Dread and Water

by Douglas Clark

  “But you don’t remember the number of the replacement set?”

  “Haven’t a clue. But I remember the bloody water-bottle sprang a leak. By the time I got to the bottom I looked as if I’d wet my pants.”

  “Thank you,” said Masters. “I’m grateful for your help.”

  “Not much help if I couldn’t remember the bloody number, was it?”

  Masters smiled. “Shall we take you home? I’ll send you out in my car in the morning to collect your own.”

  The police car from North Wales arrived at twenty past one in the morning. Masters, waiting up for it, spent less than half an hour reading the reports and inspecting the gear. Then he put in a call to the hospital in North Wales and held a few minutes’ conversation with a very sleepy consultant surgeon.

  After that, he went to bed.

  Chapter 7

  It was half past nine on Tuesday morning. There were seven of them sitting at the round table in Crome’s office. Masters had invited Toinquet and Partington to be present in addition to the Director and his own three colleagues.

  The sun had at last broken through the grey skies of the last three days. There was an air of contentment about the meeting as if everybody sensed that the tension was about to be relaxed. As if to emphasise this, Green placed a new packet of Kensitas on the table, while Crome rang for a coffee tray. The fire blazed comfortingly and Masters, who was a devotee of Charles Lamb, was reminded of the opening lines of the essay ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’: ‘A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.’ Only this time it wasn’t a game, but a chase. A chase he had successfully completed and about which he was now prepared to report.

  “I have to report,” he began, “three successful murders and one attempted but unsuccessful one.”

  “You’ve definitely established that they were murders?” asked Crome, handing round coffee and asking the question much as a committee chairwoman might enquire of her colleagues whether there were enough tables for the tea-tent at the village fete.

  Masters nodded. “Beyond doubt.”

  “Who was the subject of the attempted murder?” asked Toinquet.

  “Doctor Alec Bullock.” Masters paused to allow the ripple of comment that this announcement called forth to die down. “Gentlemen, I am fully prepared to answer questions, and I would like you to ask them, but I think many of the answers will become clear as I go, so if I could ask you to hold back—except to clarify points—you may find my report the more coherent for your abstinence. Bear with me, please, as I am trying to recount a complex narrative.”

  “Fair enough,” said Crome.

  “Thank you. Our first task, you will remember, was to establish that multiple murder had, in fact, been done. I have said categorically that we have established this. And so we have, to the tune of identifying the murderer and completing a case against that person. But our reasons for asserting murder are quite simple. In fact, in one word, similarities. Exact similarities in every case.

  “I have here a film which shows Doctor Silk immediately before his fall. A moving film which shows him leaning sideways on the cliff face and shaking his head in some distress as if to clear his eyes of dust or grit. Our enquiries show that each of these men seemed to be moving their heads as if to clear their features or their senses—from dust or, as one witness put it, soap in the eyes. And at the time they were all seen to be doing this, they were moving or leaning sideways. Without exception.

  “I see that this puzzles you, but you don’t appear to find it significant. Perhaps one other fact will impress you. All the men who fell did so after being on their respective mountains for about thirty-five or forty minutes.”

  Masters paused. There was little reaction from his audience who sat there quietly staring at him. He felt slightly irritated by their apparent lack of interest. He hadn’t got them with him—yet. Like most speakers in a similar position, he forged ahead.

  “More materially, each of those men, with the possible exception of Bullock, was definitely using equipment set number six. All Bullock could tell us was that he was not using his usual gear—number five set. So there is the possibility that he, too, used number six; and I confidently believe he did, as I will try to show later.”

  The material fact hooked them. Climbing gear is tangible. Faulty gear? Was that the answer to the problem? Masters was pleased to get the reaction. Crome made as if to ask a question, but refrained. Toinquet nodded as if to show that he could appreciate that here was a point of importance. Partington actually muttered something about having wondered, earlier, whether their gear had failed the three dead men.

  “The last similarity we have been able to prove conclusively is that each of the first three men took a pull at his water-bottle before starting the climb. I have no witness prepared to swear that Mailer did so, but it is, I believe, highly likely that he did take a drink at that time.”

  “Quite natural,” said Partington, forgetting the promise of silence. “A drink and a nervous pee.”

  “That, too. At least in some instances. Those are the similarities I spoke of, gentlemen. I’ll list them again. The same time spent on the rock-face; the same gear; the same canted-over position; the same drink; and the same signs of distress immediately prior to falling. Put them in any order you like, apportion them whatever significance you like, but the fact will still remain that there were five multiple coincidences which, added to the fact that all the men were senior scientists from the same group in the same Centre, make me certain that murder has been done.”

  “Astounding,” said Crome. “So many indications must be conclusive—I regret to say. More coffee anybody? There’s still some left, but we seem to be a bit short of milk.”

  “What about you, Widow?” asked Green. “Have you any objections?”

  “What to?”

  “The conclusion that there were three murders.”

  Toinquet shook his head. “Not if what the Super says is true. But don’t forget most people were convinced it was murder before you people started to look around for the bits and pieces we’ve heard about so far.”

