by Jo Bannister
It was the mildest of observations but it was enough to set Sheila Crosbie off again. ‘You get through a lot of other things with a baby, too,’ she snapped, ‘and one of them’s washing. My hands were dry, all right? I put some on my hands and a minute later I was climbing the walls. If I’d put it on the baby first he’d be in hospital!’
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ agreed Liz. ‘I don’t suppose you feel very lucky right now, but it could have been so much worse.’
‘What kind of freak does something like that?’ demanded Sheila. ‘Puts caustic soda in something you slap on babies?’
‘The same one who threatened to poison a yoghurt eater and burn twenty schoolgirls with acid. The notes are identical. When did you notice yours?’
‘After I washed my hands enough so the sting was easing off, I was going to take it back to Simpson’s, along with a piece of my mind. When I picked it up again I saw there was something on the bottom. So I came here instead.’
Liz had manoeuvred the bottle into a plastic bag. Even as she did it she knew she was wasting her time. It would have Sheila Crosbie’s fingerprints all over it, and Kenneth Simpson’s, and those of anyone who may have considered buying it in the last couple of days. The only one being careful to keep his prints off it, in fact, was the blackmailer. But she had to go through the motions.
Forensics would also be able to say how much caustic soda was in the bottle and how it got there. Probably the same way the jelly got into the yoghurt: it was a plastic bottle, stronger than a yoghurt pot but still capable of being pierced with a sharp needle. When they removed the label they’d probably find the hole.
‘What’s the baby’s name?’ she asked absently as she sealed the bag.
‘Jason,’ said Sheila Crosbie, defiantly.
Liz couldn’t think of anything else she could usefully ask. She doubted Mr Simpson would be able to tell her much either: when the baby lotion arrived in the shop, perhaps, which would give the earliest date it could have been tampered with, but nothing more. It was a standard mass-purchase line, even a small local chemist would sell them by the gross. He wouldn’t remember whom he sold them to.
Shapiro, when she brought him up to date, went back to something Dick Morgan had said. ‘He thought it might be easier to do in two visits. Buy the stuff, take it home and tamper with it, then come back later and slip it back on to the shelf while buying something else. Ask Simpson if he remembers anyone coming in twice since the jar went on the shelf.’
But he didn’t; or rather, there were too many people who came in on a daily basis for someone to arouse suspicion by returning too quickly. People forgot things, bought the wrong things, simply had nothing better to do than wander round any shop they passed. Kenneth Simpson remembered Sheila Crosbie buying her baby lotion; could name half a dozen other local mothers who’d bought the stuff in the last few days; couldn’t remember anything remotely suspicious about any of them. Partly because he’d never thought of it as a problem line. He watched those who turned up for their daily methadone prescription like a hawk. He didn’t pay the same sort of attention to purchasers of basic nursery products.
‘Are all your customers locals?’ asked Liz.
‘Most of them are. We get the whole of the Jubilee trade,’ he said, his tone acknowledging this as a mixed blessing. ‘But we’re close enough to the town centre to get those who’re having trouble parking. I guess three quarters of our customers are from this end of town.’
It was a stab in the dark, and she knew as she asked the question that the answer could mean very little in the circumstances he described. It was like treating all Sav-U-Mor’s customers as suspects when she knew perfectly well that Brian did his share of the shopping there every week. But she had nothing else to ask. ‘Is Miranda Hopkins a customer of yours? A woman in her mid-thirties, long fair hair, teenage daughter – she lives in Rosedale Avenue.’
‘Oh yes,’ Kenneth Simpson nodded readily, ‘I know who you mean. Nice woman. Has a bit of trouble with her hands – the chemicals, I suppose, she works at BioMed. I get her a special dermatological handcream.’
‘Do you,’ said Liz thoughtfully, nodding in concert. ‘Do you really?’
‘Still a coincidence?’ she asked Shapiro.
He chewed on the inside of his lip. ‘Damned if I know. Quite possibly yes. But it is odd, the way she keeps being there or thereabouts.’
