The Longest Pleasure

by Douglas Clark

  “Are you suggesting he pinched one of those canisters, sir? Because if you are, I can tell you he didn’t. We took damn good care none of them was carted off.”

  Green came in. “Look, lad, if we thought you’d let a gallon of poison slip through your hands, we’d have said so. We’re not interested in your tin cans. It’s a man we’re after—perhaps a woman, but we think not—anyway, a scientist of some sort. Now think. We have good reason to believe he was on your patch right at the time when you rounded up everybody with scientific knowledge that you could get hold of to identify and handle that poison. There’s a possibility, therefore, that our chap was on your list of helpers. If we can have that list it could perhaps narrow our search.”

  “I see. What’s this scientist done?”

  “That, lad, remains to be seen.”

  “You think he caused this botulism?”

  “There’s a chance that he did,” said Masters. “So you’ll appreciate how important it is that we have your list and—equally important—that we interview everybody involved as quickly as possible.”

  Jasper shook his head. “We didn’t keep a list.”

  “No?” demanded Green heavily.

  “No, sir. Look at it this way. If we are looking for a lost child, say, we get scads of people turning out to help with the search. But we don’t take lists of names. We just get on with the job.”

  “But these were specialists, for a special job.”

  “I know that, sir, but it was an emergency. We’ve got quite a few scientists of various sorts on the island. There’s quite a lot of industry—light industry that uses a lot of research people more than shop-floor workers. There’s plastics, aircraft building, boat building, and all sorts of perfume, hygiene products and so on that are tested, researched and bottled here. We just sent out a call for all specialist personnel that could be spared. We even got science masters from schools.”

  “Who decided that you had got scientific specialists and not just any old Tom, Dick and Harry who thought he would muscle in?” asked Masters.

  Jasper shrugged.

  “Nobody?”

  “They vouched for each other. Every one of them was known to somebody else. In an island this size, divided up into pockets of population, they all know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I understand perfectly,” said Masters amiably. “I’m a great believer in such local community spirit and knowledge myself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us much at this juncture. So, we’ll have to reconstruct your non-existent list.”

  “Anything I can do to help, sir,” said Jasper dejectedly. “You’ve only to ask.”

  “Despite what you said about a lot of research-based industry here, there couldn’t have been many scientists involved.”

  “Twenty or so. Less than thirty, definitely.”

  Masters turned to Green. “We ought to be able to winkle out that number easily enough.”

  “Given a start by our friend here—a few names.”

  Jasper seemed eager to recover lost ground. “I’ll see to that straight away. You could have the first of them quite quickly. The fire service took care of the canisters. I’m sure they’ll be able to help, too.”

  “Thank you.” Masters glanced at his watch. “It is getting on for six o’clock now. See what you can do for us overnight, Mr Jasper. We’ll be here bright and early in the morning. Perhaps you would lend us a couple of guides for the day—uniformed men, so that not too many questions are asked about our presence here. I don’t want to upset the even tenor of holiday life, and plain clothes men are not as readily accepted without question.”

  “Two sergeants, sir?”

  “Why not those two the Chief Super met in the spring?” asked Green. “Gardam and Crowther. I’m sure they’d like to renew the acquaintance.”

  Jasper laughed. “I’m not so sure about that—from the way Sergeant Gardam told the story. Still, if that’s what Mr Masters wants . . .”

  “That would suit me very well,” said Masters. “It will give all three of us a chance to bury the hatchet.”

  *

  “The trouble is,” said Green, as they stood in the bar of their hotel in Ryde, “that even you, George, have become pessimistic about this one.”

  “Have you, Chief?” asked Reed.

  Masters grimaced. “Pessimistic? Perhaps. But I think the real trouble is I won’t allow myself to relax.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “This is a very serious case. One which, itself, has given us no help.”

  “I like that thought,” said Green, taking the last Kensitas from the packet. “Always before, the field has been limited. Big sometimes. Perhaps a thousand or so suspects to begin with. That means that at least you have an area to concentrate your work in. But, always, when there isn’t a limited field and you get no sort of a hint from a grass, a case becomes a headache. Take just one example. That Yorkshire Ripper business. An unlimited field to begin with. Then the local boys narrowed it down to somebody from the north of England, then the North East and finally—due to the fact that the bloke recorded his own voice and sent it to the police—they have been able to name the town, almost the street where he was born and brought up. But there’s just something missing. His Nibs said the case itself had given no help. Somebody else might say they haven’t had the necessary bit of luck. But it’s more than that. Luck suggests something quick—like a coincidence or a chance remark overheard—whereas help from the case itself would come perhaps from all the months and years of routine work those lads have put in. Nothing has come up.”

  “You’re saying this case is like that?”

  “Exactly. Just as they narrowed the field to an area in the North East, we’ve narrowed the field to a scientist or a scientific technician. Well, there must be scores of thousands of them about. We’re doing the routine stuff, too. That’s why we’re looking into people who might think they have been done down by Redcokes. But how long will that take to bear fruit, if it ever does?”

