The Passing of Mr Quinn

by G. Roy McRae

  The wardress was quick to open the door, fearing that this second swoon, so soon after the first, might be serious, and she was about to lift the unconscious girl when along the corridor strode Doctor Alec Portal, followed by Chief Inspector Brent, very grim and creased of visage.

  These two were at daggers drawn. Doctor Portal was savagely angry and most amazingly full of fight. He had managed to instil a little sullen awe even into constitutional authority as represented by New Scotland Yard and Chief Inspector Brent in particular.

  He turned on the famous criminologist, his fair face hawk-like as he saw Eleanor’s unconscious form lifted on to the plank in the cell.

  ‘It is as I expected,’ he said, his voice throbbing and savage. ‘She is very ill. Your barbarian conduct has produced a very critical condition, inspector, and I warn you that if any serious results attend it I shall lay the blame at your door. I warned you that I was her doctor, and that she was in a state of nervous exhaustion. It was your duty to take medical advice before pursuing such a course as this.’

  ‘Tssh, man!’ snapped the inspector fiercely; ‘I know my duty. Plans had been made for her to escape from the country, and my duty was to stop that.’

  Doctor Portal, refusing to quibble any longer, turned to his patient. A strange, shivering thrill shot along his nerves, and his heart beat furiously at sight of her again. He who had for so long dedicated his life to his work, with never a thought of women, had now come face to face with a fundamental fact.

  How cold she was—how cold! And yet how beautiful! Why, she was little more than a lovely child! And yet fashioned exquisitely in the mould of a woman. As she lay there half on her side, her fair hair lying in gleaming waves around her slim shoulders, her rather skimpy costume revealed to the full the glorious seductive curves of her figure.

  But he pulled himself together and bent to his work with professional deftness and care. Doctor Alec Portal’s keen, intellectual face became very grave as he administered restoratives, with no effect. The minutes passed, and even the inspector behind him began to fidget. So prolonged and deathlike was the swoon that Doctor Portal began to think, with a wild pounding of his heart, that she was beyond his medical attention and care.

  This was no ordinary fainting fit!

  His medical experience told him that her condition necessitated an extremely delicate and swiftly performed surgical operation. Only a slight one it is true, yet it needed nerves and skill to perform it. It was a task for a Harley Street specialist, and even so, the issue hung on the most delicate balance.

  For a moment Alec Portal quailed at the thought that, however unwittingly, he might, by some error of judgment, pronounce sentence of eternal slumber on this frail and ethereal sleeping beauty.

  Yet he was a man. And he was made to love a woman. The thing that had never touched him yet—passion at its finest and cleanest—had wakened to life in him. And now it bade him save his mate, to claim her for his own.

  He took out his lancet, and rolled up one of Eleanor’s sleeves, exposing the perfect moulding of the snowy arm.

  ‘Just hold the arm, inspector, so as to keep it steady.’

  The Yard man complied, and Doctor Alec Portal bent to his task, his brows knit in concentration and his blue eyes gleaming. Soon there was a little gush of blood staining the ivory of the girl’s arm crimson. Doctor Alec Portal continually staunched the flow, and at length applied a tourniquet. To his satisfaction the heart commenced to beat more normally.

  And soon Eleanor’s inky lashes, like black butterflies on her pallid cheeks, fluttered upwards, and her brown eyes looked wonderingly, uncomprehendingly into Doctor Alec Portal’s. All at once it seemed memory came to her, and a look of childish fear flashed like summer lightning into her eyes.

  She tried to start up.

  ‘Oh, please—please— You are my friend!’ she cried pitifully. ‘Take me away from here. They are saying that I did it, that I killed him! But I didn’t. I swear it!’

  ‘Yes, yes—hush, child!’ the doctor cried soothingly. ‘Come, drink this.’ He tried to force a silver flask of brandy to her lips, but with a gesture of repugnance she refused it.

  ‘A little water, please,’ she said faintly. Her brown eyes dilated; she looked around her huntedly. ‘Oh—I shall die if they keep me here,’ she gasped.

