Alexis groaned. “All I want is a lever to get our money back, Kate. I don't care if he comes out of it all smelling of roses.”
“I hear and obey, oh lord,” I said, getting out of the car. “Now shift this wheelie bin and let the dog see the rabbit.”
She waved as she drove away and I slipped the Fiesta into the space she'd left. I flipped open the laptop and accessed the WORK.L directory. The files were sorted into two directories. One was called DUPLICAT, the other RV. The files in RV each related to a house purchase. In some cases, the house had been sold about five months later, always at a substantial profit. I was about to check out the addresses in my
A-Z
when a white Transit van appeared in the gateway of Lomax's yard. My target was at the wheel. Fast as I could, I closed the laptop and dumped it on the passenger seat.
Don't let anyone tell you being a private eye is a glamorous way to earn a living. I followed Lomax from his yard to his house. Then I sat in the car for two hours, plodding wearily through Martin Cheetham's files. The houses in RV were all in the seedier areas south and east of Manchester city centerâGorton, Longsight, Levenshulme. The kind of terraced streets where you can buy run-down property cheap, tart it up and make a modest killing. Or at least, you could do until the bottom started to drop out of the North West property market a few months ago. Looking at these files, it seemed that Lomax and Cheetham had been doing this on a pretty substantial scale. I did a quick mental calculation and
reckoned they'd turned over getting on for two million quid in the previous year. Since my mental arithmetic is on a par with my quantum mechanics, I decided I'd got it wrong and scribbled the sums out in my notebook. I got the same answer.
Suddenly we were in a whole new ball game. I wasn't looking at a pair of small-time operators chiselling a few grand on a dodgy land deal. I was looking at big money. They could have cleared as much as three-quarters of a million in the last year. But they must have had a substantial pot to buy the houses in the first place. Where the hell had the seed money come from to generate that kind of business?
While I'd been doing my sums, the last of the light had faded. I began to feel pretty exposed, which in turn made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I couldn't help remembering that less than a week ago someone had wanted to warn me off something so badly they'd taken the risk of killing me. If they were still around, I made a hell of a target, sitting all by myself in a car.
The answer to my fear was just behind me. I was parked on the opposite side of the street to Brian Lomax's house, about thirty yards further up the hill, outside a substantial Victorian pile with a Bed and Breakfast sign swinging slightly in the chilly wind. I collected a small overnight holdall from the boot, stuffed the law books into it and walked up the short drive.
I'd have taken the landlady on as an investigator any day. By the time I'd paid for a night in advance and she'd left me alone in my spotless little room, I felt like I'd had a bright light shining in my eyes for days. Never mind grace under pressure; there should be a private investigators' Oscar for lies under pressure. At least I was in a suit, which made it easier to be convincing about my imaginary role as a commercial solicitor acting for a local client who was interested in buying property in Manchester to expand his business. She'd gone for the lie, agog at my close-lipped refusal to breach client confidentiality. I was half-convinced that, come the morning, she'd be tailing me just for the hell of picking up some juicy local gossip.
My room was, as requested, at the front of the house, and on the second floor, which gave me a better view of Brian Lomax's house
than I'd had from the car. Glad to get out of tights and heels, I changed into the leggings, sweatshirt and Reeboks that had been relegated to the emergency overnight kit and settled down in the dark to keep watch. I passed the time dictating my client reports for PharmAce and Ted Barlow. That would take Shelley's mind off romance for a couple of hours.
Nell arrived home about half past six, parking her GTi in the garage. It was gone nine before I saw some more action. Lomax appeared round the side of the house, walking along his drive. He turned right and started towards town. I was out of the room and down the stairs a hell of a lot more quickly than I'd have been able to manage just a couple of days before. If Mortensen and Brannigan ever take on an assistant, I think we're going to have to stipulate “must be quick healer” on the job description.
