Shelf Life

by Douglas Clark

“Why not? I think it would be a good idea to phone Miss Foulger, because a lot of these home wine-makers use their own labels, so it will help you to identify what you are looking for—if she had already labelled those particular bottles. If not . . . well, I don’t suppose Boyce finished his wine before he got home. So the bottle could be there. But ask the other two tearaways if he did finish it and sling it somewhere. If that happened you should be able to pick it up.”

  Berger looked at Reed. “In this heat!” he said.

  “And I shall want the car,” added Masters.

  Reed said: “I don’t think I really want any breakfast.”

  “Get the murder bag out of the boot,” said Green. “You’ll want that for dusting and photographing. Best carry it with you, then you won’t have to walk to and fro each time you want to use it.”

  Green took out his cigarettes. “More coffee, George?” he asked. “Or another plate of gammon, perhaps?”

  Masters grinned. “I think we’ve had enough of both.” He looked across at the two glum sergeants. “Get down in time, in future,” he said. “I want to be away in five minutes flat.” He pushed back his chair and got to his feet.

  “You mean all that about looking for the bottle was all eyewash, Chief?”

  “Not eyewash. A warning and an unofficial reprimand. Hurry it up.”

  As Masters stood at the open door of the hotel filling his first pipe of the day, Green joined him.

  “Bill, do I remember young Sutcliffe said he visited a chemist on Tuesday?”

  “That’s right. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “You’re not thinking that the lad somehow got hold of the stuff when he went there?”

  “No, no. I just want to talk to a retail pharmacist. A practical chap. Haywood is fine as a forensic buff, but I feel the need to get down out of his clouds on to the good earth.”

  “I never thought the day would come when I would hear you say that, George.”

  Masters applied the match to his pipe. “Why not?”

  “Because you usually revel in the academic side of investigation.”

  “Agreed. But what do I do when I feel that the top brass on the academic side has not given us everything I feel he should?”

  “Are you saying Haywood has misled us?”

  “Not deliberately. My opinion of the man is that he would never do that. In fact, I trust his integrity.”

  “What then?”

  “Some fact, which he as a clever man in his field knows so well that he thinks everybody must know it.”

  “I’m with you. Like the boffins in the botulism case. They said that type E was found only in the northern hemisphere and spread pretty thinly on the ground. By that they meant it was in the sea, too, but we took them literally, at first.”

  “That’s it, Bill. There’s some fact like that which we haven’t got hold of yet.”

  Green shaded his eyes against the morning sun and took his time before asking the obvious question. “What makes you so sure, George?”

  Masters was equally slow in replying, as though thinking out how best to word his reply in the most convincing way.

  “Last night it was suggested that our murderer emptied some of the wine from the bottle. I don’t think he did, for all sorts of reasons like how difficult it is to judge how much to pour away, how much he is going to add and so on. But I will concede that it is a palpably weak point in my argument, because I have no proof and it is based purely on a gut feeling.”

  “None the worse for that at this stage. I agreed with you, remember.”

  “Which was good to hear, but which nevertheless adds no more proof to the conviction.”

  “So last night you stayed awake for hours thinking it over.”

  “For a few minutes, certainly.”

  “And you came up with even more gut feelings—probably more convincing this time.”

  “Right. To get two thousand milligrams of the gold solution into that bottle, and using the strongest preparation—fifty milligrams in a one mil tube—our man would have to stand in that shed and open forty glass ampoules and empty them very carefully into the bottle.”

  “Meaning he must have exercised extreme care otherwise he wouldn’t have got all two thousand milligrams in?”

  “That’s it. He would have to take time to drain and shake each one, wiping the edge on the neck of the bottle to get the last drop out. How long would snapping open and emptying forty capsules in that way take?”

  “Dunno, exactly. But if the chap doing them was not used to the job—well, say at least a minute each, bearing in mind he would have to take them, presumably, from their box and put them back again as well as all the other taradiddle; I’m assuming he wouldn’t drop the ampoules on the floor, only the snapped off tops. Boyce picked one of those up in the sole of his boot, but he didn’t pick up much more, whereas he would have done had there been forty ampoules sculling about the deck.”

  “So the man stayed there a minimum of forty minutes by your reckoning?”

  “A minimum of forty. If they only took ten seconds a tube longer it would mean a further six or seven minutes.”

  “So what’s the answer, Bill? Would a poisoner risk hanging about on the job for three quarters of an hour?”

  “Definitely not—in my opinion. I think that is the strongest argument you’ve come up with to support your views, George. But Haywood can’t be expected to consider how long a criminal spends on his task.”

  “He can’t,” admitted Masters, “and so he must be overlooking something. He must be.”

  “So we go to see your chemist first?”

  Masters shook his head. “I rang the station earlier. The court sits today at half past ten and Miss Foulger is presiding. I want to see her today, so I’ve got to get there before she leaves to take up the sword of justice . . . ah, here they are.”

  The two sergeants joined them.

  “Right. To the station first to pick up Betty Prior, and let’s be quick about it.”

