Clean Break

by Val McDermid

  “Yeah,” I said, my lack of conviction obvious.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  I told her my reservations about Sandra Bates and her boyfriend. At the end of my tale, Shelley nodded sympathetically. “I see what you mean,” she said. “Are you going to front them up and see what they’ve got to say for themselves?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” I said. “I was just going to hand over the reports to Trevor Kerr and the cops and let them get on with it. I can’t pretend murder isn’t police business, can I?”

  “No, but if they’re not the killers, maybe you should go and talk

  She was right, of course. Before I blew their lives out of the water, I should at least talk to Sandra Bates and Simon Morley. “What if they leg it?” I protested weakly.

  “If you drop off the reports with Kerr and Jackson and go straight round there, they won’t have time to leg it, will they? This isn’t a lead that Jackson’s going to sit on till morning, is it?”

  Half an hour later, I was walking up the path of 37 Alder Way. I’d sent Kerr’s copy of the report round by motorbike courier, and I’d left Jackson’s copy with his sergeant. I estimated I probably had a maximum of half an hour before the police came knocking.

  Sandra Bates opened the door. Her first reaction was bemused bewilderment, then, clearly remembering what I’d been asking about, she tried to close the door. I stepped forward, shoving my shoulder between the door and jamb. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “Too slow, Sandra,” I said. “An innocent woman would have spoken sooner. We need to talk.”

  “You’re not a student,” she accused me, eyes narrowing.

  “Correct.” I handed her one of my business cards. “I’m Kate Brannigan. I’m working for Kerrchem, and we need to talk.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said desperately, her voice rising.

  From inside the house, Simon Morley’s voice joined in. “What’s going on, Sandra?”

  “Go away,” she said to me, shoving the door harder.

  “Sandra, would you rather talk to me about industrial sabotage or to the police about murder?” I replied, leaning back against the door. “You’ve got ten seconds to decide. I know all about the scam. There’s no hiding place.”

  Simon’s tall figure loomed behind Sandra in the hall. “What’s … ? Wait a minute, you were at the factory this morning.” He looked down at Sandra. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “She’s a private detective,” Sandra spat out.

  “Simon, we need to talk,” I said, struggling to maintain a

  “Let her in,” Simon said dully. Sandra looked up pleadingly at him, but he simply nodded. “Do it, love,” he said.

  I followed them into a living room that came straight from Laura Ashley without any intervening application of taste. I chose an armchair upholstered in a mimsy floral chintz, and they sat down together on a matching sofa. Sandra’s hand crept out and clutched Simon’s. “There’s no way you can wriggle out of the scam,” I said brutally. “But I don’t think murder was on the agenda.”

  “I haven’t killed anybody,” Simon said defiantly, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  “It doesn’t look that way,” I said.

  “Look, I admit I wanted to get my own back on Kerrchem,” he said.

  “The golden handcuffs?” I asked.

  He nodded. “That was bad enough, but then I found out they were refusing to give me a proper reference.”

  I frowned. Nobody at Kerrchem had indicated that anyone had left under a cloud. “Why?” I said.

  “It was my department head, Keith Murray. He screwed up on a research project I was working on with him and it ended up costing the company about twenty grand in wasted time and materials. It was just before the redundancies were going to be announced and everybody was twitchy about their jobs, and he blamed me for the cockup. Now, because of that, personnel say I can’t have a good reference. So I’ve ended up totally shafted. Never mind waiting six months, I’ll be waiting six years before anybody gives me a responsible research job again. Kerrchem owes me.” The words spilled out angrily, tumbling out in the rush of a normally reticent man who’s had enough.

  “So you decided to take it out in blackmail?”

  “Why not?” he asked defiantly.

  “Apart from the fact that it’s illegal, no reason at all,” I said tartly. “What about the two people who died?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with us,” Sandra butted in. “You’ve got to believe us!” She looked as if she was about to burst into tears.

