Stranded (9 page)

Sneeze for Danger

I
shifted in my canvas chair, trying to get uncomfortable. The hardest thing about listening to somebody sleeping is staying awake yourself. Mind you, there wasn't much to hear. Greg Thomas was never going to get complaints from his girlfriends about his snoring. I'd come on stakeout duty at midnight, and all I'd heard was the tinny tailend of some American sports commentary on the TV, the flushing of a toilet and a few grunts that I took to be him getting comfortable in the big bed that dominated his extravagantly stylish studio penthouse.

I knew about the bed and the expensive style because we also had video surveillance inside Thomas's flat. Well, we'd had it till the previous afternoon. According to Jimmy Lister, who shared the day shift, Thomas had stopped in at the florist's on his way back from a meet with one of his dealers and emerged with two big bunches of lilies. Back at the flat, he'd stuffed them into a vase and placed them right in front of the wee fibreoptic camera. Almost as if he knew.

But of course, he couldn't have known. If he'd had any inkling that we were watching, it wouldn't have been business as usual in the Greg Thomas drugs empire. He wouldn't have gone near his network of middlemen, and he certainly wouldn't have been calling his partner in crime to discuss her forthcoming trip to Curaçao. If he'd known we were watching him, he'd have assumed we were trying to close him down and he'd have been living the blameless life.

He'd have been wrong. I'm not that sort of cop. That's not to say I don't think people like Greg Thomas should be put away for a very long time. They should. They are responsible for a disproportionate amount of human misery, and they don't deserve to be inhabiting the high life. Thomas's cupidity played on others' stupidity, but that didn't make any of it all right.

Nevertheless, my interest was not in making a case against Thomas. What mattered to me was the reason nobody else had been able to do just that. Three times the Drugs Squad had initiated operations against Greg Thomas's multi-million-pound business, and three times they'd come away empty-handed. There was only one possible conclusion. Somebody on the inside was taking Thomas's shilling.

Samuels, who runs the drugs squad, had finally conceded he wasn't going to put Greg Thomas away until he'd put his own house in order. And that's where we came in.

Nobody loves us. Our fellow cops call us the Scaffies. That's Scots for bin men. My brother, who studied Scottish literature at university, says it's probably a corruption of scavengers. Me, I prefer to knock off the first two letters. Avengers, that's what we are. We're there to avenge the punters who pay our wages and get robbed of justice because some cops see get-rich-quick opportunities where the rest of us see the chance to make a collar.

It's easy to be cynical in my line of work. When your job is to sniff out corruption, it's hard to see past that. It's difficult to hang on to the missionary zeal when you're constantly exposed to the venality of your fellow man. I've seen cops selling their mates down the river for the price of a package holiday. Sometimes I almost believe that some of them do it for the same reason as criminals commit crimes – because they can. And they're the ones who are most affronted when we sit them down and confront them with what they've done.

So. Nobody loves us. But what's worse is that doing this job for any length of time provokes a kind of emotional reversal. It's almost impossible for us Scaffies to love anybody. Mistrust becomes a habit and nothing will poison a relationship faster than that. In the end, all you've got is your team. There's eight of us, and we're closer than most marriages. We're a detective inspector, two sergeants and five constables. But rank matters less here than anywhere else in the force. We need to believe in each other, and that's the bottom line.

Movement in the street below caught my attention. A shambling figure, staggering slightly, making his way down the pavement opposite our vantage point. I nudged my partner Dennis, who rolled his shoulders as he leaned forward, focused the camera and snapped off a couple of shots. Not that they'd be any use. The three a.m. drunk was dressed for the weather, the collar of his puffa jacket close round his neck and his baseball cap pulled down low. He stopped outside Thomas's building and keyed the entry code into the door. There were sixteen flats in the block and we knew most of the residents by sight. I didn't recognise this guy, though.

Through the glass frontage of the building opposite, we could see him weaving his way to the lift. He hit the call button and practically fell inside when the doors opened. I was fully alert now. Not because I thought anything untoward was going down, but because anything that gets the adrenaline going in the middle of night surveillance is welcome. The lift stopped on the second floor, and the drunk lurched out into the lobby, turning to his left and heading for one of the flats at the rear of the building.

We relaxed and settled back into our chairs. Dennis, my partner, snorted. ‘I wouldn't like to be inside his head in the morning,' he said.

I reached down and pulled a thermos of coffee out of my bag. ‘You want some?'

Dennis shook his head. ‘I'll stick to the Diet Coke,' he said.

