“Well, she’s good fun.”
“So ring her again. Say you won’t take no for an answer. Faint heart and all that.”
“This is the voice of the expert, is it?” I argued. “You married the girl next door which gives you a one hundred percent success record and thereby qualifies you as an authority on the opposite sex.”
“Give ’er a ring.”
“No means No! Haven’t you been listening?”
“Give ’er a ring.”
“OK, I’ll think about it.”
“Good.” We were back at the station. “That’s you sorted out, now what are we doing about these shops?”
“Bacon buttie first,” I replied, “then we’ll take half each.”
“Just what I’d’ve done,” he said.
“Except that…”
“What?”
“Except that we’re assuming only Grainger’s are involved. We really ought to look at all the other supermarkets, too.”
“Sheest!”
In the afternoon I visited the stores in Halifax and Oldfield, and Sparky did three others. Halifax reported another tin of mouldy fruit and Sparky discovered two more incidents of blue beans. Puncturing a tin so the contents rotted appeared to be the first MO, followed by the dye, followed by the warfarin. It was impossible to be precise but it looked as if we had a nutter on the loose and he was on a learning curve. I rang Mr Wood from the car park of Grainger’s Oldfield store and arranged a 5 p.m. meeting. Someone was going to die if we didn’t act quickly, and the first step in catching the culprit was assessing the size of the problem.
We decided to go public, right from the start. I drew a twenty-mile radius circle on a road map and called it the locus of operations. As soon as we had an incident room organised I’d give it pride of place on the wall. Statements would be issued to local radio stations and the local weekly newspapers, starting with the Heckley Gazette, and tomorrow we would hand-deliver a questionnaire to every supermarket manager within the circle.
“What about the public health people?” somebody asked.
“Tricky,” Mr Wood replied. “I’ll talk to them in the morning and ask them to bear with us. The supermarkets are probably out of order but I’ll ask them to turn a blind eye if it helps the investigation. So far the managers have been most cooperative, haven’t they, Charlie?”
“Yep. Very helpful.”
“Good. Can I leave it with you?”
“No problem.”
“That’s my boy. There is one other thing. Another dead dog has been found. There are some photos on my desk and they’re horrific. Let’s not lose sight of that one, please.”
Everybody mumbled their assent and Mr Wood left us to it.
“Three volunteers, please,” I said. “One to write the statement, one to liaise with HQ to create the questionnaire and one, maybe two, to list every supermarket in the circle. Then we can get straight on with it in the morning. So far whoever is tampering with the tins is using low-tech means. The warfarin was an escalation and could have led to a fatality. If they get their hands on something like strychnine or arsenic we could be looking for a murderer.”
Hands were raised and I delegated the jobs. As the others were leaving Jeff Caton said: “Why does killing dogs pull at the heartstrings more than poisoning some poor soul with rat poison?”
“Because we’re a nation of animal lovers,” Pete Goodfellow told him. “That’s why we have a royal society for animals but only a national society for children. But can anyone explain why dogfighting is considered less morally defensible than hunting foxes? With the dogs it’s one on one, whereas with foxes…”
“Whoah!” I said, holding up a hand. “Let’s leave the morality and ethics out of it and stick to the law. We’ve enough on our plates. C’mon, let’s go home.”
“Why…” Dave began, looking thoughtful, “why don’t you ever see white dog turds these days? That’s what I want to know.”
“What?” I said.
“White dog turds?” Jeff queried.
“Yeah. White dog turds. Once upon a time dog turds used to be white. Not all of them, just some.”
“Gerraway!”
“It’s true. They used to be the best ones. When they were dried they floated better than the others.”
“Floated? What were you floating them for?”
“We used to have races, on the canal. The white ones always won.”
“You had dog turd races on the canal?”
“Yes. Didn’t you?”
“No!”
“Charlie did, didn’t you?”
“Um, no,” I replied. “I had a scale model of the Queen Mary.”
“Only a scale model?” Jeff asked.
“It was half-scale,” Pete told him.
“Radio-controlled,” I said.
“How were these dog turds propelled?” Jeff wondered.
“We threw stones at them.”
I said: “Why didn’t you make them into little galleons with a cocktail stick and a square of paper?”
“A cocktail stick!” Dave exclaimed. “A cocktail stick! We didn’t have cocktail sticks.”
“You should have asked. We’d’ve let you have our used ones.”
Jeff said: “If you didn’t have cocktail sticks how did you eat your stuffed olives?”
“Stuffed olives!” he exploded. “We didn’t have stuffed olives. We had a stuffed cat, to save on the food bill.”
Jeff: “Was it on wheels?”
Pete: “Did it catch many mice?”
Dave: “Only stuffed ones.”
“Home!” I shouted. “Some of us have a meal to cook. Let’s go.”
