"There's been another," Dave announced as I strode into the office.
"So I've just been told. Any details?"
"A baby. Swallowed some glass from a tin of baby food. That's all I've heard."
"And he's in the General?"
"Oh, yeah. And that."
"Look on the bright side, Dave," I said. "It's not Ebola. They'll be giving us a parking place down there soon. C'mon, let's go."
The doctor in charge came to meet us at the front desk and took us up to the paediatrics ward. He was black, with delicate hands and a soft, almost inaudible voice.
"The child was brought in yesterday evening," he explained as we exited the lift, "bleeding from a cut inside his lower lip. His mother said she found pieces of broken glass in a tin of baby food she fed him with and that she found blood in his nappy. We've X-rayed him but small pieces of glass don't show up very well."
"How serious is it?"
"Hard to say. Small pieces in his stomach will make him feel unwell, but in themselves they need not be dangerous." He stopped, his hand on the door handle. "Have you ever seen a goat eating leaves off a thorn bush, Inspector?"
"No," I admitted, stooping to hear him, hoping I hadn't misunderstood.
His face split into a grin. "Neither have I, but they do it without hurting themselves, even though their mouth parts are extremely soft. Babies' mouths and digestive tracts are similar. Ingesting broken glass is not to be recommended but it should not cause any damage if the pieces are small enough, and it should pass through relatively harmlessly. Powdered glass is not considered a problem. Bigger pieces may cause damage, of course, and we will analyse his stools for blood. Otherwise we just wait and see."
"There's been a spate of contaminated food at supermarkets," I told him. "No doubt you've read about it in the papers. It's what started the Ebola scare. We thought it had subsided, but evidently not."
He pushed the door open. "I'm afraid this was something more complicated than contaminated food. I'll show you."
Rory Norcup was asleep in an oversize cot, wearing only a disposable nappy and an adhesive strip that underlined his bottom lip. He kicked his legs and waved his arms as if deep in a disturbing dream. Sadly for him, it wasn't a dream.
"He's thirty-one weeks old, but has the weight of a baby half that age. There is also evidence of bruising on his arms, as if he has been gripped tightly, plus some old bruising on his back. He was clean when he came in but he has a severe nappy dermatitis, as if it was rarely changed."
"Where's his mother?" I asked.
"She brought him in and sat with him most of the night, but we sent her home not long ago."
"How was she?"
"Distraught with grief and concern for her poor baby." He paused between each word, implying that they meant exactly the opposite of what they said.
"You think she had something to do with it?"
"Almost certainly. Take a look at his face."
We peered at him, his eyes screwed shut, his expression contorted as he fought with demons that he had no name for.
"He's not the bonniest baby I've ever seen," Dave said, "but he's not Down's Syndrome, is he?"
"No, he's not a Down's baby."
"Alcohol whatsit?" I suggested.
"That's right, Inspector. FAS — foetal alcohol syndrome, caused by his mother drinking whilst pregnant."
"How serious is that?" Dave asked.
"It's a setback," the doctor replied, "but it can be overcome with a caring, nourishing upbringing."
"Which he won't get."
"Not with his present mother."
"You reckon she was trying to get rid of him?"
"No, she loves him, she says, but she's inadequate, has as many problems as he has, so she uses him to alleviate her own difficulties."
Dave leaned over the cot's high side and started making noises. "Hi, Rory," he whispered. "We haven't given you the best start in life, have we?" He reached in and covered the child's legs with the cellular blanket that he'd kicked off.
"I know what you're getting at, Doc," I said, "but my brain's not working. Tell me its name."
"Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She damages the child to win sympathy for herself. I've come across it before."
"That's a serious accusation."
"I know, and Munchausen mothers are plausible liars. They appear to be overly protective of their children, take great interest in their treatment and become familiar with medical procedures. It's not always to win admiration as a wonderful mother — sometimes they do it to strike up a relationship with medical staff and impress them with their concern. I'd say Mrs Norcup is a classical example."
"Have you seen her before?"
