by L M Krier
'Thank you. I'm actually calling from one of the homes. I only came in to collect the rest of my grandmother's things and one of the residents, and a carer, were both being violently sick,' he told her, and briefly outlined the circumstances. 'The old lady is still alive, but doesn't look good to me. The paramedics have just arrived and they're trying to stabilise her before they take her to hospital.'
'Do you want me to come over?' Bizzie asked.
Ted had to smile at that. 'It might be seen as a bit grisly, the pathologist in attendance before there's even been a death. I just wanted to know what I need to do to give you the most help, just in case the poor lady dies. I have to say, she really wasn't looking good.'
'Get the cake,' Bizzie said promptly. 'If there's any left, bag it and tag it for me. It could help enormously in determining the poison and the dosage. A sample of vomit, too, could be useful, if that's possible.'
Ted mentally kicked himself that recovering the cake had not been his immediate thought. He realised how much his mind was off its game in his anxiety over Trev.
'Anything else?' he asked.
'Detailed timings help a great deal,' she said. 'When you're taking statements, try to pin the times down as accurately as possible. The problem with a poisoner is that they are usually long gone before you or I begin our work. Good luck with it. And try not to worry about young Trevor, although I know that is easy for me to say and hard for you to do.'
Ted thanked her and rang off. He was feeling surprisingly emotional.
The doorbell rang and Ted went to answer it, knowing everyone else was busy elsewhere. This time he had to resolutely ignore the plaintive cries of, 'Sid! Sid!' as soon as he appeared. Maurice and Steve were standing outside the inner door. He let them in and briefed them on what he knew so far.
'As yet there is no death, but there is still the strong suspicion that this may have been a deliberate poisoning,' he told them. 'The staff are busy. You may have to follow them round as they work so you can interview them, but we need information, while it's still fresh in their minds.
'One of the residents, Betty, ate some cake just after lunch. We need to know if she had any visitors today, who they were, what they looked like. Timings are important, make sure you get them as accurately as possible. Find out if any of the residents are compos mentis enough to tell you anything useful.
'The carer who is ill also ate some of the cake. And we need that cake, if there is any left. Find it, bag it, and whatever you do, Maurice, don't be tempted to try it.'
Maurice chuckled at the boss's attempt at humour.
'Don't worry, boss, even I'm not that desperate for cake these days,' he replied.
'Now, can I safely leave you to it on this one? There's somewhere I need to be. Keep me in the loop with any new developments, any at all. I'll be on the mobile.'
He only realised that he'd forgotten to pick up his grandmother's possessions once he'd put the car in the garage and let himself into the house.
Trev was sprawling on a steamer chair on the patio, with a glass of red wine. He raised the glass in Ted's direction as he said ironically, 'Red wine. It's good for the heart.'
Ted perched on the edge of the chair and gave him a hug.
'Don't even joke about it,' he said. 'Are you ok? Did Bizzie help? I bet she enjoyed the bike ride.'
'I like Bizzie. She certainly doesn't pull her punches, and she's a total speed freak on the back of the bike,' Trev chuckled. 'She told me possibly slightly more than I wanted to know about this stupid heart condition I may have. She did at least assure me that it's not a racing certainty that I will have inherited it. She also gave me the number of a heart specialist friend of hers to get the tests done.'
They were interrupted by Ted's mobile ringtone, Freddie Mercury singing Barcelona. Ted glanced at the screen.
'Sorry, I have to take this, it's Maurice.'
Trev shook his head in mock despair. 'I've told you, you can have different ringtones for different people.'
'Maurice? What's the latest?' Ted asked as he took the call.
'Sorry, boss, it just became a suspicious death,' Maurice told him. 'Poor old Betty didn't even make it as far as the ambulance before she popped her clogs.'
Chapter Twenty-four
Unusually, Virgil Tibbs was the last to arrive for the morning briefing on Monday. Even Jezza beat him in. His weekend in Paris had clearly gone well as he was beaming from ear to ear when he came into the main office.
