A Shock to the System (11 page)

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.

Then his eye lighted on something else. It was the word he was looking for. ‘Contains paraquat', it said on the packet. He picked a middle-sized box and read the cautions on the side.

Yes, that sounded suitably dangerous. He was about to go, then changed his mind and took a large box instead.

Four pounds twenty. A bargain, if it did what he wanted it to do.

Jauntily, he walked up to the check-out.

‘Not much good for ground elder, sir.'

The omniscient youth had appeared round the corner of a garden gnome display.

‘You want something more selective,' he continued. ‘What you got there'll kill everything.'

‘Oh, don't worry,' said Graham on a bubble of laughter. ‘That'll do.'

If his resolve had been slackening (which it wasn't), Saturday lunch would have tightened it up again. The children were at their most repugnant, cross at being refused money to go to the cinema that afternoon. Lilian had moulded her face into an expression of brave anguish, and kept asserting how sharper than the serpent's tooth it was to have an ungrateful child. And Merrily, still basking in the fact that she was not the child in question, was at her most infuriating. She had taken to playing a brave little woman role. Yes, they were hard up, but she wasn't going to be daunted by that. She'd fight back. Maybe she could make a large batch of chutneys and sell them. Perhaps a little stall outside the front gate . . . ?

Graham might have minded less if he had thought his wife really meant it, if these suggestions were genuine attempts to improve the family finances. But he knew they were made only for effect, obscure flanking movements in a campaign directed at him. He noticed she never mentioned actually getting a job. On the one occasion when he had suggested it, Merrily had gone all frail and exploited, saying yes, of course, if he really wanted it, he could ‘send her out to work'. She was sure she could somehow manage to fulfil what she still regarded as her primary duty of ‘giving him a good life'. And she was sure that Henry and Emma would get used to being ‘latch-key kids . And, as to the shame, the public admission that they needed the money, well that wouldn't worry her, she had asserted with a bulldog jut of her little chin, so long as it didn't worry him ... As she got older, Merrily used her mother's methods of exaggeration more and more.

The Saturday lunch ended with Graham losing his temper. This prompted bad language from Henry, tears from Emma, and from Lilian and Merrily the identical expression of a camel patiently inviting the final straw. Merrily said they could take a hint and they would all go out for a walk in Richmond Park, ‘because at least then he couldn't object that they were spending any money'.

Graham foolishly mentioned that the petrol in the car which would drive them the two miles to the park was not exactly free, and got a predictably dramatic reaction from Merrily. She produced her housekeeping purse and emptied its contents on to the kitchen table, begging Graham to help himself to however much it cost. She would hate him to feel that his wife was trying to cheat him.

When the house was finally empty of these elaborate ironies and recriminations, Graham poured himself a large Scotch and sat down. The awfulness of the lunch gave him a sense of righteousness. Everything awful that Merrily did now gave him strength, justification, a confirmation that his decision to murder her was the right one.

The shed was rarely used. Since they moved, the Marshalls had had too much to do in the house to pay much attention to the garden. The tools lay stacked against the wall as the removal men had left them. The hover-mower, the only piece of equipment which had been used the previous summer, lay across the floor, impacted grass beneath it giving off a damp vegetable smell.

Graham cleared the clutter of shears and bamboo canes from the table-top under the dusty window, and put down his equipment. A dark green bottle half full of sherry. A wine glass. And the large box of weed killer.

He broke off a foot-length of bamboo and was ready to begin his experiment. He hadn't done anything comparable since school and then it had been in rather different laboratory conditions. But this would be good enough to tell him what he wanted to know.

He poured an inch and a half of sherry into the wine glass. The brand he bought for Lilian was darker than the Tio Pepe she preferred, yellowish in colour.

He took the box of weed killer and shook out its contents. The poison was contained in little sachets, eight in all. With a Stanley knife he nicked the corner off one and looked inside.

His first shock was that the stuff was blue. Little blue granules rather like those tiny cake decorations known as ‘hundreds and thousands'.

Oh dear. Maybe they would change colour as they dissolved. He poured a few granules into the wine glass and stirred vigorously.

At first they seemed unwilling to liquefy at all, but then they did. The colour, however, remained. The sherry turned bright, bright blue.

He wondered, not very seriously, about weaning Merrily off sherry and on to Blue Curacoa, but, even if that could be achieved, he couldn't see her being fooled. The liquid had a nasty livid sheen on the top, and an opaque sediment was forming at the bottom.

He sniffed it. The smell hadn't changed. That was one thing in its favour.

Hmm. Nobody was going to drink from a glass like that by mistake. Maybe from a bottle, though . . . ? It was worth trying.

