Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,33

If not, then I would go on living alone, working hard and keeping my eyes open so as not to miss the chance if one came along. London, I thought, might well increase the probability of such a chance.

The telephone rang on the bedside table. I reached over and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Morning, Mr Moreton,’ said Angela Milne. ‘Lovely day.’

‘Yes, lovely,’ I said, sitting up sharply. My heart-rate rose a notch. ‘Do you have any news for me?’

‘Yes, indeed I have,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?’

‘The good news, I suppose,’ I said.

‘The swabs taken by James Ward in your kitchen are all clear.’

‘Good,’ I said. I hadn’t expected otherwise. ‘So what’s the bad news?’

‘You poisoned everyone with phytohaemagglutinin.’

‘Phyto… what?’ I said.

‘Phytohaemagglutinin,’ she repeated. ‘And, yes, I did need to look up how to pronounce it.’

‘But what is it?’ I asked.

‘Kidney bean lectin.’

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s the stuff in red kidney beans that makes them poisonous,’ she said. ‘You gave your guests kidney beans that hadn’t been properly cooked.’

I thought back hard to last Friday’s dinner. ‘But I didn’t serve any kidney beans.’

‘You must have,’ she said. ‘Maybe in a salad or something?’

‘No,’ I said confidently, ‘there were definitely no kidney beans in that dinner. I made everything from scratch and I swear to you there were no kidney beans, red or otherwise, in any of it. The tests must be mistaken.’

‘Samples were taken from sixteen different individuals at the hospital and all of them contained phyto-what’s-its-name.’ She didn’t actually say that it was me that must be mistaken and not the tests, but the tone of her voice implied it.

‘Oh.’ I was confused. I knew there were no kidney beans in that dinner; at least, I hadn’t knowingly put any in it. ‘I’ll have to check the ingredients on the suppliers’ invoices.’

‘Perhaps you should,’ she said. She paused briefly. ‘In the meantime I will have to write an official report stating that the poisoning was due to an ingestion of incorrectly prepared kidney beans. The report will be sent to the Food Standards Agency.’

I would have preferred to have been given a criminal record.

‘I’m sorry, Max,’ she went on, ‘but I have to warn you that the Forest Heath District Council, that’s the district council for Newmarket racecourse, may choose to send the report to the Crown Prosecution Service for them to consider whether proceedings should be mounted against you under section 7 of the Food Safety Act.’ She paused as if thinking. ‘I don’t suppose I should really be calling you at all.’

Perhaps I was going to get the criminal record as well.

‘Well, thank you for warning me,’ I said. ‘What are the penalties?’

‘Maximum penalty is an unlimited fine and two years’ imprisonment but it won’t come to that. That would be for a deliberate act. At worst, you would get an official caution.’

Even an official caution counted as a criminal record. Maybe enough to put an end to any London aspirations. It might also be the death knell of the Hay Net.

‘I’ll write just the facts,’ she said. ‘I will emphasize that no one was really seriously ill, not life threatening or anything. All those who went to hospital were either discharged immediately or went home the following day. Maybe they will just give you a written warning for the future.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

She hung up and I sat and stared at the telephone in my hand.

Kidney beans! Every chef, every cook, every housewife, even every schoolboy knows that kidney beans have to be boiled to make them safe to eat. It was inconceivable that I would have included kidney beans in any recipe without boiling them vigorously first to destroy the poisons in them. It just didn’t make sense. But there was no escaping the fact that I had been ill and so had nearly everyone else, and that tests on sixteen people had shown that kidney bean lectin was present in them. The situation was crazy. There had to be another explanation. And I intended to find it.

I sat in my office at the restaurant and searched the Internet for information on kidney beans. Sure enough, phytohaemagglutinin was the stuff in them that made people ill. I discovered that it was a protein that was broken down and rendered harmless by boiling. Interestingly, or not, I also found out that the same stuff was used to stimulate mitotic division