Read Poison Flowers for Free Online

She suffered from a weak heart, which was presumably why she had chosen to live in a ‘retirement complex’with a warden on call.
    â€˜Most doctors,’ Tom had written, ‘would simply have certified the death as having been caused by cardiac arrest and left it at that, but Miss F. was on the list of a particularly bright – and conscientious – young GP. The symptoms were thought to have arisen very suddenly. She appears to have fainted before the warden could reach her. There had been some vomiting and diarrhoea, but she had lost consciousness fast and her heart had stopped beating before the doctor could get to the house. He noticed various oddities about her condition and refused to sign the death certificate.
    â€˜Post-mortem findings included the fact that her blood was a peculiarly dark colour and more liquid than it should have been. There were a few hyperaemic points (excessive amounts of blood in organs) in the mucous membrane of the stomach, intestines and right ventricle of the heart. The GP told the police of his suspicions and with the police surgeon pursued an investigation into every cup and glass in the house for signs of poison. They found a trace of digitalis in the glass from which she had drunk her nightly tot of sloe gin, tested the bottle and discovered an enormous quantity of digitalis in it. They are cumulative poisons and so although each dose in itself would have done her no harm, a week or two of drinking the contaminated stuff killed her.’
    Willow looked up from the report, as impressed by the GP as Tom had clearly been, but with other, less comfortable feelings worrying her. To live alone had never struck her as either unpleasant or odd; indeed, from her small involvement with other people, it had seemed infinitely more sensible to live by herself. But the thought of dying alone at sixty-five, after a solitary drink of sloe gin, because some warden could not answer her distress signal quickly enough, was unpleasant.
    â€˜But still,’ said Willow aloud, searching a rational way to calm herself, ‘at least the warden would have been less miserable at what he found than if he had been any child or spouse or lover or friend of Miss Fernside’s.’
    It was clear from Tom’s account of the next deaths that living with a lover was no protection, and Willow read it with care.
    Simon Titchmell, a successful architect of 35, and his girlfriend Annabel Wilna, a designer of fashionable gold jewellery, had died on 25 February from eating muesli that had been adulterated with dried and powdered aconite root. The two of them had not known each other long and were not living together although they often spent nights in each other’s houses. According to their friends they shared an exemplary devotion and were expected to marry or at least move into a single house. They had apparently had no real enemies and certainly no reason to form any kind of suicide pact. They owed no more money than their large mortgages and monthly credit-card bills; both of them had better than average career prospects and high incomes for their ages. No one could imagine how the aconite had got into Titchmell’s breakfast cereal unless either some lunatic had put it in during the packaging or storage of the cereal, as various people had put ground glass and pieces of metal in babyfood a year or two earlier, or the victims had done it themselves.
    Neither had come to the attention of the police except after a burglary at the Fulham house two weeks before the murder, when some of Titchmell’s cufflinks (made by Ms Wilna) had been stolen, together with a CD player, the video and – of all things – the electric toaster. The junior police officers who had interviewed them had reported later that both Titchmell and Wilna were intelligent, sensible and thoroughly approving of the police. It was thought unlikely by PC Leathwaite that they would have tried to drug themselves