A Sprinkle of Sabotage by Fiona Leitch (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

‘Thank you for waiting,’ said Nathan. Mike Mancuso snorted.

‘Like we got a choice.’

Faith looked annoyed. ‘A good man died tonight. Have some respect,’ she spat. I noticed the slight emphasis on good, and it struck me as being a little odd, but then maybe she just didn’t like Mancuso. He was loud, brash, and a touch abrasive, and he perhaps wasn’t the best company to be cooped up with in a caravan, certainly not after losing a friend and colleague in such horrible circumstances.

‘Can you tell us exactly what happened to Mr Mayhew?’ asked Nathan. Everyone immediately opened their mouths and began talking, so Nathan held up his hand and turned to Sam. ‘You, please. Mr…?’

‘Pritchard. Sam Pritchard. Well, we were all sitting around the table eating, everything was great, and then Jeremy started acting kinda weird, like he was drunk—’

‘Was that weird for him?’ I asked. ‘I understand he had a drink problem.’

‘He was fighting it,’ said Faith. ‘He was on the wagon, until tonight.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sam. ‘And he’d only drunk a little, which was what made me notice it. And then he just kinda went rigid, like he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even open his mouth, because he was trying to say something…’

Aiko shuddered, and I saw Zack reach over with his free hand to squeeze hers.

‘And then he started moaning and had a seizure, and ended up on the floor, vomiting, and then he just … stopped. Dead.’

I shivered. What a horrible way to die. Nathan wrote everything down in his notebook, then looked up.

‘It’s too early for us to say for definite what caused Mr Mayhew’s death, but at this stage it appears to be misadventure rather than a deliberate act, so—’

Zack looked up at me, then at Nathan, and said quietly, ‘It was the pufferfish, wasn’t it?’

‘Until we get lab results back…’ said Nathan calmly, but Zack shook his head and stared straight at me, a hint of pleading in his eyes; he just wanted to know the truth.

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

I couldn’t say yes for certain, but the poor young man was in an agony of not knowing and I wanted to relieve him of it if I could; although, of course, that would lead to the even worse agony of knowing, knowing that he’d been responsible (albeit unintentionally) for someone’s death.

‘We really don’t know for certain, Zack, but that’s what it looks like,’ I said. Kimi looked at him in fury.

‘What do you mean, it was the pufferfish? The fugu? You told me you knew what you were doing!’ she hissed at him. She shot to her feet, clutching Princess the Pekinese to her chest as if she were going to flounce out of the trailer. Except it was her trailer, and she didn’t have anywhere else to flounce off to at the moment.

‘I do know what I’m doing!’ he protested, then subsided. ‘At least, I thought I did. I trained in Japan—’

‘Well you obviously didn’t train hard enough!’ spat Kimi. She rounded on me. ‘You. You were supposed to be keeping an eye on him. What kind of goddamn chef are you?’

I felt my cheeks flush. Because yes, I was the chef, and maybe the buck should have stopped with me. But I’d watched him and I had been so pleasantly surprised, impressed, and in actual awe of his filleting skills that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to stop him serving it. I wasn’t sure what to say, but by now Kimi had turned on someone else: Sam.

‘And you! How could you ever let him think this was a good idea? This has put the whole movie into jeopardy, hasn’t it? You totally should have put your foot down and told him he couldn’t serve it.’

‘I told him it was fine,’ said Mancuso. Faith looked up sharply and glared at him. ‘What? It’s eating raw fish, for Chrissakes, it ain’t diving with sharks.’

‘Except it killed Jeremy,’ said Zack, his words heavy with enough guilt and grief to silence everyone else. ‘I killed him.’

Aiko wrapped her arms around him as he buried his head in her shoulder. Kimi, who was still standing, watched her sister, her lip curled with disgust and her foot tapping angrily.

‘When you’ve quite finished,’ she said, ‘perhaps you’d like to tell me what’s going to happen to everyone else who’s eaten this killer fish. Hmm? Has no one else thought of that?’

I looked at Nathan; we’d needed to warn them that they might feel some ill effects too, but Kimi was going to make them hysterical and convinced they were all going to die if we weren’t careful. And to be fair, what I knew about pufferfish you could probably write on the back of a postage stamp, so who knew? Maybe they would all die. But I didn’t think so.

The others were starting to look alarmed. We had to nip this in the bud. I looked at Nathan with a question on my face: may I?

‘Knock yourself out,’ he murmured.

‘Okay, I’m not an expert, but the speed with which Mr Mayhew took ill and then died suggests to me that he either had more of the fish, and therefore more of the toxin, than the rest of you; or, that the toxin wasn’t distributed evenly throughout the fish, and he was unfortunate enough to get a piece that was more heavily contaminated than the rest, meaning that you may have got lucky and been given a portion that was less toxic, or even not toxic at all. Or the final possibility is that he had some underlying health condition that may have made him more susceptible.’ I looked around at the assembled guests. ‘Basically, the fact that he’s dead and the rest of you are all still standing suggests to me that none of you are about to join him.’

Aiko swallowed hard. ‘I feel nauseous,’ she said. Sam