14 - Stay of Execution by Quintin Jardine

Author:Quintin Jardine [Quintin Jardine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 2012-02-10T05:08:42+00:00

41

‘Sarah, this is excellent,’ Dan Pringle mumbled, as he finished the last of his steak pie in the Skinners’ dining room. ‘It’s good of you.’

‘It’s good of Alex,’ she replied. ‘She made it while her father and I were out creating mayhem.’

An hour earlier, the DCC and the head of CID had left DI Arthur Dorward’s meticulous crime-scene officers poring over Major Tubbs’s guest bathroom, and headed for Skinner’s home.

They had briefed Sarah as soon as they had arrived. A toothbrush and a tube of combined tartar control and whitening-formula toothpaste had already been bagged and were on their way by car to the Howdenhall lab. No trace of a receipt had been found among Bartholemy Lebeau’s effects, but the manufacturer had established from an examination of the tube’s bar-code that it was part of a batch dispatched a week earlier to a pharmacist outlet in Newcastle.

‘But that’s terrible,’ she had exclaimed. ‘There could be little time-bombs ticking all over that area, just waiting to explode.’

‘Seven of them to be exact. That consignment was opened and put on the shelves on Friday; they’ve made eight sales since then. But that’s just the tip of it. Potentially, your bombs could be all over Britain. The rest of the batch has been pulled, and the shop’s checking its till records to see if any of the customers used cards and can be traced. The manufacturer’s implemented recall procedures for all shipments made up to seven days before the Tyneside lot and since. When they get them back they’ll start to test for contamination, but if it’s been done at random that’ll be a massive job. As that begins, we’re making public announcements on all television and radio news bulletins nationally. It’ll scare people, but it can’t be avoided. By the way, when did we last buy toothpaste?’

‘Six weeks ago. I bought two big pump dispensers, one for us and one for the kids.’ She shuddered. ‘Brings it close to home, doesn’t it?’

‘No, love. It brings it right inside the house.’

Sarah was still grim-faced as they finished their meal. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, guys. Right now all over the country there could be people doing what we’ve just done, then going to brush their teeth and . . . Poof! It’s horrible.’

‘I know,’ Bob agreed. ‘But maybe if it was going to happen it would have happened already. If there had been a mass contamination, I’d have expected more than one incident by now.’

‘Maybe there have been,’ his wife pointed out. ‘Lebeau’s death was taken for a heart-attack at first, remember.’

‘True, but you spotted the real cause within twenty-four hours. The worst case is that this is part of a national emergency; the best . . . although not for Lebeau, I’ll grant you . . . is that it’s a one-off.’

‘So, while the manufacturer and the retailers are doing their things, where do you go?’

‘Tomorrow I go back to the office to bring the chief fully up to date, and to field calls from Tyneside and any other forces with information.

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