“He drives a metallic green Mercedes. He’s about forty, five ten, bald on top. Anyway, I told him to look for a tarty-looking little blonde.” Dennis couldn’t keep the triumph out of his voice.
“You did what?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to go looking like yourself,” he said defensively. “Kate, these are not people you want coming after you with a clear picture. Wear a blond wig, stick on the stilettos and the short skirt. And don’t drive that poncey coupe. It sticks out like a prick in a brothel.”
“Thank you very much, Dennis,” I said.
Impervious to my sarcasm, he said, “My pleasure. Be careful out there now, you hear? Let me know how you go on.”
“Okay.”
“Be lucky.”
If only it was as simple as that. With a groan, I turned back to the computer. Just after eleven, I made it into Sandra Bates’s data. Interestingly, it looked like Sandra had overall supervisory responsibility for about half of the Filbert Brown warehouses in the North West, as well as her day-to-day charge of the Ancoats cash-and-carry. She hadn’t mentioned that in our brief encounter. I decided to concentrate on Manchester for the time being. The first thing I went for was the purchase orders for Kerrchem. When I reached those files, I printed the lot out. Analysis could wait until a time when I wasn’t wandering round someone else’s system like an illegal alien. After a bit of searching, I found the till data, sorted product by product. I scrolled through till I found KerrSter and printed that lot out too. Finally, I made myself at home in the invoices section of Sandra’s files. That was the first indication I had that there was something going on. As a matter of course, I’d been checking for hidden files as I went along. When I added up the sizes of the individual files in the invoices subdirectory, it came to less than the amount of space the terminal told me the subdirectory occupied. The difference was about the size of one biggish file.
What Sandra Bates had done was clever. She could have made the file a password file, but anyone from head office trying to get into it would have become immediately suspicious. With a hidden file, there was no way of knowing it was there unless you were looking for precisely that, and nothing to trigger off suspicions in a routine trawl. I copied the hidden file onto my own hard disk, not wanting to interfere with it in Sandra’s environment, and also copied the visible Kerrchem invoice file. I couldn’t think of anything else I needed right then, so I made my way out of the system. If what I already had suggested fresh avenues of inquiry, I could always go back in. I didn’t think I’d left any footprints obvious enough for the sysman to notice and do anything panicky like change his password.
The last thing I did was to open up the hidden file and print out the contents of it and the other invoice file. Then, clutching my pile of papers, I staggered off to bed. Richard hadn’t appeared, which meant he was probably out on the razz with a bunch of musicians. When he finally came home, he’d stagger into his own bed rather than waken me. Just one of the advantages of our semidetached lifestyle.
I woke up just before eight, the light still on, the papers strewn all over the duvet and the floor. I hadn’t got past page one before sleep had overwhelmed me. I picked up the papers and shuffled them together. I showered, sliced a banana into a bowl of muesli and took breakfast and coffee out into the conservatory. As I ate, I started to read the paperwork. The purchase orders for KerrSter showed a sudden hike about two months previously, virtually tripling overnight. Interestingly, they weren’t big orders. According to this printout, Sandra hadn’t increased the amount of KerrSter on each order. It was the number of orders that had shot up. That seemed a pretty inefficient way of doing business to me.
I checked back with the till receipts to see when the sudden surge in sales of KerrSter had started. I knew then that I was on to something. If what Sandra Bates had told me was the truth, the increased orders should have been sales-led. But what I was seeing was something very different. The till receipts for KerrSter didn’t start to pick up until a few days after the orders increased dramatically. It looked as if the product had been given its starry position before the sales justified it. I was sure Trevor Kerr hadn’t been paying them a premium to improve the profile of his product; I couldn’t imagine him parting with his company’s cash in a deal like that. Trevor struck me as a man who liked his profits, and wouldn’t cede them to anyone.
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?”
