Clean Break

‘It’s something you should consider. In relation to both your professional and your personal life.’ He was having a lot of trouble getting his head round the idea, I could see. If he’d been a bit nicer to me, I’d have been gentler. But I figure you shouldn’t dish it out unless you can take it. ‘What about business rivals? Is anybody snapping at your heels? Is anybody going under because you’ve brought out new products or developed new sales strategies?’

‘You don’t murder people in business,’ he protested. ‘Not in my line of business, you don’t.’

‘Murder might not have been what was planned,’ I told him flatly. ‘If they wanted to sabotage you and stay at arm’s-length, they might have hired someone to do the dirty. And they in turn might have hired someone else. And somewhere along the line, the Chinese whispers took over. So is there any other firm that might have a particular reason for wanting Kerrchem to go down the tubes?’

He frowned. ‘The last few years have been tough, there’s no denying that. Firms go bust, so there’s not as much industrial cleaning to be done. Businesses cut their cleaners down from five days to three, so the commercial cleaners cut back on their purchases. We’ve kept our heads above water, but it’s been a struggle. We’ve had a couple of rounds of redundancies, we’ve been a bit slower bringing in some new processes, and we’ve had to market ourselves more aggressively, but that’s the story across the industry. One of our main competitors went bust about nine months ago, but that wasn’t because we were squeezing them. It was more because they were based in Basingstoke and they had higher labour costs than us. I haven’t heard that anybody else is on the edge, and it’s a small world. To be honest, we’re one of the smaller fishes. Most of our rivals are big multinationals. If they wanted to take us out, they’d come to the family and make us an offer we couldn’t refuse.’

That disposed of the easy option. Time to move on. ‘Has anybody left under a cloud? Any unfair dismissal claims pending?’

He shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. As far as I know, and believe me, I would know, the only people who have gone are the ones we cleared out under the redundancy deals. I suppose some of them might have been a bit disgruntled, but if any of them had made any threats, I would have heard about it. Like I said, we pride ourselves on being a family firm, and the department head and production foremen all know not to keep problems to themselves.’

We were going nowhere fast, which only left the sticky bit. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Mr Kerr, but I have to ask these things. You’ve said that Kerrchem is a family firm. Is there any possibility that another member of the family wants to discredit you? To make it look like the company’s not safe in your hands?’

Suddenly I was looking at Trevor Kerr’s future. Written all over his scarlet face was the not-so-distant early warning of the heart attack that was lurking in his silted arteries. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, then he roared, ‘Bollocks. Pure, absolute bollocks.’

‘Think about it,’ I said, smiling sweetly. That’ll teach him to deprive me of a caffeine fix. ‘The other thing is more personal, I’m afraid. Are you married, Mr Kerr?’

‘Course I am. Three children.’ He jerked his thumb towards a photograph frame on the desk. I leaned forward and turned it round. Standard studio shot of a woman groomed to within an inch of her life, two sulky-looking boys with their father’s features, and a girl who’d had the dental work but still looked disturbingly like a rabbit. ‘Been married to the same woman for sixteen years.’

‘So there’re no ex-wives or ex-girlfriends lurking around with an axe to grind?’ I asked.

His eyes drifted away from mine to a point elsewhere on the far wall. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said abruptly. Then, in an effort to win me round, he gave a bark of laughter and said, ‘Bloody hell, Kate, it’s me that hired you, not the wife.’

So now I knew he had, or had had, a mistress. That was the long shot I’d have to keep in the back of my mind. Before I could explore this avenue further, the intercom on his desk buzzed. He pressed a button and said, ‘What is it, Sheila?’

‘Reg Unsworth is here, Mr Kerr. He say she needs to talk to you.’

‘I’m in a meeting, Sheila,’ he said irritably.

There were muffled sounds of conversation, then Sheila said, ‘He says it’s urgent, Mr Kerr. He says you’ll want to know immediately. It’s to do with the recalled product, he says.’

‘Why didn’t you say so? Send him in.’

A burly man in a brown warehouseman’s coat with a head bald as a boiled egg and approximately the same shape walked in. ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Kerr. It’s about the KerrSter recall.’

‘Well, Reg, spit it out,’ Kerr said impatiently.

Unsworth gave me a worried look. ‘It’s a bit confidential, like.’

‘It’s all right. Miss Brannigan here’s from the Health and Safety Executive. She’s here to help us sort this mess out.’

Unsworth still looked uncertain. ‘I checked the records before the returns started coming in. We sent out a total of four hundred and eighty-three gallon containers with the same batch number as the one that there was the problem with. Only…so far, we’ve had six hundred and twenty-seven back.’

5 (#u510b7e84-6161-5a37-827f-1d86e2904830)

Kerr looked gobsmacked. ‘You must have made a mistake,’ he blustered.

