walked back up to
the chic glass-and-wood interior. I sat by the window, sipping the kind of cappuccino that acts like intravenous caffeine and pulled the Kerrchem papers out of my bag. Time for a file review.

I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. All I knew was that I wanted to find something, anything that would legitimately allow me to postpone or short-circuit the tedious process of doing background checks into all of the redundant staff that I hadn't been able to eliminate on the phone. On the second read-through, I found exactly what I was looking for.

Joey Morton's supply of KerrSter came from the local branch of a national chain of trade wholesalers, Filbert Brown. His wife couldn't remember which of them had actually made the trip to the cash-and-carry when the fatal drum of KerrSter had been bought, but there was no doubt that that was the original source of the tainted cleanser.

It wasn't much to go on, but it was a place to start. One of the dozens of pieces of normally useless information cluttering up my dustbin brain was the fact that Filbert Brown were a Manchesterbased company. I knew this because I passed their head office and flagship cash-and-carry every time I drove from my house to North Manchester. Suddenly energized, I abandoned the hedonism of the Atlas and trotted down the steps to the car.

It didn't take long to skirt the city center. It took longer to get through to the customers' car park at Filbert Brown. They occupied an old factory building just off Ancoats Street. The area was in the middle of that chaotic upheaval known as urban renewal. East Manchester is supposedly coming up in the world; home of the new Commonwealth Games stadium, spiffy new housing developments and sports facilities. Oh, and roads, of course. Lots of them. Virgin territory for the traffic cones and temporary traffic lights that have become an epidemic on the roads of the Northwest. My political friends reckon it's the government's revenge because most of us up here didn't vote for them.

Considering it was the middle of the morning when all of us small business people are supposed to have our noses firmly to the grindstone, Filbert Brown was surprisingly busy. I walked in without challenge and found myself in a glorified warehouse. It
reminded me of those cheap and cheerless back-to-basics supermarkets that we've imported from Europe in recent years. Anyone who did their shopping in Netto or Aldi would have been right at home in Filbert Brown. Me, I always find it incredibly cheap to shop there—they never stock anything I'd want to buy. The same went for Filbert Brown. I know Richard thinks I have an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness, but even I couldn't get turned on by cases of dishwasher powder, drums of worktop bactericide and cartons of paper towels. I was clearly in a minority, judging by the number of people who were happily filling up their trolleys.

I wandered up and down the aisles for a few minutes, getting a feel for the place. One of the things that struck me was how prominent KerrSter was among the cleansers. It occupied the whole width of a shelf at eye level, the key position in shifting merchandise. Compared with the other Kerrchem products, which seemed to be doing just about OK compared with their competitors, KerrSter was king of the castle.

What I needed now was a pretext. Thoughtfully, I wandered back to the car. I always keep a fold-over clipboard in the boot for those occasions when I need to pretend to be a market researcher. You'd be amazed at what people will tell you if you've got a clipboard. I gave my clothes the once-over. I was wearing tan jodhpur-style leggings, a cream linen collarless shirt and a chocolate brown jacket with a mandarin collar. The jacket was too smart for the pitch, so I folded it up and left it in the boot. In the shirt and leggings, I could just about pass. Freeze, maybe, but pass.

I walked briskly into Filbert Brown and strode up to the customer service counter. I say counter, but it was more of a hole in the wall. Customers here clearly weren't encouraged to complain. The woman behind the counter looked as if she'd been hired because of her resemblance to a bulldog. “Yes?” she demanded, teeth snapping.

“I'm sorry to trouble you,” I said brightly. “I'm doing an MBA at Manchester Business School and I'm doing some research into sales and marketing. I wonder if I could perhaps have a word with your stock controller?”