Friday 25 September1981
Over thelast couple of weeks Mark had experienced increasingly regularfeelings of déjàvu; perhapssurprisingly, they hadn’t been particularly unpleasant and it wasalmost as if the last few years had been a mere distraction. Theyhad decided on Saturday the 26th for the planned social evening atGemma’s family house in Farnham, and it had come around quickly.While Gemma had helped her mother with invites for some of theneighbours and a couple of recently acquired golfing friends andpersuaded her to ask Ruth down for the night, Mark had been busyrenewing his acquaintance with the world of plants andpoisons.
Ratherthan visit the various and quite numerous chemists and supposedhealth shops he had previously used in the Brighton area, Mark hadtoured those in Chichester and then Portsmouth. Somehow it seemedmore anonymous in larger towns and the further from Brighton theless chance he felt there’d be of him possibly being remembered. Itwas still easy enough to get castor beans which could form thestaple and initial part of the plan; and producing powdered ricinfrom them was straightforward enough as well. Even though one ofAgatha Christie’s thrillers, The Pale Horse, had encouraged awider awareness of the dangers of thallium, there were still heavyconcentrations of it in the cockroach and rat poisons that chemistsas well as hardware stores had plentiful stocks of. Mark had foundit particularly useful in the past and although it was notcompletely untraceable, apart from a danger of hair loss it wasn’teasily recognised, and after all the link with an early 1960s bookby Agatha Christie wasn’t an obvious connection to make. Come tothink of it, a bit of appropriately targeted depilatory might notbe such a bad thing in women of a certain age, he mused; and beingrealistic, it would take a fair while before any significant lossof hair would become apparent.
It had onlytaken Mark a bit of driving around to get more than enough ofeverything he supposed that he might need. The problem was thatthose shop-bought powders were more difficult to disguise thanhome-made ricin and would have to be used only as a last resort ora final push if needed. To begin with, apple pips and peach stonescrushed up with ricin would be easy enough to slip into anythingwith a reasonably strong flavour of its own. Then he would need tomake sure the right person, in other words Anne, was the only onewhose food and drinks had the specially prepared extras included.Mind you, if there were the occasional slip up, one or two otherguests suffering stomach cramps wouldn’t be the end of the world;and there’d be no follow-up administering of regular doses withthem, so any collateral damage would be limited. It would just beseen as a one-off complaint.
Although to acertain extent he was acting on autopilot Mark had realised that hewas actually quite enjoying having something to work on, and somesort of direction and purpose at last. He had plenty of time on hishands and Gemma had encouraged him to drop in on her mother byhimself sometimes as a way of getting things moving. In fact, hehad called in for lunch last week with a ready prepared shepherd’spie as a first step and ostensibly to discuss the upcoming party.Gemma had helped by phoning her mum and telling her to give Elainethat day off; and Mark had prepared two separate versions of whathad been his signature dish last time around and with his previousin-laws. The lunch trip had worked out well. Mark had persuadedAnne to open a bottle of wine and after a glass of that, along withher usual two or three cigarettes, any slightly odd flavouring waseasy enough to put down to the special spices Mark hinted that heused with his cooking. He had decided not to hold back too muchthis time and even though he saw this as just an initial foray hehad put a pretty hefty amount of ricin along with a dash ofthallium into Anne’s individual dish; he reckoned her taste budswould be pretty shot through anyway, given her less than healthylifestyle. The military analogy seemed appropriate: he liked theway it smacked of a planned strategy.
They had satout on the patio after eating and Mark had suggested he organise atrip up to London for a night out once they’d had the party. One ofhis old favourite bands, the Pretty Things, had a mid-weekresidency at the Marquee Club and he considered that a heavy nightor two might help things along in due course. Mark would enjoyingseeing the band again too, he had always liked their hard rockstyle and he promised Anne he would bring up his favourite album oftheirs, ‘SF Sorrow’, next time he came.
Although hehad managed well enough in terms of the conventional poisons Markhad made little headway in trying to get hold of any other drugs.He no longer had ready access to students and the studentlifestyle. Since his conviction, he had lost contact with virtuallyall of his previous colleagues and on the one occasion he hadvisited the university campus where he had worked it was apparenthe was not seen as a prodigal son, let alone a welcome guest.However, he knew one of his previous students-cum-suppliers, Greg,had gone on to take a PhD and might still be around the Brightonarea. In the past Greg had always been able to get anything Markhad wanted; the problem was renewing contact. Strangely the onlymember of the Sociology Department who had shown any sympathy forMark had been Craig, a new appointment who had only been there fora few weeks before his arrest. He reckoned it might be an idea tocontact Craig and see if he knew anything about Greg and where hemight be.
Anne hadobviously enjoyed his visit and lapped up the compliments about herfigure and sense of fun. He’d left promising her a good time thefollowing weekend at her party and also that he would make sure hespent plenty of the evening with her. Even though that would be totake care of what she drunk and what it