  “She’s right,” Simon said, patting Sandra’s knee with his free hand. “The papers said they’d died from cyanide poisoning—that’s right, isn’t it?” I nodded. “Well, then,” he said. “All the stuff I’ve been using is over-the-counter chemicals, mostly ones Sandra’s picked up through work. I’ve got no access to cyanide. I’ve got none in the warehouse or here. You can search all you like, but you can’t tie us in to any cyanide. Look, all we wanted was to get some money out of Trevor Kerr. Why would we kill people if that was what we were trying to do? It’d be daft. You pay off somebody who’s wrecking your commercial operation, you do it quiet so the opposition don’t get to hear about it. You don’t go to the police. You don’t pay off murderers. You can’t hide murder.”

  “What about the note? The one that came after the first death? That implied there would be more if Kerrchem didn’t pay up,” I said.

  This time, Sandra did start crying. “I said we shouldn’t have sent that one,” she sobbed, pulling her hand away from Simon and punching ineffectually at his chest.

  Gently, Simon gripped her wrists, then pulled her into a tight hug. “You were right, I’m sorry,” he told her. Then he turned back to me. “I thought if we pretended to be more ruthless than we were, Kerr might cough up. It was stupid, I see that now. But he got me so mad when he just ignored the first note and nobody seemed to notice what we were doing. I had to make him pay attention.”

  “So if you’re not doing the killings, who is?” I demanded, finally getting round to the reason why I’d put myself through another harrowing encounter.

  I was too late. Before Simon could answer, the doorbell rang, followed by a tattoo of knocking. “Police, open up,” I heard someone shout from the other side of the door. I thought about making a run for it through the back door, but the way my luck had been running lately, I’d probably have been savaged by a police dog.

  The pair on the sofa had the wide-eyed look of rabbits transfixed by car headlights. By the time they got it together to let the cops in, their front door was going to be matchwood. With a sigh, I got to my feet and prepared for another jolly chat with Detective Inspector Cliff Jackson.

  Chapter 22

  My encounter with Jackson reminded me of the old radical slogan: help the police, beat yourself up. After listening to the usual rant about obstructing the police, withholding evidence and interfering with witnesses, I needed a drink. I was only a couple of miles away from the Cob and Pen, the pub where Joey Morton had breathed his last, which clinched the decision.

  If they’d gone into mourning over the death of mine host, it hadn’t been a prolonged period of grief. It was pub quiz night, and the place was packed. In the gaps between the packed bodies, I got the impression of a bar that had been done out in the brewery version of traditional country house: dark, William Morris-style wallpaper, hunting prints, and bookshelves containing all those 1930s best sellers that no one has read since 1941, not even in hospital out-patients’ queues. No chance of anyone nicking them, that was for sure.

  I bought myself a vodka and grapefruit juice and retreated into the furthest corner from the epicenter of the quiz. I squeezed on the end of a banquette, ignored by the other four people surrounding the nearby table. They were much too involved in arguing about the identity of the first Welsh footballer to play in the Italian league. There was no chance of engaging any of the bar staff in a
bit of gossip, not even lubricated with the odd tenner. They were too busy pulling pints and popping the caps off bottles of Bud. I sipped my drink and waited for an interval in the incessant trivia questions. Eventually, they announced a fifteen-minute break.

  The foursome round my table sat back in their seats. “John Charles,” I said. They looked blankly at me. “The first Welshman to

  “Really?” the lad with the pen and the answer sheet said.

  “Truly.”

  The one who’d been rooting for Charles against the other three grinned and clapped me on the back. “Told you so,” he said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got to get off. But thanks all the same. I’m surprised you didn’t all know the answer. I’d have thought anybody who was a regular in Joey Morton’s pub would have been shit hot on all the football questions.”

  They all looked momentarily embarrassed, as if they’d caught me swearing in front of their mothers. “Did you know Joey, then?” the penpusher said.

  “We met a couple of times. My fella’s a journalist. Bad business.”