"Yes. Rory was in about a month ago, with an undiagnosed rash on his back."
"And you think she caused it?"
"It cleared up in two days with minimum treatment. She stayed by his bedside throughout."
"Perhaps we ought to talk to her GP."
"I'd think you'd find, Inspector, that he's completely taken in by her. He'll say she's a caring mother."
"We see the self-inflicted part often enough," I said, "but not the by proxy bit. Will he go into care?" "Yes. We've notified social services." "You'd better give me the mother's address."
"Why do they have kids if they don't want them?" Dave said as we drove through Heckley towards Gaitskill House, where Mrs Norcup lived. "There's no excuse for it these days. They teach them birth control before they teach them their times tables, hand out free condoms to the juniors, and still every teenage girl you see has at least one youngster following her around."
I looked sideways at him. "It just happens."
"Well it happens too often. Booze and sex, that's what does it, if you ask me."
"Well, yes, sex does play a part," I agreed.
A traffic light fifty yards ahead turned amber and Dave braked. Two cars behind us in the right hand lane accelerated through as it turned to red.
"Look at those two bastards," he cursed. "Did you get the numbers?"
"The second one," I told him, reaching into my pocket for my notebook. "Tell me the make and colour."
The light switched to green and we moved off again. "We could always adopt him," Dave suggested.
"Who?"
"Young Rory."
"What? You and me?"
"No, Dumbo. The police station. Not adopt him, just buy him treats, keep a weather eye on him, wherever he goes. Uncle Police."
"Or Uncle Nick?"
"Something like that. It needn't cost much. The surplus on the coffee money would cover it."
"Uncle Bill?"
"Are you taking the piss?"
"Not at all, Dave. It's a great idea." I shook my head and smiled. There was a temptation to say that he'd probably have another of his own clinging to his legs before much longer, but I resisted.
Gaitskill House was one block in what was known as the Project, on the opposite side of Heckley to the Sylvan Fields estate. The tenants of the Project aspire to live in the Sylvan Fields. It had sounded like a noble idea, back in the Sixties. Housing for everyone, at an affordable price because of new construction methods. Modular design, prefabricated units, pre-stressed concrete. The councillors banded the terms around as if they knew what they meant, and the ugly, pebble-dashed facade of the Project soon scarred the landscape.
The underfloor heating was expensive and unreliable, the joints between the prefabricated sections leaked and you could hear your neighbour clack his false teeth. In the eighties the half-empty flats were condemned and marked down for demolition, but sociological trends were at work, the sanctity of marriage was under threat and there was an upsurge in demand for accommodation for one-parent families. Now the council regarded them as a dumping ground for problem tenants, and the influx of asylum seekers had put a further demand on them.
A researcher had estimated that one parking place for every two flats would be generous, but the single burned-out Sierra standing in front of them showed the error of that calculation. Dave parked well away from it, where his car was highly visible from the upper balconies. Mrs Norcup lived in number 419.
I gazed up at the bleak concrete walls, streaked with rust from the reinforcing bars, and felt as if I were part of Rumania's secret police when Ceausescu was in power. "Third floor," I said, warning my nostrils to brace themselves. "We'll walk."
"Just a tick," Dave said, and strolled over to where four industrial-size dumpsters stood, next to the stairwell. He lifted a lid, looked in, closed the lid and looked in the next one.
"Bugger!" he declared. "They're empty. Looks as if the bin men have just been."
Mrs Norcup answered the door at the fourth knock, probably after doing a high-speed tidy of the flat. Her face was flushed pink but etched with concern as Dave made the introductions.
"Is it about Rory?" she demanded, a hand nervously raised to her face, her hair untidy. "Is he all right? Has something happened to him? I was just about to go back to the hospital…"
"Rory's fine," I assured her with a smile. "We've just left him and he was chatting up the nurses. May we come in and have a word?"
She looked at me, bewildered.
"Rory's fine. Can we come in, please?"