Chapter Four
Altogether we found twenty-one recorded incidents of tampering, all in Grainger’s stores, which was a determined effort to make mischief by anybody’s standards. It looked as if the early efforts – the dye and the tin-puncturing – had not had the required effect, so more drastic measures had been adopted. But how many suspect tins were standing on the shelves, either in a store or in somebody’s larder, was impossible to calculate. There were bound to be some. Grainger’s temporarily took tinned pineapple, peaches and baked beans off their shelves and issued a statement offering to replace any that had been purchased from them in the previous three months. It made the headlines locally and was reported in the national press, lost somewhere between news that a Pop Idol contestant had had a boob job and the tomato that spelled out Allah is Great when cut in half.
We were less successful in our attempts to talk to Sir Morton Grainger. He had a personal assistant – male – resident at Dob Hall, the Georgian pile near Hebden Bridge that he called home, who told us that Sir Morton would be passing through on Wednesday afternoon. Mrs Grainger – she held the title of Lady but preferred plain Mrs – was in London, where she had an architect’s practice.
We made a list of all the dates but it was meaningless. Things could have been lying around for weeks. As Jeff Caton said, this was the only enquiry he’d ever been on where there was no point in asking: “Where were you on…?” The forensics people started some experiments to see how quickly tinned fruit went mouldy, but we knew it would be of doubtful value.
Wednesday morning Dr Hirst rang me. The name didn’t mean anything for a few seconds until he reminded me that I’d seen him at the General after the Ebola scare.
“Sorry, Dr Hirst,” I said. “I didn’t recognise the name. We’re still working on the case but not making much progress.”
“I know, I’ve heard the appeal, but there may have been a development.”
“Go on.”
“We had an admission through the night with all the symptoms of a severe stroke, but a brain scan was negative. She’s very ill – we’ve put her on a respirator – and in the light of what’s been happening I started wondering about botulism poisoning. I’ve given her a dose of the antitoxin serum and sent a stool sample for analysis, but a full diagnosis may take a day or two.”
“You work long hours, Doc,” Dave told him.
“It’s not too bad,” he replied with a grin. “They let us use the coffee machine as often as we like. Can I offer you one?”
“No, we’ll get out of your way,” I said. “So tell us about botulism.”
“I suspect you know the general details,” he replied. “It’s caused by a little blighter called Clostridium botulinum, which normally lies dormant in the soil.” He paused as a grim-faced man carrying a bunch of carnations and leading a weepy little girl was taken into the ward. The door swung silently shut and he continued: “The bacterium thrives in conditions of low oxygen, such as in sealed cans, where it produces a nerve toxin which can be deadly.”
“Sounds nasty. What can you tell us about the patient?”
“Maureen Wall, a fifty-six-year-old widow. Started feeling ill last night. Blurred vision, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing. She telephoned her daughter in Ipswich who thought it sounded like a stroke and sent for an ambulance.”
“Is she speaking?” I asked.
“Barely.”
“Will she live?”
“She’s off the danger list, but it will take a long time for her to get over the paralysis.”
“Do you want me to look for her last meal?”
“It could be a big help.”
“No problem. Do we have an address?”
“Right here.” He produced a piece of paper.
“And a key?”
“It’s with the neighbour.”
“Right. I could sign a search authority but it might be more polite to telephone the daughter.”
“I’ve spoken to her,” Dr Hirst said. “She says do whatever’s necessary.”
“You’re a treasure, Doc. If you ever want a career change we could use you. If we find something, who do we leave it with?”
*
It was the corned beef. The neighbour wanted to supervise our search but Dave steered her away with threats of having to take intimate body samples “for elimination purposes” if she stepped one inch over the threshold. It was a tiny kitchen in what I believe is called a maisonette, designed for older couples or singletons. There was a group of them, each block containing four homes, situated around an overgrown patch of lawn with cherry trees, long past their best.
I opened the refrigerator door and immediately saw the remains of the corned beef on a saucer, covered with cling film. In a swing bin under the sink we found the tin. Dave sniffed at it, said he couldn’t smell anything, but I declined the opportunity. He turned the tin in his fingers, holding it by the edges, and gestured for me to look. In the middle of the O of Corned was a tiny hole. When you looked inside you could see how the metal was displaced. This hole had been made with a nail or something like a drawing pin, not drilled.
“Brilliant,” I said. “You and the doctor could crack this one between you and I could go home.” We bagged the evidence and dropped it off at the hospital’s toxicology lab.
In the car on the way back to the station I said: “It’s good to be out on the streets again, Dave, making enquiries. Sitting behind a desk was getting me down.”
“Serves you right for joining.” What he meant was that promotion above the rank of sergeant always took you one more step away from the sharp end, where the real policing was done.
“True,” I agreed.
After a silence Dave said: “It’s great to see you more relaxed, Charlie. We were worried about you after the last job.”
“I was worried about myself. I thought I’d gone mad.”
“Yeah, well, it was a tough ’un. The rest of us were feeling edgy, too.”
“I know. Everybody in the team felt a personal involvement, but I don’t think I handled it as well as most of you.”
“It was your head that was on the block, Charlie. I don’t know ’ow you stood the pressure.”
“Well it’s behind us now, and I learned a lot from it. From now on I’m going with the flow. It’s tough luck on Mr Johnson and Mrs Wall, and I’ll do everything in my power to give them justice, but it’s their problem, not mine. I hesitate to admit it, but I’m enjoying this case.”
