Clean Break

6

I’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN THERE ARE RESTAURANTS THAT DON’T serve dim sum. For as long as I’ve known Richard, he’s maintained that if you don’t.use chopsticks on it, it ain’t food. And Josh has recently taken to extracting his payment in-kind in Manchester ’s clutch of excellent Thai restaurants. I’m not sure if that’s down to the food or the subservient waitresses. Either way, I’d entirely lost touch with anything that hadn’t come out of a wok. Which made Michael Haroun a refreshing change in more ways than one.

He’d arrived promptly at twenty-nine minutes past seven. I’d grown so used to Richard’s flexible idea of time that I was still applying eye pencil when the doorbell rang. I nearly poked my eye out in shock, and had to answer the door with a tissue covering the damage. Eat your heart out, Cindy Crawford. Michael lounged against the doorframe, looking drop-dead gorgeous in blue jeans, navy silk blouson and an off-white collarless linen shirt that sure as hell hadn’t come from Marks and Spencer. My stomach churned, and I don’t think it was hunger. “Long John Silver, I presume,” he said.

“Watch it, or I’ll set the parrot on you,” I replied, stepping back and waving him in.

He shrugged away from the door and followed me down the hall. I gestured toward the living room and said, “Give me a minute.”

Back in the bathroom, I repaired the damage and surveyed myself in the full-length mirror. Navy linen trousers, russet knitted silk teeshirt, navy silk tweed jacket. I looked like I’d taken a bit of trouble, without actually departing from the businesslike image. Michael wasn’t to know this was my newest, smartest outfit. Besides, I’d told Richard my evening engagement was a business meeting, and I wasn’t entirely ready for him to get any other ideas if he saw me leave.

I rubbed a smudge of gel over my fingers and thrust them through my hair, which I’ve kept fairly short since I was shorn without consultation earlier in the year. My right eye still looked a bit red, but this was as good as it was going to get. A quick squirt of Richard’s Eternity by Calvin Klein and I was ready.

I walked down the hall and stood in the doorway. Michael obviously hadn’t heard me. He was deep in a computer-gaming magazine. Bonus points for the boy. I cleared my throat. “Ready when you are,” I said.

He looked up and smiled appreciatively. “I don’t want to sound disablist,” he said, “but I have to admit I prefer the two-eyed look.” He closed the magazine and stood up. “Shall we go?”

He drove a top-of-the-range Citroen. “Company car?” I asked, looking forward to the prospect of being driven for a change.

“Yeah, but they let me choose. I’ve always had a soft spot for Citroen. I think the DS was one of the most beautiful cars ever built,” he said as he did a neat three-point turn to get out of the parking area outside my bungalow. “My father always used to drive one.”

That told me Michael Haroun hadn’t grown up on a council estate with the arse hanging out of his trousers. “Lucky you,”

I said with feeling. “My dad works for Rover, so my childhood was spent in the back of a Mini. That’s how I ended up only five foot three. The British equivalent of binding the feet.”

Michael laughed as he hit a button on the CD player and Bonnie Raitt filled the car. Richard would have giggled helplessly at something so middle-of-the-road. Me, I was just glad of something that didn’t feature crashing guitars or that insistent zippy beat that sounds just like a fly hitting an incinerator. We turned out of the small “single professionals” development where I live and into the council estate. To my surprise, instead of heading down Upper Brook Street toward town, he turned left. As we headed down Stockport Road, my heart sank. I prayed this wasn’t going to be one of those twelve-kilometer drives to some pretentious bistro in the sticks with compulsory spinach pancakes and only one choice of vodka.

“You into computer games, then?” I asked. Time to check out just how much I had in common with this breathtaking profile.

“I have a 486 multimedia system in my spare room. Does that answer the question?”

“It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that counts,” I replied. As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I was on a five-second-delay loop, like radio phone-ins.

He grinned and listed his current favorites. We were still arguing the relative merits of submarine simulations when he pulled up outside a snooker supplies shop in an unpromising part of Stockport Road. A short walk down the pavement brought us to That Cafe, an unpretentious restaurant done out in thirties style. I’d heard plenty of good reports about it, but I’d never quite made it across the door before. The locale had put me off, for one thing. Call me fussy, but I like to be sure that my car’s still going to be waiting for me after I’ve finished dinner.

The interior looked like flea market meets Irish country pub, but the menu had me salivating. The waitress, dressed in jeans, a Deacon Blue T-shirt, big fuck-off Doc Marten boots and a long white French waiter’s apron, showed us to a quiet corner table next to a blazing fire. Okay, they only had one vodka, but at least it wasn’t some locally distilled garbage with a phony Russian name.

