Classic Scottish Murder Stories (6 page)

There are clues to indicate that Mother had not been very understanding. It had been a strict upbringing and she would not accept that William was an adult. It did not matter whether he resented her actions or not, she simply would not stop checking through his pockets. Her attitude towards the great passion in his life is evident in the telling words which she used when she found a packet of chemical substance in his pocket. ‘What trash is this you have been buying, Willie?' she asked delicately. For some reason, too, the boys shared a bedroom, in a house which was quite spacious enough for privacy.

His father said that he knew nothing about it, but the fact is that William had been seeing a girl named Edith Ross, cashier at a garage, Liddle and Johnston's, Belford Road, where he had been sent to audit the firm's books, and where Father kept his car. William had given her a ring and a wristlet watch. She denied that they were engaged. Mother might have got wind of these secret matters, even if she did not tell her husband, because she had said to Marion Armstrong, the maid, that she was going to ‘put William abroad'.

As things stood on May 30th, all should now have been well. William had just left Father's hated office, and the whole of the rest of his life glittered in chemical letters and formulae. He could afford to be grateful, generous and forgiving, because he had won. Unfortunately, he would have to be dependent on his family financially for some years yet. Father had been paying him a salary of £2.10s a month, and Mother gave him some
pocket-money. An independent existence would come to him later than to others because of the false start which had been imposed on him. There had recently been a spot of trouble, when he had bought two cameras and had not been able to pay the account. Father had refused to help out, because he wanted to teach the lad that such things cost money.

Alexis, still a schoolboy, had just come in from tennis that Friday evening, and he was hungry again. Mother had set out the meal and made the coffee. Alexis put sugar in all four cups – it was a co-operative enterprise – and Mother poured in the coffee. William, as his duty, cut four slices of bread and handed one each to his parents balanced on the knife. Alexis grabbed the first slice which William had cut for him on the platter. Although he was the only one who did not take any cheese, it was Alexis who cut it for his parents. William took or got a smaller piece.

Father put his cheese on his bread and began to eat. He felt a burning sensation in his throat, and remarked that it was a funny bit of cheese that his wife had got that week. Piqued, perhaps, by the matrimonial slight, Mother had a second helping of the maligned cheese, together with the second half of Father's slice of bread; his appetite appeared to have diminished. Supper was over, and Mr King sat smoking by the fire. His wife and William sat beside him. Alexis tuned in on his wireless set. It was indeed a scene of domestic unity.

After a quarter of an hour, Mr King realised that he felt sick. He went up to bed, closely followed by Mrs King. Both vomited, and again, and again. There was bad pain in the stomach. Alexis was all right. William was sick three times (he said): downstairs, upstairs in the bathroom, and outside in the street. Alexis heard him vomiting downstairs in the pantry (where there was a sink).

Mr King asked for the doctor to be called. William reported that he had telephoned, but had been told that the doctor was out on a case, and it was not known when he would be back. Dr William Fraser Macdonald, of 42 Polwarth Terrace, later stated
that he had been out on a confinement and when he arrived home at nearly midnight, there was no message for him on the slate, and he went to bed. This was taken to indicate that William had lied, but he was certainly right about the doctor's movements. He should have left a message.

In the absence of medical comfort, Mr King thought of the old stand-by, warming brandy, but had none in the house. William rang up the previously mentioned chemist, David Peebles, of 20 West Maitland Street to ask for a bottle, and left the house to fetch it. This was when he was sick for the third time, but unfortunately the chemist, who met him half-way, was not asked if he had noticed a pool of vomit in the gutter, or other signs. A dose of brandy sent Mr King to sleep, in the spare bedroom to which he had moved. At 12.30am he woke to vomit again. He looked into the main bedroom and asked the boys how their mother was. They said that she seemed to be much better (after the brandy) and he went back to bed.

Although Mr King did not seem to be aware of a second telephone call to the doctor (if there actually had been a first one) in fact, shortly after he had gone to bed, Dr Macdonald was telephoned by William and told about his parents' illness. He gathered that his attendance was not urgently required, and told William to let him know if the situation worsened. William's position at this stage is defensible. While they were in the bedroom with their mother, she cried out, ‘Oh, Loch Maree, Loch Maree!' These strange, in fact sinking, words were a reference to a recent occasion when several guests at a Highland hotel had died from botulism after eating sandwiches filled with wild duck paste or pâté. The general apprehension, of course, in the stricken household was that the cheese had caused food-poisoning. Even stranger, Mother complained of seeing ‘lights' in William's eyes, but not in Alexis's eyes. They switched off the electric light, thinking that she was bothered by reflection, but she still saw the lights in William's eyes in the darkness. This is a really uncomfortable image.

