PI Kate Brannigan Series Books 1-3: Dead Beat, Kick Back, Crack Down. Val McDermid

Jett’s mansion. The home she’d never seen, I reminded myself.

      When I got to the bit about Stick asking for his four hundred pounds, she laughed out loud. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if this does work out, I might just pay him back. Mind you, he’d die of embarrassment if word got out that he took me to Seagull. Stick the hard man! He’d never live it down.’

      I turned into the gateway of Colcutt Manor and wound down the window and leaned out to press the intercom button. When it crackled back at me, I said clearly, ‘It’s Kate Brannigan to see Jett. Don’t fuck with me, Gloria, let me in.’

      As the gates opened, I caught Moira’s expression out of the corner of my eye. She looked stunned. I headed up the long drive, and the house appeared in my headlights. ‘Shit,’ she breathed. ‘You might have warned me, Kate.’

      I pulled up at the foot of the steps that led up to the front door and said, ‘You ready?’

      Moira took a deep breath and said, ‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’

      We got out of the car and I led the way up towards the door. Three steps from the top, it opened and a pool of light flooded out. Jett himself stood silhouetted in the doorway. It took only a moment for him to realize I wasn’t alone. Then he saw who my companion was. ‘Moira?’ he said in tones of wonder, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

      I paused, and she walked past me. ‘Hi, babe,’ she said, stopping a few feet short of him.

      Jett’s hesitation was only momentary. Then he stepped forward and folded her into his arms. Moira buried her head in his shoulder.

      Me, I headed back into the night, trying to start the car as quietly as possible. Some things don’t need witnesses. Besides, I had a huge invoice to dictate before I could sleep.

PART TWO

Chapter 13

      The sound of the phone jerked me awake. ‘Kate? It’s Jett. It’s an emergency. Get over here right away.’ Then the phone slammed down. The clock said 01:32. Happy Monday. I leapt out of bed and dressed on automatic pilot. I was halfway to the car before I remembered it had been six weeks since I’d stopped working for Jett. What the hell was he playing at? By then, I was awake anyway, so I figured I might as well drive out and see.

      The gates stood open, and Jett was waiting for me on the doorstep. He looked stoned out of his box. I asked what was going on and he simply handed me the key and said, ‘The rehearsal room.’

      It was my first dead body. The private eyes in books fall over corpses every other day, but Manchester’s a long way from Chicago in more ways than one. My first reaction was to get out of the room as fast as my legs would carry me and keep on running till I was safe inside my car.

      Instead, I tried to fight my nausea by breathing in deeply. That was my second mistake. Nobody ever told me that freshly spilled blood has such a strong smell. My only experience with the stuff was when half a pound of liver leaked all over my cheque book. That hadn’t been too pleasant either.

      I tried to behave like a professional and forget that I knew the person who was lying dead on the polished wooden floor. If I was going to get through this experience, I’d have to convince myself it was no more real than the Kensington Gore in a Hammer Horror film.

      Moira’s body lay a few yards inside the door of the rehearsal room. Her limbs were splayed at angles too awkward for comfort. That alone would have been enough to show something was badly wrong. But there was more. The back of her head was matted with blood, which had trickled into a congealed pool behind her. A few yards away lay a tenor sax, its gleaming golden horn smeared with blood. I left it alone. My only direct experience with murder weapons was Cluedo, but even I knew enough not to mess with it.

      I walked cautiously towards the body, and noticed that her face looked mildly surprised. I crouched down, forcing myself not to think of this as Moira, and noticed that her hands were empty, palms upwards. No clues there. Feeling foolish because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I picked up her wrist and felt vainly for a pulse. Nothing. Her skin felt warmish – not quite normal temperature, but not cold either. I got to my feet and glanced at my watch. It was forty minutes since Jett had woken me. What the hell was keeping the police?

      With a deep sigh, I left the room and locked it behind me. I found Jett in the blue drawing room, huddled in a corner of the sofa. I sat down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. His skin felt cold and clammy through the thin silk shirt.

      His eyes were frightened. I realized now he was in shock rather than stoned.

      ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he whispered hoarsely.

      ‘I’m afraid so.’

      He nodded, and kept on nodding as if he had a tic. ‘I should never have brought her here,’ he muttered.

      ‘What happened, Jett?’ I asked as gently as I could. It looked pretty obvious even to me, but I wanted to hear it from his own lips.

      ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his voice breaking like a teenager. ‘We were supposed to be working on a new song tonight, and when I went in, she was lying there.’ He cleared his throat and sniffed. ‘So I came out and locked the door and called you.’

      Gee, thanks. ‘Did you try her pulse?’ I asked.

      ‘No need. The spirit had left. I knew that right away.’

      Thank you, Dr Kildare. ‘Why aren’t the police here yet?’ I asked, refraining from pointing out that she just might have been still alive when he made his New Age diagnosis.

      ‘I didn’t call the police. I only called you. I thought you’d know what to do.’

      I couldn’t credit what I was hearing. He’d found his ex-lover’s murdered body in his house and he hadn’t called the police? If Jett wanted to throw suspicion on himself, the only way he could have made a better job of it would have been to call his lawyer as well. ‘You’ll have to call them now, Jett. You should have done that first, before you called me.’

      He shook his head obstinately. ‘No. I want you to handle it. I can trust you.’

      ‘Jett, you can’t hush up a murder. You have to call the police. Look, I’ll make the call if you don’t feel up to it,’ I offered desperately. The last thing I needed was for the police to get it into their heads that I was involved in concealing a crime.

      He shrugged. ‘Please yourself. But I want you to handle it.’

      ‘We’ll talk about it in a minute.’ I stood up. There was a phone in the room, but I wanted some privacy to gather my thoughts so I headed for Gloria’s office down the hall. Neil was coming down the stairs as I reached the door. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. ‘Kate!’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

      ‘Jett needed a meeting,’ I offered lamely, not feeling up to breaking the news.

      ‘Maybe see you later,’ he said, sketching a wave as he walked down the corridor into the far wing. Clearly he saw nothing odd about business meetings in the small hours.

      I closed Gloria’s door behind me, picked up the phone and dialled 999. I was quickly connected to the police emergency line. ‘I’m calling to report a murder,’ I said. To my amazement, I could feel a giggle welling up inside me. I must have been more shocked than I’d realized.

      The copper on the other end of the phone wasn’t amused. ‘Is this some kind of hoax?’ he demanded.

      I pulled myself together and said, ‘I’m sorry. Unfortunately not. A woman has been killed at Colcutt Manor, just outside Colcutt village.’

      ‘When did this happen, madam?’ His voice was hard and cool.

      ‘We’re