Limestone Cowboy

by Stuart Pawson

  I walked across the road to the sandwich shop, bought a cheese and pickle and a curd tart and sauntered back to the office. The phone rang six times. Three were to ask if I’d heard anything; one was a reporter wanting a quote – I gave him You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows – and two were business. Rosie Barraclough didn’t ring. I hadn’t given her my number but she could have worked it out if she’d been really keen. There again, if she’d been that keen I’d probably have run a mile. I found a tabloid and a magazine in the outer office, made myself a coffee and lunched with my feet on the desk. The magazine was Dave Sparkington’s copy of Naked Female Mud Wrestling USA. He takes it for the crossword.

  The phone rang for the seventh time. “Priest.”

  “Hi Charlie. It’s that time of year again.” It was an inspector from another division who organised the force’s contribution to the annual Heckley Gala. Part of the show is an art exhibition, open to all but with a special class for cops. We have a surprising number of respectable watercolourists helping keep law and order on the streets. And one mad abstractionist.

  “Oh God,” I said. “I haven’t anything prepared.”

  “It’s not for three weeks,” he told me. “Plenty of time for you to make a few daubs on some hardboard.”

  “A few daubs!” I exclaimed. “A few daubs! You’re talking about fine examples of abstract expressionism.”

  “That’s what I said. Can I put you down for two, as usual?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do they have titles?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Untitled 1 and Untitled 2.”

  “You’re a toff, Chas.”

  “I know. Have you rung Woodturner Willie yet?”

  “No, he’s next on my list.”

  “Ask him to make me two frames for them, please.”

  “Okie-dokie. How big?”

  “Um, oh, about four by three.”

  “Inches, feet or metres?”

  “Feet, numbskull.”

  “Will do.”

  I carefully replaced the phone. The pictures might sell for fifty pounds each, which will go to charity. The frames will cost me twenty, the board a tenner and the paint at least that. There’s something about business that I haven’t grasped, yet.

  Eighth time. “Priest.”

  The voice that answered was one that I’d grown sick of over the last six months, but today it was sweet as music. It was the CPS barrister, from the court. “Not guilty on the first five, Charlie, guilty on the next two and the kidnapping. Twenty years tariff for each. Crack open the champagne.”

  I didn’t leap up with joy, fisting the air like some second-rate sportsman who’s done what he’s paid to do. I thanked him, told him well done, and slowly replaced the receiver. I was glad nobody was there with me. I buried my hands in my hair and gave an involuntary shudder of satisfaction and relief. Justice had been done and it was over. Over for me and the team, that is. It would never be over for the relatives of the victims, but now perhaps they could start thinking about the future.

  I was glad I hadn’t been in court, waiting, as those first five Not Guilties were announced, watching the face of the accused. Her spirits would rise imperceptibly with each one, and those of the prosecution team would sink a similar amount. “Was she going to get away with it?” everybody would have been asking as the charges were dismissed, and then came those golden words: “Guilty… Guilty… Guilty,” and she would have crumbled. And I wouldn’t have liked to see that either, because my feelings towards her might have softened, just a degree, which would have been a betrayal of seven women and a young boy.

  I brushed the hair out of my eyes, pulled my shoulders back and took three deep breaths. Gilbert’s phone was engaged when I tried to pass on the verdicts, so I went up to see him. A sergeant crossed me on the stairs and shook my hand when I told him the news. “Well done, Charlie, well done.”

  Gilbert’s arm was stretched out, his hand holding the phone as I went in and he looked up at me, fumbling with the handset, having difficulty replacing it. His expression was as bleak as a January dawn, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open.

  “Three life sentences,” I announced. “Twenty years tariff.”

  “Good,” he said, half-heartedly, his thoughts a million miles away. “That’s good. Well done.”

  “What is it, Gilbert?” I asked, sitting in the chair opposite him. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Do I? I’m sorry. It’s young Freddie, Charlie. He’s in the General, you know.”

