Changelings Page 2

  Shapiro was impressed. ‘And does anybody? – appear twice.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Morgan wearily. ‘Men; children; women with prams, women without prams; old age pensioners, Rastafarians, and a man in a beret with only one arm. We can probably discount him – unless he got a mate to hold the pot for him.’

  Shapiro breathed steadily. ‘You’re telling me we have pictures of an incident taking place, we just can’t isolate them.’

  ‘That’s about it, sir. Of course, if we get a suspect we can look back at the film and see if he’s there.’

  ‘And in the meantime … ?’

  ‘Maybe Scobie’s having more luck.’

  When Detective Constable Scobie played rugby, which he did until the ENT surgeon said that if he broke his nose once more he could set it himself, he specialized in tackling. Teammates theorized that he didn’t even want the ball, he just liked knocking people over. Opponents suspected he was on week-end leave from Broadmoor.

  It was a style of play he used in his professional life too. By the time Sav-U-Mor’s under-manager had spent half an hour answering his questions about present and former employees, those who left under a cloud and those who might have wanted a payback, he was beginning to feel like a suspect himself.

  ‘Constable, if I knew who was responsible for this I would tell you. I don’t. I can’t think of anyone who might be.’

  ‘Someone is.’

  ‘Obviously. But I don’t think it’s a member of staff; not current and not recent. There’s always some turnover but we haven’t had to sack anyone for months.’

  ‘How many months?’ asked Scobie.

  ‘Three, maybe four; and that was an elderly cashier who was getting too forgetful to manage the till.’

  ‘It’s not manual strangulation we’re talking about, it’s injecting jelly into a yoghurt pot. My old granny could do it, if she had enough of a grudge.’ The faintest of bells tinkled in the back of Scobie’s mind.

  ‘The cashier I’m talking about couldn’t hold a grudge for three months: she’d forget what she was angry about. And it’s hardly rocket science, is it? – it didn’t take three months to set up. If she’d wanted to embarrass us she could have done it the day she left.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Scobie doggedly, ‘I’ll pay her a visit. To eliminate her from our inquiries. Name and address?’

  Tony Woodall shrugged, looked back his records. ‘Mrs Alice Marsden, 27a Cambridge Road.’

  Scobie blinked. ‘Ah.’

  Woodall stared at him. ‘You don’t mean she’s done this before?’

  ‘No – no.’ Incredibly, the detective was blushing. ‘Actually, Mr Woodall, Alice Marsden is my granny.’

  DC Mary Wilson had done a course on using the Police National Computer. But though the various databases gave her a list of criminals operating in the Castlemere area, and another list of people who had committed this kind of crime in the past, no names appeared on both lists. The computer didn’t know of anyone living in or around Castlemere with a history of corporate blackmail.

  She shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry, ma’am, nothing. Maybe if we get some more information about him?’

  Liz nodded resignedly. She hadn’t expected any more. The computer was a tool of criminal detection, not a substitute for it. ‘One thing, Mary – there’s no need to call me ma’am. The boys call me Guv, Donovan calls me Boss, the people downstairs call me Mrs G – at least, they do when I’m there. Any of them’s OK by me. Ma‘am makes me feel like minor royalty opening a swimming pool.’

  Wilson grinned. ‘And we call Mr Shapiro the chief.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Even though he’s no longer a Chief Inspector but a Superintendent?’

  ‘Now he’s the other sort of chief. Sitting Bull. Geronimo.’

  ‘Crazy Horse,’ offered Wilson.

  Liz shook her head. ‘No, we’re saving that in case Donovan gets promoted.’

  Wilson chuckled. ‘Does that make me Minihaha?’ With her frank blue eyes and her blonde hair cut in a pageboy bob there was something engaging about Mary Wilson. But people who worked with her quickly found she was a much tougher proposition than she looked.

  Which was as well, because she’d need to be. Liz remembered being at this stage of her career. It had seemed to go on for ever. The glass ceiling had seemed to be made of rock quartz. The sense of relief when she went as Detective Sergeant to DI Shapiro, and finally found herself treated as a fellow professional, was almost enough to make her cry.

