Devil's Food (9 page)

‘Poison?’ I asked, wondering if this was some strange double suicide over Seth and Ryan.

‘Of course,’ said Meroe. ‘All the best poisons are organic. Cyanide. Ricin. From an ordinary garden I could make you a distilled water which would kill a horse.’

‘The strongest poison ever known came from Caesar’s laurel crown,’ murmured Daniel, and Meroe nodded at him as might a teacher to an intelligent pupil.

‘Precisely. Laurel water could knock out a hundred horses. This is ready. Do you have honey, Corinna? It will taste fairly foul.’

‘I have honey,’ I said, producing the jar. ‘And how are you going to get them to drink it?’

‘Like this,’ said Meroe. It was very clever and very touching. She mixed the brew to her liking, then approached Goss and wrapped her in her long shawl so that the girl’s head lay on Meroe’s shoulder. Then with her little finger dipped in honey she touched Goss’s lower lip. The sweetness must have penetrated the crying, because a little red tongue slipped out and licked up the honey. Then gradually Meroe substituted her brew for the honey, and though there was a small grimace it went down like magic. Goss drank the whole cupful and by the time she had finished it, she was no longer crying. Her breathing had eased.

‘You will now eat what Corinna gives you,’ she told her patient, ‘while I attend to your friend.’

I sat down on the table and handed Goss a spoon and a Cafe Delicious banana cream, a speciality. It was a small pie containing custard, fruit and cream and topped with meringue. I rationed myself to one a week and I knew that they melted in the mouth. I was expecting a struggle with Goss, who dieted even more strenuously than Kylie, but she took the dish and ate the pie in little mouse-like nibbles. Tears, for some reason, pricked my eyes and I looked over to see how Daniel was managing.

Meroe had just finished with Kylie, who had also stopped crying. At last. Daniel released her and fetched the pie, and she, too, ate as biddably as a lamb. She even put the plate down on the floor for Heckle, who had indicated that his diet lacked cream. They both looked as bedraggled as if they had been fighting in a gutter. Goss’s hair hung down in strings. Kylie’s face was still flushed.

‘Now, ladies, we are taking you home to your apartment,’ said Meroe evenly. She seldom sounded severe, but when she said that something was going to happen, there was never any sense that it could be evaded. ‘You need to sleep. Come along now. Who can stand up?’

Goss managed it, leaning on my shoulder. Kylie collapsed and Daniel carried her.

We got them into the lift and conveyed the two poor little waifs to their apartment and Goss managed to open the door before she fell on the couch. Daniel was excused and returned to help Jason with the real world of bread and deliveries. Meroe and I did a little elementary housework — making two beds, for instance, clearing a path through the underwear and shoes to the said beds, trying to find some food in their kitchen. We were not conspicuously successful. They had a lot of dried soups and so on, all guaranteed 150% fat free (and how much sugar?). They did have real coffee and tea, and a lot of herbal teas in pretty packets featuring dragons and unicorns. And a whole box of hangover remedies. I put on the kettle to make Meroe and me some coffee. There were plenty of cups but the dishes had not been done recently. I loaded the dishwasher and switched it on.

I spent some minutes reassuring Tori, their kitten, who clearly hadn’t been fed yet this morning and was sitting on my foot telling me all about it. As an apology, she was about to get a tin of that very expensive cat food which makes a human, on reading the contents, think that a diet of cat food might not be so bad at that. My mouth watered as I dished up Seafood Symphony, with selected prawns and salmon in a lobster bisque aspic. So did Tori’s, for she mewed the plaintive mew of a fluffy and charmingly blonde kitten to whom nothing had previously been denied. I put down the plate and found that her water dish was empty. Dry and empty. The girls loved Tori with a passion. How could they leave her thirsty?

I left the kitchen — which was, of course, otherwise clean, being hardly ever used — to find Meroe very gently washing Goss’s face with a make-up removing wipe. Goss seemed to be asleep now. Her pulse was good. Her eyes were shut. She murmured a little as Meroe tended her like a mother cat. I did not trust my touch so I allowed Meroe to remove both of those panda-faces while I browsed through the bathroom cabinet. I did not think that my shop assistants had gone mad together just by coincidence. They had taken something. But Daniel didn’t think it was drugs. And he didn’t recognise the reaction. Was there something new on the street? Or was this something altogether more sinister than just a new recreational drug?

