Crack Down

Richard did his personal version of the Fry’s Five Boys gamut, from disappointment to anticipation. ‘So can we do that, then, Darryl?’ he asked eagerly.

Darryl already had the forms prepared. He slid them across the desk to show Richard. ‘As it happens, we have an arrangement with a finance company who offer a very competitive rate of interest. If you fill in the forms now, we can sort it with a phone call. Then, tomorrow, if you bring in a banker’s draft for the balance, we’ll be able to complete the paperwork and the car’ll be all yours to drive away.’

I looked at the form, not so easy now Darryl had reclaimed it to fill in the remaining blanks. Richmond Credit Finance. Address and phone number in Accrington. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen their footprints all over this investigation. I’d meant to check the company out, but I hadn’t got round to it yet. I made a mental note to get on to it as soon as I had a spare moment. I tuned back in at the bit where Darryl was asking Richard what he did for a living. This was always the best bit.

‘I’m a freelance rock journalist,’ Richard told him.

‘Really?’ Darryl asked. Interesting how his face opened up when he experienced a genuine emotion like excitement. ‘Does that mean you interview all the top names and that? Like Whitney Houston and Beverley Craven?’

Richard nodded glumly. ‘Sometimes.’

‘God, what a great job! Hey, who’s the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed? You ever met Madonna?’.

Richard squirmed. It’s the question he hates most. There aren’t that many rock stars he has much respect for, either as people or as musicians, and only a handful of them are names that most members of the public would identify as superstars. ‘Depends what you mean by famous. Springsteen. Elton John. Clapton. Tina Turner. And yeah, I did meet Madonna once.’

‘Wow! And is she really, you know, as, like, horny as she comes over?’

Richard forced a smile. ‘Not in front of the wife, eh?’ I was touched. He was really trying to make this work.

Darryl ran a hand through his neat dark hair and winked. In an adult, it would have been lewd. ‘Gotcha, Richard. Now, your annual income. What would that be?’

I switched off again. Fiction, even the great stuff, is never as interesting when you’re hearing it for the nth time. Darryl didn’t hang about explaining little details like annual percentage interest rates to Richard, and within ten minutes, he was on to the finance company arranging our car loan. Thanks to the wonders of computer technology, credit companies can check out a punter and give the thumbs up or down almost instantaneously. Whatever Richmond Credit Finance pulled up on their computer, it convinced them that Richard was a sound bet for a loan. Of course, when you’re relying on computers, it’s important to remember that what you get out of them depends entirely on what someone else has put in.

Twenty minutes later, Richard and I were walking out of the showroom, the proud possessors, on paper at least, of the flashest set of wheels the Leo Motor Company puts on the road. ‘I do all right, Mrs Barclay?’ Richard asked eagerly, as we walked round the corner to where I’d parked the Peugeot 205 Mortensen and Brannigan had been leasing for the six months since my last company car had ended up looking like an installation from the Tate Gallery.

‘You wish,’ I snarled. ‘Don’t push your luck, Barclay. Let me tell you, the longer I spend pretending to be your wife, the more I understand why your first marriage didn’t go the distance.’

I climbed in the car and started the engine. Richard stood on the pavement, looking hangdog, his tortoiseshell glasses slipping down his nose. Exasperated, I pushed the button that lowered the passenger window. ‘Oh for God’s sake, get in,’ I said. ‘You did really well in there. Thank you.’

He smiled and jumped in. ‘You’re right, you know.’

‘I usually am,’ I said, only half teasing, as I eased the car out into the busy stream of traffic on the Bolton to Blackburn road. ‘About what in particular?’

‘That being a private eye is ninety-five per cent boredom coupled with five per cent fear. The first time we did that routine, I was really scared. I thought, what if I forget what I’m supposed to say, and they suss that we’re setting them up,’ he said earnestly.