  Wilson said, ‘They all seem to be men.’

  Liz was still thinking about detectives. Then she realized the conversation had moved on. ‘Oh – blackmailers, you mean? What, all of them?’

  Wilson shook her head. ‘Not blackmailers in general, but those who try to extort money from big companies. According to the computer anyway.’

  Liz considered. ‘Still, don’t jump to .conclusions. It could as easily have been a woman.’

  ‘Well, maybe not,’ ventured Wilson; and Liz knew it took courage for a new DC to contradict her DI and respected her for it. ‘Physically, yes – but what about mentally? Even now, most women have families and most women shop for them. You don’t muddy a pool you want to drink from. I’m not sure anyone who buys food for her children could bring herself to contaminate food for some other mother to buy.’

  Liz nodded slowly, digesting. ‘Good point. Perhaps it would be rash to rule out mothers as suspects, but it might make sense to concentrate first on any single men who come up.’

  A pleased blush warmed Wilson’s cheeks. She’d been here a month and already she was being taken seriously by senior officers. Today the glass ceiling looked like cellophane.

  2

  Brian Graham wasn’t single but he had no children – or else he had five hundred of them. As head of the art department at Castle High he taught solemn eleven-year-olds how to mix poster paints and lectured on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to seventeen-year-olds who would soon be at art college and know more about the subject than he did. In between came 3b and their preoccupation with the wobbly bits in classical art.

  ‘Sir, sir – sir! They haven’t got no hair!’

  ‘Sir – why haven’t they got no hair, sir?’

  ‘Sir, sir – didn’t people have hair then?’

  They were not, of course, referring to the intricate coiffures in the Old Master they were studying.

  Graham glanced at his watch but found no help there: it was ten minutes to close of play. Besides, two decades in the classroom had taught him to face the enemy without blinking.

  It was not the first time he’d been ambushed like this. Pupils always thought they’d come up with some new way to embarrass their teacher; but anyone who survived the first two years had seen, heard and dealt with it all. He gave a long-suffering sigh.

  ‘Yes, Maureen, people had body hair then the same as they have now. It’s a matter of artistic convention. Just as a modern artist might choose to be tactful about my hairline, your cold sore or Darren’s teeth’ – Darren grinned, pleased, showing off the overbite with which he impersonated Dracula so successfully and so often – ‘so the classical artists turned a blind eye to what they considered the less beautiful aspects of the human form. Today we find that rather coy, go for the warts-and-all approach. It doesn’t mean we’re right and they were wrong, just that we have different priorities. People who study art in another three hundred years will find our ideas equally odd. They might see nothing worth painting in any of us.’

  The bell rang for the end of the school day but Graham was not yet free to go home. He’d been manoeuvred into helping the sports department. The first XV were playing rugby on one pitch while the under-fourteens were playing hockey on another, stretching the supervisory resources of the PE staff to breaking point. Brian Graham knew nothing about rugby so he was allocated to Miss Simmons to help with the hockey match.

  He was planted on the line and told what to wat
ch for, but he didn’t think he was doing it right or why did girls of both schools keep coming up to him mouthing obscenities? He was glad when the whistle went. It came as a terrible disappointment to find it was only half-time.

  The second half seemed to go quicker, and Castle High lost by two goals – which seemed only fair to Brian, who considered it rude to defeat one’s visitors. Victors and vanquished departed towards the showers.

  Brian might have known nothing about sport but he knew a fair bit about schoolgirls. He knew that schoolgirls coming together in any numbers without adult supervision would eventually begin to scream. He thought nothing of the hullabaloo coming from the showers until the girls started coming out too, in various states of undress, shrieking and pointing and stamping their bare feet in hysterics. Even then he wondered if it was part of the normal celebrations of a win, until one of the girls, steelier-nerved than the others, managed to get out some recognizable words.

  What they were was, ‘It’s blood, sir! Everywhere. Coming out of the showers. All over everyone. Everywhere!’

