Read Online Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson - Free Book Online

abject. By the end, the dining room looks more or less its old self and no longer like the Augean Stables after a prolonged bout of equine flu, although the faint scent of disinfectant lingers in the air from where I had to scrub the carpet. Incredibly, I even found a pea stuck to the panelled wall at shoulder height and there may yet be others. The kitchen, too, is back to normal.
    I promised Jennifer I would look in on Josh in case he woke and was frightened to find no one about. I don’t feel much like sleep myself but on my way up to the attic I find Josh wandering with the crushed, drugged look that woken children have. I gather he’s thirsty and wants his mother to bring him some water now . I explain that everyone got a bit ill suddenly and had to go to hospital for a few hours but that they’re quite all right really and will be back in the morning. So for the moment we two men are in charge of the house and the cat. He says he had a bad dream about gorillas and I assure him the gorilla is also in hospital and there are absolutely no gorillas on the premises. Seeing he is unconvinced, I reluctantly agree to his proposal that he share my bed upstairs while I keep any stray apes at bay. So he brings along his favourite stuffed dinosaur, who is apparently deadly to gorillas, and is soon asleep in a distant corner of my vast attic bed in which at length I also manage a few hours’ oblivion.
    My many weeks of being a guest at Crendlesham Hall have, in Josh’s eyes at least, accorded me the status of a member ofthe family, or at least someone he can feel free to whack with a stuffed dinosaur at six in the morning because he’s hungry. Why anyone elects to be a parent I can’t imagine. So we are both long up and about when, at seven-thirty, the first taxi-load arrives with people wearing clothes still spattered with dried flecks of the evening meal. It is nice to be able to hand Josh back into his parents’ charge, but not much else is a pleasure . I have been dreading this moment from the instant I was bullied awake. It had always seemed inevitable that there would be some quite nasty recriminations, but it turns out that things are even worse. Sir Douglas Monteith is now recumbent in a mortuary freezer, the result of a massive overnight heart attack brought on by convulsive vomiting, which in turn was due to …
    ‘… but you get my drift,’ Adrian ends grimly. ‘However you look at it, Gerry, last night you murdered a baronet in the dining room of Crendlesham Hall. And the rest of us have had a fucking awful time. Anyway, the police will be here shortly and you can try bad-taste Cluedo jokes on them if you like.’
    I am contritely brewing coffee as a peace offering and I must admit this news upsets me to the extent that I allow the milk to boil over, something I haven’t done in years. Jennifer, bless her, comes to my rescue and is a good deal more conciliatory than her brother.
    ‘Come on, Adrian, be fair. Gerry didn’t deliberately poison anyone. It was obviously a horrible accident.’
    ‘Well, okay, I know that,’ my loyal lover grudgingly concedes . ‘But all the same, you’ve got to admit there’s something about it that’s typically Gerry. Extravagant, irresponsible and just generally misplaced. Even Josh would have had more sense.’
    ‘Might somebody kindly explain what this poison is that I’m supposed to have administered?’ I ask with commendable quiet dignity but inevitably sounding like a defendant at the Nuremberg trials. ‘In my irresponsible and generally misplaced way?’
    ‘They think it was rat poison,’ Jennifer explains, ‘but they won’t know for certain until they’ve done more tests. But they do say the symptoms are a good pointer.’
    ‘Specifically,’ her brother adds with his not very charming air of technical omniscience, ‘they said it was probably red squill, which is extracted from the bulb of some plant or other. It works on rats because they can’t vomit.