A Poisoned Mind Read Free

piles awaiting collection.
    Trish loved their smell. The spiciness might be the product of rot, but it always made her think of childhood firework parties, and roasting apples with the sugar slowly turning to caramel.
    ‘If George were here,’ Antony went on as they strolled towards his favourite restaurant, ‘he’d be reciting Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and all that.’
    Trish shot a quick sideways glance at him. Whenever she’d seen him with her partner the two men had got on perfectly well, which was hardly surprising given that George was a successful London solicitor and they had a lot of friends in common, but Antony rarely passed up any opportunity to tease her about George’s more stolid qualities.
    ‘His taste’s a bit less obvious than that,’ she said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘And it’s not his fault anyway. It’s the kind of British-Empire family he comes from. They brought him up to use poetry for all the feelings proper chaps aren’t meant to have. Other Men’s Flowers and all that.’
    Antony laughed. ‘You always rise to the bait, Trish, even now after – what? Ten years?’
    ‘Not quite. But getting on that way.’
    ‘How’s it going?’
    ‘Great,’ she said, without explanation.
    She’d passed through several stages with George, none of which she would choose to describe to anyone else and some of which had been pretty rough. Now they’d both
regained their sense of humour, and they lived in a state of emotional comfort that still seemed extraordinary. They knew who they were and why they had come together in the first place. Trish also knew that, whatever happened, she could trust George. She hoped the same was true for him.
    ‘What are you thinking about?’ Antony asked, pushing open the door of the restaurant so that she could precede him.
    ‘The menu,’ she said and knew from his familiar snort that he didn’t believe her for a second.
     
    Angie was standing in the kitchen of Fran and Greg’s first-floor flat in Kentish Town, gaping at the heaps of files they’d filled as they’d worked to prepare her case against the people responsible for John’s death.
    ‘What’s the matter, love?’ Fran said, tossing a swathe of silky red-blonde hair over her ample shoulder. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    Angie shook her head and rubbed a hand over her eyes, feeling the edge of an ancient callus snag on her eyelid. Next to Fran’s magnificence, she felt dried-up and old.
    ‘I just don’t know what I’ve done to deserve all this,’ she said, waving at the files before she remembered her ugly hands. She stuffed them in her pockets. ‘Without you two, I’d be stuck up there on the farm, writing my useless letters to people who couldn’t care less about John or the farm or me, and wondering whether I’d starve before the cancer got me.’
    The temperature in the heart of the fireball had been high enough to destroy the carcinogenic benzene there, but plenty had been left on the fringes of the explosion to leach into the ground and poison the watercourses. And the rain
that had seemed like a godsend at the time had actually made everything far worse, diluting the fire crew’s foam and spreading the pollution far and wide.
    Fran leaned over to give her a kiss. ‘And without you, I’d still be handing out our leaflets in shopping centres, knowing hardly anyone would bother to read them or understand why companies like CWWM have to be stopped before they destroy the whole world with their filthy chemicals.’
    ‘She’s right, you know,’ Greg said, pushing a stoneware mug towards Angie. ‘If you hadn’t been brave enough to risk everything by being a litigant in person, we’d never have got them into court.’
    Angie nodded her thanks for the tea and he beamed before returning to the cooker to stir his pan of bean stew. Steam billowed out, scented with onions and herbs, which made her realise how