Free The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) by Robert Parker Page B

information, but all I see is a solitary photo tag. The owner of the photo is a Leonard Freund. On opening the picture, I make a positive ID straight away. The picture itself is a standard nightclub snap - bright flash, pitch-black background, all the glamour and excitement of the moment itself stripped away leaving the bare facts. Just two men at a table, by a mostly-empty club dance-floor. With champagne. And that’s it. Neither look too pissed, neither look too happy, neither look too bothered. They look bored to tears. I notice the pupils. Saucers. Pills? Possibly. One of the men in it is clearly Michael Davison, the man from before. Michael Davison is clearly a man who is not shy of the odd excess. His name is written at the bottom, along with Leonard’s. Hovering the cursor over the names I see that Leonard’s is clickable, and Michael’s is not. Michael has no Facebook profile. I click on Leonard’s and it quickly becomes obvious that this man is a social media obsessive and a consummate narcissist.
    For starters, his profile picture looks like a homemade modeling shot. Black and white, high contrast, shades. An odd pencil mustache kind of completes the look. I scroll down into this bemusing catalogue. Is this what makes this Leonard man tick, or what he thinks people want to see? Either answer is a strange one. There are meals as photo updates, just pictures of plates of food. And cars - a few nice sports models. There’s a fancy watch called a Breitling. A flew cliche’s of a stereotypical high-life, like jacuzzis, first class air travel, gadgets. It’s like a ten year old boy in 1985, with a penchant for boasting and telling porky pies, had a Facebook profile. From looking at him, Leonard could well have been ten in 1985, and has just never managed to grow up, now living out his fantasies and making sure everyone unlucky enough to stumble on his internet persona knows it.
    I’m lost in my thoughts, eyes glazed right over, and I realize I have been staring into space for the last few minutes. Something has snapped me out of it, and while I pour my consciousness back into the present, I notice it is my phone, buzzing on the table. Caller ID lets me know it is Jack, and I grab it without delay.
    ‘Yes?’ I answer.
    ‘I’ve got it.’ Jack says hurriedly. He sounds a little out of breath.
    ‘You got...?’
    ‘A name. They gave me a name.’
    Jack’s meeting clearly went well. I am desperate to question Jack further, but I imagine there will be time for that later. Jack won’t want to sit inert for long. ‘Do you recognize it?’
    ‘Kind of. Anyway, I know where we are going.’
    ‘You want to get started right away, I take it?’
    ‘No. We’ll wait till tonight.’
    ‘Can you give me any info?’
    ‘The Floating Far East. That’s where we are headed.’
    I have no idea what that is, or where it might be found. ‘Anything else?’ I enquire.
    ‘Not now. Meet me at 8.30, at the ice rink in Spinningfields. It’s not far from there.’
    ‘I’ll be there.’
    The line goes dead, and my mind transforms instantly. My senses tighten, my resolve fortifies, and my mind clears. I am back on the frontline, adopting the familiar mental state that immediately precedes a mission. It’s a battening down of the hatches, the calm, the pause, the reflection - before the unavoidable descent into harm’s way.

10
    I get to Spinningfields early, my nervous energy too much for the hotel room to handle, prompting me to head out into the cooling, prickly, pre-evening air. It’s a crisp evening, the spots of rain from the afternoon having drifted off somewhere else, and the atmosphere retains that post-downpour clarity. If Manchester wasn’t so alive, I’m sure I’d hear a pin drop. I make the short walk along the backstreets from my hotel, keeping fixed in my eye line the upper floors of Manchester Civil Justice Centre - a huge, preposterously balanced, filing cabinet of a building that stands in the centre of