The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

I try to call Charlotte, ostensibly to offer my sympathy, but in reality to ascertain the truth. To find out if Dan is all right, if he’s alive, what the prognosis is. I’m frantic with worry, fretting and fussing around the cafe, muddling orders, dropping things. Whatever’s gone wrong between us, I truly believed myself in love with him, I truly believed that we had a future together. Feelings like that don’t just disappear in a puff of smoke.

But Charlotte doesn’t pick up.

Naomi’s devastated, too.

‘Who would have thought it? Dan, of all people? My beautiful boy, my Dan?’ she keeps saying, as if she’d given birth to him and then fallen in love with him. Weird. ‘I never could have imagined something like this …’

The question is, like what? Because we don’t know but while we are ignorant, the imagination – and the gossips – conjure up all sorts of unpleasant options.

Finally, on the Tuesday morning after the Saturday night, Miriam turns up in the cafe with the whole story, which she proceeds to lay before us both, Naomi and I, the rapt and attentive audience she always longs for.

Apparently, Dan was taken ill during the course of the reconciliation meeting with Charlotte, after they had eaten. By the time she got him to hospital, choosing to drive him there herself through the raging storm rather than wait for the ambulance, he was at death’s door. Miriam says that Charlotte wasn’t feeling too clever herself, and ended up on a ward for the night, but that she was nowhere near as bad as Dan.

‘But what was it?’ presses Naomi, insistently. ‘What could possibly have made them both so ill?’

Miriam pauses for maximum effect.

‘Poison.’

All the breath is knocked out of my body as if I’ve been thumped in the solar plexus.

‘Wh-what do you mean?’ I can hardly articulate the words, am struggling to make sense of what she has said.

‘Hemlock poisoning, so they’re saying. There’s no antidote but they pumped his stomach and did all the things you can do and by some enormous good fortune, Dan survived. Charlotte, too, though she was only minimally affected. Her life was never in danger.’

For once, Miriam is not speaking in exclamations.

‘Hemlock,’ I repeat, my voice wavering.

‘The very same!’

The exclamations are back. In some strange way, it’s reassuring.

‘What the ancient Greeks did for Socrates with. And what the killer used in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs!’

It’s almost incomprehensible. Almost, but not quite.

Because poison has long been a weapon of choice for would-be murderers especially, for some reason, female ones. I should know, I did it myself. And my idea to use mercury on Charlie and Josephine came from an Agatha Christie book. But though I knew how angry you were, I still never thought you’d take it this far. Then I remember the text you sent and it all makes sense.

When the police come calling, I’m glad I’ve still got it to show to them. They’re glad too, finding it very interesting.

Sadly, I know from prior experience that however clever one thinks one is being, one always makes mistakes, leaves a trail, provides clues. That is bound to be as true for you as it is for anyone.

Chapter 41

Charlotte

It was a long, long night, the longest I’ve ever known. But Dan made it through those bleak hours of darkness, bravely battling the poison in his system as the wind and rain battled each other outside. My own suffering was not nearly as bad, just a little nausea. It was lucky I ate so little of the curry. Providence looked down on me when I decided to throw my no-carbs rule out for the night. I was so busy stuffing bread and rice and poppadoms into my mouth – tastes I haven’t had for so long I could hardly remember how good they were – that I only had room for a tiny taste of the massaman. Which was far too hot anyway. Everyone knows I hate spicy food.

He and I have been back home for a few days now, recovering physically. Mentally, I’m not so sure. Well, how quickly would anyone get over being poisoned? Not the actual toxins themselves but the toxic realisation that someone wants to kill you, that someone will do anything to get what they want.

And when I say ‘someone’, of course I mean you. The investigative tests have confirmed poisoning by hemlock. I think of when you inadvertently discovered the hemlock patch. I showed you how to identify it, warned you to be careful. You know exactly where it is, and it doesn’t take much of a brain to find out how to use it. A few internet searches and you’re sorted. You masked the mousy scent and bitter taste with the super-spiciness of that curry you cooked. I bet you thought you were being so clever.

Still reeling from the whole event, I haven’t even begun to think about what happens next. Dan’s already given a full statement to the police, as have I. I’ve told them everything, all the lengths you went to so that you could get your hands on my husband. How you invented all sorts of ways to spend time alone with him, to beguile him with your blondeness, your sycophantic flattery, your sympathetic ear.

At some point, it’s all going to come out in the local papers, isn’t it? I’ve already heard that reporters have been sniffing round. So far, just the ones from the provincial rag, the kind of low-calibre journalists who have to cover everything from the cat rescue centre’s annual fundraiser to the arguments over parking charges in the parish council meeting. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the big boys come calling. This is the kind of story the tabloids kill for. A jilted divorcee. A wronged wife. A love triangle.

Perfectly correctly, the doctors kept stumm on the amount of alcohol in my system. It was quite clear we’d been through enough, Dan and I,