Limestone Cowboy

by Stuart Pawson

  Gilbert wasn’t alone. A tall man with a navy blue sweater and the resigned expression of a long-term political prisoner was sitting in my chair, nursing a coffee. Gilbert introduced me and confirmed what I’d already deduced by reading the logo on the man’s epaulettes: he was an RSPCA inspector.

  We shook hands briefly, but then I turned back to Mr Wood, saying: “How’s young Freddie?”

  Gilbert brightened and shuffled in his seat. “He’s fine, thanks, Charlie. As good as new. This morning I had the public health people on to me, about the botulism. I told them it was the result of criminal activity, not a natural outbreak, and that seemed to satisfy them for the moment. Does that sound right?”

  “Yes, that’s fair enough.”

  “Good. Now, John here was telling me about the apparent increase in dog fighting. He believes there’s an organised ring, and they’re into badger baiting, too.”

  And for the next hour Inspector John regaled us with horror stories about Man’s inhumanity to his fellow creatures. The natural world is red in tooth and claw, as we all know, but Man, with his gift of imagination and insatiable desire for excitement, adds a new dimension to the game. I wasn’t unsympathetic, and doing unspeakable things to animals is only a small step away from repeating the practise against human beings. It was chicken for tea, in lemon sauce, but I didn’t enjoy it.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” I said, stooping to give Shirley, Dave’s wife, a peck on the cheek. When we go for a midweek drink Dave and I walk to the pub and Shirley usually collects us towards closing time.

  “Wouldn’t let me out on my own,” he complained. “Said you were a bad influence.”

  I got the drinks, with a packet of crisps for myself, and we made ourselves comfortable at a corner table. “We’ve got to concentrate on the dog fighting,” I said after the first sip of my pint. “There was an RSPCA inspector with the boss and he reckons it’s widespread. And badger baiting. Gilbert’s promised to divert resources in that direction, whatever that means.”

  “Send a panda down the lane once a shift,” Dave replied.

  “Yeah, but it would be good PR if we made a few arrests, and that’s what it’s all about, these days.”

  “Why do they do it?” Shirley asked, adding: “They must be sick,” to answer her own question.

  “Has Dave told you all about our visit to Dob Hall?” I said, changing the subject. “You’d’ve loved it. Talk about how the other half live.”

  “No, he never tells me anything.”

  “That’s not true,” he protested, and extricated himself from blame by describing in intricate detail the precise geography of the hall, as gathered from studying the scale model.

  “It sounds rather grand,” Shirley agreed without enthusiasm, adjusting the position of her glass so it was dead central on the beer mat and then slipping her jacket off her shoulders. Dave reached across and helped arrange it on the back of her chair.

  “You never finished telling me why you’re so fond of Sir Morton,” I said, and Dave made a grunting noise and picked up his pint.

  When it was firmly back on the table I said: “So?”

  He looked uncomfortable, glancing at Shirley, at his pint and back to Shirley. “I was going to tell Charlie about your mum,” he said to her.

  Shirley reached for her glass, turned it in her fingers and replaced it. “If you want,” she said. “It can’t hurt Mum now.”

  Something had happened but I didn’t know what. I opened my mouth to say that if it was personal I was happy to be kept in the dark, but before I could find the right words Dave started speaking. “Shirley’s mum was done for shoplifting,” he said, “six months before she died.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. She died… what? About a year ago?”

  “It will be twelve months on the 18th of August,” Shirley said. “The day before my birthday.”

  “She’d bought a trolley full o’ shopping at Grainger’s Halifax branch,” Dave continued, “including a toothbrush in a plastic tube. It fell through the wire of the trolley a couple of times so she must have put it in her pocket. She was stopped outside and hauled off to the manager’s office. They have no discretion, they always call the police and prosecute.”

  “Discretion requires making a decision,” I said.

  “Exactly. So, at the age of seventy-two, and never having been as much as a day behind with a payment for anything, she finds herself summoned to Halifax nick for an official caution.”

