The Best of Friends Alex Day (best short novels .TXT) 📖

Perhaps having them there was the reminder I needed that I had revenge to exact for a wound inflicted. This mission was the boost that gave me the impetus to get me through the day, the plan that galvanised me into action.

The plan that would bring retribution.

It had to be perfectly executed if it was going to achieve what I needed it to. The first part of it demanded that I was alone in the flat to make the phone call and of course it had to be a weekday. Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon, I had my opportunity.

My hands shook as I lifted the receiver and dialled the number. The nervous sweat on my fingers left damp patches on the plastic and caused them to slip. As the ringing tone began, I swallowed hard and took a deep breath; I was really going to do this.

When the call connected, there was a small delay before I heard the voice of the call handler. Pretending to be our course director, a Professor of Pharmacology, one of the few females in such a prestigious role in the whole country, was easy. Nobody whose job it was just to answer the phone in a poison-control unit would know what she really sounded like. It only took a few minutes to get the information I needed, which I noted down carefully on the notepad in front of me. I thought I had recovered my composure after the initial terror, but as I tried to write, the pen slid in my fingers, making my writing erratic and untidy – though still perfectly legible.

I asked the call handler to repeat back her words, to make double sure I had recorded them correctly. She did so, speaking slowly and clearly as she had presumably been trained to do.

Satisfied, I coolly thanked her and rang off. I checked back what she had told me; it was entirely consistent with what I had understood from my toxicology books and the lectures that had formed part of my course. The satisfying snap of the elastic band as it fastened the notebook closed was the perfect end to the day.

The 14th of February, Saint Valentine’s Day, dawned bright and clear, the day for lovers everywhere, the time to declare your feelings and, if you’re a man, buy two dozen red supermarket carnations for your partner. One dozen if you’re a cheapskate.

It was the day that I’d been dreading because of all the reminders of what Charlie and I had had together and what I’d lost. What he now shared with that strumpet Josephine. But now it was here, there was a fizz of excitement deep within my bowels, a steeliness to my nerves and a steadiness to my intent. It was time for me to get my own back.

It was harder than I imagined to break the first thermometer. I tried firmly rapping it as you would an egg on the side of the metal bowl but nothing happened. Smashing it against the rim didn’t work either and nor did trying to snap it. In the end, I put some newspaper on the floor to protect the carpet – I needed to be mindful of my deposit – and stepped on the slim glass tube. A splintering sound told me I’d succeeded.

Hastily snatching the thermometer up, I poured the liquid mercury into the bowl where it slid and rolled in a small, perfectly formed silver-white sphere. The syringe hoovered it up but it barely filled the receptacle – only 0.5g. I broke another, and then another.

My mouth and nose felt sweaty under the mask that I’d taken the trouble to bring from my placement in the hospital pharmacy. As a vapour, broken down into individual atoms, mercury absorbs into the lungs where its poisonous effects are quickly felt. I needed to be careful that I didn’t contaminate myself in the process of what I wanted to achieve.

Obviously, I didn’t tell anyone what I was planning, or afterwards what I had done. I was naive enough to think that I’d covered all my tracks, that no one would ever be able to point the finger at me.

I truly believed I’d committed the perfect crime.

Chapter 28

Susannah

The questioning didn’t take long.

I thought I’d be at the police station for ages but I think the officers felt sorry for me; I was so obviously a fish out of water in a cell or an interview room. They weren’t in any case in any doubt as to the culprit. I didn’t even really care by that point. I just wanted the whole business over with.

Already, I could hardly remember injecting the chocolates, those perfect, shiny brown spheres that resembled the carapaces of cockroaches, with the mercury from the thermometers, wrapping them back up and delivering them to the flat, addressed to that French floozy Josephine. It was as if it were something I’d seen in a movie, not something I’d done myself, lived in my own real life.

Josephine had come home and found the chocolates on the doorstep. Thinking they were a gift from Charlie, she’d immediately opened them and taken one. She might have been skinny but she was bloody greedy. But in the end she’d eaten just the one, only one measly little chocolate. And not even eaten it really as, not liking the taste, she’d spat it out. I’d thought that the strong cherry brandy flavour I’d chosen would have masked the contamination, but it seemed not.

When Charlie came home he’d examined the box and found the mercury oozing out of the holes made by the syringe; he’d called the police and immediately implicated me.

Attempted murder.

That’s what Charlie wanted me to be charged with. But of course it wasn’t that. The mercury, even if they’d eaten all the chocolates, every last one, would at worst have given them stomach pains and vomiting; in solid form it passes through the intestines so nicely that, in Victorian times, it was used to