Clean Break

4

AS I WAITED FOB THE SECURITY GUARD IN CHARGE OP THE barrier at Kerrchem’s car park to check that I wasn’t some devious industrial spy trying to sneak in to steal their secrets, I stared across the car park at the sprawling factory, its red brick smudged black by years of industrial pollution. Somewhere inside there I’d find the end of the ball of string that would unravel to reveal a killer.

Eventually, he let me in and directed me to the administration offices. Trevor Kerr’s secretary was already at her desk when I walked in at twenty-five past eight. Unfortunately, her boss wasn’t. I introduced myself. “Mr. Kerr’s expecting me,” I added.

She’d clearly been hired for her efficiency rather than her charm. “Health and Safety Executive,” she said in the same tone of voice I’d have used for the VAT inspector. “Take a seat. Mr. Kerr will be here soon.” She returned to her word processor, attacking the keys with the ferocity of someone playing Mortal Kombat.

I looked around. Neither of the two chairs looked as if it had been chosen for comfort. The only available reading material was some trade journal that I wouldn’t have picked up even on a twelve-hour flight with a Sylvester Stallone film as the inflight movie. “Maybe I could make a start on the documents I need to see?” I said. “To save wasting time.”

“Only Mr. Kerr can authorize the release of company information to a third party,” she said coldly. “He knows you’re coming. I’m sure he won’t keep you waiting for long.”

I wished I shared her conviction. I tried to make myself comfortable and used the time to review the limited information I’d gleaned so far. After Richard and I had stuffed ourselves in a small Chinese restaurant in Whitefield, where we’d both felt seriously overdressed, I’d sat down with the previous weeks’ papers and brought myself up to speed. Richard, meanwhile, had changed and gone off to some dive in Longsight to hear some local techno band who’d just landed a record deal. Frankly, I felt I’d got the best end of the bargain.

On my way through the stuttering early rush-hour traffic, I’d stopped by the office to fax my local friendly financial services expert. I needed some background on Trevor Kerr and his company, and if there was dirt to be dug, Josh Gilbert was the man. Josh and I have an arrangement: he supplies me with financial information, and I buy him expensive dinners. The fact that Josh wouldn’t know a scruple if it took him out to the Savoy is fine by me; I don’t have to think about that, just reap the rewards.

The financial data would fill one gap in my knowledge. I hoped it would be more comprehensive than the newspaper accounts. When Joey Morton died, the media responded with ghoulish swiftness. For once, there were no government scandals to divert them, and all the papers had given the Stockport publican’s death a good show. At first, I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed the hue and cry, till I remembered that on the day in question I’d been out all day tracking down a key defense witness for Ruth Hunter, my favorite criminal solicitor. I’d barely had time for a sandwich on the hoof, never mind a browse through the dailies…

Joey Morton was thirty-eight, a former Third Division footballer turned publican. He and his wife Gail ran The Cob and Pen pub on the banks of the infant Mersey. Joey had gone down the cellar to clean the beer pipes, taking a new container of KerrSter. Joey was proud of his real ale, and he never let anyone else near the cellarage. When he hadn’t reappeared by opening time, Gail had sent one of the bar staff down to fetch him. The barman found his boss in a crumpled heap on the floor, the KerrSter sitting open beside him. The police had revealed that the postmortem indicated Joey had died as a result of inhaling hydrogen cyanide gas.

The pathologist’s job had been made easier by the barman, who reported he’d smelt bitter almonds as soon as he’d entered the cramped cellar. Kerrchem had immediately denied that their product could possibly have caused the death, and the police had informed a waiting world that they were treating Joey’s death as suspicious. Since then, the story seemed to have died, as always happens when there’s a dearth of shocking revelations.

It didn’t seem likely that Joey Morton could have died as a result of some ghastly error inside the Kerrchem factory. The obvious conclusion was industrial sabotage. The key questions were when and by whom. Was it an inside job? Was it a disgruntled former employee? Was it an outsider looking for blackmail money? Or was it a rival trying to annex Trevor Kerr’s market? Killing people seemed a bit extreme, but as I know from bitter experience, the trouble with hiring outside help to do your dirty work is that things often get dangerously out of hand.

