He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked. -- P. G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time

"Well, of all the stupid, imbecilic, ridiculous, bone-headed..."

Nancy continued in this vein for a while. Finally she ran out of synonyms for "idiotic". Ruth suspected she had checked the thesaurus and memorised the full list before starting her lecture.

"You forgot 'unintelligent' and brainless'," Ruth said when Nancy stopped for breath.

Nancy glared at her. "Do you want a chair thrown at your head? No? Shut up!"

Ruth sighed. "It was a dumb idea and it failed. Now let's stop talking about it. What are we going to do instead?"

~~~~

As it turned out, the next move didn't come from them.

Louise swept around the house like a whirlwind, packing everything and arranging to have the furniture moved in record time. Before anyone knew what was happening, the date was already set for them officially moving into the new house.

Then it was upon them, and chaos reigned as everyone tried at once to sort their belongings out of the pile in the middle of the floor.

Louise had labelled all of the boxes. None of the labels had stuck. Nancy opened a box that she thought she recognised as containing all her clothes. Instead she found her father's shoes. Ruth searched for her books and found more cushions than she'd ever known they owned.

"Where did all these lampshades come from?" Louise complained.

"Why do we have fifteen hair-dryers?" Stephen asked.

Nancy called out, "Has anyone seen my pencils?"

"Where are all the plates? And the cutlery? And the cups?" Ruth wondered.

After an hour everyone sat down in the middle of the wreckage. Nancy was so tired that she didn't even mind that she was sitting on a shaggy, bright pink rug. It was one of Louise's, thrown rather than placed in the hall to give the place a splash of colour. Normally Nancy would have sooner picked up a tarantula than touched it.

"I think we should have some tea," Louise said. Those were the first sensible words Nancy had ever heard from her.

Ruth groaned. "How? I've only found one cup, and the teapot must be buried somewhere in a box we haven't opened yet. I can't even find the kettle!"

"We have a kettle in the kitchen," Louise said. "Remember? I bought it. And if we can't find cups, we'll use saucers. Have you found any of those?"

"Five. And they're all cracked," Stephen said flatly.

He and Louise were sitting on the stairs with open boxes piled around them. He reached into one of them and took out a saucer to prove his point. Nancy couldn't see the cracks from where she was sitting on the floor. Louise peered at it, then shrugged.

"Then we'll use bowls! Where are they?"

"In the box with the quilts," Nancy said, pointing vaguely towards several boxes all overflowing with bedding.

Louise stood up. She picked her steps gingerly down the stairs. One of the boxes wobbled ominously. Porcelain clinked inside it. Stephen grabbed it before it fell. 

"Careful! You nearly broke all our plates!" he exclaimed.

Louise ignored him. She'd reached the floor, sprinted over to the box of quilts, picked it up, and started for the kitchen before he finished speaking. Stephen, Nancy and Ruth watched in various stages of surprise as she disappeared into the kitchen.

Odd noises issued through the door. Thumps, squeaks, cardboard being torn, crockery clattering against a hard surface, and something that sounded like gears grinding together, followed by the sound of a tap being turned on. Then there was the hiss of the stove at its highest possible setting. Cupboards opened and closed. A brief silence, then Louise threw the door open.

"The tea's ready!" she shouted, as if they were on the other side of the house instead of mere metres away.

~~~~

Nancy couldn't have said what made her wary of the tea. It looked perfectly normal. Too strong for her taste, but she was used to that. Louise was only capable of making tea that was either so weak it was practically water, or so strong that it looked like coffee. It smelled normal too. When she took a sip, she found it even tasted normal. But there was just something about it that she didn't like.

She waited until Louise's back was turned. Then she emptied her cup into the sink.

Ruth finished her cup. She pulled a face. "I don't think this was washed properly. I could've sworn it tasted of washing-up liquid."

~~~~

That evening Ruth abandoned her efforts at unpacking and ran to the bathroom. Nancy could hear her retching.

Upstairs, Stephen was also complaining of an upset stomach. His voice drifted down through the ceiling: a wavering, childish, almost drunken "I feel soooooo very ill!"

Nancy began to think. She continued to think during the night. And in the morning she tried an experiment.

Once again, Louise made tea. Once again Nancy felt sure there was something wrong with it. This time she forced herself to finish the cup anyway.

By lunchtime she began to feel queasy. By three o'clock she was light-headed, the sun hurt her eyes, and the room pitched around like a ship at sea when she moved too quickly. By teatime she was curled up in bed with a basin beside her.

The efforts at unpacking continued while Nancy was ill. She winced at the never-ending thuds of cupboards being opened and closed. Ruth took a break from arranging her room to see how Nancy was.

"Must be a flu going round," she said.

Nancy shook her head. "Close the door, Ruth. You won't believe what I've got to say."

She was wrong. Ruth did believe it.

"How very like Louise," Ruth growled. "Hasn't even the decency to let herself be killed easily! And she won't even wait to make it look like an accident! Does she really think she'll get away with it if three people drop dead mysteriously?"

"But what are we going to do? How do we stop her poisoning us without revealing we know?"

"Trick her into drinking her own poison?"

"I think she's made herself immune to it. Probably drinks little doses every day. She poured her own tea from the same teapot as mine, and I watched her drink it."

Ruth said what she thought.

When she was finished they sat in silence for a while. Nancy was struck by another wave of nausea. She pulled the basin into her lap and clung to it for dear life.

"How about we switch it? Use a different sort of poison that she's not used to?" Ruth suggested.

"First we have to find where she keeps it."

