Stranded Read online

  A girl can still dream, though. So when Gerry Banks told me he’d lost his BMW Z3 roadster, one of only half a dozen then in the country, an advance release that had cost him a small fortune to come by and which turned every head when he drove down the street, I understood why he spoke as if he was talking about the death of a particularly close and beloved family member. If I’d been lucky enough to own one of those little beauties, I’d have probably replaced the bedroom wall with an up-and-over door so I could sleep with it. And if some rat had kidnapped my baby and held it to ransom, I’d have hired every investigator in the kingdom if it meant bringing my darling home to me.

  Banks had revealed his pain behind the closed door of his office, a functional box on the upper floor of the custombuilt factory where his company made state-of-the-art electronic components. The sort of things that tell your tumble drier exactly when to scorch your favourite shirt. The best you could call the view of the nearby M62 would be ‘uninspiring’. But if, like Gerry Banks, all you could see was a hole in the car park where a scarlet roadster ought to be, it must have been heartbreaking.

  ‘I take it that’s the scene of the crime,’ I said, joining him by the window.

  He pointed to the empty parking space nearest the door, the series of smooth curves that made up his pudgy features rearranging themselves into corrugated lines. ‘Bastard,’ was all he said.

  I waited for a couple of minutes, the way you do when someone’s paying their respects to the dead. When I spoke, my voice was gentle. ‘I’m going to need full details.’

  ‘Fine,’ he sighed, turning away and throwing himself miserably into his black leather executive chair. I was left with the bogstandard visitor’s number in charcoal tweed and tubular metal. Just in case I didn’t know who was the boss here.

  ‘Take me through it from the beginning,’ I urged when he showed no signs of communicating further.

  ‘He turned up on Tuesday morning at nine. He said his name was John Wilkins and he ran an executive valet service for cars. He gave me a business card and a glossy brochure. It quotes half a dozen top Manchester businessmen saying what a great job this Valet-While-U-Work does.’ His voice was the self-justifying whine of a man desperate not to be seen as the five-star prat he’d been. He pushed a folded A4 sheet towards me, a business card lying on top of it. I gave them the brief glance that was all they deserved. Nothing that couldn’t come out of any neighbourhood print shop.

  ‘So you agreed to let him valet your car?’

  He nodded. ‘I gave him the keys and he promised to have it back by close of business. But he didn’t.’ He clenched his jaw, bunching the muscles under his ear.

  ‘And that’s when you got the fax?’

  He looked away, ostensibly searching for the piece of paper I knew was right under his hand. ‘Here,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got your car. By this time Friday, you’ll have ten thousand pounds. Fair exchange is no robbery. No cops or the car gets it just badly enough not to be a writeoff. Yours faithfully, Rob-It-While-U-Work,’ I read. A villain with a sense of humour. ‘The price seems a bit steep,’ I said. ‘I thought the Z3 only cost about twenty grand new.’

  ‘If you can get one. They’re not officially released till next January and there’s already a twoyear waiting list. Money can’t buy a replacement. I’m not interested in common rubbish. You know where I live? Not in some poxy executive development. I live in a converted sixteenth-century chapel. There’s not another one like it in the world. Anywhere. I want my car back, you understand? Without a scratch on it,’ Banks said, the ghost of his management skills starting to emerge from the shadows of his grief. ‘I’ll have the money here tomorrow afternoon, and I want you to take care of the exchange. Can you handle that?’

  I’m so used to middleaged businessmen taking one look at my twenty-nine-year-old five feet and three inches and treating me like the tea girl that it barely registers on the Brannigan scale of indignation any more. ‘I can handle it,’ I said mildly. ‘But wouldn’t you rather get the car back and hang on to the cash?’

  ‘You think you could do that? Without putting the car at risk?’

  I gave him the stare I’d copied from Al Pacino. ‘I can try.’

