Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,53

and the streets of Central Manchester are still fairly safe to walk around late at night. Especially if you're a Thai boxer. Besides, I figured it wouldn't do me any harm to limber up for looking chilled out.

The Paradise Factory considers itself Manchester's coolest nightclub. The brick building is on the corner of Princess Street and Charles Street, near Chinatown and the casinos, slightly off the beaten track of clubland. It used to house Factory Records, the famous indie label that was home to Joy Division and lots of other bands less talented but definitely more joyful. When Factory fell casualty to the recession, an astute local businesswoman took over the building and turned it into poseur's heaven. Officially, it's supposed to be an eclectic mix of gay and hetero, camp and straight, but it's the only club where I've been asked at the door to verify that I'm not a gender tourist by listing other Manchester gay and lesbian venues where I've drunk and danced.

As soon as I walked through the door, I was hit by a bass rhythm that pounded stronger in my body than my heart ever had. It was hard to walk without keeping the beat. I found Dan and Lice propped against a wall near the first bar I came to as I walked into the three-story building. The guy I knew without asking was Scan Costi-gan stood slightly to one side, his wiry body dwarfed by his fellow Celts. His eyes were restless, constantly check¬ing out the room. He let me buy the drinks. Both rounds. That wasn't the only way he made it plain he was there on sufferance. The sneer was another dead giveaway. It stayed firmly in place long after the formal introductions were over and he'd given me the kind of appraising look that's more about the labels and the price tags on the clothes than the body inside them.

"I don't know what the boys have been saying to you, but I want to make one thing absolutely plain," he told me in a hard-edged Belfast whine. "We are the victims here, not the villains." He sounded like every self-justifying North¬ern Irish politician I'd ever heard. Only this one was lean¬ing over me, bellowing in my ear, as opposed to on a TV screen I could silence with one blast of the remote control.

"So how do you see what's been happening?" I asked.

"I've been at this game a very long time," he shouted over the insistent techno beat. "I was the one put Morrissey on the map, you know. And the Mondays. All the big boys, I've had them all through my hands. You're talking to a very experienced operator here," he added, wetting his whistle with a swig of the large dark rum and Coke he'd asked for. Dan and Lice nodded sagely, backing up their man. Funny how quickly clients forget whose side you're on.

I waited, sipping my extremely average vodka and bot¬tled grapefruit juice. Costigan lit a Marlboro Light and let me share the plume of smoke from his nostrils. Some¬times I wonder if being a lawyer would really have been such a bad choice. "And I have not been trespassing," he said, stabbing my right shoulder with the fingers that held the cigarette. "I am the one trespassed against."

"You're telling me that you haven't been sticking up posters on someone else's ground?" I asked skeptically.

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. Like I said, we're the victims here. It's my ground that's getting invaded. More times than I can count in the past few weeks, I've had my legitimate poster sites covered up by cowboys."

"So you've been taking revenge on the guilty men?"

"I have not," he yelled indignantly. "I don't even know who's behind it. This city's always been well regulated, you know what I mean? Everybody knows what's what and nobody gets hurt if they stick to their own patch. I've been doing this too long to fuck with the opposition. So if you're trying to lay the boys' trouble at my door, you can forget it, okay?"

"Is there any kind of pattern to the cowboy fly-posting?" I asked.

"What do you mean, a pattern?"

"Is it always the same sites where they're taking liber¬ties? Or is it random? Are you the only one who's being hit, or is it a general thing?"

He shrugged. "It's all over, as far as I can tell. It's not the sort of thing you talk about, d'you understand? Nobody wants the opposition