Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,64

it, the interior was pretty bare. Devlin hired a designer who took Beaubourg as his inspiration. An inside-out Beaubourg. Big, multi¬colored drainage pipes curved and wove throughout the building, iron stairs like fire escapes led to iron galleries and walkways suspended above the dancers and drinkers. The joys of postmodernism.

I climbed up steps that vibrated to the beat of unidenti¬fiable, repetitive dance music. At the second level, I made my way along a gallery that seemed to sway under my feet like a suspension footbridge. It was still early, so there weren't too many people around swigging designer beers from the bottle and dabbing speed on their tongues. At the far end of the gallery, a rectangular structure jutted out thirty feet above the dance floor. It looked like a Por-tacabin on cantilevers. According to Dennis, this was the "office" of Denzel Williams, music promoter and, nomi¬nally, assistant manager of Garibaldi's.

I couldn't see much point in knocking, so I simply stuck my head around the door. I was looking at an ante¬room that contained a couple of battered scarlet leather sofas and a scarred black ash dining table pushed against the wall with a couple of metal mesh chairs set at obvi¬ously accidental angles to it. The walls were papered with gig posters. In the far wall, there was another door. I let the door close behind me and instantly the noise level dropped enough for me to decide to knock on the inner door.

"Who is it?" I heard.

I pushed the door open. The noise of the music dropped further, and so did the temperature, thanks to an air conditioning unit that grunted in the side wall. The man behind the cheap wood-grain desk stared at me with no great interest. "Who are you?" he demanded, the strong Welsh vowels immediately obvious. Call me a racist, but when it comes to the Welsh, I immediately summon my irregular verb theory of life. In this instance, it goes, "I have considered opinions; you are prejudiced; he/she is a raging bigot." And in my considered opinion, the Welsh are a humorless, clannish bunch whose contribution to the sum total of human happiness is on the negative side of the ledger. The last time I said that to a Welshman, he replied, "But what about Tom Jones?" QED.

I had the feeling just by looking at him that Denzel Williams wasn't going to redeem my opinion of his fellow countrymen. He was in his middle thirties, and none of the deep lines that scored his narrow face had been put there by laughter. His curly brown hair was fast losing the battle with his forehead and the mustache he'd carefully spread across as much of his face as possible couldn't hide a narrow-lipped mouth that clamped meanly shut between sentences. "Do I know you?" he said when I failed to reply before sitting in one of the creaky wicker chairs that faced his desk.

"I'm a friend of Dennis O'Brien's," I said. "He sug¬gested I talk to you."

He snorted. "Anybody could say that right now."

"You mean because he's inside and it's not easy to check me out? You're right. So either I am a genuine friend of Dennis's or else I'm a fake who knows enough to mention the right name. You choose."

He looked at me uncertainly, slate gray eyes narrowing as he weighed up the odds. If I was telling the truth and he booted me out, then when Dennis came out, Williams might be eating through a straw for a few weeks. Hedging his bets, he finally said, "So what is it you want? I may as well tell you now, if you're fronting a band, you're about ten years too old."

I'd already had a very bad week. And if there's one thing that really winds me up, it's bad manners. I looked around the shabby room. The money he'd spent on that mandarin-collared linen suit would probably have bought the office furnishings three times over. The only thing that looked remotely valuable in any sense was the big tank of tropical fish facing Williams. I stood up and felt in my pocket for my Swiss Army knife. As I turned away from him and appeared to be making for the door, I flipped the big blade open, sidestepped, and picked up the loose loop of flex that fed power to the tank. Without a heater and oxygenation, the fish wouldn't last too long. Tipped onto the floor, they'd have an even shorter