Those girls had more make-up than a theatre company. It was everywhere, stuffed into every corner of the bathroom. I did find some soluble aspirin, some contraceptives, something called bikini line wax, that made me shudder, and a lot of miscellaneous instruments which I did not recognise. Eyelash curlers? Hair crimpers? They looked remarkably like something that the Inquisition might have found useful in extracting confessions from one of Meroe’s forebears. Most of them fell clattering into the bath when I opened the towel cupboard. Which contained one towel and more make-up. Lipsticks of every hue from bone white to black, through avocado and berry and sunset and Malibu and desert and tangerine and portulaca and True Red. Foundations enough to build a small Greek temple, eye shadows in little pots, and little boxes, and little palettes, and wands of mascara and eye pencils to supply Ancient Egypt for a dynasty.

And most of it in the bath. I went looking for a plastic shopping bag and stuffed them all in. The girls could have hours of fun sorting it all out and none of it had broken. Fortunately. I had seen the labels and I could not afford to replace this stuff without taking out a mortgage on Earthly Delights. But I had not found anything out of place. Tons of make-up, dried soups, cat food, shoes enough to make the late President Marcos’s widow cry with envy — yes, expected. The same went for clothes in various degrees of fashion and disarray, some still in their drycleaner bags. I began to feel like a burglar and wondered how burglars did it. This wasn’t my house and I had no right to be here.

‘Meroe, I’m feeling like an intruder. Shouldn’t we call a doctor for them and get out of here?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet, at least. We do not know what they have taken — you agree it must have been something, Corinna — and if we call a doctor and they test the girls for some illegal substance, they might easily be charged by the police. And I happen to know that their fathers said it was back home with them if they ever got involved with drugs. They are resting comfortably,’ added Meroe.

‘We could wait until they wake up,’ I suggested.

‘I need to find it now,’ said Meroe. ‘Because if it has other ingredients, we may need to call an ambulance and get them to hospital before liver failure sets in. Actually, there isn’t much anyone can do for liver failure. Look for a packet, Corinna, probably of dried herbs, and we must pray to the Goddess that there is no loose white powder in the mix.’

‘Loose white powder?’ I thought, not liking the sound of this at all. I returned to the kitchen and lay out on the bench all the pretty boxes of herbal teas. They contained exactly what they said they contained, which was herbal tea in tea bags: fruity, peppery, and one smelling just like hair conditioner. I stacked them back into their basket.

‘It’s that serious, this white stuff?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s paracetamol. Perfectly safe painkiller when used as prescribed. An excellent liver killer when the dose is exceeded, and it doesn’t have to be exceeded by much. The trouble with a lot of drugs is that the toxic dose is very close to the effective dose. And anyone can call themselves a herbalist. Some benighted idiot was selling his own home-picked soothing tea with paracetamol in it and nearly killed two young women. It was in the herbalists’ magazine. I sell herbs: I do not like to think of them being so misused. Nothing in the teas? I’ll try the fridge.’

Tori, who had finished her breakfast, padded off to sit next to the fridge, posing prettily. Meroe was not moved.

‘You have been fed, young daughter of Basht,’ she told Tori. Tori, recognising an iron will, yawned (also prettily) and strolled off to find a suitable background for her wash. Meroe exclaimed at the number of pre-packaged meals in the freezer. All of them in the original wrapping. A tub of Double Death by Chocolate ice cream, half full. Much as expected.

I had gone back to examine the built-in kitchen cupboards, which were almost empty. Up on the top shelf of the highest I found a set of those stubby canisters which were so popular in the fifties, about the same time as there had last been any sugar in this flat. They were made of dark brown plastic with orange highlights and I took them down one by one as Meroe swore and slammed the fridge door. They were all empty but one, the flour canister.

‘You said it would be a packet of herbs?’ I asked from my perch on the kitchen chair.

‘Yes?’ she said curtly.

‘But it might be loose leaves?’ She flew at me and grabbed the canister and set it on the table. She combed through it with a wet finger and tasted. Gingerly.

‘Are we out of the woods?’ I wanted to know.

