Poison At The Pueblo by Tim Heald

or verna .’
    â€˜Unlikely, I’d say,’ offered Contractor. ‘Death Cap, Destroying Angel and Spring Amanita produce vomiting and diarrhoea after about six hours and then there’s a remission period of around forty-eight hours before the liver packs up. But our man Trubshawe felt ill almost immediately and seems to have died within the hour. That doesn’t sound like an Amanita to me.’ Valencia had won with a penalty in extra time. It sounded like a good game.
    â€˜So, oh wise one, what do you think?’
    Contractor abandoned the paper with a sigh.
    â€˜I’m only guessing but I’d hazard Coprinus atramentarius . The common ink cap. Especially as Trubshawe was a bit of a boozer. I’d guess that the others ate Coprinus comatus . Common ink cap and shaggy ink cap to the layman.’ Bognor felt patronized. ‘Very difficult to tell apart but comatus , the shaggy one, is delicious whereas atramentarius , the common one is lethal. Especially with booze. Violent reactions within ten minutes.’
    â€˜Death?’
    They had reached some sort of dual carriageway and picked up speed, passing blue-smoke-belching trucks on the inside lane.
    â€˜Not usually,’ said Contractor. ‘In fact, the Amanitas are generally deadlier. The ink cap produces unpleasant symptoms. You go very red in the face, though from what I’ve learned about our friend Trubshawe he couldn’t have gone more puce than usual – a combination of foul temper and high living. The heart rate increases dramatically, you get blisteringly unpleasant chest pains and headaches. It’s all down to coprine which is a mixture of glutamine and cyclopropanine. Used to be confused with disulfiram which is the main ingredient in Antabuse, the anti-alcohism drug. We now know that nothing could be further from the truth and the two things have a completely different formulation. All the same, alcohol remains the key. If you take a drink on a cold day you should watch out for the common ink cap. Same goes for the club-footed funnel cap or Clitocybe clavipes , which is sometimes said to be edible but makes you sick and brings you out in spots if you have a tincture at the same time. But I think club-foot is an innocent party in this case.’
    â€˜But death?’ insisted his boss, reluctantly impressed by this all too typical display of knowledge unlightly worn. ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme?’
    Contractor appeared to think, frowning at yet another belching juggernaut exceeding the speed limit on the inside lane.
    â€˜Not with sufficient booze. Particularly if the victim had a dicky heart and/or high blood pressure. Which Trubshawe did. He was on all sorts of medication. Beta-blockers mainly.’
    â€˜How do you know that?’
    â€˜I make it my business.’ Contractor stared longingly at the sports report on his lap. He yearned to return to it but judged such a tactic premature.
    â€˜I see,’ said Bognor. ‘I didn’t realize that mycology was part of the semiotics course at the University of Wessex.’
    Contractor’s degree, like so many new qualifications, meant something and nothing at one and the same time. What exactly it meant was another matter. Different things to different people, reckoned Bognor. It was like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland : it meant whatever you wanted it to mean. That was the meaning of meaning nowadays. Being a degree-holder in semiotics, he seldom said quite what he meant and if his message was difficult to understand that suited him. It might have encompassed mycology but then again it might not. It was immaterial anyway. Contractor was irritatingly well read, to the point of almost being a genuine post-Renaissance man. A latter-day polymath, certainly. Sir Simon liked to think of himself as more of a tortoise than a hare. He might have known comparatively little but, by God, he knew a lot about it.
    This time Contractor did