The Danger Game Page 3

  ‘So what’s Tanga Tans like?’ he asked Courtney as she sat down at her desk and began connecting the miniature camera to her laptop. ‘I mean, what’s your overall impression of the place?’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly a high-class establishment,’ she said. ‘It’s in one of those rough little side streets just off Slade Lane, not far from the estate. There’s a fried chicken place on one side of it and a minicab office on the other side. I’m not being snotty or anything, but it’s not the kind of place I’d go to if I wanted to top up my tan.’

  I knew what she meant. The Slade Lane estate is a pretty rough area, and the people who live there don’t take kindly to strangers. Even if you know people who live there, which I do, you’ve still got to watch your step.

  ‘Right,’ Courtney said, tapping at the keyboard of her laptop, ‘here we go.’

  I watched as the video footage appeared on the screen. It was kind of jumpy at first, and I couldn’t work out what I was looking at, but then Courtney said, ‘The salon’s on the first floor. That’s me going up the stairs.’

  The video settled down then, and we watched as Courtney entered the salon and went up to the reception desk. From what we could see of the salon, it didn’t look as if a lot of money had been spent on it. There was a poky little waiting area in front of the reception desk, with a couple of cheap-looking settees and a shabby little coffee table with a pile of old magazines on it, and the room itself looked as if it had been decorated in a hurry by someone who’d never used a paintbrush before.

  The woman behind the desk had shortish dark hair and light-olive skin, and she was dressed in a plain blue T-shirt and jeans. There was a simple prettiness to her face that vaguely reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t for the life of me think who. Although she wasn’t that old – around thirty-five, I guessed – the woman’s prettiness was already fading, her face weighed down with sadness and worry.

  The video played on: Courtney asking about prices, the woman wearily answering her questions . . . then Courtney being shown into a booth and the woman pointing out how everything worked. She sounded bored out of her mind.

  ‘No mention of protective goggles?’ Grandad asked Courtney.

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Was anyone else there? Any other staff?’

  ‘Someone comes in later,’ Courtney said, ‘which I think you’ll find interesting. But at that point, Lisa was on her own.’

  ‘Lisa?’ Grandad said.

  ‘I asked her what her name was when I left.’

  ‘Just Lisa?’

  ‘It would have been a bit suspicious if I’d asked for her full name, wouldn’t it?’

  Grandad grinned. ‘Just checking.’

  Courtney tapped the keyboard and fast-forwarded the video. ‘Nothing happens for the next ten minutes or so,’ she explained.

  ‘Did you actually get on the sunbed?’ I asked.

  Courtney frowned at me. ‘That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, immediately feeling my face go red, ‘I only meant—’

  ‘You never learn, do you?’ Courtney said, smiling at me. ‘You’re so easy to wind up it’s almost no fun.’

  I looked at her, trying to think of something smart to say, but I couldn’t come up with anything.

  Courtney gave me another quick grin, then turned her attention back to the laptop. She hit a key and the fast-forwarding stopped. ‘This is where the sunbed timer goes off,’ she told us, starting the video again.

  ‘It wasn’t faulty then?’ Grandad said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And this is definitely the same booth that Jakes and Mortimer’s client used?’

  ‘Yeah, I checked with them before I went. There are three booths, and their client used the one nearest the door. That’s the one I’m in.’

  ‘Maybe the timer’s been fixed since their client used it,’ Grandad suggested.

  ‘Listen to this,’ Courtney said, turning up the volume.

  The muffled sound of raised voices crackled from the laptop speaker – a man’s voice, shouting . . . then Lisa’s voice yelling in reply.

  ‘I’m still in the booth at this point,’ Courtney said, ‘but as soon as I heard the ruckus outside . . . well, as you can see, I went out to see what was going on.’

  The viewpoint from the camera showed Courtney opening the door and going out into the reception area. Over at the desk, a mean-looking guy in an expensive-looking suit was shouting at Lisa and angrily jabbing his finger towards her face. He was a bit younger than Lisa – in his mid- to late twenties – but there was no doubt that he was in charge.

