Hickory Dickory Dock: A Hercule Poirot Mystery

by Agatha Christie

  “And the bottles?”

  “I don’t know what happened to the bottles . . . I should think they probably were just thrown into the wastepaper basket?”

  “But the poison itself was destroyed?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of that. I saw it.”

  “And that was—when?”

  “About, oh, just over a fortnight ago, I think.”

  “I see. Thank you, Miss Tomlinson.”

  Jean lingered, clearly wanting to be told more.

  “D’you think it might be important?”

  “It might be. One can’t tell.”

  Inspector Sharpe remained brooding for a few moments. Then he had Nigel Chapman in again.

  “I’ve just had a rather interesting statement from Miss Jean Tomlinson,” he said.

  “Ah! Who’s dear Jean been poisoning your mind against? Me?”

  “She’s been talking about poison, and in connection with you, Mr. Chapman.”

  “Poison and me? What on earth?”

  “Do you deny that some weeks ago you had a wager with Mr. Bateson about methods of obtaining poison in some way that could not be traced to you?”

  “Oh, that!” Nigel was suddenly enlightened. “Yes, of course! Funny I never thought of that. I don’t even remember Jean being there. But you don’t think it could have any possible significance, do you?”

  “Well, one doesn’t know. You admit the fact, then?”

  “Oh yes, we were arguing on the subject. Colin and Len were being very superior and high-handed about it so I told them that with a little ingenuity anyone could get hold of a suitable supply of poison—in fact I said I could think of three distinct ways of doing it, and I’d prove my point, I said, by putting them into practice.”

  “Which you then proceeded to do?”

  “Which I then proceeded to do, Inspector.”

  “And what were those three methods, Mr. Chapman?”

  Nigel put his head a little on one side.

  “Aren’t you asking me to incriminate myself?” he said. “Surely you ought to warn me?”

  “It hasn’t come to warning you yet, Mr. Chapman, but, of course, there’s no need for you to incriminate yourself, as you put it. In fact you’re perfectly entitled to refuse my questions if you like to do so.”

  “I don’t know that I want to refuse.” Nigel considered for a moment or two, a slight smile playing round his lips.

  “Of course,” he said, “what I did was, no doubt, against the law. You could haul me in for it if you liked. On the other hand, this is a murder case and if it’s got any bearing on poor little Celia’s death I suppose I ought to tell you.”

  “That would certainly be the sensible point of view to take.”

  “All right then. I’ll talk.”

  “What were these three methods?”

  “Well.” Nigel leant back in his chair. “One’s always reading in the papers, isn’t one, about doctors losing dangerous drugs from a car? People are being warned about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it occurred to me that one very simple method would be to go down to the country, follow a GP about on his rounds, when occasion offered—just open the car, look in the doctor’s case, and extract what you wanted. You see, in these country districts, the doctor doesn’t always take his case into the house. It depends what sort of patient he’s going to see.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, that’s all. That’s to say that’s all for method number one. I had to sleuth three doctors until I found a suitably careless one. When I did, it was simplicity itself. The car was left outside a farmhouse in a rather lonely spot. I opened the door, looked at the case, took out a tube of hyoscine hydrobromide, and that was that.”

  “Ah! And method number two?”

  “That entailed just a little pumping of dear Celia, as a matter of fact. She was quite unsuspicious. I told you she was a stupid girl, she had no idea what I was doing. I simply talked a bit about the mumbo jumbo Latin of doctors’ prescriptions, and asked her to write me out a prescription in the way a doctor writes it, for tincture digitalin. She obliged quite unsuspecting. All I had to do after that was to find a doctor in the classified directory, living in a far off district of London, add his initials or slightly illegible signature. I then took it to a chemist in a busy part of London, who would not be likely to be familiar with that particular doctor’s signature, and I received the prescription made up without any difficulty at all. Digitalin is prescribed in quite large quantities for heart cases and I had written out the prescription on hotel notepaper.”

