by Mike Ashley
“We heard . . . I heard and Jack with me, so Mary must have, too, we heard young William give a cry,” Bartel admitted unwillingly. “Just once and it wasn’t like we hadn’t heard such other times. See, Master Shellaston had a heavy hand and was ready with it, especially when he was drinking, which was mostly.”
“She could lay one along a man’s ear, too, when she wanted, come to that,” said Jack bitterly.
“When did you hear this cry?” Thomas asked and added, to their blank looks, “Before or after you passed through here?”
“Ah,” said Bartel, understanding. “Before. Wasn’t it, Jack?”
“Aye,” Jack agreed. “Quite a while before, maybe.”
And maybe it had been and maybe it had not, or maybe they were mistook or maybe they were lying – Thomas could think of several reasons, not all guilty ones, why they might be – because the more both men were coming to enjoy this, the less confidence he had in their answers.
“By your leave, sir, she’s here,” Giles said behind him, and Thomas turned away from the men and their eager listeners to find Giles standing with a firm-built woman, neatly aproned, wimpled and cloaked, her sharply judging eyes meeting his as she curtsyed and said, “Esmayne Wayn at your service, Master Chaucer. I’m herbwife and midwife here. Your man says there’s three folk dead and you want me to see.”
More happy with her directness than with anything else he’d encountered these past two hours, Thomas said, “Mistress Wayn, thank you for coming. Yes, if you’d be so good as to look and tell me what you think about their deaths . . .”
Master Hugh started what might have been a protest, but a glance from Thomas made him think better of it and he subsided. Meanwhile Bartel at Thomas’s nod went to pull the carriage’s end curtain aside and tie it back, and Jack hauled out the chest and set it down for a step. “Some better light would help, too,” Thomas said to Jack because the day was drawing in toward dark, then he offered Mistress Wayn a hand up.
He felt no need to ready her for what was there. As the village healer and midwife, she had surely seen enough of death in various forms and degrees of unpleasantness for this to be no worse. Besides, the cold was doing its work; the smell was none so bad as it had been, and Mistress Wayn went forward without hesitation, making room for him to follow her as she bent first over Master Shellaston, then over his wife, apparently able to see enough for now by the light from the opened window-flaps. The further jouncing of the carriage seemed not to have moved the bodies, already jostled into settled places between when they had died and when they were found, Thomas supposed. “The child is further on,” he said quietly.
Mistress Wayn nodded but took Mistress Shellaston by the chin, moved her head slightly back and forth, then prodded at her stomach and learned close over her face, seemingly sniffing. None of that was anything Thomas would have cared to do and he heard murmurs from the watchers outside and wished the door-curtain could be closed, but Mistress Wayn, ignoring everyone and him, repeated with Master Shellaston what she had done with his wife, before she straightened as much as the low curve of the ceiling allowed her, to look to Thomas and ask, “How long have they been dead?”
“No one is certain. At least three hours at a guess. It’s been maybe two since I first saw them and the bodies were cooling by then.”
“Best I straighten them, if I may? Much longer and we’ll have to wait until they unstiffen again.”
“If it will make no difference to what we might learn about how they died . . .”
“You’ve noted how they’re lying and can say so if asked? And that their eyes be closed. Nobody did that, did they?”
Thomas far outranked her in life but she had a greater skill than he at this, and they both accepted the equality that gave them. So her interruption did not matter and he said simply, “I’ve noted, and no, nobody closed their eyes.”
“That’s enough then. Cleaning them can come later,” and briskly, firmly, she straightened both bodies out of their sprawl, then moved on to young William, still curled into his nest of cushions. “You’ve noted him, too?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She straightened the boy and rolled him onto his back, moved and prodded and did with him much as she had with his parents, before sitting back on her heels and saying up at Thomas, “His eyes be open, you see. That’s the usual way with dead folk that didn’t die easy.”
“You’re saying his parents died easily and he didn’t? That they didn’t all three die the same way?”
