The Perfect Murder

weeks’ pay for each of the sixteen years he had served. That worked out at six months’ pay.

Victor was so shocked that after work he drank five pints at the Font and Firkin, as well as four whisky chasers. He had intended to keep the news a secret from Joan but, arriving home blind drunk, he blurted it out.

That night, Joan screamed at him in rage, and told him how useless he was.

At his desk the next morning, Victor had a bad hangover. He worked out how many visits to the Kitten Parlour he could make with six months’ pay and the remains of his savings. He realized it would be a lot more visits, and more tips for Kamila, if he did not have to pay housekeeping money.

To save his money, Joan was going to have to go more quickly than he had planned. There was no option. There simply was not enough time for Plan A. He was going to have to go with Plan B.

The only problem was, he didn’t yet have a Plan B.

But Joan did.

Chapter Five

The solution came to Victor that night.

As happened most nights now, he was woken at about 2 a.m. by Joan hitting him on the chest and hissing, ‘Stop snoring!’

At 4 a.m. Joan woke him again, climbing out of bed and saying, ‘God, Victor, you are worse than ever! What do you keep up your nose and down your throat? Trumpets?’

He mumbled a sleepy apology. He heard her leave the room and slam the bedroom door behind her. Then he heard the slam of the door to the spare bedroom. All of a sudden, he was wide awake with excitement. He had an idea.

Joan was always moaning about the little spare room where she went to sleep when his snoring kept her awake at night. It was grotty, she said, and she was right. The walls were the colour of sludge and the thin curtains had moth holes in them. It was the one room they had never bothered to do up after they bought the house. To begin with, they had planned it to be their first child’s bedroom. But they’d had no children, of course. So it still had the old single bed which the previous owners of the house had left behind. It was a sad little room.

Every few weeks, Joan would have a go at Victor about it, telling him it was high time to do up the room. She said he should make it look nice in case they ever had an overnight guest. He could at least make it nice for her to sleep in when she couldn’t stay in their room because of his snoring. This had been going on for years and years.

Now he thought he had the answer to two problems at once! Making the room nice for Joan, and giving him his Plan B!

Unable to sleep any more he put on his dressing gown and went into the kitchen. Quietly, not wanting to wake Joan, he made himself a cup of tea. He was so excited. Then he went up to his den, switched on his computer and logged on to the Internet. He entered the word cyanide into Google.

As he had found before, there were hundreds and hundreds of web pages on cyanide poison. Tonight, he steadily narrowed down his search. He typed in cyanide vapour. Then cyanide gas. He read every word, greedily lapping it all up. The more he read, the more excited he became. Some things he read over several times because it was better to remember things than to write them down. That was Rule 52: Leave no tracks.

This is what he remembered:The extent of poisoning caused by cyanide depends on the amount of cyanide a person is exposed to.Breathing cyanide gas causes the most harm.Cyanide gas is most dangerous in enclosed places where the gas will be trapped.To some people cyanide smells like bitter almonds.Cyanide is present in some paints, such as Prussian blue.

Now he really smiled. Prussian blue had long been one of Joan’s favourite colours.

Chapter Six

Joan wondered what had come over Victor. That weekend, he didn’t watch his detective shows or potter around in his shed or his greenhouse. He spent the whole of Saturday and Sunday in the spare bedroom. He was busily decorating it for her.

‘For you, my angel!’ he told her. ‘You are quite right. This room has been in an awful state for far too long. Now I’m going to make it beautiful for you.’

He would not let her in while he was at work. He wanted to surprise his angel, he told her. She could not go in until it was finished!

Every now and then he came out coughing and spluttering. He had a breathing mask pushed up onto his forehead, and wore a white, hooded, paint-spattered boiler suit. It reminded her of the paper suits that she saw Scene of Crime Officers wear at murder scenes on the TV news.

‘It’s your favourite colour!’ he told her.

‘Prussian blue?’

He beamed at her. ‘How did you guess? Have you peeped?’

She simply pointed at him. ‘It’s splashed all over you!’ she said with a scowl.

‘I’m putting up new blinds too,’ he told her.

‘They’ll probably fall down,’ she replied. ‘Everything you put up usually falls down after a short while.’ Just like your tiny weeny dick, she nearly added.

Victor did not react to her rudeness. It no longer mattered. After a few nights sleeping in the spare room with the windows shut, she wouldn’t be saying anything rude to him ever again.

They would find the cyanide in her at the post-mortem, of course. But the makers of the paint would be blamed. They would be in trouble for making a rogue batch of Prussian blue with too much cyanide in it. He just had to make sure no one ever found the tins he used, but getting rid of them would be easy.

On Sunday night, when he had finished, he left the spare-bedroom window wide open. He told Joan it was to let the paint dry. She would be able to start using the room from Monday night onwards, whenever he snored. And blimey, was he planning to snore tomorrow night! He would snore like he’d never snored before. He would snore for