  “God, Dave, why didn’t you say?”

  “It’s all right. I had a word and she didn’t have to attend. But that’s when the decline started and she was dead in six months.”

  “Like Lady Barnet,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Lady Isobel Barnet,” Shirley replied for me. “Something similar happened to her, a long time ago. Mum wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last.”

  We had another drink and decided that was enough. Dave went to the loo and I followed him. There was one person already in there, shaking the drops off. When he’d gone, without washing his hands, I pushed open the doors to the two cubicles with my toe to prove they were empty.

  “You realise,” I said, “that this makes you a suspect. You have a motive.”

  “Yeah, I know. Me and a few hundred others.”

  “Jeez, you’re right.”

  Shirley was waiting in the car for us. “Dave says you’ve had a postcard from Sophie,” she said, brightly.

  “That’s right, last Thursday, I think it was. Said she was having a good time and that I’d like it in Cap Ferrat because everybody was old.”

  Shirley laughed. “Good old Sophie, tactful as ever.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt her to send a card home,” Dave grumbled. “If she doesn’t send you one on your birthday she’s in big trouble.”

  “She’s young,” Shirley explained. “She’s probably in love. Leave her alone.”

  “Huh!” he snorted.

  When I was at art school I remember my dad coming out with a maxim that was prevalent at the time: send your sons to university but keep your daughters away. I’d a feeling that Dave had heard the same maxim.

  Chapter Five

  Thursday I gave a talk to a mixed bunch of police officers attending a conference on major crimes at the staff college in Bramshill, Hampshire. I drove down for the day and on the car radio I heard that there’d been another case of contaminated food in Heckley and the police were investigating.

  “Tut tut, whatever next?” I said to myself. Staff college had booked me over a year ago, so I’d had plenty of time to prepare my lecture. There were delegates there from all over the UK and Thursday was serial killer day. A forensic psychologist explained how his techniques could narrow down the field and indicate which way an enquiry should progress; my job was to demonstrate how this should not be allowed to hijack the investigation. Forensic, in my book, means “for use in a court of law.” Drawing dots on a map is very interesting, but forensic it is not. At lunch I sat with an inspector from Newcastle, a chief inspector from Exeter and a captain in the RCMP who had wandered into the wrong dining room. We had a back-slapping time and came away with his card in our pockets and invitations to visit, any time we wanted.

  The lecture room was still empty when I returned, prior to my session. Several of the delegates had left their morning newspapers on the desks, and I saw that the botulism scare had made the front pages of them all, with the warfarin story being resurrected to reinforce the impact. We were between wars, so all the familiar faces of TV and tabloid journalism had donned their designer parkas and headed north again, smelling a story. An outbreak of one deadly disease is unfortunate, two outbreaks in the same small town smacks of outside forces at work. They named the usual bogeymen and railed about the lack of readiness of the authorities. At the very least a madman was on the loose, and somebody would die soon if he wasn’t caught. If they discovered that the officer leading the enquiry was swanning it at the st
aff college they’d have a field day. No doubt HQ would hold a press conference, probably at that very moment, and the nation would be reassured that coincidences do happen and the outbreaks had been contained. Meanwhile, purely as a precaution, if anybody did happen to have a tin of pineapple or corned beef on their shelves they should place it in a bucket of water and surround it with sand-bags. Alternatively, they could return it to their nearest branch of Grainger’s.

  “How did it go?” Dave asked, next morning, when I came down from Gilbert’s prayer meeting.

  “How did what go?”

  “The talk, Dumbo.”

  “Oh,” I said, dismissively, “you know how it is. Boring speakers, nobody interested in what you say. Complete waste of time.”

  “So you won’t be going to any more?”

  “We-ell, you know how I hate to disappoint people. According to Gilbert I missed all the fun.”

  “Big-hearted Charlie. Yeah, you got out of it quite nicely. It’s kids’ stuff this morning compared to yesterday. It was like the fall of Saigon in the car park. There was even a TV crew from France. No doubt a few more of our delicacies will be taken off their shelves.”

