Donovan Carmichael was a second-year engineering student at UMIST. He’d just started eking out his pathetic student grant by working part time for me as a process-server, doing the bread and butter work that pays his mother’s wages. Did I mention Shelley the office tyrant was his mother? And that she hated the thought that her highly educated baby boy might be tempted to throw it all away to become a maverick of the mean streets like her boss? That probably explained why said boy was using his one phone call on me rather than on his doting mother.
‘What for?’
‘Being black, I think,’ he said angrily.
‘What happened?’
‘I was in Hale Barns.’ That explained a lot. They don’t have a lot of six-feet-three-inch black lads in Hale Barns, especially not ones with shoulders wider than the flashy sports cars in their four-car garages. It would lower the property values too much.
‘Doing what?’
‘Working,’ he said. ‘You know? Trying to make that delivery that came in yesterday afternoon?’ His way of telling me there were other ears on our conversation. I knew he was referring to a domestic violence injunction we’d been hired to serve. The husband had broken his wife’s cheekbone the last time he’d had a bad day. If Donovan succeeded in serving the paper, there might not be a next time. But there were very good reasons why Donovan was reluctant to reveal his target or our client’s name to the cops. Once you get outside the high-profile city-centre divisions that are constantly under scrutiny, you find that most policemen don’t have a lot of sympathy for the victims of domestic violence. Especially when the guy who’s been doing the battering is one of the city’s biggest football stars. He’d given a whole new meaning to the word ‘striker’, but that wouldn’t stop him being a hero in the eyes of the boys in blue.
‘Are they charging you with anything?’
‘They’ve not interviewed me yet.’
‘Which nick are you in?’
‘Altrincham.’
I looked at my watch. I stuck my head round the side of the skip. They were about to go for a take. ‘I’ll get someone there as soon as I can. Till then, say nothing. OK?’ I said in a low voice.
I didn’t wait for a reply, just ended the call and tiptoed back to the set. Gloria and the idiot boy she was acting opposite went through their interaction for the eighth time and the director announced she was satisfied. Gloria heaved a seismic sigh and walked off the set, dragging Brenda’s beehive from her head as she approached me. ‘That’s me for today, chuck,’ she said. ‘Drop me at home and you can have the rest of the day off.’
‘Are you staying in?’ I asked, falling into step beside her as we walked to the dressing room she shared with Rita Hardwick, the actress who played Thelma Torrance, the good-time girl who’d never grown up.
‘I am that. I’ve got to pick up next month’s scripts from the office on the way out. I’ll be lying in the Jacuzzi learning my lines till bedtime. It’s not a pretty sight, and I don’t need a spectator. Especially one that charges me for the privilege,’ she added with an earthy chuckle.
I tried not to look as pleased as I felt. I could have sent a lawyer out to rescue Donovan, but it didn’t sound as if things had reached the point where I couldn’t sort it out myself, and lawyers cost either money I couldn’t afford or favours I didn’t want to owe.
Two hours later, I was walking Donovan back to my car. The police don’t like private eyes, but faced with me threatening a lawsuit for false imprisonment and racial harassment, they were only too happy to release Donovan from the interview room where he’d been pacing the floor for every one of the minutes it had taken me to get there.
‘I didn’t do anything, you know,’ Donovan complained. His anger seethed just below the surface. I couldn’t blame him, but for all our sakes, I hoped the cycle ride back into town would get it out of his system.
‘According to the copper I spoke to, one of the neighbours saw you sneaking round the back of the house and figured you for a burglar,’ I said drily.
‘Yeah, right. All I was doing was checking if he was in the snooker room round the back, like his wife said he usually is if he’s not training in the morning. I reckoned if he was there, and I walked right up to the French windows, he’d be bound to come over and open up, at least to give me a bollocking. When I saw the place was empty, I came back down the drive and went and sat on a wall down the road, where I could see him come home. It’s not like I was hiding,’ he continued. ‘They only arrested me because I’m black. Anybody black on the street in Hale Barns has got to be a burglar, right?’
‘Or a drug dealer. The rich have got to get their coke and heroin from somewhere,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘Where’s your bike?’
‘Hale Barns. Chained to a lamppost, I hope.’
‘Let’s go back out there and do it,’ I sighed.
The leafy lanes of Hale Barns were dripping a soft rain down our necks as we walked along the grass verge that led to our target’s house. Wrought-iron gates stood open, revealing a long drive done in herringbone brick. There was enough of it there to build a semi. At the top of the drive, a matching pair of Mercedes sports cars were parallel parked. My heart sank. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I muttered.
We walked up the drive towards a vast white hacienda-style ranch that would have been grandiose in California. In Cheshire, it just looked silly. I leaned on the doorbell. There was a long pause, then the door swung silently open without warning. I recognized his face from the back pages of the Chronicle. For once, I didn’t have to check ID before I served the papers. ‘Yeah?’ he said, frowning. ‘Who are you?’
I leaned forward and stuffed the papers down the front of the towelling robe that was all he was wearing. ‘I’m Kate Brannigan, and you are well and truly served,’ I said.
As I spoke, over his shoulder, I saw a woman in a matching robe emerge from an archway. Like him, she looked as if she’d been in bed, and not for an afternoon nap. I recognized her from the Chronicle too. From the diary pages. Former model Bo Robinson. Better known these days as the wife of the man I’d just served with the injunction her solicitor had sweated blood to get out of a district judge.
Now I remembered what I’d hated most about my own days as a process-server.
The last thing Donovan had said before he’d pedalled off to the university library was, ‘Don’t tell my mum I got arrested, OK? Not even as a joke. Not unless you want her to put the blocks on me working for you again.’
I’d agreed. Jokes are supposed to be funny, after all. Unfortunately, the cops at Altrincham weren’t in on the deal. What I didn’t know was that while I’d been savouring the ambience of their lovely foyer (decor by the visually challenged, furnishings by a masochist, posters from a template unchanged since 1959) the desk sergeant had been calling the offices of Brannigan & Co to check that the auburn-haired midget and the giant in the sweat suit really were operatives of the agency and not a pair of smart-mouthed burglars on the make.
I’d barely put a foot inside the door when Shelley’s voice hit me like a blast furnace. ‘Nineteen years old and never been inside a police station,’ came the opening salvo.
