Not to be Taken (7 page)

‘Oh, nothing.’ All of a sudden the old appealing look came into her face. Her voice went up at least two tones. ‘Oh, but Douglas…’

‘Well?’

‘Before you go, if you
do
happen to see Cyril, please try to find out what it is he’s been searching the house for ever since last night. He and the servants have turned everything simply upside down.
Do
try to find out, and tell me. Will you?’

‘I’ll ask him,’ I said, and escaped.

Cyril was in the hall as I came down the stairs. I had the feeling that he had been lying in wait for me.

Cyril evidently believed in direct methods, for his question was certainly blunt.

‘I suppose Angela sent for you. What did she want?’

I believe in direct methods myself at times, and I used them then.

‘That’s her business. What have you been searching her house for?’

Cyril stroked his little moustache and smiled, unpleasantly.

‘I might answer, that’s my business. But I won’t. I’ll tell you: I’ve been searching for a half-empty bottle of medicine which, as I understand, was prescribed and sent round by Doctor Brougham to my brother, but now seems unaccountably to have disappeared. Can you throw any light on its whereabouts, Sewell?’

I kept my composure.

‘If you have any problems of that sort, I suggest you take them to the police,’ I said shortly.

He smiled again.

‘Oh, but I’ve already done
that.
’

I let myself out of the house.

I had made an enemy, but that did not worry me. I thoroughly disliked the fellow in any case.

But I could not help reflecting, as I walked home, how very fortunate it was that the post-mortem had proved
abortive – for all of us. As for that wretched bottle of medicine, I determined to bury it under the next tree I planted.

4

Just ten days later Harold came round to see us at ten o’clock in the evening, in a state of dithering excitement. There was no need for him to apologise for the lateness of his call. The news he brought fully justified that.

‘I say, what do you think?’ he broke out, almost before the door had closed behind him. ‘I thought you’d like to know at once – they found arsenic in John’s body!’

Enter the Police

Frances and I stared at Harold.

‘
Arsenic
?’
I repeated stupidly, stopping dead in my movement to pull a chair up to the fire for him. ‘Nonsense!’

‘Not nonsense at all,’ retorted Harold. ‘I happened to be at the Broughams’ this evening, and the report came through to Glen on the telephone. As a matter of fact I believe it was that fellow who did the autopsy, tipping Glen off.’

‘And Glen told you?’ asked Frances.

‘He said it would be all round the place tomorrow, so I might as well be the first to know,’ Harold said ingenuously. ‘I thought you’d like to be the second. Arsenic! That’s a pretty serious thing, you know.’

‘That’s a mild way of putting it,’ I muttered.

To tell the truth I felt quite dazed. I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever had an intimate friend die from the effects of poison, but if so he will know that at first the news sounds quite incredible; and the closer the friend is, the more incredible does the news sound. Other people, other people’s friends, people of whom one reads in the newspapers, may die perhaps of poison, but one’s own friends never. The thing seems impossible.

Harold pulled his own chair up to the fire. I leaned back against the mantelpiece, still staring at him. Mechanically I
noticed
that the book Frances had been reading had fallen on the floor, apparently without her noticing it, and mechanically I stooped and picked it up and laid it very carefully on the arm of her chair.

‘Arsenic!’ breathed Frances again. She looked at me in a peculiar way. I realised at once what was in her mind: that cursed bottle of medicine. More than ever I wished that she had not seen fit to meddle with it.

‘There’ll be an inquest, of course,’ Harold said, not without a certain relish. ‘And pretty quickly too, I expect.’

‘What does Glen think?’ I asked abruptly.

Harold shrugged his shoulders. ‘Can’t account for it, of course. Flummoxed.’

‘Yes, yes, but what does he
think
? You know – accident, suicide or murder?’

‘Oh, not murder,’ Frances put in with such assurance that Harold looked at her.

‘Why not murder?’ he asked with (I would swear) something like disappointment in his voice.

‘Who could possibly want to murder John?’ Frances replied simply.

Harold prepared to be argumentative. ‘How do we know? We can’t possibly say. All sorts of things might have been going on.’

‘Nobody could ever want to murder John,’ Frances returned with the same conviction.

I felt she was right.

‘John was such – such a grand fellow,’ I amplified, searching for the right phrase to describe John and finding them all either inadequate or banal. ‘Nobody but a fiend or a lunatic could have thought of murdering him.’

Harold quirked the corners of his mouth in that mannerism which has always slightly irritated me. ‘Well, how can we say? It might have been a lunatic. Or a fiend.’

‘The idea’s out of the question,’ I snapped.

