Kick Back by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online

carrier bags and a case of Miller Lite was clearly too much for the poor lamb, who immediately slumped on one of my living-room sofas. “I thought you were doing your brains in to the sound of young black Manchester tonight?” I said.
    â€œThey decided they weren’t ready to expose themselves to the fearless scrutiny of the music press,” he said. “So they’ve put me off till next week. By which time, I hope one of them’s had a brain transplant. You know, Brannigan, sometimes I wish the guy who invented the drum machine had been strangled at birth. He’d have saved the world a lot of brain ache.” Richard shrugged his jacket off, kicked off his shoes and put his feet up.
    â€œHaven’t you got someone else to mither?” I asked politely.
    â€œNope. I haven’t even got any deadlines to meet. So I thought I might go and pick up a Chinese, bring it back here and litter your lounge with beansprouts out of sheer badness.”
    â€œFine. As long as you promise you will not insinuate a single shirt into my ironing basket.”
    â€œPromise,” he said.
    An hour and a half later, I pressed my last pair of trousers. “Thank God,” I sighed.
    No response from the sofa. It wasn’t surprising. He was on his third joint and it would have been hard to hear World War Three over the soundtrack of the Mötley Crüe video he was inflicting on
me. What did penetrate, however, was the high-pitched electronic bleep of my phone. I grabbed the phone and the TV remote, hitting the mute button as I switched the phone to “talk.” That got a reaction. “Hey,” he protested, then subsided immediately as he registered that I was using the phone.
    â€œHello,” I said. Never give your name or number when you answer the phone, especially if you’ve got an ex-directory number. In these days of phones with last number re-dial buttons, you never know who you’re talking to. I have a friend who discovered the name and number of her husband’s mistress that way. I know I’ve got nothing to fear on that score, but I like to develop habits of caution. You never know when they’ll come in necessary.
    â€œKate? It’s Alexis.” She sounded the kind of pissed off she gets when she’s trying to put together a story against the clock and the news editor is standing behind her chair breathing down her neck. But the time was all wrong for her deadlines.
    â€œOh, hi. How’s tricks?” I said.
    â€œIs this a good time?”
    â€œGood as any. I’ve eaten, I’m still under the limit and I still have my clothes on,” I told her.
    â€œWe need your help, Kate. I don’t like to ask, but I don’t know who else would know where to begin.”
    This was no pick-your-brains business call. When Alexis wants my help with a story, she doesn’t apologize. She knows that kind of professional help is a two-way street. “Tell me the score, I’ll tell you if I can help.”
    â€œYou know that piece of land we’re supposed to be buying? The one I showed you the pics of yesterday? Yeah?”
    â€œYeah,” I soothed. She sounded like she was about to explode.
    â€œWell, you’re not going to believe this. Chris went up there today to do some measurements. She figured that if she’s going to be designing these houses, she needs to have a feel for the lie of the land so the properties can blend in with the flow of the landscape, right?”
    â€œRight. So what’s the problem?”
    â€œThe problem is, she gets up there to find a couple of surveyors marking out the plots. Well, she’s a bit confused, you know,
because as far as we know none of the other self-builders we’re working with have asked anyone to start work yet, on account of we haven’t completed on it yet. So, she parks up in the Land Rover and watches them for half an hour or so. Then it dawns on her that the