He emptied the remains of the sachet into the sherry bottle and shook it vigorously. For a moment he set aside the problem of getting Merrily to drink straight from the bottle. Just see if it works first.

He looked through the dark green glass. The adulteration of the contents was not apparent at first glance. The colour didn't look odd. But when it was held up to the light the thick sediment showed, and when he looked close, undissolved granules clustered against the sides like some obscene Chinese meal.

It was pretty obvious it wasn't going to work, but something kept him going. Maybe it took time to dissolve. Maybe more would have the required effect.

He ripped open another sachet and, forming a funnel from a piece of cardboard torn off the box, poured the contents in. Another shake and the bottle's contents looked even more bizarre.

Suddenly the incongruity of his actions struck and he found himself laughing. The whole situation was farcical and filled him with a strange elation. He slit open the remaining six sachets and poured their stock of granules into the bottle. Then he shook it, like a rattle, singing, through his giggles, the South American tune ‘La Bamba'. What he was doing seemed the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. The seriousness of his intention and the crass incompetence of what he was doing triggered his wild hilarity.

At last he sobered up and looked at the bottle.

No. No one would ever be taken in by that blue mass of half-dissolved granules. The person who drank through that lot would have to be very, very determined to die.

He heard a noise from the house and looked up to see Merrily waving from the kitchen window. Damn. Hadn't noticed the time. Well, he couldn't wash up his experiment now. Do it some other time when he was alone in the house.

He shoved the bottle, the glass and the remnants of the weed killer packing on a shelf behind a large rectangular can of creosote.

Need for a rethink. Silly to imagine it would have been as easy as that. He went indoors, mildly irritated but not depressed by his failure.

He carried the Stanley knife to explain his presence in the shed. ‘Wondered where it had got to, darling,' he said kissing Merrily perfunctorily on the forehead.

‘I'm surprised you can find anything in that shed,' she accused. ‘It's a terrible mess. Really needs tidying.'

‘Yes. Yes. Yes.'

‘You must get round to it some time.'

‘Sure.'

‘Though I suppose I'll have to end up doing it myself. Like most things,' she concluded with a long-suffering sigh.

The remark was meant to make Graham feel guilty. But he was damned if he was going to let it. Guilt, he had decided, even for trivial matters, was not an emotion in which he intended to indulge in the future.

He was coming down from having shouted the children into bed when he met Lilian in the hall. She moved her arm behind her back, but too slowly. He saw the bottle of sherry in her hand.

‘Where did you get that from?' he snapped.

She gave him the defiant look of the boy in
When Did You Last See Your Father?,
an expression that didn't suit her.

‘In the shed.'

‘Why on earth did you go in there?'

‘The bottle was around at lunchtime. I saw it. I knew you had hidden it somewhere, Graham.'

‘Why should I do that?'

She straightened up into a posture of martyrdom.

‘I know you don't like me, Graham.' She left a pause for the flood of contradictions, which didn't come.

‘But I do think hiding the sherry's pretty petty.'

‘But I wasn't hiding it. I was just using the bottle. It's not sherry in there.'

‘It smells like sherry.'

Oh God. Had she snatched a quick tipple out in the shed? What effect would it have? He had wanted to test the dosage somehow, but this was not the way he would have chosen.

‘Well, it isn't sherry!' He snatched the bottle from her quite roughly. ‘I was just using it for something in the garden. If you want a drink, there's some wine in the fridge.'

A deep breath telegraphed the start of Lilian's weeping. ‘I think you're very cruel to me, Graham. You know I'm desperately upset about how Charmian behaved. And now you ... I expected a bit of support from you ... I wouldn't have changed my will if I'd known –'

‘Oh, for God's sake!' Graham stumped off towards the garden. Going through the utility room, he saw the sticky labels Merrily used to identify food in the freezer. He tore one off and wrote on it with felt pen: ‘POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN.'

He stuck it over the bottle's original label. Out in the shed he hid the bottle deep in the corner behind a pile of seed trays. Too risky to put it in the dustbin. He'd dispose of it another time.

He looked out of the dusty window to the lights of the house next door. How warming, welcoming other people's lights looked. Perhaps, he thought wryly, that was how the lights of his house looked to outsiders, the glow of a happy family within. Huh.

It was going wrong. Lilian's finding the sherry shouldn't have happened. He had taken a stupid, unnecessary risk.

In fact, his whole approach had been wrong. Slipshod. Inefficient.

He had killed the old man effortlessly and that was now a source of fierce pride. But killing Merrily would take more cunning. In the euphoria of having made the decision he had been careless, underestimated the difficulties that faced him.