‘Yes, but so does Brian.’ When his eyebrows rocketed Liz explained. ‘No, I’m not considering him a suspect, I’m using him as a control. He uses Sav-U-Mor and he was at the school when the incident there occurred; I bet he goes into Simpson’s from time to time. That’s all we have on Miranda Hopkins: that she was at the school, with a perfectly good reason, and that she uses a local shop.’
‘Brian doesn’t have access to botulism.’
‘We don’t know the blackmailer does either.’ Liz thought for a moment. ‘Still, maybe I should bring him in for questioning.’
Shapiro chuckled. ‘That’s going to be the problem – that almost anyone who attracts our attention for any reason is going to have had perfectly legitimate reasons for being in all the places involved. They’re all more-or-less public areas, and this is a small town: you’re always bumping into the same people. It means nothing.’
‘Miranda Hopkins is a chemist – she’d have access to caustic soda.’
‘I’m a Detective Superintendent and I have caustic soda under my sink! I’m sorry, Liz, you’re clutching at straws.’
‘Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic on a boat made of enough straws,’ she commented perceptively. ‘While straws is all we have, I think I’ll keep an eye on people who seem to have more than most.’
‘Miranda Hopkins.’
‘And Brian,’ she said with a ghost of a smile.
5
Although the damage was in fact minor, the escalation from threats to an actual physical attack had a marked effect on Castlemere. Half the town knew what had happened to Sheila Crosbie, what had almost happened to baby Jason, within an hour of their visit to Queen’s Street. Within two hours women were leaving work to go home and check the contents of their cupboards before the children got out of school.
In situations like this, only one thing may be counted on absolutely: that those who respond to the crisis will overreact in inverse proportion to the amount of good their contribution will do. Thus, while the traders who might have been able to limit the blackmailer’s activities were still debating whether an attempt to do so would be tantamount to accepting liability, every bar, every turf accountant’s and every street corner soon had an ad hoc committee of those who knew how to handle the situation better than the police. By common consent, vigilante patrols were the way to go.
The other task to which they applied themselves was allocating blame – not to the blackmailer himself, a pointless exercise since his identity was unknown, but to easier targets. At noon someone hurled a brick from a speeding car through the window of the Sav-U-Mor supermarket, with a note attached saying, ‘Pay up, you mean bastards’.
As soon as he’d cleared up and called the glazier, Tony Woodall was round thumping on Shapiro’s desk. Shapiro let him thump. It was mostly reaction, adrenalin provoked by the incident now swilling round in his system with nothing to do but make him twitchy. Shapiro’s desk had taken the brunt of Donovan’s temper before now, it wasn’t going to collapse under the ire of a supermarket under-manager.
‘Do you know something you’re not telling us?’ demanded Woodall. ‘Has he made contact? Has he asked for money and been told to get lost?’
‘No, no and no,’ said Shapiro with measured calm. ‘Mr Woodall, sit down before you impale yourself on my Pending spike. There was another incident this morning. A girl burnt her hands with caustic soda in a bottle of baby lotion. But she’s not badly hurt, and there was in fact a warning on the bottom of the bottle. It’s worrying, but it’s not Armageddon.
‘And no, he still hasn’t made co
ntact. I still expect him to at some point – if it isn’t an attempt to extort money I don’t know what it is.’
‘Then …?’ Woodall waved the note attached to his brick in wordless fury.
Shapiro spread his hands. ‘Mr Woodall, they’re making the same mistake you did – assuming somebody must know what’s going on, assuming there must have been a demand for money by now and a decision has been taken to hold out against it. Which it has, though so far there’s nothing to hold out against.’
‘So what are you going to do about this? Anything? Or do I just collect the things until I’ve got enough to build a privy?’
Shapiro tried not to smile. ‘If anyone saw who did it, I’ll go round and charge him with malicious damage; if not I’ll endorse your insurance claim. I’m sorry but a broken window is the least of our problems right now. Obviously people are anxious; regrettably, some anxious people lash out at the nearest target. It won’t just be the glaziers who are busy today, it’ll be Women’s Aid, the NSPCC and the RSPCA.’