  “What’s happened to him?”

  “Well, nothing, but they won’t let his mother in to see him. There’s an infection loose and they’ve quarantined the whole place.”

  “I’ve heard about it. They’re always having infections in hospitals, Gilbert – it’s all those sick people. And the cuts. He’ll be all right, mark my words.”

  But he wasn’t listening. “I rang the medical director,” he said.

  “I couldn’t get through when I tried.”

  “I rang his wife and she gave me his mobile number.”

  “Don’t tell me – he’s a lodge member.”

  “It has its uses. This is in confidence, Charlie. It mustn’t go outside these walls, you understand?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. If galloping salmonella was rampaging through the corridors and wards of Heckley General I was hardly likely to go shouting it from the rooftops, but it was unfortunate for young Freddie.

  “There’s a virus loose in the place,” he told me.

  “What sort of virus?”

  “It’s Ebola, Charlie. They’ve got Ebola virus in Heckley General.”

  There was no need for me or anybody else to shout it from the rooftops, because even as we spoke the news was being disseminated by more efficient means. The nurse who started the scare rang her parents, who recognised the dreaded word Ebola in the midst of her hysterical rantings, and from then on it spread like a bloodstain through the community. At five o’clock it was on the local news, at six the nation heard about it and by twenty past the more daring camera crews started arriving.

  A couple of weeks ago there had been a TV special about the 1994 outbreak of Ebola in the Central African Republic, so the public was well clued-up. The Ebola River is a tributary of the Congo, and the people who live along its banks hunt monkeys for food and to sell for medical research. Back in the seventies another virus that the monkeys carry suffered a mutation in its DNA that gave it the ability to exist in their close relative – Homo sapiens. This virus has an incubation period of several years and is only passed on by the most intimate contact, but it spread stealthily – an invisible cloud of poison that chose its victims all the way from the mud huts of Africa to the marble mansions of the most privileged people in the world. When they started to die it was given a name – AIDS.

  Ebola probably has the same origins, but its MO is different. Ebola can be transmitted through the air, like the common cold, and it kills nine out of ten of its victims in fifteen days. There is no cure.

  Residents of Heckley who had caravans or bungalows at the coast suddenly decided that now was a good time for a visit. Others decided that an extended weekend away was long overdue and hastily threw a few belongings in the back of the Mondeo. The queue of vehicles leaving town gridlocked with the rush hour traffic trying to get home, anxious to see if the wife and kids were feeling OK, and Heckley ground to a stand-still.

  I went home, made myself a salad sandwich and watched it on TV. The usual pundits were there, outside the hospital, spouting their limited knowledge at the camera, scaring everybody sugar-less. First symptom was a headache, we were told, then the whites of the eyes turned scarlet as the capillaries burst, followed by bleeding from all the body’s orifices.

  “I feel like that everyday,” I mumbled, fielding a piece of tomato that fell out of my sandwich and reaching for the remote control.

&nbs
p; By eight o’clock it was all over. False alarm. “A patient was admitted who had recently travelled in Africa and showed the early symptoms of Ebola,” a hospital spokeswoman told the waiting cameras. “The hospital was quarantined as a precaution, but tests for Ebola have proved negative and the quarantine can now be lifted. This was a routine safeguard and at no time was any member of the public or staff at risk.”

  Pull the other one. God, what a farce. I went into the garage, cut some hardboard to size and painted it white. In less than three weeks I had to produce a couple of paintings worthy of my not-inconsiderable reputation. Something that “my five-year-old daughter could do,” as numerous friends and colleagues would take great delight in pointing out. Would it be a couple of Picassos, or maybe a pair of Modigliani ladies? They always went down well. When I’d finished I thought about phoning Rosie, but it was too late. I’d ring her tomorrow, make arrangements for Saturday. Mr Ho, the proprietor of the Bamboo Curtain, was a friend of mine. One of his special banquets was an event rather than a meal. I was sure Rosie would enjoy it. Before I went to bed I found the bottle of cheap champagne I’d been saving and put it in the fridge.