  ‘You’re supposed to be running the place,’ he was yelling at her. ‘It’s not difficult, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ Lisa told him.

  ‘Yeah, well it’s not good enough, is it?’ He glared at her. ‘You know what’ll happen to you if anything comes of this, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not my fault, Dee Dee,’ Lisa said. ‘All I do is take their money and tell them which booth to use.’

  The guy called Dee Dee turned towards the camera then, suddenly aware of Courtney’s presence. ‘Yeah?’ he snarled at her. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Courtney said hesitantly, ‘I was just . . . I didn’t mean to interrupt . . .’

  Now that Dee Dee was looking straight at the camera, it was clear that he wasn’t just mean-looking – he was a lot more than that. He was, without doubt, the scariest-looking man I’d ever seen. Physically he wasn’t anything special – medium size, medium weight, not overly muscle-bound or anything – but there was a dead-eyed menace about him that even the hardest of tough guys don’t have. He didn’t just look mean and hard, he looked as if he could kill you without blinking.

  He’d turned away from Courtney now and was staring at Lisa again.

  ‘I haven’t finished with you,’ he said to her.

  She nodded.

  He glanced briefly at Courtney again, then strode off and disappeared through a door at the back of the salon.

  ‘Nice guy, eh?’ Courtney said, turning off the tape.

  ‘I think I know who he is,’ I said quietly.

  Grandad and Courtney both looked at me.

  ‘Lisa called him Dee Dee,’ I explained. ‘Dee Dee’s the street-name of a guy called Drew Devon.’

  ‘And who’s this Drew Devon?’ Grandad asked.

  ‘He runs the Slade Lane estate.’

  8

  I’d heard about Dee Dee from a friend of mine called Mason Yusuf. Mason’s a couple of years older than me. He lives on the Slade, and he knows pretty much everything that goes on there. He knows most of the gang kids, and he knows what they get up to, and I’d be very surprised if he isn’t involved in at least some of it himself. Mason’s no angel, that’s for sure. But he’s been a true friend to me ever since I helped out his younger sister once, and I’ll always be in his debt for the help he gave me in solving the case my parents were working on when they died.

  ‘When you say that this Dee Dee character runs the Slade Lane estate,’ Grandad said to me, ‘what does that actually mean?’

  ‘He runs the biggest gang on the Slade,’ I said. ‘And it’s the gangs that control the estate. It was Dee Dee who organised the riot in North Walk just after Mum and Dad died, remember?’

  Grandad nodded. The riot had been arranged to cover up a break-in at Delaney & Co’s office. A secretive organisation known as Omega were searching for material relating to the case my parents had been working on at the time, and they’d paid Dee Dee to get a load of kids from the Slade to go on a rampage and smash up all the shops and offices in North Walk so that the break-in at our office didn’t arouse any suspicion.

  ‘According to my friend Mason,’ I continued, ‘Dee Dee’s a very powerful man.’

  ‘So what’s he doing in a rundown tanning salon?’

  ‘Maybe he owns it,’ Courtney suggested.

  ‘Why wou
ld someone so powerful own a shabby little place like that?’ Grandad said to her. ‘Were there any other customers around when you were there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did it look like a profitable business to you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I paid five pounds for a ten-minute session. I was in the salon for about fifteen or twenty minutes altogether, and I hung around outside for twenty minutes or so before I went in. When I left I spent another twenty minutes in the fried chicken place next door. I didn’t see anyone going in or out of the salon the whole time.’

  ‘So in the hour that you were there, Tanga Tans made a grand total of five pounds,’ Grandad concluded. ‘It’s not exactly big money, is it?’ He got up and began pacing around the office. ‘I don’t suppose it really matters though, does it?’ he mused. ‘We’re not being paid to question the ownership of the place, or why a big-shot local gangster is threatening the woman who works there. That’s not our concern, is it?’

