Stranded by Val McDermid

Author:Val McDermid
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2014-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

Guilt Trip

As neither of my parents was too bothered about religion, I managed to miss out on Catholic guilt. Then I found myself working with Shelley. A guilt trip on legs, our office manager. If she treats her two teenagers like she treats me, those kids are going to be in therapy for years. ‘You play, you pay,’ she said sweetly, pushing the new case file towards me for the third time.

‘Just because I play computer games doesn’t mean I’m qualified to deal with the nerds who write them,’ I protested. It was only a white lie; although my business partner Bill Mortensen deals with most of the work we do involving computers, I’m not exactly a techno-illiterate. I pushed the file back towards Shelley. ‘It’s one for Bill.’

‘Bill’s too busy. You know that,’ Shelley said. ‘Anyway, it’s not software as such. It’s either piracy or industrial sabotage and that’s your forte.’ The file slid back to me.

‘Sealsoft are Bill’s clients.’ Brannigan’s last stand.

‘All the more reason you should get to know them.’

I gave in and picked up the file. Shelley gave a tight little smile and turned back to her computer screen. One of these days I’m going to get the last word. Just wait till hell freezes over, that’s all. Just wait. On my way out of the door and down the stairs, I browsed the file. Sealsoft was a local Manchester games software house. They’d started off back in the dawn of computer gaming in the mid-eighties, writing programs for a whole range of hardware. Some of the machines they produced games for had never been intended as anything other than word processors, but Sealsoft had grabbed the challenge and come up with some fun stuff. The first platform game I’d ever played, on a word processor that now looked as antique as a Model-T Ford, had been a Sealsoft game.

They’d never grown to rival any of the big players in the field, but somehow Sealsoft had always hung in there, coming up every now and again with seemingly simple games that became classics. In the last year or two they’d managed to win the odd film tie-in licence, and their latest acquisition was the new Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis boys ’n’ toys epic. But now, two weeks before the game was launched, they had a problem. And when people have problems, Mortensen and Brannigan is where they turn if they’ve got sense and cash enough.

I had a ten o’clock appointment with Sealsoft’s boss. Luckily I could get there on foot, since parking round by Sealsoft is a game for the terminally reckless. The company had started off on the top floor of a virtually derelict canal-side warehouse that has since been gutted and turned into expansive and expensive studio flats where the marginally criminal rub shoulders with the marginally legitimate lads from the financial services industries. Sealsoft had moved into modern premises a couple of streets away from the canal, but the towpath was still the quickest way to get from my office in Oxford Road to their concrete pillbox in Castlefield.

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