‘It wouldn’t have been the end of the world,’ I said absently, keeping an eye on the road signs so I didn’t miss the turn off for Manchester. ‘We’re not dealing with the Mafia here. They wouldn’t have dragged you out kicking and screaming and kneecapped you.’

‘No, but you might have,’ Richard said. He was serious.

I laughed. ‘No way. I’d have waited till I got you home.’

Richard looked worried for a moment. Then he decided I was joking. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘now when we do it, I’m not nervous any more. The only danger is that it’s so repetitious I’m afraid I’ll blow it out of boredom.’

‘Well, I’m hoping we won’t have to go through it many more times,’ I said, powering down the ramp on to the dual carriageway. The little Peugeot I chose has a 1.9 litre engine, but since I got the dealership to take the identifying badges off it, it looks as innocuous as a housewife’s shopping trolley. I’d be sorry to see the back of it, but once I’d finished this job, I’d be in line for a brand new sporty Leo hatchback. Freemans.

‘That’s a shame, in some ways. I hate to admit it, Brannigan, but I’ve quite enjoyed working with you.’

Wild horses wouldn’t have got me to admit it, but I’d enjoyed it too. In the two years that we’d been lovers, I’d never been reluctant to use Richard as a sounding board for my investigations. He’s got one of those off-the-wall minds that sometimes come up with illuminating insights into the white collar crime that makes up the bulk of the work I do with my business partner Bill Mortensen. But the opportunity to get Richard to take a more active part had never arisen before this job. I’d only gone along with Bill’s suggestion to involve him precisely because I felt so certain it was a no-risk job. How could I expose to danger a man who thinks discretion is a fragrance by Calvin Klein?

This job was what we call in the trade a straight up-and-downer. The only strange thing about it was the way we’d got the job in the first place. A two-operative agency in Manchester isn’t the obvious choice for an international car giant like the Leo Motor Company when they’ve got a problem. We’d got lucky because the new head honcho at Accredited Leo Finance was the brother-in-law of a high-class Manchester jeweller. We’d not only installed Clive Abercrombie’s security system, but we’d also cracked a major gang of counterfeiters who were giving the executive chronometer brigade serious migraine. As far as Clive was concerned, Mortensen and Brannigan were the people to go to when you wanted a slick, discreet job.

Of course, being an arm of a multi-national, ALF couldn’t bring themselves to knock on the door and pitch us the straight way. It had all started at a reception hosted by the Manchester Olympic Bid organization. Remember the Olympic Bid? They were trying to screw dosh out of local businesses to support their attempt to kick off the new millennium by holding the Games in the Rainy City. Bill and I are such a small operation, we were a bit bewildered at being invited, but I’m a sucker for free smoked salmon, and besides, I reckoned it would do no harm to flash my smile round a few potentially lucrative new contacts, so I went off to fly the flag for Mortensen and Brannigan.

I was only halfway through my first glass of Australian fizz (as good a reason as any for awarding the Olympics to Sydney) when Clive appeared at my elbow with a strange man and a sickly grin. ‘Kate,’ he greeted me. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

I was on my guard straight away. Clive and I have never been buddies, probably because I can’t bring myself to be anything more than professionally polite to social climbers. So when the Edmund Hillary of the Cheshire set accosted me so joyously, I knew at once we were in the realms of hidden agendas. I smiled politely, shook his hand, counted my fingers and said, ‘Nice to see you too, Clive.’

‘Kate, can I introduce my brother-in-law, Andrew Broderick? Andrew, this is Kate Brannigan, who’s a partner in Manchester’s best security company. Kate, Andrew’s the MD and CEO of ALF.’ I must have looked blank, for Clive added hurriedly, ‘You know, Kate. Accredited Leo Finance. Leo Motor Company’s credit arm.’

‘Thanks, Tonto,’ I said.

