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