‘Not even strolling on a path yet,’ she replied, spilling some of the leaves onto a clean piece of kitchen paper. She smoothed them out then put them in piles. Even I could see that some of this tea was mint. It had a strange, musty smell which seemed familiar. I couldn’t remember. Nothing to do with tea, though. Meroe was paying special attention to some shrivelled berries which ranged in size from peppercorns to what looked like lilly pilly berries. But, it appeared, weren’t.

Meroe stood up and massaged her temples. ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘No sign of chemical contamination. Most of the herbs are benign, even though the combination makes no sense. There are hot herbs and cold herbs here, and herbs for bile and herbs for blood, and —’

‘So it wouldn’t actually do anything?’ I asked. ‘With all the remedies acting against each other?’

‘There are some that are meant to act together. Powerful laxatives, powerful diuretics, in strong enough concentrations they deplete the body of water and strip it of potassium. That can kill a weakened person. Though I’ve never heard of our girls’ hysteria before, it is probably a strange conjunction between the ingredients. No one has heard of it because no herbalist in their right mind would use these together.’

‘So, what do we do?’ I asked. I was still feeling very uncomfortable.

‘You wait with them while I arrange a watcher,’ she said, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders decisively. ‘We have businesses to run and they will sleep for a long time yet.’

‘Not Mrs Dawson or the Prof,’ I told her. ‘They’re at lunch in the University Club by now. And I do not think Mrs Pemberthy would be a wise choice.’

We thought about our very own vindictive, blue-haired, aggressively frail Mrs Pemberthy and her rotten little doggie, Traddles, and shook our heads.

‘Trudi will be busy,’ said Meroe.

‘Nerds Inc and the Pandamuses have their own businesses,’ I went on, dreading what she was going to say.

‘Andy Holliday and Cherie are at the zoo,’ she said. ‘It will have to be Ms Webb.’

‘Therese would be perfect,’ I said, not knowing or caring how this was going to sound, ‘but I’m not letting my mother anywhere near Kylie and Goss.’

I looked down, ashamed, but Meroe was agreeing with me. ‘Certainly not. In her jangle of hatred and sorrow, she could do them incalculable damage in their present state. Let me call Therese — surely Star can be left for a little while — and you find the wrapper for that tea.’

I found it, in the almost empty rubbish bin, between a copy of
TV Week
with all the articles torn out and one sad little packet of instant soup. It was a modest wrapper for such dangerous contents. I patted it out flat on the table.

Meroe and I examined it. A non professional packing job, I considered, with raw edges on the bottom. It was also not entirely square; the edges did not meet perfectly at the top. On the beige background a slightly blurry black stamp proclaimed ‘Weight Loss Tea’ and underneath ‘Melb. Pkng Cy’.

‘And a fat lot of use that is,’ I said on my released breath. ‘No manufacturer, no instructions even. Oh no, here they are. Inside the packet.’

I laid out a piece of common typing paper and read out the words printed in black Gothic type: ‘Infuse contents in one litre of water. Strain. One wineglass on rising and on going to bed. Keep infusion in a cool place.’

‘And that’s it?’ asked Meroe. I searched the packet.

‘That’s it,’ I told her, taken aback. Meroe was gradually going pale. Her hands had fastened on the front of her shawl and her knuckles were standing out. Sometimes Meroe looks like a young woman, especially when she laughs. She wasn’t laughing. She was aging. In front of my eyes something like the Wicked Witch of the West was evolving. I stepped back a pace. I was glad I was on her side, whichever side it was.

‘Therese has left your mother asleep and will be here directly,’ she said. ‘Tell her to call me if anything happens. If the girls wake she should let them drink as much water or tea — not coffee — as they like and eat as much ice cream as they desire, and tell them I said so.’

I fought down an urge to salute. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I will get onto the net,’ said Meroe. ‘I will talk to all my customers. I will report this to all reputable herbalists. And we will find out who is selling this poison, and we will make the seller really, really sorry.’

Then she did laugh, briefly, but it did not make her look young. She left without slamming the door. I might have felt better if she had slammed it. All that anger had to go somewhere.

In all it was a relief to hand the invalids over to Therese, who came in bearing an embroidery bag and a thermos. She clucked over the sleeping girls and settled herself next to Tori on the couch, where she could see into both rooms. Tori approved of the embroidery bag and tried to climb into it, but was gently dissuaded.