It was ten to nine when Trevor Kerr barged in. His eyes looked like the only treasure he’d found the night before had been in the bottom of a bottle. “You Miss Brannigan, then?” he greeted me. If he was harboring dreams of an acting career, I could only hope that Kerrchem wasn’t going to fold. I followed him into his office, catching an unappealing whiff of Scotch revisited blended with Polo before we moved into the aroma of stale cigars and lemon furniture polish. Clearly, the Spartan motif didn’t extend beyond the outer office. Trevor Kerr had spared no expense to make his office comfortable. That is, if you find gentlemen’s clubs comfortable. Leather wing chairs surrounded a low table buffed to a mirror sheen. Trevor’s desk was repro, but what it lacked in class it made up for in size. All they’d need to stage the world snooker championships on it would be a bit of green baize. That and clear the clutter. The walls were hung with old golfing prints. If his bulk was anything to go by, golf was something Trevor Kerr honored more in the breach than the observance.

He dumped his briefcase by the desk and settled in behind it. I chose the armchair nearest him. I figured if I waited till I was invited, I’d be past my sell-by date. “So, what do you need from me?” he demanded.

Before I could reply, the secretary came in with a steaming mug of coffee. The mug said “World’s Greatest Bullshitter.” I wasn’t about to disagree. I wouldn’t have minded a cup myself, but clearly the hired help around Kerrchem wasn’t deemed worthy of that. If I’d really been from the HSB, the lack of courtesy would have had me sharpening my knives for Trevor Kerr’s well-cushioned ribs. I waited for the secretary to withdraw, then I said, “Have you recalled the rest of the batch?”

He nodded impatiently. “Of course. We got on to all the wholesalers, and we’ve placed an ad in the national press as well as the trade. We’ve already had a load of stuff back, and there’s more due in today.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll want to see that, as well as all the dispatch paperwork relating to that batch. I take it that won’t be a problem?”

“No problem. I’ll get Sheila to sort it out for you.” He made a note on a pad on his desk. “Next?”

“Do you use cyanide in any of your processes?”

“No way,” he said belligerently. “It has industrial uses, but mainly in the plastics industry and electroplating.

There’s nothing we produce that we’d need it for.“

“Okay. Going back to the original blackmail note. Did it include any instructions about the amount of money they were after, or how you were to contact them?”

He took a cigar out of a humidor the size of a small greenhouse and rolled it between his fingers. “They didn’t put a figure on it, no. There was a phone number, and the note said it was the number of one of the public phones at Piccadilly Station. I was supposed to be there at nine o’clock on the Friday night. I didn’t go, of course.”

“Pity you didn’t call us then,” I said.

“I told you, I thought it was a crank. Some nutter trying to wind me up. No way was I going to give him the satisfaction.”

“Or her,” I added. “The thing that bothers me, Mr. Kerr, is that killing people is a pretty extreme thing for a blackmailer to do. The usual analysis of blackmailers is that they are on the cowardly side. The crimes they commit are at arm’s length, and usually don’t put life at risk. I would have expected the blackmailer in this case to have done something a lot more low-key, certainly initially. You know, dumped caustic soda in washing-up liquid, that sort of thing.”

“Maybe they didn’t intend to kill anybody, just to give people a nasty turn,” he said. He lit the cigar, exhaling a cloud of smoke that gave me a nasty turn so early in the day.

I shrugged. “In that ease, cyanide’s a strange choice. The fatal dose is pretty small. Also, you couldn’t just stick it in the drum and wait for someone to open it up. There must have been some kind of device rigged up inside it. To produce the lethal gas, cyanide pellets need to react with something else. So they’d have had to be released into the liquid somehow. That’s a lot of trouble to go to when you could achieve an unpleasant warning with dozens of other chemical mixtures. If it was me, I’d have filled a few drums either with something that smelled disgusting, or something that would destroy surfaces rather than clean them, just to persuade you that they were capable of making your life hell. Then, I’d have followed it up with a second note saying something like, ‘next time, it’ll be cyanide.’ ”

“So maybe we’re dealing with a complete nutter,” he said bitterly. “Great.”

“Or maybe it’s someone who wants to destroy you rather than blackmail you,” I said simply.

Kerr took his cigar out of his mouth, which remained in a perfect 0. Finally, he said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It’s something you should consider. In relation to both your professional and your personal life.” He was having a lot of trouble getting his head round the idea, I could see. If he’d been a bit nicer to me, I’d have been gentler. But I figure you shouldn’t dish it out unless you can take it. “What about business rivals? Is anybody snapping at your heels? Is anybody going under because you’ve brought out new products or developed new sales strategies?”

