Kick Back

1

The Case of the Missing Conservatories. Sounds like the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle didn't get round to writing because it was too boring. Let me tell you, I was with Conan Doyle on this one. If it hadn't been for the fact that our secretary's love life was in desperate need of ECT, there's no way I'd have got involved. Which, as it turned out, might have been no bad thing.

I was crouched behind the heavy bulk of the elevator machinery, holding my breath, desperately praying I'd pick the right moment to make my move. I knew I wouldn't get a second chance with a nasty bag of works like Vohaul's hit man. I caught sight of him as he emerged from the stairwell. I leaped to my feet and threw myself at one of the pair of heavy pulley attachments suspended from the ceiling. It shot across the room towards my relentless opponent. At the last minute he turned, spotted it and ducked, letting it whistle over his head. My mouth dried with fear as he caught sight of me and headed menacingly in my direction. I dodged round the elevator machinery, trying to keep it between us so I could make a dash for the stairs. As he rushed after me, I desperately swung the other pulley towards him. It caught him on the side of the head, the momentum plunging him over the Up of the lift shaft into the blackness below. I'd done it! I'd managed to stay alive!

I let my breath out in a slow sigh of relief and leaned back in the chair, hitting the key that offered me the 'Save Game' option. A glance at my watch told me it was time to leave Space Quest III for the day. I'd had the half-hour lunch break that was all I could spare in my partner Bill's absence. Besides, I knew that our secretary Shelley would be returning from her own lunch break any minute now, and I didn't want her wandering in and catching me at it. While the cat's away, the mouse plays Space Quest, and all that, which isn't very businesslike behaviour for a partner in a security consultancy and private investigation agency. Even if I'm only the junior partner.

That particular week, I was the only show in town. Bill had abandoned ship for the fleshpots (or should that be lobster pots?) of the Channel Islands to run a computer security course for a merchant bank. Which meant that Kate Brannigan was the only functioning half of Mortensen and Brannigan, as far as the UK mainland was concerned. Say it fast like that and we sound like major players instead of a two-operative agency that handles a significant chunk of the white-collar crime in the North West of England.

I headed for the cupboard off my office that doubles as the ladies loo and office darkroom. I had a couple of films that needed processing from my weekend surveillance outside a pharmaceutical company's lab. PharmAce Supplies had been having some problems with their stock control. I'd spent a couple of days working on the inside as a temporary lab assistant, long enough to realize that the problem wasn't what went on in working hours. Someone was sneaking in when the lab was locked and helping himself or herself, then breaking into the computer stock records to doctor them. All I needed to discover was the identity of the hacker, which had been revealed after a couple of evenings sat cramped in the back of Mortensen and Brannigan's newest toy, a Little Rascal van that we'd fitted out specifically for stake-out work. Hopefully, the proof that incriminated the senior lab technician was in my hand, captured forever on the fastest film that money could buy.

I was looking forward to half an hour in the darkroom, away from phones that didn't seem to have stopped ringing since Bill left. No such luck. I'd barely closed the blackout curtain when the intercom buzzed at me like that horrible drill dentists use to smooth off a filling. The buzzing stopped and Shelley's distorted voice came at me like Donald Duck on helium. 'Kate, I have a client for you,' I deciphered.

I sighed. The Tooth Fairy's revenge for playing games on the office computer. 'I was playing in my own time,” I muttered, in the vain hope that would appease the old bag. 'Kate? Can you hear me?' Shelley honked.

There's no appointment in the book,” I tried.

'It's an emergency. Can you come out of the darkroom, please?'

'I suppose so,” I grumbled. I knew there was no point in refusing. Shelley is quite capable of letting a full minute pass, then hammering on the door claiming an urgent case of Montezuma's Revenge from the Mexican taco bar downstairs where she treats herself to lunch once a week. She always varies the days so I can never catch her out in a lie.

Still grumbling, I let myself back into my office. Before I'd taken the three steps back to my chair, Shelley was in the room, closing the door firmly behind her. She looked slightly agitated as she crossed to my desk, an expression about as familiar on her face as genuine compassion is on Baroness Thatcher's. She handed me a new-client form with the name filled in. Ted Barlow. Tell me about it,” I said, resigning myself.

'He owns a firm that builds and installs conservatories and his bank are calling in his loans, demanding repayment of his overdraft and refusing him credit. He needs us to find out why and to persuade his bank to change their minds,” Shelley explained, slightly breathlessly. Well out of character. I was beginning to wonder just what had happened to her over lunch.

