Dead Beat. Val McDermid

still there, so I can’t answer you.’

      I nearly got up and walked out right then. But I don’t think it would have changed anything if I had. Certainly not Jett’s neolithic view of women. I couldn’t understand how a man of some intelligence and sensitivity, judging by his music, could still hold views like that in the last decade of the twentieth century. I swallowed the nasty taste in my mouth and got down to business. ‘About Moira,’ I began.

      Two hours later, I was back in my own office. I’d just spent quarter of an hour persuading Bill that we should take on the case. I was far from convinced that we could get a result, but I thought the chances were better than evens. It would earn us a tasty fee, and if I did pull it off word would get around. Record companies have a lot of money to throw around, and they’re notoriously litigious. Going to law and winning requires solid evidence, and private investigators are very good at amassing that evidence.

      Now I’d pitched Bill into accepting the case, I had some work to do. Once I’d prised Jett away from Kevin and Neil I’d managed to get a substantial amount of background on Moira. The difficulty had been getting him to shut up. Now I needed to arrange my thoughts, so I booted up my database and started filling in all I knew about Moira.

      Moira Xaviera Pollock was thirty-two years old, a Pisces with Cancer rising and a Sagittarius moon, according to Jett. I felt sure that piece of knowledge would help enormously in my task. They had been kids together in Moss Side, Manchester’s black ghetto, where growing up without a drug habit or a criminal record is an achievement in itself. Moira’s mother had three children by different fathers, none of them in wedlock. Moira was the youngest, and her father had been a Spanish Catholic called Xavier Perez, hence the unusual middle name that was such a godsend to an investigator. In the photographs Jett had given me, she looked both beautiful and vulnerable. Her skin was the colour of vanilla fudge and her huge brown eyes made her look like a nervous bambi peeping out from a halo of frizzy brown curls.

      Jett and Moira had started dating in their early teens and they’d soon discovered that they both enjoyed writing songs. Moira wrote the poignant and enigmatic lyrics, Jett put them to music. She had never wanted to perform, seeing no need to compete with Jett’s unique voice, but she’d done her best to organize gigs for him. He’d played a couple of local clubs, then she’d managed to get him a regular weekly spot in a new city centre wine bar. That had been the break they needed. Kevin, who’d bought the wine bar as a diversion from the family wholesale fashion business, immediately saw Jett’s potential and informed the pair that he was going to manage them and to hell with the rag trade.

      Seeing Jett now, it was hard to imagine what an enormous change it must have been for the two of them. Suddenly they were being wined and dined by Kevin Kleinman, a man who had a suit for every day of the week and then some left over.

      Height, five foot, four inches, I typed in. She’d had a good figure too. The snapshots taken before Jett hit the top of the charts looked positively voluptuous. But later, she’d lost weight and her clothes had hung unbecomingly on her. Cutting through Jett’s self-reproach, it seemed that Moira had felt increasingly insignificant as Jett became the idol of millions.

      So she had fallen for the scourge of the music industry. I could see how it had happened. Drugs are everywhere in rock, from the fans at the concerts to the recording studios. With Moira, it had all started when Kevin was piling on the pressure for more songs for the third album. She’d started taking speed to stay awake, working through the night with Jett on new songs. Soon she’d moved on to the more intense but shorter high of coke. Then she’d started freebasing coke and before too long she’d been chasing the dragon. Jett hadn’t had a clue how to cope, so he’d just ignored it and tried to lose himself in his music.

      Then one night, he’d come home and she hadn’t been there. She’d just packed her bags and gone. He’d looked for her in a half-hearted way, asking around her family and friends, but I suspected that deep down he’d felt a kind of relief at not having to deal with her mood swings and erratic behaviour any longer. Now, his fear of falling into musical oblivion had spurred him into taking action. I could see why his entourage were nervous. The Return of the Junkie was not a feature eagerly awaited at Colcutt Manor.

      I finished inputting all my notes, and checked my watch. Half-past six. If I was lucky, I might just be able to short circuit some of the tedium of tracing Moira. Her unusual middle name made the search through any computerized records a lot easier. I picked up the phone and rang Josh, a friend of mine who’s a financial broker. In exchange for a slap-up meal every few months, he obligingly does credit checks on individuals for Mortensen and Brannigan.

      His job gives him access to computerized credit records for almost everyone in the British Isles. These records tell him what credit cards they hold, whether they have ever defaulted on a loan, and whether there have ever been County Court judgements against them for debt. Also, if you supply him with a person’s full name and date of birth, he can usually come up with an address. Very handy. We could probably hack into the system and do it ourselves, but we do like to keep things semi-legal when we can. Besides, I like having dinner with Josh.

      The next call I made was to ask for something strictly illegal. One of my neighbours on the estate is a detective constable with the vice squad. He’s always happy to earn the twenty-five pounds I slip him for checking people out on the police national computer. If Moira had any kind of criminal record, I’d know by morning.

      There was nothing more I could do that night to trace Moira Pollock. It had been a hell of a day. All I wanted was to go out and kick the shit out of someone. So I decided to do just that.

       6

      I shook my head to clear the sunburst of stars that filled my vision, trying to dodge the next blow. The woman who was bearing down on me was a good three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than me and there was a mean look in her eyes. I tried to match her glare and circled her warily. She feinted a punch at me, but that opened up her defences and I swung my leg up and round in a short, fast arc. It caught her in the ribs. Even through her body protector, it winded her. She crashed at my feet, and I felt the last of the day’s tensions flow out of me.

      It was a burglar who got me into Thai boxing three years ago. Dennis O’Brien is what I like to think of as an honest villain. Although he feeds and clothes his wife and kids with the proceeds of other people’s hard work, he’s got his own rigid moral code that he adheres to more firmly than most of the supposedly honest citizens I know. Dennis would never rob an old lady, never use shooters, and he only steals from people he thinks can afford to be robbed. He never indulges in mindless vandalism, and always tries to leave houses as tidy as possible. He’d never grass a mate, and the one thing he hates more than anything else is a bent copper. After all, if you can’t trust the police, who can you trust?

      I’d been having a drink with Dennis one evening, asking his advice about an office I needed to have a quiet little look round. In return, I was answering his questions about how I work. He’d been outraged when I’d revealed I had no self-defence skills.

      ‘You want your head mending,’ he exploded. ‘There’s a lot of very naughty people out there. They’re not all like me, you know. Plenty of villains don’t think twice about hitting a woman.’

      I’d laughed and said, ‘Dennis, I deal in white-collar crime. The sort of people I’m chasing don’t think their fists have the answers.’

      He’d interrupted, saying, ‘Bollocks, Kate. Never mind work, living where you live, you need martial arts. I wouldn’t bring the milk off the doorstep in your street without a black belt. Tell you what, you meet me tomorrow night and I’ll have you sorted in no time.’

      ‘Sorted’ meant taking me to the club where his own teenage daughter was junior Thai boxing champion. I’d had a good look around, decided that the showers and the changing rooms were places where I’d be prepared to take my clothes off, and signed up there and then. I’ve never regretted it. It keeps me fit and gives me confidence when I’m up against the wall. And time has shown