Fen Country

by Edmund Crispin

  In the ordinary way of things—taking into account remissions for good conduct—Wynter would have been released in October of this year.

  On 23 April, he died in his cell.

  This was discovered when luncheon was brought to him at noon of that day. In the absence of contra-indications, the death was taken as being due to angina; for although a man suffering from this complaint may, and often does, live on for a great many years, there is no guarantee that any single attack may not finish him. As with all prison deaths, an inquest was held. But there was no post mortem, since none seemed to be called for, and on the 27th Wynter was buried in the prison cemetery, his death being certified as due to his disease.

  There the matter might well have rested. Three days later, however, we received here at Scotland Yard an anonymous letter which accused Gellian of having poisoned Wynter with a plant spray containing nicotine; Gellian’s motive, the writer added, was infatuation with Wynter’s wife.

  I myself ordered that this accusation be investigated, and there proved to be sufficient plausibility in it to justify us in exhuming Wynter’s body. The stomach was shown to contain a small but sufficiently lethal quantity of nicotine; in consequence of this a full-scale examination of the circumstances was at once put in hand.

  The writer of the anonymous letter was traced easily enough. He was a warder at Nottsville named Parker, who conceived himself to have a grudge against the governor, and who purely by chance had come to hear of the irregular association which did in fact exist between Gellian and Mrs. Wynter; the nicotine, he said, was a guess, based on the fact that he knew this type of plant spray to be used occasionally in the governor’s shrubbery. It was a suspiciously good guess, and Superintendent Colleano devoted plenty of time and energy to investigating whether Parker himself had opportunity or motive for poisoning Wynter. In the event, however, it was ascertained that he had neither. A second possibility was that Wynter’s death had some connection with the death of the patient he was alleged to have neglected; but this again proved impossible to substantiate. To cut a long story short, the closest checking and counter-checking failed to establish a motive for Wynter’s death in any of the prison staff excepting Gellian.

  Gellian’s motive, however, was undeniably a strong one: he was in love with Mrs. Wynter. (There is no doubt that Wynter was devoted to his wife, to the extent that—in her view—he would never have agreed to divorce her, no matter what she did; and in spite of his illness, he might well have lived on for many years after his release from Nottsville.) As to the manner in which Gellian and Mrs. Wynter became acquainted, that, I think, calls for no detailed description here. It is worth noting, however, that Gellian’s obsession with the woman was by no means a happy one. The husband was a prisoner in his personal charge, undergoing a relatively savage sentence for a crime of which he may quite possibly have been innocent; he loved his wife; and finally, he was an incurable invalid. To a man with Gellian’s record for probity these considerations may well have been horribly distressing; he himself has said that they worried him deeply—and his anxiety was naturally compounded by the fact that from the official point of view his surreptitious connection with Mrs. Wynter was an unforgivable offense for which his resignation would certainty be demanded as soon as the truth became known. As you are aware, that resignation was tendered, and accepted, a fortnight ago. Since Gellian is a wealthy man in his own right, his financial position will scarcely be affected; at the same time, for a man with his long and devoted connection with the penal service, the wrench must have been considerable.

  Was Gellian’s interest in Mrs. Wynter sufficiently strong to override all these considerations? Unquestionably it was; and if so, we may not unreasonably assume that it was strong enough to impel him to the act of murder. He had motive, he had means.

  Unfortunately, what he seems quite definitely not to have had is opportunity.

  The medical evidence as to the time of Wynter’s death, and how long he took to die, is regrettably uncertain; but there is a definite consensus of opinion to the effect that the poison cannot have been ingested earlier than breakfast-time—that is to say, 7:30 a.m. on the day of his death. It seems equally certain, however, that the nicotine was not in Wynter’s breakfast; two warders (perfectly reputable men) were concerned in the serving of this, and more-over they were, as it happened, accompanied on this occasion by one of HM Inspectors of Prisons, who had been staying in Nottsville overnight; without going into the matter in detail, I can assure you that short of a conspiracy between these three it is absolutely impossible that the poison can have been administered at this time.

  But if not at this time, when? On the morning of his death Wynter did not, as it chanced, require fresh materials for the work he performed in his cell and the result of this was that the next visit paid to him was at lunch-time, when his body was discovered. It is certain that between 7:30 and noon Wynter was alone in his cell in E block, and that during this period he came in contact neither with Gellian nor with anyone else.

  These circumstances would seem to point either to suicide or to murder by trickery (for example, Wynter might previously have been given a preparation of nicotine under the guise of medicine, and have consumed it of his own volition some time on the morning of his death). There exists, however, an insuperable objection to either assumption, in that before breakfast on that particular morning a snap search of the cells in E block was carried out. These searches are routine, but they are not the less thorough for that; and because of the recent suicide of Pickering at Tawton Prison, special attention is currently being paid to the possibility of concealed poison.

