disastrous marriage. It’s just that, having reached the age of twenty-seven unencumbered (or enriched, according to some) by a child, I don’t want to live with someone else’s.
I was almost sorry that Richard was out working, since I could have done with a bit of cheering up. I got out of the shower, towelling my auburn hair as dry as I could get it. I couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it. I pulled on an old jogging suit which was when I remembered my shopping was still in the car. I was dragging the carriers out of the hatchback of my Nova when a hand on my back made my heart bump wildly in my chest. I whirled round, going straight into the ‘ready to attack’ Thai boxing position. In inner-city neighbourhoods like ours, you don’t take chances.
‘Hang about, Bruce Lee, it’s only me,’ Richard said, backing off, raising his palms in a placatory gesture. ‘Jesus, Brannigan, hold your fire,’ he added, as I moved menacingly towards him.
I bared my teeth and growled deep in my throat, just the way my coach Karen trains us to do. Richard looked momentarily terrified, then he gave that Cute Smile of his, the one that got me into this in the first place, the smile that still, I’m ashamed to admit, turns me into a slushy Mills and Boon heroine. I stopped growling and straightened up, slightly sheepishly. ‘I’ve told you before, sneak up on me outside and you risk a full set of broken ribs,’ I grouched. ‘Now you’re here, give me a hand with this.’
The effort of carrying two carrier bags and a case of Miller Lite was clearly too much for the poor lamb, who immediately slumped on one of my living-room sofas. ‘I thought you were doing your brains in to the sound of young black Manchester tonight?’ I said.
‘They decided they weren’t ready to expose themselves to the fearless scrutiny of the music press,’ he said. ‘So they’ve put me off till next week. By which time, I hope one of them’s had a brain transplant. You know, Brannigan, sometimes I wish the guy who invented the drum machine had been strangled at birth. He’d have saved the world a lot of brain ache.’ Richard shrugged his jacket off, kicked off his shoes and put his feet up.
‘Haven’t you got someone else to mither,’ I asked politely.
‘Nope. I haven’t even got any deadlines to meet. So I thought I might go and pick up a Chinese, bring it back here and litter your lounge with beansprouts out of sheer badness.’
‘Fine. As long as you promise you will not insinuate a single shirt into my ironing basket.’
‘Promise,’ he said.
An hour and a half later, I pressed my last pair of trousers. ‘Thank God,’ I sighed.
No response from the sofa. It wasn’t surprising. He was on his third joint and it would have been hard to hear World War Three over the soundtrack of the Motley Crue video he was inflicting on me. What did penetrate, however, was the high-pitched electronic bleep of my phone. I grabbed the phone and the TV remote, hitting the mute button as I switched the phone to ‘talk’. That got a reaction. ‘Hey,’ he protested, then subsided immediately as he registered that I was using the phone.
‘Hello,’ I said. Never give your name or number when you answer the phone, especially if you’ve got an ex-directory number. In these days of phones with last number re-dial buttons, you never know who you’re talking to. I have a friend who discovered the name and number of her husband’s mistress that way. I know I’ve got nothing to fear on that score, but I like to develop habits of caution. You never know when they’ll come in necessary.
‘Kate? It’s Alexis.’ She sounded the kind of pissed off she gets when she’s trying to put together a story against the clock and the news editor is standing behind her chair breathing down her neck. But the time was all wrong for her deadlines.
‘Oh, hi. How’s tricks?’ I said.
‘Is this a good time?’
‘Good as any. I’ve eaten, I’m still under the limit and I still have my clothes on,’ I told her.
‘We need your help, Kate. I don’t like to ask, but I don’t know who else would know where to begin.’
This was no pick-your-brains business call. When Alexis wants my help with a story, she doesn’t apologize. She knows that kind of professional help is a two-way street. ‘Tell me the score, I’ll tell you if I can help.’
‘You know that piece of land we’re supposed to be buying? The one I showed you the pics of yesterday? Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ I soothed. She sounded like she was about to explode.
‘Well, you’re not going to believe this. Chris went up there today to do some measurements. She figured that if she’s going to be designing these houses, she needs to have a feel for the lie of the land so the properties can blend in with the flow of the landscape, right?’
‘Right. So what’s the problem?’
‘The problem is, she gets up there to find a couple of surveyors marking out the plots. Well, she’s a bit confused, you know, because as far as we know none of the other self-builders we’re working with have asked anyone to start work yet, on account of we haven’t completed on it yet. So, she parks up in the Land Rover and watches them for half an hour or so. Then it dawns on her that the plots they’re marking out are different altogether from the plots we’ve been sold. So she goes over to them and gets into conversation. You know Chris, she’s not like me. I’d have been out there gripping them by the throat demanding to know what the hell they thought they were up to.’ Alexis paused for breath, but not long enough for me to respond.
‘But not Chris. She lets them tell her all about the land and how they’re marking out the plots for the people who have bought them. Half a dozen have been bought by a local small builder, the rest by individuals, they tell her. Well, Chris is more than a little bewildered, on account of what they are telling her is completely at odds with the situation as we know it. So she tells them who she is and what she’s doing there and asks them if they’ve got any proof of what they’re saying, which of course they don’t have, but they tell her the name of the solicitor who’s acting for the purchasers.’
This time, I managed to get in, ‘I’m with you so far,’ before the tide of Alexis’s narrative swept back in. Richard was looking at me very curiously. He’s not accustomed to hearing me take such a minor role in a telephone conversation.
‘So Chris drives down to this solicitor’s in Ramsbottom. She manages to convince their conveyancing partner that this is urgent, so he gives her five minutes. When she explains the situation, he says the land was sold by a builder and that the sales were all completed two days ago.’ Alexis stopped short, as if what she’d said should make everything clear.
‘I’m sorry, Alexis, I suspect I’m being really stupid here, but what exactly do you mean?’
‘I mean the land’s already been sold!’ she howled. ‘We handed over five grand for a piece of land that had already been sold. I just don’t understand how it could have happened! And I don’t even know where to start trying to find out.’ The anguish in her voice was heartbreaking. I knew how much she and Chris wanted this project to work, for all sorts of reasons. Now, it looked as if the money they’d saved to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder had been thrown away.
‘OK, OK, I’ll look into it,’ I soothed. ‘But I’m going to need some more info from you. What was the name of the solicitor in Ramsbottom that Chris saw?’
‘Just
