The financial data would fill one gap in my knowledge. I hoped it would be more comprehensive than the newspaper accounts. When Joey Morton died, the media responded with ghoulish swiftness. For once, there were no government scandals to divert them, and all the papers had given the Stockport publican’s death a good show. At first, I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed the hue and cry, till I remembered that on the day in question I’d been out all day tracking down a key defense witness for Ruth Hunter, my favorite criminal solicitor. I’d barely had time for a sandwich on the hoof, never mind a browse through the dailies…

Joey Morton was thirty-eight, a former Third Division footballer turned publican. He and his wife Gail ran The Cob and Pen pub on the banks of the infant Mersey. Joey had gone down the cellar to clean the beer pipes, taking a new container of KerrSter. Joey was proud of his real ale, and he never let anyone else near the cellarage. When he hadn’t reappeared by opening time, Gail had sent one of the bar staff down to fetch him. The barman found his boss in a crumpled heap on the floor, the KerrSter sitting open beside him. The police had revealed that the postmortem indicated Joey had died as a result of inhaling hydrogen cyanide gas.

The pathologist’s job had been made easier by the barman, who reported he’d smelt bitter almonds as soon as he’d entered the cramped cellar. Kerrchem had immediately denied that their product could possibly have caused the death, and the police had informed a waiting world that they were treating Joey’s death as suspicious. Since then, the story seemed to have died, as always happens when there’s a dearth of shocking revelations.

It didn’t seem likely that Joey Morton could have died as a result of some ghastly error inside the Kerrchem factory. The obvious conclusion was industrial sabotage. The key questions were when and by whom. Was it an inside job? Was it a disgruntled former employee? Was it an outsider looking for blackmail money? Or was it a rival trying to annex Trevor Kerr’s market? Killing people seemed a bit extreme, but as I know from bitter experience, the trouble with hiring outside help to do your dirty work is that things often get dangerously out of hand.

It was ten to nine when Trevor Kerr barged in. His eyes looked like the only treasure he’d found the night before had been in the bottom of a bottle. “You Miss Brannigan, then?” he greeted me. If he was harboring dreams of an acting career, I could only hope that Kerrchem wasn’t going to fold. I followed him into his office, catching an unappealing whiff of Scotch revisited blended with Polo before we moved into the aroma of stale cigars and lemon furniture polish. Clearly, the Spartan motif didn’t extend beyond the outer office. Trevor Kerr had spared no expense to make his office comfortable. That is, if you find gentlemen’s clubs comfortable. Leather wing chairs surrounded a low table buffed to a mirror sheen. Trevor’s desk was repro, but what it lacked in class it made up for in size. All they’d need to stage the world snooker championships on it would be a bit of green baize. That and clear the clutter. The walls were hung with old golfing prints. If his bulk was anything to go by, golf was something Trevor Kerr honored more in the breach than the observance.

He dumped his briefcase by the desk and settled in behind it. I chose the armchair nearest him. I figured if I waited till I was invited, I’d be past my sell-by date. “So, what do you need from me?” he demanded.

Before I could reply, the secretary came in with a steaming mug of coffee. The mug said “World’s Greatest Bullshitter.” I wasn’t about to disagree. I wouldn’t have minded a cup myself, but clearly the hired help around Kerrchem wasn’t deemed worthy of that. If I’d really been from the HSB, the lack of courtesy would have had me sharpening my knives for Trevor Kerr’s well-cushioned ribs. I waited for the secretary to withdraw, then I said, “Have you recalled the rest of the batch?”

He nodded impatiently. “Of course. We got on to all the wholesalers, and we’ve placed an ad in the national press as well as the trade. We’ve already had a load of stuff back, and there’s more due in today.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll want to see that, as well as all the dispatch paperwork relating to that batch. I take it that won’t be a problem?”

“No problem. I’ll get Sheila to sort it out for you.” He made a note on a pad on his desk. “Next?”

“Do you use cyanide in any of your processes?”

“No way,” he said belligerently. “It has industrial uses, but mainly in the plastics industry and electroplating.

There’s nothing we produce that we’d need it for.“

“Okay. Going back to the original blackmail note. Did it include any instructions about the amount of money they were after, or how you were to contact them?”

He took a cigar out of a humidor the size of a small greenhouse and rolled it between his fingers. “They didn’t put a figure on it, no. There was a phone number, and the note said it was the number of one of the public phones at Piccadilly Station. I was supposed to be there at nine o’clock on the Friday night. I didn’t go, of course.”

“Pity you didn’t call us then,” I said.

“I told you, I thought it was a crank. Some nutter trying to wind me up. No way was I going to give him the satisfaction.”

“Or her,” I added. “The thing that bothers me, Mr. Kerr, is that killing people is a pretty extreme thing for a blackmailer to do. The usual analysis of blackmailers is that they are on the cowardly side. The crimes they commit are at arm’s length, and usually don’t put life at risk. I would have expected the blackmailer in this case to have done something a lot more low-key, certainly initially. You know, dumped caustic soda in washing-up liquid, that sort of thing.”

“Maybe they didn’t intend to kill anybody, just to give people a nasty turn,” he said. He lit the cigar, exhaling a cloud of smoke that gave me a nasty turn so early in the day.

I shrugged. “In that ease, cyanide’s a strange choice. The fatal dose is pretty small. Also, you couldn’t just stick it in the drum and wait for someone to open it up. There must have been some kind of device rigged up inside it. To produce the lethal gas, cyanide pellets need to react with something else. So they’d have had to be released into the liquid somehow. That’s a lot of trouble to go to when you could achieve an unpleasant warning with dozens of other chemical mixtures. If it was me, I’d have filled a few drums either with something that smelled disgusting, or something that would destroy surfaces rather than clean them, just to persuade you that they were capable of making your life hell. Then, I’d have followed it up with a second note saying something like, ‘next time, it’ll be cyanide.’ ”

“So maybe we’re dealing with a complete nutter,” he said bitterly. “Great.”

“Or maybe it’s someone who wants to destroy you rather than blackmail you,” I said simply.

Kerr took his cigar out of his mouth, which remained in a perfect 0. Finally, he said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“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?”