  The upshot, as regards Wynter, you will guess: no pills or powders or capsules or fluids were found in his cell other than the small supply of trinitrate tablets which he was allowed to keep by him for use in case of an angina attack. Of these, at the time of the search, there were three, in a sealed container; and there is a complex of irrefutable evidence to prove that this same container was still there, still sealed and intact, when Wynter’s body was discovered (it was, of course, noticed particularly for the reason that at the time, Wynter’s death was assumed to be due to an angina attack sufficiently disabling to have prevented his getting at the tablets).

  Now, Gellian’s last direct encounter with Wynter had taken place more than a week before the death; and on that occasion (as always) another member of the prison staff was present (this precaution is so invariable in dealing with convicts that if Gellian had at any time departed from it in his dealings with Wynter, the fact must inevitably have become known to us). How, then, can Gellian or anyone else possibly have supplied Wynter with the means? The three warders who conducted the search on the morning of the death might just conceivably have conspired together to make Wynter a present of poison; but in view of their excellent record, this was not a possibility which Colleano felt able to accept so long as another, and likelier, explanation of the circumstances remained open to him.

  And such an explanation did in fact exist. Despite the external appearance of what thriller-writers describe as an “impossible murder” or a “locked-room mystery,” the ingenious yet simple way in which Wynter had in fact been murdered was easily deduced from the facts I have given above. Unluckily, proving it in court is quite another matter. The DPP has refused to sanction a prosecution, and I cannot blame him; here, I am sorry to have to say, is one murderer who has been altogether too clever for us.

  In reconsidering what I have written, I realize that I have left Mrs. Wynter unduly in the background; for in returning Gellian’s affection (as she admits she did), she too had cause to wish Wynter dead—a motive all the more powerful in that Gellian is a rich man, while Wynter was not. This motive, however, is offset by the fact that, on the face of it, Mrs. Wynter had even less chance of conveying the poison to her husband than Gellian did: the prison staff is convinced that Mrs. Wynter cannot have transmitted the nicotine to her husband either through the post—which naturally
is strictly censored in Nottsville as in all prisons—or in the course of a visit; and even if this conviction were mistaken, there would still remain the problem of how the poison thus supplied could possibly have escaped notice during the search of Wynter’s cell on the morning of his death.

  I return now to the scene yesterday morning in my office.

  Colleano having finished his account of the case, Mrs. Wynter, acutely distressed, urged that her husband’s death was almost certainly suicide. She was unable to give any coherent idea of how he could have obtained the poison, or secreted it so effectively as to defy expert search; but she propounded the theory that although she had never explicitly mentioned her association with Gellian to Wynter, he might have come to hear of it through prison rumor, emanating, presumably, in the first instance, from the warder Parker; in support of this notion she mentioned the fact—which she knew from Colleano—that Wynter had destroyed all but a single page (this, presumably, having accidentally escaped his attention) of the many letters she had written him.

  Furthermore—

  But at this point there came an interruption, in the form of a short report addressed to me by the head of our forensic laboratory.

  Having scanned this myself, I proceeded to read it aloud.

  The single page surviving from Mrs. Wynter’s correspondence with her husband has been mentioned above; and it was with this that the report was concerned. The page was a part of the very last letter which Wynter received from his wife, delivered to him two days before his death; its news and messages were commonplace; but one of Colleano’s subordinates who handled it had been struck by something unusual in the texture of the paper, and had therefore passed it on to the laboratory for examination.

  The laboratory’s report, though technical in its phraseology, was clear and conclusive: the paper on which the letter was written had been impregnated with a nicotine solution identical with the plant spray that Gellian used in his shrubbery.

  When Mrs. Wynter heard the contents of the report, she seemed to shrivel. I make no apology for stating her reaction in such melodramatic terms, for never in all my experience have I seen anyone display such plain physical evidences of guilt. This was satisfactory. An actual confession, induced by shock, would have been more satisfactory still; the DPP, however, had already advised us that such a confession would be worthless in court so long as it was unsupported by other evidence, so that we were not unduly cast down by its failure to materialize. Since Mrs. Wynter remained silent, Gellian presently asked, in a bewildered fashion, for an explanation. With as much as I could manage of the air of one to whom the truth has at last miraculously been made plain, I gave it.

  When Wynter’s arrest became imminent (I said), he must have arranged with his wife that in the event of his being sent to prison, she should keep him supplied with morphine by the medium of what are known to United States prison authorities as “satch” letters—i.e., letters written on paper which has been previously saturated in the drug required; so long as these arrive regularly, the chewing and swallowing of them will keep even a confirmed addict fairly happy during the period when his normal sources of supply are cut off. This program Mrs. Wynter was evidently scrupulous in carrying out. But then she met Gellian; noted his infatuation for her; noted that he was a rich man; became aware of the existence of the plant spray in his potting-shed; and at once saw not only how her husband could be murdered, but also how in the process the victim could effortlessly be induced to destroy the evidence against his murderer.