Ted, already in position in front of the white board, noticed and said, 'If you have some good news, Virgil, let's hear it. I have bad, so we could do with something for us all to smile about.'
Virgil took his seat, still grinning and said, 'Me and the wife had an amazing time in Paris. And she told me she's pregnant.'
There was a chorus of congratulations, then Maurice added, 'How'd you manage that? I thought you weren't getting any, as you're always falling out about your hours?'
'Yeah, but come on, what woman could resist me for long?' Virgil asked jokingly.
'Right, quick drink on me in The Grapes this evening after work. This is certainly something to brighten the day. Jezza, I hope you'll join us?'
'I'm washing my hair,' she replied curtly.
'That's a shame,' Ted said evenly. 'It would be nice if you could join us, even for half an hour, after you leave Cottage Row. You're part of this team.'
'Can't do it,' she said with a firm shake of her head.
Ted decided to let it go and continue with the briefing.
'Right, bad news. We have a fifth death. Elizabeth Hibbert, known as Betty, at Snowdon Lodge once more. It happened yesterday when I was there on a different matter. Same symptoms as before. One of the care workers was also taken ill but she's younger, stronger, and may well have ingested less poison, or got rid of it more effectively. She's now fortunately making a good recovery.
'Yet again, there was cake involved, brought in from someone outside. Maurice, can you you fill us in on what the witnesses said about who brought it? I take it Steve's taking a lieu day today?'
Maurice nodded, then Jezza chipped in. 'Why the hell weren't they implementing the ban on food from outside, for God's sake? You'd think with one dead already, they would have been more careful.'
Maurice looked acutely uncomfortable. 'I think that might be my fault, boss,' he said guiltily. 'When we did the tour of the homes checking details and asking them to stop letting food in, I went to that one but I forgot to tell them. Well, I sort of thought they would do it automatically, as they knew how the first victim died. I should have made sure. I'm really sorry, boss.'
Ted sighed to himself. He felt like karate-kicking Maurice right round the room and out of the window. But he made it a point not to blame members of his team, and certainly not in an open meeting. And it was a reasonable mistake to have made. He, too, would have thought that the home would have realised for themselves, after the first death.
'Don't sweat it, Maurice, it was a reasonable assumption to make. Just please don't assume anything next time,' he looked round at the team, 'any of you. But now we know that lightning can strike twice in the same place, we need to be extra vigilant. Do a ring-round of the homes again, remind them all how important it is.
'So, what about the bearer of the cake? Is it the same Angie as in the death of Mrs Jones? Maurice, did you get a description?'
'I did, boss, but the carer I spoke to had never met the first Angie. She only works weekends there, so she wouldn't have been there on the day your gran got poisoned,' Maurice told him. 'But according to her, the woman who brought the cake was called Ann, a neighbour of Betty's. She said she was about forty, medium height, short, curly, brown hair and green eyes. That's all she knows.'
'Could easily be the same person,' Jezza said with a shrug. 'The height is about constant through all the descriptions. Hair can be changed with a wig. Eye colour can be altered with coloured contact lenses. It could even be a bloke in drag.'
Ted was scribbling the description up on the white board with the others as Maurice spoke.
'We're missing something in all of this,' he said, standing back and looking at it. 'This can't surely be just a random killer? There’s got to be something linking all our victims. But what the hell is it?'
'They're a bunch of parasitic old grunters taking up valuable oxygen?' Jezza said, then as Ted and the rest of the team glared at her, she shrugged and spread her hands. 'What? I'm just trying to get inside the killer's head. Look for their motivation. Maybe it's time to think of bringing in a profiler?'
This time, the other members of the team chuckled and even Ted smiled. Seeing her puzzled look, Mike told her, 'The boss is rather allergic to the whole idea of profilers.'