  “You’re not kidding,” another said with feeling. “Now, if you’d said it was Mrs. M. that took a breadknife to him, I wouldn’t have been half as surprised. But dying like that, a casual bystander in somebody else’s war, that’s seriously bad news.”

  “You thought his wife had done it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light and jokey.

  They all snorted with laughter. “Gail? Get real,” Penpusher said scornfully. “Like Tez said, if it had been a breadknife job, nobody would have been gobsmacked. Them two fighting behind the bar’s the nearest thing you used to get to cabaret in here. But rigging up a drum of cleaning stuff with cyanide? Nah, Gail’s too thick.”

  “When Gail writes the daily specials up on the board, there’s more spelling mistakes than there are hot dinners,” another added. “She probably thinks cyanide’s a perfume by Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “Must have been a hell of a shock, then. I guess it hit her hard,” I said.

  The one I’d backed up gestured over his shoulder with his thumb towards the bar. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  I looked across. “Which one’s Gail? I never met her, just Joey.”

  “The bottle blonde with the cleavage,” Penpusher said.

  I didn’t have to ask for more details. Gail Morton’s tumbled

  “Widow’s weeds up until the funeral, then back to normal.”

  I began to wonder if my eager inquiries down the line of industrial sabotage had shunted Jackson off the right track. After all, it’s one of the great truisms that when wives or husbands die of unnatural causes, the prime suspect is the spouse. I was going to have to eat more than my usual portion of humble pie with Jackson if Gail Morton turned out to be Joey’s killer. But that didn’t explain why Mary Halloran had died. Time to go and pick some more brains.

  I made my excuses and left. I headed east out of Stockport, and soon I was on the edge of the Pennine moors. About a mile before I hit Charlesworth village, I turned right on to a narrow road whose blacktop had been laid so recently it still gleamed in my headlights. The road climbed round the side of a hill and emerged in what had originally been a quarry. In the huge horseshoe carved out of the side of the hill stood ten beautiful stone houses, each individually designed by Chris.

  For as long as I’d known them, Chris and Alexis had cherished the dream of building their own home, designed by Chris to their own specifications. They’d joined a self-build scheme a few years back, and, after a few hiccups, the dream had finally become a reality. Chris had swapped her architectural skills for things like plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry and wiring, while Alexis had served as everybody’s unskilled laborer. The site was perfect for people who get off on a spectacular view, looking out through a gap in the Pennines to the Cheshire plain. There isn’t a pub within three miles, the nearest decent restaurant is ten miles away, and if you run out of milk at half past nine at night, you’re drinking black coffee. Me, I’d rather live in a luggage locker at Piccadilly Station.

  The house wasn’t quite ready to be inhabited yet. A small matter of connection to the main gas, electricity, telephone and sewage systems. So for the time being Alexis and Chris were living

  The light was on in their van, so I knocked. Chris opened the door in her dressing gown, blonde hair in a damp, tousled halo round her head. Seeing me, a broad grin split her face. “Kate!” she exclaimed, then made a point of leaning out and scanning the area beyond me. “And you made it without a team of native bearers and Sherpa guides.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” I muttered as I followed her into the claustrophobe’s nightmare. The caravan was a four-berth job which might conceivably have contained a family for a fortnight’s holiday. Right now, it was bursting at the seams with the worldly goods that Chris and Alexis simply couldn’t do without. Once they’d packed in their work clothes, their casual clothes, a couple of shelves of books, a portable CD player with the accompanying music library, two wine racks, a drawing board for Chris and the files Alexis deemed too sensitive to trust to her office drawers, there wasn’t a lot of room left for bodies.

  Alexis was sprawled on the double bed watching the TV news in a pair of plaster- and paint-stained jogging pants and a ripped T-shirt, her unruly hair tied back in a ponytail with an elastic band. She greeted me with a languid wave and said, “Kettle’s just boiled. Help yourself.”