As our starters arrived, I said ruefully, “I wish finding Henry Naismith’s Monet was as easy as a computer game.”

“Yeah. At least with games, there’s always a bulletin board you can access for hints. I suppose you’re out on your own with this,” Michael said.

“Not entirely on my own,” I corrected him. “I do have one or two contacts.”

He swallowed his mouthful of food and looked slightly pained. “Is that why you agreed to have dinner with me?” he asked.

“Only partly.”

“What was the other part?” he asked, obviously fishing.

“I enjoy good scoff, and I like interesting conversation with it.” I was back in control of myself, the adolescent firmly stuffed back into the box marked “not wanted on voyage.”

“And you thought I’d be an interesting conversationalist, did you?”

“Bound to be,” I said sweetly. “You’re an insurance man, and right now insurance claims are one of my principal interests.”

We ate in silence for a few moments, then he said, “I take it you were behind the story in the Chronicled”

I shrugged. “I like to stir the pot. That way, the scum rises to the surface.”

“You certainly stirred things around our office,” Michael said dryly.

“The people have a right to know,” I said, self-righteously quoting Alexis.

“Cheers,” Michael said, clinking his glass against mine. “Here’s to a profitable relationship.”

“Oh, you mean Fortissimus are going to hire Mortensen and Brannigan?” I asked innocently.

He grinned again. This time I noticed his teeth, so even, so white I had to suspect them of being crowns. Or maybe they were naturally perfect, just like his profile. “I think I’ll pass on that one. I simply meant that with luck, you might track down Henry Naismith’s Monet.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. “I spoke to Henry this afternoon. He says your assessor had just been there.”

“That’s right,” Michael said cagily.

“Henry says your man put a very interesting suggestion to him. Purely in confidence. Now, would that be the kind of confidence you’re already privy to?”

Michael carefully placed his fork and knife together on the plate and mopped his lips with the napkin. “It might be,” he said cautiously. “But if it were, I wouldn’t be inclined to discuss it with someone who has a hot line to the front page of the Chronicle.”

“Not even if I promised it would go no further?”

“You expect me to believe that after today’s performance?” he demanded.

I smiled. “There’s a crucial difference. I was acting in my client’s best interests by setting the cat among the pigeons with Alexis’s story. I didn’t breach my client’s confidentiality, and I didn’t tell Alexis anything that wasn’t already in the public domain. She just put the bits together. However, if Henry acted on your colleague’s suggestion and I leaked that to the press, it would seriously damage his business. And I don’t do that to the people who pay my mortgage. Trust me, Michael. It won’t go any further.”

The arrival of the waitress gave him a moment’s breathing space. She removed the debris, rewarded by Michael’s grateful smile. “So this would be strictly off-the-record?”

“Information only,” I agreed.

The waitress returned with a cheerful smile and two huge plates. I stared down at our plates, where enough rabbit to account for half the population of Watership Down sat in pool of creamy sauce. “Nouvelle cuisine obviously passed this place by,” I said faintly.

“I suspect we Mancunians are too canny to pay half a week’s wages for a sliver of meat surrounded by three baby carrots, two mange-tout, one baby sweetcorn and an artistically carved radish,” he said wryly.

“And is it that Mancunian canniness that underlies your assessor’s underhand suggestion?” I asked sweetly.

“Nothing regional about it,” Michael said. “You have to have a degree in bloody-minded caution before you get the job.”

“So you think it’s okay to ask your clients to hang fakes on the wall?”

“It’s a very effective safety precaution,” he said carefully.

“That’s what your assessor told Henry. He said you’d be prepared not to increase his premium by the equivalent of the gross national product of a small African nation if he had copies made of his remaining masterpieces and hung them on the walls instead of the real thing,” I said conversationally.

“That’s about the size of it,” Michael admitted. At least he had the decency to look uncomfortable about it.

“And is this a general policy these days?”

Slicing up his vegetables gave Michael an excuse for not meeting my eyes. “Quite a few of our clients have opted for it as a solution to their security problems,” he said. “It makes sense, Kate. We agreed this morning that there isn’t a security system that can’t be breached. If having a guard physically on-site twenty-four hours a day isn’t practical because of the expense or because the policyholder doesn’t want that sort of presence in what is after all his home, then it avoids sky-high premiums.”

“It’s not just about money, though,” I protested. “It’s like Henry says. He knows those paintings. He’s lived with them most of his life. You get a buzz from the real thing that a fake just doesn’t provide.“

“Not one member of the public has noticed the substitutions,” Michael said.