'It works wonderfully well on the telly,' Ted explained. 'You know, someone like Fitz or that Geordie bloke start talking to themselves and come up with exactly what the killer is thinking and where they're going to strike next. Unfortunately, in real life, there's not much concrete evidence that it does any good. But I promise to consider it, if we don't get a breakthrough soon.
'But Jezza is definitely right on one thing. We need to keep coming back to Motive, Means, Opportunity,' he reminded the team. 'The waste of oxygen and the bed-blocking idea both seem reasonable to me as possible motives. Where's Steve up to on tracing press cuttings of relatives with an axe to grind, Maurice?'
'He's done us a printout, boss, some names we can start checking up on today,' Maurice replied, producing a sheaf of papers, which he handed round. 'The trouble is, there's a fair bit of 'a relative who asked not to be identified' in most of the articles, so we may not have all the information.'
Ted nodded. 'Right. Means. Just about anyone would have, I would say. Jezza, from what you found out, anybody could buy any of the plants involved from their local garden centre, is that right?'
Jezza nodded. 'They'd need to know in advance which were poisonous but that's a piece of piss to find out from Google.' She saw Ted's disapproving look at her turn of phrase and protested, 'Well, I was going to say a piece of cake but I thought you'd say I was being flippant.'
Even Ted had to smile at that.
'Finally, Opportunity. Well, I can say, from personal experience at Snowdon Lodge that Jack the Ripper could get in there and do whatever he wanted to, without anyone noticing. Can one of you compile a list of security or the lack of it at all the other homes, just so we know where we're at?
'Also find out which of our victims had ever had to be hospitalised, just in case the bed-blocking idea is the real motive.'
Ted headed for his office while the rest of the team got on with their appointed tasks. He had yet another mountain of paperwork awaiting his attention. But first he needed to make a phone call to sort out Trev's appointment for heart tests. He had undertaken to do it, so he could be sure it was sorted as soon as possible.
He grabbed a quick sandwich at lunch time, intending to work through at his desk. He was just about to tuck into it when his mobile rang. The caller display showed it was Steve.
'Hi, Steve, I thought you were on a day off today?' Ted said in greeting.
'I am, sir, but I thought you'd better take a look at the local rag's website.'
Dreading what he was about to see, Ted reached for his computer. It did not sound good. Trev had patiently shown him how to bookmark pages for easy retrieval, as Ted was not a natural with technology. He found the one he needed.
'And I thought you might like to see it before the Super does, sir,' Steve added.
Ted's eyes fell on the page in question and went straight to a headline asking, 'How safe are your parents?'
He swore under his breath as he quickly scanned the text which began, 'Parents are used to worrying about their children in the modern world. But here in Stockport, it's the turn of children to worry about their parents and grandparents, after a succession of sudden deaths in care homes, which the police are treating as suspicious.'
'Thanks, Steve, for the heads-up,' he said gratefully. 'The Super's been out all morning so I'll try and catch her before she sees this for herself. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. Now go and have a day off that actually consists of not doing any work.'
He phoned down to the front desk to ask them to let him know the minute the Ice Queen put in an appearance. He did not have long to wait. He went hurriedly downstairs to her office the minute he got the call, knocked, and waited for her summons to go in.
She gave him a shrewd look, then went to switch on her coffee machine.
'I'm sensing from your expression that this is not a social call?' she asked.
Ted shook his head and filled her in on everything, from the fifth victim to the newspaper article online.
'I don't understand how this latest death happened,' she said. 'Did you not tell me that you had asked the homes to stop allowing food from outside to be consumed by the residents?'
'I did, ma'am, but there was a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line,' Ted told her evasively.
'Are you saying one of your team slipped up, Inspector? Which one?'
'I accept full responsibility, ma'am, so I would prefer not to say. If something went wrong, I clearly didn't brief the team correctly.'
'As ever, your loyalty to your team is commendable,' she said dryly. 'Now, this débâcle with the local newspaper, yet again …'
She was interrupted by the ring of her mobile phone. She checked the caller display and said tersely, 'Chief Constable,' then took the call.