  With the W.P.C. as guide, they reached Miss Foulger’s cottage a few minutes after nine o’clock. The magistrate, dressed in flowered overall and headscarf, was dusting the hall when Masters reached the open front door.

  “Good morning, ma’am. Am I speaking to Miss Foulger?”

  “You are.”

  “Then I’d better identify myself. I am Detective Chief Superintendent Masters of Scotland Yard . . .”

  “Have you your card?”

  Masters rarely showed his warrant, but he did so now. After taking it with rheumaticky fingers and scrutinising it closely and inspecting his features, she handed it back.

  “Can’t be too careful with strangers, you know.”

  “Quite right, ma’am. I have with me three colleagues from the Yard and W.P.C. Prior from the local force who is acting as our guide.”

  “Know her,” said Miss Foulger, giving Betty a nod of recognition. “These others . . .?”

  Masters introduced them individually.

  “What can I do for you? Want a search warrant signed?”

  “No, ma’am. We have come to talk to you about the murder of the youth, Boyce.”

  “Idle young layabout. Had him in front of us last Tuesday. Let him go, of course.”

  “A pity, as it turned out, ma’am,” said Green. “If you’d given him a custodial sentence he might still be alive.”

  “Suppose so. But we’re not clairvoyant on the bench, you know.”

  “That, too, is a pity,” said Masters.

  “What do you mean? Criticising our sentences, are you? If so, I need hardly tell you . . .”

  “Not your sentences,” cut in Masters.

  “What then?”

  “Your homilies from the bench, ma’am. It was what you had to say to young Boyce and his friends—or the way you said it—that drove him to the decision to break into your home.”

  “Nobody has broken into my home.”

  “Into your property. He
smashed your bottles of wine.”

  “Did he, indeed!”

  “But he kept one back to drink.”

  “Theft as well as vandalism, eh?”

  “And murder, ma’am. He died that night as a direct result of drinking that bottle of wine from your store shed.”

  “Nonsense. That was good, fine wine.”

  “You would have a hard time convincing Professor Haywood of that, ma’am. All his tests show the wine to have contained a large amount of toxic substance.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Now ma’am,” said Masters, “as a magistrate you will appreciate that we have to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox. So could we step inside and discuss it thoroughly and exhaustively?”

  “I am due in court . . .”

  “At half past ten, ma’am, I know. I shall make sure my car gets you there in good time, but the sooner we get started, the more comfortable the time margin will be.”

  She led them in, through the highly polished hall, small and scarcely roomy enough for so great a number of big men, into a garden sitting room. This too was small, but had a number of chairs, no two alike, but all covered in bottle green velvet. The french window gave on to the garden which boasted no well-kept symmetry, but rather a comfortable and shaggy nonchalance: a garden tended for colour and what it would produce rather than for prize-winning lay out.

  “The old laundry is out here,” she said, moving to the open half of the french window. “Over to the right there. It is nearer or more available to the back door than to this one. Its door is on the far end.”

  Masters peered out and then turned to her.

  “You bottle your wine out there?”

  “Because it is an old laundry, really, and so has water and a sink for cleaning bottles and utensils. After bottling, I transfer my wines to the small cellar I have below the front of the cottage.”

  “And where does it ferment, or whatever the term is?”

  “Under the stairway. You see, all the areas I can use for my hobby are quite tiny, so I have to have a different workshop, as it were, for each part of the process.”

  “So can we talk about the wine which young Boyce stole from you?”

  “It was not poisoned, Mr Masters.”

  “Not by you, perhaps, ma’am. But I assure you it killed the lad.”

  “I don’t understand it at all.” She sat down and the rest followed suit. “Nothing of this sort has ever happened to my wine before, and I would swear that particular racking was as sweet and wholesome as could be.”

  “What sort of wine was it?” asked Green.

  “Rose petal.”

  “Rose . . . petal?”

  “Yes. White and yellow petals—no leaves or stalk. That makes the wine bitter. But for a white wine—pale golden, actually, use the pale petals. Dark red petals give a red wine, of course.”

  “But isn’t it perfumed?” asked Green. “Sort of bath essencey?”

  “Delicately scented, dependent upon how pungent the flowers are. I pick them when full blown. But the point about rose petal wine is that you can make it throughout the summer months because the flowering season is so long and prolific. And, of course, it only takes about a month from picking the flowers to bottling.”

  “How do you start?” asked Green. “By boiling the flowers and adding sugar?”

  “No, no, no. That is absolutely fatal. You must not boil the flowers or pour boiling water over them. You wash them, of course, in case a bird or pest spray has fouled them.”

  “I see.”

  “For flower wines, one must prepare the must first, and then . . .”

  “Must?” asked Reed. “That sounds as if it had gone mouldy.”

  “The name we give to grape juice or sugar solution which forms the basis of wine fermentation. You’re thinking of mustiness.”

  “Sorry ma’am.”

  “For rose petal wine I use a white grape concentrate with as little taste as possible, and I add about one pound of sugar to the gallon of must. And as a starter—that is the agent to start fermentation—I use a good white-wine yeast.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Yeast.”

  “I leave this for a few days to let the first violent fermentation die down before adding the petals. The reason for this is obvious.”

