City of Bells (25 page)

             
“But I did not know….”

             
Emma looked at Miss Hoffman curiously.  During the limited time she had spent with Leigh Anne Hoffman she had seen a variety of emotions seize the strong features of the woman’s face.  But they always seemed to do a swift dance before settling into an expression of calm self-assurance, as if Miss Hoffman had written the story of the world for her own personal amusement.  As if it were impossible for any person to say anything she had not thought of first.  This was the first time Emma had seen Miss Hoffman honestly struggle to regain her composure.

             
“Two people expired that morning in the lobby of the Byculla Club,” Emma repeated.  “You were not aware of this?” 

             
“So little gossip comes to me here,” said Miss Hoffman.  “I do not go to the Club, of course, and few people…”

             
“Did you know the man?”

             
Miss Hoffman shook her head.  The initial shock had passed now and she seemed to be composing herself a bit.  Pulling herself back to her full height, she took a shaky step or two in the direction of the portico.

             
“I met him but once,” she said.  “On Adelaide’s first day of employment I escorted her to the Weaver house and Sang greeted us…he greeted us with the greatest courtesy.  Which was noteworthy, for so few people really look at Adelaide, you see.  She is a walking reminder of an aspect of India that everyone, both light and dark, would dearly like to forget.  But Sang bowed and took us both on a tour of the entire house. Showed us everything she might be expected to do, which was not much.  It was as if he sensed she might be unnerved by a strange place and I might be hesitant to leave her there.  He seemed a kind man.”

             
“Yes,” Emma said.  For just this brief instant the mask of superiority had dropped and she found she liked the face which lay beneath.  Her opinion of Miss Hoffman shifted, at least for the moment, and she felt an irrational urge to take the woman’s arm, to steady her as she weaved on her feet. “That is my impression as well, although I knew him, of course, even less than you.”

             
“Will he be mourned?”  Miss Hoffman asked, a bit hollowly.

             
“He will,” Emma said, Felix’s face flashing before her.  He had mentioned a mother and grandmother as well and then an unwelcome image tumbled in with the others: the dark days after Mary’s death.  Trevor had told her that parties were held in Mary’s honor all over the East End of London, innumerable glasses of ale raised in her memory.  It wasn’t a plaque or a statue, or even a headstone.  Certainly there was no school bearing her name.  But if the question was “Who mourns the poor among us?  Who mourns the servants, the paupers, the whores?”  the answer appeared to be “Many.”

             
“His death was not even mentioned in the newspapers,” Miss Hoffman continued fretfully.  “Just one more Indian, deemed unworthy of notice.”

             
“True enough,” said Emma.  “But of the three who died, I have no doubt that Pulkit Sang shall be missed the most.”

Chapter Fourteen

The Tucker House

6
:40 PM

             
“Laudanum is extraordinarily bitter to the taste,” Tom said.  They had all reconvened in Mrs. Tucker’s parlor to once again confer, this time on the findings of the afternoon. Exhaustion was etched on the face of every person seated in the circle and they had all promised each other that they would tumble into their beds early tonight. 

             
“Bitter in the same way that residue from the suicide tree might be?” Trevor asked.

             
“Having never sampled Cerbera Odollam, I could not draw such a comparison,” Tom answered, before cheerfully adding, “Oh dear, I seem to have made a slip.  All right then, I’ll confess to an occasional dose of laudanum.  I doubt anyone makes it through medical school without sampling the wares now and then.”

             
“Tom,” Geraldine said disapprovingly.  “They say it is most addictive.”

             
“And they are quite right,” Tom admitted.  “Whoever ‘they’ may be.  I’ve always wondered about this nameless group of people, this gang of ‘theys’ who always seem to be so certain about what others should do.”  He turned back to Trevor.  “But if you are suggesting that someone might willingly swallow Cerbera Odollam, believing it to be their normal dose of prescribed laudanum, I suppose that it is possible. Both are bitter to the taste, yes, and laudanum has a reddish brown color, not that different from the dark shade the kernels of the Cerbera Odollam turn after exposure to air.”

             
“All right then, let us follow this thread of assumption and see where it leads,” Trevor said.  “What if the poison was not administered through a highly spiced food like a curry, but rather through the medication of Rose Weaver?” 

             
“You sound quite sure of yourself,” Emma said.

             
“Do not let him fool you with his Socratic question,” Rayley said with a smile. “Trevor and I know for a fact that Rose Weaver took laudanum every morning because her son Michael told us so.  Confessed it to us as we all stood in Jonathan Benson’s rented room along with a good deal of claptrap about his mother being ill and finding her little songbird dead.”

             
“Songbird?” Davy repeated.

