A few days before, I’d have reckoned that as motives for murder go, the prospect of losing your livelihood was a pretty thin one. That had been before Bill’s bombshell. Since then, I’d been harbouring plenty of murderous thoughts, not just against a business partner who’d been one of my best friends for years, but also against a blameless Australian woman I’d barely met. For all I knew, Sheila could be Sydney’s answer to Mother Teresa. Somehow, I doubted it, but I’d been more than ready to include her in the homicidal fantasies that kept slipping into my mind. Like unwanted junk mail, I always intended to throw them straight in the bin, but every time I found myself attracted by some little detail that sucked me in. If a well-adjusted crime fighter like me felt the desire to kill the people I saw as stealing my dream, how easy it would be for someone who was borderline psychotic to be pushed over the edge by the prospect of losing their professional life. What Gus Walters told me handed motive on a plate to everyone Sarah Blackstone had worked with at St Hilda’s, from the professor who supervised the department to the secretary who maintained the files.
There was nothing I could do now about pursuing that line of inquiry. By the time I’d got home and driven to Leeds, it would be the end of the medical working day. I made a mental note to follow it up, which freed my brain to gnaw away at the problem which had been uppermost there since Bill’s return. Never mind murderers, never mind rock saboteurs, what I wanted the answer to was what to do about Mortensen and Brannigan. The one thing I was sure about was that I didn’t intend to roll over and die, waiting for Bill to find the buyer of his choice. As I walked back through the red-brick streets dotted with grass-filled vacant sites that lie between Rusholme and my home, I was plagued by the question of whether I could find a way to generate enough income to pay off a loan big enough to buy Bill out while managing to remain personally solvent.
The key to that was to find a way to make the agency work more profitably. There was one obvious avenue that might prove lucrative, but I’d need an extra pair of hands. Back when I’d started working for Bill, I’d done bread-and-butter process-serving. Every week, I’d abandon the law library and turn up at the office where Shelley would hand me a bundle of court papers that had to be served a.s.a.p. Domestic-violence injunctions, writs and a whole range of documents relating to debt. My job was to track down the individuals concerned and make sure they were legally served with the court documents. Sometimes that was as straightforward as cycling to the address on the papers, ringing the doorbell and handing over the relevant bumf. Mostly, it wasn’t. Mostly, it involved a lot of nosing about, asking questions of former colleagues, neighbours, drinking cronies and lovers. Sometimes it got heavy, especially when I was trying to serve injunctions on men who had been persistently violent to wives who took out injunctions one week and were terrorized, bullied, sweet-talked or guilt-tripped into taking their battering men back the next. The sort of men who see women as sexually available punchbags don’t usually take kindly to being served papers by a teenager who barely comes up to their elbow.
In spite of the aggravation, I’d really got into the work. I’d loved the challenge of tracking down people who didn’t want to be found. I’d enjoyed outwitting men who thought that because they were bigger and stronger than me, they weren’t going to accept service. I can’t say I took any pleasure slapping some of the debtors with bankruptcy papers when all they were guilty of was believing the propaganda of the Thatcher years, but even that was instructive. It gave me a far sharper awareness of real life than any of my fellow law students. So I’d quit to work for Bill full time as soon as the opportunity arose.
But I hadn’t joined the agency to be a process-server. In the medium to long term, Bill wanted a partner and he was prepared to train me to do everything he could do. I learned about surveillance, working undercover, doing things with computers that I didn’t know were possible, security systems, white-collar crime, industrial sabotage and espionage, and subterfuge. I learned how to use a video camera and how to bug, how to uncover bugs and how to take photographs in extreme conditions. I’d also picked up a few things that weren’t on the syllabus, like kick boxing and lock picking.
Of course, as my skills grew, the range of jobs Bill was prepared to let me loose on expanded too. The end result of that was that we’d been content to let most of the process-serving fall into the laps of other agencies in the city. Maybe the time had come to snatch back that work for ourselves.
What I needed was a strategy and a body to serve the papers.
Shelley sipped her glass of white wine suspiciously, as if she were checking it for drugs, and glanced around her with the concentration of a bailiff taking an inventory. She had only been in my house a couple of times before, since we tended to do our socializing on the neutral ground of bars and restaurants. That way, when Richard reached screaming point we could make our excuses and leave. It’s not that he doesn’t like Shelley’s partner Ted, a former client who opted for a date with her instead of a discount for cash and ended up moving in. It’s just that Ted has the conversational repertoire of a three-toed sloth and is about as quick on the uptake. Nice bloke, but…
‘You can’t stay out of the office forever,’ she said. A woman who’s never been afraid to state the obvious, is Shelley.
‘Call it preventative medicine. I’m trying to get a plan in place before I have to confront Bill,’ I said. ‘At the moment, every time I’m within three yards of him, I feel an overwhelming desire to cave his head in, and I don’t fancy spending the next twenty years in prison. Besides, I do have some cases that I’m working on.’ I picked up the microcassette recorder on the table and flipped the cassette out of it. ‘I dictated some reports this afternoon. That brings me up to date. I’ve included the new client details.’
Shelley leaned across and picked up the tape. ‘So why am I here? I don’t guess it’s because you couldn’t go without my company for a whole day.’
I explained my idea about generating more income by reclaiming process-serving work. Shelley listened, a frown pulling her eyebrows closer together. ‘How are you going to get the business? All the solicitors who used to put the work our way have switched to somebody else, and presumably they’re satisfied with the service they’re getting.’
This was the bit I was slightly embarrassed about. I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. ‘I thought I could do a Charlie’s Angel and try some personal visits.’
I risked a look. Shelley had a face like thunder. Jasper Charles runs one of the city’s biggest firms of criminal solicitors. The primary qualification for employment as a clerk or legal executive there is having terrific tits and long legs. The key role of these women, known in legal circles as Charlie’s Angels, is to generate more business for the firm. Every day, one or more of the Angels will visit remand clients in prison, often for the slenderest of reasons. They’ll get the business out of the way then sit and chat to the prisoner for another half-hour or so. All the other prisoners who are having visits from their briefs see these gorgeous women fawning all over their mates, and a significant proportion of them sack their current lawyers and shift their business to Jasper Charles. Every woman brief in Manchester hates them. ‘You’ve done some cheesy things in your time, Kate, but this is about as low as it gets,’ she eventually said.
‘I know. But it’ll work. That’s the depressing thing.’
‘So you go out and prostitute yourself and you snatch back all this business. How you going to find the time to do it?’
‘I’m not.’
Shelley’s head tipped to one side. Unconsciously, she drew herself in and away from me. ‘Oh no,’ she said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Oh no.’