  The wardress gave her water, and she closed her eyes and fell back.

  Doctor Portal, with a significant look at Inspector Brent, withdrew for a minute.

  ‘Now, inspector,’ he said aggressively, ‘I demand the instant release of this unfortunate and innocent lady. You may have taken out a warrant for arrest, but I imagine you will not care to execute it before the coroner’s inquest, and without doing so you cannot detain her any longer.’

  Inspector Brent’s eyes glinted under his shaggy brows. He was convinced of Eleanor Appleby’s guilt.

  ‘I may detain anyone in England on suspicion for twenty-four hours without entering a charge,’ he said doggedly. ‘I am within my rights, and I shall have her remanded on suspicion—’

  ‘Tush, man; do you want to kill her?’ Doctor Portal exclaimed savagely. ‘I will act as security for her safe keeping. She must have nursing and care, and I am going to take her to my mother’s home.’

  Eventually the taciturn inspector concurred in this arrangement, and Eleanor was half-carried out and helped into the doctor’s big saloon car. With his face somewhat relaxed Alec Portal whirled his precious charge away to his mother’s home.

  All the same there was a vague stirring of dread in the doctor’s heart.

  He did not like the queer mingling of combativeness and triumph in Inspector Brent’s attitude towards him. It was as though he knew something, and was sure of his victim. Eleanor, too, resting against the cushions at the back of the car, looked like a haunted creature. He was afraid for her. He wished the next few days well over.

  Alec’s mother, a beautiful, silver-haired old lady, received Eleanor with every kindness, and the next three days were days of almost untrammelled rest and delicious peace for the girl. Doctor Portal ordered her to remain in bed, and she was inundated with flowers and fruit and gifts of all sort; friends she had known before her marriage, and whom the professor had debarred from his house, came to see her, and they were all very gentle and kind, so much so that Eleanor began to wonder.

  She began to notice curious looks that they cast at one another when they were together at her bedside. Eleanor’s mind by now was in a curiously dreamy state. She could not make it all out. Sometimes the memory of her husband would come … and that night of horror. It would come like a blinding pain in her head.

  If she mentioned her husband those around her would say ‘Hush, dear—all that is past!’

  And Eleanor was only too willing to forget. Only too willing! It all seemed like a bad dream—that night, and the dreadful hours that had followed the discovery of Professor Appleby dead in his chair.

  Doctor Portal watched her with a certain amount of uneasiness. He was not quite sure that his treatment was as satisfactory as it seemed. The transformation was so sudden and complete. Eleanor seemed so completely happy; a little quiet, perhaps, and dreamy. She adored Alec’s mother, and followed her wherever she went with her eyes. The girl’s half-parted lips, the tiny tinge of colour in her cheeks, and the soft glow of serenity in her brown eyes told of an unnatural artificial state to Doctor Alec Portal.

  Her highly-strung nature, unable to bear the weight of tragedy and anguish that had fallen upon her, had given way. And sitting there in bed, with the white pillows propping her up, her fair hair plaited round her shapely head, she just looked a very beautiful and adorable child.

  Alec hated to undeceive her, to take the bandage from her eyes and reveal the sword of Damocles that hung above her head. But it had to be done. For on the third day the coroner’s inquest was appointed to take place.

  Alec’s mother tried to soften the blow. Very, very timidly she came to the girl, al
l in black herself, and carrying soft, filmy black things in her hands. She sank down by the bedside. ‘It’s time for you to get up, my dear. We are going out this morning, in the car.’

  Eleanor looked at the widow’s weeds on the bed. Troubled, she looked at Alec’s mother, who tried to smile at her, though her eyes were shining with blinding tears. ‘But what are these?’ Eleanor was going to ask—and then it came, that tearing, flashing pain in her head. And her brain came to a sharp focus.

  ‘Oh!’ she put her little hands to her head.