  “Never, most likely,” said Berger. “Grudges like that are usually secret ones. What I mean is, if people sound off about what they’d like to do to people who’ve done them dirt, they never actually do it. They let off steam by shouting about it. But secret grudges, they fester away in silence until they blow up like a volcano erupting and cause the owners to take drastic action. And the owners may well be mild-mannered people who have become embittered.”

  “Right, lad,” agreed Green. “So when His Nibs says the case isn’t helping us, he’s right. And we’re reduced to guessing—at least, he is.”

  “But,” said Reed, “this guess of the Chief’s has all the hallmarks of . . .”

  “Of what, lad?”

  “Well, it makes sense to me.”

  “You mean it could make sense,” said Masters. “That’s my point. A guess is a quickie, like the bits of luck or chance remarks the DCI mentioned earlier. And the essence of a quickie is that one should put it to the test immediately. While the enthusiasm for it is still red hot.”

  “What you’re saying, Chief, is that not having been able to test your theory today has taken the steam out of it?”

  “To some degree. I’ve been given time to realise just how monstrously coincidental it would be if the guess paid off. It means I’m a lot less sanguine than I was last night when I first thought of it.”

  “If you’ll allow me to say so, Chief, you’re looking at this from the wrong point of view.”

  “Am I?” asked Masters, surprised by the sergeant’s tone as well as his words. “What makes you think so?”

  “You’ve all along said this jaunt was a longshot. So it is. But a longshot is not just a guess. At least, this one isn’t. You’ve worked it out by deduction based on knowledge. That’s not just a guess. It’s the way all egg-head academics discover things and push out the boundaries of knowledge. I know what you’re feeling. You reckon there are so many other
things you ought to be doing. Interviewing those botulism patients, perhaps. But there’s nothing else you can do. Those patients can’t talk. Their throats are paralysed. You’ve been stopped from warning the public. You’d be no good helping Convamore and Moller in their laboratories. You wouldn’t be as good as local police in searching out local grievances. You’ve started everything up and now all you can do is sit back and wait—or try longshots like this. It may not pay off, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. At any rate I believe in it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well said, lad,” said Green. “Just for that I’ll buy the next round.”

  “It’s time for dinner.”

  “Is it? Good. That lets me out.”

  “You could always buy a bottle of vino for the table.”

  “Vino? Be your age, young Reed. I’d want white and you’d want red, and before I knew where I was I’d have paid enough corkage to buy the pub itself.”

  “You don’t pay corkage on bottles you buy here.”

  “Inflated prices, then. Same thing. I have a strong belief that no bottle of table wine is worth more than five bob. That’s my top limit.”

  As they entered the dining-room, Green stopped for a word with the head waiter. A moment or two later a litre bottle of medium dry Monte Cristo Montilla appeared on the table. “Now this,” said Green, picking it up, “is better and cheaper than plonk. Try it. It goes with anything.”

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “Many times.”

  “Why?’ asked Masters. “Bearing everything in mind.”

  Green looked across at him. “Doris likes it.”

  Masters nodded his understanding.

  *

  Jasper said: “I think we’ve got nearly all of them for you.”

  “Excellent.” Masters sounded in high spirits. It was a gorgeous morning, so much so that even Green had enjoyed the car journey from Ryde. In addition, Masters had salved his conscience by ringing his office and speaking to Lake who reassured him that nothing of any moment had happened in his absence. Now that the chance to prove whether his longshot was on target or wide of the mark had arrived he had cheered considerably. This, in turn, had cheered Green who believed matters always looked rosier in the evening than in the harsh light of a new day. If Masters had reversed this belief then it was for him, Green, a good sign: almost an augury of success.

  “Fourteen names,” said Jasper. “Of course, I couldn’t contact everybody, and people tend to forget, but if you question those you have there, sir, you should get a few more.”

  “Thank you. And our guides?”

  “In the car park. Crowther has a Panda car. I expected you would want to borrow it, seeing that you only have the one vehicle with you.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you. I was going to ask if you could let us have a car.”

  “Anything I can do for you, sir, I will. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you let me know what is really happening—when it’s all over, that is.”

  “The pleasure will be ours, lad,” said Green. “Now, let’s have that list . . .”

  After Masters had found and introduced Sergeant Gardam and a very sheepish Constable Crowther, he said to them all: “We have here fourteen names. My first thought on getting this list was that those who figure on it are obviously fairly well-known men for one reason or another. That suggests that they live here permanently and, though they may go to and from the mainland occasionally, I shouldn’t imagine that they are the sort who get about there quite as much as our man obviously did—from Somerset, to Derby, to Colchester, to Bournemouth and heaven knows where else.”

  “You mean the list is no good, Chief.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. But I suspect that the names on it will not contain the one we want, and . . .” he turned to Gardam, “. . . is there a Redcoke store or supermarket anywhere on the island, Sergeant?”

  “No, sir. You know the policy here? None of the big chain stores is allowed to open up in case they put the locals out of business.”

  “Thank you. I thought that was so.” He continued to address the rest of them. “So you see it is unlikely that anybody who actually lives here or has lived here for any great length of time will have been subjected to a raw deal from the Redcokes property division.”