  It wasn’t, in fact, blood. It was raspberry jelly. There were gallons of the stuff, too dilute to set, in a white drum beside the attic water tank, connected to the system by means of some hose, Jubilee clips and a plastic tap. When the showers were turned on the jelly was syphoned into the pipes.

  ‘Well now,’ said Liz thoughtfully, as the last of the crimson tide was swilled down the drains by the school caretaker, ‘I hope no one’s claiming this was a coincidence. That two people have independently lit on the idea of using jelly as an offensive weapon.’

  Dick Morgan was halfway into the roofspace, perched on top of a ladder with the drum, now almost empty, in his arms. ‘Not me, Guv. There’s a note on this one too.’

  When he got it down they studied it. The same square black letters, the same gummed paper. This time the message was: ‘This could have been acid.’

  And it could have been. It might have been harder to buy than several packets of raspberry jelly, although there are many legitimate uses for acid in industry and a minimum of research would enable anyone so inclined to acquire some. After that, apart from using a glass carboy and rubber hoses, the installation would have been the same.

  ‘So he doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone,’ said Liz. ‘At least, not yet.’

  ‘But if he wants money,’ frowned Morgan, ‘why doesn’t he say so? It’s no use being shy if you’re a blackmailer.’

  ‘Maybe he wants us to think about it. Think about the consequences if it had been acid.’

  ‘Us? – who?’ asked Morgan. ‘Exactly who is he planning to blackmail?’

  It was a good question. Liz hadn’t realized as quickly as her DC that targeting the school was a different proposition to targeting a multinational supermarket chain. She found that slightly worrying; but everyone knew that Dick Morgan was brighter than he let on. He lived in fear of being promoted and given more responsibility.

  ‘OK,’ said Liz, ‘so it’s not Sav-U-Mor specifically. Is it the town as a whole? You can’t blackmail a school – who’d pay? But you could conceivably blackmail a town. Threaten its children, through the food they eat and the schools they attend, and maybe you’ll scare people enough that they’ll drum up the money somewhere: from the council; from local businesses; from a whip round in the streets. It might be quite a clever move. If he was going for a particular store we could stake it out. But this makes him much harder to find. His only connection with Sav-U-Mor may be as an occasional customer; his only connection with the school may be that he found an opportunity to come here with his drum and his bits of hose. If he wore overalls and seemed to know what he was doing, nobody’d challenge him.’

  Though somebody may have noticed, just thought that the arrangements were made by someone else. The caretaker was the best bet. His name was Duffy, and he was swabbing the pink stuff off his tiling as if he’d suffered a personal insult. Liz had not overlooked the fact that the school’s janitor was ideally placed to interfere with the school plumbing; but his whole manner argued against.

  ‘Mr Duffy.’ She nodded, and he nodded back brusquely. They knew one another well enough not to need introductions: Duffy knew Liz was the art teacher’s wife as well as a detective, she knew he was formerly a merchant seaman. He was in his mid-thirties, and though he probably had a first name no one at Castle High knew it. ‘Someone’s got a funny sense of humour.’

  ‘He’ll be laughing on the other side of his face if I catch up with him,’ growled Duffy, swabbing furiously.

  ‘Any idea when it was done?’

  ‘It must have been today. This afternoon, even.’

  ‘You were up there earlier?’

  He nodded at the drum now sitting in the middle of the changing rooms while the Scenes of Crime Officer went over it with a fine-tooth comb. ‘There’s no kind of timing device. The stuff would be drawn up the first time the showers were used. They were used before lunch, and again at about three. He must have been up there after that.’

  Liz was impressed. Now they had a time window: whoever did this was in the roof space between three and six p.m. ‘Did you see anyone suspicious in that time?’

  ‘There are twelve hundred bloody kids here,’ he spat, ‘every one of them a criminal in the making. That’s just our kids. After four o’clock two buses rolled up containing another thirty thuglets from two other schools. And that’s only the kids. You should have seen the teachers.’