  Hill bristled. “What’s that about if what the Chief says is true? Are you suggesting he’s making it up?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. But it’s very circumstantial.”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Partington. “Any research scientist in this Centre, given a battery of facts like that, would consider he had proved a point. Is that not so, Director?”

  “I would certainly postulate on such evidence and then seek to prove beyond doubt, which, I imagine, is exactly what Mr Masters has done and proposes to recount to us now.”

  “If you please,” said Masters. He led off again. “In none of the bodies was there any toxic substance. Yet I could not disregard the fact that each man, about forty minutes after drinking from a water-bottle, and while carrying out a move that any mountaineer does quite frequently—that is, leaning to the right or to the left—showed signs of physical distress and then lost his grip and fell—all, that is, except Bullock whom we shall mention in more detail later.

  “These facts convinced me that each of those men had ingested some noxious substance that took about forty minutes to work. But if so, whatever substance it was, immediately disappeared from the body. This seemed impossible outside the realms of the old undetectable poisons in which I am not a great believer.

  “The poison—if such existed—could not have been excreted by normal bodily functions, because two of the men were dead before there was the possibility of this happening.”

  “You were up a gum tree there,” said Partington.

  “Until you helped me down,” replied Masters.

  “I did? How?”

  “You asked—on my behalf—for a personal report from the doctor who was first called to Mailer—on the old-boy basis. Nothing in the report was unexpected by me, except the mention of nystagmus due—according to the doctor who made the report—to brain damage. D
o you recall explaining it to me?”

  “I remember.”

  “Nystagmus is an involuntary oscillating movement of the eyeballs in which they repeatedly turn slowly in one direction and fast in the reverse direction. The medical profession doesn’t call it horizontal nystagmus, but I think we might do so to distinguish it from the other sort—jerking or vertical nystagmus. Is everybody clear on that?”

  Nobody replied, so he assumed they understood him fully.

  “The great thing about nystagmus is that it can be due to a variety of causes. For instance, with brain damage, the resulting nystagmus is of the jerking variety, whereas a person who has drunk too much alcohol—and is not used to doing so—will get a form of horizontal nystagmus, generally referred to in medical circles as PAN, I believe, Dr Partington?”

  “That’s right. Short for Positional Alcohol Nystagmus, because it only occurs when the head is held in certain positions when lying down.”

  “Is that absolutely right?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say when the head is held in certain positions relative to gravity?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose it would. But for all practical purposes when dealing with drunks, it happens when they are lying down with the head held right or left side down.”

  “Thank you. Gentleman, I am not suggesting that the three dead men were in a state of alcoholic intoxication when climbing. Far from it. It would have been better for them had they had a slug of brandy before setting out, for it was brandy that saved Alec Bullock. However, more of that later.

  “To return to PAN. A drunk, with his head held right side down will evince nystagmus with his eyes turning fast to the right, slowly back to the left, fast to the right, and so on. This type is called ‘to the right’, named after the direction of the faster movement. When the drunk’s head is to the left, the nystagmus is ‘to the left’. In other words, nystagmus due to alcohol is fast in the direction of the cheek that is down or, more reasonably to laymen, fast downhill—as if pulled by gravity.”

  “You’re labouring this point,” said Toinquet.

  “Because I want to be sure you understand what I have yet to say.”

  Partington looked across. “Yesterday you didn’t know what nystagmus meant. Today you can give a lecture on it.”

  “All part of the service,” said Green airily. He selected a Kensitas from the new packet without handing it round. “His mother was frightened by a rabbit, now he’s for ever pulling them out of hats.”

  “Shall we push on? PAN is caused, after alcohol, by the action of gravity. That is why I was so particular to establish this point with Dr Partington, and because there is, in the ear, something called the vestibular apparatus which, as most people know vaguely, is the organ of balance for the whole body, and is not affected by gravity. This last point, too, is important.

  “I’ll try to explain this bit quite simply. In the vestibular apparatus there are sensory receptors and three semicircular canals. And it is these canals which cause nystagmus. Floating in each of these canals is a cupula—a sort of little ball which behaves like a buoy at sea. The liquid in the canals, in which the cupulas float, is called endolymph. The cupula is normally moved by movements of the endolymph, just as a buoy is moved by the sea. These movements of the endolymph result from angular accelerations—that is by movement of the head from side to side. But because the cupula has neutral buoyancy, it is not moved by linear accelerations—which are the movements you make when you look up or down— and so they are not affected by gravity.”

  “That’s why, if you turn round and round rapidly, you lose your balance,” said Partington. “But you can nod your head as much as you like and only get a crick in the neck without getting dizzy.”

  “Quite. But here’s the important point. Because of their proximity to blood capillaries, after somebody has taken a lot of alcohol, the cupulas acquire alcohol more rapidly than their surrounding endolymph. In other words, the alcohol gets into the blood stream quicker than it gets into other body fluids. The cupulas thereby lose their neutral buoyancy, because alcohol is less dense than water. They therefore float high enough to be affected by gravity until the alcohol concentration in the endolymph in turn rises sufficiently to restore neutral buoyancy. Therefore, if you are very drunk and you get your head down and turned on one side, you can get strong sensations of bodily rotation, dizziness and nausea, together with motion sickness. I imagine most drunks, when put to bed, have experienced this.”

