Clean Break

The man who’d been hovering in the hall behind her stepped forward and said, ‘I’m Trevor Kerr.’ He signalled with his eyebrows towards the stairs and we followed him up into a den that looked like it had been bought clock, stock and panel from a country house. The only incongruity was the computer and fax machine smack in the middle of the desk. ‘We won’t be disturbed here,’ he said. ‘It’ll be at least half an hour before the host distributes the clues and we move off. Perhaps your friend would like to go downstairs and help himself to the buffet?’

I could hear Richard’s hackles rising. ‘Mr Barclay is a valued associate of Mortensen and Brannigan. Anything you say is safe with him,’ I said stiffly. I dreaded to think how many people Richard could upset at a Round Table potluck buffet.

‘That’s right,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not just scenery.’

Kerr looked uncomfortable but he wasn’t really in a position to argue. As he settled himself in an armchair, we studied each other. Not even a hand-stitched suit could hide a body gone ruinously to seed. I was tempted to offer some fashion advice, but I didn’t think he’d welcome the news that this year bellies are being worn inside the trousers. He couldn’t have been much more than forty, but his eyes would have been the envy of any self-respecting bloodhound and his jowls would have set a bulldog a-quiver. The only attractive feature the man possessed was a head of thick, wavy brown hair with a faint silvering at the temples.

‘Well, Mr Kerr?’ I said.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘I run Kerrchem. You probably haven’t heard of us, but we’re quite a large concern. We’ve got a big plant out at Farnworth. We manufacture industrial cleaning materials, and we do one or two domestic products for supermarket own-brands. We pride ourselves on being a family business. Anyway, about a month ago, I got a letter in the post at home. As far as I can remember, it said I could avoid Kerrchem ending up with the same reputation as Tylenol for a very modest sum of money.’

‘Product tampering,’ Richard said sagely.

Kerr nodded. ‘That’s what I took it to mean.’

‘You said: “as far as I can remember”,’ I remarked. ‘Does that mean you haven’t got the note?’

Kerr scowled. ‘That’s right. I thought it was some crank. It looked ridiculous, all those letters cut out of a newspaper and Sellotaped down. I binned it. You can’t blame me for that,’ he whined.

‘No one’s blaming you, Mr Kerr. It’s just a pity you didn’t keep the note. Has something happened since then to make you think they were serious?’

Kerr looked away and pulled a fat cigar from his inside pocket. As he went through the performance of lighting it, Richard leaned forward in his seat. ‘A man has died since then, hasn’t he, Mr Kerr?’ I was impressed. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I was impressed.

A plume of acrid blue smoke obscured Kerr’s eyes as he said, ‘Technically, yes. But there’s no evidence that there’s any connection.’

‘A man dies after opening a sealed container of your products, you’ve had a blackmail note and you don’t believe there’s a connection?’ Richard asked, with only mild incredulity.

I could see mischief dancing behind his glasses, so I thought I’d better head this off at the pass. Any minute now, Richard would decide to start enjoying himself, completely oblivious to the fact that not everyone has the blithe disregard for human life that characterizes journalists. ‘Suppose you give me your version of events, Mr Kerr?’

He puffed on the cigar and I tried not to cough. ‘Like I said, I thought this note was some crank. Then, last week, we had a phone call from the police. They said a publican had dropped down dead at work. It seemed he’d just opened a fresh container of KerrSter. That’s a universal cleanser that we produce. One of our biggest sellers to the trade. Anyway, according to the postmortem, this man had died from breathing in cyanide, which is ridiculous, because cyanide doesn’t go anywhere near the KerrSter process. Nobody at our place could work out how him dying could have had anything to do with the KerrSter,’ he said defensively. ‘We weren’t looking forward to the inquest, I’ll be honest, but we didn’t see how we could be held to blame.’

‘And?’ I prompted him.

Kerr shifted in his seat, moving his weight from one buttock to the other in a movement I hadn’t seen since Dumbo. ‘I swear I never connect edit with the note I’d had. It’d completely slipped my mind. And then this morning, this came.’ His pudgy hand slid into his inside pocket again and emerged with a folded sheet of paper. He held it out towards me.

‘Has anyone apart from you touched this?’ I asked, not reaching for it.

He shook his head. ‘No. It came to the house, just like the other one.’