  We didn’t make the front page, which was a disappointment for the troops. A Town in Fear was a better headline than The Face of Evil, so the first six pages of the tabloids were filled with graphic descriptions of Ebola symptoms and primary school diagrams of DNA, showing how red triangles could mutate into blue hexagons with deadly results. The broadsheets used the scare to highlight the multimillion dollar trade in living primates, printing hard-hitting articles from their libraries to pad out the pages and demonstrate their concern.

  Our PR people had prepared a couple of statements from me – one for if we lost the trial; one for if we won – so I read that I was pleased with the result and hoped that it would be of some comfort for the families of the victims.

  “See!” I announced as I went into Gilbert’s office for our morning meeting. “Nothing to worry about. When’s he coming home?”

  “Tomorrow, all being well,” he replied, pushing the file he’d been reading to one side. “But it was a worry, Charlie. Did you see that programme on TV about it? If that gets loose it could be the end of the world.”

  “Nah,” I said. “A comet. That’s what’ll do it, like it did for the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.” I’ve been swatting up on dinosaurs recently.

  I opened the champagne in the office and we drank it from our coffee mugs. It was just a little ceremony to mark the closure of the case: a collective sigh of relief and mutual back-slap, expressed in fizzy pop. We’d had a major piss-up the weekend after the arrest, but the job’s not over until someone has the key turned on them.

  Most of the troops knew what cases they were on with, and I had a couple of others to hand out. Prioritising the work is a big part of my contribution, but it sometimes makes me unpopular with the public. Each detective has at least five or six crimes to deal with at any time. If there’s a chance of an arrest in one of them it moves to the front of the queue, if there isn’t it goes backwards. So victims sit at home, surrounded by what’s left of their scattered belongings, waiting for the handsome crime-fighter to come knocking at the door to detect the villain. But he doesn’t come, not for three days, because he knows he has a better chance of finding the youths who screwed the filling station in full view of the CCTV cameras.

  One of the DCs approached me, more hesitantly than normal. “Um, can I have a quick word, Boss?” he asked.

  “Oh, what do you want, my blue-eyed son?” I asked.

  “It’s the coffee fund. You’re a bit behind.”

  I delved into my jacket pocket and produced a handful of coins. “How much?”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “Go on.”

  “Twelve pounds.”

  “Twelve quid! Twelve quid! Just for coffee! It’s highway robbery.”

  “You haven’t paid anything for three months.”

  I found a twenty pound note in my wallet and handed it over, saying: “Make sure you enter it in your book. I think you must have forgotten, the last time.”

  Dave Sparkington hung back as the team dispersed.

  “How did you get on with the knicker thief,” I asked.

  “Great. We got a description.”

  “Go on.”

  “Black lace, open crotch. I’m looking into it.”

  I exhaled, slowly and deliberately, casting my gaze towards the ceiling. Sparky likes to tell you things in his own way.

  “About fourteen years old,” he added. “Short, with fair hair. Wears a grey football shirt. Not sure what it is but it could be something like Leeds United second team Tuesday morning away strip.”

  “Good. Any other ideas?”

  “We’ve a couple o’ names.”

  “OK. Keep on with it.”

  He dangled a telephone report sheet in front of me, saying: “They can wait. This came in about five minutes ago while you were upstairs. It’s from the General Hospital. They had an admission yesterday afternoon that might be a poisoning. Non-fatal but it could’ve been. Victim thinks his ex-wife is trying to kill ’im. Thought I’d go along and talk to him but wondered if you wanted to come.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Mmm.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “Er, no, Dave. I think you can manage that one yourself.”

  “OK. See if I care. I’ve had my flu jab. Apparently the ex-wife was runner-up in the Miss Ferodo brake-linings beauty contest.”

  “On second thoughts,” I said, “if it’s an attempted murder maybe I should come along. I’ll get my coat.”

