Kick Back (22 page)

“Go on then,” I challenged, convinced I could unravel any theory his twisted mind could come up with.

Richard swallowed his mouthful, leaned back in his seat and polished his glasses in a parody of the learned academics who pontificate on TV. “OK. He's had this showdown with you then
he's rushed off to meet Lomax. As a result of all this, he's really wound up, but he thinks he's handled it beautifully and he deserves a treat. So he arranges that what's-her-name, the girlfriend, is going to come around for a bit of afternoon delight. Now, from what you've told me about his little treasure trove, who knows what that pair get up to when they're getting their rocks off? Just supposing he's staged this tableau to get her going—he's all done up in his drag and tied up and pretending to hang himself when she arrives. Only it gets out of hand and he snuffs it. OK so far?”

I nodded, reluctantly. Certainly, Cheetham had had enough time alone in the house for that scenario to be feasible. “OK,” I sighed.

“So what would your reaction be if you arrived at your boyfriend's house to find him hanging dead from the banisters in a frock? Especially if you knew he was into some hooky business that was going to come on top now he's popped his clogs? Remember, for all you know, the lovely lady could be right up to her eyeballs in his little schemes. You'd want to cover your back, wouldn't you?” He gave me that smile of his, the one that got me in this mess in the first place.

“You would indeed,” I conceded.

“So Lomax turns up like a bat out of hell and the pair of them clear out everything that might be remotely connected to Cheetham's little rackets. Lomax takes off with all the incriminating documents and what's-her-name …?” He gave me an inquiring look.

“Nell,” I prompted him.

“Yeah, Little Nell, how could I forget?”

“This is no time for obscene rugby songs,” I said.

“Wrong sport, Brannigan.
You'll Never Walk Alone
is more my speed than
The Ball of Kirriemuir
. Anyway, as you so correctly pointed out, any fool knows these days that forensic science could place Little Nell not just at the scene of the crime but in the bed if they'd bonked in it since the last time the sheets were changed. She does nothing more than take off the dirty linen so she can wash it in private. Meanwhile, Lomax goes down Cheetham's office and clears out the safe and has it away on his toes with the
computer discs in the office. Pick the holes in that,” he ended triumphantly.

I thought about it for a moment, then I jumped to my feet. “Hold everything,” I said on my way through to my spare room, which doubles as study and computer room. I pulled out a book on forensic medicine written for the popular market that Richard had bought me for my birthday as a kind of joke. I ran my finger down the index and turned to the section on body temperature. “Got it!” I shouted. Richard appeared in the doorway, looking crestfallen. I pointed to the relevant sentence, “‘The rule of thumb applied by pathologists is that a clothed body will cool in air at between two and five degrees Fahrenheit per hour,' it says here,” I said. “And, when I touched him, he was the same temperature as I was, near as dammit. No way was he between four and ten degrees colder than me, which he should have been if he'd died when you suggested.”

Richard took the book from me and read the relevant section. As usual, the journalist in him took over and he found all sorts of fascinating things he simply had to read about. Leaving him to it, I started to clear up the debris of dinner. I'd just dumped the tinfoil containers in the bin when he reappeared, brandishing the book with a look of pure triumph.

“You should have kept reading,” he said sanctimoniously. “That way, you wouldn't have given me half a tale. Look,” he added, pointing to a paragraph on the following page.

“‘Typically, death by asphyxiation raises the body temperature. This must be taken into account in estimates of the time of death, and is known to have caused confusion in some historical cases.'” I read. “Bollocks,” I said. “OK, you win,” I sighed. “I'm letting my imagination run away with me.”

“So you accept my theory?” Richard asked, a look of total disbelief on his face.

“I guess so,” I admitted.

“There's one good thing about it,” he said. “I mean, I know I've just deprived you of all the excitement of chasing a murderer, but look on the bright side. It puts Alexis in the clear.”

“I never thought for a moment she wasn't in the clear,” I lied frostily.