  Liz wondered what had induced him to work in a school if that was how he felt. Or perhaps he only felt that way as a result of working in a school. ‘What about before the buses came? Did you see anyone round the changing rooms who could have done this? Have you had any workmen in the school?’

  He spared her a frankly incredulous look. ‘Mrs Graham, if I’d seen anyone I thought might have done this I’d have said so by now. No, I didn’t see anyone carrying that drum into the shower block and leaving without it. Yes, there have been workmen in the school – there always are, this is a big complex. But I didn’t see anything suspicious. If I’d seen someone somewhere he shouldn’t have been, or doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, I’d have stopped him.’

  Liz nodded. ‘Of course. I’m sorry, I have to ask – people forget all sorts of important details until they’re prompted. These workmen: do you know what firm they’re from and what they’re doing?’

  ‘Well, the overalls say Sidgwick & Mellors,’ said the caretaker heavily, ‘so that might be a clue. They’re strengthening the floors in the chemistry block and refitting the library.’

  Both were on the far side of the campus from the sports field. ‘And you haven’t seen any of them wandering round here?’

  ‘No.’

  He wasn’t going to say any more because he hadn’t seen any more. Liz believed him: if he’d seen anything suspicious he’d have done something about it. Not to protect the children but to preserve the sanctity of his little kingdom. Mary McKenna might be the principal of Castle High, but even she knew who was the boss. Liz left Duffy to his swabbing.

  ‘Well, we know when,’ she told Dick Morgan. ‘If we can find a suspect that’ll come in useful.’

  Morgan sniffed apologetically. ‘Actually, he didn’t have to carry the thing up there this afternoon. He could have put it there days ago, linked up the hoses, left it ready to go. All he had to do today, and he didn’t even have to do this in person, was turn the tap. Half the pupils of this school would have done that for him for a fiver.’ Morgan had the same opinion of children as Duffy, perhaps because he had three of his own.

  ‘Terrific,’ growled Liz. He’d cast doubt on the only useful bit of information she’d garnered so far. She turned to the Scenes of Crime Officer. ‘Can you give me anything to work on?’

  It was too early for Sergeant Tripp to make even an interim report; all the same, the pained look was mostly from habit. ‘There aren’t going to be any fingerprints,’ he said judiciously, nodding at the
smears of aluminium powder. ‘He used gloves. The hoses and clips you’d find in anybody’s shed, the tap’s probably off a rainwater butt. The drum held cooking oil, probably came from a caterer.’

  ‘So he could work in a restaurant?’

  ‘Or he could have salvaged it from their bin.’

  Liz breathed heavily at him. What he was saying was No, I can’t give you anything to work on. ‘How about Forensics?’

  ‘Ah now,’ said Tripp respectfully, ‘Forensics. They’ll be able to tell you what brand of cooking oil, and what brand of jelly.’

  As a piece of science it was undoubtedly impressive; as an aid to detection it was negligible.

  ‘I’m going back to Queen’s Street,’ Liz told Morgan. ‘Tidy up here, then you can call it a night.’

  Brian, who was sitting on the wing of her car, looked up resignedly. ‘You’ll be burning the midnight oil, I suppose.’

  Liz lifted one shoulder in an apologetic shrug. ‘Don’t wait up.’

  Criminal detection is like most forms of creativity: ten per cent inspiration, ninety per cent perspiration. At nine twenty she and Shapiro were still pushing the thing across the desk between them like a very slow game of table tennis.

  ‘None of the items he’s used so far can be traced to an individual,’ the superintendent observed. ‘Anyone could have got hold of any of it. We can’t get at him that way. So what about the targets he’s chosen?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘High profile, good scare factor. Large numbers of people coming and going, even at the school. Though he’d be safer if he had a right to be there – a teacher, parent, ancillary staff, even a pupil.’

  Shapiro was doing mental arithmetic. ‘Assuming you’re right, that narrows it down to’ – he sucked his teeth – ‘maybe fifteen hundred people.’

  ‘You could rule out the smaller children,’ said Liz helpfully. ‘Lifting that drum into the roof space took a certain amount of strength.’