  I made a cup of instant and joined the two of them on the bed. It wasn’t that we were planning an orgy; there just wasn’t anywhere else to sit. “So what brings you up here in the hours of darkness, girl?” Alexis asked, leaning across me to switch off the TV. “You finally decided to tell me why you’ve been doing a Cook’s tour of the EC?”

  “I bring greetings from civilization,” I told her. “Cliff Jackson’s just arrested two suspects in the Kerrchem product-tampering scam.”

  I had all her attention now. Alexis pushed herself into an upright position. “Really? He charging them with the murders?”

  “I don’t know. If he does, he’ll be making a mistake,” I said.

  “So, spill,” Alexis urged.

  I gave her the bare bones of the tale, knowing she wouldn’t be able to say much in the following day’s paper because of the reporting restrictions that swing into place as soon as suspects are charged with an offense. But the details would be filed away in Alexis’s prodigious memory, to be dragged out as deep background when the case finally came to court. And she wouldn’t forget where the information came from.

  “And you believe them when they say they had nothing to do with the two deaths?” Chris chipped in.

  “Actually, I do,” I said. “Breaks my heart to say so, but I don’t think the job’s finished yet, whatever Cliff Jackson decides to charge them with.”

  Alexis lit a cigarette. Chris pointedly cracked the window open an inch and moved out of the draught. “I know, I know,” Alexis sighed. “But how can I possibly be a laborer without a fag hanging out of my mouth and a rolled-up copy of the Sun stuffed in my back pocket? Anyway, KB, I suppose this means that you’re here for access to the Alexis Lee reference library?”

  “You can see why she’s an investigative reporter, can’t you?” I said nonchalantly to Chris.

  “So what do you want to know?” Alexis asked.

  “Tell me about Joey Morton,” I said. First rule of murder investigation, according to all the detective novels I’ve read: find out about the victim. Embarrassing that it had taken me so long to get there.

  “Born and raised in Belfast. Came over here with a fanfare of trumpets that said he was going to be the next George Best. Unfortunately, the only thing Georgie and Joey had in common was their talent for pissing it all up against the wall. United took him on as an apprentice, but they didn’t keep him on, and he never made it past the Third Division. Gail believed the publicity when she married him. She was expecting the days of wine and roses, a
nd she never forgave him for not making the big time. So she gave him the days of bitter and thorns. They fought like cat and dog. When we were living in the Heatons, we used to pop into the Cob and Pen occasionally for a drink and the spectator sport of watching Joey and Gail tear lumps out of each other.”

  “So why didn’t she leave him?” I asked.

  Alexis shrugged. “Some people get addicted to rowing,” Chris said. “You watch them at it and imagine how stressed it would make you to live like that, but then you realize they actually thrive on it. If they ever found themselves in agreement, the relationship would die on the spot.”

  “Also, where would she go? It’s not a bad life, being the grande dame of a busy pub like the Cob,” Alexis added. “Besides, Joey was a staunch Catholic. He’d never have stood on for a divorce.”

  “Now she’s got it all,” I said. “She’s got her freedom, and presumably the brewery aren’t going to chuck her out of the pub as long as it keeps making money.”

  “And the insurance,” Alexis said. “Word is, Joey was worth a lot more dead than he ever was in the transfer market.”

  “All of which adds up to a tidy bit of motive for Mrs. Morton,” I said. “But if she’s behind Joey’s murder, how does Mary Halloran’s death fit in?”

  “Copycat?” Alexis suggested.

  “Maybe, but cyanide isn’t exactly a common household chemical. I wouldn’t know how to get my hands on it. Would you?”

  Alexis shrugged. “I’ve never wanted to kill her enough,” she joked, grabbing Chris and hugging her. A sudden pang of envy took me by surprise. All too painfully, I could remember when Richard and I were as easy and warm together. It felt like a long time had passed since then. I wanted that back. I just didn’t know any more if I could recover it with Richard or if I was going to have to start all over again on the wary process of love.

  I must have shown something on my face, for Chris looked at me with a worried frown. “You all right, Kate?” she asked.