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VENUS SQUARES NEPTUNE

This is a tense aspect that produces strain in affairs of the heart because she has a higher expectation of love and comradeship than her world provides. She has a strong determination to beat the odds stacked against her.

From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

It’s not every night you feel like you need a Visiting Order to enter your own conservatory. That night I definitely wanted reinforcements before I could face the music or the men. A quick trip to the kitchen and I was equipped with a sweating tumbler of ice-cold pepper-flavoured Absolut topped up with pink grapefruit juice. I took a deep draught and headed for whatever Dennis and Richard had to throw at me.

When I say the conservatory was full of criminals, I was only slightly exaggerating. Although Richard’s insistence on the need for marijuana before creativity can be achieved means he cheerfully breaks the law every day, he’s got no criminal convictions. Being a journalist, he doesn’t have any other kind either.

Dennis is a different animal. He’s a career criminal but, paradoxically, I trust him more than almost anyone. I always know where I am with Dennis; his morality might not be constructed along traditional lines, but it’s more rigid than the law of gravity, and a hell of a lot more forgiving. He used to be a professional burglar; not the sort who breaks into people’s houses to steal the video and rummage through the lingerie, but the sort who relieves the very rich of some of their ill-gotten and well-insured gains. Some of his victims had so many expensive status symbols lying around that they didn’t even realize they’d been burgled. These days, he’s more or less given up robbing anyone except other villains who’ve got too much pride to complain to the law. That’s because, after his last enforced spell of taking care of business from behind high walls with no office equipment except a phone card, his wife told him she’d divorce him if he ever did anything else that carried a custodial sentence.

I’ve known Dennis even longer than I’ve known Richard. He’s my Thai-boxing coach, and he taught me the basic principle of self-defence for someone as little as I am – one crippling kick to the kneecap or the balls, then run like hell. It’s saved my life more than once, which is another good reason why Dennis will always be welcome in my house. Well, almost always.

I leaned against the doorjamb and scowled. ‘I thought you didn’t do drugs,’ I said mildly to Dennis.

‘You know I don’t,’ he said. ‘Who’s been telling porkies about me?’

‘Nobody. I was referring to the atmosphere in here,’ I said, wafting my hand in front of my face as I crossed the room to give Dennis a kiss on a cheek so smooth he must have shaved before he came out for the evening. ‘Breathe and you’re stoned. Not to mention cutting your life expectancy by half.’

‘Nice to see you too, Brannigan,’ my beloved said as I pushed the evening paper to one side and dropped on to the sofa next to him.

‘So what are you two boys plotting?’

Dennis grinned like Wile E. Coyote. My heart sank. I was well past a convincing impersonation of the Road Runner. ‘Wanted to pick your brains,’ he said.

‘And it couldn’t wait till morning?’ I groaned.

‘I was passing.’

Richard gave the sort of soft giggle that comes after the fifth bottle and the fourth joint. I know my man. ‘He was passing and he heard a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Bohemian Pilsner calling his name,’ he spluttered.

‘Looking at the number of bottles, it looks more like a crate shouting its head off,’ I muttered. The boys looked like they were set to make a night of it. There was only one way I was going to come out of this alive and that was to sort out Dennis’s problem. Then they might not notice if I answered the siren call of my duvet. ‘How can I help, Dennis?’ I asked sweetly.

He gave me the wary look of a person who’s drunk enough to notice their other half isn’t giving them the hard time they deserve. ‘I could come back tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ I said repressively. ‘Like the song says, tonight will be fine.’

Dennis gave me a quick sideways look and reached for his cigarettes. ‘You never finished your law degree, did you?’

I shook my head. It was a sore point with my mum and dad, who fancied being the parents of the first graduate in the family, but all it brought me was relief that business could never be so bad that I’d be tempted to set up shop as a lawyer. Two years of study had been enough to demonstrate there wasn’t a single area of legal practice that wouldn’t drive me barking within six months.

‘So you couldn’t charge me for legal advice,’ Dennis concluded triumphantly.

I raised my eyes to the heavens, where a few determined stars penetrated the sodium glow of the city sky. ‘No, Dennis, I couldn’t.’ Then I gave him the hard stare. ‘But why would I want to? We’ve never sent each other bills before, have we? What exactly are you up to?’

‘You know I’d never ask you to help me out with anything criminal, don’t you?’

‘’Course you wouldn’t. You’re far too tight to waste your breath,’ I said. Richard giggled again. I revised my estimate. Sixth bottle, fifth joint.

Dennis leaned across to pick up his jacket from the nearby chair, revealing splendid muscles in his forearm and a Ralph Lauren label. It didn’t quite go with the jogging pants and the Manchester United away shirt. He pulled some papers out of the inside pocket then gave me a slightly apprehensive glance. Then he shrugged and said, ‘It’s not illegal. Not as such.’

‘Not even a little bit?’ I asked. I didn’t bother trying to hide my incredulity. Dennis only takes offence when it’s intended.

‘This bit isn’t illegal,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s a lease.’

