The Longest Pleasure

by Douglas Clark

  “Tell the others to let their people know we’ll be away tonight. I’ll ring Wanda after I’ve seen Anderson.”

  The Assistant Commissioner listened to his report and then said to Masters: “This long shot of yours, George. You haven’t told me anything about it, and I’m not asking you to do so at this stage, but I would like to know how confident you feel about it.”

  “I can’t claim to have a great deal of confidence in the idea itself, sir.”

  “Yet you’re taking your whole team off the case here.”

  “I am, sir, because I really am confident that I’ve got to break out of the routine here. We’ve gone a long way with it, but getting Stratton’s co-operation was, quite honestly, the last positive step I could think of. The alternative is to stay where we are and wait for something to break. I daren’t do that. I’ve got to pursue the investigation actively, otherwise we are going to stagnate and more people are going to be ill and perhaps die . . .”

  “Hold it, George. The same number will become ill and die whether you go or not, now Stratton has removed the tins from his shelves. We can’t warn people who have already bought contaminated produce.”

  “With respect, sir. I hope that’s not true. If I can lay my hands on the culprit and make him tell me in which branches he deposited his blasted doctored cans . . .

  “Then we can put out a limited warning, you mean?”

  “Why not, sir?”

  Anderson nodded. “There can be no objections when there’s no longer any speculation. Get after your man, George. And the best of luck.”

  *

  As the large Rover sped westwards, making for Southampton and the Cowes car ferry, Masters turned to Green who was sitting, as was his habit, in the nearside back seat which he considered to be the safest spot in the car.

  “Explanation time, Bill.”

  “Don’t rush it,” said Green airily. “There’s no great reason why Reed and Berger and I should know why we’re going to the Izzly of Widgett. After all, it’s a nice day in July, and a trip to the seaside makes a nice break from routine and the heat and noise of London. You can keep us in the dark . . .”

  “On a nice day in July?”

  “Figuratively speaking. You can keep us in the dark for as long as you like. After all, why spoil a nice outing like this with thoughts of the nastiest crime we’ve encountered in Britain since the late Jack the Ripper roamed the gaslit streets of the metropolis?”

  “Have you finished, Bill?”

  “Don’t stop him, Chief,” implored Berger. “He’s getting quite lyrical.”

  “That’s right, Chief,” added Reed who was driving. “After all, it’s not much more than an hour ago that he was giving us a load of bull about ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Mister Nobody. So what’s he got to complain about if you mention the Isle of Wight and Mister No Reason.”

  Green growled. “Cut it out, you two comedians. You’re both dying with curiosity. I can tell because all four of your ears have grown big and red . . .”

  Reed joined the motorway, the worst time for Green with his fear of speed and traffic. Masters hastened to take his colleague’s mind off the great juggernauts that were pounding along all about them.

  “Bill,” he said. “When I said I wanted somewhere quiet but pleasant to take Wanda for a few days’ holiday before Michael was born . . .”

  “Michael William,” corrected Green, hanging on to the back of Berger’s seat.

  “Sorry. Michael William. At that time you and Doris recommended the Isle of Wight. I’d never been there, but you were familiar with it and so fond of it that you paid it regular visits every summer.”

  “What’s up?” queried Green. “Didn’t it come up to expectations?”

  “Very much so. It was ideal there in the spring. Clean, pleasant, quiet, refreshing . . . Wanda and I told you how much we’d enjoyed it.”

  Green grunted in confirmation. The knuckles of his hands were white with the intensity of his grip.

  “Slow down a bit, Reed. I can’t concentrate on what I want to say at this speed.”

  “Sorry, Chief.”

  Masters turned again to Green. “What we didn’t tell you, Bill, was that on our last morning there we had just a momentary unpleasant clash with a member of the local police.”

  “You what?” demanded Green, apparently forgetting his fear of speed in the anger he experienced at the thought of Wanda being upset or inconvenienced. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Because it wasn’t important and, as I said, it was a momentary incident which I dealt with quite easily.”