“Aye. Him and her, they died the same as each other, surely.” Mistress Wayn nodded to the elder Shellastons. “The boy, he went otherwise. I can smell it on him. He took dwale would be my guess, only I’m not much guessing. It’s good for some things, carefully used, but only outwardly. Taken inwardly, it takes not much to kill.”
“Poison,” Thomas said. “You’re saying the boy was poisoned. What about his parents? They had to have been poisoned, too.”
“You’d think it,” Mistress Wayn said. “It would seem the most likely but they’re chancey things, poisons.” She sounded almost regretful over it. “What kills one person only makes another sick and there’s no way to know beforehand which way it will be. That I can still smell on him –” She nodded at young William. “- tells me he had enough to be almost certain of killing him, being a child. Why he didn’t taste it as he started to drink it down, that’s a question I don’t have answer to. As for his parents and what they drank . . .” She shrugged.
“You don’t think it was the same thing?”
“There’s no smell of it and it would have to have been more than the amount that killed the boy to kill them quick and quietly. No, whatever they drank down was different, I’d say. I don’t know what. It’s that they made no outcry and show no sign of suffering I don’t understand. Poisons hurt. I’d guess by the way the boy was curled in on himself he was hurting when he died, but with them it’s more like they fell to sleep and died without waking up.”
“There are potions that do that. Bring on a sleep so deep it turns into death.”
“Aye.” She still sounded unsatisfied. “But why one kind for them and another for the boy? Why weren’t they drinking all the same?”
“Wine made the boy sick,” Thomas said absently.
“So two different bottles had to be poisoned.” She pushed a half-full, stoppered one lying near young William with her foot. “But still, why two different poisons? And he didn’t just fall to sleep, neither,” she added with a nod at the boy.
Thomas noticed there was no nonsense about the Devil from her. To her it was plain that poison had killed these three and, like him, she had no doubt that poison was a thing that came from a human hand.
Or poisons, it must have been, according to her.
Different poisons by different hands?
Three murders planned – Master and Mistress Shellaston’s separate from their son’s – by two different people with two different poisons, with it only being chance they happened together?
Or . . .
A sudden, ugly guess rose up in Thomas’s mind.
Something of it must have shown in his face because Mistress Wayn asked sharply, “What?”
He shook his head. “I need more questions answered first, before I say.”
But at least now he had a better thought of what the questions were.
An hour later, as the day drew in to grey twilight, when he had asked some of those questions and had answers, he gathered in a sideroom of the inn bespoken from the innkeeper for the sake of privacy with Master Hugh, Giles, the other servants, and Mistress Wayn, along with the innkeeper and a few village men for witness. Thomas had not put it that way but had merely asked the innkeeper if there were a few worthy men in the village who might care to join them for hot, spiced cider and talk this cold evening. That he meant to guide the talk he did not say.
After Mistress Wayn had overseen the moving of the bodies respectfully to her house for c
leaning and shrouding, he and Giles, without asking Master Hugh’s leave – and by his expression he would not have given it if asked – had searched through the carriage, generally seeking, finding specifically, and now asking, “Bartel, the wine Master and Mistress Shellaston were drinking, where did it come from?”
“It was his own. Being a wine merchant, he could lay hands on good stuff when he wanted.”
“Was it a new bottle he had . . .”
“Bottles,” said Bartel. “Three at least.”
That accorded with what Thomas had found in a hamper in the carriage. Safely cushioned among various wrapped food bundles, there had been an empty bottle, a mostly empty bottle, and a full, tightly corked one.
“Could anyone have been at those bottles before they were put into the carriage?”
“Been at them? I filled them from a cask at the manor if that’s what you mean, and put them in the hamper and put it into the carriage.” Bartel straightened with sudden suspicion. “Hoi, hold up there. You’re not saying I put something in them, are you? There were folk around all the time can say I never had chance to.”
“Nor do I think you did. I just wanted to know that no one else had chance at them either.”
Bartel subsided, not fully happy.