The boys went to bed. Alexis slept, and William said that he did, too. At 2 am, Mr King woke up and was sick again. He staggered in to see his wife, and found that she was dead. She had slipped away, all on her own. He called the boys and told them to telephone his brother, Dr Robert King and David Peebles. Then he lay down in the library, where he spent the remainder of the night. He recovered. At 2.15am on his own initiative, William rang for Dr Macdonald.

The chill, dim house was suddenly ablaze with lights and thronged with people anxious to help and full of questions. Mr King lay on his sofa, helpless and bereaved. William, in great distress on his knees beside his dead mother, was heard to lament, in curiously stilted terms, ‘Why was Mother taken and I not taken? Why did I not take my exam?' Mrs Peebles, wife of the chemist, arrived at 3.20am, saw the remains of a meal on the table, but did not notice any bread. (The loaf had not been intact, having been broached at tea-time, and the four slices taken at supper could have finished it, except, perhaps, for the end-crust.) She took all the cups, saucers and plates to the kitchen and washed them.

The doctors' joint and several opinion was that the cheese had been contaminated by an irritant poison, probably arsenic. On the morning of the following day, Detective Inspector David Fleming made the first of a number of visits to the house. He removed a glass jar of jelly, a tin box of coffee, and a paper bag of sugar, all found in the sideboard in the parlour. No cheese appeared to be left, so he visited the grocer's shop in Roseburn Terrace and appropriated the whole cheese from which the Kings' portion had been cut. On the Sunday, he took from the pocket of a grey jacket belonging to William, which was hanging in the wardrobe, a glass bottle containing a white powder and labelled Potass. Ferricyanide. He bore it away for analysis, together with other bottles from William's miniature laboratory in the back garden, where there was a great deal of photographic apparata. Two days later he was back at the
house, asking about poisons – weed-killer, fly-killer, mouse-killer, rat-killer – but father and sons all stated categorically that they had no poisons whatsoever. The cheese, they said, must have been lethal. William was to say that he had never smelt or tasted a cheese like it, with a very sharp ‘kick': the cheese-dish stank of it for three days after being washed (possibly by poor, kind Mrs Peebles!).

The post-mortem on the body of Mrs Agnes Scott King made by Professor Harvey Littlejohn on June 2nd had indicated that death had been caused by an irritant poison. She had been an apparently healthy woman, although it was known that she had been complaining of pain in the region of the heart, and had consulted Dr Macdonald. Any thoughts that she, rather than her husband, had succumbed because of some innate fragility were soon dispelled by the results of chemical analysis of internal organs. The horrifically large quantity of 3.01 grains of arsenious oxide (white arsenic in powder form) was found in the tissues tested, and, allowing for vomiting and purging, the computation was that the whole dose of arsenic taken in must have been in the region of 10 grains. The fatal dose in an adult is usually stated as from two to three grains. Mother had had no chance at all.

One week after the death, Detective Inspector Fleming was told at Surgeons' Hall that the glass bottle taken from the pocket of William's grey jacket actually contained three-quarters of an ounce of arsenious oxide, not potassium ferricyanide (which is comparatively less toxic, although capable of poisoning). Considerably activated by this discovery, he proceeded to the garage, Liddle and Johnston's, and triumphantly abstracted from the office two books which William had kept there:
Death and its Mystery at the Moment of Death,
and
Death and its Mystery after Death.
Rather more evidential than this adolescent reading matter, which Edith Ross knew all about, was the order form for ‘1lb arsenious oxide', in William King's handwriting, signed ‘Liddle and Johnston', which a firm of wholesale chemical dealers, Baird's,
of 39 Lothian Street, produced upon enquiry as to whether they had recently sold any arsenic. The clue which led Fleming to the dealers was a bottle found at the garage which bore the firm's label. On Tuesday June 10th, William was arrested in Douglas Gardens. After caution, he was searched, and some arsenic powder was found loosely adhering to the lining of the left hip-pocket of his trousers.