It was about fifteen minutes later that we heard it. Our headphones exploded into life with a volley of sneezing. I nearly fell out of my chair. The volume was deafening. It seemed to go on forever. A choking, spluttering, gasping fit that I thought would never end. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended. I looked at Dennis. ‘What the hell was that?'

He shrugged. ‘Guy's coming down with a cold?'

‘Out of the blue? Just like that?'

‘Maybe he decided to have a wee taste of his own product.'

‘Oh aye, right. You wake up in the night, you can't get back to sleep, so you do a line of coke?'

Dennis laughed. ‘Right enough,' he said.

We left it at that. After all, there's nothing inherently suspicious about somebody having a sneezing fit in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, they never wake up.

I was spark out myself when Greg Thomas made his presence felt again. Groggy with tiredness, I reached for the phone, registering the time on my bedside clock. Just after one o'clock. I'd been in bed for less than four hours. I'd barely grunted a greeting when a familiar voice battered my eardrum.

‘What the hell were you doing last night?' Detective Inspector Phil Barclay demanded.

‘Listening in, boss,' I said. ‘With Dennis. Like I was supposed to be. Why?'

‘Because while you were listening in, somebody cut Greg Thomas's throat.'

On my way to the scene, I called Jimmy Lister and tried to piece together what had happened. When the dayshift hadn't heard a peep out of Thomas by noon, they'd grown suspicious. They began to wonder if he'd somehow done a runner. So they'd got the management company to let them into Thomas's flat and they'd found him sprawled across his bed, throat gaping like some monstrous grin.

By the time I got to the flat, there was a huddle of people on the landing. Drugs Squad, Serious Crime guys and of course, the Scaffies. Phil Barclay was at the centre of the group. ‘There you are, Chrissie,' he said. ‘So how the hell did you miss a murder while you were staking out the victim?' For Phil to turn on one of his own in front of other cops was unheard of. I knew I was in for a very rough ride.

Before I could answer, Dennis emerged from the stairwell. ‘Listen to the tapes, boss,' he said. ‘Then you'll hear everything
w
e did. Which is nothing.'

‘Except for the sneezing,' I said slowly.

All the eyes were on me now. ‘About twenty past three. Somebody had a sneezing fit. It must have lasted a couple of minutes at least.' I looked at Dennis, who nodded in confirmation.

‘We assumed it was Thomas,' he said.

‘That would fit,' one of the other cops said. I didn't know his name, but I knew he was Serious Crime. ‘The pathologist estimates time of death between two and five a.m.'

Samuels from the Drugs Squad stuck his head out of the flat. ‘Phil, do you want to take a look inside, see if anything's out of place from when you had the video running?'

Barclay looked momentarily uncomfortable. ‘Chrissie, you and Dennis take a look. I didn't really pay much attention to the video footage.'

‘Talk about distancing yourself,' Dennis muttered as we entered the flat, sidestepping a SOCO who was examining the lock on the door through a jeweller's loupe.

I paused and said, ‘Key or picks?'

The SOCO looked up. ‘Picks, I'd say. Fresh scratches on the tumblers.'

‘He must have been bloody good,' I said. ‘We never heard a thing.'

Greg Thomas wasn't a pretty sight. I was supposed to be looking round the flat, but my eyes were constantly drawn back to the bed. ‘How come we never heard it? You'd think he'd have made some sort of noise.'

One of the technicians looked up from the surface he was dusting for prints. ‘The doc said it must have been an incredibly sharp blade. Went through right to the spine, knife through butter. He maybe would have made a wee gurgle, but that's all.'

At first glance, nothing in the flat looked different. I stepped round the bed towards the alcove where Thomas had his workstation. ‘His laptop's gone,' I said, pointing to the cable lying disconnected on the desk.

‘Great. So now we know we're looking for a killer with a laptop,' Dennis said. ‘That'll narrow it down.'

Back on the landing, Phil told us abruptly to head back to base. ‘We'll have a debrief in an hour,' he said. ‘The Drugs Squad guys can run us through Thomas's known associates and enemies. Maybe they'll recognise somebody from our surveillance.'

I walked back to my car, turning everything over in my head. The timing stuck in my throat. It felt like an uncomfortable coincidence that Greg Thomas had been killed the very night we'd lost our video cover. I knew Phil Barclay and Samuels were tight from way back and wondered whether my boss had mentioned the problem to Samuels. If the mole knew we were watching, he might have decided the best way to avoid detection was to silence his paymaster for good. That would also explain the silence. None of Thomas's rivals could have known about the need to keep the noise levels down.

