Marjorie began to scream.

Means of Evil

Means of Evil

‘BLEWITS,’ SAID INSPECTOR Burden, ‘parasols, horns of plenty, morels and boletus. Mean anything to you?’

Chief Inspector Wexford shrugged. ‘Sounds like one of those magazine quizzes. What have these in common? I’ll make a guess and say they’re crustacea. Or sea anemones. How about that?’

‘They are edible fungi,’ said Burden.

‘Are they now? And what have edible fungi to do with Mrs Hannah Kingman throwing herself off, or being pushed off, a balcony?’

The two men were sitting in Wexford’s office at the police station, Kingsmarkham, in the County of Sussex. The month was November, but Wexford had only just returned from his holiday. And while he had been away, enjoying in Cornwall an end of October that had been more summery than the summer, Hannah Kingman had committed suicide. Or so Burden had thought at first. Now he was in a dilemma, and as soon as Wexford had walked in that Monday morning, Burden had begun to tell the whole story to his chief.

Wexford, getting on for sixty, was a tall, ungainly, rather ugly man who had once been fat to the point of obesity but had slimmed to gauntness for reasons of health. Nearly twenty years his junior, Burden had the slenderness of a man who has always been thin. His face was ascetic, handsome in a frosty way. The older man, who had a good wife who looked after him devotedly, nevertheless always looked as if his clothes came off the peg from the War on Want Shop, while the younger, a widower, was sartorially immaculate. A tramp and a Beau Brummell, they seemed to be, but the dandy relied on the tramp, trusted him, understood his powers and his perception. In secret he almost worshipped him.

Without his chief he had felt a little at sea in this case. Everything had pointed at first to Hannah Kingman’s having killed herself. She had been a manic-depressive, with a strong sense of her own inadequacy; apparently her marriage, though not of long duration, had been unhappy, and her previous marriage had failed. Even in the absence of a suicide note or suicide threats, Burden would have taken her death for self-destruction – if her brother hadn’t come along and told him about the edible fungi. And Wexford hadn’t been there to do what he always could do, sort out sheep from goats and wheat from chaff.

‘The thing is,’ Burden said across the desk, ‘we’re not looking for proof of murder so much as proof of attempted murder. Axel Kingman could have pushed his wife off that balcony – he has no alibi for the time in question – but I had no reason to think he had done so until I was told of an attempt to murder her some two weeks before.’

‘Which attempt has something to do with edible fungi?’

Burden nodded. ‘Say with administering to her some noxious substance in a stew made from edible fungi. Though if he did it, God knows how he did it, because three other people, including himself, ate the stew without ill effects. I think I’d better tell you about it from the beginning.’