His splendid subsequent explanation deserves to be in a textbook of defences. Around May 26th, he said, he had his mind set on certain chemical experiments. He particularly wanted to derive a magenta dye from coal-tar, and he saw in his textbooks, (not, apparently, produced) that he needed arsenious oxide to bring about the desired reaction. Secondly, he wanted to make a crystal of arsenious oxide and sulphur for his wireless set. He had previously made a crystal of lead sulphite, but it was no good.

The quantity of arsenic that he required was 2 ounces (875 grains) but that was too much to obtain from an ordinary retail chemist, and it occurred to him that he might be able to get it through the garage, Liddle and Johnston's, from the wholesale chemist, Baird's. He made a telephone enquiry and was told that 2 ounces was too small a quantity to supply to the garage, but that 1lb (7,000 grains) could be made available. It was a simple matter to fill in one of the garage's order forms. He did not bother to initial the order, because he expected that he would have to sign the poisons books personally when he collected the arsenic. (This does not seem to have been the case.)

He did not think it necessary, the explanation continued, to tell anyone connected with the garage that he had ordered in some arsenic, because he thought that an invoice would be sent. (Indeed, that had been duly done, and the account had not been paid.) He was
not
wearing his suit of blue dungarees (which would have made him look like a garage employee) when he collected the arsenic, whatever the assistant at Baird's had said to the police to the contrary.

The 1lb parcel of arsenic was wrapped in brown paper, which he took off. The inner wrapping of white paper was labelled POISON. He put the packet in his left-hip trouser-pocket, where his mother came across it the following morning, as she went through his pockets. (This was theoretically the ‘What trash is this?' incident, attested to by Alexis, and by Mr King, although the latter used milder language – ‘Willie, is this some more chemicals or stuff that you have been buying?'). Mother told him to put it in the outhouse and took it downstairs herself.
He forgot all about it
(although he had been to such pains to obtain it) and did not know where she had put it. He could only explain his failure of memory by the fact that he had other things to think of. He was so absolutely nervous at having the police about that he forgot to tell them about the arsenic. He thought anyone in a similar position would be in a nervous state. Anyway, he did remember about the packet on Monday June 2nd, when he looked for it and happened to notice it on the pantry shelf. (His mother would surely have seen the POISON label and been more careful or perhaps she was inured to his chemicals.) It was sort of hidden (that was the implication) in the right angle formed by the first shelf and the sliding door of the pantry press. A little of the contents had run out – one of the corners was ‘kind of burst'. He first learned of the leakage in his pocket much later, at the police station.

When he found the packet, he thought that he had better take what he required (surely he was not even contemplating chemical experiments three days after Mother's death?) and throw the rest away, because he knew it was so dangerous. The only bottle that was available at the time was the small one labelled ‘Potass. Ferricyanide' and he filled it with about 2 ounces of the arsenic. He never thought of taking the POISON label off the packet, and putting it on the bottle for reasons of safety. Then he put it in his grey jacket pocket. He poured the remainder of the contents of the packet down the pantry sink (in which he had been sick) and threw the wrapper in the fire.

William Laurie King was put to his trial at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh on August 26th 1924. He pleaded Not Guilty. The fifteen jurors, five of whom were women, liked him. He was a golden boy, blond and rosy-cheeked, and he was sturdy, more like a son of the manse, a Boy Scout, than a scheming murderer riddled with hatred and resentment. The judge did not like him at all and made some remarks calculated to cut to the quick. He said this was a young man of no moral character, no moral courage, prone to resort to cowardly expedients and incapable of facing up to unpleasant situations. Father and Alexis, called by the Crown, consistently maintained that there had been no hatred, only love, behind the walls at Wester Coates Terrace. This must have weighed with the jury, as must his father and brother's insistence that William had had no opportunity to add poison to food at the fatal supper. He had not left the room during the whole evening (i.e. to tamper with the food waiting in the pantry), they said, and he had not, definitely not, had the opportunity to sprinkle arsenic on the slices of bread as he cut them. There had, it was true, been a moment when Alexis had stretched across the table between William and his father, but they did not accept that this was sufficient opportunity for the notional sleight of hand. William did not do it.