Read the opening chapter of 'The Fountain in the Forest' by Tony White

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1: Fumeterre (Common fumitory)

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Like any British policeman who had been brought up on the truecrime stories of the early twentieth century, Detective Sergeant Rex King recognised the jagged, hairy leaves and the sickly-looking yellowish and purple-veined five-pointed flowers immediately. It was henbane – Hyoscyamus niger – source of the deadly alkaloid scopolamine. This was the poison that, in 1910, the notorious ‘Doctor’ Hawley Harvey Crippen had used to kill Cora Turner, the musichall entertainer who had had the misfortune to become his second wife. But what was a substantial and tall-stemmed henbane doing thriving here in the window box of a Bloomsbury pub, rather than in a cabinet of forensic medical curiosities, where it belonged? King made a mental note to let Emma at the Safer Neighbourhood Team know, so they could at least send one of the Police Community Support Officers, or PCSOs, round to have a friendly word. With no real powers and little training, PCSOs were sometimes seen as little better than ‘cardboard cut-outs’ by many of their uniform colleagues. They were the butt of seemingly endless variations on the old joke about ‘impersonating a police officer’ and the subject of many a petty cavil, as well as more serious and justifiable resentments. This was perhaps understandable, given the negative impact on pay and conditions, let alone collective bargaining, that the creation of the post had engendered across the force. But the way King saw it, policing wasn’t all blues and twos. Someone had to be out there on dog-shit duty, taking up the slack and covering all the 3


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