             
“Yes, for you were quite right, lad,” Rayley said.  “The little yellow bird we found in the Weaver house once had a little yellow friend.  Strange to think how random life and death can be.  A hand reaches into a wicker cage and one creature lives while the other dies.”

             
“Do you think Rose’s use of laudanum was well known among the Weaver’s contemporaries and servants?” Emma asked.  “Widely enough that anyone would consider it a likely vehicle for poison?”

             
“Rose was a habitual user of opium even back when I knew her in the fifties,” Geraldine said matter-of-factly.  “She would walk out of a room in a most agitated manner and walk back in a few minutes later with an utterly serene demeanor.  Most likely everyone knew.”

             
“Good heavens, Geraldine,” Trevor said in exasperation.  “Might you have mentioned this earlier?”

             
“How was I to know it was relevant, darling?” Geraldine asked, flicking some sort of crawling bug from her arm as she spoke, and then fanning herself with vigor.  The sun was sinking but the air outside the open windows had not yet cooled to the lusciousness of evening.  “Almost all the women in the Raj had their little pills and potions and a woman like Rose more than most.  I remember that her traveling satchel rattled and clanked like a great group of brass bells whenever I would venture to move it.  Ah, that satchel.  She wouldn’t let it out of her sight.”

             
“So what do we make of that?” Rayley said thoughtfully.  “If she had been relying on opium in some form ever since the fifties she was almost certainly an addict of the highest order by the time she died.  Would her doctor confess to providing the opiates if we manage to find him?”

             
“We can find her doctor in the snap of a finger,” Tom said.  “He is no doubt a member of the Byculla Club, that small circle, and he will confess, I venture, with great alacrity simply because he will not see it as a confession.  There are two groups of people who look upon drug addiction without shame, my dear detectives, and that is the very rich and the very poor.  They discuss their medications openly, while middle class citizens might hide the needle or the pillbox. If Rose Weaver’s laudanum was given to her by a doctor, then I would venture she took it as casually as you might take a bicarbonate of soda.  And I would further venture that she was not the only person in her household who was an addict.”

             
“I know I said we might follow a thread of assumption,” Trevor said with a sigh.  “But let us not spin it out for miles.  Whyever would you say all that?”

             
“Did you see how much alcohol was consumed last night at the Byculla Club?” Tom asked wryly.  “Even I was given pause.  And it was all of them – young, old, male, female – the whole lot drinking with a steadiness that would put a group of cavalry officers under the table.  We all were feeling the effects by the end of that so-called cocktail hour, while the members of the Club merely proceeded into dinner and took up another round of pegs.  I would bet my pocket watch that the entire Raj is riddled with alcoholics and addicts.”

             
“You don’t have a pocket watch,” Trevor said.

             
“Quite right.  Then I shall wager yours.”

             
“Tom’s observations are sound,” Geraldine said.  “I have never known women who drink like these women drink…not then and not now.  And the pills… Rose was not the only one of the chaperones whose satchels were rattling, I assure you of that.”  She looked at Trevor with a serious expression.  “I believe it starts because they are all so very bored.  So much leisure, you know, without even the duties of motherhood to distract them, since the squadrons of nannies and the British boarding schools lift their children from their arms at almost the moment of birth.  It is as if they are trapped eternally in a railway station, waiting for a train which never seems to arrive.  And if one’s entire day is filled with nothing but sitting about the house or the Club, why not have a glass of wine with luncheon, or a bottle?  Why not have a bit of opium to distract the mind as well as soothe the body?”

             
“It happens in London too,” Tom said.  “Among a certain class.  And I daresay the doctors are especially lax when a patient is the age of Rose Weaver.  It is not ethical, I know this, Trevor, so don’t you glower like that at me. But it is expedient.  A woman comes to her physician, full of vague complaints, and it is all too easy to sedate her – and thus silence her - and tell yourself that you will deal with the effects later.  But of course, if the patient is in her seventies, the doctor likely believes that he will never have to deal with the effects.  Even if she becomes dependent upon the medication, the odds are she will die of something else first.”

             
“That’s all very well,” said Trevor.  “But why would you say that Rose was not the only addict in the household?”

             
“Two reasons,” said Tom.  “Addiction is frequently shared by spouses or family members.  One person is the designated patient, if you will.  The one who is officially sick in the eyes of the world and the physician.  Rose apparently volunteered for this role decades ago, according to Auntie Gerry, and has played it throughout the years marvelously well.  She procures the medication for everyone.”

             
“Quite a stretch,” Trevor said.

