‘That’s saved you a few bob, then. The lad’ll be back with the locks any minute,’ Handbrake said, giving the door the judicious once-over. ‘Nice clean job, really.’
‘No problem with the Beetle?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. Piece of piss. I left it outside your house, stuck the keys back through the letter box. Mr Music out of town, is he?’ I was saved from lying by the arrival of a young black kid on a mountain bike. ‘All right, Dobbo?’ Handbrake called out.
The lad hauled back on his handlebars to pull up in midwheelie. ‘My man,’ he affirmed. He shrugged out of a smart leather backpack and took a new set of locks for my Peugeot out of it. He handed it to Handbrake, quoted what seemed to be an interestingly low price and added on a tenner for delivery. Handbrake pulled a wad out of his back pocket and counted out the cash. The lad zipped it into his leather bum bag and cycled off. At the corner, he stopped and took out what looked like a mobile phone. He hadn’t looked a day over fourteen.
‘Don’t take offence, Handbrake, but these parts aren’t a little bit moody, are they?’ I hate having to be such a prissy little madam, but I can’t afford to be caught out with a car built from stolen spares.
Handbrake shook his head. ‘Nah. Him and his mates have got a deal going with half the scrap yards in Manchester. Product of the recession. Not so much drugs around, not so much dosh to be made ferrying them round the town, so Dobbo and a couple of his mates spent some of their ill-gotten gains on a computer. One of them checks with the scrap yards every morning to see what new stock they’ve got in. Then when punters like me want a part, we ring in and the dispatcher works out where they can get it from and sends one of the bike boys off for it. Good game, huh?’
‘You’re not kidding.’ I watched Handbrake pop the remains of the lock out of my car door. ‘Handbrake? You know anybody on the drugs scene that moves their merchandise in stolen motors?’
Handbrake snorted. ‘Ask me another. I try not to know anything about drugs in this town. Like the man said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.’ Handbrake did A Level English while he was inside. Who says prison doesn’t change a man?
‘OK. How would someone get hold of a set of trade plates?’
‘You mean if you’re not a legitimate person?’
‘Why would I be asking you about legitimate people?’
He snorted again. ‘Well, you can’t just cobble them together in a backstreet workshop. It’s only the Department of Transport that makes them, and the numbers are die-stamped into the metal, not like your regular licence plates. You’d have to beg, borrow or steal. There’s enough of them around. You could nick them off a garage or a motor in transit, though that way they’d be reported stolen and you wouldn’t get a lot of mileage out of them. Beg or buy a loan of a set off a delivery driver. Best way is to borrow them off a slightly dodgy garage. Why, you need some?’
Handbrake likes to wind me up by pretending he’s the innocent abroad and I’m the villain. But I wasn’t in the mood for it right then. ‘No,’ I snarled. ‘But I think I might be about to deprive someone of some.’
‘Better be careful where you use them, then.’
‘Why?’
‘Cos you’ll get a tug is why. The traffic cops always pull you if you’re using trade plates. Not so much on the motorway, but defo if you’re cruising round. If they so much as think you’re using them for anything except demos, tuition or delivery, you’ve had it. So you better have a good cover story.’
I was glad of the tip. I didn’t think this was the right weekend for a roadside chat with the traffic division.
Chapter 8
I kicked my heels for the best part of an hour in Ruth’s waiting room while she was dealing with a client. I’d have been better employed catching up on my sleep. After I’d stood on for a major bollocking for my outrageous behaviour at Longsight nick, we sat glumly staring at each other across her cluttered desk, depressed by the lack of information we had to trade. ‘I suspect the officers actually working the case don’t believe a word Richard’s saying,’ Ruth said. ‘All I get is the condescending wink when I suggest that if they really want to make a major drugs bust they should be on the phone to every villain who’s ever grassed in his life. Anything to get a lead on the car thieves. But of course, they don’t really believe in the car thieves,’ she added cynically. ‘The one lucky break we have so far is that none of the police officers we’ve dealt with has made the connection between Richard and you. At least the superintendent is prepared to go along with the idea of a lie-down, even though he stressed that it was for his team’s benefit and not mine.’
I got to my feet. ‘I suppose it’s a step in the right direction. I’ll let you know as soon as I get anything,’ I said grimly.
Out in the street, the city carried on as usual. I cut across Deansgate and through the Victorian glass-domed elegance of the Barton Arcade into the knots of serious shoppers bustling around the designer clothes shops of St Ann’s Square. Nobody had told the buskers outside the Royal Exchange that this was not a day for celebration and their cheery country rock mocked me all the way across the square and into Cross Street. I’d abandoned the car on a single yellow line round the back of the Nat West bank, and to my astonishment, I didn’t have a ticket. It was the first time all day that I’d got the benefit of an even break. I had to take it as an omen.
Back home, I checked Richard’s answering machine and saved the handful of messages. I returned a couple of the more urgent calls, explaining he’d had to go out of town at a moment’s notice and I wasn’t sure when he’d be back. I also checked his diary, and cancelled a couple of interviews he’d arranged for the early part of the coming week. Luckily, he didn’t have much planned, thanks to Davy’s visit. God only knew how he was going to write this week’s magazine column. Frankly, it was the least of my worries.
• •
Manchester’s rush hour seems to have developed middle-aged spread. When I first moved to the city, it lasted a clearly definable ninety minutes, morning and evening. Now, in the evening it seems to start at four and continue till half past seven. And on Fridays, it’s especially grim. Even on the wide dual carriageway of Princess Parkway, it was a major challenge to get into third. It felt like a relief to be in the airport. That’s how bad it was.
I was ten minutes early for our meeting, but Della was already sitting in the domestic terminal with a coffee. When the automatic doors hissed open to let me in, she glanced up from her
By the time she returned, I was as hard-boiled as Philip Marlowe again. ‘Like the hair,’ I remarked. Her shining chestnut hair, normally controlled to within an inch of its life in a thick plait, was loose around her shoulders, held back from her face with a wide, sueded silk headband.
‘Thanks.’ She pulled a face. ‘Think it’ll impress a forty-year-old merchant banker?’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘He thinks pleasure, I suspect business.’ Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice is the operational head of the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. She’s a Cambridge graduate, with all the social graces that implies, which means that when she’s got some bent businessman in her sights he’s more likely to think this charming woman who’s so fascinated by his work is a corporate headhunter rather than a copper. The problem is, as Della once explained with a sigh, the best con men are often the most charming.
‘We never sleep, eh?’ I teased.
‘Not with people we suspect might have their hands in a rather interesting can of worms,’ Della said. ‘Even if he is buying me dinner at the Thirty-Nine Steps.’ I felt a momentary pang of jealousy. Since Richard only ever wants to eat Chinese food, I don’t often get the chance to eat at the best fish restaurant in Manchester. As if reading my thoughts, Della said, ‘But enough of my problems. Any news on Richard?’
