Trust No One by Alex Walters Page A

suggest ion it was.
    She shrugged, then made a show of pouring herself another cup of coffee, ignoring Salter’s empty cup. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Just a hunch.’
    â€˜Ah. A hunch.’ Salter rolled the word round in his mouth, his expression suggesting that he might be about to spit it out physically. ‘One of those.’
    â€˜Woman’s intuition, Hugh. You know how it is. We’re just better at that kind of stuff.’ She smiled. ‘You lot have parallel parking instead.’
    â€˜Well, I’ll bear your suggestion in mind, sis.’
    â€˜That’s all I’m asking, Hugh. Just keep him on your radar. There’s something about him.’
    â€˜Good looking, is he?’
    â€˜Why? You jealous, Hugh? Don’t worry, he’s not in your league.’ She shook her head, wondering why they had to go through all this crap. Just a bit of banter. Show that she was one of the lads. Or as close to being one of the lads as she was ever likely to get.
    That had been her third liaison meeting with Salter. She made a point of using the word ‘liaison’, which was how it was described in the formal procedures they were both supposed to follow. Hugh preferred the more old-fashioned term, ‘supervision’, presumably because it made him feel more important. He might have been designated as her ‘buddy’ up here, but they were the same pay grade. She had every intention of reminding him of that if he showed signs of getting uppity.
    The venue had been yet another anonymous business hotel, this one just off the M56 near the airport. The small meeting room was, as always, nothing more than a semi-converted bedroom. Not her ideal choice of location for a meeting with Hugh Salter, though so far he’d always been on what presumably passed for his best behaviour.
    She didn’t know quite why she’d mentioned Morton at all. It was partly because, at least to her own ears, her achievements to date had sounded pretty thin. OK, she’d got the business up and running, which was no mean feat for someone of her inexperience. And it had been a tough few weeks. She’d arrived at the print shop on her first day to find that Gordon, the supposedly ultra-reliable, long-serving, ever-willing assistant she’d inherited with the business, had decided that he was happy to turn his hand to anything except working for a woman. Her first task on her first day, therefore, had been to accept Gordon’s resignation. Her second had been to call the Job Centre.
    For the last couple of weeks, as well as the endless phone calls to drum up business, she’d found herself interviewing a steady stream of no-hopers, most of whom couldn’t be bothered even to pretend they had an interest in printing. Fortunately, Gordon had grudgingly agreed to hang around for a couple of weeks to keep the show on the road through a stream of mildly sexist grumbling. And, a couple of days before, she’d finally managed to find a suitable candidate to succeed him, Joe Maybury, an experienced printer who’d just been made redundant from some print shop in Stockport. She was just waiting for the Agency to run the criminal records checks – even with the day-to-day stuff, as Salter kept reminding her, you couldn’t be too careful– before she offered him the job. So, as she told Salter, things were looking up.
    But she was acutely conscious that all this was mundane stuff. Just laying the foundations. Getting her legend up to scratch. It was all necessary. You couldn’t afford to cut corners at this stage. But by itself it was nothing. She had made only minimal progress in starting to build the relationships that would really matter – with the key players in the local underworld. Sure, she’d followed up all the introductions that had been provided to her, with some initial success. Some, like Kerridge, had agreed to see her. Some had made