'Shelley,” I groaned. 'You know that's not our kind of thing. The guy's been up to some fiddle, the bank have cottoned on and he wants someone to pull him out of the shit. Simple as that. There's no money in it, there's no point.'

Kate, just talk to him, please?' Shelley as supplicant was a new role on me. She never pleads for anything. Even her demands for raises are detailed in precise, well-documented memos. The guy's desperate, he really needs some help. He's not on the fiddle, I'd put money on it.'

'If he's not on the fiddle, he's the only builder that hasn't been since Solomon built the temple,” I said.

Shelley tossed her head, the beads woven into her plaits jangling like wind chimes. 'What’ s the matter with you, Kate?' she challenged me. 'You getting too high and mighty for the little people? You only deal with rock stars and company chairmen these days? You're always busy telling me how proud you are of your dad, working his way up to foreman from the production line at Cowley. If it was your dad out there with his little problem, would you be telling him to go away? This guy's not some big shot, he's just a working bloke who's got there the hard way, and now some faceless bank manager wants to take it all away from him. Come on, Kate, where's your heart?' Shelley stopped abruptly, looking shocked.

So she should have done. She was bang out of order. But she'd caught my attention, though not for the reason she'd thought. I decided I wanted to see Ted Barlow, not because I'd been guilt tripped. But I was fascinated to see the man who had catapulted Shelley into the role of a lioness protecting her cubs. Since her divorce, I hadn't seen any man raise her enviable cool by so much as a degree.

'Send him in, Shelley,” I replied abruptly. 'Let's hear what the man has to say for himself.'

Shelley stalked over to the door and pulled it open. “Mr… Barlow? Miss Brannigan will see you now.' She simpered. I swear to God, this tough little woman who rules her two teenagers like Attila the Hun simpered.

The man who appeared in the doorway made Shelley look as fragile as a Giacometti sculpture. He topped six foot easily, and he looked as if a suit were as foreign to him as a Peruvian nose-flute. Not that he was bulky. His broad shoulders tapered through a deep chest to a narrow waist without a single strain in the seams of his off-the-peg suit. But you could see that he was solid muscle. As if that wasn't enough, his legs were long and slim. It was a body to die for.

Nice legs, shame about the face, though. Ted Barlow was no hunk from the neck up. His nose was too big, his ears stuck out, his eyebrows met in the middle. But his eyes looked kind, with laughter lines radiating out from them. I put him in his mid-thirties, and he didn't seem to have spent too many of those years in an office, if his body language was anything to go by. He stood awkwardly in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a nervous smile not making it as far as the gentle blue eyes.

'Come in, sit down,' I said, standing up and gesturing towards the two exquisitely comfortable leather and wood chairs I'd bought for the clients in a moment of uncharacteristic kindness. He moved uncertainly into the office and stared at the chairs as if not entirely certain he would fit in to them. Thank you, Shelley,' I said pointedly as she continued to hang around by the door. She left, reluctantly for once.

Ted lowered himself into the chair and, surprised by the comfort, relaxed slightly. They always work, those chairs. Look like hell, feel like heaven. I pulled a new-client form towards me and said, 'I need to take a few details, Mr… Barlow, so we can see if we can give you the help you need.' Shelley might be besotted, but I wasn't giving an inch without good cause. I got the phone numbers and the address – an industrial estate in Stockport – then asked how he'd come to hear of us. I prayed he'd picked us out of Yellow Pages so I could dump him without offending anyone except Shelley, but clearly, wiping out Vohaul's hit man was to be my sole success of the day.

'Mark Buckland at SecureSure said you'd sort me out,' he said.

'You know Mark well, do you?' Foolishly, I was still hanging on to hope. Maybe he only knew Mark because SecureSure had fitted his burglar alarm. If so, I could still give him the kiss-off without upsetting the substantial discount that Mark gives us on all the hardware we order from him.

This time, Ted's smile lit up his face, revealing the same brand of boyish charm I get quite enough of at home, thank you. 'We've been mates for years. We were at school together. We still play cricket together. Opening batsmen for Stockport Viaduct, would you believe?'

I swallowed the sigh and got down to it. 'What exactly is the problem?'

'Well, if s the bank. I got this from them this morning,' he said, tentatively holding out a folded sheet of paper.

I put him out of his misery and took it from him. He looked as if I'd taken the weight of the world off his broad shoulders. I opened it up and ploughed through the mangled verbiage. The bottom line was he had £74,587.34 outstanding on a £100,000 loan and an overdraft of £6,325.67. The Royal Pennine Bank wanted their money back pronto, or they'd seize his home and his business. And their associate finance company would be writing to him separately, basically to tell him his punters wouldn't be stiffing them for any more loans either. And I thought my bank manager wrote stroppy letters. I could see why Ted was looking gutted. 'I see,' I said. 'And do you have any idea why they wrote this letter?'

