Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  ‘And you think that, since your career is coming to an end anyway, it might as well be you that everyone’s aiming at.’

  ‘Better me than you, anyway.’

  Liz stopped in the corridor. After a few paces, reluctantly, Shapiro stopped too.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought,’ she said quietly. ‘But I don’t want to build my career on the ashes of yours. If a scapegoat’s needed, at least I’ll have time to put it behind me. You may not have. You’ve been too good a copper to go out under a cloud.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve nothing left to prove. Anyone who matters knows that, regardless of the outcome, this was the right decision. If a bunch of frightened people need someone to blame when things get nasty, that’s something I can do. After the dust settles they’ll see things clearer.’

  Liz wasn’t convinced. But she knew there was scant chance of changing his mind if he was doing what he believed to be right and necessary. She wished she could call on Donovan’s support. Donovan’s powers of persuasion were not legendary because logic wasn’t his strong point. He fought with his heart rather than his head. You could always poke holes in Donovan’s reasoning, but you couldn’t deny the strength of his feelings. He’d walk barefoot over coals to prevent Shapiro ending his days at Queen’s Street as a ritual sacrifice.

  But Donovan wasn’t here. He’d be back in a few days, and this wouldn’t be resolved in a few days. When he discovered what Shapiro intended he could be relied on to go ballistic without any prompting.

  Local radio ran it almost immediately; the television stations had picked it up by early evening. Everyone in Castlemere knew what had happened and what the official response was going to be by the time they’d had their tea. That meant the blackmailer knew too.

  Shapiro waited for his phone to ring. He’d primed the switchboard to start a trace as soon as anyone called him: if it turned out to be his wife, no harm done. He was sure the blackmailer would contact him, if only to place the blame for what might follow. It was another reason he took the lead at the press conference. He didn’t want the call to go to Tony Woodall at Sav-U-Mor or Kenneth Simpson the chemist, he wanted it to come to Queen’s Street where the systems were already in place.

  Not that he expected to trace it all the way to the blackmailer’s sitting room. If he got a fix at all it would be on a public phone that would be swinging from its wire in an empty kiosk by the time they got there. But someone might have seen him using the phone. A full description was a lot to hope for but even a passer-by might remember age, size, colour, style of dress. Just knowing he was a middle-aged, middle-class white man with no distinguishing features would rule out a lot of people who were none of those things.

  So he sat by the phone, catching up on his paperwork, and waited. And no one called. Not only the blackmailer but everyone else in town seemed to be giving him a wide berth. At one point he asked the switchboard to make sure his line was working. It was; still no one wanted to talk to him.

  At seven o’clock he called Angela to say he was sending out for a sandwich and didn’t know when he’d be home. She knew why, asked no questions, wished him luck. Though the exchange took hardly a minute he was oddly cheered by it. Six months ago he’d had no one to tell he’d be late home, no one who cared if he went home at all. Ten years ago there’d have been a tight-lipped intake of breath as if he’d done it on purpose. Perhaps it had been a mistake getting married in the first place. Perhaps if they’d lived in sin for thirty years Angela would never have left him. Married people expect more of one another, and he’d never been in a position to give her all she was entitled to.

  Mary Wilson was going out so she brought him a round of cheese and pickles that was at least as kosher as he was. Actually, he quite enjoyed the odd ham sandwich when there was someone new on the desk. He sat by his phone and ate his tea, and tried to think of something – anything – that he knew about his adversary and somehow hadn’t registered. But there was nothing.

  At ten fifteen the phone finally rang.

  Liz had given up and gone home half an hour before. Just long enough, Shapiro thought ruefully, to get into her pyjamas and start making some supper. Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first time a police officer had turned out with pyjamas under his clothes. He called her home number.

  ‘Meet me at Castle General. They have someone in ICU they think we ought to know about.’

  His name was Martin Wingrave, he was thirty-six, he was a joiner, and he wasn’t up to answering questions. He was in an isolation ward awaiting transfer to Cambridge Fever Hospital.

