Val Mcdermid: Clean Break

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 aquiver. 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 connected it 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 rules 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 lowercase, 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 nosy bastards are always poking round 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?