~~~~

Ruth took the precaution of making her own food and drink for the rest of the day. She continued unpacking. So did Louise, hidden away somewhere upstairs. Stephen went to the office until late at night. Then he and Louise went off to the cinema, leaving Nancy still in her room and Ruth pretending to be very busy with her suitcases.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Ruth ran out of her room. She and Nancy had rooms side by side on a corridor that opened on the left of the entrance hall. There was unfortunately no way to get to the kitchen from her room or back without being seen from the landing, the living room, the dining room, and possibly the garden if the lights were on.

This had to be done while Louise was out.

She turned on the light in the kitchen. Louise hadn't replaced the ugly metal lampshade. Nor had she done anything about how depressing the place looked. Forget poison; just setting foot in the room made Ruth feel ill. The black cabinets looked like graves and the marble countertop made her think of headstones.

Never mind about that now, she told herself.

First she checked the tea canister. It was full of teabags. Ruth took one out and studied it. No obvious tears. Anyway, it would be too obvious to put the poison in the teabag itself. Then she checked the teapot. It needed a good scrub on the outside, but there was no sign of anything sinister inside. From there Ruth moved on to the cupboards. She checked sugar packets, boxes of painkillers, even tried to prise open the bag of ground coffee in case something was hidden under the flap. Nothing.

Either we're wrong or Louise carries the poison around with her.

Neither option seemed likely. But in the meantime, all they could do was pretend to be oblivious... and make their tea themselves.

~~~~

Nancy recovered quickly. Neither Ruth nor Stephen took sick over the next few days. Ruth would have been worried if she had, since she was going to an awful lot of trouble to prepare her own food in secret. She'd even gone as far as buying sandwiches, hiding them in her room, and eating them at night. But Stephen continued to eat and drink everything Louise made for him.

It was disgustingly trusting, and downright baffling that he remained healthy.

"She's up to something," Nancy said, which was exactly what Ruth thought too.

Ruth's bedroom, like every other room in the house, was decorated in the most ghastly way imaginable. The ceiling was dark blue, the walls were papered with a dark grey brick-like pattern, and the floor was covered with a fluffy white carpet. Ruth had taken one look at the carpet and immediately began to imagine burning it.

It didn't occur to her that there might be danger in redecorating it.

To be honest, even if she had thought it, she'd have decided it was worth the risk.

A week after the tea incident, the decorating shop delivered a small mountain of wallpaper rolls and paint tins. Nancy picked up the rolls and set to work in the hallway. Ruth gathered up the tins and carted them into her room. She had already stripped off the hideous paper. All that remained was to whitewash the ceiling and paint the walls a nice, cheerful shade of pale pink.

She got half of the ceiling done before Nancy called her. "Ruth! Get out here and hold this ladder!"

Ruth went out to the hall. Nancy was balancing on a stepladder with a roll of paper in her hand. Louise appeared at the end of the hall.

"Can I help?" she asked.

"No!" Nancy's voice was muffled because the paper had somehow fallen over her face.

"Yes," Ruth said, holding onto the stepladder. "Check that I didn't leave the paint tin open, please."

With her luck she just knew that she'd knock it over when she went back in. Louise went into the bedroom and came out again a minute later. Neither sister paid much attention to her. Nancy was struggling to unglue the paper from her hair. Ruth was saying, "Get down, idiot! You're going to fall!"

Sure enough, Nancy fell. She toppled off the ladder and onto Ruth's head. Ruth staggered back and crashed into the wall. The two of them sat down on the floor in a daze.

A tremendous thud rocked the hallway as they were still trying to recover. It came from inside Ruth's room. At the same time they heard glass shatter. It sounded like someone had taken a cricket bat to a greenhouse.

They scrambled to their feet. Ruth was the first through the door. She froze at the scene of devastation before her. Nancy stood on tiptoes to see over her shoulder.

"Good grief! What happened?"

It was a stupid question. Even the most unobservant person could have seen that the lampshade had fallen.

As the house's lampshades went, that one hadn't been too bad. It wasn't made of metal or plastic, and it wasn't an abstract sculpture masquerading as a lampshade. It had been a glass circle with glass pendants hanging from it, like a miniature chandelier.

Ruth hadn't planned to change it. She hadn't even touched it. There was no reason it should have fallen. Therefore...

Louise had gone into the room a few minutes before it fell. Ruth had been too distracted by Nancy's antics to notice how long Louise had spent there. Could she have unscrewed the lampshade without using a ladder?

"Look! The ropes have been cut!" Nancy pointed at the cords that had once attached the lampshade to the light fixture.

Sure enough, most of them had been cut. The edges were far too neat for them to have frayed.

If Ruth had gone into the room just a little earlier...

Ruth and Nancy looked at each other. There was no doubt about it. Louise was trying to kill them.

From now on it was war.