  “I’ll bet,” murmured Berger.

  “What happened?” demanded Green.

  “Each morning we were there, we took a gentle stroll along the beach at Shanklin. The weather was blustery, but there were few people about and the wind and waves provided us with a lot of interest. Wanda enjoyed herself. She collected smooth pebbles and pretty shells . . .”

  “And you played ducks and drakes with flat stones,” interjected Green. “I know. It’s about par for the course.”

  “Maybe. But whatever it was, Wanda and I came to value those excursions. She was very fit, as you know, despite the imminence of the young man’s birth, and she felt that stooping to pick up shells was useful exercise, and the wind put colour into her cheeks . . .”

  “Now who’s being lyrical?”

  “Anyway, you can imagine my attitude when, on the last morning we were there, we had just got down to the beach when a local bluebottle somewhat brusquely ordered us off the sand and forbade us the promenade, too.”

  “He what? You’re joking, Chief.”

  “I assure you I’m not. What was worse, however, was that the bobby refused us an explanation. He merely said we had got there before the road blocks had been erected and now we must go back beyond them.”

  Green snorted. “Without giving a reason?”

  “That’s what got my goat. That and the fact that he was much less than courteous to us.”

  “Until you revealed who you were, I suppose?”

  “Quite.”

  “You made him regret his attitude, I hope?”

  “With Wanda present?”

  “I see what you mean. Lucky for him. But you did get to know why they were roping off the prom and sands?”

  “What do you think? But before I go into that, let me remind you, Bill, that you rang me last night concerning botulism and fish.”

  “The Birmingham do was caused by a dicey tin of salmon, and there was my missus lobbing up fish for supper. It made me think.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Hold it,” said Green. “Are you saying you’d thought of the fish business before I rang you?”

  “No. Your call was invaluable. It concentrated my mind.”

  “But you reckon you were already thinking along those lines.”

  “No. Don’t get so het up. Let me explain and you will see what I mean. I was reading about type E. It was only then that I discovered that I had misunderstood both Convamore and Moller or, and I prefer to believe this is the more likely, that they had not briefed us fully. Bill, you are the memory man. Where did our two scientific friends say we were most likely to encounter botulism type E?”

  Green frowned. “In the northern hemisphere.”

  “What did you take that to mean?”

  “What it says.”

  “I’ll ask the question another way. Did you take that to mean Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe, Russia . . .”

  “Of course. Siberia was actually mentioned.”

  “You didn’t include the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, the White Sea, the Baltic and every other sea north of the equator?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” snorted Green. “Why the hell should I have done so? If somebody mentions the northern hemisphere to me, I think of the land masses, not the seas unless they are specifically mentioned.”

  “I made the same mistake—until I started reading th
ose papers last night. Then I discovered that type E is predominantly found in the waters of the northern hemisphere.”

  “But . . .” began Green.

  “Yes?”

  “There was a lot of tarradiddle spoken about the scarcity of Type E in this country. Why the devil couldn’t they have said that the waters round about were snived with it?”

  “I think it was a case of those who know think that those who don’t know actually know more than they really do.”

  “Go on,” grunted Green, apparently too immersed in the conversation to notice the snarling traffic.

  “It had occurred to me that if one is looking for the source of some disease, the most likely place to find it is where it is rife, not where it is literally so thin on the ground as to be almost imperceptible.”

  “Logical.”

  “So, in our case, we should be looking at the sea.”

  “Right again.”

  “Then you rang up and started talking about fish.”

  “So?”

  “I was thinking about the sea, you were talking about fish. Your very convenient call—as I said—concentrated my mind.”

  “I follow. But all we’ve got are tins of contaminated ham, luncheon meat and bully beef. Not a sign of fish.”

  “So far.”

  “You reckon there’ll be more cases? Ones that will involve tins of fish?”