Relenting, because Woodall hadn’t asked to be stuck in the middle of this, he added, ‘It might be a good idea if we gave a press conference. Set the record straight as to exactly what’s happened and what hasn’t. That should take the pressure off you. I don’t know why you’ve been singled out as the villain.’
Woodall sighed. ‘Because Sav-U-Mor is the only organization involved which is big enough to pay off a blackmailer. We’re a multi-national, that makes us a bunch of callous rich bastards to start with. If the attacks continue it must be because we were asked for money and wouldn’t stump up.’
‘If it’s any comfort, it won’t go on being your fault for long,’ said Shapiro wryly. ‘It’s only a matter of time before it’s mine.’
Woodall was about to leave. Then Shapiro saw him waver, and think about something else he might say but wasn’t sure he should.
‘What is it?’
The under-manager turned back. ‘You’ll know soon enough but you might like to know now. My head office are taking this pretty seriously. They’re sending their troubleshooter. Apparently he’s had some experience with corporate blackmail in the States.’
Shapiro breathed lightly for a moment, avoided saying anything he might later regret. None of this was Woodall’s fault. He wasn’t even the manager, his influence in Seattle must be minimal. ‘I see,’ he said, levelly. ‘They do understand that, even if their troubleshooter finds the culprit before we do, they won’t be allowed to hang him from the flagpole?’
‘Mr Shapiro, I’ve never met Mitchell Tyler. I have no way of knowing if the rumours about him are true, half-truths or urban myth. But if only half of them are true, he’ll turn this town upside down looking for someone who dared to threaten the great god Sav-U-Mor. Anything you can do to settle this matter before Mitchell Tyler arrives in Castlemere, you want to do it.’
Shapiro blinked. ‘When’s he due?’
‘The weekend. He’d have been here sooner but he’s up in front of a Grand Jury.’
He didn’t want to know, but he needed to. ‘Fiddling his tax returns?’
‘Homicide. Manslaughter.’
Superintendent Giles called the press conference for 3 p.m. By then Shapiro had more to say than he’d expected, because the ransom demand had finally turned up.
It didn’t come by post, or by telephone. It was found in a brown envelope, addressed to Detective Superintendent Shapiro and marked ‘Urgent’, tucked under the windscreen wiper of an area car that parked in Brick Lane for ten minutes while Constable Stourton bought some throat lozenges from Simpson’s. It wasn’t buying them that took the time, it was checking the packaging for messages. He found none; but when he returned to the car, sucking, he found the blackmailer had been and gone while he was in the shop.
When Shapiro opened the envelope and saw what it contained, he sent Stourton and every available officer back to Brick Lane to knock on doors. But no one had seen anything and there were no security cameras covering the scene – which might have been a coincidence but which Shapiro was beginning to feel was characteristic of his adversary. That wasn’t a lucky break: he’d sized up where the various CCTVs were located around Castlemere, worked out their fields of view, and looked for a police vehicle parked outside one. It was the work of a moment to slip the envelope under the nearside wiper; he could have done it without breaking his stride. The chances of him being spotted were remote.
Inside the envelope the note was written in the same square stencilled letters as the warnings, and equally succinct. ‘£lm or people die. Get it and wait.’
‘One million pounds,’ whistled Shapiro. ‘Not a bad return for some groceries and stationery.’
‘And nerve,’ said Liz. ‘That’s really what he expects to be paid for: having the nerve to ask. Setting it up, making us sweat and then telling us what he’ll take to go away.’
‘It’s a nice round figure,’ said Shapiro.
‘It’s probably about the right figure. If this goes on until someone gets hurt, sorting out the insurance will cost a million pounds. It could cost local businesses a million pounds in lost confidence. In purely financial terms, it would probably pay Sav-U-Mor to divvy up rather than send in their specialist and risk him starting more trouble than they can handle. It’s a lot of money to us common folks, but even a million pounds doesn’t buy what it used to. Half a mile of motorway, three houses at the better end of Cambridge Road? A Van Gogh sunflower, the fetlock of a Derby winner or a third of a footballer. Times change, Frank – we’re the only coppers still in circulation.’