“Maybe not so far,” I conceded. “But according to my understanding, the trouble with fakes is that they don’t stand the test of time.” Thanking Shelley silently for my art tutorial that afternoon, I launched myself into my spiel. “Look at Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers. At the time, all the experts were convinced they were the real thing. But you look at them now, and they wouldn’t even fool a philistine like me. The difference between schneid and kosher is that fakes date, but the really great paintings don’t. They’re timeless.”

He frowned. “Even if you’re right, which I don’t concede for a moment, that’s not a bridge that our clients will have to cross for a long time yet.”

I wasn’t about to give up that easy. “Even so, don’t you think it’s a bit of a con to pull on the public? A bit of a swizz to spend your Bank Holiday Monday in a traffic jam just so you can ogle a Constable that’s more phony than a plastic Rolex? Aren’t you in danger of breaching the Trades Descriptions Act?” I asked.

“Our clients maybe,” Michael said carelessly. “We’re not.”

The brazen effrontery of it astonished me. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” I said. “You work in a business that must spend hundreds of thousands a year trying to catch its customers out in fraud, and yet you’re happily suggesting to another bunch of clients that they go off and commit a fraud?”

“That’s not how we see it,” he said stiffly. “Besides, it works,” he said. “In at least two cases that I know about personally, customers who have been burgled have only lost copies. Surely that proves it’s worthwhile.”

In spite of the blazing fire, I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Only a man with no personal knowledge of the strung out world of crime could have made that pronouncement with such self-satisfaction. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the scene when an overwrought burglar turns up at his fence’s gaff with something he thinks is an Old Master, only to be told it’s Rembrandt-by-numbers. Scenario number one is that the burglar thinks the fence is trying to have him over, so he takes the appropriate steps. Scenario number two is that the fence thinks the burglar is trying to have him over, and takes the appropriate steps. Either way, somebody ends up in casualty. And that’s looking on the bright side. Doubtless, law-abiding citizens like Michael think they’ve got what they deserve, but even villains have wives and kids who don’t want to spend their spare time visiting hospital beds or graves.

My silence clearly spelled out defeat to Michael, since he leaned over and squeezed my hand. “Trust me, Kate. Our way, everybody’s happy,” he said.

I pretended to push my chair back and look frantically for the door. “I’m out of here,” I said. “Soon as an insurance man says ‘trust me,’ you know you should be in the next county.” He grinned. “I promise I’ll never try to sell you insurance.” “Okay. But I won’t promise I’ll never try to pitch you into using Mortensen and Brannigan.”

“Speaking of which, how did you get into the private-eye business?” Michael said.

I couldn’t decide whether it was an attempt to change the subject or a deliberate shift away from the professional toward the personal. Either way, I was happy to go along with him. I didn’t think I was going to get any more useful information out of him, and I only had to look across the table to remember that when I’d agreed to this dinner, my motives hadn’t been entirely selfless. By the time we’d moved on to coffee and Armagnac, he knew all about my aborted law degree, abandoned after two years because the part-time job I’d got doing bread-and-butter process serving for Bill Mortensen was a damn sight more interesting than the finer points of jurisprudence.

“So tell me about your most interesting case,” he coaxed me.

“Maybe later,” I said. “It’s your turn now. How did you get into insurance?”

“It’s the family business,” he said, looking faintly embarrassed.

“So you followed in daddy’s footsteps,” I said. I felt disappointed. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe I expected him to live up to that profile with a suitably buccaneering past.

“Eventually,” he said. “I read Arabic at university, then I worked for the BBC World Service for a while. But the money was dire and there were no prospects. My father had the sense to see that sales had never interested me, but he persuaded me to take a shot at working in claims.” Michael raised his shoulders and held out his hands in an expressive shrug. “What can I say? I really enjoy it.”

All of a sudden, I remembered one of the key reasons I like being with Richard. He lives an interesting life: music journalist, football fan and Sunday-morning player, part-time father. I was sure if I hung around with Michael Haroun, I’d learn a lot of invaluable stuff. But not even the most brilliant raconteur can make insurance interesting forever. With Richard, no two days are the same. With Michael, I suspected variety might not be the spice of life.

Now I’d established that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the man, I felt a sense of release. I could take what I needed from the encounter, and that would be that. My life wasn’t about to be turned on its head because I’d fallen in love with a profile when I was fourteen.

With that comforting thought in the front of my mind, I had no hesitation about inviting him in for coffee. The fact that I’d forgotten to mention Richard to him somehow didn’t seem too important at the time.