  Shapiro frowned. ‘And this concerns me because … ?’

  Dr Gordon was a man in his early thirties with an expression of earnest scholarship behind thick glasses. ‘Because he has cholera, and he didn’t get it from an unwise ice-cream in Karachi. He got it here, in Castlemere, from a bottle of cold remedy.’

  Shapiro shut his eyes. So that was it: that was the next move in the game. The blackmailer had done with empty threats and minor injuries and gone straight up the scale to life-threatening communicable diseases. He’d said people would die if he wasn’t taken seriously: this was him proving it.

  ‘Is he in any danger?’ asked Liz through clenched teeth.

  Dr Gordon gave an awkward shrug. ‘He’s certainly sick. And people do die of cholera – even with modern treatments you can expect to lose about one per cent of patients. Worldwide, Vibrio cholerae kills five million a year; but most of them are children and Mr Wingrave’s a fit man at the peak of his strength with access to good medical treatment. I can’t offer a guarantee, you understand, but I’d be surprised to lose him.’

  Behind the shut eyes Shapiro had been thinking. ‘You know where he got the bug. Does that mean you have the bottle it came in?’

  Dr Gordon took them down to the pathology department in the basement. In a sealed plastic sleeve in a fridge with a warning sign on the door was a small brown bottle of the sort that wait in expectant ranks in every chemist’s shop in the land every winter. ‘Philbert’s Cold & Flu Remedy,’ proclaimed the label. ‘Because Granny knew best.’

  Also in the sleeve were the square cardboard box the bottle came in and the white address label that had fluttered out of the box when the paramedic picked it up to see what his patient had overdosed on.

  The label read: ‘This was cholera.’

  ‘Which took the guess work out of it,’ said Dr Gordon. ‘Is he behind this? The man you’re looking for?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Shapiro with heavy certainty.

  It occurred to him then that he wasn’t getting much input from Liz, and he looked round to see what she was thinking.

  Her brow was furrowed as if she were trying to remember something. She started to say, ‘I’ve seen one of those somewhere before.’ But halfway through the sentence she remembered where. Shock hit her like a slap in the face and her eyes flew wide.

  ‘Donovan was swigging that stuff like a soft drink when I saw him off at the wharf!’

  6

  Shapiro left Liz to discover what she could at the hospital and returned to Queen’s Street. Soon news of Martin Wingrave’s misfortunes would get out. This was a frightened and angry town already, when people realized the lengths this man was prepared to go to … Well, Shapiro needed to be in his office. Eighty thousand scared people are a mob in the making. He wanted to be on hand to forestall what trouble he could and deal with whatever he couldn’t.

  On the way back to the police station he called at his house. He left the engine running while he let himself in, located Angela and kissed her firmly. Then he went back to work.

  Liz forwarded the Philbert’s bottle to Forensics in the probably vain hope that it would yield some clues. Dr Gordon was called away while she was doing this; when she was finished she hunted him out again.

  ‘Cholera,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it. What’s the incubation period? What are the symptoms?’

  Dr Gordon looked pensive
. ‘Of course, this isn’t a classic case. If he really has got cholera from a specimen cultured for the purpose, the usual timings may not apply. If you get it from dirty water you could expect to be feeling ill within twelve to forty-eight hours. Most people are still on their foreign holiday when they succumb. It lasts anything from two days to a week.’

  ‘It’s fairly dramatic, then. I mean, you’re not likely to confuse it with some ordinary run-of-the-mill sickness. A cold, for instance.’

  Gordon blinked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  So it was a coincidence. The blackmailer couldn’t have contaminated every bottle of Philbert’s Remedy in Castlemere; he probably only tampered with one. That was what he’d done before: a specimen act to show what he was capable of. Donovan had had a cold. If the Philbert’s Remedy was as good as Granny thought he should be over it by now.

  ‘How long before we can talk to Mr Wingrave?’

  ‘You won’t get any sense out of him tonight: he was febrile, I gave him a sedative. Tomorrow, maybe. But I’m hoping to have him transferred to a fever unit by then.’

