A Shock to the System

by Simon Brett

  The murder was now part of the same imagery, a major challenge which he had met. It was as if he had completed his first marathon. From now on he knew he could go the distance; it was just a matter of improving his performance.

  Having decided Merrily’s fate, he felt again as if he were entering a period of intensive training.

  He also felt renewed strength in his identity when it came under threat.

  Which was just as well, because his identity received a considerable blow on the Monday morning, when he was summoned to Robert Benham’s office.

  After Stella had showed him in, Graham began by thanking Robert for ‘a really terrific weekend’.

  ‘Oh yes. Glad you enjoyed it.’ The dismissive tone made this sound like a reprimand, as if Graham were gratuitously introducing his private life into office hours. Robert moved quickly on. ‘Listen, I’ve just had a letter about a three-day conference in Brussels. Set up by some EEC committee. I gather it’s a comparative study of personnel methods in the member countries. I want you to go and wave the Crasoco flag.’

  Graham was gratified. Very few foreign trips came the way of the Personnel Department. He got the occasional day or maybe an overnight at one of the regional offices, but other countries were administered either locally or from America. On the rare occasions when opportunities for travel had arisen in the past, George Brewer had appropriated them.

  So it was good news. The Brussels trip sounded like a classic non-essential freebie. Maybe, Graham began to think, life under Robert Benham wouldn’t be so bad.

  ‘Oh, that sounds. .’ He was about to say ‘fun’, but realised that the word might lack gravity, so substituted,

  ‘. . interesting. When is it?’

  ‘22nd to 24th of April,’ replied Robert, looking at him with unusual intensity.

  ‘Well, that should be. .’ Then Graham realised the reason for the look. ‘But the Departmental Heads’ Meeting is on the 23rd.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The Departmental Heads’ Meeting was an important part of Graham’s power-base within the company. Twice a year the heads of all the London departments, as well as the regional ones, met to discuss staffing problems and proposals. Chairing the meeting was one of the tasks George Brewer had willingly relinquished to his assistant, and it was a job that Graham enjoyed. It also gave him an insight into the fortunes of the various sectors of the company, privileged information that fuelled his own scheming over the next six months. Excluding him from the Departmental Heads’ Meeting would remove his finger from the company’s pulse.

  ‘But, Robert, I chair that meeting.’

  ‘Have chaired it in the past. I think it’s a job that should be done by the Head of Personnel.’

  Graham considered his position. There was no doubt that Robert had planned this annexation of responsibility. The casual line of ‘just had a letter about a three-day conference’ did not fool him. Robert had certainly made up his mind to send Graham to Brussels the previous week; the softening-up of the weekend had been calculated and this new assault was definitely a challenge. Graham now understood the game Robert was playing. It was the tactic of any conqueror — to relax his victims with assurances, and then to remove their liberties piecemeal, in a series of small raids, none in themselves big enough to warrant resistance. Robert was working on the assumption that the worm wouldn’t turn.

  But Graham was not prepared to submit that easily. ‘O.K., that’s a point of view, Robert. I don’t agree with it, but obviously you’re entitled to your opinion.’ He paused. ‘However, I would point out that on April 23rd George Brewer will still be Head of Department. I think I should consult him before I agree to go to this conference.’

  ‘I’ve squared George.’

  Robert spoke with finality. Graham knew there was no point in appealing to the older man. George would only bid for sympathy, agree that no one took any notice of him any longer, and plead for company in another maudlin drinking session. Graham had been thoroughly outmanoeuvred.

  It was like the weekend, designed to diminish him and make him feel subservient to Robert Benham. The only thought which protected Graham from its full effect was the knowledge that he had done something that Robert had never achieved. He had committed a murder.

  And was going to commit a second.

  As he left Robert’s office and passed George’s he gave himself another boost by inviting Stella out for a drink after work. She consented, suggesting that this time, rather than leaving together, they should meet in the wine bar. He liked her practicality, the precision with which she followed a sequence of steps she had certainly trodden before. He wondered how many of his colleagues had trodden them with her.

  He liked talking to Stella. Again he found that evening it was a relief to be with a woman who made no demands on him and who talked about things that were not part of his daily life. He relaxed, and felt his relaxation was justified, a licensed day out from training so that he didn’t become obsessed with thinking of the challenge ahead.

  As they emerged after three glasses of wine, Stella said she’d be happy to cook him supper one night, and Graham realised with slight shock that this was a sexual invitation.

  Sex had not figured much in his thoughts since he had killed the old man. His fantasies of expensive women were intellectual, not physical, desires. No doubt he had made dutiful love to Merrily a few times and he had certainly fell sexual envy for Robert and Tara at the weekend, but lust had not been a strong motive. He wondered if it ever had for him. The ‘Swinging London’ experiments of his twenties and his marriage to Merrily had, in retrospect, been prompted more by the demands of convention than importunate desire. And now that there was something else of significance in his life, he felt no shame in admitting that sex was not very important to him.

  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.

  CHAPTER TEN

  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 emp
loying 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.

  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 tak
e 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.