‘I double-checked,’ Unsworth said. His jaw set in a line as obstinate as his boss’s. ‘Then I went back down to production and checked again. There’s no doubt about it. We’ve had back one hundred and forty-four containers more than we sent out. And that’s not even taking into account the one that the dead man opened, or ones that have already been used, or people who haven’t even heard about the recall yet.’

‘There’s got to be some mistake,’ Kerr repeated. ‘What about the batch coding machine? Has anybody checked that it’s working OK?’

‘I checked with the line foreman myself,’ Unsworth said. ‘They’ve had no problems with it, and I’ve seen quality control’s sheets. There’s no two ways about it. We only sent out four hundred and eighty-three. There’s a gross of gallon drums of KerrSter that we can’t account for sitting in the loading bay. Come and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ he added in an aggrieved tone.

‘Let’s do just that,’ Kerr said, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Come on, Miss Brannigan. Come and see how the workers earn a living.’

I followed Kerr out of the room. Unsworth hung back, holding the door open and falling in beside me as we strode down the covered walkway that linked the administration offices with the factory. ‘It’s a real mystery,’ he offered.

I had my own ideas about what was going on, but for the time being I decided to keep them to myself. ‘The drums that have been returned,’ I said, ‘are they all sealed, or have some of them already been opened?’

‘Some of them have been started on,’ he said. ‘The batch went out into the warehouse the Tuesday before last. They’ll probably have started taking it out on the Thursday or Friday, going by our normal stockpile levels, so there’s been plenty of time for people to use them.’

‘And no one else has reported any adverse effect?’

Unsworth looked uncomfortable. ‘Not as such,’ he said.

Kerr half turned to catch my reply. ‘But?’ I asked.

Unsworth glanced at Kerr, who nodded impatiently. ‘Well, a couple of the wholesalers and one or two of the reps had already had containers from that batch returned,’ Unsworth admitted.

‘Do you know why that was?’ I asked.

‘Customers complained the goods weren’t up to us usual standard,’ he said grudgingly.

‘What sort of complaints?’ Kerr demanded indignantly. ‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’

‘It’s only just come to light, Mr Kerr. They said the KerrSter wasn’t right. One of them claimed it had stripped the finish off the flooring in his office toilets.’

Kerr snorted. ‘He should tell his bloody workforce to stick with Boddingtons. They’ll have been pissing that foreign lager all over the bloody tiles.’

‘Have you had the chance to analyse any of the containers that have come back?’ I butted in.

Unsworth nodded. ‘The lads in the lab worked through the night on samples from some of the drums. There wasn’t a trace of cyanide in any of them.’

Kerr shouldered open a pair of double doors. As I caught one on the backswing, the smell hit me. It was a curious amalgam of pine, lemon, and soap suds, but pervaded throughout with sharp chemical smells that bit my nose and throat. It was a bit like driving past the chemical works at Ellesmere Port with one of those ersatz air fresheners in the car. The ones that make you feel that a rotting polecat under the driver’s seat would be preferable. Right after the smell came the noise of machinery, overlaid with the bubbling and gurgling of liquid. Kerr climbed a flight of narrow iron stairs, and I followed him along a high-level walkway that travelled the length of the factory floor. It was unpleasantly humid. I felt like a damp wash that’s just been dumped in the tumble dryer.

Beneath us, vats seethed, nozzles squirted liquid into plastic containers, and surprisingly few people moved around. ‘Not many bodies,’ I said loudly over my shoulder to Unsworth.

‘Computer controlled,’ he said succinctly.

Another avenue to pursue. If the sabotage was internal, perhaps the culprit was simply sending the wrong instructions to the plant. I’d thought this was going to be a straightforward case of industrial sabotage, but my head was beginning to hurt with the permutations it was throwing up.

A couple of hundred yards along the walkway, we descended and cut through a heavy door into a warehouse. Now I know how the Finns feel when they walk into the snow from the sauna. I could feel my pores snapping shut in shock. Here, the air smelled of oil and diesel. The only sound came from fork-lift trucks shunting pallets on and off shelves. ‘This is the warehouse,’ Kerr said. I’d never have worked that one out all by myself. ‘The full containers go through from the factory to packing, where the machines label them, stamp them with batch numbers and seal-wrap them in dozens. Then they come through here on conveyor belts and they’re shelved or loaded.’ He turned to Unsworth. ‘Where have you stacked the recalls?’

Before Unsworth could reply, my mobile started ringing. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, moving away a few yards and pulling the phone out. ‘Kate Brannigan,’ I announced.

‘Tell me,’ an amused voice said. ‘Is Alexis Lee a real person, or is it just your pen name?’

I recognized the voice at once. I moved further away from Kerr’s curious stare and turned my back so he couldn’t see that my ears had gone bright red. ‘She’s real all right, Mr Haroun,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’