  “That’s one of my fears. But if there are, we can’t do anything about them.”

  “So what’s your point, George?”

  “We’ve been wondering how the perpetrator of this hideous business could produce pure type E botulism—if you’ll forgive the term. There have been two questions to answer, actually. First, if he just used meat and vegetables, or even fish, from a fish shop and just cooked them partially, how would he get the rare type E? And having got the rare type E, how did he get it uncontaminated with salmonella and other similar nasties? I asked Moller about that one, and he couldn’t give me a useful answer. But to me the answer is obvious. The type E came from the sea. Our criminal scientist did not culture his contaminant. The sea did it for him.”

  “Wait a moment, Chief,” protested Berger. “I presume you mean the sea infected some fish.”

  “Right.”

  “But you just said that he couldn’t have used fish.”

  “From a fish shop.”

  “What difference does it make whether it comes from a fish shop or not?”

  “Because, laddie,” said Green heavily, “botulism only attacks dead meat or fish. You were told that. If it attacked live animals, all the fish in the sea would be kaput or infected so’s we couldn’t eat them. The fish that finds itself on the fishmonger’s slab is taken from the water while still alive and kicking. Therefore, it hasn’t got botulism. Therefore, it comes in the same category as any meat and veg that Chummy might use for culturing botulism—and His Nibs has proved that that is napoo unless you want a pinch of salmonella with it. And you can’t have salmonella and suchlike with it, because they would blow the tins and give the game away before it got started.”

  “I get all that,” said Berger slowly, “but I still don’t see . . .”

  “Don’t see what?”

  “What the Chief’s getting at.”

  “Of course you don’t, lad, because it’s his secret and he hasn’t got there yet.”

  “Oh! That’s a relief. I thought I was being a bit dim.”

  “Perish the thought, lad.” Green leaned forward to address Reed. “When you can get this heap of upholstered machinery off this misbegotten racetrack, please do so. I’m in need of a large beer, and after that I’ll want a drink.”

  “A good idea,” said Masters, who always tried to please Green on car journeys. “But not a motorway pull-in. We want a decent pub, so turn off when you can.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  Green turned to him: “You were saying, George? Before young Berger gave as fine a display of ignorance as I’ve seen from a member of the force in years, that is?”

  “I said the sea produced the botulism. You explained it had to be in dead flesh. Now apart from the carcase of a dead fish on the shore, how could you get dead fish in the sea?”

  “In a can,” chorused Reed and Berger together.

  “Clever lads,” said Green. “They’re like that old comic turn—the Sisters Twizzle. Funny, isn’t it, that although the Halls are a thing of the past, the old routines live on in the young?”

  “Chief,” said Reed breezily, “we’ve just heard how it is impossible for the fishmonger’s fish to be contaminated with botulism, but I could almost swear I heard of somebody who, only last night, was given Dover sole for supper and then got so worried lest it might be infected that he rang you up for reassurance.”

  Green had the grace to laugh. “All right. You win. And just for scoring off me, young Reed, you can buy my first pint, while young Berger can buy the drink after that.”

  Masters felt pleased by the atmosphere in the car. The near-hilarity, though possibly unseemly among senior detectives faced with an exceedingly serious case that was far from solved, had served to lift some of the gloom which he felt had sat heavily on them ever since they had been given the job. Each one had tried to be cheerful in his work, but until now it had been a forced, bogus cheerfulness, put on at his request. This trip—his longshot trip—seemed to have lifted their spirits. He prayed that it wouldn’t be all for nothing. The let-down of a complete failure would, even among these men, hardened as they were to disaster, be difficult to take and almost impossible to reverse.

  “We’ll get on,” he said. “After the DCI rang me to mention his fish supper, I concentrated on discovering from the papers I was reading what I could about type E and the sea. I learned a lot. First, that where types A and B are characteristically contaminants of meat and vegetables, type E attacks fish, and is particularly associated with fish.