  Like journalists, private eyes are only as good as their sources. Unfortunately, our best ones tend to be people your mother would bar from the doorstep, never mind the house. Like my mechanic, Handbrake. He’s no ordinary grease monkey. He learned his trade tuning up the wheels for a series of perfect getaways after his mates had relieved some financial institution of a wad they hadn’t previously realized was surplus to requirements. He only got caught the once. That had been enough.

  When he got out, he’d set himself up in a backstreet garage and gone straight. Ish. But he still knew who was who among the players on the wrong side of the fence. And as well as keeping my car nondescript on the outside and faster than a speeding bullet on the inside, he tipped me the odd wink on items he thought I might be interested in. It sat easier with his conscience than talking to Officer Dibble. He answered the phone just as I was about to give up. ‘Yeah?’ Time is money; chat is inessential.

  ‘Handbrake, Brannigan.’ The conversational style was catching. ‘I’m working for a punter who’s had his BMW Z3 ripped for a ransom. The guy called himself John Wilkins. Valet-While-U-Work. Any ideas?’

  ‘Dunno the name but there’s a couple of teams have tried it on,’ he told me. ‘A Z3, you say? I didn’t think there were any over here yet.’

  ‘There’s only a handful, according to the punter.’

  ‘Right. Rarity value, that’s what makes it worth ransoming. Anything else, forget it – cheaper to let the car walk, cop for the insurance. I’ll ask around, talk to the usual suspects, see what the word is.’

  I started the engine and slipped the car into gear at about the same time my brain did the same thing. A couple of minutes later, I was grinning at Gerry Banks’s receptionist for the second time that morning. ‘Me again,’ I chirped. Nothing like stating the obvious to make the victim of your interrogation feel superior.

  ‘Mr Banks has gone into a meeting with a client,’ she said in the bored singsong you need to master before they let you qualify as a receptionist.

  ‘Actually, it was you I wanted a word with.’ Ingratiating smile.

  She looked startled. I’d obviously gone for a concept she was unfamiliar with.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mr Banks has hired me to try to get his car back,’ I said. ‘A couple of questions?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘When the car valet bloke arrived, did he ask who the Z3 belonged to?’

  She shook her head. ‘He said, could he have five minutes with Mr Banks concerning the ongoing maintenance of his roadster. I buzzed Mr Banks, then sent him in.’

  ‘Those were his actual words? He said roadster?’

  ‘That’s right. Like Mr Banks always calls it.’

  I’d been afraid that’s what she would say.

  I was being ushered into the presence of my financial advisor when Handbrake rang me back. Josh waved me to one of his comfortable leather armchairs while I wrestled the phone out of my bag and to my ear. ‘You got a problem I can’t solve,’ Handbrake said. ‘Whoever’s got your punter’s motor, either they’re not from around here or they’re new talent. So new nobody knows who they are.’

  ‘I had a funny feeling you were going to tell me that,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘I’ll add it to your next service.’

  I hung up. This was beginning to look more and more like something very personal. ‘Drink?’ Josh asked sympathetically.

  ‘I’m not stopping. This is just a quick smashandgrab raid. Gerry Banks, Compuponents. Who’s got it in for him?’

  The only thing in common between Gerry Banks’s home and the flat wh
ose bell I was leaning on was that they’d both been converted. Somehow, I couldn’t see my client in this scruffy Edwardian rattrap in the hinterland between the curry restaurants of Rusholme and the street hookers of Whalley Range.

  Eventually the door opened on a woman in jeans faded to the colour of her eyes, a baggy chenille jumper and her early thirties. Dark blonde hair was loosely pulled back in a ponytail. She had the kind of face that makes men pause with their pints halfway to their lips. ‘Yeah?’ she asked.

  ‘Tania Banks?’

  Her head tilted to one side and two little lines appeared between her perfectly groomed eyebrows. ‘Who wants to know?’

  I held a business card at eye level. ‘I’ve come about the car.’

  The animation leaked out of her face like the air from a punctured tyre. ‘I haven’t got a car,’ she said, her voice grating and cold.