Slowly, an idea began to form in my head. We might have lost the direct route to the Drugs Squad's bad apple, but maybe there was still an indirect passage to the truth. I made a wee detour on the way back to the office, wondering at my own temerity for even daring to think the way I was.

The debrief was the usual mixture of knowledge and speculation, but because there were three separate teams involved, the atmosphere was edgy. The DI from the Crime Squad told us to assume our unidentified drunk was the killer. He hadn't been heading for a flat, he'd been making for the back stairs. Apparently the lock on the door leading to the penthouse floor showed signs of having been forced. He'd probably left by the same route, using the fire door at the rear of the building. He showed our pix on the big screen but not even the guy's mother could have identified him from that. ‘And that is all we know so far,' he said.

The silhouette I'd been expecting finally showed up outside the frosted glass door of the briefing room. I put up my hand. ‘Not quite all, sir,' I said. ‘We also know he's allergic to lily pollen.'

As I spoke, the door opened and the desk officer walked in, looking sheepish behind a big bouquet of stargazer lilies. The fragrance spread out in an arc before him as he walked towards Samuels. ‘I was told these were urgent,' he said apologetically.

I held my breath, my eyes nailed to the astonished faces of Samuels and his cohort of Drugs Squad detectives.

And that's when Phil Barclay shattered the stunned silence with a fusillade of sneezes.

Guilt Trip

A
s neither of my parents was too bothered about religion, I managed to miss out on Catholic guilt. Then I found myself working with Shelley. A guilt trip on legs, our office manager. If she treats her two teenagers like she treats me, those kids are going to be in therapy for years. ‘You play, you pay,' she said sweetly, pushing the new case file towards me for the third time.

‘Just because I play computer games doesn't mean I'm qualified to deal with the nerds who write them,' I protested. It was only a white lie; although my business partner Bill Mortensen deals with most of the work we do involving computers, I'm not exactly a techno-illiterate. I pushed the file back towards Shelley. ‘It's one for Bill.'

‘Bill's too busy. You know that,' Shelley said. ‘Anyway, it's not software as such. It's either piracy or industrial sabotage and that's your forte.' The file slid back to me.

‘Sealsoft are Bill's clients.' Brannigan's last stand.

‘All the more reason you should get to know them.'

I gave in and picked up the file. Shelley gave a tight little smile and turned back to her computer screen. One of these days I'm going to get the last word. Just wait till hell freezes over, that's all. Just wait. On my way out of the door and down the stairs, I browsed the file. Sealsoft was a local Manchester games software house. They'd started off back in the dawn of computer gaming in the mid-eighties, writing programs for a whole range of hardware. Some of the machines they produced games for had never been intended as anything other than word processors, but Sealsoft had grabbed the challenge and come up with some fun stuff. The first platform game I'd ever played, on a word processor that now looked as antique as a Model-T Ford, had been a Sealsoft game.

They'd never grown to rival any of the big players in the field, but somehow Sealsoft had always hung in there, coming up every now and again with seemingly simple games that became classics. In the last year or two they'd managed to win the odd film tie-in licence, and their latest acquisition was the new Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis boys 'n' toys epic. But now, two weeks before the game was launched, they had a problem. And when people have problems, Mortensen and Brannigan is where they turn if they've got sense and cash enough.

I had a ten o'clock appointment with Sealsoft's boss. Luckily I could get there on foot, since parking round by Sealsoft is a game for the terminally reckless. The company had started off on the top floor of a virtually derelict canal-side warehouse that has since been gutted and turned into expansive and expensive studio flats where the marginally criminal rub shoulders with the marginally legitimate lads from the financial services industries. Sealsoft had moved into modern premises a couple of streets away from the canal, but the towpath was still the quickest way to get from my office in Oxford Road to their concrete pillbox in Castlefield.

Fintan O'Donohoe had milkwhite skin and freckles so pale it looked like he'd last seen daylight somewhere in the nineteenth century. He looked about seventeen, which was slightly worrying since I knew he'd been with the company since it started up in 1983. Add that to the red-rimmed eyes and I felt like I'd stumbled into
Interview
with the Vampire
. We settled in his chrome and black-leather office, each of us clutching our designer combinations of mineral water, herbs and juices.

‘Call me Fin,' he said, with no trace of any accent other than pure Mancunian.

I resisted the invitation. It wasn't the hardest thing I'd done that day. ‘I'm told you have a problem,' I said.

‘That's not the word I'd use,' he sighed. ‘A major disaster waiting to happen is what we've got. We've got a boss moneyearner about to hit the streets and suddenly our whole operation's under threat.'

‘From what?'

