Twenty-Seven

Andy Carstairs was growing very red in the face. He was talking to Miss Nugent, the personnel officer at de Vries Industries, and getting precisely nowhere. Miss Nugent’s office was situated in a single-storey building to the rear of the de Vries canning factory in Spalding. The factory had been erected in Marsh Rails Road in the 1940s, on the eastern extremity of the town. At the time, there had been no buildings beyond it, but now a complex of light industrial businesses and market gardens stretched all the way to Wardentree Lane, beyond which lay the large village of Pinchbeck.

Margaret Nugent was a large-boned lady in her fifties. Although she had been working in her office when the receptionist announced Andy’s arrival, she was ostentatiously clad in the white lab coat and white trilby hat that the office workers were required to don when they walked through the factory. She rose to greet Andy without offering to shake hands. She gestured at a small plastic chair that had been placed in front of her desk, before seating herself again. She made a point of continuing to write something in the margin of the document placed in front of her. Eventually she reached the end of the document and signed it with a flourish.

“Now,” she said, regarding Andy with unfriendly, watery blue eyes. “What is it that you wanted?” She made no attempt to call Andy by his rank or make other reference to his status of policeman.

Andy sat in the plastic chair as bidden and immediately felt at a disadvantage. The chair was much lower than her own, with the result that, although he was taller than she, he still had to peer up at her in order to look her in the eye. Its round plastic seat, as well as being extremely uncomfortable, was also very small. Andy was uncomfortably aware of his thighs and buttocks as they bulged untidily beyond it on both sides. If not actually designed to humiliate, it was surely an item of furniture selected to discourage those to whom it was assigned from spending more time in Miss Nugent’s office than was absolutely necessary.

“Thank you for taking my call earlier, Miss Nugent,” Andy had said, hoping to disarm her with chatty friendliness. “It’s good of you to see me at such short notice. Now, can I just confirm once again that you are personnel officer for all of the staff at de Vries Industries, not just the people who work at this factory?”

Miss Nugent inclined her head.

“That is correct. As the company has grown, I’ve had some assistance: Moira, the receptionist whom you’ve now met, does some work for me when she’s on the desk and I can call on help from the typing pool. But it makes sense for one person to be in charge of all the staff, because it’s easier to move people around between the businesses, or ask them to change shifts.”

“Are you saying that you personally know everyone who works for Kevan de Vries?”

She scrutinised him for some seconds.

“More or less. Not all the casual seasonal labour, naturally, but I can put names to faces for most of the regular staff.”

“So you’re in charge of the staff at the food-packing plant at Sutton Bridge?”

“I wouldn’t say I was in charge of them. They have their own line managers, or they are line managers. I’m responsible for seeing that they get paid and for their welfare. The three ‘t’s: tea, towels and toilets. That’s what personnel managers are supposed to be about, isn’t it?” She smiled bleakly at her own joke. Andy gave her an enthusiastic smile in return.

“As I mentioned on the telephone, I’m here in connection with a suspected murder. The body of a young woman has been found in the woods at Sandringham. She was wearing an overall and overshoes belonging to de Vries Industries. We don’t yet know her identity. We have a working theory that she was employed at the food-packing plant because Sutton Bridge is much closer to where she was found than any of the other de Vries operations. But of course we could be jumping to the wrong conclusions entirely.”

Miss Nugent looked at him steadily without speaking. He found her passively-hostile intransigence intimidating.

“Miss Nugent?”

“Yes?”

“I wondered if you had any comment to make. Something that could help us.”

“What sort of comment?”

“Well, for example, have any of the staff at Sutton Bridge been reported missing, or unexpectedly failed to turn up for work?”

“Not to my knowledge. But I wouldn’t expect such details to be reported to me unless the person concerned was a persistent offender, or in need of formal disciplining.”

“Do you pay staff for unexplained absences?”

“Not unexplained absences. Sickness benefit is paid according to statutory obligations. Staff may request days off unpaid. And then there is their annual holiday entitlement.”

“So you’d know if someone had failed to turn up for work but was neither off sick nor on holiday – nor taking the day off unpaid?”