  ‘Neither has your husband.’

  A muscle at the corner of her mouth twitched. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

  I shrugged. ‘Please yourself. I thought we could leave the police out of it, but if you want to play it the other way . . .’

  ‘You don’t frighten me,’ she lied.

  ‘Maybe not, but I’m sure your husband knows people who would.’

  Her shoulders sagged, her mouth slackened in defeat. ‘You’d better come in.’

  The bedsit was colder and damper than the street outside, in spite of the gas fire hissing at full blast. She perched on the bed, leaving the chair to me. ‘You left him three months ago,’ I said.

  ‘I got tired of everybody feeling sorry for me. I got tired of him only ever coming home when the latest mistress was out of town on a modelling assignment,’ she sighed, lighting a cheap cigarette.

  ‘And you wanted a life. That’s why you’ve been doing the part-time law degree,’ I said.

  Her eyebrows flickered. ‘I finished the degree. I’ve just started the one-year course you need to be a solicitor.’

  ‘You don’t get a grant.’ Some of my best friends are lawyers; I know about these things. ‘The fees are somewhere around four and a half grand. Plus you’ve got to have something to live on. Which you expected to get from the divorce settlement. Only, there’s a problem, isn’t there?’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ she said.

  ‘It’s my job. He’s clever with money, your husband. On paper, he’s spotless. It’s the offshore holding company that owns the car, the house, everything. He takes a salary of a few hundred a month. And the company pays for everything else. And it’s all perfectly legal. On paper, he can’t afford to pay you a shilling. So you decided to extract your divorce settlement by a slightly unorthodox route.’

  She looked away, studying the hand that held the cigarette. ‘Ten grand’s a fraction of what I’m entitled to,’ she said softly. Her admission of guilt didn’t give me the usual adrenalin rush. She sighed again. ‘You have no idea what I’ve had to put up with over the years.’

  I submitted my account to Gerry Banks without a qualm. I’d done the job he asked me to do, and as far as I was concerned, he should be grateful. He’d asked me to handle the exchange, to make sure his car came back to him in one piece. It had been me who’d made the foolish offer to get the Z3 back without handing over the cash. And everybody knows that we women aren’t up to the demanding job of being private eyes, don’t they? Hardly surprising I wasn’t able to live up to my promises.

  Besides, we’ll have forgotten each other inside six months. But I’ll never forget the wind in my hair the night Tania Banks and my inner spiv cruised the M6 till dawn with the top down.

  The Wagon Mound

  Nothing destroys the quality of life so much as insomnia. Ask any parent of a new baby. It only takes a few broken nights to reduce the most calm and competent person to a twitching shadow of their normal proficiency. My wakefulness started when the nightmares began. When I did manage to drop off, the visions my subconscious mind conjured up were guaranteed to wake me, sweating and terrified, within a couple of hours of nodding off. It didn’t take long before I began to fear sleep itself, dreading the demons that ripped through the fabric of my previous ease. I tried sleeping pills, I tried alcohol. But nothing worked.

  I never dreamed that I’d rediscover the art of sleeping through the night thanks to a legal precedent. In 1961, the Privy Council heard a case concerning a negligent oil spillage from a ship called the Wagon Mound in Sydney Harbour. The oil fouled a nearby wharf, and in spite of expert advice that it wouldn’t catch fire, when the wharf’s owners began welding work, the oil did exactly what it wasn’t supposed to do. The fire that followed caused enough damage for it to be worth taking to court, where the Privy Council finally decreed that the ship’s owners weren’t liable because the type of harm sustained by the plaintiff must itself be reasonably foreseeable. When Roger, the terminally boring commercial attaché at the Moscow Embassy, launched into the tale the other night in the bar at Proyekt OGI, he could never have imagined that it would change my life so dramatically. But then, lawyers have never been noted for their imagination.

  Proximity. That’s another legal principle that came up during Roger’s lecture. How many intervening stages lie between cause and effect. I think by then I was the only one listening, because his disquisition had made me think back to the starting point of my sleepless nights.