“Course you didn't,” Richard said, with a broad wink. “Anyway, now I've saved you all the work of a murder hunt, do I get a reward?”

I checked my body out for bruises and stiffness. I was beginning to heal, no doubt about it. I leaned into Richard's warmth and murmured, “Your place or mine?”

The bulging eyes stared fixedly at me, the blue lips twitching some message I could neither hear nor read. I moved back, but the face kept following me. I shouted at it, and the sound of my voice woke me up with the kind of staring-eyed shock that sets the adrenaline racing through the veins. The clock said six, Richard was lying on his stomach, breathing not quite heavily enough to be called snoring, and I was wide awake with Martin Cheetham's face accusing me.

Even if he hadn't been murdered, Nell and Lomax had behaved unforgivably, always supposing there was anyone still around to forgive them. Nell's actions in particular sickened me. I know I couldn't behave like that if someone I'd been lovers with was hanging dead in the hall. There must have been a lot at stake for Nell and Lomax to have had the nerve to carry off their cover-up and, although the voice of reason said it was none of my business, I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Since I was awake anyway, I decided to do something useful. I slipped out of Richard's bed and cut through the conservatory to my house. A steaming shower banished the morning stiffness that still lingered in my muscles, and a strong cup of coffee kick-started my brain. I chose a pair of bottle green trousers and a matching sweater to go under the russet padded silk blouson that I'd picked up for a song on Strangeways market.

It was a quarter to seven when I parked outside Alexis's house. As I'd expected, her car was still in the drive. I knew her routine of old. Up at six, in the bath with a pot of coffee, the phone and her notebook at five past. Morning calls to the cops, then out of the bath at half past. Then toast and the tabloids. I estimated she'd be
finishing her second slice of toast about now. Unfortunately, she wouldn't be in the office at seven
this
morning.

I looked through the kitchen window as I knocked on the door. Alexis dropped her toast at the sound of the knock. I waved and grinned at her. With a look of resignation, she opened the door.

“I have a question for you,” I announced.

“Come in, why don't you?” Alexis said as I walked across the kitchen and switched the kettle on.

“When you left Tamarind Grove yesterday afternoon, did you already know that Martin Cheetham was dead?” I asked conversationally, spooning coffee into a mug.

Alexis's face froze momentarily. Always pale, she seemed to go sheet white. “How the hell did you know about that?” she asked intensely. If she used that tone of voice professionally, she'd get all sorts of confessions she wasn't looking for.

“I don't suppose you remember a red Little Rascal van that you nearly drove into, but that was me. I remember it particularly because for a brief moment, I wondered what Bill would say if I wrote off a second company vehicle inside a week,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere a bit.

“I might have known,” Alexis sighed. “If you're brewing up, I'll have another cup.”

I made the coffees and said, “I'm listening.”

Alexis lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags before she spoke. I sometimes think it must be lovely to have an instant trank permanently to hand. Then I think about my lungs.

“I'd had a couple of drinks at lunchtime. I wasn't pissed, just a bit belligerent. So I bought a can of spray paint. I was going to spray some rude graffiti on Cheetham's house,” she said, looking as embarrassed as she must have felt. “Anyway, I got there and there was his car in the drive. I thought about spraying ‘You dirty rat' on the bonnet, then I realized if he was home I might as well give him a piece of my mind. So I rang the doorbell. There was no reply, so I looked through the letter box. And I saw these feet, legs, just dangling there.”

“Tell me about it,” I said with feeling, remembering my own experience.

“So I took off like a bat out of hell,” Alexis said, dropping her head so that her haystack of unruly black hair hid her face.

“You didn't phone the cops?” I asked.

“How could I? I didn't have any legit reason for being there. I didn't even know who the body was. And I couldn't have done it anonymously, could I? Half the cops in Manchester know who it is on the phone the minute I open my gob.” She was right. Anyone who'd ever spoken to Alexis would remember that smoky Liverpudlian voice.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I should have rung you about it last night. I was just too wiped out. So, when did you realize it was Cheetham?”

