Excerpt from the book called The Frisby Waterless Murders
A late middle-aged woman carrying a large basket was sitting on the bench on the station platform looking wistfully at the train.
“Carly Waferr? Is she a member of the Round Table?”
“She’s not their Queen Guinevere figure is she sir?”
“I hope not for their sake – unless Sir Lancelot is blind of course – anyway let me out here and I will go and speak to her; I will see you at the scene of the crime in a few minutes.”
Knowles ambled over towards Carly Waferr who physically recoiled from him as he approached. She gripped her basket tightly.
“Carly Waferr, what are you doing here? Were you the one who was going to be murdered?”
“No, Inspector, this is nothing to do with me, I was just doing the catering for the trip.”
“Magic mushroom salad?”
“Mushroom soup, actually, then a carrot, bean, and celery salad with condiments followed by quiche a la Goat Parva and vol-au-vents, rounded off with an organic blueberry ice cream and decaffeinated tisanes and coffee.”
“This is a weight watchers trip, then?”
“Healthy eating in The Shires is my motto, Inspector.”
“All grown in your own garden and the local woods I presume?”
“Just the garden, actually. I don’t go to the woods to look for mushrooms any longer as the only ones left are the poisonous ones.”
“That’s like a parable of modern society, Carly. You’ve used up all the sustainable resources and all that’s left is the poisonous stuff, which can’t be used by anyone. What is the point of a poisonous mushroom anyway? Who or what can eat that?” Knowles made a mental note to ask the Reverend Strong at Goat Parva why God had created poisonous mushrooms and what their role was in God’s plan of creation. Did God have a bad couple of minutes during the creation week, perhaps on a Monday morning, and create all the venomous creatures, poisonous plants, and horrible diseases at that time?
“Perhaps they’re a throwback to the time of the dinosaurs when creatures were a lot bigger and so wouldn’t be affected by such small amounts of toxins. But then that comet hit us around 65 million years ago and all the dinosaurs died out, but the mushrooms survived.”
Knowles had a vision of the tabloid headline “Mushrooms survive direct hit by comet” but decided he should get back to official police business.
Julian Worker Fiction Writing 