  “Very ingenious,” said Inspector Sharpe drily.

  “I am incriminating myself! I can hear it in your voice.”

  “And the third method?”

  Nigel did not reply at once. Then he said:

  “Look here. What exactly am I letting myself in for?”

  “The theft of drugs from an unlocked car is larceny,” said Inspector Sharpe. “Forging a prescription. . . .”

  Nigel interrupted him.

  “Not exactly forging, is it? I mean, I didn’t obtain money by it, and it wasn’t exactly an imitation of any doctor’s signature. I mean, if I write a prescription and write H R James on it, you can’t say I’m forging any particular Dr. James’s name, can you?” He went on with rather a wry smile. “You see what I mean? I’m sticking my neck out. If you like to turn nasty over this—well—I’m obviously for it. On the other hand, if. . . .”

  “Yes, Mr. Chapman, on the other hand?”

  Nigel said with a sudden passion:

  “I don’t like murder. It’s a beastly, horrible thing. Celia, poor little devil, didn’t deserve to be murdered. I want to help. But does it help? I can’t see that it does. Telling you my peccadilloes, I mean.”

  “The police have a good deal of latitude, Mr. Chapman. It’s up to them to look upon certain happenings as a light-hearted prank of an irresponsible nature. I accept your assurance that you want to help in the solving of this girl’s murder. Now please go on, and tell me about your third method.”

  “Well,” said Nigel, “we’re coming fairly near the bone now. It was a bit more risky than the other two, but at the same time it was a great deal more fun. You see, I’d been to visit Celia once or twice in her Dispensary. I knew the lay of the land there. . . .”

  “So you were able to pinch the bottle out of the cupboard?”

  “No, no, nothing as simple as that. That wouldn’t have been fair from my point of view. And, incidentally, if it had been a real murder—that is, if I had been stealing the poison for the purpose of murder—it would probably be remembered that I had been there. Actually, I hadn’t been in Celia’s Dispensary for about six months. No, I knew that Celia always went into the back room at eleven-fifteen for what you might call ‘elevenses,’ that is, a cup of coffee and a biscuit. The girls went in turn, two at a time. There was a new girl there who had only just come and she certainly wouldn’t know me by sight. So what I did was this. I strolled into the Dispensary with a white coat on and a stethoscope round my neck. There was only the new girl there and she was busy at the outpatients’ hatch. I strolled in, went along to the poison cupboard, took out a bottle, strolled round the end of the partition, said to the girl, ‘What strength adrenalin do you keep?’ She told me and I nodded, then I asked her if she had a couple of Veganin as I had a terrific hangover. I swallowed them down and strolled out again. She never had the least suspicion that I wasn’t somebody’s houseman or a medical student. It was child’s play. Celia never even knew I’d been there.”

  “A stethoscope,” said Inspector Sharpe curiously. “Where did you get a stethoscope?”

  Nigel grinned suddenly.

  “It was Len Bateson’s,” he said. “I pinched it.”

  “From this house?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that explains the theft of the stethoscope. That was not Celia’s doing.”

  “Good lord no! Can’t see a kleptomaniac
stealing a stethoscope, can you?”

  “What did you do with it afterwards?”

  “Well, I had to pawn it,” said Nigel apologetically.

  “Wasn’t that a little hard on Bateson?”

  “Very hard on him. But without explaining my methods, which I didn’t mean to do, I couldn’t tell him about it. However,” added Nigel cheerfully, “I took him out not long after and gave him a hell of a party one evening.”

  “You’re a very irresponsible young man,” said Inspector Sharpe.

  “You should have seen their faces,” said Nigel, his grin widening, “when I threw down those three lethal preparations on the table and told them I had managed to pinch them without anybody being wise as to who took them.”

  “What you’re telling me is,” said the inspector, “that you had three means of poisoning someone by three different poisons and that in each case the poison could not have been traced to you.”