“There was a bottle that had held cider beside young William and then there are these.” Thomas held up two pottery vials, slight enough to have fit in a belt pouch. “Do any of you know these?”
No one did, but Bartel’s suspicion had been catching. All the Shellaston servants looked wary now and Master Hugh was frowning.
Thomas held one of them higher. “This one held poppy syrup sweetened with sugar, Mistress Wayn tells me. Master Shellaston favoured sweet wine, I gather?” Heads agreed he had, and indeed it had been malmsey in the bottles. Thomas held up the other small bottle. “This one held dwale, otherwise called nightshade, enough of it to kill if drunk straight down. And young William must have, because there was half the cider left in the bottle and no dwale in it.’
Thomas regarded the empty vial sadly for a moment, then handed it with the other to Giles to keep. “We found it under young William. The other one was in the bottom of the box used for a step into the carriage. The box that has what’s needed to keep the carriage in good order on the road.” Spare parts for mending wheels and harness, grease for axles, tools and other odds and ends that might be useful. “It was Mistress Wayn who noticed and showed me the black grease smear on the back of young William’s hand that he had mostly wiped off- black grease he could have come by in the carriage nowhere else but in that box. From one of the rags probably, when he hid the other vial there, the one with poppy syrup, after his parents were unconscious. Or after he’d killed them. Before he drank the potion of dwale in the other vial, a potion strong enough it brought him to death almost immediately.”
“He killed his parents and then himself?” Master Hugh asked. “Is that what you’re saying? He’d have to be off his wits to do any of that!”
“Off his wits or misled,” Thomas said levelly. “But to go back to his parents. Let us guess he found a way to put the poppy syrup into one of the bottles of wine. It wouldn’t have been hard. They were packed in a hamper with food. He only had to pretend he was taking overlong getting out what he wanted to eat, while pouring the syrup into the wine. After that, he only had to wait until his parents guzzled it down, as it seems was their way with wine. Now, poppy syrup, if you give enough, brings on sleep and if too much is given, it can kill. There was never enough in that vial to kill two people but there was enough to make them both sleep so heavily, helped on by the wine, that they didn’t wake even when their son – and it had to have been him, there was no one else there to do it – pressed a pillow over the face of first one of them and then the other. He was a large, solid child, with weight enough to hold a pillow down and smother someone if they were heavily unconscious, the way his mother and father were. And then he closed their dead eyes, to keep them from staring at him.”
“But why would he go and do it? Kill them, I mean,” protested one of the village men. “It’s not natural.”
“I’d guess he did it for hatred. From everything I’ve heard, there was little love lost between him and them. Today, when he cried out in the carriage, probably from the unexpected pain of the dwale working in him, he was heard but no one thought anything about it but that he’d been struck by his mother or father, and that was too usual to take much heed of. Besides, I’d guess he thought – or maybe someone put it in his head – that if he were orphaned, rid of his parents and no one able to say how they died – he’d be given in ward to Master Hugh Shellaston, who got on with him far better than his parents did.”
“But then why would he kill himself?” Bartel asked.
“I don’t think he did. I think his death was Master Hugh’s doing.”
Master Hugh jerked up straight in his chair, his stare furious at Thomas before he gathered his thoughts and exclaimed, “That’s mad! I was nowhere near any of them when they died. You said yourself my cousin and his bitch-wife were smothered. I was never in the carriage or anywhere near it. And you said the boy drank that poison of his own will and died of it.”
“I said he drank it of his own will and died of it, yes. I didn’t say he meant to die of it. Why bother to hide the vial he’d poisoned his parents with if he was going to kill himself afterwards? He probably thought that what he drank was some light potion that would make him merely sleep and that when he and his dead parents were found he could claim all ignorance of their deaths and simply be weepingly thankful he was spared whatever had killed them. My guess is that you gave him the poppy syrup and dwale, told him the dwale was harmless, maybe even warned him there might be some pain and to keep from being caught he must fight against crying out, which he mostly did. He must have been a brave boy in his way. But he never meant to kill himself. You’re the one who’s guilty of his death. As guilty as if you’d poured the poison down his throat yourself.”