  Pete Goodfellow was bent over his keyboard, his typing sounding like a dripping tap. “You’re in charge, Pete,” I called to him.

  “No problem. Where are you going?”

  “To the hospital.”

  “Right. I’ve an appointment there myself next week, about this knee. It still isn’t right. Did I tell you?”

  “Yes, Pete, you told us all about it, several times. Have you tried St. John’s wort?”

  “No. I’ve tried glucosamine, and cod liver oil capsules, but they haven’t been much good. How does St. John’s wort work?”

  “I don’t know but it cured Dave’s irritable bowel syndrome, didn’t it, Sunshine?”

  “No, it gave me it. C’mon, let’s go.”

  We went in my car, with Dave driving. As we pulled out of the station yard he said: “Who is she?”

  “Who’s who?”

  “The woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one that’s making you so flippin’ cheerful.”

  “What makes you think it’s a woman?”

  “You mean… it’s a man?”

  “Er, no. You were right, it’s a woman.”

  He gave a chuckle and looked across at me. “When you die, Charlie, we won’t have you cremated or buried. We’ll roll you flat and make you into a window.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m transparent?”

  “Only where women are concerned.”

  “And you’ll go before me. Look at you: overweight, sedentary lifestyle. We thin nervous types live to a ripe old age.”

  “Don’t you start, I’ve enough with Shirley and Sophie lecturing me. But you’re right, I need more exercise.”

  I was quiet for a few seconds. Shirley is Dave’s wife, Sophie his daughter and my goddaughter. She’s studying at Cambridge, about to start her final year, and breaking Dave’s heart. She’s tall and beautiful, and had hardly been home this year. Dave was having to come to terms with the apple of his eye being plucked off the tree by someone he didn’t know.

  “Have you heard from Sophie?” I ventured.

  “No. Not for about six weeks. Last we heard she was going to Cap Ferrat with this boyfriend and his parents, she said. They have a place there, apparently.”

  “It was bound to happen, Dave. And if they’ve a place over there she can’t be doing too b
ad.”

  “I don’t suppose so. She asked how you were, if you’d found a new girlfriend. Can I tell her about Miss X?”

  “No. Tell her that I’m not looking, that she’s the only woman for me.”

  “Uh!” he snorted, and his knuckles tightened on the wheel.

  Ten minutes later we were running up the steps into the hospital.

  “I assume you were fibbing about the Miss Ferodo bit,” I gasped between breaths.

  “No, scout’s honour,” he replied, adding: “Mind you, it was 1945.”

  The doctor in charge of the patient came to meet us at the front desk. He looked about twenty and smelled like a National Trust gift shop. Dave introduced me and we shook hands.

  “Is everything back to normal now?” I asked.

  “Just about,” he replied, grinning, “but it was interesting for a while.”

  “Have the Press abandoned you now that there’s no story?”

  “They have. It was like Downing Street on budget day for a while, out in the car park. They’ve gone now, thank God, but they might be back when they hear about this.”

  “Really? So where do we begin?”

  “He came in by ambulance,” he told us. “Rang for it himself. Must have been quite frightening for the poor chap. They were gathered round him, reading his vital signs and wondering what to do next, when the houseman dealing with him asked if he’d had any illnesses lately. He said he hadn’t, all innocent, but he’d just come back from a holiday in Kenya. Could it be something he’d picked up there? And that was that. This nurse – a black girl from Nigeria – said: ‘Oh my God, it’s Ebola!’ and everybody took ten paces backwards.”

  From the expression on his face it was evident that he was enjoying telling us this. I was more interested in the poisoning but I stayed quiet, content to let the doctor have his five minutes and tell us in his own time.

  “How is he now?” Dave asked.

  “Ask him yourself. Come on, I’ll take you to him.”

  Dave and I looked at each other and back at the doctor. “You mean…” I began. “You mean… the person we’ve come to see is the Ebola suspect?”