Excerpt from the book called The Frisby Waterless Murders
“There’s also the fact that Mrs Smedley was in Seat 1 and would have had a perfect view of the Major as he died in plain sight without her knowing what was going on.”
“But Inspector, he was only moved there when Maudie Trimble cancelled.”
“Right, but Maudie Trimble’s dog was deliberately poisoned by the sound of it; a piece of meat was thrown into her garden the previous evening, she left the dog outside all night, not appearing to care whether it came in or not, and then she found the poor thing passed out the following morning. Not surprisingly she had to take it to the vet…”
“It was OK, sir?”
“Yes, just about but she had to cancel the murder/mystery of course.”
“So you think the murderer poisoned her dog?”
“I think that’s highly likely, because we have not had a dog poisoning in these parts for months, have we Sergeant?”
“We haven’t, no, but I just wonder where the murderer obtained the contaminated meat and the curare to commit these terrible crimes?”
“Barnesy, what bothers me is that two or three people decided to poison the Major with curare, which means that those people have bought the plants independently and created curare, so there’s a lot of poison around.”
“Three people, why three?”
“It seems as though someone put curare either in his coffee or in his muffin as well, but you can’t poison someone with curare by having them ingest it.”
“So another ignorant attempted murderer then? That’s two! When would that have happened?”
“Before the drinks were served perhaps – but wait on, if that is the case then the person doing the poisoning might not have known that Maudie wasn’t coming – the Major had pre-ordered coffee as had Maudie Trimble so he would have been served the coffee meant for Maudie.”
“They pour the coffee out of the coffee maker into individual coffee pots before wheeling it out to the passengers then? Each coffee is marked with the correct seat number? Is that why the steward spilled the coffee, because he realised the wrong person was sitting there?”
“No, the stewards helped move the Major,” Knowles reminded him.
“So coffee could have been served believing Maudie was in Seat 22, therefore if the murderer attempts to kill Maudie and they put the curare in the coffee, the coffee would have been drunk by the Major.”
Julian Worker Fiction Writing 