“When I did my calls this morning. They told me about it as a routine non-suspicious death. If he hadn't been a solicitor, I doubt they'd even have mentioned it. It made my stomach turn over, I can tell you.”

“Any details?” I asked.

“Not a lot. Unattributed, I got that he was wearing women's clothing and playing bondage games. According to the DI at the scene, he had a proper little torture chamber in his wardrobe. They reckon he died some time yesterday afternoon. He didn't have any form for sexual offenses. Not so much as a caution. He's not even on their list of people they know get up to naughties in their spare time. They don't think there was anyone else involved, and they're not treating it as a suspicious death. They don't even think it was suicide, just an accident. All I can say is thank God he didn't have nosy neighbors, or else the lads might be asking me what exactly I was doing kicking his door in yesterday afternoon.” Alexis managed a faint smile. “Especially if they knew I had a private eye working on how to recover the five grand he helped to con me out of.”

“You weren't the only person who was there yesterday,” I said, and went on to fill her in on the events of the afternoon. “I was convinced they'd killed him,” I added. “But Richard persuaded me that I was just seeing dragons in the flames.”

“So what happens now?” Alexis asked.

“Well, theoretically, we could just ignore the whole thing, and I
could still follow Lomax like you asked me to and try to get some money back from him. The problem is that now Cheetham's dead, I'm afraid Lomax might try to deny any criminal involvement in the whole thing and blame it all on Cheetham.”

“You don't really think he'd get away with that, do you?” Alexis demanded, lighting up another cigarette.

“I don't honestly know,” I admitted. “Personally, I think there's been a lot more going down between Lomax and Cheetham than we know about. And if there's any proof of a connection other than the fact that I know I've seen them together, it could be buried in the other stuff. So I want to keep digging.”

Alexis nodded. “So how can I help?”

 

There are parts of Greater Manchester where it wouldn't be too big a shock to encounter a shop catering for the needs of transsexuals and transvestites. A back street in Oldham isn't one of them. I find it hard to imagine anyone in Oldham doing anything more sexually radical than the missionary position, which only goes to show what a limited imagination I have. The locals clearly didn't have a problem with Trances, since there was nothing discreet about the shopfront, sandwiched rather unfortunately as it was between a butcher's and a junk shop.

On the way over, Alexis had told me about the shop and its owner. Cassandra Cliff had endured a brief spell of notoriety in the gutter press a few years previously when some muck-raking journo had discovered that the actress who was one of the regulars in the country's favorite soap opera was in fact a male-to-female transsexual. In the flurry of “Sex Swap Soap Star” stories that followed, it emerged that Cassandra, previously Kevin, had been living as a woman for a dozen years, and that no one among cast or production team had a clue that she wasn't biologically of the same gender as the gossipy chip-shop owner she played. Of course, the production company of
Northerners
denied that the uncovering of Cassandra's secret would make any difference whatsoever to their attitude to her.

Two months later, Cassandra's character perished in a tragic accident when the extension her husband was building to their terraced
house collapsed on her. The production company blandly denied they had dumped her because of her sex change, but that didn't much help Cassandra, on the scrap heap at thirty-seven. “She didn't let them get away with it,” Alexis said. “She sold her own inside story to one of the Sunday tabloids, dishing the dirt on all the nation's idols. Then with the money she set up Trances, and a monthly magazine for transvestites and transsexuals. She's got so much bottle, Kate. You can't help respecting Cassie.”

Alexis skirted the one-way system and cut round the back of the magistrates' court. Modern concrete boxes and grimy red brick terraced shops were mixed higgledy-piggledy along almost every street, a seemingly random and grotesque assortment that filled me with the desire to construct a cage in the middle of it and make the town planners live there for a week among the chip papers blowing in the wind and the empty soft-drink cans rattling along the gutters. I tried to ignore the depressing townscape and asked, “So how come you know her so well? What's she got to do with the crime beat?”