  Although the seeds were sown when my boss in London decided to invite the bestselling biographer Sam Uttley on a British Council tour of Russia, I can’t be held accountable for that. The first point where I calculate I have to accept responsibility was on the night train from Moscow to St Petersburg.

  I’d been looking after Sam ever since he’d landed at Sheremetyevo airport two days before. I hadn’t seen him smile in all that time. He’d lectured lugubriously at the university, glumly addressed a gathering at the British Council library, done depressing signings at two bookshops and sulked his way round a reception at the Irish embassy. Even the weather seemed to reflect his mood, grey clouds lowering over Moscow and turning April into autumn. Minding visiting authors is normally the part of my job I like best, but spending time with Sam was about as much fun as having a hole in your shoe in a Russian winter. We’d all been hoping for some glamour from Sam’s visit; his Channel Four series on the roots of biography had led us to expect a glowing Adonis with twinkling eyes and a gleaming grin. Instead, we got a glowering black dog.

  Over dinner on the first evening, he’d downed his vodka like a seasoned Russian hand, and gloomed like the most depressive Slav in the Caucasus. On the short walk back to his hotel, I asked him if everything was all right. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘My wife’s just left me.’

  Right, I thought. Don’t go there, Sarah. ‘Oh,’ I think I said.

  The final event of his Moscow visit was a book signing, and afterwards I took him to dinner to pass the time till midnight, when the train would leave for St Pete’s. That was when the floodgates opened. He was miserable, he admitted. He was terrible company. But Rachel had walked out on him after eight years of marriage. There wasn’t anyone else, she’d said. It was just that she was bored with him, tired of his celebrity, fed up of feeling inferior intellectually. I pointed out that these reasons seemed somewhat contradictory.

  He brightened up at that. And suddenly the sun came out. He acted as if I’d somehow put my finger on something that should make him feel better about the whole thing. He radiated light, and I basked in the warmth of his smile. Before long, we were laughing together, telling our life stories, swapping intimacies. Flirting, I suppose.

  We boarded the train a little before midnight, each dumping our bags in our separate first-class compartments. Then Sam produced a bottle of Georgian champagne from his holdall. ‘A nightcap?’ he suggested.

  ‘Why not?’ I was in the mood, cheered beyond reason by the delights of his company. He sa
t down on the sleeping berth beside me, and it seemed only natural when his arm draped across my shoulders. I remember the smell of him; a dark, masculine smell with an overlay of some spicy cologne with an edge of cinnamon. If I’m honest, I was willing him to kiss me before he actually did. I was entirely disarmed by his charm. But I also felt sorry for the pain that had been so obvious over the previous two days. And maybe, just maybe, the inherent Doctor Zhivago romance of the night train tipped the balance.

  I don’t usually do this kind of thing. What am I saying? I never do this kind of thing. In four years of chasing around after authors, or having them chase after me, I’d not given into temptation once. But Sam penetrated all of my professional defences, and I moaned under his hands from Moscow to St Petersburg. By morning, he swore I’d healed his heart. By the time he left St Pete’s three days later, we’d arranged to meet in London, where I was due to attend a meeting in ten days’ time. I’d been out of love for a long time; it wasn’t hard to fall for a man who was handsome, clever and amusing, and who seemed to find me irresistible.

  Two days’ later, I got his first e-mail. I’d been checking every waking hour on the hour, wondering and edgy. It turned out I had good reason to be anxious. The e-mail was short and sour.

  Dear Sarah, Rachel and I have decided we want to try to resolve our difficulties. It’ll come as no surprise to you that my marriage is my number one priority. So I think it best if we don’t communicate further. Sorry if this seems cold, but there’s no other way to say it. Sam.

  I was stunned. This wasn’t cold, it was brutal. A hard jab below the ribs, designed to take my breath away and deflect any possible comeback. I felt the physical shock in the pit of my stomach.