The flat was about what I expected: cheap furniture; untidy and smelling of cooking. I try not to be judgemental, lest others judge me. It was reasonably clean and the carpets didn't stick to your feet as you walked across them, for which I am always grateful. The electric fire was on low and the television on high. A man with a toupee and an orange face was talking about antiques. Dave switched off the telly and settled into the only easy chair that didn't have something on it, giving me a smile that said: "Beat you to it." I found an upright one and invited Mrs Norcup to sit on her own settee.
"The doctor told us that Rory should make a full recovery, Mrs Norcup," I said, "with no after-effects."
"Oh, thank God for that. I've been so worried about the little mite. I wanted to stay with him but I had to tell his daddy what had happened. I hadn't taken his phone number to the hospital."
"Where is Rory's dad?" Dave asked.
"He lives in Sheffield."
"Are you together?"
"No, we split up just before Rory was born. It was amicable. No one else was involved."
"Did you get through to him?"
"No, I missed him. I'll go back to the hospital and try him again tonight. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to Rory. I just don't know what I'd do." She started to cry and excused herself. Dave pulled a face at me. f walked over to the window and looked down to where the car was parked. It still had its wheels on.
Mrs Norcup came back looking slightly tidier, her face newly washed and her hair tied back, dabbing her nose with a tissue.
"You told the doctor that Rory had eaten some baby food with glass in it," Dave said.
"That's right. Can you believe it? Who'd do something like that to a little baby?"
"What happened?"
"I was feeding him. Do you have any children?"
"No," Dave lied and I shook my head.
"It's a special time, feeding them. It's when you bond. I loved to feed him, watch him watching me. I'd tease him and he'd laugh. He has a lovely laugh. It was peach and banana, Rory's favourite."
"From a tin?"
"Yes," she replied, looking at me as if to say: "What other sort is there?"
"Go on."
"That's it. Suddenly he was crying and blood was pouring out of his mouth. I poked my fingers in, cleared his mouth out, and cut my finger on a piece of glass." She looked at her finger but decided not to offer it as evidence.
"How much had he eaten?" Dave asked.
"About half the tin."
"Have you kept the rest of it?"
"Yes, it's in the fridge."
We moved into the tiny kitchen and she produced the offending item. It was one of those with a pull-tab on the top and she'd saved the lid, too.
"Did you open the tin yourself?" I asked.
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Was there any evidence of it having been tampered with?"
"Not that I noticed. You don't look for things like that, do you? You don't expect anybody to poison your baby's food, do you? What sort of people are there who could do such a thing?"
"There are some strange people about, Mrs Norcup." I spooned some of the gooey mixture out of the tin and rubbed it between my fingers. I found a piece of glass, about four millimetres square and gave it to Dave.
"Where did you buy this?" I asked.
"At Lidl, yesterday. I still have the receipt." She found it immediately, on the windowsill, together with another one. "I bought some shampoo, too, at Wilkinson's."
I took the receipts that she offered me, looked at them and handed them to Dave. The sum of her shopping trip was one tin of baby food and one bottle of shampoo. Hardly worth the journey into town.
"It's lightbulb glass," Dave declared, passing the piece back to me. "I'll tell you what's 'appened. They make this stuff by the ton, and have conveyor belts filled with it. A lightbulb above the conveyor has broken and fallen in the food. That's what 'appened. Nobody tried to poison your baby, Mrs Norcup."
Her face lightened, the crumpled brow smoothed out and she almost smiled. "You mean… you mean, it was an accident?"
"I'd say so."
"Oh, that is a relief. I'd never have slept again if I'd thought someone had tried to kill poor Rory. An accident! Oh, that's wonderful."
"Glad to be of assistance. Now, do you think I could use your toilet, please? I've drunk rather a lot of coffee this morning."
I took Mrs Norcup back into the other room and closed the door behind us while Dave went to the loo and had a wander round. "How do you get on with your neighbours?" I asked.