  Nigel nodded.

  “That’s fair enough,” he said. “And given the circumstances it’s not a very pleasant thing to admit. But the point is, that the poisons were all disposed of at least a fortnight ago or longer.”

  “That is what you think, Mr. Chapman, but it may not really be so.”

  Nigel stared at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had these things in your possession, how long?”

  Nigel considered.

  “Well, the tube of hyoscine about ten days, I suppose. The morphine tartrate, about four days. The tincture digitalin I’d only got that very afternoon.”

  “And where did you keep these things—the hyoscine hydrobromide and the morphine tartrate, that is to say?”

  “In the drawer of my chest of drawers, pushed to the back under my socks.”

  “Did anyone know you had it there?”

  “No. No, I’m sure they didn’t.”

  There had been, however, a faint hesitation in his voice which Inspector Sharpe noticed, but for the moment he did not press the point.

  “Did you tell anyone what you were doing? Your methods? The way you were going about these things?”

  “No. At least—no, I didn’t.”

  “You said ‘at least,’ Mr. Chapman.”

  “Well, I didn’t actually. As a matter of fact, I was going to tell Pat, then I thought she wouldn’t approve. She’s very strict, Pat is, so I fobbed her off.”

  “You didn’t tell her about stealing the stuff from the doctor’s car, or the prescription, or the morphia from the hospital?”

  “Actually, I told her afterwards about the digitalin; that I’d written a prescription and got a bottle from the chemist, and about masquerading as a doctor at the hospital. I’m sorry to say Pat wasn’t amused. I didn’t tell her about pinching things from a car. I thought she’d go up in smoke.”

  “Did you tell her you were going to destroy this stuff after you’d won the bet?”

  “Yes. She was all worried and het up about it. Started to insist I took the things back or something like that.”

  “That course of action never occurred to you yourself?”

  “Good lord no! That would have been fatal; it would have landed me in no end of a row. No, we three just chucked the stuff on the fire and poured it down the loo and that was that. No harm done.”

  “You say that, Mr. Chapman, but it’s quite possible that harm was done.”

  “How can it have been, if the stuff was chucked away as I tell you?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Chapman, that someone might have seen where you put those things, or found them perhaps, and that someone might have emptied morphia out of the bottle and replaced it with something else?”

  “Good lord no!” Nigel stared at him. “I never thought of anything of that kind. I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s a possibility, Mr. Chapman.”

  “But nobody could possibly have known.”

  “I should say,” said the inspector drily, “that in a place of this kind a great deal more is known than you yourself might believe possible.”

  “Snooping, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you’re right there.”

  “Which of the students might normally, at any time, be in your room?”

  “Well, I share it with Len Bateson. Most of the men here have been in it now and again. Not the girls, of course. The girls aren’t supposed to come to the bedroom floors on our side of the house. Propriety. Pure living.”

  “They’re not supposed to, but they might do so, I suppose?”

  “Anyone might,” said Nigel. “In the daytime. The afternoon, for instance, there’s nobody about.”

  “Does Miss Lane ever come to your room?”

  “I hope you don’t mean that the way it sounds, Inspector. Pat comes to my room sometimes to replace some socks she’s been darning. Nothing more than that.”

  Leaning forward, Inspector Sharpe said:

  “You do realise, Mr. Chapman, that the person who could most easily have taken some of that poison out of the bottle and substituted something else for it, was yourself?”

  Nigel looked at him, his face suddenly hard and haggard.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen that just a minute and a half ago. I could have done just exactly that. But I’d no reason on earth for putting that girl out of the way, Inspector, and I didn’t do it. Still, there it is—I quite realise that you’ve only got my word for it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The story of the bet and the disposal of the poison was confirmed by Len Bateson and by Colin McNabb. Sharpe retained Colin McNabb after the others had gone.

