Limestone Cowboy (5 page)

“It was very worrying for him,” I said. “And for the staff at the hospital. The symptoms were similar to those for the Ebola virus, and for several hours the
hospital
was quarantined.” Pow! Fifteen love to me.

At the word Ebola he jerked upright as if a small
electric shock had passed through his chair and his mouth fell open.

“Ebola?”

We stayed silent.

“You mean… the outbreak at the General… that’s what this is about?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Oh my God.”

“How long do you keep your security camera tapes, Mr Robshaw?” I asked.

“A week.”

“Would there happen to be one looking at the tinned fruit shelves?”

“No. Sorry.”

I turned to Dave. “Any point in watching them?” I asked.

He shook his head, knowing that he’d be the one who had to do the watching. “No.”

“The pineapple had been tampered with, Mr Robshaw,” I said. “Somebody had made a determined effort to contaminate it.” Dave produced the label from the offending tin and laid it in front of him and I went on: “We soaked the label off. There’s a bar code on it so can you explain what that tells us, please?”

He relaxed when he realised that the offence had been beyond his control and typed the bar code
numbers
into his computer terminal. The new tin was
similar
to the one we’d taken from Carl Johnson’s fridge, and Robshaw soon confirmed that the price of 432 grams of Del Monte pineapple rings had not changed for six weeks. The offending tin was still with
forensics
, but Dave had made a note of the numbers printed
on the bottom and these were a couple of digits different from those on the new tin.

Robshaw drummed his fingers on the desk and after a few seconds pinned me with his best
managerial
stare in an attempt to regain the initiative. “Pardon me asking this, Inspector,” he said, “but how do I know that this tin came from this store? As you have realised, all prices are indicated at the shelf; we don’t use stickers on individual items.”

Which saves you money, I thought, and makes it almost impossible for the shopper to check the bill when they get home. I said: “The victim says it came from here and we found a drawer full of your bags at his home.”

“But no receipt?”

“No.”

He let go with his forearm volley: “So you’ve no proof?”

I retaliated with a backhand smash. It’s my
speciality
stroke. “He thought he was dying of Ebola. Why would he lie?”

“Good question,” he admitted. Forty-thirty to the forces of law and order.

“So what does the code tell you?”

“Right. When I type in the numbers, or a checkout assistant scans it, the terminal is immediately
connected
to the stock record entry for that particular item.” He rotated his flat-screen monitor so we could see the figures. “It identifies the product, retrieves the price and subtracts one unit from the stockholding. Each record entry has a maximum and minimum stock level specified and if necessary an order is automatically
initiated. Batch numbers and sell-by dates are also stored, as shown on the base of the tin. That’s about it.”

“Can you confirm that this batch came to you?”

He turned the screen back to face himself. “Um, yes. ’Fraid so.”

“Thank you. So what date did it arrive?”

“Let’s have a look. Here we are… July 10th.”

“This year?”

“Yes.”

Dave coughed and said: “Only ten days ago. Maybe we should look at those videotapes after all.”

“I think you’d better,” I told him. Turning back to Robshaw I said: “I thought, these days, that you could tell who bought what.”

“Not from this program. If a customer holds our loyalty card, certain selected items are recorded and we can use this information to identify their tastes. That’s the theory, but for Grainger’s stores the system is in its infancy.”

Dave said: “Would pineapple slices ’appen to be a selected item?”

“No. It tends to be more specialised lines, such as wine or our cordon bleu ready meals. Then we can
target
our mailshots and special offers more accurately.”

“Thanks for explaining that,” I said, making a
mental
note not to ever buy another ready meal. I didn’t want some spotty supermarket analyst dissecting my eating habits. “So, have you sacked anybody in, ooh, the last two months?”

“No. I’ve never sacked anybody ever, I’m proud to say,” he replied. “It’s part of the Grainger’s ethos that everybody can be usefully employed. It’s a question of
training and finding an employee’s potential. We don’t sack people, we redeploy and redevelop them.”

“Have you redeployed or redeveloped anybody in the last two months?”

He thought about it before answering. “We do it constantly, but most of them go along with it, accept the need. There was one girl…”

“Go on.”

