It was the night of the annual dinner of the Outdoor Pursuits Association of Great Britain at the National (formerly Royal) Geographical Society. The banqueting hall was full of men and women with weatherbeaten faces and hearty appetites. Canoeists chatted to mountaineers. Orienteers swapped anecdotes with proprietors of sports equipment shops. Most of the guests looked uncomfortable in their formal evening wear, as if they couldn’t wait to change back into their rugged outdoor clothes.
Jack Barker was the guest of honour. He sat at the top table, flanked by an official of the British Canoe Union and the Chairperson of the Caving Association of Great Britain. Jack was bored out of his brain. He hated the outdoors, but at this particular moment he would gladly have climbed Ben Nevis backwards and naked rather than endure yet another interminable story about being trapped in a flooded cave. He pushed his soup bowl away – the soup tasted fishy.
‘What’s the soup?’ he asked the Master of Ceremonies, who stood behind him.
‘Fish, Prime Minister,’ answered the flunkey.
By the time Jack was halfway through his Coronation Chicken he had begun to sweat and the colour had gone from his face.
The British Canoe Union official bent towards Jack and asked with concern, ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘I’m not sure,’ answered Jack.
Eric Tremaine, who was attending the dinner in his role as a member of the Caravan and Camping Club of Great Britain, watched triumphantly from a more humbly placed table as Jack was led away by the Master of Ceremonies.
‘Most undignified,’ Eric remarked to his neighbour, a free-fall parachutist, as Jack vomited uncontrollably into the water jug that he clutched in his hands.
When the contents of Jack’s soup bowl were analysed in the laboratories of St Thomas’s Hospital, the liquid was found to contain elements of a common weedkiller and a tiny proportion of a liquidized slug pellet.
As no other guest at the dinner had suffered Jack’s fate, the conclusion drawn by the doctors at the hospital and the police forensic experts was that an amateurish attempt had been made to poison the Prime Minister.
Eric Tremaine sat inside his caravan in a layby near East Croydon next morning. He re-read the headline for the third time: ‘P.M. SURVIVES SLUG PELLET ASSAULT’ and threw his paper down in disgust.