He looked confused. 'Well, I rang them up as soon as I got it, like you would. And they said they couldn't discuss it on the phone, would I come in to see them. So I said I'd go in this morning. It wasn't my local branch, you see; all the little branches come under the big branch in Stockport now, so I didn't know the bloke who'd signed the letter or anything.' He paused, waiting for something.

I nodded and smiled encouragingly. That seemed to do the trick.

'Well, I went in, like I said, and I saw the chap that signed the letter. And I asked him what it was all about, and he said that if I checked my paperwork, I would see that he wasn't obliged to give me a reason. Right stuffed shirt, he was. Then he said he wasn't at liberty to discuss the bank's confidential reasons for their decision. Well, I wasn't happy with that, no way, because I've not missed a single payment on that loan, not in the four months I've had it, and I've reduced the overdraft by four grand over the last six months. I told him, I said, you're not being fair to me. And he just shrugged and said he was sorry.' Ted's voice rose in outrage. I could see why.

'So what happened then?' I prompted.

'Well, I'm afraid I lost my rag a bit, you know? I told him he wasn't bloody sorry at all, and that I wasn't going to leave matters there. Then I walked out.'

I struggled to keep a straight face. If that was Ted's idea of losing his rag a bit, I could see that someone like Shelley was just what he needed. 'You must have some idea of what's behind this, Mr… Barlow,” I prodded.

He looked genuinely baffled as he shook his head. 'I haven't a clue. I've always given the bank what they were due when it were due. This loan, I took it out so I could expand the business. We've just moved into a new industrial unit at Cheadle Heath, but I knew business was going well enough to pay back the loan on time.'

'Are you sure your orders haven't dropped back because of the recession and the bank's not just taking safety precautions?' I hazarded.

He shook his head, his hand nervously heading for his jacket pocket. He stopped, guiltily. 'Is it all right if I smoke?' he asked.

'Go right ahead,' I responded. I got up to fetch him an ashtray. “You were saying? About the effects of the recession?'

He dabbed his cigarette nervously at his lips. 'Well, to be honest, we've not seen it. I think what's happening is that people who've been trying to sell their houses have kind of given up on the idea and decided to go for some improvements to the places they're in already. You know, loft conversions for extra bedrooms, that kind of thing? Well, a lot of them go for conservatories, to give them an extra reception room, especially if they've got teenage kids. I mean, if a conservatory's double glazed and you stick a radiator in, it's as warm as a room in the house in the winter. Our business is actually up on this time last year.'

I dragged out of him that he specialized in attaching conservatories to newish properties on the kind of estates where double-glazing salesmen used to graze like cattle. That way, he only ever had to produce a handful of designs in a few standard sizes, thus cutting his overheads to a minimum. He also concentrated on a relatively compact area: the south-west side of Manchester and over to Warrington new town, the little boxes capital of the North West. The two salesmen he employed brought in more than enough orders to keep the factory busy, Ted insisted.

'And you're absolutely positive that the bank gave you no idea why they are foreclosing?' I demanded again, reluctant to believe they had been quite so bloody-minded.

He nodded, uncertainly, then said, 'Well, he said something I didn't understand.'

'Can you remember exactly what that was?' I asked in the tone of voice one uses with a particularly slow child.

He frowned as he struggled to remember. It was like watching an elephant crochet. 'Well, he did say there was an unusual and unacceptably high default rate on the remortgages, but he wouldn't say any more than that.'

'The remortgages?'

'People who can't sell their houses often remortgage to get their hands on their capital. They use the conservatory as the excuse for the remortgage. But I don't understand what that’s got to do with me,' he said plaintively.

I wasn't altogether sure that I did. But I knew a man who would. I wasn't excited by Ted Barlow's story, but I'd wrapped up the pharmaceuticals case in less time than I'd anticipated, so the week was looking slack. I thought it wouldn't kill me to play around with his problem for a day or two. I was about to ask Ted to let Shelley have a list of his clients over the last few months when he finally grabbed my attention.

'Well, I was that angry when I left the bank that I decided to go and see some of the people who had done a remortgage. I went back to the office and picked up the names and addresses and went over to Warrington. I went to four of the houses. Two of them were completely empty. And the other two had complete strangers living in them. But – and this is the really weird bit, Miss Brannigan – there were no conservatories there. They'd vanished. The conservatories had just disappeared.'