Simon Brett - A Shock to the System

It was certainly not the main reason for his consorting with Stella. He did that for a change of company and, he realised, from a shrewd sense of survival. If Robert Benham was set to exclude him from the legitimate sources of information within the company, then Graham was going to have to build up his own underground network. And Stella, soon to take over as secretary to the new Departmental Head, would be an essential contact.

But, though he had no particular desire to capitalise on it, Graham recognised that her sexual interest was flattering and might, in time, prove useful.

Keeping his options open, he said that supper one night would be very nice, kissed her gently on the cheek and left.

It was not until the weekend that he began to think seriously about the murder. The euphoria which followed his decision about Merrily’s fate had begun to dissipate from inaction. Also, Lilian was staying again ‘because she’s still so upset over Charmian’. His mother-in-law’s presence was the reminder he needed of his intolerable situation.

And his money worries remained. A grovelling letter to the bank had bought time, but not a solution. So many of the family’s expenses were essentials paid by standing order that, though he made himself unpleasant to Merrily about housekeeping and to the children about their entertainments, he knew that their actual savings could only be nominal. No, he had to stop paying the mortgage. And there was only one way to do that.

Murder, however, is easier in the abstract than it is in reality. Though the lack of repercussion from the old man’s death gave him an occasional glow of unassailable immunity, Graham did not delude himself that Merrily’s would be as easily achieved. For a start, it had to look like an accident. And, since he knew that the first port of call for every murder-investigating detective was the partner of the victim, it had to be accomplished in a way that absolved him from all suspicion.

The more he thought about the problem, the more his respect for successful murderers increased.

He quickly rejected the devices recollected from his occasional reading of detective fiction. Stabbing with icicles, bludgeoning with deep-frozen chops, injecting air bubbles into the bloodstream and employing Pigmies with blowpipes all seemed likely to raise more problems than they would solve.

Poison, though. . Poison did have possibilities. Not for nothing was it one of the favourites of the domestic murderer. Everyone ate and drank and, without resorting to the fictional hope of a poison unknown to medical science, there were an adequate number of lethal compounds around most houses.

Some research was needed. Graham went to the local library.

The girl behind the counter did give him a slightly odd look when he asked what they had on poisons, but directed him, without much confidence, to the SCIENCE section. Failing that HEALTH or HANDICRAFTS. Or she had a feeling there was something on famous murderers in BIOGRAPHY. Or, of course, there was the Encyclopaedia Britannica in REFERENCE.

Graham hummed cheerily to himself as he set out along the stacks.

SCIENCE proved unavailing. He fell eagerly on the Chemistry text books that were there, but they only glanced incidentally on poisons. Still, they did at least remind him of the little chemistry he had done at school. Maybe all those boring practicals hadn’t been wasted. Maybe they’d had some use other than getting him an O-level. Might be worth checking through his old notes when he got home.

HEALTH was also, perhaps predictably, unhelpful. There were plenty of references to poisons, but all concentrated on how to cure someone who had taken them. Which was the last thing Graham wanted to know.

HANDICRAFTS, he decided, had just been an optimistic guess on the part of the librarian.

BIOGRAPHY looked too dauntingly large a section for him to go through, so he went over to REFERENCE and took down the volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica which covered POISONS.

He sat down at a table and, amidst pensioners going through the newspaper racecards, mothers planning holidays with hotel guides and schoolchildren working on ‘projects’, he tried to find out how to murder his wife.

He stayed there for about an hour, rising periodically to fetch a new volume for a cross-reference, but at the end felt little further advanced. The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not appear to have had the would-be poisoner in mind when they compiled their great work.

Graham found out a good deal about the triumvirate of arsenic, cyanide and strychnine, but no clue as to how they might be unobtrusively obtained. Did rat poisons still contain arsenic? And if they did, how did one set about extracting it? Or feeding it to the victim? It didn’t seem the ideal solution. And he didn’t feel any more optimistic about building up a supply of cyanide from almonds or apricot kernels.

At the end of the hour the only hopeful fact he knew was that poisons were much used as weed killers and insecticides.

Graham Marshall set off for the garden centre.

There, too, there was a Saturday morning crowd, of husbands with worried expressions and steel tape-measures estimating paving stones, of pensioners carefully stocking window-boxes, and wives loading Volvos with dahlia tubers and garden furniture. Graham again felt light-hearted, even light-headed, as he walked between greenhouses and Gro-bags to the covered part of the garden centre. He felt a gleeful immunity from suspicion, just another commuter bent on titivating his rectangle of urban soil. His intentions were deliciously private.

As he went through the glass doors, a word came to him. A word he should have thought of earlier, a word whose dangers had recently received considerable press coverage.

Paraquat.

There seemed to have been a little spate of cases of children dying from accidental consumption of paraquat. Most of these had occurred on farms where the concentrated form of the poison was to hand, but Graham felt sure that a gardening version was available.

He also felt it was the ideal treatment for Merrily.

He looked along the rows of proprietary weed killers, but none was labelled ‘Paraquat’. Obviously an ingredient rather than a brand-name. He started taking down bottles and cans to check their contents.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

The assistant was young, with transparent down as yet unshaven over a spotty face. The green overall he wore was too large, suggesting that he was weekend staff, perhaps even still at school.

‘Yes. I’m looking for something with paraquat in it.’

‘Oh, yes, sir. Why? What exactly did you want to kill?’

Graham looked up sharply, but of course there was no suspicion in the boy’s eyes. It was a logical question to ask of someone selecting weed killers.

‘Well, er, weeds,’ he replied feebly.

‘Yes. Any particular sort, sir?’

Graham searched quickly through his memory and managed to come up with ‘Ground elder.’

‘Oh, well, sir, I think you’ll find this very good.’ The boy displayed a small bottle between finger and thumb.

‘Does that contain paraquat?’

‘No, sir. Glyphosate, sir.’ If he was still a schoolboy, the young man certainly seemed to know his business.

‘Oh, thank you.’

‘That is the best, sir.’ The boy hovered. ‘The check-out’s over there, sir.’

‘Yes. Yes. I’ll. . thank you. A few other things and. .’

At last the boy wandered off and Graham resumed his study of the shelves. He felt disappointed. He had taken a fancy to the word ‘paraquat’; ‘glyphosate’ had not got quite the same ring. Anyway, his eroded recollections of chemistry could not provide a precise definition of ‘glyphosate’ or its likely effects on Merrily.