Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,14

minutes, but someone had had it away on their toes with my stereo.
Chapter 4
It took me an hour and a half around Handbrake's backstreet garage to get a new window and stereo cas¬sette. I knew the window had come from a scrap yard, but it would have been bad manners to ask about the origins of the cassette. I wouldn't have been entirely surprised if my own deck had arrived in the bike pannier of one of the young lads who supply Handbrake with spare parts from scrap yards as an alternative to drug-running around Moss Side, but it clearly wasn't my lucky day and I had to settle for a less sophisticated machine. While that might increase the shelf-life of my new driver's door window, it wouldn't improve the quality of my life in Manchester's orbital motorway traffic jams, so I wasn't in the best of moods when I finally staggered through the door of the office just after ten.

I knew at once that something was seriously wrong. Shelley, our office manager, made no comment about my lateness. In all the years I've been working with her, she'd never before missed the opportunity to whip me into line like one of her two teenage kids. I'd once found her son Donovan, a six-foot-three-inch basketball player, engi¬neering student, and occasional rapper with a local band, having to give up a weekend to paint my office because he hadn't come home till four in the morning. After that, I'd always had a good excuse for being late into work. But this morning, she scarcely glanced up from her screen when I walked in. "Bill's in," was all she said.

Worrying. "Already? I thought he only flew in yester¬day afternoon?"

Shelley's lips pursed. "That's right," she said stiffly. "He said to tell you he needs a word," she added, gesturing with her head toward the closed door of my partner's office. Even more worrying. Shelley is Bill's biggest fan. Normally when he returns from one of his foreign security consultancy trips, we all sit around in the outside office and schmooze the morning away over coffee, catching up. Bill's a friendly soul; I'd never known him to hide behind a closed door unless he needed absolute peace and quiet to work out some thorny computer problem.

I tapped on the door but didn't wait for an answer before I opened it and walked in on the sort of scene that would have been more appropriate in the new Dance-house a few doors down Oxford Road. Bill Mortensen, a bearded blond giant of a man, was standing behind his desk, leaning over a small dark woman whose body was curved back under his in an arc that would have had my spine screaming for mercy. One of Bill's bunch-of-bananas hands supported the small of her back, the other her shoulders. Unlike the ballet, however, their lips were welded together. I cleared my throat.

Bill jumped, his mouth leaving the woman's with a nau¬seating smack as he straightened and half-turned, releasing his grip on her. Just as well her arms were wrapped around his neck or she'd have been on the fast track to quadriplegia. "Kate," Bill gasped. His face did a double act, the mouth smiling, the eyes panicking.

"Welcome back, Bill. I wasn't expecting to see you this morning," I said calmly, closing the door behind me and making for my usual perch on the table that runs along one wall.

Bill stuttered something about wanting to see me while the woman disentangled herself from him. She was a good six inches taller than my five feet and three inches. Strike one. Her hair was as dark as Bill's was blond, cut in the sort of spiky urchin cut I'd recently abandoned when even I'd noticed it was getting a bit passe. On her, it looked terrific. Strike two. Her skin was burnished bronze, an impossible dream for those of us with the skin that matches auburn hair. Strike three. I didn't have the faintest idea who Bill's latest companion was, but I hated her already. She grinned and moved toward me, hand stuck out in front of her with all the enthusiasm of an extroverted teenager who hasn't been put down yet. "Kate, it's great to meet you," she announced in an Australian accent that made Crocodile Dundee sound like a BBC news reader. "Bill's told me so much about you, I feel like I know you already." I tentatively put out a hand, which she gripped