"I don't," she replied. "There's a white girl lives below who's on the game, a West Indian crack dealer above, Chinese on one side who have gambling parties that last for days and two Bosnian refugees on the other side. It's not a good place to bring up a child. We'll be out of here as soon as we can find somewhere else. Rory's dad said he'd try to help.
"It's like the United Nations." I heard the sound of flushing and the creak of floorboards. "Do you see Rory's dad very often?"
"Not really. He does his best, always sends Rory a present, but he works hard. He's on oilrigs."
I didn't know if they had oilrigs in Sheffield, and Rory hadn't seen a birthday or Christmas, yet, but I let it go. Dave came in and raised an eyebrow.
"We'll need a full statement from you, Mrs Norcup," he said. "I think you ought to come to the station with us."
Alarm flashed across her face. "But what about Rory?" she said. "I ought to be with him. He'll be missing me."
"Rory'll be fine. Do you have a coat?"
She produced a big blue and yellow anorak with Michigan in four-inch letters across the back. We locked the door behind us and led her down to the car. When I'd put her safely in the back seat Dave jerked his head at me and walked a few paces away from the car.
"There's glass fragments embedded in the kitchen worktop and glass in the rug," he told me. "We need a SOCO here, soon as possible."
I made the phone call and we took Mrs Norcup to Heckley nick. There was a good chance that she'd never see Rory again.
I was making a brew when Gilbert came in to ask about developments. He accepted the offer and I spooned Nescafe into a clean mug. Pete joined us, complaining about the roadworks that had sprung up on the bypass. I pushed the coffee jar his way and gave mine a vigorous stir.
"Why do they have to cone off half a mile of road when they're only working on about five yards of it?" he asked.
"They don't realise that the amount of delay is proportional to the length of time you slow the traffic for. There's a critical point when the traffic slows so much it becomes stationary."
"It's a conundrum, Peter," Gilbert told him. "Where's the sugar?"
"Write to the Gazette," I suggested. "It's in the Coffee Mate tin."
Pete handed out beer mats and we cleared spaces on desks in the big office to make room for our drinks. Maggie came in, asked if it was a private party and we told her to join us.
"So," Gilbert began. "What's the state of play with the lady you have downstairs?"
"According to the doc at the hospital she's a classic case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy," I replied. "I've invited the child protection unit to talk to her — it's a bit outside my experience."
Gilbert sipped his coffee and replaced it on the desk, adjusting the position of the beer mat until it was just right. "Dodgy jobs, these involving mothers and babies," he said. "One wrong step and we're accused of misogyny, or matricide or something. Be careful how you go with this one, Charlie."
"Matricide's killing your mother," Pete told us. "There was a bad case of MSBP reported in Norwich earlier this year. Mother of twins and they had about a hundred visits to hospital and operations and all sorts before she was found out. There's probably more of it about than we realise. Doctors are not as aware of it as they should be."
"Dave's at her flat right now," I told Gilbert, cutting off Pete before he could start telling us more about the Great Norwich Twins case. "He reckons there were fragments of glass on the worktop and on the rug in the kitchen. He has a SOCO with him. If they find any glass we should be able to match it with that from the tin of food."
"Good," Gilbert said. "Good. That's what we want — good, solid forensic evidence. So how does this fit in with the Grainger's job? Was that her handiwork, too?"
"I'm afraid not," I replied. "The two are unrelated."
"That's a shame. What's the state of play there?"
"We're struggling. There's been no new case reported for over a fortnight, so the scare may be over, But we're no nearer catching the culprit."
"Anybody in the frame?"
"Not really. Chief suspect is the wife of the warfarin victim, but it's a long shot."
Gilbert looked puzzled, then said: "Oh, I see. She poisoned her husband's pineapple and placed the other tins on the supermarket shelves to divert the blame elsewhere."
"That's right."
"There was a similar case in America a few years ago," Pete informed us. "Poisoned her husband with stuff you clean aquariums with after taking out a big insurance policy on him."
"Have another word with her, eh, Charlie," Gilbert said. "It's a high profile case with a lot of public interest. People in high places will start asking questions before too long so we need to draw a line under it as soon as possible."