“She was all fingers and thumbs. Kept dropping things on the shop floor. We moved her into the
warehouse
where she could do less damage, but she
handed
in her notice after a week.”

We asked him for her name and after a phone call he gave it to us.

“So you don’t know of anybody who might hold a grudge against the company?”

“No, not at all. Sir Morton might have made a few enemies along the way, but none I know of. Has he been told about all this?”

“Not yet. How often do you see him?”

“We have a monthly meeting but we see his wife more often. She likes to play the secret shopper,
sneaking
in heavily disguised but all the staff recognise her. There’s a daughter-in-law too, who does the same thing, but we’re not so sure about her.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds until he said: “We’ll have to withdraw them all, won’t we? And recall them. Oh God, we need this, we really need this,” and buried his head in his hands.

“Has anything like it happened here before?” I asked.

Robshaw shuffled in his leather executive chair and
ran a finger under the collar of his shirt. That was the question he hoped we wouldn’t ask. He picked up the phone again and asked someone to bring in the complaints book.

“What do you fancy for lunch?” Dave asked as we climbed into his car in the supermarket car park.

“We could have bought something here,” I replied.

“And risk being poisoned? No thanks.”

“OK. Bacon sandwich in the canteen. The poison in them is slow-acting.” I pulled the door shut and reached for the seat belt.

“What did you reckon to him?” Dave said.

“Robshaw? He was helpful, once he realised we weren’t after his blood. Not exactly managerial
material
, I’d’ve thought, but he’d done well for himself. Credit where it’s due.”

“He’s a twat,” Dave stated.

Robshaw’s helpfulness extended to furnishing us with a list of the other ten stores in the group, with names and phone numbers, plus Sir Morton Grainger’s home number. Not classified information but it saved us about an hour’s work.

The complaints book revealed that two weeks earlier a customer had returned some peaches that had turned mouldy in the tin, and ten days before that someone had brought back a tin of blue baked beans. These had been sent to the group’s
laboratory
and found to be contaminated with a harmless food dye. Both customers were placated and the incidents brushed over without involving the local health inspector. There was no investigation into
how the tins were breached and they hadn’t been saved.

“So what did you think of Sharon?” Dave asked. It was Sharon who delivered the compaints book when Robshaw asked for it. “Personal service,” he’d said with a smile as she passed it to him. She was severely dressed in a dark suit which went well with her bobbed hair and dark-rimmed spectacles, but the skirt was short and the heels high and she chose her
perfume
carefully.

“She’s… um, sexy, if you like that sort of thing.” She’d sashayed to the door as she left the office and cast a glance backwards as she closed it to confirm that we were looking.

“And we do, don’t we?”

“Not arf!”

I was still thinking about Sharon when Dave said: “So what were you saying?”

“About what?” I rubbed the side of my face. “That flippin’ fan’s given me neuralgia.”

“You were telling me about Miss X.”

“Miss X? You mean Rosie. She’s called Rosie. Rosie Barraclough.”

“So where did you really meet her?”

“At the geology class. She was the teacher.”

“I’d forgotten about that. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Last week was the last one.”

“Was it any good?”

“Yes. It was interesting. I enjoyed it.”

“Particularly with Rosie in charge.”

“Um, yes, she did add to the enjoyment.” The 4X4 in front of us had two stickers on the back window:
one for the Liberty and Livelihood jamboree and the other urging us to Buy British Beef. It was a Mitsubishi Shogun.

“So what ’appened.”

“Nothing. Last Wednesday was the final night and I invited her to the pub for a drink. We arranged to go to Mr Ho’s on Saturday, but when I rang her she’d changed her mind.”

“Because you were a policeman, you said.”

“Mmm. I’d told someone in the class that I was a graphic designer, and she overheard me. When I told her I was really a cop she went all quiet, as if I’d deceived her.”

“I usually say that I’m a cattle inseminator. That keeps ’em quiet. So what are you doing about it?”

I looked across at him. “Doing about it? Nothing. What can I do about it?”

“Charlie!” he gasped. “Won’t you ever learn. Women ’ave to be chased. You like her, don’t you?”

“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 co-operative, 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 dog-fighting 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?”