"Sharon and Wayne?" someone suggested.
"Yeah, maybe," Jeff said, 'but it's the same van all right."
"Well, that narrows it down," Sparky declared.
"We don't know they did it," I warned. "Let's not jump in with both feet half cocked. Maybe this van is running up and down the motorway all day."
"It's a start, though."
"Oh, it's definitely a start, and we have a number to look for now. See if the whiz kids can enhance those other plates for us, Jeff. Even if they can't give us a definite number they might be able to confirm that it's similar. Anything else, anybody?"
Sparky shook his head. "Sorry, boss. Wasted day. The lack of information or even gossip must mean something, but I don't know what."
"Right. Nigel…" I began.
He jumped to his feet and snapped me a salute. "Yes sir!" He thinks he's being humorous.
"Circulate all our friends, will you, with what we've got. Especially Traffic. The next time that van turns a wheel I want to know about it."
"No problem."
"Good, in which case I suggest we all have an early night, for once.
Catch up on the gardening while the weather's good."
"Tea on the patio," Maggie enthused. "Heaven."
"Painting the mother-in-law's window frames," Dave muttered. "Hell on earth."
"Cricket practice," Nigel said. "Absolute bliss, if it goes well."
"Cricket practice!" I scoffed. "It's wider bats you lot need."
"Tell me something," Maggie said. "Where do these villains get their baseball bats from? Surely it would be much easier for them to use cricket bats?"
"Cricket bats!" Nigel spluttered, affronted. "They wouldn't use a cricket bat!"
Sparky said: "Somehow, a yob wielding a Stuart Surridge three-springer doesn't have the same menace, don't you think?"
In my PC Plod voice I said: "Did you notice anything unusual about him, sir?" and then, in an upper-crust accent: "Ye-es, Officer. His hands were too close together."
"I thought it was a sensible question," Maggie murmured, pretending to be hurt.
"It was, Maggie," I told her. "And the answer is: God knows."
"Perhaps their counterparts in America use cricket bats," Nigel suggested.
"Magnum see-mi-automatic cricket bats," Dave added.
"Let's go," I said, pushing my chair back from the desk. "This is getting silly."
"Did you, erring him?" Dave asked me.
"Who?"
"Keith Crosby."
"Oh, no. I thought I'd wait for him to ring again. We've enough on our plates without resurrecting ghosts."
"Keith Crosby? The disgraced MP?" Jeff asked.
"Not sure, but I imagine it's him."
"What does he want?"
"I don't know."
"He lives in Heckley, over near Dale Head."
"So I believe. We had dealings with him a long time ago, didn't we, Dave?"
"You can say that again," he replied.
"What did he do?" Nigel asked. He was from Berkshire, brought north by tales of streets paved with opportunity and warm-hearted women, and therefore unfamiliar with local folklore. He would also have been in short trousers at the time.
"Nothing," I told him. "He just happened to own this house in Leeds.
Chapeltown. It burned down. Arson. Seven people inside were burnt to death."
"Eight," Dave corrected. "Three women and five kids. It was a hostel for battered wives. First job Charlie and me ever worked together on, wasn't it, squire?"
"Mmm."
"That was a sunny day, too."
"I know. Somehow it made it worse."
"Did he start the fire himself?" Nigel asked.
"Crosby? No, it was never pinned to anyone. There was a big stink about it and he was forced to resign as an MR'
Maggie said: "He has an MBE now."
"That's right," I replied, remembering. "For his charity work. He started some sort of Samaritan organisation shortly afterwards.
Rehabilitated himself, I suppose."
"That's it, then," Nigel stated. "He wants a donation."
"Very probably," I agreed, standing up and unhooking my jacket. "C'mon, or we'll be here all night again." Sometimes I've just got to be firm with them.
Audrey and Joe McLelland were a pleasant old couple. She was still confined to bed when Maggie and I called to see them on Friday morning, but one of the nurses had found a wheelchair for Joe and he was parked alongside her. The bedside cabinet was covered in get-well cards and she was busy opening the pile that had arrived that morning. The woman in the next bed was fast asleep and snoring, her toothless mouth gaping like an oven door.
"A policeman and a police lady to see you. Aren't you lucky?" the nurse said by way of introduction, as if she were talking to two infants. "Now be sure not to let them tire you out."
"We won't," I told her, and she dashed off to her other duties.
Audrey and Joe said they were feeling better and expecting to be going home later that day. Maggie told them to stay where they were and be looked after, if they could. I left her with Audrey and wheeled Joe out of the ward and into the lift. We bought two teas from the snack bar in the entrance and had them outside, me sitting on a low wall alongside him. Several other people were doing the same; relatives in summer clothes, patients oddly at ease in dressing gowns and slippers.
"I used to buy paints in your shop," I told him. "And 6B pencils. I think you got them specially for me."
"We sold a few," he replied, uninterested.
He confirmed what we knew about the van, and the baseball bats. The one he was threatened with had red stripes around it, as if it were bound together with insulation tape. Other than that he had nothing further to add. They had a son who was living in America and a daughter in Kent. She'd be coming up some time today if her husband could have time off work to look after their children. They'd decided not to tell the son. "He's in computers," Joe told me, as if that explained why.
We needed to know what had been stolen but didn't want to drag them out of hospital before they were ready. It would take weeks, even years for them to get back to anything like normal, and the bad dreams would probably be with them forever, but they were already over the initial shock. Whether they would ever feel safe again in their own home was doubtful, but I knew they'd both prefer it to Heckley General. Joe was reasonably well, but he'd be hopeless at telling us what had gone from where. We needed the woman's touch. I spoke with the doctor and he agreed that they could both go home the next day.
In the previous robberies the villains had taken any handy silverware and jewellery, plus the victims' credit cards. In the eight or ten hours' grace that they allowed themselves they'd stung the accounts for increasing amounts that were now up to the 3,000 mark. First of all, armed with PIN numbers, they took the daily limit of 300 from each account. Then, after practising the signatures, they did a tour of travel agents and bought themselves several 250 tranches of pesetas or dollars.
After that, it was credit card purchases of tyres, aluminium wheels, TVs and VCRs; stuff they probably already had orders for. It was like winning first prize in a game show all you can stuff in your Transit before the shops shut.
We had photographs of one of them, the bright one, presumably, courtesy of the travel agents' CCTV cameras. He was burly and wore a hat and spectacles in a variety of styles. This time it had been a beanie hat and heavy rims. I turned my pad sideways and did a sketch of the crime scene, with Burglar Bill standing before the counter. If we measured the height of the camera from the ground, the height of the spot on the wall behind him level with his head, and the distance between the two, a bit of nifty geometry would give us his height. To the millimetre.