  ‘Because of the risk of contagion?’

  ‘It’s not a nice thing to have in a hospital at the best of times, and we don’t know what to expect of this due to the atypical vector.’ He saw her waver and repeated it in patient English. ‘With him drinking it neat instead of as a few bugs in a contaminated ice-cube. Concentrated like that, it could be a lot more virulent. I don’t want it getting into the air conditioning while we’re waiting for the lab results.’

  If she couldn’t talk to the patient, perhaps she could get her questions answered elsewhere. ‘How did he get here? Did somebody call an ambulance?’

  ‘He did, apparently. And not a moment too soon. If he’d waited any longer I don’t think he’d have got to the phone.’

  So he lived alone: no family who might know where he bought his cold remedy and when. ‘Do you have the address?’

  It was a flat in one of the big red-brick villas in Rosedale Avenue; the paramedics had lifted his keys when they collected him so she wouldn’t have to break in.

  Something occurred to her before she left. ‘Do I need to take special precautions in there?’

  ‘Rubber gloves and a face-mask would be a good idea.’ Gordon found some for her. ‘Otherwise, do what you do abroad: don’t drink the water.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk to Wingrave as soon as he’s making sense. Will someone call me?’

  ‘Of course.’ He gave her the number of the fever hospital in case Wingrave was transferred before that.

  Liz needed to know when and where Wingrave bought his cold remedy, although she had little doubt it would have been from a local shop in the last few days. That was what the blackmailer needed: an alarmingly sick victim at just the right time to swing the vote. Which suggested someone familiar with his material. A doctor, a medical scientist? Her thoughts strayed back to Miranda Hopkins. She worked with botulism: perhaps she also worked with, or at least had access to, Vibrio cholerae.

  And she lived in the same street as Martin Wingrave. Coincidence? Quite possibly: there were a lot of houses, and a lot of them were in flats. There was a good chance they knew one another, at least by sight. But then, if Hopkins were involved, why draw attention to herself by poisoning a neighbour?

  But whoever did it, and precisely how they did it, it must have taken a little time. Time to doctor the bottle; time to plant it on a shelf; time for Wingrave to buy it, take it and become ill. It was hard to see how it could all happen in less than a day. So this wasn’t a response to what Shapiro told the press conference eight hours ago: it was a response prepared one or more days ago to what the blackmailer knew Shapiro would be saying about then.

  Oh yes: this was a clever man. Cold, and clever.

  The flat confirmed that Martin Wingrave lived alone. There were no feminine traces, just tweed and wood and leather. A neat man, careful and particular; and the last time he’d been here, a desperately sick one. Even through her mask the smell was overpowering. She went to open the windows, stopped herself just in time. She didn’t know enough to be sure she wouldn’t release a plague on the town like a hungry tiger. She put on her mask and bore the discomfort.

  Liz tried to visualize the sequence of events. Martin Wingrave caught a cold and bought a bottle of Philbert’s Remedy. He couldn’t have had it in his bathroom cabinet from the last time he had a cold or it wouldn’t have been tampered with. He brought it home and started taking it. But as his cold got better Wingrave got worse. Maybe he thought it wasn’t so much a cold as flu, in which case he’d keep taking the medicine.

  He hadn’t had the bottle more than a couple of days. The chemist’s bag should still be around, either in the rubbish or – he was a neat man, organized, a place for everything and everything in its place – in a kitchen drawer.

  She tried the drawers first. And there it was, top of the pile – a blue plastic bag emblazoned with an official-looking crest and the name of Kenneth Simpson, Dispensing Chemist. She went to knock Mr Simpson out of his bed above the shop in Brick Lane.

  It took the chemist a minute but then he remembered: Mr Wingrave bought the remedy, along with a bumper pack of paper hankies and something soothing for his nose, on Monday afternoon.

  Liz nodded. ‘That fits. I’m sorry, Mr Simpson, this sod has it in for you. He probably planted the cold remedy at the same time as the baby lotion.’