Shapiro was nodding pensively. ‘He’s done his homework, hasn’t he? – he’s thought about this. He knows where he can take risks – like at the supermarket, like putting this on the area car – without much danger of being caught. He knows how to disguise his writing without telling us what papers he reads. And he knows how much money is worth his time and the risk to his liberty without pricing himself out of the market. I don’t like this man. He’s too clever, he’s going to be hard to catch.’
‘If we don’t catch him he’ll really hurt someone. He could have done this time – it’s pure luck the Crosbie baby wasn’t burned. You don’t strip the nappy off a grizzly baby to see if you’ve just slapped caustic soda on its bottom! She might have put up with his crying for hours before taking him to the doctor. By then he’d have needed skin grafts.’
Shapiro checked the time. ‘Nearly half two.’ The digital watch had come too late for him: he automatically translated its precision into a cosier analogue approximation. ‘We’ve half an hour to decide how much we tell the Press.’
In the end it took fifty minutes and the Press had to wait. Then Detective Superintendent Shapiro, flanked by the Mayor and the chairman of the Chamber of Trade, rose to explain exactly what was going on. That was what had taken the extra time: agreeing to hold nothing back. In a situation like this, where the police couldn’t hope to protect everyone, people needed to protect themselves. To check their purchases for tampering; to act immediately on any notes they found; to watch for suspicious behaviour in others.
‘I don’t mean I want the people of this town turning vigilante. That isn’t necessary, it wouldn’t be helpful, and it would result in more innocent people getting hurt than if we left the blackmailer to do his worst. I mean, we need to be aware of what’s happening around us. If someone’s spending longer than seems reasonable hovering over the cooked meats, have a look at them. Be ready to give a description. Then tell the retailer so he can check the produce. If he has any doubts, he’ll call us and we’ll go all the way to a laboratory analysis if we have to. There’ll be a lot of false alarms, but hopefully we can minimize the risk of serious injury.’
Gail Foster from the Castlemere Courier was first on her feet. ‘Mr Shapiro, can you confirm that Sav-U-Mor are sending a specialist from America to help find this man?’
Shapiro pursed his lips. ‘I understand that, as an international organization, they have
specialists in a great many things we don’t see much of in Castlemere. I dare say if we were threatened by a tornado Sav-U-Mor would know just the man to deal with it.’ There was a tiny, appreciative chuckle. ‘There’s been a feeling in town that they haven’t done enough to protect their customers. I don’t share that feeling, I think it’s most unfair to blame the victim of a crime for not preventing it, but they’re anxious to do all they can to help and this is what they proposed. Mr Tyler arrives at the weekend.’
‘Assuming he isn’t in San Quentin by then,’ murmured Ms Foster, attracting curious glances.
Tom Parker, a local freelance representing some of the nationals, was doing sums in the margin of his notebook. ‘A million pounds. Am I right in thinking that isn’t actually beyond the ability of local businesses to pay? And therefore that the decision has been taken on principle?’
The chairman of the Chamber of Trade went to take that one but Shapiro wasn’t yielding the floor. ‘This isn’t about money, it’s about protecting people. If we pay up, this man may very well take the money and run. But since it worked so well, he may come back for more. Or someone else may. You’re right, it’s a policy decision. You start paying blackmail, you never get the door closed again. Maybe we could afford to pay him off, but we’re not going to. Him, or anyone like him; not now, and not ever.’
As the press conference dispersed Liz sidled up beside him. ‘That was very generous.’
‘Generous?’
She eyed him knowingly. ‘Frank, I’ve known you a long time, I know what that was all about. It was about making yourself the target. If this goes wrong, if people get hurt, they won’t blame the Town Hall or the traders, they’ll blame you.’
He shrugged and didn’t deny it. ‘I’ve got a broad back.’
‘That doesn’t mean you have to paint a bull’s-eye on it!’
When they were alone he turned to face her. ‘Liz, there’s every chance this’ll go wrong. Or not wrong, because what we’re doing is right, but messy. The best way to limit the damage is to make sure all the flak is going one way.’