Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,3

like a kipper just so some smart bastard can go out and buy another designer suit or a mobile bloody phone," I said angrily. I know all the rules about never letting yourself get emotionally involved with the jobs, but there are times when staying cool and disinterested would be the mark of inhumanity rather than good sense. This was one of them.

Alexis lit another cigarette, shaking her head. "Pure scumbags," she said in disgust. "Twenty- four-karat shysters. So they take the cash and disappear into the night, leaving your clients to pick up the pieces when the head¬stone remains a ghostly presence?"

"Something like that. They really are a pair of unscru¬pulous bastards. I've been interviewing some of the people who have been had over, and a couple of them have told me the woman has actually driven them to ATMs to get money for a cash deposit." I shook my head, remembering the faces of the victims again. They showed a procession of emotions, each more painful to watch than the last. There was grief revisited in the set-ting of the scene for me, then anger as they recalled how they'd been stung, then a mixture of shame and resent¬ment that they'd fallen for it. "And there's no point in me telling them that in their shoes, even a street-wise old cynic like me would probably have fallen for it. Because I probably would have done, that's the worst of it," I added bitterly.

"Grief gets you like that," Alexis agreed. "The last thing you're expecting is to be taken for a ride. Look at how many families end up not speaking to each other for years because someone has done something outrageous in the immediate aftermath of death, when everyone's staggering around feeling like their brain's in the food processor along with their emotions. After my uncle Jos's second wife Theresa wore my gran's fur coat to the old dear's funeral, she might as well have been dead too. My dad wouldn't even let my mum send them a Christmas card for about ten years. Until Uncle Jos got cancer himself, poor sod."

"Yeah, well, us knowing these people haven't been par¬ticularly gullible doesn't make it any easier for them. The only thing that might help them would be for me to nail the bastards responsible."

"What about the cops? Haven't they reported it to them?"

I shrugged. "Only one or two of them. Most of them left it at phoning my client. It's pride, isn't it? People don't want everybody thinking they can't cope just because they've lost somebody. Especially if they're get¬ting on a bit. So all Officer Dibble has to go on is a few isolated incidents." I didn't need to tell a crime corre¬spondent that it wasn't something that was going to assume a high priority for a police force struggling to deal with an epidemic of crack and guns that seemed to claim fresh victims every week in spite of an alleged truce among the gangs.

Alexis gave a cynical smile. "Not exactly the kind of glamorous case the CID's glory boys are dying to take on, either. The only way they'd have started to take proper notice would have been if some journo like me had stum¬bled across the story and given it some headlines. Then they'd have had to get their finger out."

"Too late for that now," I said firmly.

"Slimeballs," Alexis said. "So you've put Richard's death notice in to try and flush them out?"

"Seemed like the only way to get a fix on them," I said. "It's clear from what the victims have said that they oper¬ate by using the deaths column. Richard's out of town on the road with some band, so I thought I'd get it done and dusted while he's not around to object to having his name taken in vain. If everything goes according to plan, some¬one should be here within the next half hour."

"Nice thinking," Alexis said approvingly. "Hope it works. So why didn't you use Bill's name and address? He's still in Australia, isn't he?"

I shook my head. "I would have done, except he was flying in this afternoon." Bill Mortensen, the senior part¬ner of Mortensen and Brannigan, Private Investigators and Security Consultants, had been in Australia for the last three weeks, his second trip Down Under in the past six months, an occurrence that was starting to feel a lot like double trouble to me. "He'll be using his house as a jet lag recovery zone. So that