  “Good lord!” said Crome. “Imagine a drunk on a cliff face.”

  “But Masters said they weren’t drunk,” objected Toinquet, “and they wouldn’t be lying down if they were on a cliff-face.”

  “If they were upright on a cliff-face they might be OK, admittedly. But the Superintendent has stressed that they were canted over.”

  “Right, Director. But he also stressed they weren’t drunk. So what’s he getting at?”

  “Not drunk on alcohol, at any rate,” said Masters.

  “What else is there?” asked Partington. “Except possibly hallucinatory drugs or some such—and the post-mortems showed that this was not so.”

  “Heavy water,” said Masters. “The stuff there’s gallons of in Group Six.”

  “Drunk on heavy water?” asked Toinquet incredulously.

  Masters nodded.

  “I’ve never heard of this,” said Partington.

  “A very recent study,” said Masters. “Your library, quite naturally, has a bias towards physics rather than towards medicine, so the paper was filed under heavy water and not under nystagmus. That’s why you would miss it.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It works in exactly the opposite way from alcohol, but the results are the same. Where alcohol is less dense than the endolymph, heavy water is much denser. After ingestion of heavy water, the cupula takes it up more quickly than the surrounding endolymph—just as with alcohol. But where alcohol causes the cupula to float higher, heavy water causes it to sink—with all the same results of losing neutral buoyancy. Whoever has drunk the heavy water eventually suffers from dizziness, sickness, etcetera, but particularly when keeling over into a lateral position—just as the drunk gets the same symptoms when lying down.”

  “Such as when leaning sideways on a cliff?” asked Crome unhappily.

  “Exactly. But here is the point. Where PAN is, as I explained earlier, to the right if the right cheek is downwards and vice versa with the left cheek, heavy water nystagmus is in exactly the opposite direction. For obvious reasons. If positive buoyancy causes nystagmus to the right, even the layman can appreciate that negative buoyancy will cause it to be to the left.”

  “How does the direction affect these people on the mountain?” asked Crome.

  “In itself, not at all. They suffered from dizziness, sickness, vertigo and nausea when they canted over, and they fell to their deaths. But where the direction of the nystagmus has helped us is in establishing that heavy water was, in fact, the culprit.

  “Dr Partington had a call from his colleague in North Wales who had diagnosed brain damage because he saw nystagmus. Yet the post-mortem on Mailer did not confirm damage to the cerebellum—the lower part of the brain which, when damaged, causes nystagmus. So, what had caused the eye movement the doctor had observed? Alcohol? Or heavy water?

  “I called the hospital and spoke to the surgeon. He had used electro-oculography to observe the movement, simply because Bill the Pill had suggested brain damage. Please understand that the surgeon was only interested in the nystagmus in so far as it was a symptom of brain damage. He was in a hurry to try and save a life, and he was not interested in causes other than those he could alleviate. So he ignored the nystagmus entirely once he’d established that the injury was elsewhere. However, when I telephoned him and asked for the direction of the nystagmus, he was able to recall—to his own great surprise—that the nystagmus was to the right when the head was left
side down. I suspect that he had subconsciously noted this and the knowledge had been niggling away at his mind without his being able to identify it. The point is, gentlemen, that his information confirmed heavy water nystagmus of a particularly vigorous type.”

  “I take my hat off to you,” said Partington. “Not one doctor in a thousand would know the effect of drinking D2O.”

  “What about the similarities of timing of onset?” asked Crome. “You made great play of that earlier.”

  “Because they were so coincidental, Director. The paper I read describing the clinical trial stated that eye movements in all subjects had started within half an hour of drinking heavy water and the effects lasted until nearly eight hours later. But those subjects were lying down. So I had to assume that the first significant lateral position taken up by each man after being on the mountain-face for thirty minutes would cause the onset of dizziness.”

  “Which they tried to dispel by shaking their heads?”

  “I think so. And in so doing, I assume, making their state even worse. All except Bullock, that is. He is a bit of a heavy drinker. He carries a flask of brandy on mountains. When he felt himself getting woozled, his natural recourse was to his flask.”

  “Got it!” said Partington. “The alcohol cancelled out the effects of the deuterium oxide on the cupulas.”

  “Quite right. The positive buoyancy induced by the alcohol neutralised the negative buoyancy induced by the heavy water. Restored almost neutral buoyancy, in fact, so that the dizziness was almost conquered and Bullock was able to make his way down in safety.”

  “Dear lord!” breathed Crome. “It’s … it’s almost beyond belief. And you say they all drank heavy water before they started to climb?”

  “From the same water-bottle, Director. Number six.”

  “Which someone, presumably, had filled with heavy water in each case.”

  “Just so. My information is that a mere one hundred grams of heavy water will produce this intoxicating effect.”