  Alec’s mother saw that the flood of memory was returning. Her heart cried out, for she recognised that the crisis was coming. She put in anxiously, gently: ‘It is the inquest today. You will be brave. Oh, my dear; I know you are good and pure, and you have nothing to fear.’

  Eleanor sat very white and still for a while with the horror back in her eyes. Her face was frozen. Then all at once the tears came to her relief, too, and she seized Mrs Portal’s hand and kissed it again and again.

  ‘You believe in me?’ she cried pitifully. ‘You do believe in me? Oh, I have a feeling that something dreadful is going to happen. But I will be brave,’ she added, and she looked up suddenly with an odd expression in her eyes. ‘I—I’m going to play the game through to the end.’

  And so half an hour later they set out for the coroner’s court, Eleanor and Doctor Portal side by side. The doctor was telling himself that the three days’ surcease from sorrow and anguish had saved her reason. But he feared for what might yet happen. Looking at the lovely face beside him in the car, pure in its frozen calm as some marble lily, Alec Portal vowed to himself that she was innocent and that he would yet save her from the final awful result that, whether directly or otherwise, her husband’s cruelty threatened to bring about.

  ‘Hallo!’ exclaimed Alec Portal sharply all at once.

  He had turned the car into the street which led directly to the court, and now the car’s progress was barred; for the whole street was a seething mass of human heads, straining to catch sight of the lovely young wife who was said to have poisoned her brilliant professor husband.

  For the first time during the drive Eleanor showed acute emotion. She wrung her hands, and crouched back, her face wreathed in anguish. The eyes of the curious sightseers seemed to bore into her. A few gave pitying exclamations at sight of her plight and turned away, but their places were quickly taken by the throng that pressed ever on.

  Doctor Portal and Eleanor were saved by two mounted police who cleared the street and made an avenue through the press for the car to reach the court. Even so they were forced to run the gauntlet of the crowd’s gaze, and listen to its varied remarks, an experience which seared Eleanor’s mind indelibly with horror.

  But that was only the first confused impression in what seemed a never closing phantasmagoria of terror and dread. Next she was in the coroner’s court, a small, dusty apartment of long benches from which a sea of faces stared at Eleanor.

  She remembered seeing Derek Capel. It seemed he would never take his eyes off her. Though she had but a vague impression of him, he appeared more dissolute, more reckless than ever. His eyes were haunting her, begging, pleading and threatening alternately. It appeared he wanted to say something to her. But some inward voice prompted her to take as little notice of him as possible.

  And Vera! She was there, flaunting herself in one of her mistresses’ hats. Superb confidence and insolence played in her smile. Malice steeled to do its worst shone in her eyes. She looked about the court as though she were quite familiar with such surroundings and rather enjoyed being there.

  There fell a death-like hush in the crowded room as the coroner entered by a side door and took his seat. He appeared a stern, formidable figure; his face, with its high forehead, rather hooked nose and thin, compressed lips seemed as if carved in wax in the white glare of light that fell upon him. He gazed around the court with keen, penetrating eyes, and at last they rested on Eleanor, and it seemed to the girl that they were filled with a dread accusation.

  The jury were empanelled. And then to Eleanor there followed a confused blur of events. The court was filled with a monotonous hum. People utterly unknown to her stepped into the witness-box and gave evidence. She knew that she should be following the proceedings with close attention, but she was unable to do so. Her heart was filled with a numbling loneliness and despair. She felt indescribably old and tired, and all she knew was that she wanted to creep away somewhere and be alone.

  Someone had moved quietly to her side. It was Alec Portal, and he was speaking in low tones that held an undercurrent of strained excitement.

  ‘This is he—Doctor Lasglow, the Home Office analyst. He was responsible for the post-mortem examination. And now we shall know the truth, and this deplorable business will be all over.’

  A tall, spare man, almost bald, and with a keen, intellectual face was in the box. He took the oath quietly and gravely, and then the coroner was seen to lean forward in his seat.

  ‘You have made an examination of the body and the organs of Professor Aldous Appleby: what is your considered opinion of the manner in which he met his death.’

