Clean Break. Val McDermid
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 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