Master Hugh did not give way yet. Instead – with what he probably meant to be the outrage of innocence – he fell back on, “You can’t prove any of this!”
“Not at this moment,” Thomas said coldly. “But I’ll warrant that if question is made among apothecaries and every herbwife anywhere near where you’ve been of late, we’ll learn of rather many requests for poppy syrup and dwale potion from them.”
“No one is going to admit to making him a killing potion,” Mistress Wayn said quietly.
“No, and probably none did. But I daresay several will be found who’ll admit to making a non-killing potion. Dwale is after all good for some poultices. But put several lots together and they’d kill, yes?” Thomas asked at Master Hugh.
Boldly surly, the man tried, “My shit of a cousin had more enemies than me who’d probably like him dead. And how likely is it I’ve been wandering around talking to herbwives and apothecaries? I’ve a life to lead and people who notice where I go and why.”
“We’ll find out if other enemies had chance to give young William the poisons. We’ll see if anyone had as much to gain from their deaths as you do as the only heir. We’ll see who’s been asking for poppy syrup and dwale, and we’ll find, I’ll lay odds, that if not you, then some several of your servants have been, sent here and there without knowing what they were doing.”
With one of his men already looking at him with widening eyes and dawning alarm. Master Hugh suffused a slow, deep red, rose to his feet and looked around the room for a way out.
“The window is shuttered,” Thomas said mildly, “and my man is ordered to stop you going out the door by whatever means are needed. Nor do I think you’ll find anyone here, even your own men, ready to help you.”
That much Master Hugh had already read in the faces around him; and heavily he dropped back into his chair and said, from the heart, “Damn.”
THE SILVER CURTAIN
John Dickson Carr
More than that of any
other writer, the name of John Dickson Carr is indelibly linked with the impossible crime story. For a start, he wrote more of them than anyone else (though Edward D. Hoch has overtaken him in the short story stakes), and he explored more variants on the theme than anyone else, in some cases producing definitive texts. I’ve said much about him in my afterword, so I won’t repeat it here. Although his best known detective was Gideon Fell, Carr wrote several books featuring other detectives, in particular Henry Merrivale and Colonel March. The following is one of Colonel March’s mysteries and comes from the collection The Department of Queer Complaints (1940).
The croupier’s wrist moved with such fluent ease as to seem boneless. Over the green baize its snaky activity never hesitated, never wavered, never was still. His rake, like an enormous butter-pat, attracted the cards, flicked them up, juggled them, and slid them in a steady stream through the slot of the table.
No voice was raised in the Casino at La Bandelette. There was much casualness; hardly any laughter. The tall red curtains and the padded red floors closed in a sort of idle concentration at a dozen tables. And out of it, at table number six, the croupier’s monotone droned on.
“Six mille. Banco? Six mille. Banco? Banco?”
“Banco,” said the young Englishman across the table. The cards, white and grey, slipped smoothly from the shoe. And the young man lost again.
The croupier hadn’t time to notice much. The people round him, moving in hundreds through the season, were hardly human beings at all. There was a calculating machine inside his head; he heard its clicks, he watched the run of its numbers, and it was all he had time for. Yet so acutely were his senses developed that he could tell almost within a hundred francs how much money the players at his table still retained. The young man opposite was nearly broke.
(Best to be careful. This perhaps means trouble.)
Casually the croupier glanced round his table. There were five players, all English, as was to be expected. There was the fair-haired girl with the elderly man, obviously her father, who had a bald head and looked ill; he breathed behind his hand. There was the very heavy, military-looking man whom someone had addressed as Colonel March. There was the fat, sleek, swarthy young man with the twisty eyebrows (dubious English?), whose complacency had grown with his run of luck and whose wallet stuffed with mille notes lay at this elbow. Finally, there was the young man who lost so much.