  “I don’t want to cause you any more pain than I can help, Mr. McNabb,” he said. “I can realise what it means to you for your fiancée to have been poisoned on the very night of your engagement.”

  “There’ll be no need to go into that aspect of it,” said Colin McNabb, his face immovable. “You’ll not need to concern yourself with my feelings. Just ask me any questions you like which you think may be useful to you.”

  “It was your considered opinion that Celia Austin’s behaviour had a psychological origin?”

  “There’s no doubt about it at all,” said Colin McNabb. “If you’d like me to go into the theory of the thing. . . .”

  “No, no,” said Inspector Sharpe hastily. “I’m taking your word for it as a student of psychology.”

  “Her childhood had been particularly unfortunate. It had set up an emotional block. . . .”

  “Quite so, quite so.” Inspector Sharpe was desperately anxious to avoid hearing the story of yet another unhappy childhood. Nigel’s had been quite enough.

  “You had been attracted to her for some time?”

  “I would not say precisely that,” said Colin, considering the matter conscientiously. “These things sometimes surprise you by the way they dawn upon you suddenly, like. Subconsciously no doubt, I had been attracted, but I was not aware of the fact. Since it was not my intention to marry young, I had no doubt set up a considerable resistance to the idea in my conscious mind.”

  “Yes. Just so. Celia Austin was happy in her engagement to you? I mean, she expressed no doubts? Uncertainties? There was nothing she felt she ought to tell you?”

  “She made a very full confession of all she’d been doing. There was nothing more in her mind to worry her.”

  “And you were planning to get married—when?”

  “Not for a considerable time. I’m not in a position at the moment to support a wife.”

  “Had Celia any enemies here? Anyone who did not like her?”

  “I can hardly believe so. I’ve given that point of view a great deal of thought, Inspector. Celia was well-liked here. I’d say, myself, it was not a personal matter at all which brought about her end.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not a personal matter?’ ”

  “I do not wish to be very precise at the moment. It’s only a vague kind of idea I have and I’m no
t clear about it myself.”

  From that position the inspector could not budge him.

  The last two students to be interviewed were Sally Finch and Elizabeth Johnston. The inspector took Sally Finch first.

  Sally was an attractive girl with a mop of red hair and eyes that were bright and intelligent. After routine inquiries Sally Finch suddenly took the initiative.

  “D’you know what I’d like to do, Inspector? I’d like to tell you just what I think. I personally. There’s something all wrong about this house, something very wrong indeed. I’m sure of that.”

  “You mean you’re afraid of something, Miss Finch?” Sally nodded her head.

  “Yes, I’m afraid. There’s something or someone here who’s pretty ruthless. The whole place isn’t—well, how shall I put it?—it isn’t what it seems. No, no, Inspector, I don’t mean communists. I can see that just trembling on your lips. It’s not communists I mean. Perhaps it isn’t even criminal. I don’t know. But I’ll bet you anything you like that awful old woman knows about it all.”

  “What old woman? You don’t mean Mrs. Hubbard?”

  “No. Not Ma Hubbard. She’s a dear. I mean old Nicoletis. That old she-wolf.”

  “That’s interesting, Miss Finch. Can you be more definite? About Mrs. Nicoletis, I mean.”

  Sally shook her head.

  “No. That’s just what I can’t be. All I can tell you is she gives me the creeps every time I pass her. Something queer is going on here, Inspector.”

  “I wish you could be a little more definite.”

  “So do I. You’ll be thinking I’m fanciful. Well, perhaps I am, but other people feel it too. Akibombo does. He’s scared. I believe Black Bess does, too, but she wouldn’t let on. And I think, Inspector, that Celia knew something about it.”

  “Knew something about what?”

  “That’s just it. What? But there were things she said. Said that last day. About clearing everything up. She had owned up to her part in what was going on, but she sort of hinted that there were other things she knew about and she wanted to get them cleared up too. I think she knew something, Inspector, about someone. That’s the reason I think she was killed.”