  “What do we do about it, Chief?”

  “We interview each of these people in turn and during the course of the interviews we ask them for the names of any scientist who worked with them. In that way we should expand the list until, eventually, we really have met everybody concerned. So please keep the lists carefully and get to know whereabouts each person was working.”

  “We might be able to compile a map,” said Green. “You never know, it might tell us something.”

  “True. Perhaps you can tell us, Sergeant Gardam, how many days the search took.”

  “Three days, sir. Not that there was much to be found on the third day, though we had one or two calls of sightings up to a week later.”

  “I see. Get the days each scientist worked, too. Then the DCI can cover each day. My wife and I left the island on the Wednesday, so the first day of the search would be Tuesday.”

  “Joe,” said Green, addressing Constable Crowther. “You were down on the beach that first day . . .”

  “All three days, sir.”

  “Better still. Besides those poison canisters, was there a lot of other stuff thrown up on the beach?”

  “You name it, sir, and it was there. We got cartloads of timber, bits of clothing, even an old alarm clock and a few grapefruit.”

  “Tins of food?”

  “Quite a few, sir, but we were careful about them. They’ve most of ’em got their labels soaked off and they’d been close to those cans of poison. They were collected and dumped.”

  “You mean nothing was taken from the beaches?”

  “I’m not saying that, sir, because all the wood was, and I know for a fact that a life belt and a couple of jackets disappeared from a heap. So it’s likely other stuff went as well.”

  “We concentrated on seeing nothing dangerous went missing, Mr Green,” said Gardam. “The poison was kept strictly separate under guard the whole time.”

  “Fair enough,” said Green airily enough to give the two local men the impression that a few things wandering off was of no consequence. “Now, George, if I could have seven of those names . . .”

  Masters handed the list over and told off Crowther to drive Green and Berger, while Gardam was to accompany himself and Reed. “Report in here, by phone, please. After every interview. We can keep in touch with each other that way if needs be.”

  *

  It was a wearying task on so hot a day. The same questions over and over again; the jogging of reluctant memories—reluctant because long days on cold wind-swept beaches are best forgotten; who were your companions? were there any whom you didn’t know personally or didn’t know by repute? which beaches did you scour? did you remove anything from them? do you know anybody who did remove anything? After that, questions as to whether the one being interviewed had a laboratory at his disposal or did he work with slide rule and calculator. A quick inspection of the working area of the few who had access to laboratories.

  Then, because it was high summer, some were on holiday. Were they away or were they spending their leave at home?

  Masters decided to have lunch at the little pub in Cowes which he and Wanda had visited. It was overcrowded. They had to queue up and choose their food and be given a numbered ticket before pressing into the bar for a drink. It did little to refresh them after so hot and abortive a morning. Fortunately, Gardam’s uniform won him instant attention at the bar, and the wait for cold beer was not a long one.

  “We’re not getting anywhere, Chief.”

  Masters, determined not to give way to further pessimism, replied: “I think we are. This exercise was bound to appear abortive unl
ess we were lucky enough to strike oil very early on. Besides, we are eliminating them one by one. Virtually none of them has been to the mainland since Easter, for example.”

  “We haven’t tested their claims, Chief.”

  “Not at the moment. We may have to, of course.”

  “If we do, and find a discrepancy . . .”

  “It could help, or merely mean that the boffin in question is forgetful.”

  Gardam brought the beer.

  “You’re having a fairly thin time, Sergeant, just acting as guide.”

  “Don’t worry about me, sir. It’s as good a day as any to wait about doing nothing or riding round the island in your Rover.”

  “You’ve done the ringing in after each interview,” reminded Reed.

  Gardam grinned. “Hard work that is. I don’t think I’ll manage to endure the cracks I’m getting from Dave Wright—the desk sergeant. Which reminds me, sir, I’d better get out to a phone for this last call. It’s nearly two o’clock.”

  “Is it that time already?”

  “Watch my beer,” said Gardam to Reed.

  “Finish it first,” said Masters. “We’ll look after your sandwiches when they come.”

  Gardam swallowed the last of his beer and pushed his way out of the bar. “Get him—and us—another,” said Masters to Reed. “You just might have them by the time he gets back.”

  In the event, both beer and sandwiches were on the little corner table Masters had managed to secure by the time Gardam returned. He looked hot and excited.

  “Sorry to have been so long, sir, but there was somebody using the kiosk, and I didn’t want to speak from here with this crowd listening.”

  “Sit down and have your lunch.”

  “No time for that, sir, I’m afraid. DCI Green wants to see you. He’s in a pub in Yarmouth.”

  “Sit down,” ordered Masters. “Have your sandwiches and tell me exactly what the message was.”

  Gardam spoke with his mouth full.

  “Sergeant Wright said Mr Green rang in, at about twenty to two. What he said was to tell you when you next rang in that he was just going to have lunch at the pub in Yarmouth, and if you wanted to enjoy a bite, you’d join him there as soon as you could.”