Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,75

centuries, it was a rare, exotic fabric, worn only by the seriously rich. Then, almost overnight, somewhere around 1992, it was every¬where. From Marks and Spencer to market stalls, you couldn't get away from the stuff. Kids on council estates living on benefits were suddenly wearing silk shirts. What I want to know is where it all came from. Were the Chi¬nese giving silk worms fertility drugs? Had they been stockpiling it since the Boxer Rebellion? Or is there some deeper, darker secret lurking behind the silk explosion? And why does nobody know the answer? One of these days, I'm going to drive over to Macclesfield, grip the curator of the Silk Museum by the throat, and demand an answer.

I was sitting in an armchair at right angles to the oppo¬site end of the sofa from Tony. Richard was in Shelley's chair, his feet on the desk. The pool of light illuminated him to somewhere around mid-thigh, then he disap¬peared into darkness. The whole scenario looked like a straight lift from a bad French cop movie. I decided pretty quickly that there weren't going to be any subtitles to help me out. The questions were down to me.

"I really appreciate you talking to me, Tony," I said.

"Yeah, well," he mumbled. "I ain't said nothing yet. It's edgy out there right now, you know? Stability's gone, know what I mean? It's not a good time to stick your head above the parapet, people are too twitchy."

"Anything you tell me, nobody's going to know it came from you," I tried.

He snorted. "So you say. But if some bruiser's got you up against the wall, how do I know you ain't going to give him me?"

"You don't know for sure." I gestured around the office, which we've spent enough on to impress corporate clients. "But I didn't get a gaff like this by dropping people in the shit. Anyway, in my experience, if some bruiser's got you up against the wall, he's going to do what he's going to do. So there's not a lot of point in giving him any more bodies. It doesn't save you any grief."

He gave me a long, slow head-to-toe look. "What's your interest?" He eventually said.

"I'm working for Dan Druff and the Scabby Heided Bairns." Sometimes you need to give a bit to get a lot.

"They got well unlucky," Tony observed.

"How do you mean? What have they done to deserve what they're getting?"

"Nothing. Like I said, they just got unlucky. Any war of attrition, somebody always has to be made an example of. To keep the rest in line. Dan and the Bairns just drew the short straw, that's all. Nothing personal. Least, I don't think it is. I haven't heard anything that says it is."

"So who's making the example of the boys?"

Tony took a packet of Camels out of his pocket and lit up without asking permission. I said nothing, but walked through into my office, took the saucer out from under a Venus flytrap that wasn't ever going to dish out any more lip, and pointedly slid it down the coffee table so it was in front of Tony. Richard took that as a sign and straight¬ened up in the chair, using the desktop to roll a joint. Shelley was going to be well pleased in the morning to find tobacco shreds all over her paperwork. "So what's happening in the music business?" I asked, getting bored with all this mannered posturing we were playing at. "Who's making a bid for a piece of the action?"

"I don't think it's a piece of the action they want," Tony said in a sigh of smoke. "I think they want the lion's share."

"Tell me about it," I said.

"It started a couple of months ago. There was a wave of cowboy fly-posting. Nobody seemed to know who was behind it. It wasn't the usual small-time gangsters trying to muscle in. So one or two of the major players decided to have a go at the bands and the venues who were having their posters put up by the cowboys. The intention was to find out who was behind it, but also to put the frighteners on the bands and the venues, so they'd come back to heel and abandon this new team."

Tony paused, staring into the middle distance. "So what happened?" I asked.

"They took a beating," he said simply.

"What happened?"

"They sent a team of enforcers along to one of the gigs. They found themselves staring down the barrels of