  ‘He died by poison,’ was the answer, quietly and gravely given.

  There was a great stir in court.

  Doctor Alec Portal looked at Eleanor, and his eyes were filled with amaze and dread. She covered her face with her gloved hands and broke into a fit of violent shuddering.

  Other questions followed, and the amazing information was elicited that the great Home Office expert, skilled though he was, was unable to designate the exact nature of the poison that had killed Professor Appleby. The organs of the stomach all indicated acute poisoning, but no traces of any known poison had been discovered.

  The atmosphere in the court had by now become electric. All were craned forward to listen to the Home Office chemist. Newspaper reporters were scribbling hastily. This promised to become the most sensational and mysterious poisoning case of the century. And in his seat in the well of the court, Derek Capel leant forward, his face ghastly, his whole attention strained upon the chemist who was making these fateful disclosures.

  ‘Yes; we have examined the whole of the contents of the medicine cabinet,’ the expert declared quietly. ‘We found many known poisons, but scarcely one which it is possible could have caused the death of the professor. Otherwise we should have found traces in the body. In “exhibit 19”’—the coroner was holding up the fateful little blue-black bottle marked ‘Poison’ which had so early arrested the attention of Inspector Brent—‘we found strychnine in the form of hydrocholoride. Yes, sir, that is the bottle.’

  ‘Is it possible,’ the coroner asked, ‘that Professor Appleby could have been poisoned by hydrochloride?’

  ‘It is not, sir,’ the expert answered emphatically. ‘Otherwise we should have found traces in the body.’

  Derek Capel leant back in his seat.

  The case was rapidly assuming a bewildering aspect. And drama now followed swiftly. Another Government witness was called, a finger-print expert from Scotland Yard. He identified the little blue-black bottle, and spoke to having found finger marks.

  ‘Are those finger marks identical with any finger-prints at present in possession of the authorities?’ asked the coroner amidst tense and strained attention

  ‘Yes, sir,’ answered the detective. ‘During, her period of detention we took the finger-prints of Mrs Eleanor Appleby, the deceased’s wife. The finger-prints on the bottle are identical with those of Mrs Appleby.’

  It was as if a thunderclap had burst in the court.

  There was a loud and prolonged stir—an excited buzz of comment. The ushers sternly demanded silence. But little notice was taken for a time. All heads were craned to stare at her who was now the central figure in this amazing tragedy.

  Eleanor had started upright. Her eyes were transfixed by the little blue-black bottle which the coroner had now placed again on the desk. A deadly faintness seiz
ed her, and it was noticeable that her whole slim figure in the flowing widow’s weeds which so tragically became her was trembling violently. A long moment her burning eyes were fixed on ‘exhibit 19,’ and with half-parted lips she strove to speak. At last the words came in a tragic cry.

  ‘That bottle! I saw it on the night. Oh, mother—help your girl! What could I have been thinking of—what could I have been thinking of?’

  She relapsed into her seat, her whole slim body shaken by dry, hard sobs. Otherwise there was a dead silence in the court.

  Alec put his arm around her, and fought against a cold douche that seemed to flood all his sympathy. No, no—not that! It couldn’t be that she … What was she saying? Poor child! In her overwrought state she was near to delivering herself into the hands of the Philistines.

  He tried to comfort her.

  ‘Hush, hush! Don’t cry so. Don’t let these lawyers and people confuse you.’

  He managed to soothe her a little, half-leaning against him, her whole body palpitant, her lashes trembling against her smooth, pale cheeks. Doctor Alec Portal inwardly anathematised the court—the whole business. They had brought her to a dangerously overwrought state.

  The coroner was meticulously arranging papers on his desk. He looked over at the jury box. ‘You are to remember,’ he said in his most precise tones, ‘that the bottle, “exhibit 19”, contained hydrocholoride which it is impossible could have caused the death of Professor Appleby. The point is very important.’

  But it is doubtful whether it impressed the jury. They had just seen sheer startled fear and guilt on a woman’s face, and they had been shocked by the vivid impression of it.