‘No doubt it will.’ Wexford slammed shut the thickest of his books. ‘We need confirmation,’ he said, ‘but I’ve found the answer.’

‘For God’s sake! Why didn’t you say?’

‘You didn’t ask. Sit down.’ Wexford motioned him to the chair on the other side of the desk. ‘I said you’d done your homework, Mike, and so you had, only your textbook wasn’t quite comprehensive enough. It’s got a section on edible fungi and a section on poisonous fungi – but nothing in between. What I mean by that is, there’s nothing in your book about fungi which aren’t wholesome yet don’t cause death or intense suffering. There’s nothing about the kind that can make people ill in certain circumstances.’

‘But we know they ate shaggy caps,’ Burden protested. ‘And if by “circumstances” you mean the intake of alcohol, we know shaggy caps aren’t affected by alcohol.’

‘Mike,’ said Wexford quietly, ‘do we know they ate shaggy caps?’ He spread out on the desk the haul he had made from the roadside and from Corinne Last’s garden. ‘Look closely at these, will you?’

Quite bewildered now, Burden looked at and fingered the dozen or so specimens of fungi. ‘What am I to look for?’

‘Differences,’ said Wexford laconically.

‘Some of them are smaller than the others, and the smaller ones are greyish. Is that what you mean? But, look here, think of the differences between mushrooms. You get big flat ones and small button ones and . . .’

‘Nevertheless, in this case it is that small difference that makes all the difference.’ Wexford sorted the fungi into two groups. ‘All the small greyer ones,’ he said, ‘came from the roadside. Some of the larger whiter ones came from Corinne Last’s garden and some from the roadside.’

He picked up between forefinger and thumb a specimen of the former. ‘This isn’t a shaggy cap, it’s an ink cap. Now listen.’ The thick book fell open where he had placed a marker. Slowly and clearly he read: ‘The ink cap, coprinus atramentarius, is not to be confused with the shaggy cap, coprinus comatus. It is smaller and greyer in colour, but otherwise the resemblance between them is strong. While coprinus atramentarius is usually harmless when cooked, it contains, however, a chemical similar to the active principle in Antabuse, a drug used in the treatment of alcoholics, and if eaten in conjunction with alcohol will cause nausea and vomiting.’

‘We’ll never prove it.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Wexford. ‘We can begin by concentrating on the one lie we know Corinne Last told when she said she picked the fungi she gave Axel Kingman from her own garden.’

Old Wives’ Tales

THEY LOOKED SHOCKED and affronted and somehow ashamed. Above all, they looked old. Wexford thought that in the nature of things a woman of seventy ought to be an orphan, ought to have been an orphan for twenty years. This one had been an orphan for scarcely twenty days. Her husband, sitting opposite her, pulling his wispy moustache, slowly and mechanically shaking his head, seemed older than she, perhaps not so many years the junior of his late mother-in-law. He wore a brown cardigan with a small neat darn at one elbow and sheepskin slippers, and when he spoke he snuffled. His wife kept saying she couldn’t believe her ears, she couldn’t believe it, why were people so wicked? Wexford didn’t answer that. He couldn’t, though he had often wondered himself.