Dead Beat
‘This is crime writing of the very highest order … Kate Brannigan has turned into the most interesting sleuthess around’ The TimesDead Beat introduces Kate Brannigan, a female private detective who does for Manchester what V.I. Warshawski has done for Chicago.As a favour, Kate agrees to track down a missing songwriter, Moira Pollock, a search that takes her into some of the seediest parts of Leeds and Bradford. But little does she realize that finding Moira is a prelude to murder…
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VAL McDERMID
DEAD BEAT
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1992 and Orion Books Ltd 1999
Copyright © Val McDermid 1992
Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007142910
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007327645
Version: 2014-09-05
For Lisanne and Jane; can we just tell them that, then, darlings?
CONTENTS
I swear one day Iâll kill him. Kill who? The man next door, Richard Barclay, rock journalist and overgrown schoolboy, is who. I had stumbled wearily across the threshold of my bungalow, craving nothing more exotic than a few hoursâ sleep when I found Richardâs message. When I say found, I use the term loosely. I could hardly have missed it. Heâd sellotaped it to the inside of my glass inner door so that it would be the first thing I saw when I entered the storm porch. It glared luridly at me, looking like a childâs note to Santa, written in sprawling capitals with magic marker on the back of a record company press release. âDonât forget Jettâs gig and party afterwards tonight. Vital youâre there. See you at eight.â Vital was underlined three times, but it was that âDonât forgetâ that made my hands twitch into a stranglehold.
Richard and I have been lovers for only nine months, but Iâve already learned to speak his language. I could write the Berlitz phrasebook. The official translation of âdonât forgetâ is, âI omitted to mention to you that I had committed us to going somewhere/doing something (that you will almost certainly hate the idea of) and if you donât come it will cause me major social embarrassment.â
I pulled the note off the door, sighing deeply when I saw the sellotape marks on the glass. Iâd weaned him off drawing pins, but unfortunately I hadnât yet got him on to Blu-Tack. I walked up the narrow hall to the telephone table. The house diary where Richard and I are both supposed to record details of anything mutually relevant lay open. In todayâs space, Richard had written, in black felt-tip pen, âJett: Apollo then Holiday Innâ. Even though heâd used a different pen from his note, it didnât fool the carefully cultivated memory skills of Kate Brannigan, Private Investigator. I knew that message hadnât been there when Iâd staggered out an hour before dawn to continue my surveillance of a pair of counterfeiters.
I muttered childish curses under my breath as I made my way through to my bedroom and quickly peeled off my nondescript duvet jacket and jogging suit. âI hope his rabbits die and all his matches get wet. And I hope he canât get the lid off the mayo after heâs made the chicken sandwich,â I swore as I headed for the bathroom and stepped gratefully under a hot shower.
Thatâs when the self-pitying tears slowly squeezed themselves under my defences and down my cheeks. In the shower no one can see you weep. I offer that up as one of the great twentieth-century aphorisms, right up there alongside âLove means never having to say youâre sorryâ. Mostly, my tears were sheer exhaustion. For the last two weeks Iâd been working on a case that had involved driving from one end of the country to the other on an almost daily basis, staking out houses and warehouses from the hours before dawn till past midnight, and living on snatched sandwiches from motorway service stations and greasy spoons my mother would have phoned the environmental health inspectors about.
