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. ‘Five minutes working with you, and he might as well be some smackhead from Moss Side. That’s it now, his name’s on their computer. Another black bastard who’s got away with it, that’s how they’ll have him down.’
I raised my palms towards her, trying to fend off her fury. ‘It’s all right, Shelley. He wasn’t formally arrested. They won’t be putting anything into the computer.’
Shelley snorted. ‘You’re so street smart when it comes to your business. How come you can be so naive about our lives? You don’t have the faintest idea what it means for a boy like Donovan to get picked up by the police! They don’t see a hard-working boy who’s been brought up to respect his elders and stay away from drugs. They just see another black face where it doesn’t belong. And you put him there.’
I edged across reception, trying to make the safe haven of my own office without being permanently disabled by the crossfire. ‘Shelley, he’s a grown man. He has to make his own decisions. I told him when I took him on that serving process wasn’t as easy as it sounded. But he was adamant that he could handle it.’
‘Of course he can handle it,’ she yelled. ‘He’s not the problem. It’s the other assholes out there, that’s the problem. I don’t want him doing this any more.’
I’d almost reached the safety of my door. ‘You’ll have to take that up with Don,’ I told her, sounding more firm than I felt.
‘I will, don’t you worry about that,’ she vowed.
‘OK. But don’t forget the reason he’s doing this.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘It’s about independence. He’s trying to earn his own money so he’s not dipping his hand in your pocket all the time. He’s trying to tell you he’s a man now.’ I took a deep breath, trying not to feel intimidated by the scowl that was drawing Shelley’s perfectly shaped eyebrows into a gnarled scribble. My hand on the doorknob, I delivered what was supposed to be the knockout punch. ‘You’ve got to let him make his own mistakes. You’ve got to let him go.’
I opened the door and dived for safety. No such luck. Instead of silent sanctuary, I fell into nerd heaven. A pair of pink-rimmed eyes looked up accusingly at me. Under the pressure of Shelley’s rage, I’d forgotten that my office wasn’t mine any more. Now I was the sole active partner in Brannigan & Co, I occupied the larger of the two rooms that opened off reception. When I’d been junior partner in Mortensen & Brannigan it had doubled as Bill Mortensen’s office and the main client interview room. Now, it was my sanctum.
These days, my former bolthole was the computer room, occupied as and when the occasion demanded by Gizmo, our information technology consultant. In our business, that’s the polite word for hacker. And when it comes to prowling other people’s systems with cat-like tread, Gizmo is king of the dark hill. The trade off for his computer acumen is that on a scale of one to ten, his social skills come in somewhere around absolute zero. I’m convinced that was the principal reason he was made redundant from his job as systems wizard with Telecom. Now they’ve become a multinational leading-edge company, everybody who works there has to pass for human. Silicon-based life forms like Gizmo just had to be downsized out the door.
Their loss was my gain. There had had to be changes, of course. Plain brown envelopes stuffed with banknotes had been replaced with a system more appealing to the taxman, if not to the company accountant. Then there was the personal grooming. Gizmo had always favoured an appearance that would have served as perfect camouflage if he’d been living on a refuse tip.
The clothes weren’t so hard. I managed to make him stop twitching long enough to get the key measurements, then hit a couple of designer factory outlets during the sales. I was planning to dock the cost from his first consultancy fees, but I didn’t want it to terrify him too much. Now he had two decent suits, four shirts that didn’t look disastrous unironed, a couple of inoffensive ties and a mac that any flasher would have been proud of. I could wheel him out as our computer security expert without frightening the clients, and he had a couple of outfits that wouldn’t entirely destroy his street cred if another of the undead happened to be on the street in daylight hours to see him.
The haircut had been harder. I don’t think he’d spent money on a haircut since 1987. I’d always thought he simply took a pair of scissors to any stray locks whose reflection in the monitor distracted him from what he was working on. Gizmo tried to make me believe he liked it that way. It cost me five beers to get him to the point where I could drag him across the threshold of the city centre salon where I’d already had to cancel three times. The stylist had winced in pain, but had overcome his aesthetic suffering for long enough to do the business. Giz ended up with a seriously sharp haircut and I ended up gobsmacked that lurking underneath the shambolic dress sense and terrible haircut was a rather attractive man. Scary.
Three months down the line, he was still looking the business, his hollow cheeks and bloodshot eyes fitting the current image of heroin addict as male glamour. I’d even overheard one of Shelley’s adolescent daughter’s mates saying she thought Gizmo was ‘shaggable’. That Trainspotting has a lot to answer for. ‘All right,’ he mumbled, already looking back at his screen. ‘You two want to keep the noise down?’
‘Sorry, Giz. I didn’t actually mean to come in here.’
‘Know what you mean,’ he said.
Before I could leave, the door burst open. ‘And another thing,’ Shelley said. ‘You’ve not done a new client file for Gloria Kendal.’
Gizmo’s head came up like it was on a string. ‘Gloria Kendal? The Gloria Kendal? Brenda Barrow-clough off Northerners?’
I nodded.
‘She’s a client?’
‘I can’t believe you watch Northerners,’ I said.
‘She was in here yesterday,’ Shelley said smugly. ‘She signed a photograph for me personally.’
‘Wow! Gloria Kendal. Cool! Anything I can do to help?’ The last time I’d seen him this excited was over an advance release of Netscape Navigator 3.0.
‘I’ll let you know,’ I promised. ‘Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I have some work to do.’