She was clearly getting an ear-bashing as she barely managed to say two words. Finally, she said, 'Yes, sir, he's here with me now,' and wordlessly handed the phone to Ted.
Instinctively, Ted stood up to take the phone from her, then remained standing, almost to attention, as he received the biggest bollocking he'd ever taken in his entire career.
The top brass usually approved of Ted. He had an excellent clean-up rate, he generally did things by the book, his personnel management skills were good and his paperwork was always on time. They were always disappointed by his refusal to accept commendations and honours, and his PR skills were definitely lacking. He had a habit of scowling at the press during conferences as if secretly plotting painful martial arts deaths for all of them. But he was normally flavour of the month.
Not today, however, as he stood in silence in the face of an almost non-stop tirade. Matters were made worse by the fact that he felt himself that he merited most of it. He had had his eye well and truly off the ball with this case. Basic, sloppy mistakes had been made. It was not like him and he knew the comments directed at him were largely justified.
The newspaper article was bad enough as it stood. But it had been written before news of the fifth death had leaked out. He hardly dared to think what would happen once that news became public.
He did not get the chance to say a single word, even in goodbye. At the end of the call, it was disconnected so abruptly that he had a mental image of the Chief Constable hurling his mobile phone across his office in fury.
The Ice Queen was just putting bone china mugs of coffee in front of each of them and sitting back down.
'That's me thoroughly told, then,' Ted said ruefully, also taking a seat.
'I do hope you don't find this situation amusing, Inspector?'
'No ma'am, not at all. I apologise for the flippant remark.'
The Ice Queen was studying him keenly.
'I have to say, Inspector, that you are not up to your usual performance. Is there something I should be aware of? Is the presence of DC Vine putting too much of a strain on the team during an already difficult enquiry?'
It would have been so easy to latch on to the excuse she was offering him. But it was not Ted's style. He always took full responsibility for his team and any mistakes they made, without making a scapegoat of any of them. It was one of the reasons he was universally popular, throughout the division.
'No, ma'am.'
'Then I
have to ask, and I do so without any wish to pry into your personal life. Is there something worrying you at present? Is it perhaps connected to the medical appointment you told me about?'
She was certainly astute, Ted gave her that. He was, as ever, loath to talk about himself and his personal life, but he clearly owed her an explanation.
'My partner, Trev, recently found out that he may possibly have inherited a life-threatening heart condition,' he said, trying to keep his voice steady. 'We're arranging tests but we won't know for some time whether or not he is clear.'
'I see,' she said. 'Then can you give me a straight answer to a simple question? Are you up to heading this enquiry, or do I need to look at replacing you?'
Ted held her gaze steadily as he replied, 'Can I just say, ma'am, that I believe I am. But that if or when that changes, I promise to let you know immediately.'
She nodded in apparent satisfaction.
Chapter Twenty-five
The team had seldom seen Ted quite so down. When they made the short walk together for a swift drink in The Grapes, he looked like exactly what he was. A man who had just taken a serious verbal kicking, made worse by the fact that he believed he deserved it.
Maurice was mortified, blaming himself for his mistake. He kept apologising over and again to the boss he felt he had badly let down. In typical Ted fashion, he kept assuring him that nothing was his fault and that he took full responsibility himself for the direction the case had gone in.
When they went into the pub, Dave was all smiles to see them and asked Ted, 'How's your Trev now?'
Ted shook his head imperceptibly and Dave understood the message. The team knew nothing about Trev's unfortunate behaviour and it would stay that way. As a landlord, Dave was nothing if not discreet about what his customers got up to in the sanctity of his bar.
'I look forward to seeing him again soon,' he said, already pouring Ted's customary Gunner drink. 'Tell him not to be a stranger.'
Once the drinks were served and a toast drunk to Virgil's good news, Maurice sidled over to Ted once more.