“I’d know at the end of the month, when I receive the weekly time-sheets. If the supervisors had filled them in correctly and not tried to cover the absence out of some misplaced idea of loyalty, that is.”

“Does that happen much?”

“Not as far as I can prove. But sometimes I have my suspicions, naturally.”

Not for the first time while they’d been talking, Andy wondered why Miss Nugent had chosen a career in which ‘staff welfare’ was supposed to play a prominent part.

“Do you have a picture of this woman?” she asked with sudden avidity.

“Not yet. I’m hoping to have one sketched by an artist shortly. It will be based on the face of the corpse, but remove the distressing details. For public circulation.”

Miss Nugent looked at him stonily. Andy thought to himself that he might have produced the head from a plastic carrier bag and laid it on her desk and she would still have looked as unmoved.

“I’m not sure how I can help you. But I’ll check with the supervisors at Sutton Bridge.”

“Thank you. What about the clothes she was wearing?”

“What about them? I doubt that we’d want them back. We operate strict rules of hygiene here.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to use them again! But if I bring them to you, will that help you to help me? Would you be able to say what tasks the victim was engaged in? Or identify the clothes in some way, say when they were issued, that type of thing?”

There was another long pause.

“I’ll have a look at them, but I very much doubt that it’ll help. We buy the overalls in bulk from a Chinese supplier. They come embroidered with the de Vries logo, but we don’t mark them ourselves. They come in all sizes, from an 8 to a 22. All the workers wear the same ones, regardless of the jobs that they do. And everyone is issued with them. The only staff who don’t have them are the office workers who never go into the plants, but there are only a few of those, as many of the lower grade office workers choose to supplement their incomes with the odd evening shift from time to time.”

“What about the senior managers and directors?”

“Senior staff have white coats like this one, and are issued with white hats. When we’re in the plants we wear the same white rubber shoes as the rest of the staff.”

“And seasonal staff?”

“Seasonal staff are also required to wear the overalls; it would be a contravention of the hygiene rules if they didn’t. But they’re only issued with two each and I try to give them older stock if possible – I mean, overalls that have been handed in by leavers.”

“Any particular reason for that? Or is it just that they aren’t as valued as the regular staff?”

“That’s a very inflammatory suggestion, Mr... I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“Detective Constable Carstairs,” said Andy, accentuating the first two words.

“Yes. Well, all of our employees are equally regarded, but, in the case of some of the gang women, there have been instances of the overalls – and, especially, the rubber shoes – not having been returned. We stop an appropriate amount from their wages if we find out in time, but this is a further precaution to protect company profits.”

“Are you saying that there’s a black market in de Vries factory clothing?”

Miss Nugent shrugged.

“How should I know? Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to keep one of our overalls once they’ve left our employment. The shoes, I agree, might come in useful for working on the land or, I suppose, for wearing when carrying out household chores.”

“But there’s a possibility that this clothing might come into the possession of someone who’s never been a de Vries employee?”

“Notionally, yes.”

“That could make the job of identifying the victim much more difficult. Miss Nugent, as I’m sure you’re aware, murder enquiries are time critical. We’ve already lost the precious first few days after the victim’s likely date of death because the body has only just been discovered. We need all the co-operation that we can get if we are still to catch whoever did it.”

“That is quite understood. But, as I’ve already said, I’m afraid that I probably can’t be of much help.”

“No, you’re probably right,” said Andy. Miss Nugent blinked a little at this forthright statement and sat up straighter in her chair. “I probably need to speak to someone more at the coal face, if you’ll allow me,” he continued smoothly. “How many supervisors are there at the Sutton Bridge plant?”

“Eight, I believe. They’re not all there at the same time: that plant operates two shifts per day, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.”

“So it might be possible, say, to meet them all together just before or just after 2 p.m.?”

“In exceptional circumstances, I suppose so. But I’m not a director. You’d need a director’s permission to halt work at the plant in that way.”

“Permission from the Operations Director, I suppose?”

“No. No – we don’t have one as such. It would be permission from my own boss. He’s the Finance Director, but I report to him as well as the two financial controllers.”

“Could you let me have his name and contact details?” Andy had already guessed what her reply would be.

“Certainly. It’s Mr Sentance. Tony Sentance.”