Clive looked baffled, but Andrew Broderick laughed. ‘If I’m the loan arranger, you must be Tonto. Old joke,’ he explained. Clive still didn’t get it. Broderick and I shook hands and weighed each other up. He wasn’t a lot taller than my five feet and three inches, but Andrew Broderick looked like a man who’d learned how to fight his battles in a rugby scrum rather than a boardroom. It was just as well he could afford to have his suits hand-stitched to measure; he’d never have found that chest measurement off the peg. His nose had been broken more than once and his ears were as close to being a pair as Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But his shrewd grey eyes missed nothing. I felt his ten-second assessment of me had probably covered all the salient points.

We started off innocuously enough, discussing the Games. Then, casually enough, he asked what I drove in the course of business. I found myself telling him all about Bill’s new Saab convertible, the workhorse Little Rascal van we use for surveillance, and the nearly fatal accident that had robbed me of the Nova. I was mildly surprised. I don’t normally talk to strangers.

‘No Leos?’ he asked with a quirky smile.

‘No Leos,’ I agreed. ‘But I’m open to persuasion.’

Broderick took my elbow, smiled dismissively at Clive and gently steered me into a quiet corner behind the buffet. ‘I have a problem,’ he said. ‘It needs a specialist, and I’m told that your organization could fit my spec. Interested?’

Call me a slut, but when it comes to business, I’m always open to offers. ‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘Will it keep, or do you want to thrash it out now?’

It turned out that patience wasn’t Andrew Broderick’s long suit. Within five minutes, we were in the lounge of the Ramada, with drinks on their way. ‘How much do you know about car financing?’ he asked.

‘They always end up costing more than you think,’ I said ruefully.

‘That much, eh?’ he said. ‘OK. Let me explain. My company, ALF, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Leo Motor Company. Our job is to provide loans for people who want to buy Leo cars and haven’t got enough cash. But Leo dealerships aren’t obliged to channel all their customers through us, so we have to find ways to make ourselves sexy to the dealerships. One of the ways we do this is to offer them soft loans.’

I nodded, with him so far. ‘And these low-interest loans are for what, exactly?’

‘Dealerships have to pay up front when they take delivery of a car from Leo. ALF gives them a soft loan to cover the wholesale cost of the car for ninety days. After that, the interest rate rises weekly. When the car is sold, the soft loan is supposed to be paid off. That’s in the contract.

‘But if a dealership arranges loans for the Leos it sells via a different finance company, neither ALF nor Leo is aware that the car’s been sold. The dealer can smack the money in a high-interest account for the remains of the ninety days and earn himself a tidy sum in interest before the loan has to be paid off.’ The drinks arrived, as if on cue, giving me a few moments to digest what he’d said.

I tipped the bottle of grapefruit juice into my vodka, and swirled the ice cubes round in the glass to mix the drink. ‘And you obviously hate this because you’re cutting your own margins to supply the low-interest loans, but you’re getting no benefit in return.’

Broderick nodded, taking a hefty swallow of his spritzer. ‘Leo aren’t crazy about it either because it skews their market share figures, particularly in high turnover months like August,’ he added.

‘So where do I come in?’ I asked.

‘I’ve come up with an alternative distribution system,’ he said simply. Now, all I know about the car business is what I’ve learned from my dad, an assembly line foreman with Rover in Oxford. But even that little is enough for me to realize that what Andrew Broderick had just said was on a par with the Prime Minister announcing he was going to abolish the Civil Service.

I swallowed hard. ‘We don’t do bodyguard jobs,’ I said.

He laughed, which was the first time I’d doubted his sanity. ‘It’s so simple,’ he said. ‘Instead of having to fill their showrooms with cars they’re then under pressure to sell asap, dealers would carry only one sample of the model. The customer would specify colour, engine size, petrol or diesel, optional extras, etc. The order would then be faxed to one of several regional holding centres where the specific model would be assembled from Leo’s stock.’

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. Leo are fighting it tooth and nail because it involves them in initial expenditure of more than threepence ha’penny,’ I said resignedly.