Clean Break

by Val McDermid

  Trevor Kerr was planted in an armchair in the corner with a brandy glass in front of him. I sat down opposite him. He didn’t offer me a drink. “So what have you got to say for yourself?” he demanded by way of greeting. “I’ve had a hell of a day thanks to your incompetence. The police have turned my bloody factory upside down, questioning everybody. God knows what today’s production figures will be like.”

  “Somebody is making fake KerrSter. They’re releasing it on to the market via a little scam they’ve got going with one of the major wholesale chains. I know how the scam works and I know who’s

  His red face turned purple. “Who is it? Who’s doing this to me?” he shouted, leaning forward and banging the table with his fist. Several distant drinkers turned towards us, curious. The Hilton’s bar isn’t a place that’s used to raised voices that early in the evening.

  “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 for 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 clearing 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, Della. Without a word to Kerr, I got up and went to the phone. “Time to go,” Della 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.”

  Della 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 the 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 Della the rundown on the case. “And so I sent you the stuff from the safe,” I ended up.

  Della 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, 50,000E. 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 sizeable 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.”

  Della 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 on to 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, Della,” 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.”

  Della 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.”

  Della 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, OK?”

  After Della had gone, I went next door. No sign of the coupé, which wasn’t surprising if Richard had 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.

  Chapter 21

  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

  As he disappeared inside, I cruised into the estate and parked further down the road, outside a company that made garden sheds. Just after nine, a battered Transit van pulled up behind Morley’s car. The two lads in overalls who got out looked as if they should still be in school. You know you’re getting old when even the villains start looking young. I gave it another ten minutes, then I grabbed my clipboard and the bag containing the video camera, and headed for the unmarked warehouse.

  I knocked on the door and marched straight in. At one end of the room were a couple of tall vats with taps on the bottom of them. On a platform behind them, one of the lads was emptying the contents of a white plastic five-gallon drum into a vat. The other lad was halfway down the room, pushing a trolley that held gallon drums identical to the ones Kerrchem used for KerrSter. Simon Morley had his back to me, doing something at a bench on the far wall. Compared to the high-tech world of Kerrchem, this was a medieval alchemist’s cell.

  The lad pushing the trolley looked over at me, and called, “Can I help you, love?”

  At the sound of his voice, Simon Morley whirled round, consternation written all over his face. “Who are you?” he demanded, crossing the room towards me.

  “Is this Qualcraft?” I asked, casually swinging my bag through a gentle arc, hoping the video was getting the full flavor of the premises. “Only, there’s no name on the door, and I’ve got an order for Qualcraft, and I can’t seem to find them.”

  By now, Simon Morley was feet away from me. He looked like the classroom swot twenty years on, gangling limbs, acne scars and glasses that were constantly slipping down his sharp nose. “You’ve come to the wrong place,” he said nervously. “This isn’t Qualcraft.”

  If I hadn’t stepped backwards, he’d have trodden on my trainers. “Sorry,” I said. “You don’t know where Qualcraft is, do you?”

  “No,” he said.

  I smiled. “Sorry to have bothered you.” I carried on backing out the door. Morley closed it firmly behind me, and I heard a key turn in the lock.

  I pressed my ear to the door and heard him say, “How many times have I told you to keep the door locked?” He said something more, but he was obviously moving back to his workbench, since I couldn’t make out the words.

  Back at the car, I checked the video on playback. The picture was slightly hazy, but the vats and the gallon drums were clearly discernible, along with a nice clear shot of Morley’s face. I set the video camera up on the dashboard and waited. I rang Shelley and filled her in on what had happened to me in Italy and told her to call me as soon as she heard from Richard. “Don’t worry if you get diverted to the message service,” I added. “I’m trying to avoid the cops, so I won’t actually be answering the phone.” Wonderful thing, technology. If I don’t want to take calls on my mobile, I can divert them to an answering machine. Then, when I want to pick the messages up, I simply dial a number and it plays them over to me.

  By eleven, I’d had messages from Della, Mellor from the Art Squad, a superintendent from the Drugs Squad, Alexis and Michael Haroun. I didn’t feel like talking to any of them, but I made myself ring Michael. I still had a client, after all, something I’d kind of lost sight of as I’d chased across Europe. And Henry needed insurance. If I could convince Michael Haroun that the art thieves’ racket was over for the time being, maybe he’d be a little more flexible about Henry’s premium.

  Michael was in a meeting, but I made an appointment with his secretary for three o’clock. I figured I’d be through here by then. Next, I took out my micro-cassette recorder and dictated a full report on the KerrSter scam. I’d drop it off with Shelley on my way to meet Michael so I could hand the client a copy this evening. I’d also be dropping off a copy with Inspector Jackson, just so Clever Trevor couldn’t go taking the law into his own hands.