“You might not if someone dies,” Dave cautioned.
“Yeah, well, let’s say a little prayer that it doesn’t come to that.”
“Amen. So why do you think he’s suddenly started using poison?”
We were going through the town centre but it was still early and not many shoppers were about. Two girls and a youth were standing outside the side door of the HSBC bank, shivering in the cool morning air and drawing on cigarettes as if their lives depended on it. The last remaining greengrocer in Heckley was loading his outdoor display with fruit and veg. Handwritten signs showed the prices of carrot’s, apple’s and orange’s. I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“Well something’s tickling you.”
“It’s nothing.”
Now Dave was laughing. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”
I found a tissue and blew my nose. “Do you remember when I was in digs at Chapeltown?” I said.
“At Mrs Stalin’s? I remember.” Dave had been a PC and I was a rookie sergeant.
“Well, there was this youth lived next door. Had a car with a straight-through exhaust. An Avenger or an Allegro, some rubbish like that. A Morris Ital, I think that was it. Anyway, every morning at eleven minutes past seven he’d slam the door and rev the engine like he was starting a grand prix, ruining my beauty sleep, especially if I’d just come off nights.”
“That sounds like Chapeltown,” Dave said.
“So, this fine sunny morning I was coming down Roundhay Road on my bike at the end of the shift when I saw this great big cooking apple lying in the gutter. I stopped and picked it up. It was the biggest, greenest, shiniest apple I’d ever seen. I got off my bike at Mrs Stalin’s and I was wondering what to do with the apple. It was a cooker, but not big enough to make a pie with. And then I saw Laddo’s car, and knew that in exactly thirty-one minutes he’d be revving the damned thing enough to wake the dead. And me. So I jumped over the fence and stuffed the apple up his exhaust pipe.”
Dave chuckled and gave me a disbelieving look. “What ’appened.”
“Nothing. I fell asleep and never heard a thing, and next morning the car was as noisy as ever.”
“So why are you confessing after all these years?”
“You asked me why the person tampering with the tins had turned to poison. Because he wasn’t getting any feedback from his other activities, that’s why. He planted the tins with the dye, at great personal risk, but never heard anything more about them. It was one big anti-climax, so he upped the ante. Now he’s in the papers, reading about his handiwork. For months it was eating my heart out not knowing what happened to that apple. My next stunt was going to be a bomb wired to his ignition but fortunately my promotion came through first.”
“You sneaky so-and-so. Sir Morton this afternoon?”
“Yep.”
“Am I invited?”
“You bet.”
Dob Hall was built by a merchant adventurer who made his fortune out of wool in the eighteenth century, according to the local history society. Less charitable authorities suggested that slaves, guns and opium may have made a contribution to the family’s wealth. Sir Morton’s father, also a Sir Morton, had switched from blanket manufacturing into the grocery business when he realised that the duvet would do to blanket sales what the steam engine did to sail-making. When a shrinking army caused his lucrative military contracts to dry up he opened his first supermarket.
Originally the family had been called Grossbach, but the great-grandfather changed this to Grainger at a time when a foreign-sounding name was not good for a family business. The Saxe Coburg Gothas became the Windsors for similar reasons.
I knew a
ll this because I’d asked Pete Goodfellow to do some research, and his findings were neatly typed and left on my desk. He’d resumed his normal duties, looking for the knicker thief and following up on burglaries, so I scrawled a message on the bottom of the sheet and placed it back on his desk. I put: That’s great, Pete. It looks as if Sir M. inherited the family business. See if you can discover any disgruntled siblings hovering in the wings.
At five minutes to three Dave steered us into the imposing gateway of Dob Hall and spoke into the security system. A lone hot hatchback was standing outside them with a young female reporter from the Heckley Gazette dozing behind the wheel. She jerked awake as we stopped and climbed out of her car.
I wound my window down, shouting to her: “What time does the Gazette go to bed, love?”
“Anytime now. It’s Inspector Priest, isn’t it?”
“Never heard of him, but if you contact our press office you might just get a scoop.”
She thanked me with a big smile and started to stab a number into her cell phone. If not a scoop at least she’d be up there with the tabloids when the news of the poisoned corned beef broke. The gates opened and we drove forward. The personal assistant met us at the front door and we were ushered into a side room, lined with books, and invited to sit down.
“Sir Morton will be down shortly,” he told us. My idea of a personal assistant didn’t run close to this one. He was about thirty and of a type that women find attractive, if you can believe the deodorant adverts: dark-haired and designer stubble. Yasser Arafat has a lot to answer for.
He turned to leave, but before he could I said: “I get the impression that Sir Morton is just passing through.”
“Yes.”
“It sounds a hectic schedule. Any idea where he’s going or how long he will be away for?”
“I’m sure Sir Morton will be able to tell you that himself,” he replied, scowling at me from beneath bushy eyebrows, and left.
“Good try,” Dave said.
“The soul of discretion.”
“Think he’s gay?”
“It’s possible. Is it relevant?”
“It’s possible.”
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