  “No doubt. Did you find anything else?”

  “Not much. Two more tins of corned beef found at the Huddersfield store and a tin of peaches at Oldfield.”

  “All with puncture holes?”

  “That’s right. They’re at Weatherton now.”

  “Well done. It’s worth a try but dozens of people could have handled them.”

  “Nuh uh. Not necessarily so. They’re loaded on to the shelves twelve at a time in a cardboard tray, and up to then all the handling has been mechanical. The person whose delicate fingers punctured the tin could be the first one to touch it. We’re in with a chance.”

  “Hey, that’s brilliant. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t hurt to cherchez la femme. I’ve a feeling that’s what this is all about. Let’s start by bringing Mrs Sharon Brown down to size.” I found the number for Heckley Grainger’s and dialled it. “Could I speak to Mrs Brown, please?”

  “Sorry, but Mrs Brown is off work for a few days.”

  “Oh. When will she be back?”

  “Tuesday. Can I put you through to her secretary?”

  “No, it’s a personal call. I’ll ring her on Tuesday.” I replaced the receiver and turned to Dave, saying: “She has a secretary.”

  “Might be worth having a word with her.”

  “True. I’ll put Pete on to it, preferably away from the office. He can charm the ducks off the water.”

  We weren’t following leads or pursuing a clearly defined course of action. We were, frankly, floundering. The culprit might be a nutcase loner, living in a tower block, or a bitter housewife with a grudge, or it might be an insider conducting a personal vendetta. We’d re-situated CCTV cameras to cover the first two possibilities, and for the third one all we could do was gather information about the principle characters, listen to gossip and go where it led. That way, when the break came, we’d be prepared.

  Dave said: “Pete doesn’t charm them off the water, he talks them off it.”

  “But he gets them talking back, too. Much better than I can.”

  “If they can get a quack in. He’s done a chart for you.”

  “Good. I like charts. Charts make it look as if we’re doing something. Where is he?”

  “Probably in the briefing room. He’s taken a shine to the new probationer. I’ll fetch the chart.”

  It was a map, and he’d done a good job. All the findings were marked on it, colour coded to indicate peaches, pineapple or corned beef, with different shapes for punctured tins, the coloured dye and the warfarin.

  “Well, this should impress the ACC,” I said. “I’m not sure if it will progress the investigation, but the ACC will have an orgasm.” I spanned the spaces between incidents with my fingers, making mental adjustments for distance, numbers of cases and degree of seriousness, remembering the talk I’d heard the day before and adding a few touches of my own.

  “He lives there,” I declared, stabbing a finger at the centre of gravity of the case. “I’ve done a course on this and it never fails.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Dave said. He considered the location for a few seconds before adding: “Well that should make it easy. According to your course he lives in Heckley nick.”

  Have a day off and the paperwork accrues. Nobody does it for you and the problems don’t go away. The troops had plenty to be on with so I listened to what they had to say, made a few suggestions and sent them on their way. We’d opened an incident room at the nick for the Grainger’s job and I pinned Pete’s chart on the wall next to the map with the twenty-mile radius that I’d drawn. His contribution looked more professional so I unpinned my map and stuffed it in a drawer. I’d ask Pete to add the radius to his map.

  Back in my own office I answered a few letters, including one to a local councillor who persistently complained about harassment of young people for skateboarding in the mall car park. We’d captured the problem on video and the mall management were receiving equally vociferous complaints about damage to parked vehicles, but the councillor would not listen. Not even when we told him about the needles being left all over the place. He also complained about the older youths in souped-up cars who congregated in one of the town-centre car parks late at night, about the lack of amenities for our budding basketball players and about the speed bumps on Fellside Road. He lives on Fellside Road. He has a regular column in the Gazette and he uses it to beat the police. Our community affairs officer had talked to him, explained the problems, told him what limited powers we had, but he wouldn’t listen and now he was coming through to me. There’s nothing wins votes like a fearless campaigner, and he had nothing to fear because we’d long ago stopped dangling our critics from the ceiling and administering the bastinado. I politely told him that, much as I sympathised with him about the children from the comprehensive dropping litter outside his sweet shop, it was not my intention to take any action, and in future I was only prepared to correspond with him through his solicitor.

