Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,2

before. He won't notice a thing."

"He will when I show him the cutting," Alexis coun¬tered. "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 cops. 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 pretense 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 ten¬dencies, 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 bed-sit," I commented.

"Yeah, well, you gotta give it a bit of topspin or the adrenaline junkies on the news desk 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 favorite kind of story."

"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 con¬cerned, 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 pro¬duce 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 is 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 a new approach 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