             
“You saw the Secretary-General,” Tom said.  “How did he look to you?  Twitching?  Sweating?  Did his thoughts jump around?  Was there any indication he might have been in the throes of an enforced opium withdrawal?”  When Trevor remained silent, biting his lip, Tom moved in for this final thrust.  “And that ‘Fourteen?’ here in Benson’s notes…  Evidently he meant that there was far more poison than was needed for a woman of Rose Weaver’s diminutive size.  But Anthony Weaver is a large man, is he not?  Would you say fourteen stone?”

             
“He was hale and hearty back in his day,” Gerry said.  “I believe you are right, darling, and that Anthony was the intended target all along.”

             
Although Trevor had mused over the same possibility himself only hours earlier, for some reason he resisted the theory when it came so readily from the mouths of Tom and Geraldine.  They could consider the fact Weaver was the target, true, but they must not rush to it too quickly. He strained to reel the group in before they leapt entirely beyond the bounds of what they could actually prove.

             
“So let us say for the sake of argument that someone within the household did indeed know that both Rose and Anthony Weaver were availing themselves of her prescribed laudanum,” he said.  “And let us further accept that this person then decided to use that laudanum to murder one or both of them.  It still leaves us with a very vexing question.  How did Pulkit Sang end up dead?”

             
“Quite right,” said Rayley.  “Sang’s death was the first fact which prompted the case and it remains the most challenging.  It’s hard to fathom that the whole household would be awash in opiates, including the servant.  I believe we should indeed pursue this line of thinking about the medication but still not entirely abandon our original theory, that the poison was hidden in one of the notably spicy local dishes.  Based on the ones Davy and I sampled last night, I could readily believe that our killer could hide an entire bush of Cerbera Odollam in a single pot of chicken curry without the slightest risk of detection.  Or they might sneak in a barrel of gunpowder, for that matter.  The, um, let us say explosive qualities of the local cuisine are the perfect cover for poisoning.  Within an hour of the meal, it becomes difficult to ascertain if one is dying or merely digesting.”

             
“What size is Sang?” Trevor asked Tom, above the general laughter.

             
“Always hard to estimate when a body is horizontal and not vertical, but I’d venture he was middling.   Somewhere between eight and fourteen stone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

             
“Everyone in this room is somewhere between eight and fourteen stone,” Emma said, continuing to laugh.  “That’s quite a span of weight.”

             
“So a dosage is concocted,” Trevor mused, parenthetically noting that Emma's estimation of his own weight was quite generous.  “Benson believed it was more than was needed to fell Rose, and in fact enough to kill her rather large husband.  And apparently, based on the fact we have two bodies, it was also enough to kill a very small woman and a middling sized man.”

             
“Over time,” Rayley said.  “As much as thirty minutes elapsed between the point where Rose and Sang must have ingested the substance and the time they died.”

              “I find it easier to believe Sang took laudanum than to believe Rose ate a curry,” Geraldine said. 

             
“I cannot say I agree, Miss Bainbridge,” Rayley said.  “Whyever would Pulkit Sang ingest his mistress’s medication?”

             
“For the same reason everyone else did,” Davy broke in.  “He liked it.  You saw the Weaver home, Sir, just as I did.  Sang did not live as an ordinary servant.  He must have been more a member of the family based on the size and location of his room and you yourself called it queer, Sir, that he would sleep right there on a pillow between his sir and madam.”

             
“Do you have another reason for saying this, Davy?” Trevor asked.   Experience had taught him that although Davy spoke rarely, his words carried weight.  The boy would never venture a comment merely to hear the sound of his own voice, a discretion that set him apart from the others in the group.

             
“We hadn’t come to the fingerprints, Sir, so I was waiting my turn to report,” Davy said.  “But I have seen something in the pattern.  The kitchen was wiped clean of prints, which is not surprising in light of the fact that the cook and maid had plenty of time to straighten up after Rose Weaver left the house on the morning of her death.  The tops and surfaces of everything quite properly scrubbed down, but the knobs on the drawers….”

             
“Ah yes,” said Geraldine.  “I am always telling Gage to wipe the knobs but he never does.”

             
“There is a large chest of drawers in the corner of the kitchen,” Davy said.  “All of them filled with items you might expect to find for the business of cooking and eating.  Save for one.  An empty drawer, in the top left side, rather small.  A perfect size for medicinal bottles and the like and so I took special care in dusting it….”

             
“Whose prints were on it?” Trevor asked.

             
“It is a bit curious, Sir,” Davy said.  “Both those of the maid and the cook, which is to be expected, and then Sang and Mr. Weaver, which seemed less so.  Not those of Mrs. Weaver, nor those of Felix.  And there were no unidentified prints which might belong to this Adelaide character who cannot be cornered long enough to be printed.”