Harold’s quirk deepened. ‘Is it? It would have been out of the question, I should have said a month ago, that we could be sitting in this room discussing John’s death from arsenical poisoning. But we are. After that, nothing seems impossible.’

I did not wish to pursue the argument.

‘Did Glen say how much arsenic they’d found?’

‘I gathered it was a measurable quantity. Glen seemed to think that meant a good deal.’

‘More than just traces?’

‘A lot more. If you’re thinking of arsenical wallpapers or minute traces from cooking utensils,’ Harold said knowledgeably, ‘it’s nothing like that. Death was directly due to arsenical poisoning, and for a measurable quantity to be found after an illness lasting several days, with all the eliminations that took place, a good deal more than a fatal dose must have been swallowed.’

‘You seem to know a lot about arsenic all of a sudden,’ I said suspiciously.

‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ Frances told me. ‘Glen’s been coaching him.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ returned Harold, ‘Glen hasn’t. He didn’t seem to know very much about arsenic himself. We looked it up in one of his textbooks.’

‘I believe Glen positively despises drugs,’ Frances remarked. ‘Surgery’s all he cares for. Why does a man have to be a physician and a surgeon? He may be rotten at one of them and brilliant at the other…well, like Glen.’

‘This will look pretty bad for Glen, by the way,’ I said to Harold, disturbed by the thought.

‘He doesn’t seem worried.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he is. And if he were, he wouldn’t show it. But it can’t do a doctor much good to have a patient die of poison under his nose and give a certificate that he died a natural death. They won’t break him, of course, but he’ll come in for some very nasty criticism.’

‘It’s a shame to put all that responsibility on one man,’ Frances observed with some heat.

‘Oh, Glen seems to think he’s covered all right,’ Harold said carelessly: ‘Rona was asking him about that. He says no one can tell the symptoms of arsenical poisoning from natural illness, or very rarely. After all, it happens over and over again with these arsenical poisoning cases.’

There was a little silence.

‘How the devil did John get arsenic inside him?’ I burst out. ‘That’s what I can’t understand.’ It still seemed an incredible horror that John, whom we had known so well, should have died from arsenic poisoning. It made me feel foolishly and uselessly angry; and the anger, as I dimly realise, sprang from an irrational sensation of guilt, as if in some way I could have prevented the thing and had not done so. Of course I could not have prevented it.

Harold quirked again. ‘Well, you and Frances seem agreed that it can’t have been murder, and I imagine that John was hardly the person to commit suicide, so it must have been
accident
.’

‘But how?’ I demanded helplessly. ‘How could anyone, John least of all, have taken a large dose of arsenic by accident? One simply doesn’t do such a thing.’

Harold spread out his hands. ‘One doesn’t. But the only presumption is that he did.’

There was another uneasy silence.

Finally Frances broke it.

‘It needn’t have been an accident on John’s part,’ she said quietly. ‘It might have been someone else’s.’

‘It must have been someone else’s,’ Harold affirmed. I avoided Frances’ eye.

2

After Harold had gone I tackled her.

‘Things have gone too far now,’ I told her. ‘We must hand that infernal bottle over to the police.’

‘I suppose we must,’ she agreed reluctantly. ‘Oh, Douglas, I wish we needn’t. I wish I hadn’t taken it. At first I wanted to have it analysed, but now…’

‘If the arsenic was in that,’ I said gloomily, ‘it’ll break Glen. A mistake in diagnosis is one thing, but a mistake in a prescription is serious. I should think they could have him for manslaughter if they wanted. Glen is so confoundedly careless, too. It really was the devil’s own luck that he should have been doing the dispensing on that day of all days. Rona would never make a mistake like that.’

‘You feel sure that’s where the arsenic was, then?’ Frances asked almost fearfully.

‘Where else could it have been?’

‘That wretched man Cyril Waterhouse seems to think Angela…’

‘Absolute nonsense,’ I snapped. ‘Can you see Angela poisoning anyone? He dislikes her and he seems to have some sort of grudge against her, and he’s taking this dirty way of paying it off.’

‘I think he really believes it. Oh dear,’ Frances wailed suddenly, ‘life’s going to be simply
beastly
for the next few months, with everyone suspecting everyone else and all of us suspecting each other. If the arsenic isn’t in the medicine, I mean. But of course it is.’

‘I wish to goodness you’d left the bottle where it was,’ I could not help saying.

