SOLVED. mystery short story: "the boy is in the way", nightshade [s]

[Daphne]

I keep thinking this is by Neil Gaiman, but I don't know that he does straight crime fiction.

I think this happens in Britain. It could really be any time period, but I felt like it was recent enough that people had telephones.

A man is unhappy. His brother has died, and so the man is raising his nephew as a guardian. The nephew is the heir to all kinds of money. And the man wants the money. He walks around thinking about it. Suddenly people start saying things to him, "The boy is in the way". One of them tells him to go to a certain bar. He goes there and talks to someone (can't remember if it's a man or a woman), who offers to kill the boy for a certain amount of money. The money will be paid after the death. He signs a paper without really looking at it.

A little later the kid starts telling everyone about this fairy queen (or similar figure) he meets while he's out wandering the moors. (The man, his wife, and the kid live on an estate or something of that sort.) Of course they're all like "how cute and imaginative you are!"

Then the kid becomes seriously ill. He explains that the fairy queen told him to eat nightshade berries, which are wild on the moor. The kid dies and of course they find the nightshade in his stomach. They even go to the extent of looking out on the moor and finding bushes where the berries were eaten. The amount of poison in the berries is quite variable and a person could have painted the berries with extra poison. The story makes it clear that this is what has happened; also, no one suspects anything. For one thing, nightshade makes people hallucinate, so they figure the kid ate berries and then hallucinated the woman.

The man meets up with the criminals again, and pays them. They hand him back the paper he signed, and it's a confession that he hired them to do the murder. If he hadn't paid, he'd be in trouble. The end.

[Daphne]

Well, the power of posting strikes again. I then googled "the boy is in your way" and found it. This is by Dorothy L. Sayers, called "The Leopard Lady", in In the Teeth of the Evidence.