  “Oh, is it?” asked Green. “Not to me it isn’t.”

  “During fermentation, carbon dioxide is bubbled off. This would carry away the volatile esters and essential oils that give the petals their fragrance and flavour. So I wait until the vigorous activity in the fermentation vessel is over. Then I add my petals in a muslin bag. By that time there is enough alcohol in the must to draw out the scent, colour and flavour. And I assure you that nothing unwholesome got into the vessel. Every petal was handpicked and washed by me, and the vessel itself had a snap seal lid with a fermentation lock firmly fixed in a rubber grummet. The only times the vessel was opened was once daily when I had to squeeze the bag of petals with a plastic spoon. After five days I transferred the must to the fermentation jar—with a lock, of course.”

  “For four weeks, you said?”

  “That’s right. Then I bottled it last Tuesday morning.”

  “Why then? When you were due in court at half past ten?”

  “Because,” said Miss Foulger patiently, “the final step before you bottle rose wine is the addition of a crushed Campden tablet.”

  “What’s that?” asked Green suspiciously.

  “Sodium metabisulphite. It gives sulphur dioxide. It’s used in lots of food.”

  “It’s all right,” said Masters. “Campden tablets are quite harmless.” He turned to Miss Foulger. “What is their purpose in the process?”

  “As a stabiliser and anti-oxidant. It helps the wine keep.”

  “But why is timing so critical?”

  “Because while the wine is in the jar, it settles and clears. When it is clear and bright, you have to add the Campden tablet to keep it stable in that condition.”

  “When did you add the tablet?”

  “On Monday morning. That was when it was best to add it. And you have to bottle the wine twenty-four hours after adding the tablet. Not that it is vital to a few minutes, but I was going to be away all day in court and out in the evening, so I had to do it before I set off.”

  “No choice but Tuesday morning then,” said Green glumly.

  “None whatever.”

  “What sort of bottles did you use?” asked Masters.

  “Bordeaux bottles.”

  “What are they?” asked Reed.

  “Square shouldered, clear glass, of course.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “Punted.”

  “I . . . er . . . beg your pardon?”

  “Punted,” said Masters, “means they have an indented base.”

  “Oh, that, Chief!”

  That settled, Miss Foulger pressed on. “The important thing, once the wine is bottled, is to get it stoppered, to prevent wild yeasts getting in and ruining it. I had sterilised my stoppers ready for insertion. I use the white polythene flanged type, chiefly because I have arthritis and they are easier for me to handle than corks and lever-actioned corkers or corking guns. There are other advantages with polythene stoppers of course. The first being that they are easily sterilised and they are also reusable. The second is that they don’t have to be kept damp like a cork, and so one can stand the bottles upright, which is better for me on my particular shelving.”

  “And that is how you left your bottles?”

  “Yes. There were six of them. Each bottle holds just over twenty-six fluid ounces, you see, so a gallon just nicely fills six. I had intended on Wednesday morning to cover the stoppers with viscose capsules. You know what they are—the skirts that cover the tops of the necks and closures. One applies them wet, and they shrink to a tight fit.”

  “Why wait to do it?” asked Green.

  “Because I had no time on Tuesday morning, and also because ano
ther advantage of the polythene stopper is that it will blow without the bottle bursting should the wine, by any mischance, start to ferment again. It is, therefore, advisable to wait for a day or so before putting on the viscose. Just to make sure there is no movement starting up again.”

  Masters leaned forward. “One last question on this particular point, Miss Foulger. How full were the bottles?”

  “How full? I always try to level them out to about an inch below where the bottom of a cork would come. And this is what I did on Tuesday. But you must realise that polythene stoppers are hollow, and so it is possible to fill to much nearer the top of the neck should you have the wine to do so.”

  Masters looked across at Green, who stared back.

  “Now the shed, Miss Foulger. Did you leave it open or locked?”

  “Definitely locked.”

  “So somebody had to break in to get at the wine.”

  “No. When I arrived home on Tuesday evening, I found the key in the door. You see, Chief Superintendent, I do what you will say is a foolish thing. I hide that key on the ledge above the door . . .”

  Green grunted in disgust.

  “. . . and I suppose somebody came and discovered it.”

  “Or knew where to look for it,” said Green. “Somebody who knew he could tamper with your wine because he knew your habits and where you always left that key.”

  “I never imagined . . .”

  “Miss Foulger,” said Masters. “I imagine you have been a J.P. for a good many years. Surely the stories you have heard in the magistrates’ court should have alerted you to the fact that these days there are those who will break in anywhere for little or no reason?”

  “I should have known better,” she confessed.

  “Now ma’am,” said Masters, “positively the last question. Have you ever had gold injections for your arthritis?”

  “What an extraordinary question to ask in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  “Have you?”

  “Never. And I’m pleased I haven’t. Some of my acquaintances—I belong to the Arthritis and Rheumatism Club, you know—have had gold injections. They can be quite painful in themselves, I’m told.”

  “So there will be no gold injection ampoules anywhere in the house or the shed.”

  “No. I have my tablets—the same ones I’ve been on for years.”