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Maxwell and Jacquie are getting married. They are planning a nice, quiet ceremony with a few friends and colleagues, on a date Maxwell can’t forget – Balaclava Day, Trafalgar, something like that.
The Autumn Term starts in lovely weather. Interviews are being held for a replacement in the SLT and the staff holds its collective breath. Will it be the efficient-looking woman with the swept-back hair and the rather pleasant smile? Or the one who looks eleven but clearly has a mind like a razor, having learned all their names by lunchtime of the first day? Or will it be the one with a face like an old boot, breath that could stun a yak and an attitude you could strike a match on?
The lunch laid on that day decides that one out in no uncertain manner. Soon, all three of the women, Legs Diamond, Bernard Ryan and the Head of Business Studies are seriously ill with food poisoning.
Maxwell finds himself in the rather surprising position of running the school, as the longest serving senior member of staff. Soon, Jacquie is involved too - Leighford General have three dead teachers on their hands and don’t know the protocol. Two of the job interviewees and the Head of Business are dead, the other three are still critical.
Jim Astley is called in and finds that the dead women were all poisoned with an enormous dose of a strychnine derivative. Maxwell, as acting head, issues an edict banning eating during lessons, as Mrs B is complaining about the crumbs. But, despite all of these precautions, Paul Moss accepts the offer of a mini sausage roll and is rolling in agony minutes later. He’s lucky – the sausage roll was very mini and his bite from it was very small – he’ll live to teach another day. The wrapper is found to have a needle mark through which the poison has been injected.
The whole town of Leighford becomes gripped in mass hysteria. Takeaways close through lack of business and home cooking becomes the rage. Prepacked means dangerous and the supermarkets can’t sell a pie or Scotch egg for ready money.
A mad poisoner seems to be on the loose. But who is the target? Teachers? Students? Or just anyone? Maxwell and Jacquie must find the method behind the madness and only when they do will the poisonings stop. The problem they face is that their most likely suspect knows them both too well. Maxwell looks around for someone to send in instead, and who better than his mother-in-law-to-be. She and Maxwell both have the same aim in mind – Jacquie mustn’t find out. And she doesn’t, until the murderer is discovered at the bedside of the surviving interviewee.
Somehow, their appetite for planning the wedding breakfast isn’t quite the same any more. Released from his headmasterly duties by Diamond’s return, Maxwell jots down the menu on the back of an old memo from Bernard Ryan. All it says is – NO Prawn Cocktail. NO sausage rolls. NO hospital mince.
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