Blood in the Cotswolds Read Free Page A

table, and said, ‘Hepzie likes her, as well. She took to her right away.’
    Phil was unimpressed. ‘Hepzie likes everybody,’ he said.
        
    Hector’s Nook boasted a small courtyard at the back of the house, facing south-west and filled with more pots of exuberant plants. One in particular caught Phil’s attention. It had large palmate leaves and a cluster of ripening seedpods in a striking shade of pale terracotta. ‘That’s acastor oil plant,’ he said, his voice oddly harsh to his own ears.
    ‘So what if it is?’
    ‘The seeds are used for making ricin.’
    Thea grinned. ‘My God! Miss Deacon’s part of the supply chain for al-Qaeda. Who’d have guessed it? Do you think she has a little chemistry lab in the cellar? Has the Government banned these plants? If not, why not?’
    ‘It’s not funny, Thea,’ he snapped.
    ‘You’re wrong, my lamb. It is actually very funny. There must be thousands of old ladies with one of these plants on their patios or even in the front room. It’s a handsome thing – I bet the Victorians loved them. Besides, I thought we decided that ricin isn’t especially lethal anyway. Didn’t we?’
    He screwed up his eyes, struggling to reconcile the two extreme bodies of opinion in his daily life. As a police officer, he was expected to anticipate and prevent all activity that might present a threat to the general public. He was supposed to take the worst case scenario and act as if it was certain to happen. But Thea threw doubt and even mockery over much of what he was obliged to take seriously. With feignedinterest, she cross-examined him on the precise method of extracting ricin from the plant, and just what damage it wreaked on the human body. To his irritation, he found he could give only the vaguest answers. ‘It can kill,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘It killed that Bulgarian. The one that was stabbed with an umbrella.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ she recalled. ‘And Miss Deacon’s got an umbrella – probably. I can’t say I’ve seen it, but there’s sure to be one. So we can agree that ricin is dodgy if it’s injected into you. That’s true of quite a few substances, isn’t it?’
    ‘Stop it!’ he ordered, laughing in spite of himself. ‘You make everything I do look ridiculous. I don’t know why I tolerate it.’
    ‘It’s not you,’ she soothed. ‘It’s this idiotic Government. You’re just the helpless instrument. Just obeying orders,’ she added, less flippantly.
    Phil was not much reassured. He had watched her becoming more and more enraged by the latest round of legislation further curtailing individual freedoms, sometimes floundering for the words with which to explain how sinister it all was. He worried at the wedge it threatened to drive between them. When sitting at one of the many briefings he received at work, he tried togive space in his head for Thea’s point of view, with increasing difficulty. The innocent have nothing to fear , came the official line. These measures are designed specifically to protect the innocent. But he wasn’t stupid. He could see some of the dangers for himself. When he visualised ‘the innocent’ they were pink-skinned, rural-dwelling, unambitious zombies. Anybody brown or clever or angry or unusual raised suspicions. And it didn’t stop there. The police were supposed to keep a close eye on people who behaved irresponsibly in their cars, who smoked or drank too much, who cast a lustful eye on young girls or accessed the wrong sort of websites on their computers. Surveillance was everywhere, and sometimes it seemed to him that it wouldn’t be long before half the population were being employed by the police to keep a close eye on the other half. He knew it was possible, that there were unpleasant precedents in countries not so very far away.
    But he couldn’t let any of this spoil the day with Thea. The long lazy Sunday afternoon stretched invitingly ahead, slowing the pace of life almost to a standstill. There were