‘If you want to have them analysed or examined or whatever, you’re getting a bit late. Their season’s practically over.’ She looked at Burden and gave him a gracious smile. ‘But you took the last of them yesterday, didn’t you? So that’s all right.’

Wexford, of course, said nothing about Burden’s experiment. ‘We’ll have a look in your garden, if you don’t mind.’

She didn’t seem to mind, but she had been wrong. Most of the fungi had grown into black-gilled pagodas in the twenty-four hours that had elapsed. Two new ones, however, had thrust their white oval caps up through the wet grass. Wexford picked them, and still she didn’t seem to mind. Why, then, had she appeared to want their season to be over? He thanked her and she went back into the cottage. The door closed. Wexford and Burden walked out into the road.

The fungus season was far from over. From the abundant array by the roadside it looked as if the season would last weeks longer. Shaggy caps were everywhere, some of them smaller and greyer than the clump that grew out of Corinne Last’s well-fed lawn. There were green and purple agarics, horn-shaped toadstools, and tiny mushrooms growing in fairy rings.

‘She doesn’t exactly mind our having them analysed,’ Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘but it seems she’d prefer the analysis to be done on the ones you picked yesterday than on those I picked today. Can that be so or am I just imagining it?’

‘If you’re imagining it, I’m imagining it too. But it’s no good, that line of reasoning. We know they’re not potentiated – or whatever the word is – by alcohol.’

‘I shall pick some more all the same,’ said Wexford. ‘Haven’t got a paper bag, have you?’

‘I’ve got a clean handkerchief. Will that do?’

‘Have to,’ said Wexford who never had a clean one. He picked a dozen more young shaggy caps, big and small, white and grey, immature and fully grown. They got back into the car and Wexford told the driver to stop at the public library. He went in and emerged a few minutes later with three books under his arm.

‘When we get back,’ he said to Burden, ‘I want you to get on to the university and see what they can offer us in the way of an expert in fungilogy.’

He closeted himself in his office with the three books and a pot of coffee. When it was nearly lunchtime, Burden knocked on the door.

‘Come in,’ said Wexford. ‘How did you get on?’

‘It’s not fungologist or fungilogist,’ said Burden with triumphant severity. ‘It’s mycologist and they don’t have one. But there’s a man on the faculty who’s a toxicologist and who’s just published one of those popular science books. This one’s about poisoning by wild plants and fungi.’

Wexford grinned. ‘What’s it called? Killing for Nothing? He sounds as if he’d do fine.’

‘I said we’d see him at six. Let’s hope something will come of it.’