PI Kate Brannigan Series Books 1-3: Dead Beat, Kick Back, Crack Down
Three crime novels featuring PI Kate Brannigan from Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author Val McDermid.DEAD BEAT: Kate Brannigan is a female private detective set to do for Manchester what V.I. Warshawski has done for Chicago. As a favour to her rock journalist boyfriend, Kate agrees to track down a missing song-writer Moira Pollock, a search that takes her into some of the seediest parts of Leeds and Bradford. But little does she realise that finding Moira is only a prelude to murder…KICK BACK: Kate Brannigan, feisty Manchester-based PI, is back, investigating the bizarre case of the missing conservatories. Before long she’s up to her neck in crooked land deals, mortgage scams, financial chicanery – and murder. But when a favour for a friend puts Kate’s own life in danger, bizarre is not the first word she thinks of…CRACK DOWN: PI Kate Brannigan only let her boyfriend help out with an investigation into a car sales fraud because she thought it was safe. But by now Kate should know that with Richard you have to expect the unexpected. Soon she finds herself dragged into a world of drug traffickers, child pornographers, fraudsters and violent gangland enforcers bringing her face to face with death in the most terrifying investigation of her career.
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This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Val McDermid 2014
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Source ISBN: 9780007327645, 9780007327638, 9780007327546
Ebook Edition © MAY 2014 ISBN: 9780007557561
Version: 2016-11-11
VAL McDERMID
PI KATE BRANNIGAN SERIES
BOOKS 1–3 Dead BeatKick BackCrack Down
CONTENTS
VAL McDERMID
DEAD BEAT
For Lisanne and Jane; can we just tell them that, then, darlings?
CONTENTS
I swear one day I’ll 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 hours’ sleep when I found Richard’s message. When I say found, I use the term loosely. I could hardly have missed it. He’d 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 child’s note to Santa, written in sprawling capitals with magic marker on the back of a record company press release. ‘Don’t forget Jett’s gig and party afterwards tonight. Vital you’re there. See you at eight.’ Vital was underlined three times, but it was that ‘Don’t forget’ that made my hands twitch into a stranglehold.
Richard and I have been lovers for only nine months, but I’ve already learned to speak his language. I could write the Berlitz phrasebook. The official translation of ‘don’t forget’ is, ‘I 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 don’t come it will cause me major social embarrassment.’
I pulled the note off the door, sighing deeply when I saw the sellotape marks on the glass. I’d weaned him off drawing pins, but unfortunately I hadn’t 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 today’s space, Richard had written, in black felt-tip pen, ‘Jett: Apollo then Holiday Inn’. Even though he’d used a different pen from his note, it didn’t fool the carefully cultivated memory skills of Kate Brannigan, Private Investigator. I knew that message hadn’t been there when I’d 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. ‘I hope his rabbits die and all his matches get wet. And I hope he can’t get the lid off the mayo after he’s made the chicken sandwich,’ I swore as I headed for the bathroom and stepped gratefully under a hot shower.
That’s 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 ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’. Mostly, my tears were sheer exhaustion. For the last two weeks I’d 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.