  Inevitably, her principal intention was that the death should be assumed to be due to the angina; and but for Parker’s grudge against Gellian, that is precisely what would have happened. In case this first line of defense failed, however, Mrs. Wynter took a further precaution: she used a poison which could be traced to Gellian, arguing that even if he were to be implicated, arrested and convicted, her hold over him was such that she could persuade him at least to make arrangements for keeping her in comfort during the period of his imprisonment; there might even, she thought, be a fair chance of marrying him before the warrant for his arrest was implemented.

  There was little more that I needed to say. Gellian could scarcely have avoided noticing Mrs. Wynter’s terror, and his own reaction, as the details of this cruel murder plot were unfolded, was everything I had hoped for: he will be careful, I am confident, never to see or communicate with the woman again. What remained was the question of whether or no Mrs. Wynter would call our bluff. For of course it was bluff; the wretched Wynter undoubtedly chewed up every fragment of the final, poisonous letter precisely as he had chewed up every fragment of the preceding ones.

  As your know, a confession obtained by trickery is not inadmissible in court; but we were aware that in the absence of confirmatory evidence, such a confession would be hopelessly inadequate for the purpose of a prosecution. In any case, we never got it: Mrs. Wynter challenged us to produce the sheet of paper which had supposedly been subjected to laboratory examination, and to that challenge we naturally had no reply. For a few moments Mrs. Wynter seemed confusedly to suppose that this circumstance would exonerate her in Gellian’s eyes. But the signs of her guilt had been too plain; and the two of them left Scotland Yard separately.

  Like the majority of policemen I detest murderers, and accordingly it would be no sorrow to me if you were driven to expound Mrs. Wynter’s guilt in detail in the privileged circumstances of the House of Commons. The Opposition, however, is notoriously solicitous regarding the sensibilities of criminals; consequently I have no doubt that if the truth is made known to them in private they will exert themselves most strenuously to prevent its going further.

  Hoping that this letter supplies as much detail as you require,

  I am, Sir,

  Yours truly,

  JOHN KIRKBRIDE

  We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute

  “After all, it’s only us,” they said.

  I must introduce myself.

  None of this is going to be read, even, let alone published. Ever.

  Nevertheless, there is habit-the habit of putting words together in the most effective order you can think of. There is self-respect, too. That, and habit, make me try to tell this as if it were in fact going to be read.

  Which God forbid.

  I am forty-seven, unmarried, living alone, a minor crime-fiction writer earning, on average, rather less than £1,000 a year.

  I live in Devon.

  I live in a small cottage which is isolated, in the sense that there is no one nearer than a quarter of a mile.

  I am not, however; at a loss for company.

  For one thing, I have a telephone.

  I am a hypochondriac, well into the coronary belt. Also, I go in fear of accidents, with broken bones. The telephone is thus a necessity. I can afford only one, so its siting is a matter of great discretion. In the end, it is in the hall, just at the foot of the steep stairs. It is on a shelf only two feet from the floor, so that if I had to crawl to it, it will still be within reach.

  If I have my coronery upstairs, too bad.

  The telephone is for me to use in an emergency. Other people, however, regard it differently.

  Take, for example, my bank manager.

  “Torhaven 153,” I say.

  “Hello? Bradley, is that Mr. Bradley?”

  “Bradley speaking.”

  “This is Wimpole, Wimpole. Mr. Bradley, I have to talk to you.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Now, it’s like this, Mr. Bradley. How soon can we expect some further payments in, Mr. Bradley? Payments out, yes, we have plenty of those, but payments in…”

  “I’m doing everything I can, Mr. Wimpole.”

  “Everything, yes, everything, but payments in, what is going to be coming in during the next month, Mr. Bradley?”

  “Quite a lot, I hope.”

  “Yes, you hope, Mr. Bradley, you hope. But what am
I going to say to my regional office, Mr. Bradley, how am I going to represent the matter to them, to it? You have this accommodation with us, this matter of £500…”

  “Had it for years, Mr. Wimpole.”

  “Yes, Mr. Bradley, and that is exactly the trouble. You must reduce it, Mr. Bradley, reduce it, I say,” this lunatic bawls at me.

  I can no more reduce my overdraft than I can fly.

  I am adequately industrious. I aim to write two thousand words a day, which would support me in the event that I were able to complete them. But if you live alone you are not, contrary to popular supposition, in a state of unbroken placidity.

  Quite the contrary.

  I have tried night-work, a consuming yawn to every tap on the typewriter. I have tried early-morning work.

  And here H.L. Mencken comes in, suggesting that bad writing is due to bad digestion.

  My own digestion is bad at any time, particularly bad during milkmen’s hours, and I have never found that I could do much in rhe dawn. This is a weakness, and I admit it. But apparently it has to be. Work, for me, is thus office hours, nine till five.

  I have told everyone about this, begging them, if it isn’t a matter of emergency, to get in touch with me in the evenings. Office hours, I tell them, same as everyone else. You wouldn’t telephone a solicitor about nothing in particular during his office hours, would you? Well, so why ring me?