  He wasn’t really asking us the question – he was pretty much talking to himself – so neither of us bothered answering him.

  ‘We’ve done what we were paid to do,’ he went on. ‘We’ve got the video evidence that Jakes and Mortimer wanted. It’s up to them what they do with it.’

  He stopped pacing, thought deeply for a moment, then looked over at us. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind looking into it a bit more,’ Courtney said. ‘For curiosity’s sake if nothing else. I mean, it’s not as if we’re working on anything else at the moment, is it?’

  Grandad looked at me, asking for my opinion.

  ‘I could have a word with Mason, if you want,’ I told him. ‘See if he knows anything about the salon.’

  Grandad nodded. ‘I suppose I could ask Gloria to do a bit of digging into Tanga Tans’ financial records. She might find something that sheds a bit of light on things.’ He turned to Courtney. ‘Like you said, we’re not exactly rushed off our feet at the moment, so it’s not as if we haven’t got the time to take a closer look at Tanga Tans.’

  ‘It’ll show how incredibly efficient we are,’ Courtney said.

  ‘That’s true. And if another job comes up in the meantime, we can stop being “incredibly efficient” and get back to doing some proper work.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Courtney said.

  Travis?’ Grandad said, turning to me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Right,’ Grandad said, ‘so that’s agreed then. We’ll carry on looking into it for a few more days and then . . . well, we’ll just see what happens, OK?’

  When I told them about the school changing-room thefts, and that I’d been hired to look into them, they were both genuinely pleased for me.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Grandad said. ‘Your very first solo investigation. I’m impressed.’

  ‘Yeah, well done, Trav,’ Courtney added. ‘That’s fantastic. You’ll be taking over from me if I don’t watch out.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I told them. ‘But I didn’t really do anything. Kendal just came up and asked me if I’d do it.’

  ‘A job’s a job,’ Grandad said. ‘It doesn’t matter how you get it.’

  ‘What equipment do you think I should use?’ I asked him. ‘I was thinking of some kind of motion sensor device.’

  ‘Let me see what we’ve got,’ he said, getting up and going over to a cupboard by the window. He opened it up and pulled out what he called his ‘gadget case’. It was a large aluminium briefcase, about the size of a small suitcase, in which he kept all the tracking and surveillance equipment. ‘How much are you charging them for this job?’ he asked, bringing the case over to his desk.

  ‘I think I said I’d do it for nothing.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Well, Kendal told me they wanted to keep it unofficial, and I made a joke about getting paid with good grades, and then . . . I don’t know. The question of payment kind of got forgotten.’

  ‘We’re not a charity, Travis,’ Grandad said, sitting down and opening the gadget case. ‘We’re professional investigators. We don’t work for nothing, OK?’

  ‘Not even for friends?’

  ‘Especially not for friends.’

  ‘Sorry. I just thought—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, rummaging around in the case. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you get paid next time, OK?’

  I leaned over his desk and looked at the bewildering array of electronic surveillance equipment inside the case – cameras, trackers, recorders, bugs, cables.

  ‘I think these are your best bet,’ he said, fishing out a couple of small metal cylinders. ‘They’re simple motion sensor devices, no video or audio capability. These particular models use ultrasonic waves to detect movement. You can link them up to your mobile with a Wi-Fi connection, and set whatever type of alert you want – sound, flashing lights, vibration. All you need to do is work out a way to hide them.’

  I reached into the gadget case and pulled out what looked like a stick-on air freshener. It was actually a disguised miniature surveillance camera. ‘Could we take the cameras out of these and replace them with the motion sensors?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Grandad said. He looked across at Courtney. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Here, let me have a look,’ she said, getting up and coming over to us.

  I passed her the air-freshener camera. She took a small Swiss Army knife from her pocket, opened up a screwdriver attachment, and began taking the air freshener apart.

  ‘As long as the camera isn’t permanently fixed inside,’ she said, ‘it shouldn’t be a problem.’

