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.
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 right. A couple of hundred yards down the road, there was a turning on the right, leading to a small industrial estate. I pulled up and watched as he parked outside a unit that wasn’t much bigger than a double garage.
As he disappeared inside, I cruised into the estate and parked farther 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 toward 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 Simon 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 Delia, 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 microcassette 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 went back indoors with one of the lads, and the van took off. I followed at a discreet distance. I needn’t have bothered. If I’d just driven straight to Filbert Brown’s Manchester HQ, I’d have been able to film them arriving just as easily.
I was astonished 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.”