Val Mcdermid - Clean Break

“It’s a former employee, who clearly wasn’t too impressed with the golden handcuffs you slapped on him,” I said.

“I want a name,” he demanded, his voice lower but his expression no less menacing. “And an address. I’m going to break every bone in his fucking body when I get my hands on him.”

I shook my head, weary of his incontinent anger. “No way.”

“What the hell do you think I’m paying you for, girl? Give me the name and address!”

“Mr. Kerr, shut up and listen to me.” I’d reached the end of my rope and I suspect it showed. Kerr fell back in his seat as if I’d hit him. “A client hires me to do a job, and I do that job. Sometimes I come up against things that make people want to take the law into their own hands. Part of my job is stopping them. If I give you that name and address, and you go round there and give this bloke a good seeing-to, you won’t thank me tomorrow when you’re in a police cell and he’s sitting in his hospital bed free and clear because there isn’t a shred of tangible evidence to tie him to the fake KerrSter or these killings. Sure, he’ll have a sticky couple of hours down the nick, but unless we find where this stuff is being made and connect him directly to it, all we have is a chain of circumstantial evidence.” Kerr opened his mouth to speak, but I waved a finger at him and carried on. “And I have to tell you that because of the way I’ve collected some of that circumstantial evidence, we’re not going to be able to produce it to the police. We can tell them where to look, but we can’t show them all we’ve got. We need the factory. I’m not keeping the name from you out of bloody-mindedness. I’m doing the job you paid me for, and I intend to finish it before somebody else dies. Do you have a problem with any of that?“ I challenged him.

“Your name will be mud in this town,” he blustered.

“For what? Keeping my client out of jail? Mr. Kerr, if I ever get the faintest whiff that you have bad-mouthed me to a living soul, our solicitors will slap a writ on you so fast it’ll make your eyes water. If you want this case cleared up, and your good name restored, you’ll give me till this time tomorrow to come up with the final piece of evidence that we need to hand this mess over to the police.”

Before he could answer, the barman appeared at his shoulder. “Excuse me? Miss Brannigan?”

“That’s me,” I said wearily.

“Phone call for you. You can take it at the bar.”

Thank you, Delia. Without a word to Kerr, I got up and went to the phone. “Time to go,” Delia said.

“I’ll be right with you.” I replaced the phone and returned to the table. “I have to go now,” I said. “Frankly, Mr. Kerr, there are plenty more productive things for me to be doing than talking to you. I’ll be in touch.”

Delia was as good as her word. While I soaked in a bath laced with refreshing essential oils, a cold drink sweating on the side, she knocked together a chicken-and-spinach curry from the contents of the freezer. Wrapped in my cuddly toweling dressing gown, I curled up in a corner of one of my sofas and tucked in. I hadn’t been able to face food on the flight, and as soon as the first forkful hit my mouth, I realized I was absolutely ravenous. As we ate, I gave Delia the rundown on the case. “And so I sent you the stuff from the safe,” I ended up.

Delia nodded. “I’ve been through it, as far as I could get with an Italian dictionary. What’s your conclusion?”

“Drugs,” I said. “They’re swapping art for drugs. Those number and letter combinations-20CC, 34H, 50,OOOE. I make that twenty kilos crack cocaine, thirty-four kilos heroin, fifty thousand tabs of Ecstasy. Once you’ve taken a painting out of its frame, it’s a lot more portable than the cash equivalent, and a lot easier to smuggle. It’s costing them next to nothing to acquire the stolen art, and it’s got a sizable black market value, so they can swap it for a much greater value in drugs than they’ve initially laid out to have it stolen.”

Delia nodded. “I think you’re right. Kate, you know I’m going to have to pass all this on to other teams, don’t you? It’s not my field.”

I sighed. “I know. And somebody’s going to have to liaise with the Italians so they can send someone to pick up Nicholas Turner’s body. But I can’t handle going through all this with some skeptical stranger tonight.”

“Of course you can’t. And before you talk to any other coppers, you need to have Ruth with you. They’re going to put a lot of pressure on you to come up with the original source that put you onto Turner in the first place. I’ve got a shrewd idea who that might be, but I don’t see any need to pass my suspicions on.”

I smiled gratefully. She was right about Ruth. I’d broken the law too many times in the previous couple of days to be prepared to talk to the police without a solicitor. And my buddy Ruth Hunter is the best criminal solicitor in Manchester. “Thanks, Delia,” I said. “Can you start the ball rolling tomorrow? I warn you now that I’m not going to be available for questioning till the day after. I’ve got something else to chase that I can’t ignore.”

Delia looked doubtful. “I don’t know if they’ll want to wait that long.”

“They’ll have to. Watch my lips. I’m not going to be available. I won’t be in the office, I won’t be here, I won’t be answering my mobile.”

Delia grinned. “I hear you. I’ll leave a message on the machine.” She gave me the copper’s once-over look. “You need to sleep, Kate. Speak to me tomorrow, okay?”

After Delia had gone, I went next door. Neither Richard’s car nor Shelley’s was outside, not surprising if he’d chosen to drive back. He might have made tonight’s ferry out of Rotterdam, or he might have decided to take the long way home. I was still furious with him, but something inside me didn’t want it to end here. I climbed into his bed, drinking in the smell of him from his pillows.

Call me sentimental. On the other hand, if you’ve just handed the police a stack of information pointing straight to a Mafia-style drug-running operation, sleeping in your own bed might not seem to be the safest option.

SOME MORNINGS YOU WAKE UP READY TO TAKE ON THE WORLD, feeling invincible, immortal and potentially omniscient. This wasn’t one of them. I’d set Richard’s Star Trek alarm clock for seven, which meant I’d had a straight eight hours sleep before Captain James T. Kirk intoned, “Landing party to Enterprise, beam us up, Scotty,” but I was in no mood to boldly go. I felt rested, but the hangover you get from guilt is infinitely worse than the one that comes from drink.

I dragged myself next door, called a cab and dived into the shower. I dressed in the last clean pair of jeans, a dark blue shirt and the new navy blazer, and managed half a cup of instant before the taxi pulled up outside. I picked up Shelley’s Rover from Bill’s garage, making a mental note to ring Hertz in Antwerp and ask them to hang on to Bill’s car till I could get back over to pick it up. I was parked at the end of Alder Way by eight.

For once, I didn’t have long to wait. At ten past, Sandra Bates left the house with a tall, skinny bloke in overalls. She passed me without a glance in her little Vauxhall Corsa. Clearly her feminism didn’t extend to boycotting products that indulge in blatantly sexist advertising. The man I took to be Simon Morley followed in a two-year-old Escort. I slipped into the traffic a couple of cars behind him.

When we reached Kingsway, he turned left, heading away from the city center. I had no trouble staying in touch with him as we drove down the dual carriageway. We went out through Cheadle, past Heald Green and on into Handforth. He turned left in the center of the village, out past the station. We drove through a housing estate, then, just as we reached open country, he turned right. A couple of hundred yards down the road, there was a turning on the right, leading to a small industrial estate. I pulled up and watched as he parked outside a unit that wasn’t much bigger than a double garage.