  “I also noted, in an article written about the Birmingham outbreak . . .”

  “Which started with a tin of salmon,” reminded Green.

  “Quite. Salmon canned in Alaska.”

  “Which is about as far north in the northern hemisphere as you can get.”

  “That’s quite an important point, actually,” said Masters, apparently unruffled by the interruptions. “But I’ll get back to that in a minute or two. For the moment, let’s concentrate on the Birmingham tin of salmon.

  “The scientist who wrote the paper I am telling you about stated quite categorically that type E spores are killed by heating to eighty degrees centigrade for thirty minutes. He declares that the routine canning process would have destroyed any spores present at that time because it involves heating at between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and twenty degrees for longer than thirty minutes.

  “He suggests, therefore, that though there may have been the possibility of a disruption in the factory heating routine, this is unlikely as there were no other contaminated tins.”

  Green grunted his approval of this obvious piece of logic, and Reed began to slow to turn off the motorway a few hundred yards ahead.

  Masters continued. “The only other possibility—and this seems to be the most likely one—is that an individual can was contaminated through a minute hole after the canning was complete. I am not sure of my facts here, but I believe the cans are water-cooled . . .”

  “Ah! Go on, George. This is getting interesting.”

  “If the organism was in the cooling water and it got through that minute hole . . . well, as the man said, one spore would have been enough—so long as no oxygen got in, too. Just one spore which subsequently grew and elaborated its toxin in the way our own boffins described to us.”

  Reed, who was by now coasting away from the motorway, said: “What was that about Alaskan water, Chief?”

  “The DCI said that Alaska is pretty far north, implying, I suspect, that it is pretty cold up in those parts.”

  “Eskimo weather,” agreed Green.


  “Well,” continued Masters, “you will be intrigued to learn that a distinctive feature of type E is that it can live, grow, and produce its toxin at four degrees centigrade, which is the temperature at which water begins to freeze and at which domestic refrigerators operate.”

  There was a short silence, then Green said: “Interesting, George, but why intriguing? I mean, does that particular nugget of information help us in any way?”

  “At the moment, perhaps not, except to dispel the impression we were given that these organisms only spring to life when conditions are right. I most definitely imagined them lying doggo—like snakes—until the sun came to warm them up and the food was there to hand. The little bastards can do their stuff in seawater that is damn-near freezing, and I think that it was seawater which cultured the bacilli which are causing the present trouble. So, if my longshot comes off, I reckon this distinctive feature of being able to operate in the cold will be important.”

  “Fair enough. I’m beginning to get the drift.”

  “I’ll leave it there for the moment, and continue after lunch,” replied Masters, as Reed pulled into the forecourt of an elderly but inviting-looking inn. “What’s this place?”

  “The White Swan. Chief. It’s not bad. If we just want a drink and a ploughman’s, there’s a door at the far end.”

  “I see it,” said Green, already out of the car. “That’s the place for me. The Tipsy Bar. I couldn’t have thought up a better name myself. It had better come up to expectations, young Reed.”

  “There are a couple of nice bits of capurtle in there,” replied Reed as he locked the door. “They’re a great attraction, as you can see by the number of cars.”

  “It’s the booze and food that wants to be the attraction at a pub,” retorted Green, “not bits of skirt.”

  “Go and see for yourself. There’s a cold table right down at the end. They’re two student types—trained food handlers.”

  “Right,” said Green. “I will. After all, you two lads are buying the drinks. I’ll go and see what the grub’s like.”

  *

  “Not bad. Not bad at all,” said Green as they re-entered the car forty minutes later. “I liked the one with the big bust. She had to be a bit careful, of course, when she was sharpening the carving knife—had to hold it a long way in front of her, if you get my meaning, but she was a dab hand at making sandwiches. Oh, and the beer wasn’t bad either. I’m not quite sure whether that was due to good cellarage or not having to pay for it—on the principle that free beer tastes bitterest.”