have,’ I said through clenched teeth. Ironing out the problems in my relationship with Richard would have taken the entire staff of an industrial laundry a month. It had taken us rather longer.
‘So what’s going on?’ Alexis demanded belligerently. ‘What’s so important that you have to give everybody a heart attack thinking me laddo’s popped his clogs?’
‘Can’t you resist the journalistic exaggeration for once?’ I sighed. ‘You know and I know that nobody under sixty routinely reads the deaths column. I had to use a real name and address, and I figured with Richard out of town till the end of the week, nobody’s going to be any the wiser if I used his,’ I explained. ‘And he won’t be, unless you tell him.’
‘That depends on whether you tell me what this is all in aid of,’ Alexis said cunningly, her outrage at having wasted her sympathy a distant memory now she had the scent of a possible story in her nostrils. ‘I mean, I think he’s going to notice something’s going on,’ she added, sweeping an eloquent arm through the air. ‘I don’t think he knows that carpet has a pattern.’
‘I took Polaroids before I started,’ I told her. ‘When I’m finished, I’ll put it back the way it was before. He won’t notice a thing.’
‘He will when I show him the cutting,’ Alexis countered. ‘Spill, KB. What’re you playing at? What’s with the grieving widow number?’ She leaned back and lit a cigarette. So much for my clean ashtrays.
‘Can’t tell you,’ I said sweetly. ‘Client confidentiality.’
‘Bollocks,’ Alexis scoffed. ‘It’s me you’re talking to, KB, not the bizzies. Come on, give. Or else the first thing Richard sees when he comes home is …’
I closed my eyes and muttered an old gypsy curse under my breath. It’s not that I speak Romany; it’s just that I’ve refused to buy lucky white heather once too often. Believe me, I know exactly what those old gypsies say. I weighed up my options. I could always call her bluff and hope she wouldn’t tell Richard, on the basis that the two of them maintain this pretence of despising each other’s area of professional expertise and extend that into the personal arena at every possible opportunity. On the other hand, the prospect of explaining to Richard that I was responsible for the report of his death didn’t appeal either. I gave in. ‘It’s got to be off the record, then,’ I said ungraciously.
‘Why?’ Alexis demanded.
‘Because with a bit of luck it will be sub judice in a day or two. And if you blow it before then, the bad guys will be out of town on the next train and we’ll never nail them.’
‘Anybody ever tell you you’ve got melodramatic tendencies, KB?’ Alexis asked with a grin.
‘A bit rich, coming from a woman who started today’s story with, “Undercover police swooped on a top drug dealer’s love nest in a dawn raid this morning,” when we both know that all that happened was a couple of guys from the Drugs Squad turned over some two-bit dealer’s girlfriend’s bedsit,’ I commented.
‘Yeah, well, you gotta give it a bit of topspin or the boy racers on the newsdesk kill it. But that’s not what we’re talking about. I want to know why Richard’s supposed to be dead.’
‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ I started in a last attempt to lose her interest.
Alexis grinned and blew a long stream of smoke down her nostrils. Puff the Magic Dragon would have signed up for a training course on the spot. ‘Great,’ she enthused. ‘My favourite kind.’
‘The client’s a firm of monumental masons,’ I said. ‘They’re the biggest provider of stone memorials in South Manchester. They came to us because they’ve been getting a string of complaints from people saying they’ve paid for gravestones that haven’t turned up.’
‘Somebody’s been nicking gravestones?’
‘Worse than that,’ I said, meaning it. Far as I was concerned, I was dealing with total scumbags on this one. ‘My clients are the incidental victims of a really nasty scam. From what I’ve managed to find out so far, there are at least two people involved, a man and a woman. They turn up on the doorsteps of the recently bereaved and claim to be representing my client’s firm. They produce these business cards which have the name of my clients, complete with address and phone number, all absolutely kosher. The only thing wrong with them is that the names on the cards are completely unknown to my client. They’re not using the names of his staff. But this pair are smart. They always come in the evening, out of business hours, so anyone who’s a bit suspicious can’t ring my client’s office and check up on them. And they come single-handed. Nothing heavy. Where it’s a woman who’s died, it’s the woman who shows up. Where it’s a man, it’s the bloke.’
‘So what’s the pitch?’ Alexis asked.
‘They do the tea-and-sympathy routine, then they explain that they’re adopting the new practice of visiting people in their homes because it’s a more personal approach to choosing an appropriate memorial. Then they go into a special-offer routine, just like they were selling double glazing or something. You know the sort of thing – unique opportunity, special shipment of Italian marble or Aberdeen granite, you could be one of the people we use for testimonial purposes, limited period offer.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Alexis groaned. ‘And if they don’t sign up tonight, they’ve lost the opportunity, am I right, or am I right?’
‘You’re right. So these poor sods whose lives are already in bits because they’ve just lost their partner or husband or wife, or mother or father, or son or daughter get done up like a kipper just so some smart bastard can go out and buy another designer suit or a mobile bloody phone,’ I said angrily. I know all the rules about never letting yourself get emotionally involved with the jobs, but there are times when staying cool and disinterested would be the mark of inhumanity rather than good sense. This was one of them.
Alexis lit another cigarette, shaking her head. ‘Pure gobshites,’ she said in disgust. ‘Twenty-four-carat shysters. So they take the cash and disappear into the night, leaving your clients to pick up the pieces when the headstone remains a ghostly presence?’
‘Something like that. They really are a pair of unscrupulous bastards. I’ve been interviewing some of the people who have been had over, and a couple of them have told me the woman has actually driven them to holes in the wall to get money for a cash deposit.’ I shook my head, remembering the faces of the victims again. They showed a procession of emotions, each more painful to watch than the last. There was grief revisited in the setting of the scene for me, then anger as they recalled how they’d been stung, then a mixture of shame and resentment that they’d fallen for it. ‘And there’s no point in me telling them that in their shoes even a streetwise old cynic like me would probably have fallen for it. Because I probably would have done, that’s the worst of it,’ I added bitterly.
‘Grief gets you like that,’ Alexis agreed. ‘The last thing you’re expecting is to be taken for a ride. Look at how many families end up not speaking to each other for years because someone has done something outrageous in the immediate aftermath of death, when everyone’s staggering round feeling like their brain’s in the food processor along with their emotions. After my Uncle Jos’s second wife Theresa wore my gran’s fur coat to the old dear’s funeral, she might as well have been dead too. My dad wouldn’t even let my mum send them a Christmas card for about ten years. Until Uncle Jos got cancer himself, poor sod.’
‘Yeah,
