Crack Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

floor, face smacked up against the skirting board, forced to recognize that it was too long since I’d cleaned the house. Cursing in a fluent monotone, I made it as far as the porch and pulled a pair of flat loafers out of the shoe cupboard. On my way out of the door, I remembered the route I was planning to go down, and hurried back into the living room, where I picked up the slim black leather briefcase I use to impress prospective clients with my businesslike qualities.
    As I started the car, I noticed Richard’s Beetle wasn’t in its usual parking space. What in God’s name was going on? If he’d gone out in his own car, what was he doing driving round in the middle of the night in a stolen car with a parcel of heavy drugs? More to the point, did the owners of the drugs know who’d driven off with their merchandise? Because if they did, I didn’t give much for Richard’s chances of seeing his next birthday.
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    I pulled up in the visitors’ car park at Longsight nick a couple of minutes later. There wasn’t much competition for parking places that time of night. I knew I’d have at least fifteen minutes to kill, since Ruth had to drive all the way over from her house in Hale. Usually, I don’t have much trouble keeping my mind occupied on stake-outs. Maybe that’s because I don’t have to do it too often, given the line of work Mortensen and Brannigan specialize in. A lot of private eyes have to make the bulk of their income doing mind-and-bum-numbing bread-and-butter surveillance work, but because we work mainly with computer crime and white-collar fraud, we spend a lot more of our backside-breaking hours in other people’s offices than we do outside their houses. But tonight, the seventeen minutes I spent staring at the dirty red brick and tall
blank windows of the rambling, mock-Gothic police station felt like hours. I suppose I was worried. I must be getting soft in my old age.
    I spotted Ruth’s car as soon as she turned into the car park. Her husband’s in the rag trade, and he drives a white Bentley Mulsanne Turbo. When she gets dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, Ruth likes to drive the Bentley. It doesn’t half get up the noses of the cops. Her regular clients love it to bits. As the dazzling headlights in my rear-view mirror dimmed to black, I was out of my car and waving to Ruth.
    The driver’s window slid down with an almost imperceptible hum. She didn’t stick her head out; she waited for me to draw level. I grinned. Ruth didn’t. “You’ll have a long wait, Kate,” she said, a warning in her voice.
    I ignored the warning. “Ruth, you and I both know you’re the best criminal lawyer in the city. But we also both know that being an officer of the court means there is a whole raft of things you can’t even think about doing. The kind of shit Richard seems to have got himself in, he needs someone out there ducking and diving, doing whatever it takes to dig up the information that’ll get him off the hook with the cops and with the dealers. I’m the one who’s going to have to do that, and the most efficient way for that process to get started is for me to sit in on your briefing.”
    Give her her due, Ruth heard me out. She even paused for the count of five to create the impression she was giving some thought to my suggestion. Then she slowly shook her head. “No way, Kate. I suspect you know the provisions of PACE as well as I do.”
    I smiled ruefully. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act hadn’t exactly been my bedtime reading when it became law, but I was reasonably familiar with its provisions. I knew perfectly well that the only person a suspect was entitled to have sitting in on their interview with the police was his or her solicitor. “There is one way round it,” I said.
    There’s something about the mind of a criminal solicitor. They can’t