"The wife works at the electronics factory," Pete added, "soldering components on printed circuit boards. One of the contaminated tins of pineapple had been soldered."
"There you go, then," Gilbert said. "You have a volunteer."
Gilbert stumped off back to his office and Pete found the file and swatted up on the warfarin victim. I indicated for Maggie to follow me and carried my coffee into my little office.
"You didn't sound convinced about the wife," Maggie stated as she manoeuvred the visitor's chair to a more favourable position.
"No," I replied as I hung my jacket behind the door, "but it gets Pete out of the way. There've been too many cases for it to be her. The crime is the poisoning of the tins, not the poisoning of Mr Johnson. It's either done for pure mischief or it's aimed at Grainger's. Enough of that, what was Tenerife really like?"
She laughed. "It was brilliant, Charlie, just brilliant. You'd love the place. OK, so it's a bit chicken-and-chipsy in some parts, but it's incredibly beautiful in others. And the weather is gorgeous. That's what you go for, isn't it?"
"It's been sunny here while you were gone. You missed the summer."
"So I've heard. Ah, well, you can't have everything. And what about you? How have you been, Charlie?"
"Pretty good. A couple of juicy cases to solve, with no personal involvement. Old-fashioned detective work, just like we joined for. I've been enjoying myself."
"And the love life?"
"Um, looking up, Maggie. Looking up."
The phonecall came about ten minutes later. "That's brilliant," I said. "Well done," and "Keep me informed."
I replaced the receiver. "She's coughed," I said. "Mrs Norcup has just confessed to poisoning her son with broken glass."
"Congratulations," Maggie said. "More brownie points for the department."
She went to tell Pete and make some more coffee while I rang Gilbert. It was a tidy conclusion to a difficult case, but we didn't rejoice or jump up and down with jubilation at a crime solved. It was a sad ending, and two lives would never be the same again. I stood looking out of the window at the traffic down below, marvelling at the way it kept going without all piling into each other. There were simple rules. That's why it kept moving, and in each vehicle was a driver with a pair of eyes and a brain and a desire to survive. So they obeyed the rules, or most of them, and everybody rubbed along.
"Do you take sugar these days?" Maggie asked.
I turned around and held the door for her as she manoeuvred in, holding two more coffees. "I don't mind," I replied.
"What'll happen to her?" Maggie asked, when she was seated again.
"I don't know. Little Rory's going into care. Dave thinks the department should adopt him."
"Hey, that's a brilliant idea."
I found a KitKat in my drawer and broke it into two. "There's this woman," I said, munching on my half of the biscuit. "She's all alone in a house and has nobody to talk to all day. No neighbours, no friends. Her relationship, if you can call it that, is on the rocks and she's reached the end of her tether, so she decides to do something about it. She damages the person she says she loves. Does it make sense, Maggie? Why would a woman do something like that?"
"Who can say? When you're in an emotional state there's no knowing what the human mind can rationalise. People do things like that to attract attention to themselves. They have bleak, loveless lives. Abject poverty with no possible way out of it, never any treats, never the centre of attention. It must grind away at you, a life like that."
"But it's not the sole prerogative of the poor, Maggie. It happens to rich people, too."
"I know, and that's more difficult to explain. But you can still be well off and have a loveless life, be downtrodden. And poverty's relative, isn't it? Most of us realise that our lives are in our own hands, we can do something about them, but some people don't see that, or they're trapped. They make a cry for help. Slash their wrists, take an overdose. You've seen it often enough, Charlie."
"That's true, but money helps, doesn't it?"
"Usually, but not always. And I draw the line at damaging the baby. That's cowardly, unforgivable, in my opinion."
"The baby?"
"Young Rory."
"Oh yes, young Rory. No, Maggie, I'm not talking about Mrs Norcup. I'm not talking about her at all."
"Sorry, Chas, but you've lost me."
"How do you feel about having your hair done, in the firm's time, on expenses?"
"Now you've really lost me."