Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,61
might pay off, but I'd need an extra pair of hands. Back when I'd started working for Bill, I'd done bread-and-butter process serving. Every week, I'd abandon the law library and turn up at the office where Shelley would hand me a bundle of court papers that had to be served ASAP. Domestic violence injunctions, writs, and a whole range of documents relating to debt. My job was to track down the individuals concerned and make sure they were legally served with the court documents. Sometimes that was as straightforward as cycling to the address on the papers, ringing the doorbell, and handing over the relevant material. Mostly, it wasn't. Mostly, it involved a lot of nosing about, asking questions of former colleagues, neighbors, drinking cronies, and lovers. Sometimes it got heavy, especially when I was trying to serve injunctions on men who had been persistently violent to wives who took out injunctions one week and were terrorized, bullied, sweet-talked, or guilt-tripped into taking their battering men back the next. The sort of men who see women as sexually available punching bags don't usually take kindly to being served papers by a teenager who barely comes up to their elbow.
In spite of the aggravation, I'd really got into the work. I'd loved the challenge of tracking down people who didn't want to be found. I'd enjoyed outwitting men who thought that because they were bigger and stronger than I was, they weren't going to accept service. I can't say I took any pleasure in slapping some of the debtors with bankruptcy papers when all they were guilty of was believing the propaganda of the Thatcher years, but even that was instructive. It gave me a far sharper awareness of real life than any of my fellow law students. So I'd quit to work for Bill full-time as soon as the opportunity arose.
But I hadn't joined the agency to be a process server. In the medium to long term, Bill wanted a partner and he was prepared to train me to do everything he could do. I learned about surveillance, working undercover, doing things with computers that I didn't know were possible, security systems, white collar crime, industrial sabotage and espionage, and subterfuge. I learned how to use a video camera and how to bug, how to uncover bugs, and how to take photographs in extreme conditions. I'd also picked up a few things that weren't on the syllabus, like kick boxing and lock picking.
Of course, as my skills grew, the range of jobs Bill was prepared to let me loose on expanded too. The end result of that was that we'd been content to let most of the process serving fall into the laps of other agencies in the city. Maybe the time had come to snatch back that work for ourselves.
What I needed was a strategy and a body to serve the papers.
Shelly sipped her glass of white wine suspiciously, as if she were checking it for drugs, and glanced around her with the concentration of a bailiff taking an inventory. She had only been in my house a couple of times before, since we tended to do our socializing on the neutral ground of bars and restaurants. That way, when Richard reached scream¬ing point we could make our excuses and leave. It's not that he doesn't like Shelley's partner Ted, a former client who opted for a date with her instead of a discount for cash and ended up moving in. It's just that Ted has the conversational repertoire of a three-toed sloth and is about as quick on the uptake. Nice bloke, but. ..
"You can't stay out of the office forever," she said. A woman who's never been afraid to state the obvious, is Shelley.
"Call it preventive medicine. I'm trying to get a plan in place before I have to confront Bill," I said. "At the moment, every time I'm within three yards of him, I feel an overwhelming desire to cave his head in, and I don't fancy spending the next twenty years in prison. Besides, I do have some cases that I'm working on." I picked up the microcassette recorder on the table and flipped the cassette out of it. "I dictated some reports this afternoon. That brings me up to date. I've included the new client details." Shelley leaned across and picked up the tape. "So why am I here? I don't guess it's because you couldn't go with¬out my company for a whole