A Shock to the System by Simon Brett Page B

went over to REFERENCE and took down the volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica which covered POISONS.
    He sat down at a table and, amidst pensioners going through the newspaper racecards, mothers planning holidays with hotel guides and schoolchildren working on ‘projects’, he tried to find out how to murder his wife.
    He stayed there for about an hour, rising periodically to fetch a new volume for a cross-reference, but at the end felt little further advanced. The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not appear to have had the would-be poisoner in mind when they compiled their great work.
    Graham found out a good deal about the triumvirate of arsenic, cyanide and strychnine, but no clue as to how they might be unobtrusively obtained. Did rat poisons still contain arsenic? And if they did, how did one set about extracting it? Or feeding it to the victim? It didn’t seem the ideal solution. And he didn’t feel any more optimistic about building up a supply of cyanide from almonds or apricot kernels.
    At the end of the hour the only hopeful fact he knew was that poisons were much used as weed killers and insecticides.
    Graham Marshall set off for the garden centre.
    There, too, there was a Saturday morning crowd, of husbands with worried expressions and steel tape-measures estimating paving stones, of pensioners carefully stocking window-boxes, and wives loading Volvos with dahlia tubers and garden furniture. Graham again felt light-hearted, even light-headed, as he walked between greenhouses and Gro-bags to the covered part of the garden centre. He felt a gleeful immunity from suspicion, just another commuter bent on titivating his rectangle of urban soil. His intentions were deliciously private.
    As he went through the glass doors, a word came to him. A word he should have thought of earlier, a word whose dangers had recently received considerable press coverage.
    Paraquat.
    There seemed to have been a little spate of cases of children dying from accidental consumption of paraquat. Most of these had occurred on farms where the concentrated form of the poison was to hand, but Graham felt sure that a gardening version was available.
    He also felt it was the ideal treatment for Merrily.
    He looked along the rows of proprietary weed killers, but none was labelled ‘Paraquat’. Obviously an ingredient rather than a brand-name. He started taking down bottles and cans to check their contents.
    â€˜Can I help you, sir?’
    The assistant was young, with transparent down as yet unshaven over a spotty face. The green overall he wore was too large, suggesting that he was weekend staff, perhaps even still at school.
    â€˜Yes. I’m looking for something with paraquat in it.’
    â€˜Oh, yes, sir. Why? What exactly did you want to kill?’
    Graham looked up sharply, but of course there was no suspicion in the boy’s eyes. It was a logical question to ask of someone selecting weed killers.
    â€˜Well, er, weeds,’ he replied feebly.
    â€˜Yes. Any particular sort, sir?’
    Graham searched quickly through his memory and managed to come up with ‘Ground elder.’
    â€˜Oh, well, sir, I think you’ll find this very good.’ The boy displayed a small bottle between finger and thumb.
    â€˜Does that contain paraquat?’
    â€˜No, sir. Glyphosate, sir.’ If he was still a schoolboy, the young man certainly seemed to know his business.
    â€˜Oh, thank you.’
    â€˜That is the best, sir.’ The boy hovered. ‘The check-out’s over there, sir.’
    â€˜Yes. Yes. I’ll . . . thank you. A few other things and . . .’
    At last the boy wandered off and Graham resumed his study of the shelves. He felt disappointed. He had taken a fancy to the word ‘paraquat’; ‘glyphosate’ had not got quite the same ring. Anyway, his eroded recollections of chemistry could not provide a precise definition of ‘glyphosate’ or its