  There was movement at the warehouse just after noon. I hit the record button on the video and taped Simon Morley and the two lads loading up the van with pallets of schneid KerrSter. Simon

  I was gobsmacked at their sheer cheek. Two people had died because of their crazy product tampering, yet they were still milking the racket for all it was worth. The more I thought about it, the more disturbing I found that. Simon Morley might well be crazy enough to carry on putting people’s lives at risk in his vendetta against Kerrchem. But Sandra Bates hadn’t struck me as a woman who would go along with random murder. I know people do ridiculous things for love, but I couldn’t get the scenario into a credible shape at all.

  But if Sandra Bates and Simon Morley weren’t bumping people off, who was? It went beyond the bounds of credibility to imagine two lots of blackmailing saboteurs. I know coincidences do happen, but this wasn’t one I could buy into. I closed my eyes and groaned. All this time and effort and I had a horrible feeling I wasn’t any nearer the killer than I had been at the start.

  Michael looked delighted to see me, greeting me with an unprofessional kiss on the lips. The tingle factor was still firing on all four cylinders, I noted as I moved away and sat demurely on the opposite side of the table from him. “You’ve been keeping a very low profile,” he complained jocularly. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Your secretary keeps telling me you’re unavailable. I was beginning to think you’d gone off me.”

  “She wasn’t bullshitting,” I said. “I genuinely have been unavailable. I’ve been out of the country. The good news is that you’re not going to have any more trouble from this particular gang of art thieves.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes surprised and interested. “Really? They’ve been arrested?”

  “Let’s just say the market’s collapsed,” I replied. “Take it from me, the racket’s over and done with. So you can safely reinsure Henry Naismith’s property. They won’t be back for a second bite of the cherry.”

  Michael ran a hand through his dark hair and shook his head. “This is incredible. What on earth have you been up to? It all sounds very unorthodox.”

  “That’s a word,” I said.

  “You’re going to have to tell me more than that,” Michael said, his face and voice equally determined. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. But I have to explain myself to higher powers, and they’re not going to be overly impressed if I tell them I’ve taken a particular course of action on the say-so of a private eye who isn’t even our employee.”

  I was growing bored with this story already, and I was still going to have to repeat it more times than the sole survivor of an air crash. “Look, I can’t go into great detail. I’ve still got a lot of talking to do to the police, and there are going to be arrests to come. The bare bones go like this. I got a tip-off from a good source as to who was fencing the goods. I tracked him back to an international criminal consortium who have been using art works as payment in kind for drugs. The fence is out of the game for good, and the police will be closing in on the rest of the syndicate. Without a guaranteed market, the thieves won’t be doing any more robberies. I promise you, Michael, it’s all over.”

  He looked up from the pad where he’d been taking notes. “You’re sure? You don’t think the fence is going to start up again once everything quietens down?”

  I closed my eyes briefly. “Not unless you believe in communications from beyond the grave,” I said.

  Michael’s mouth opened as he stared at me with new eyes. “He’s dead?” His voice was incredulous.

  “Very.”

  “You didn’t … ? It wasn’t … ?” A flicker of fear showed in his eyes.

  I snort
ed with ironic laughter. “Please,” I said. “I didn’t kill him, Michael, I only set him up. And my payoff was getting to discover the body.”

  He looked faintly queasy. I can’t say I blamed him. “Is there any chance of recovering any of the stolen paintings?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I shouldn’t think so. I’m afraid you’re going to have

  “What can I say?” He spread his hands. “I’m impressed. Look, I can’t make any promises at this stage, but I’d be interested in working with you in future. On a more official basis.”

  “Fine by me. Anything you need sorting, give us a call and we’ll talk.” Normally, I’d have been punching the air in jubilation at landing a client as major as Fortissimus. Today, all I could muster was a moment’s satisfaction. Fortissimus had been too expensive an acquisition.

  I got to my feet. “And on a personal note,” Michael added, his eyes crinkling in a smile, “when can I see you again?”

  “Tomorrow night?” I suggested. “Meet me in the bar at the Cornerhouse at half past seven?”

  “Fine. See you then.”

  I sketched a wave and moved towards the door. He bounded to his feet and caught up with me on the threshold. He tried to put his arms round me in a hug, but I backed off. “Not in business hours,” I said defensively. “If we’re going to work together, we need some ground rules. Rule one, no messing about on the company’s time.”

  His mouth turned down ruefully. “Sorry. You’re absolutely right. See you tomorrow. Stay lucky.”

  I stopped off at the Cigar Store café for a bite to eat and a cappuccino, then went back to the office to pick up the Kerrchem reports from Shelley. “Nice work,” she remarked as she handed me two neatly bound copies.