‘As a doctor, you’ll appreciate the burdens of confidentiality. Even if I wanted to tell you what I’ve been hired to do, I couldn’t. So I’ll have to be the judge of whether I’m wasting my time or not,’ I said, staking out the cool ground now I’d finally raised Helen Maitland’s temperature a degree or two.
‘Be that as it may, you’re certainly wasting mine,’ she said sharply.
‘When did you see Sarah last?’ I asked, taking advantage of the fact that our conversation had become a subtlety-free zone.
She frowned. ‘Hard to say. Two, three weeks ago? We bumped into each other in the lab.’
‘You didn’t see each other socially?’
‘Not often,’ she said, biting the words off abruptly.
‘What? She shared your house for the best part of a year because the two of you got along just fine, then she moves out and the only time you see each other is when you bump into each other in hospital corridors? What happened? You have a row or what?’
Helen Maitland glowered at me. ‘I never said we were friends,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘All I said was that we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. After she moved out, we didn’t stay in close touch. But even if we had fallen out, it would still have nothing to do with the fact that Sarah Blackstone was murdered by some junkie burglar.’
I smiled sweetly as I got to my feet. ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that score,’ I said. ‘What it might explain, though, is why Sarah Blackstone was hiding behind your name to commit her crimes.’
I started for the door. ‘What crimes?’ I heard.
Half turning, I said, ‘Obviously nothing to do with you, Dr Maitland, since you had nothing to do with her. Thanks for the tea.’
She didn’t follow me down the hall. I opened the door and nearly walked into a key stabbing towards me at eye height. I jumped backwards and so did the woman wielding the key. She was the original of the photograph in the kitchen. With her cascade of dark hair, skin pale as marble and a long cape-shouldered coat, she looked as extreme as a character in an Angela Carter story. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
No, just an extra from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, I thought but didn’t say. ‘You startled me,’ I said, putting a hand on my pounding heart.
‘Me too!’ she exclaimed.
From behind me, I heard Helen Maitland’s voice. ‘Ms Brannigan was just leaving.’
The other woman and I skirted round each other, swapping places. ‘Bye,’ I said brightly as the door closed behind me. Trotting down the stone steps leading to the garden, I told myself off for being childish enough to give away my secrets to Helen Maitland just to score a cheap point because she’d made her way under my skin. It was hard to resist the conclusion that she had learned more from our interview than I had.
I didn’t think she had lied to me. Not in so many words. Over the years, I’ve developed a bullshit detector that usually picks up on outright porkies. But I was fairly sure she wasn’t telling me anything like the whole story. Whether any of it was relevant to my inquiries, I had no idea. But I had an idea where I might find some of the facts lurking behind her smoke screen of half-truths. When I got back to the car, I switched on my mobile and left a message for Shelley on the office answering machine. An urgent letter needed to go off to the Land Registry first thing in the morning. The reply would take a few days, but when it came, I had a sneaky feeling I’d have some bigger guns in my armoury to go after Helen Maitland with.
Chapter 13
In these days of political correctness, it’s probably an indictable offence to say it, but Sean Costigan didn’t have to open his mouth to reveal he was Irish. I only had to look at him, even in the sweaty laser-split gloom of the nightclub. He had dark hair with the sort of kink in it that guarantees a bad hair life, no matter how much he spent on expensive stylists. His eyes were dark blue, his complexion fair and smooth, his raw bones giving him a youthful, unformed look that his watchful expression and the deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth denied.
I’d got home around nine after fish and chips in Leeds’s legendary Bryan’s, making the mistake I always do of thinking I’m hungry enough for a jumbo haddock. Feeling more tightly stuffed than a Burns Night haggis, I’d driven back with the prospect of an early night all that was keeping me going. I should have known better, really. Among the several messages on my machine — Alexis, Bill, Gizmo and Richard, just for a kickoff — there was one I couldn’t ignore. Dan Druff had called to say he’d set up a meet at midnight in Paradise. Why does nobody keep office hours any more?
I’ve never been able to catnap. I always wake up with a thick head and a mouth that feels like it’s lined with sheep-skin. I don’t mean the sanitized stuff they put in slippers — I mean the stuff you find in the wild, still attached to its smelly owner. I rang Alexis, but she didn’t want to talk in front of Chris, whom she was keeping in the dark about Sarah Blackstone’s murder on account of her delicate condition. Richard was out — his message had been to tell me he wouldn’t be home until late. We’d probably meet on the doorstep as we both staggered home in the small hours. Bill I still wasn’t talking to, and Gizmo doesn’t do conversation. So I booted up the computer and settled down for a serious session with my football team. Not many people know this, but I’m the most successful manager in the history of the football league. In just five seasons, I’ve taken struggling Halifax Town from the bottom of the Conference League up through the divisions to the Premier League. In our first season there, we even won the Cup. This game, Premier Manager 3, is one of my darkest secrets. Even Richard doesn’t know about my hidden nights of passion with my first-team squad. He wouldn’t understand that it’s just fantasy; he’d see it as an excuse to buy me a Manchester United season ticket for my next birthday so I could sit next to him in the stands every other week and perish from cold and boredom. He’d never comprehend that while watching football sends me catatonic, developing the strategies it takes to run a successful team is my idea of a really good time. So I always make sure he’s out when I sit down with my squad.
Around half past eleven, I told the boys to take an early bath and grabbed my leather jacket. When I stepped outside the door, I discovered the rain had stopped, so I decided to leave the car and walk to the Paradise. It’s only fifteen minutes on foot, and the streets of central Manchester are still fairly safe to walk around late at night. Especially if you’re a Thai boxer. Besides, I figured it wouldn’t do me any harm to limber up for looking chilled out.
The Paradise Factory considers itself Manchester’s coolest nightclub. The brick building is on the corner of Princess Street and Charles Street, near Chinatown and the casinos, slightly off the beaten track of clubland. It used to house Factory Records, the famous indie label that was home to Joy Division and lots of other bands less talented but definitely more joyful. When Factory failed, a casualty to the recession, an astute local businesswoman took over the building and turned it into a poser’s heaven. Officially, it’s supposed to be an eclectic mix of gay and hetero, camp and straight, but it’s the only club where I’ve been asked on the door to verify that I’m not a gender tourist by listing other Manchester gay and lesbian venues where I’ve drunk and danced.