Means Of Evil And Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

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.
   "My mother died of a stroke," Mrs. Betts said tremulously. "It was on the death certificate, Dr. Moss put it on the death certificate."
   Betts snuffled and wheezed. He reminded Wexford of an aged rabbit, a rabbit with myxomatosis perhaps. It was partly the effect of the brown woolly cardigan and the furry slippers, and partly the moustache and the unshaven bristly chin. "She was ninety-two," Betts said in his thick catarrhal voice. " Ninety-two . I reckon you lot must have got bats in the belfry."
   "I mean," said Mrs. Betts, "are you saying Dr. Moss was telling untruths? A doctor?"
   "Why don't you ask him? We're only ordinary people, the wife and me, we're not educated. Doctor said a cerebral haemorrhage," Betts stumbled a little over the words, "and in plain language that's a stroke. That's what he said. Are you saying me or the wife gave Mother a stroke? Are you saying that?"
   "I'm making no allegations, Mr. Betts." Wexford felt uncomfortable, wished himself anywhere but in this newly decorated, paint-smartened house. "I am merely making enquiries which information received obliges me to do."
   "Gossip," said Mrs. Betts bitterly. "This street's a hotbed of gossip. Pity they've nothing better to do. Oh, I know what they're saying. Half of them turn up their noses and look the other way when I pass them. All except Elsie Parrish, and that goes without saying."
   "She's been a brick," said her husband. "A real brick is Elsie." He stared at Wexford with a kind of timid outrage. "Haven't you folk got nothing better to do than listen to a bunch of old hens? What about the real crime? What about the muggings and the breakins?"
   Wexford sighed. But he went on doggedly questioning, remembering what the nurse had said, what Dr. Moss had said, keeping in the forefront of his mind that motive which was so much more than merely wanting an aged parent out of the way. If he hadn't been a policeman with a profound respect for the law and for human life, he might have felt that these two, or one of them, had been provoked beyond bearing to do murder.
   One of them? Or both? Or neither? Ivy Wrangton had either died an unnatural death or else there had been a series of coincidences and unexplained contingencies which were nothing short of incredible.
     
It was the nurse who had started it, coming to him three days before. Sergeant Martin brought her to him because what she alleged was so serious. Wexford knew her by sight, had