  Simpson regarded her glumly. ‘Aren’t there any other chemists in town?’

  ‘I suppose it was safer for him than visiting two different shops.’ Something occurred to her. ‘You fill prescriptions, don’t you?’ He nodded. ‘That could be how he did it: brought in a prescription, and while you were in the back he doctored a couple of items from your stock. Martin Wingrave came in on Monday afternoon, Sheila Crosbie on Tuesday: can you get me a list of prescriptions you filled since, say, Friday?’

  ‘I can,’ nodded Mr Simpson, ‘but there’ll be a lot of them.’

  It was the signature tune of this investigation: at every turn, either there were no suspects or there were too damn many.

  When she finally got home Liz found Brian still up and with a fresh attempt at supper ready to heat. She leaned on him as an old horse leans on a gate while he finished off. ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Do you want it in bed?’

  ‘Mm.’

  She told him where she’d been, what she’d discovered, all the blind alleys she’d marched up and then had to shuffle back down again.

  ‘Poor old Simpson,’ said Brian when she finished. ‘He’s not the jolliest shopkeeper in town at the best of times. He’ll be crying into his toiletries after this.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a useful shop, and you can always park outside. I was in about this time last week, stocking up. I got some Philbert’s Cold & Flu Remedy … ’

  They regarded one another levelly for a minute, then Brian got up and went into the bathroom. He came back with the little cardboard box held between finger and thumb.

  They inspected it from all angles but there was no warning, not in the packaging and not on the bottle. ‘Even so,’ said Brian, ‘I think I’ll ditch it. The last thing you need if you have a cold is the worry that you might get cholera as well.’

  Then he put his head on one side as something occurred to him. ‘You say he injected contaminants into the other products with a hypodermic? Well, not this one he didn’t.’

  He was quite right. It was a glass bottle with a tin lid sealed with a plastic strip. Any attempt to tamper with it should have been obvious.

  ‘Unless Wingrave was too preoccupied with his cold to notice,’ said Shapiro the next morning. ‘If the seal was removed it might not have struck him there should have been one.’

  ‘To remove the seal the blackmailer must first have opened the box,’ said Liz. ‘And if the box had been opened Kenneth Simpson would have noticed. He sells these t
hings all the time, anything abnormal would hit him in the eye.’

  ‘You’re suggesting our friend has found a way of penetrating a sealed glass bottle inside a shut box? He’s not just a blackmailer, he’s a magician as well?’

  She wasn’t suggesting anything, could offer no explanation. ‘Sorry, Frank, right now magic seems the best line of inquiry. We could haul in the usual suspects – Paul Daniels, Tommy Cooper, Harry Houdini … ’

  ‘Cardboard boxes aren’t supposed to be hermetically sealed,’ said Shapiro, ignoring her. ‘They’re folded together or glued together. Given a little time he could have opened the box carefully enough to close it again without it showing. Simpson only saw the outside. Wingrave saw the bottle as well, but he wasn’t familiar enough with the product to know it should have had a seal round the lid.

  ‘He didn’t do it on the premises,’ he concluded. ‘He bought the stuff, took it home, doctored it, then put it back on the shelves under the pretext of looking for something else. Tell Mr Simpson not to waste his time with the prescriptions, his name isn’t on the list.’

  They weren’t looking for someone who had spent a lot of time in the shop, rather for someone who had gone in twice.

  Or possibly not. ‘Actually,’ said Liz apologetically, ‘he may not have bought them from Simpson in the first place. He could have bought standard lines like that anywhere: he didn’t have to risk showing his face twice.’

  ‘They’d have somebody else’s labels on,’ objected Shapiro.

  ‘He peeled the labels off. When Wingrave bought his cold remedy, and when Sheila Crosbie bought her baby lotion, Simpson would just think his labelling gun had misfired and check the price on an adjacent item.’

  She became aware that Shapiro was watching her oddly. When she caught his gaze he cleared his throat, a reticent sound. ‘Frank?’