"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. Hand-written 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 all 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.