By now, I was gripped by the paper trail. Time for the invoices. First, I went through the accessible KerrSter invoice file. That was when the alarm bells started ringing. The product orders might have tripled, but the invoices hadn’t. I double-checked, but there was no mistake. Filbert Brown were still paying Kerrchem for the same amount of cleaning fluid as they had been before the order hike.
That left the contents of the hidden file. It contained the invoices for the remaining two-thirds of the KerrSter. There was one crucial difference. The bank account where the electronic fund transfer was sending the money for the extra KerrSter wasn’t the same as the bank account on the other, up-front invoices. Whoever Sandra Bates was paying for the KerrSter, it wasn’t Kerrchem.
That left me two possibilities. Either somebody at Kerrchem was creaming off a tidy backdoor profit for themselves, or Sandra Bates was dealing with the schneid merchants who were peddling phony KerrSter with such disastrous results. I knew which theory looked most likely to me.
I checked the clock. Ten to nine. Chances were that management staff at Filbert Brown didn’t start work until nine. If I was quick, I could be in and out of their computer before their sysman logged in to find someone else using his ID. To be on the safe side, I should have waited until the evening, but I was behind the door when they were handing out patience.
Two minutes later, I was in the system again. This time, I wasn’t looking for Sandra Bates’s terminal. I wanted her personnel file. I got into personnel at three minutes to nine. A minute took me to staff personnel files. Once I was there, I downloaded Sandra Bates’s file to my own hard disk. I was back out of Filbert Brown by one minute past nine. A couple of minutes later, I was looking at Sandra Bates’s CV.
She’d been to school in Ashton-under-Lyne, a once separate town now attached to East Manchester by a string of down-at-the-heel suburbs. She’d done a degree in business studies at what was then Manchester Poly and is now Manchester Metropolitan University. You’d think when they got their university status that someone would have noticed their new initials translate only too readily to Mickey Mouse University, endorsing the snooty opinions of those who attended “real” universities. After her degree, Sandra had gone to work for one of the big chains of do-it-yourself stores, havens for suburbanites on Sundays and Bank Holidays. She’d stayed there for a couple of years before joining Filbert Brown three years previously. She’d had one promotion since then and was pulling down just over twenty grand. The item that really interested me was her address. Thirty-seven Alder Way, Burnage. I needed to check out her house at some point today while she was out at work. I would probably have to stake her out or do a little bit of illegal bugging to find out who her phony KerrSter supplier was, and to do that, I needed to get a picture of the setup out in Alder Way.
Before I could do any of that, I needed to get dressed and stop by the office. I had plenty of time before I had to make the meet with Dennis’s fence, so I could at least put off the tart’s disguise till later. I grabbed a clean pair of jeans, my Reeboks and a denim-look cotton sweater. If I was going to spend the afternoon teetering on stilettos, I could at least spend the morning in comfort.
Shelley was catching up on the filing when I walked in, a clear sign that she was bored. “Going part-time now, are we?” she asked acidly.
“I’ve been doing some work on the computer at home,” I said defensively. Shelley has the unerring knack of making me feel fifteen and guilty again.
“A report would be nice now and again,” she said. “I know I’m only the office manager, but it does help when clients phone if I know where we’re up to.”
“Sorry,” I said contritely. “It’s just that most of the things I’ve been doing for the last couple of days are the kind of things I don’t want the clients to know I’m up to. I’ll get something down on tape for you by the end of today, promise.” I smiled ingratiatingly. “Would you like a cappuccino?”
“How much is it going to cost me?” Shelley asked suspiciously. Abe Lincoln wouldn’t have said you can fool all of the people some of the time if he’d ever met Shelley.
“Can I borrow you and your car this afternoon?” I asked. “I’ve got a meet with the fence who’s been handling these stolen artworks, and I’m going to need to tail him afterwards. He’s going to have clocked the coupe, and it’s too obvious a car to follow him in. I want you to come out there with me and after the meet, we can swap cars. I go off in your motor, you come back in the coupe”.“
“You saying my Rover’s common?” Shelley asked.
“Only in a numerical sense. Please?”
“How do I know you’ll bring it back in one piece?”
She had a point. In the past eighteen months I’d written off one car and done serious damage to the Little Rascal, the van we’ve got fitted out with full surveillance gear. Neither incident had been my fault, but it still made me the butt of all office jokes about drivers. “I’ll bring it back in one piece,” I said through gritted teeth.
“What about the Little Rascal?” Shelley demanded. “You could tail him in that. All you have to do is make sure he doesn’t see you getting out of it. Just be there early, out of the car, waiting for him.”
I pulled a face. “The guy drives a Merc. I suspect I’d lose him on the motorway. Besides, he’s no dummy. He’s probably going to wait till he sees me drive off before he takes off himself.”
“So if you drive off, how are we going to swap cars?”
“Trust me. I’ll show you when we get there.”
“I get the coupe overnight?” she bargained.
“But of course. I might as well take it now, since I need to look unobtrusive in Burnage.”
We swapped keys and I headed off in her four-year-old Rover to Burnage. My first stop was the local library, where I checked the electoral roll. Sandra Bates was the only resident listed at 37. Alder Way was a quiet street of 1930s semis, each with a small garden. I marched boldly up the path of 37 and knocked on the door. There was no reply. There was an empty carport at the side of the house, and I walked cautiously through it and opened the wrought-iron gate leading into the back garden. Sandra was obviously as efficient at home as she was at work. There was a line of washing pegged out, drying in the watery sunlight. Whatever the electoral roll said, Sandra didn’t live alone. Hanging beside her underwear were boxer shorts and socks. Flapping in the breeze like a phantom among the shirts and blouses were two pairs of overalls. Maybe I wouldn’t have to look so far for the mystery chemist after all.
14
I RANG THE DOORBELL Of 35 ALDER WAY. I WAS ABOUT TO GIVE up when the door opened. I realized why it had taken so long. The harassed-looking young woman who stood in the doorway had identical toddlers clinging onto each leg of her jeans. As a handicapping system, it beat anything the Jockey Club has ever come up with. The twins stared up at me and conducted a conversation with each other in what sounded like some East European language, all sibilants and diphthongs. “Yes?” the woman said. At least she spoke Mancunian.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m looking for a guy called Richard Barclay. The address I’ve got for him is next door at number thirty-seven. But there doesn’t seem to be anybody in.”
She shook her head. “There’s nobody by that name next door,” she said with an air of finality, her hand rising to close the door.