‘Oh, darling, so do I. But I was sorry for John. He looked so ill and awful. I was sure Glen had made a mistake in the medicine, and I meant to show him up.’ Frances burst suddenly into tears. She is not a woman who cries easily. ‘Oh, poor, poor John! We all liked him so much. What a dreadful way to have to die…and so unnecessary. Who could ever have –’

She stopped crying and looked at me fixedly.

‘Douglas,’ she said, ‘how did Cyril Waterhouse
know
that there was anything wrong at all? How did he know there was anything worth having a post-mortem and an analysis for?’

‘I don’t think he did know,’ I said a little awkwardly. ‘I think he was only being vindictive and troublesome at first, and just carried the thing through to the end. I’ve no doubt he was as surprised by the result of the analysis as we were.’

Frances shook her head. ‘He acted as if he
knew
,’ she said obstinately. ‘I believe he did know.’

3

I don’t know why I did not hand the bottle of medicine over to the police first thing the next morning.

That is not true, I do know. It was the instinctive wish to put off a distasteful task, when any excuse can be found for doing so. My excuses were fairly good ones, as it happened. For one thing I took it for granted that a journey into Torminster would be necessary, for I did not fancy entrusting the thing to our own local and somewhat bucolic constable; and that would take up a lot of time. For another I had been much worried during the night over Angela and the extremely awkward position in which she must now be finding herself.

I had said nothing to Frances about the letter of which Angela had told me. That was Angela’s secret – or should have been. Besides, I saw no reason why Frances should be involved any further in the affair. Nevertheless I felt that someone else, possibly wiser than myself, ought to be consulted; and having meditated over a plan for approaching Angela’s solicitor in confidence, and rejecting it for a number of excellent reasons, I had decided before morning came to lay the trouble at the feet of the two most level-headed persons I knew, Glen and Rona, and let them see what they could make of it. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, I gave a few hurried directions to my men for the morning’s work and then set out for the Broughams’ house, hoping to catch them before Glen’s surgery.

I caught Glen actually before he had begun his breakfast. Ten minutes was the time he allowed for that meal, and I arrived one minute early. While he despatched eggs and bacon with professional skill, and Rona plied him with coffee, I told the two of them what I had to say.

They received it in their respective ways.

‘The confounded young ass,’ remarked Glen benevolently.

‘You’re right, my friend,’ said Rona seriously. ‘This makes things look unnecessarily bad. What do you want us to do?’

That was characteristic of Rona, I thought. She took it for granted that Angela’s indiscretions had no bearing upon John’s death, she took it for granted that she and Glen would do what they could to help, and she knew that I had some sort of a scheme in mind. Rona certainly made things easy for one.

‘I’ll tell you,’ I said gratefully. ‘You know what Angela is. There may be nothing organically wrong with her, as Glen told us the other day; but she’s pretty spineless. That fellow Cyril Waterhouse, to whom, by the way, I’ve taken a strong dislike, is going to do what he likes with her unless we interfere. I think he’s made up his mind that she poisoned her husband. We know that’s absurd, but that’s the bee he’s got in his bonnet. We’ve got to put a buffer between him and Angela, or he’ll probably drive her right off her head. There’s only one person who can act as a buffer, and that’s you, Rona. My idea is that you should go up there (at once: there’s no time to lose), see Angela, and get her to let you install yourself in the house again as nurse – her nurse this time. And tell her why, if you like. She’ll be delighted to have you. In fact she’ll clutch at you. And no one could keep Cyril at bay better than you. I would ask Frances, but…’

Rona nodded quickly. ‘No, no. It’s my job, of course. Admirable. I’ll go and get my hat on at once.’

Glen gulped down the end of his last cup of coffee. ‘Some hustler, aren’t you?’ he asked ironically.

‘You’re in on this too,’ I retorted. ‘Surely you can fake up some medical excuse to prevent Angela from being badgered.’

‘Oh, I’ll have a shot, of course,’ Glen answered casually. ‘Though I’ve an idea that my stock isn’t too high with friend Cyril just at present.’

‘Look here,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Harold came round to us last night. Is it true that they’ve discovered arsenic?’

‘Perfectly,’ Glen said with complete equanimity.

‘But – but how the devil did he come to take it?’

Glen shrugged his shoulders as he rose from the breakfast table. ‘How is a victim usually persuaded to take it? Disguised in something else, I suppose.’

‘A – a victim?’ I stammered. ‘You don’t mean John was murdered?’

‘Of course he was murdered,’ Glen retorted with complete calm. ‘And damn cleverly too. I’ll admit I was taken in, properly.’

‘But it’s out of the question,’ I felt compelled to expostulate. ‘My dear chap…oh no, it can’t be murder.’