  I watched her working – her eyes narrowed in concentration, her delicate fingers carefully dismantling the plastic device – and then I glanced at Grandad. He’d put his reading glasses on and was studying the back of a packet he’d taken out of the gadget case.

  ‘Have you seen these, Trav?’ he said, passing me the packet. ‘I ordered them last week and they’ve just come in.’

  The packet contained two small silver discs. They were about the size of a 5p coin, but thicker. They looked a bit like hearing-aid batteries.

  ‘They’re GPS tracking devices,’ Grandad said, tapping at his laptop. ‘There’s a magnetic strip on one side, so you can easily fix them to a vehicle or anything metallic, or you can just plant them in someone’s pocket or handbag or whatever. All you have to do to activate them is go to this website, enter the code specific to each device, put in your mobile number, and that’s it. The device sends a signal to your phone, and you can follow its location on whatever kind of map you want – road map, street view, satellite view. You just choose the option from a menu on your phone.’

  ‘What’s the range?’

  ‘Well, it’s supposed to be up to five kilometres, but I’d imagine it’s a lot less in built-up areas. Do you want to give it a go?’

  I took out one of the trackers and read off the code. As Grandad started keying it into the website, I couldn’t help smiling at the gleam of excited curiosity in his eyes. He looked like a little kid playing with a brand-new toy. I watched him for a while, then turned my attention to Courtney again, studying her as she worked away on the air-freshener camera. It felt really nice, just sitting there watching them both, and the fact that Gloria wasn’t there made it feel even nicer. It was just the three of us, like it used to be, with no one else to complicate things.

  As I looked away from Courtney and gazed around the office, I found myself thinking back even further, remembering all the good times I’d spent in here with Mum and Dad, watching them getting on with their work, listening to them talking and joking with each other . . .

  It wasn’t the same now, of course. Nothing would ever be the same. But being in here with Courtney and Grandad was as close to how it used to be as I could ever hope to get, and despite feeling incredibly sad, I also felt incredibly lucky.

  9

  It was nearly six o’clock by the time Courtney had fini
shed adapting the air-freshener cams, and by then she was in a hurry to get home. Her house was only five minutes’ walk from the office, but she had to get back to take over from the carer who looked after her mum during the day. Her mother has Parkinson’s disease.

  ‘When are you going to be putting the sensors into the changing rooms?’ she asked me, buttoning up her coat.

  ‘Sometime over the weekend.’

  ‘Give me a call if there’s any problems, OK?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Right, I’ve got to go. See you later.’

  I called Mason Yusuf then and asked him if I could come over and see him about something. He didn’t ask me what it was, he just said, ‘When?’

  ‘Any time tonight would be good. I could be there in half an hour—’

  ‘I’m kind of tied up with something right now, but I’ll be free after seven. Is that OK?’

  ‘Yeah, great.’

  ‘Just ring me when you get to the estate, OK?’

  I hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime, so rather than just hanging around before it was time to head off to see Mason, I thought I’d nip into town and get a burger or something. But just as I was fetching my coat, Grandad called out to me from his office.

  ‘Have you got a minute, Trav?’

  When I went into his office, he was still sitting at his desk, his laptop open in front of him, his reading glasses halfway down his nose.

  ‘Pull up a seat,’ he said, ‘I want to show you something.’

  I grabbed a chair from the other side of the office, took it over to the desk, and sat down next to him.

  ‘We haven’t talked about Omega for a while, have we?’ he said.

  I looked at him, my heart turning cold.

  When my parents were killed in a car crash, they were investigating the disappearance of a young man called Bashir Kamal. At first, there didn’t seem to be any connection between the accident and their investigation, and it wasn’t until I started looking into the case myself that I began to suspect that the crash might not have been an accident after all. There was a lot more to the case than had first met the eye, and it soon turned out that not only were the CIA and MI5 mixed up in the investigation, but a shadowy organisation known as Omega were involved in it too.