Oh dear. Maybe they would change colour as they dissolved. He poured a few granules into the wine glass and stirred vigorously.
At first they seemed unwilling to liquefy at all, but then they did. The colour, however, remained. The sherry turned bright, bright blue.
He wondered, not very seriously, about weaning Merrily off sherry and on to Blue Curacoa, but, even if that could be achieved, he couldn’t see her being fooled. The liquid had a nasty livid sheen on the top, and an opaque sediment was forming at the bottom.
He sniffed it. The smell hadn’t changed. That was one thing in its favour.
Hmm. Nobody was going to drink from a glass like that by mistake. Maybe from a bottle, though. .? It was worth trying.
He emptied the remains of the sachet into the sherry bottle and shook it vigorously. For a moment he set aside the problem of getting Merrily to drink straight from the bottle. Just see if it works first.
He looked through the dark green glass. The adulteration of the contents was not apparent at first glance. The colour didn’t look odd. But when it was held up to the light the thick sediment showed, and when he looked close, undissolved granules clustered against the sides like some obscene Chinese meal.
It was pretty obvious it wasn’t going to work, but something kept him going. Maybe it took time to dissolve. Maybe more would have the required effect.
He ripped open another sachet and, forming a funnel from a piece of cardboard torn off the box, poured the contents in. Another shake and the bottle’s contents looked even more bizarre.
Suddenly the incongruity of his actions struck and he found himself laughing. The whole situation was farcical and filled him with a strange elation. He slit open the remaining six sachets and poured their stock of granules into the bottle. Then he shook it, like a rattle, singing, through his giggles, the South American tune ‘La Bamba’. What he was doing seemed the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. The seriousness of his intention and the crass incompetence of what he was doing triggered his wild hilarity.
At last he sobered up and looked at the bottle.
No. No one would ever be taken in by that blue mass of half-dissolved granules. The person who drank through that lot would have to be very, very determined to die.
He heard a noise from the house and looked up to see Merrily waving from the kitchen window. Damn. Hadn’t noticed the time. Well, he couldn’t wash up his experiment now. Do it some other time when he was alone in the house.
He shoved the bottle, the glass and the remnants of the weed killer packing on a shelf behind a large rectangular can of creosote.
Need for a rethink. Silly to imagine it would have been as easy as that. He went indoors, mildly irritated but not depressed by his failure.
He carried the Stanley knife to explain his presence in the shed. ‘Wondered where it had got to, darling,’ he said kissing Merrily perfunctorily on the forehead.
‘I’m surprised you can find anything in that shed,’ she accused. ‘It’s a terrible mess. Really needs tidying.’
‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘You must get round to it some time.’
‘Sure.’
‘Though I suppose I’ll have to end up doing it myself. Like most things,’ she concluded with a long-suffering sigh.
The remark was meant to make Graham feel guilty. But he was damned if he was going to let it. Guilt, he had decided, even for trivial matters, was not an emotion in which he intended to indulge in the future.
He was coming down from having shouted the children into bed when he met Lilian in the hall. She moved her arm behind her back, but too slowly. He saw the bottle of sherry in her hand.
‘Where did you get that from?’ he snapped.
She gave him the defiant look of the boy in
‘In the shed.’
‘Why on earth did you go in there?’
‘The bottle was around at lunchtime. I saw it. I knew you had hidden it somewhere, Graham.’
‘Why should I do that?’
She straightened up into a posture of martyrdom.
‘I know you don’t like me, Graham.’ She left a pause for the flood of contradictions, which didn’t come.
‘But I do think hiding the sherry’s pretty petty.’
‘But I wasn’t hiding it. I was just using the bottle. It’s not sherry in there.’
‘It smells like sherry.’
Oh God. Had she snatched a quick tipple out in the shed? What effect would it have? He had wanted to test the dosage somehow, but this was not the way he would have chosen.
‘Well, it isn’t sherry!’ He snatched the bottle from her quite roughly. ‘I was just using it for something in the garden. If you want a drink, there’s some wine in the fridge.’
A deep breath telegraphed the start of Lilian’s weeping. ‘I think you’re very cruel to me, Graham. You know I’m desperately upset about how Charmian behaved. And now you … I expected a bit of support from you … I wouldn’t have changed my will if I’d known — ’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Graham stumped off towards the garden. Going through the utility room, he saw the sticky labels Merrily used to identify food in the freezer. He tore one off and wrote on it with felt pen: ‘POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN.’
He stuck it over the bottle’s original label. Out in the shed he hid the bottle deep in the corner behind a pile of seed trays. Too risky to put it in the dustbin. He’d dispose of it another time.
He looked out of the dusty window to the lights of the house next door. How warming, welcoming other people’s lights looked. Perhaps, he thought wryly, that was how the lights of his house looked to outsiders, the glow of a happy family within. Huh.
It was going wrong. Lilian’s finding the sherry shouldn’t have happened. He had taken a stupid, unnecessary risk.
In fact, his whole approach had been wrong. Slipshod. Inefficient.
He had killed the old man effortlessly and that was now a source of fierce pride. But killing Merrily would take more cunning. In the euphoria of having made the decision he had been careless, underestimated the difficulties that faced him.
Just because of his failure to get George’s job, he must not let his standards slip. He had always prided himself on efficiency, and now he had to demonstrate that he was more efficient than Robert Benham. Since he was prevented from deploying his skills at the office, then he would apply them to his wife’s murder.
No more carelessness.
Detailed, systematic planning.
He was determined that the murder was going to work.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was Merrily herself who showed him how to do it.
On the Sunday evening, after Lilian had finally gone off to what she insisted on calling her ‘lonely little room’, Graham was watching something less than riveting on the television, when he thought of a new potential economy and went up to his ‘study’ to work it out on the calculator.
He had assumed Merrily to be pottering around in the kitchen, so was surprised to see her kneeling on the floor in front of his desk, sifting through the contents of the drawers. She turned round guiltily at his approach.
‘Lost something?’ he asked.
‘No.’
