Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,18

his Ice-T from his Enya, but he could figure out where to make a bent earner in the Hallelujah Chorus." The only problem was, as I didn't have to remind Shelley, my friend and some¬time-mentor Dennis wasn't quite as accessible as normal, Her Majesty the Queen being unreasonably fussy about keeping her guests to herself.

When I met Dennis, like so many people in their late thirties, he'd just gone through a major career change. After a stretch in prison, he'd given up his previous job as a professional and highly successful burglar to the rich and famous and taken up the more demanding but less dangerous occupation of "a bit of ducking and diving" on the fringes of the law. Which included, on occasion, a spot of consultancy work for Mortensen and Brannigan. Thanks to Dennis, I'd learned how to pick locks, defeat alarm systems, and ransack filing cabinets without leaving a trace.

Unfortunately, a little enterprise of Dennis's aimed at separating criminals from their cash flow had turned sour when he'd inadvertently arranged one of his handovers in the middle of a Drugs Squad surveillance. Instead of grabbing a couple of major league traffickers and one of those cocaine hauls that gets mentioned in the news, the cops ended up with a small-time villain and the kind of nothing case that barely makes three paragraphs in the local paper. Inevitably, Dennis paid the price of their pique, seeing his scam blown sufficiently out of propor¬tion in court to land him with an eighteen-month sen¬tence. Some might say he got off lightly, given his CV and what else I happened to know he'd been up to lately, but speaking as someone who would go quietly mad serv¬ing an eighteen-day sentence, I wouldn't be one of them.

"When can you get in to see him?" Shelley asked.

Good question. I didn't have a Visiting Order nor any immediate prospect of getting one. Once upon a time, I'd have rung up and pretended to be a legal executive from his firm of solicitors and asked for an appointment the next day. But security had grown tighter recently. Too many prisoners had been going walkabout from jails that weren't supposed to be open prisons. Now, when you booked a brief's appointment at Strangeways, they took the details then rang back the firm you allegedly repre¬sented to confirm the name of the person attending and to give them a code consisting of two letters and four numbers. Without the code, you couldn't get in. "I thought about asking Ruth to let me pose as one of her legal execs," I said.

Shelley snorted. "After the last time? I don't think so!"

The last time I'd pretended to be one of Ruth Hunter's junior employees it had strained our friendship so severely it had to wear a truss for months afterward. Shelley was right. Ruth wasn't going to play.

"I don't mean to teach you to suck eggs," Shelley said without a trace of humility or apology. "And I know this goes against the grain. But had you thought about doing it the straight way?"
Chapter 5
I pivoted on the ball of my right foot, bending the knee as I straightened my left leg, using the momentum to drive me forward and around in a quarter circle. The well-muscled leg whistled past me, just grazing the hip that moments before had been right in its path. I grunted with effort as I sidestepped and jabbed a short kick at the knee of my assailant.

I was too slow. Next thing I knew, my right leg was swept from under me and I was lying on my back, lungs screaming for anything to replace the air that had been slammed out of them. Christie O'Brien stood above me, grinning. "You're slowing down," she observed with the casual cruelty of adolescence. Of course I was slow com¬pared to her; she was, after all, a former British under-fourteen championship finalist. But Christie-Christine until she discovered fashion and lads-was above all her father's daughter. She'd learned at an early age that nothing succeeds like kicking them when they're down.

One of the other things I'd learned thanks to Dennis was Thai kick boxing, a sport he insisted every woman should know. The theory goes, a woman as small as I am is never going to beat a guy in a fair fight, so the key to personal safety is to land one good kick either in the shins or in the gonads. Then it's, "Legs, don't let me