“You don’t murder people in business,” he protested. “Not in my line of business, you don’t.”

“Murder might not have been what was planned,” I told him flatly. “If they wanted to sabotage you and stay at arm’s length, they might have hired someone to do the dirty. And they in turn might have hired someone else. And somewhere along the line, the Chinese whispers took over. So is there any other firm that might have a particular reason for wanting Kerrchem to go down the tubes?”

He frowned. “The last few years have been tough, there’s no denying that. Firms go bust, so there’s not as much industrial cleaning to be done. Businesses cut their cleaners down from five days to three, so the commercial cleaners cut back on their purchases. We’ve kept our heads above water, but it’s been a struggle. We’ve had a couple of rounds of redundancies, we’ve been a bit slower bringing in some new processes, and we’ve had to market ourselves more aggressively, but that’s the story across the industry. One of our main competitors went bust about nine months ago, but that wasn’t because we were squeezing them. It was more because they were based in Basingstoke and they had higher labor costs than us. I haven’t heard that anybody else is on the edge, and it’s a small world. To be honest, we’re one of the smaller fishes. Most of our rivals are big multinationals. If they wanted to take us out, they’d come to the family and make us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

That disposed of the easy option. Time to move on. “Has anybody left under a cloud? Any unfair-dismissal claims pending?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of. As far as I know, and believe me, I would know, the only people who have gone are the ones we cleared out under the redundancy deals. I suppose some of them might have been a bit disgruntled, but if any of them had made any threats, I would have heard about it. Like I said, we pride ourselves on being a family firm, and the department heads and production foremen all know not to keep problems to themselves.”

We were going nowhere fast, which only left the sticky bit. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Mr. Kerr, but I have to ask these things. You’ve said that Kerrchem is a family firm. Is there any possibility that another member of the family wants to discredit you? To make it look like the company’s not safe in your hands?”

Suddenly I was looking at Trevor Kerr’s future. Written all over his scarlet face was the not-so-distant early warning of the heart attack that was lurking in his silted arteries. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, then he roared, “Bollocks. Pure, absolute bollocks.”

“Think about it,” I said, smiling sweetly. That’ll teach him to deprive me of a caffeine fix. “The other thing is more personal, I’m afraid. Are you married, Mr. Kerr?”

“Course I am. Three children.” He jerked his thumb toward a photograph frame on the desk. I leaned forward and turned it round. Standard studio shot of a woman groomed to within an inch of her life, two sulky-looking boys with their father’s features, and a girl who’d had the dental work but still looked disturbingly like a rabbit. “Been married to the same woman for sixteen years.”

“So there’s no ex-wives or ex-girlfriends lurking around with an ax to grind?” I said sweetly.

His eyes drifted away from mine to a point somewhere on the far wall. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said abruptly. Then, in an effort to win me round, he gave a bark of laughter and said, “Bloody hell, Kate, it’s me that hired you, not the wife.”

So now I knew he had, or had had, a mistress. That was the long shot I’d have to keep in the back of my mind. Before I could explore this avenue further, the intercom on his desk buzzed. He pressed a button and said, “What is it, Sheila?”

“Reg Unsworth is here, Mr. Kerr. He says he needs to talk to you.”

“I’m in a meeting, Sheila,” he said irritably.

There were muffled sounds of conversation, then Sheila said, “He says it’s urgent, Mr. Kerr. He says you’ll want to know immediately. It’s to do with the recalled product, he says.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Send him in.”

A burly man in a brown warehouseman’s coat with a head bald as a boiled egg and approximately the same shape walked in. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Kerr. It’s about the KerrSter recall.”

“Well, Reg, spit it out,” Kerr said impatiently. Unsworth gave me a worried look. “It’s a bit confidential-like.”

“It’s all right. Miss Brannigan here’s from the Health and Safety Executive. She’s here to help us sort this mess out.”

Unsworth still looked uncertain. “I checked the records before the returns started coming in. We sent out a total of four hundred and eighty-three gallon containers with the same batch number as the one that there was the problem with. Only… so far, we’ve had six hundred and twenty-seven back.”