‘It started about six weeks ago. There were just one or two at first, but we've had getting on for sixty in the last two days. It's a nightmare,' O'Donohoe told me earnestly, leaning forward and fiddling anxiously with a pencil.

‘What exactly are we talking about here?' He might not have anything better to do than take a long tour round the houses, but I certainly did. Apart from anything else, there was a cappuccino at the Atlas café with my name on it.

‘Copies of our games with the right packaging, the right manuals, the guarantee cards, everything, are being returned to us because the people who buy them are shoving the disks into their computers and finding they're completely blank. Nothing on them at all. Just bogstandard highdensity preformatted unbranded three-and-a-half-inch disks.' He threw himself back in his chair, pouting like a five year old.

‘Sounds like pirates,' I said. ‘Bunch of schneid merchants copying your packaging and stuffing any old shit in there.'

He shook his head. ‘My first thought. But that's not how the pirates work. They bust your copy protection codes, make hundreds of copies of the program and stick it inside pretty crudely copied packaging. This is the opposite of that. There's no game, but the packaging is perfect. It's ours.' He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a box measuring about eight inches by ten and a couple of inches deep. The cover showed an orc and a human in mortal combat outlined in embossed silver foil. O'Donohoe opened the box and tipped out a game manual, a story book, four disks with labels reading 1–4 and guarantee card. ‘Right down to the hologram seal on the guarantee, look,' he pointed out.

I leaned forward and picked up the card, turning it to check the hologram. He was right; if this was piracy, I'd never seen quality like it. And if they could produce packaging this good, I was damn sure they could have copied the game too. So why the combination of spoton packaging and blank disks? ‘Weird,' I said.

‘You're not kidding.'

‘Is this happening to any of your competitors?'

‘Not that I've heard. And I would have heard, I think.'

Sounded as if one of Sealsoft's rivals was paying off an insider to screw O'Donohoe's operation into the deck. ‘Where are the punters buying them? Market stalls?' I asked.

Head down, O'Donohoe said, ‘Nope.' For the first time I noted the dark shadows under his eyes. ‘They're mostly coming back to us via the retailers, though some are coming direct.'

‘Which retailers? Independents or chains?' I was sitting forward in my seat now, intrigued. What had sounded like a boring piece of routine was getting more interesting by the minute. Call me shallow and superficial, but I like a bit of excitement in my day.

‘Mostly smallish independents, but increasingly we're getting returns from the big chain stores now. We've been in touch with quite a few of the customers as well, and they're all saying that the games were shrink-wrapped when they bought them.'

I sat back, disappointed. The shrink-wrapping was the clincher.

‘It's an inside job,' I said flatly. ‘Industrial sabotage.'

‘No way,' O'Donohoe said, two pale pink spots suddenly burning on his cheekbones.

‘I'm sorry. I know it's the message no employer wants to hear. But it's clearly an inside job.'

‘It can't be,' he insisted bluntly. ‘Look, I'm not a dummy. I've been in this game a while. I know the wrinkles. I know how piracy happens. And I guard against it. Our boxes are printed in one place, our booklets in another, our guarantee cards in a third. The disks get copied in-house onto disks that are overprinted with our logo and the name of the game, so you couldn't just slip in a few blanks like these,' he said contemptuously, throwing the disks across the desk.

‘Where does it all come together?' I asked.

‘We're a small company,' he answered obliquely. ‘But that's not the only reason we pack by hand rather than on a production line. I know where we're vulnerable to sabotage, and I've covered the bases. The boxes are packed and sealed in shrinkwrap in a room behind the despatch room.'

‘Then that's where your saboteur is.'

His lip curled. ‘I don't think so. I've only got two workers in there. We've always had a policy of employing friends and family at Sealsoft. The packers are my mum and her sister, my Auntie Geraldine. They'd kill anybody that was trying to sabotage this business, take my word for it. When they're not working, the door's double-locked. They wouldn't even let the parish priest in there, believe me.'

‘So what exactly do you want me to do?' I asked.

‘I don't want you questioning my staff,' he said irritably. ‘Other than that, it's up to you. You're the detective. Find out who's putting the shaft in, then come back and tell me.'

When I left Sealsoft ten minutes later, all I had to go on was a list of customers and companies involved in returns of Sealsoft's games, and details of who'd sent back what. I was still pretty sure the villain was inside the walls rather than outside, but the client wasn't letting me anywhere near his good Catholic mother and Auntie Geraldine. Can't say I blamed him.