‘A lease?’

‘For a shop.’

‘You’re taking out a lease on a shop?’ It was a bit like hearing Dracula had gone veggie.

He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Only technically.’

I knew better than to ask more. Sometimes ignorance is not only bliss but also healthy. ‘And you want me to cast an eye over it to see that you’re not being ripped off,’ I said, holding a hand out for the papers.

Curiously reluctant now, Dennis clutched the papers to his chest. ‘You do know about leases? I mean, it’s not one of the bits you missed out, is it?’

It was, as it happened, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Besides, since I’d quit law school, I’d learned much more practical stuff about contracts and leases than I could ever have done if I’d stuck it out. ‘Gimme,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to argue with that tone of voice,’ Richard chipped in like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Dennis screwed his face up like a man eating a piccalilli sandwich, but he handed over the papers.

It looked like a bog standard lease to me. It was for a shop in the Arndale Centre, the soulless shopping mall in the city centre that the IRA tried to remove from the map back in ’96. As usual, they got it wrong. The Arndale, probably the ugliest building in central Manchester, remained more or less intact. Unfortunately, almost every other building within a quarter-mile radius took a hell of a hammering, especially the ones that were actually worth looking at. As a result, the whole city centre ended up spending a couple of years looking like it had been wrapped by Christo in some bizarre pre-millennium celebration. Now it looked as if part of the mall that had been closed for structural repairs and renovation was opening up again and Dennis had got himself a piece of the action.

There was nothing controversial in the document, as far as I could see. If anything, it was skewed in favour of the lessee, one John Thompson, since it gave him the first three months at half rent as a supposed inducement. I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t Dennis’s name on the lease. He’s a man who can barely bring himself to fill in his real name on the voters’ roll. Besides, no self-respecting landlord would ever grant a lease to a man who, according to the credit-rating agencies, didn’t even exist.

What I couldn’t understand was what he was up to. Somehow, I couldn’t get my head round the idea of Dennis as the natural heir of Marks and Spencer. Karl Marx, maybe, except that they’d have had radically different views of what constituted an appropriate redistribution of wealth. I folded the lease along its creases and said, ‘Looks fine to me.’

Dennis virtually snatched it out of my hand and shoved it back in his pocket, looking far too shifty for a villain as experienced as him. ‘Thanks, love. I just wanted to be sure everything’s there that should be. That it looks right.’

I recognized the key word right away. Us detectives, we never sleep. ‘Looks right?’ I demanded. ‘Why? Who else is going to be giving it the once-over?’

Dennis tried to look innocent. I’ve seen hunter-killer submarines give it a better shot. ‘Just the usual, you know? The leccy board, the water board. They need to see the lease before they’ll connect you to the utilities.’

‘What’s going on, Dennis? What’s really going on?’

Richard pushed himself more or less upright and draped an arm over my shoulders. ‘You might as well tell her, Den. You know what they say – it’s better having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.’

I let him get away with the anatomical impossibility and settled for a savage grin. ‘He’s not wrong,’ I said.

Dennis sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘All right. But I meant it when I said it’s not criminal.’

I cast my eyes upwards and shook my head. ‘Dennis O’Brien, you know and I know that “not criminal” doesn’t necessarily mean “legal”.’

‘Too deep for me,’ Richard complained, reaching for another bottle of beer.

‘Let’s hear it,’ I said firmly.

‘You know how I hate waste,’ Dennis began. I nodded cautiously. ‘There’s nothing more offensive to a man like me than premises standing empty because the landlords’ agents are crap at their job. So I had this idea about making use of a resource that was just standing idle.’

‘Shop-squatting,’ I said flatly.

‘What?’ Richard asked vaguely. ‘You going to live in a shop, Den? What happened to the house? Debbie thrown you out, has she?’

‘He’s not going to be living in the shop, dope-head,’ I said sarcastically.

‘You keep smoking that draw, you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,’ Dennis added sententiously. ‘Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.’

‘Take me through it,’ I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the Evening Chronicle about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.

‘You want to know how it works?’

Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. ‘Was Georgie Best?’

‘First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.’

‘What?’ Richard mumbled.

Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. ‘That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,’ he explained patiently.

‘Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the Dibble can’t touch you for it, on account of you’ve broken no laws.’

‘What about criminal damage?’ I asked. ‘You have to bust the locks to get in.’

Dennis winked. ‘If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?’

‘Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?’ Richard asked. It was an amazingly sensible question given his condition.

Dennis shrugged. ‘Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.’ Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. ‘I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.’

‘I can imagine,’ I said drily. ‘Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?’

‘Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?’ He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.

‘Profitable, is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.’

‘You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,’ I sighed.

He shook his head, rueful. ‘Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?’

He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I dressed it up with the excuse of doing it for the clients and my own version of justice. It had led me into some strange places, forced me into decisions that I didn’t like to examine too closely in the harsh light of day. Once upon a time, I’d have had no doubt whether it was me or Dennis who could lay claim to the better view from the moral high ground.

These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.