  I was basking in the warm glow of indignation gratified and gathering my strength for an assault on the staff development reports, thirteen months overdue, when the phone interrupted me. It was the front desk.

  “Lady thinks she may have seen the knicker thief, Charlie. I’ll put her through.”

  I waited a few seconds then said: “Detective Inspector Priest here. How can I help you?”

  “Oh, hello. I think I may have seen this… person who’s stealing underwear from washing lines.”

  “That’s music to my ears, Madam. First of all, can I ask you your name, please?”

  She was called Mrs Mavis Lewis and had been reading the Heckley Gazette as her smalls went through the rinse cycle when she happened to see an article about the thefts from washing lines. To be accurate, they were her daughter’s smalls. Miss Lewis was a nurse at the White Rose clinic, just outside town, and changed her underwear twice a day. Every Friday Mrs Lewis did a big wash and, weather permitting, hung her daughter’s frillies on the line to dry. Last week a shower interrupted the process and as she unpegged them she became aware of a youth standing in the garden that backed on to her garden, in the shadow of the overgrown privet hedge. He appeared to be watching her, but when she looked again he’d disappeared.

  “This was last Friday?” I asked, and she confirmed that it was.

  “And you’re doing a wash now?”

  “Yes. They’ve just finished spinning.”

  “Are you going to hang them outside?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of, it looks like rain again.”

  I glanced out of the window and banks of clouds glowered back at me. “I know. What time did you see the youth?”

  “It would be sometime after one o’clock. The lunchtime concert had just started.”

  “The lunchtime concert?”

  “On Radio 3.”

  I was impressed.
Radio 3 listeners don’t make up a significant percentage of our clients. They don’t make up a significant percentage of the BBC’s clients. If the thief knew her routine there was a chance that he’d come back today, and if he did, we could nab him.

  “If I sent a couple of officers over would you be happy to hang the washing out, Mrs Lewis?” I asked.

  “Yes. No problem.”

  “OK. Don’t do anything just yet and I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes to see how the land lies.”

  I contacted Dave and two other DCs and told them to come back to the station, then drove to Mrs Lewis’s home. It was a semi, built back in the Thirties when houses had decent gardens but tiny kitchens. I drove round the block a couple of times, learning the street names, and parked a few doors away.

  She was a pleasant woman, overweight and jolly, and not at all troubled by the attentions of the knicker thief. Her husband was there, sitting in an easy chair with a pair of headphones on. He had a bushy beard and wore brown brogues and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Men who wear their shoes and jacket in the house make me lose sleep at night. I can’t help thinking that they’re prepared for a quick getaway. He removed the ’phones and stood up to shake hands.

  “Don’t let me interrupt the concert,” I said.

  “Tchaikovsky,” he replied with a sniff. “Music for lifts.”

  Ah well, that was one of my favourite composers demolished. Mrs Lewis took me through into the kitchen, from where I could survey the garden. The rain had blown over but the next lot wasn’t far away. There was a shed halfway down the garden, which would make a good observation post, and the neighbour had a greenhouse filled with tomato plants.

  “Do you think your neighbours would let us use their greenhouse?” I asked, and I was assured that she wouldn’t mind, so I rang the station and told Dave and the other two to come over, and arranged for a panda to stand by a couple of streets away. Then I asked Mrs Lewis to hang out the washing.

  I sat on a step-ladder in the kitchen, Dave took the shed and the others lay doggo in the greenhouse. We stayed like that for three hours, as Miss Lewis’s underwear came under more scrutiny than the Turin shroud. It hung from two lines like a set of teeth from some fabulous beast until the occasional gust of wind disturbed the image.