I figured there wasn't a lot of point in starting with the chain stores. Even if something hooky was going on, they were the last people I could lean on to find out. With dole queues still well into seven figures, the staff there weren't going to tell me anything that might cost them their jobs. I sat in the Atlas over the coffee I'd promised myself and read through the names. At first glance, I didn't recognise any of the computer-game suppliers. We buy all our equipment and consumables by mail order, and the only shop we've ever used in dire emergencies was the one that used to occupy the ground floor of our building before it became a supermarket.

Time for some expert help. I pulled out my mobile and rang my tame darkside hacker, Gizmo. By day he works for Telecom as a systems manager. By night, he becomes the Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace. Or so he tells me. ‘Giz? Kate.'

‘Not a secure line,' he grumbled. ‘You should know better.'

‘Not a problem. This isn't top secret. Do you know anybody who works at any of these outlets?' I started to read out the list, Gizmo grunting negatively after each name. About halfway through the list, he stopped me.

‘Wait a minute. That last one, Epic PC?'

‘You know someone there?'

‘I don't but you do. It's wossname, the geezer that used to have that place under your office.'

‘Deke? He went bust, didn't he?'

‘'S right. Bombed. Went into liquidation, opened up a new place in Prestwich Village a week later, didn't he? That's his shop. Epic PC. I remember because I thought it was such a crap name. That everything?'

‘That'll do nicely, Giz.' I was speaking to empty air. I like a man who doesn't waste my time. I drained my cup, walked up the steps to Deansgate station and jumped on the next tram to Prestwich.

Epic PC was a small shop on the main drag. I recognised the special offer stickers. It looked like Deke Harper didn't have the kind of fresh ideas that would save Epic PC from its predecessor's fate. I pushed open the door and an electric buzzer vibrated in the stuffy air. Deke himself was seated behind a PC in the middle of a long room that was stuffed with hardware and software, his fingers clattering over the keys. He'd trained himself well in the art of looking busy; he let a whole five seconds pass between the buzzer sounding and his eyes leaving the screen in front of him. When he registered who his customer was, his eyebrows climbed in his narrow face. ‘Hello,' he said uncertainly, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. ‘Stranger.'

‘Believe me, Deke, it gets a lot stranger still,' I said drily.

‘I didn't know you lived out this way,' he said nervously, hitting a key to clear his screen as I drew level with him.

‘I don't,' I said. Sometimes it's just more fun to let them come to you.

‘You were passing?'

‘No.' I leaned against his desk. His eyes kept flickering between me and his uninformative screen.

‘You needed something for the computer? Some disks?'

‘Three in a row, Deke. You lose. My turn now. I'm here about these moody computer games you've been selling. Where are they coming from?'

A thin blue vein in his temple seemed to pup up from nowhere. ‘I don't know what you're on about,' he said, too nonchalantly. ‘What moody computer games?'

I rattled off half a dozen Sealsoft games. ‘I sell them, sure,' he said defensively. ‘But they're not hooky. Look, I got invoices for them,' he added, pushing past me and yanking a drawer open. He pulled out a loose-leaf file and flicked through fast enough to rip a couple of pages before he arrived at a clutch of invoices from Sealsoft.

I took the file from him and walked over to the shelves and counted. ‘According to this, Deke, you bought six copies of Sheer Fire II when it was released last month.'

‘That's right. And there's only five there now, right? I sold one.'

‘Wrong. You sold at least three. That's how many of your customers have returned blank copies of Sheer Fire II to Sealsoft. Care to explain the discrepancy? Or do I have to call your local friendly Trading Standards Officer?' I asked sweetly. ‘You can go down for this kind of thing these days, can't you?' I added conversationally.

Half an hour later I was sitting outside Epic PC behind the wheel of Deke's six-year-old Mercedes, waiting for a lad he knew only as Jazbo to turn up in response to a call on his mobile. Amazing what people will do with a little incentive. I spotted Jazbo right away from Deke's description. A shade under six feet, jeans, trainers and a Chicago Cubs bomber jacket. And Tony Blair complains about Manchester United's merchandising. At least they're local.

He got out of a battered boy racer's hatchback, clutching a carrier bag with box-shaped outlines pressing against it. I banged off a couple of snaps with the camera from my backpack. Jazbo was in and out of Epic PC inside five minutes. We headed back into town down Bury New Road, me sitting snugly on his tail with only one car between us. We skirted the city centre and headed east. Jazbo eventually parked up in one of the few remaining terraced streets in Gorton and let himself into one of the houses. I took a note of the address and drove Deke's Merc back to Prestwich before he started getting too twitchy about the idea of me with his wheels.