He was still in sight as I ran out of the guest house, trying to look like a jogger nipping out for her evening run. At the traffic lights, he turned left, walking up the hill towards the market place. I reached the corner in time to see him entering a pub. Wonderful. I didn't even have a jacket on, and I couldn't follow him into the pub because he knew only too well who I was. Furious, I walked right up to the pub and peered through the stained-glass door. Through a blue haze, I saw Lomax at the bar, talking and laughing with a group of other men, all around the same age. By the looks of it, he was having his regular Thursday night down his local with the lads, rather than meeting a business contact. That much was a relief. I stepped back and had a look round. Across the street, on the opposite corner, there was a fish and chip shop that advertised an upstairs dining room. I had nothing left to lose.
It's amazing how long I can take to work my way through steak pudding, chips, mushy peas, gravy, a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter. Oddly enough, I actually enjoyed it, especially since I'd missed lunch. Best of all was the spotted dick and custard that tasted better than anything my mother used to make. I managed to make the whole lot string out until half past ten, then it was back out into the cold. Of course, it started to rain as soon as I emerged from the chippy. I crossed to the pub and had another look through the glass. The scene hadn't changed much, except that the pub had
got busier. Lomax was still standing at the bar with his cronies, a pint pot in his fist. I couldn't see any point in getting soaked while he got pissed, so I jogged back to the guest house, my dinner sitting in my stomach like a concrete block.
He came back, alone, just on half past eleven. Five minutes later, a light went on in an upstairs room and he appeared at the window to close the curtains. Ten minutes after that, another light went on and Nell did the same thing in her room. I didn't bother waiting for their lights to go out. I bet I was asleep before they were.
I bet I was up before them too. I'd set my alarm for six, and I was out of the shower by quarter past. Lomax's curtains opened at a quarter to seven, and my heart sank. My landlady didn't start serving breakfast till eight, and it looked like he'd be out of the house by then. I consoled myself with the individually wrapped digestive biscuits supplied with the tea- and coffee-making facilities. (Fine if you like sterilized milk, tea bags filled with house dust and powdered instant coffee that tastes like I imagine strychnine does.)
Wearily, I packed my bag and returned to the car. I was beginning to wonder if there was any point to this surveillance. I sometimes think my boredom threshold's too low for this job. Twenty minutes later, the nose of a white E-type appeared in his gateway. I'd seen the Jag sitting next to Nell's GTi in the garage the night I'd spotted the T. R. Harris signboard. The classic car's long bonnet emerged cautiously, until I could see Lomax himself was at the wheel. He drove past me without so much as a glance. I watched him round the bend in my rear-view mirror, then quickly reversed out of the guest house drive and sped after him.
I'd thought the road from Manchester had been bad enough. The one we took out of Buxton was that nightmare you wake up from in a clammy sweat. The road corkscrewed up through a series of tight bends with sheer drops on the other side, just like in the Alps. Then it became a narrow bucking switchback that made me grateful for missing breakfast. The visibility was appalling. I couldn't decide if it was fog or cloud I was driving through, but either way I was glad there weren't too many side turnings for the E-type to disappear into. What left me gasping with disbelief was
the amount of traffic on this track from hell. Lorries, vans, cars by the dozen, all bucketing along as if they were in the fast lane of the M6.
Eventually, we left the gray-green moors behind and dropped into the red brick of Macclesfield. I felt like an explorer emerging from the jungle after a close encounter with the cannibals. These were proper roads, with traffic lights, roundabouts, and white lines up the middle. Through Macclesfield, we emerged into the country again, but this was more my idea of what countryside should be. None of those dreadful moors, heather stretching to infinity, dilapidated dry-stone walls with holes in where someone failed to make the bend, grim pubs stranded in the middle of nowhere and trees that grow at an angle of forty-five degrees to the prevailing wind. No, this was much more like it. Neat fields, pretty farmhouses, Little Chefs and garden centers, notices nailed to trees announcing craft fairs and car boot sales. The kind of country you might just be tempted to take a little run out to in the car.