‘Put it down on the desk,’ I said, raking in my bag for a pen and my Swiss Army knife. I took the eyebrow tweezers out of their compartment on the knife and gingerly unfolded the note. It was a sheet from a glue-top A4 pad, hole-punched, narrow feint and margin. Across it, in straggling newsprint letters Sellotaped down, I read, ‘Bet you wish you’d done what you were told. We’ll be in touch. No cops. We’re watching you.’ The letters were a mixture of upper and lower case, and I recognized the familiar fonts of the Manchester Evening Chronicle. Well, that narrowed it down to a few million bodies.

I looked up and sighed. ‘On the face of it, it looks like your correspondent carried out his threat. Why haven’t you taken this to the police, Mr Kerr? Murder and blackmail, that’s what they’re there for.’

Kerr looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t think they’d believe me,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Look at it from their point of view. My company’s products have been implicated in a major tampering scandal. A man’s dead. Can you imagine how much it’s going to cost me to get out from under the lawsuits that are going to be flying around? There’s nothing to show I didn’t cobble this together myself to try and get off the hook. I bet mine are the only fingerprints on that note, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the police aren’t going to waste their time hunting for industrial saboteurs they won’t even believe exist. Anyway, the note says “No cops”.’

‘So you want me to find your saboteurs for you?’ I asked resignedly.

‘Can you?’ Kerr asked eagerly.

I shrugged. ‘I can try.’

Before we could discuss it further, there was a knock at the door and our hostess’s head appeared. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Trevor, but we’re about to distribute the treasure-hunt clues, and I know you’d hate to start at a disadvantage.’ She didn’t invite us to join in, I noticed. Clearly my suit didn’t come up to scratch.

‘Be right with you, Charmian,’ Trevor said, hauling himself out of his chair. ‘My office, half past eight tomorrow morning?’ he asked.

I had a lot more questions for Trevor Kerr, but they could wait. ‘I thought you were worried about me coming to the office?’ I reminded him.

He barely paused on his way out the door. ‘I’ll tell my secretary you’re from the Health and Safety Executive,’ he said. ‘Those nosey bastards are always poking around where they’re not wanted.’

I shook my head in despair as he departed. Some clients are like that. Before you’ve agreed to work for them, they’re practically on their knees. Soon as you come on board, they treat you like something nasty on their Gucci loafers. ‘And I thought heavy metal bands were arseholes,’ Richard mused.

‘They are,’ I said. ‘And while we’re on the subject, how come you knew about the KerrSter death?’

Richard winked and produced one of those smiles that got me tangled up with him in the first place. ‘Not much point in having the Chronicle delivered if you don’t bother reading it, is there?’ he asked sweetly.

‘Some of us have more important things to do than laze around smoking joints and reading the papers,’ I snarled.

Richard pretended to look huffed. At least, I think he was pretending. ‘Oh well, if that’s the way things are, you won’t be wanting me to take you to dinner, will you?’ he said airily.

‘Try me,’ I said. There are few things in life that don’t look better after aromatic crispy duck. How was I to know Trevor Kerr would be one of them?

4

As I waited for the security guard in charge of 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 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 in-flight 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 a 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 defence witness for Ruth Hunter, my favourite 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 Marina ran the Cob and Pen pub on the banks of the infant Mersey. Joey had gone down to 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, Marina 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 harbouring 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 armchairs 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 honoured 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 HSE, 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 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.’

‘OK. 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 case, 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 ‘O’. 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 labour 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 head and production foremen all know not to keep problems to themselves.’

We were going nowhere fast, which only left the sticky bit. ‘OK,’ 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 towards 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’re no ex-wives or ex-girlfriends lurking around with an axe to grind?’ I asked.

His eyes drifted away from mine to a point elsewhere 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 say she 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.’

5

Kerr looked gobsmacked. ‘You must have made a mistake,’ he blustered.

‘I double-checked,’ Unsworth said. His jaw set in a line as obstinate as his boss’s. ‘Then I went back down to production and checked again. There’s no doubt about it. We’ve had back one hundred and forty-four containers more than we sent out. And that’s not even taking into account the one that the dead man opened, or ones that have already been used, or people who haven’t even heard about the recall yet.’

‘There’s got to be some mistake,’ Kerr repeated. ‘What about the batch coding machine? Has anybody checked that it’s working OK?’

‘I checked with the line foreman myself,’ Unsworth said. ‘They’ve had no problems with it, and I’ve seen quality control’s sheets. There’s no two ways about it. We only sent out four hundred and eighty-three. There’s a gross of gallon drums of KerrSter that we can’t account for sitting in the loading bay. Come and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ he added in an aggrieved tone.