We roared down the slip road of the M6 at 8:14, according to my dashboard clock. I began to feel excited. Whatever Lomax was up to, it was more interesting than repairing guttering. As the speedo hit ninety, I really began to miss my Nova. It may not have looked much, but it was a car that only really ever seemed to get into its stride over eighty. Unlike the Fiesta, which had an interesting shake in the steering wheel between eighty-two and eighty-eight. As we changed lanes to head west down the M62, I remembered the phone call from Alexis that had started this latest phase of the operation. A passport application form.
To obtain a full British passport, you have to fill in a complicated form, have your photographic identity attested by a supposedly reputable member of the community who's known you for at least two years, and send it off to the passport office. Then you sit back and wait for a few weeks while the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slow. If you're in a hurry, you take yourself off to one of the five passport offices on the UK mainlandâLondon, Liverpool, Newport, Peterborough or Glasgow. I remember the performance well. Richard and I booked a fortnight's holiday in July driving round California in a Winnebago. Two days before we
were due to leave, he materialized in my office mid-morning to announce his passport was out of date. Of course, he was too busy to sort it out himself, could I possibly �
If you get there on the stroke of nine, they deign to take your paperwork off you and tell you to come back in four hours' time. If you're late, you have to wait in the queue and pray they get round to you before closing time. If that was where Brian Lomax was headed, he was clearly determined to avoid queuing all day.
He headed straight for the center of Liverpool, and parked his car in the multi-story nearest the passport office at ten to nine. I stayed in my car and watched him through the door of India Buildings. He might well have been headed for any of the offices on any floor except the fifth, but I doubted it. He was out within twenty minutes but, instead of going straight back to his car, he headed off towards the city center. I swore steadily under my breath as I tried to keep him in sight. As long as he didn't turn into a pedestrian precinct, I might just be OK.
I was and I wasn't. About a mile from the passport office, Brian Lomax marched purposefully into a travel agency.
23
I burst through the door, fighting back the tears, rushed up to the assistant and wailed, “Where's he taking her? Tell me! I've got a right to know where he's going with the bitch!” Then I burst into tears and collapsed into the chair that Brian Lomax had just vacated.
“I know it's stupid, but I still love him,” I sobbed. “Whatever he might have done with that cow, he's still my husband.” Through the tears I could see the travel agent looking completely stricken. Her mouth was opening and closing.
“For God's sake, put me out of my misery! Let me know the worst. You're a woman, you should understand,” I added, accusingly.
Another woman pushed the younger assistant out of the way. “What is it, queen?” she said soothingly.
“My h-husband,” I hiccuped. “He's got a girlfriend, I just know it. So I've been following him. When he came in here, I thought, he's taking her away, never mind that me and the kids haven't had a holiday for two years. And something just snapped. You've got to tell me,” I added, on a rising note. Then I gulped noisily.
“Sharon,” the older woman said. “The gentleman who was just in.”
“Lomax,” I said. “That's his name. Brian Lomax.”
“Mr. Lomax,” the woman echoed. “What was he after, Sharon?”
“I thought we weren't supposed to discuss clients?” the younger girl muttered.
“Have you got no heart, girl? That could be you one day. Us girls have got to stick together,” the woman said. Then to me she said,
“Men. They're all the same, eh, girl?” Thank God for the legendary hearts of gold of Liverpudlians.
I nodded and made a great show of trying to get myself under control while Sharon nervously jabbed the keys of her computer with nails that would have had Cruella de Vil looking to her laurels. “There, Dot,” she said, pointing at the screen.
The older woman nodded sagely and swung the screen round so I could see it for myself. “Whatever he might be up to, he's not going off with her,” she said. “Look. He's only booked for one person. Fly/drive to Florida. Flight, car hire and accommodation vouchers, including single person supplement.” As she spoke, I was taking it all in. Airline, flight number, price. Flying out of Manchester on Monday night. “He paid in cash an' all,” Dot added. “Now that's something we don't see a lot of in here these days.”