Death of a Frightened Editor: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  “Accomplice, Doctor. Walked down with Mortensen to train that night, sprinkles poison on Mortensen’s food, could look like salt, couldn’t it?”

  “It won’t do, Jones. And you know it. The food was finished at 5 o’clock. Mortensen was taken ill just before 6 o’clock, forty-five minutes too late. We’re getting somewhere by a tedious process of attenuation. We’ve eliminated, I think, all but two of the suspects. We’ve found out how the poison was probably obtained—and that seemed an impossible task at one time. We’ve now to get it into Mortensen’s mouth—at the right time.”

  27

  “Ay! there’s the rub.” Manson soliloquised with Hamlet . . .

  A mystery of forty-five minutes . . .

  Encircled within a period of sixty minutes.

  And, so far, insurmountable.

  He took down from his library shelves some half-a-dozen books on poisons, their fatal doses, symptoms and periods of attack. There was Hale White’s Materia Medica, Sydney Smith’s Forensic Medicine, Bamford’s Poisons and their Isolation. There was Glaister, Dixon Mann and Keith Simpson. They represented the cream of information about death in doses. What they said represented the last word on the subject.

  Painstakingly, he perused in each the sections devoted to strychnine—and made no more progress than he already knew. While three of them differed in the times at which death might ensue from a fatal dose of strychnine—from twelve minutes to three hours—all were agreed on the time that the first convulsion, the symptom of strychnine poisoning, might be expected to appear, and that was from minutes to a quarter-of-an-hour. And no longer.

  At this stage in his deliberations, when he was confessing himself completely baffled, the Doctor thought of his old friend, Professor Mulholland. The man was Professor of the Chair of Toxicology at Cambridge, and one of the world’s greatest experts on poisons. He had been up at Cambridge as an undergraduate at the same time as Manson himself.

  A telephone call to the university brought the news that the Professor was actually in London, carrying out research in the School of Tropical Medicine. A call to the school brought him along to the Yard. After a few minutes of reminiscence Manson brought him to business. “I’m in trouble, Mulholland,” he said, simply.

  The Professor shook a tousled head of thick, grey hair. The hair belied the man; he was not old—no older than Manson himself; he was just one of those men who, for no reason at all, go grey within a few years. “It must be trouble if it has you in a dilemma, Manson,” he said. He fidgetted in his chair as he listened to the problem, shaking his towselled head from time to time.

  “H’m! You are in a jam, aren’t you?” He squeaked the words. A big man, he yet had that high thin voice that was possessed also by the late H.G. Wells and which betrayed that giant in literature from among any company he might be in.

  “How do you say the poison was administered?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say. I don’t know.” Manson described how the strychnine could possibly have been obtained from the packet of weed-killer.

  “Crystal form?” Mulholland queried.

  “I know. But it could have been powdered. I am banking on the curious discrepancy in the number of tablets noticed in the bottle that it was administered in the form of a tablet. That must mean that they were similar in shape and colour to the real Bismuth, or Mortensen would have looked at them suspiciously, and probably have discarded them.”

  “H’m! I see . . . Had he swallowed them at 5 o’clock with the meal or immediately after with the coffee, he’d have been in convulsions by 5.15. And you want to keep him going—until what time?”

  “Until five minutes to six.”

  “Hm!” The Professor squeaked again—in protest this time. “Then I can’t help you.”

  “But it was done, Mulholland. I’m absolutely certain of that.”

  The Professor stared hard at the array of books on the shelves of Manson’s study. He stared so long that Manson thought he had fallen asleep. Then:

  “There IS a known method of retarding the action of certain medical drugs . . .” He was speaking to himself.

  “How? I’m prepared to catch at any clutching straw which can be examined.”

  “Well, it’s a device to retard effects until a certain part of the body has been reached. For instance if a patient has a complaint in the lower intestines, Manson, and this has to be treated by a dose taken by the mouth, then precautions have to be taken to ensure that dissolution of the pill or whatever it is, does not take place until it has passed through the stomach to the small intestines.”

  “And that is done—how?”

  The Professor entered into medical terms and described the procedure. Manson sat very straight up in his chair.

  “Could it be used with poison?” he asked.

  “I should say so. I’ve never known it to be done, but there’s no reason why not. Any poison so treated would have the action delayed.”

  “Good lord; then that’s what I’m looking for.”

  “I don’t think so, Manson.”

  “Why not? You say . . .”

  “It would put you in a worse jam than before. The delay in action would be anything from an hour-and-a-half to three hours—most probably the latter.” He chuckled. “Whichever way you take it, you’re out of your time.” Manson became suddenly alert. There was a light in his deep-sunk eyes, and his brow which had been furrowed with creases, cleared. “I think I’m beginning to see through a mist darkly, Mulholland,” he said. “Three hours, you say. So that if he had taken the poison at 5 o’clock, the delay would have brought Mortensen’s attack to round about eight o’clock?”

  “Unless arithmetic has gone haywire since this morning, yes.”

  “Listen, Mulholland. Is there any chance, any possible chance, of lessening that period to three-quarters-of-an-hour? Any hare-brained idea, even, that can give me a guide?”

  “Hm! You’re setting me a poser there.” Mulholland settled himself back in his chair, and closed his eyes . . . “Strychnine . . . H’m! . . . The damned stuff is so swift . . . Dissolve . . . how? . . . Only thing, alcohol . . .” Manson sat bolt upright.

  “What did you say then?” he shouted.

  The Professor jolted into consciousness. “Eh?” he said. “What did I say? I was thinking.”

  “You mentioned alcohol.”

  “Oh, yes. It could be dissolved by alcohol.”

  “That’s it!” Manson nearly whooped. “I’ve got it.”

  “What?”

  “Listen, Mulholland—” Manson put his fingers together and leaned forward. He spoke rapidly, emphasising points with a slap on his knees. He spoke for two minutes. Then: “Well?”

  The Professor nodded his leonine head of grey. “I think it could be done,” he said, gravely.

  “There is only one point,” Doctor Manson said. “A post-mortem was conducted on the man. Strychnine was, of course, found. If the other had been used, as we are supposing it was, would not trace of that, too, have been found?” He waited, tense, for the answer.

  “I do not think so for a moment, Manson.” Mulholland fitted his fingers together, spatulate fashion. “In the first place unless its presence was suspected it would not be tested for. Why should it be? And, in the second place the amount would be so minute as to be practically impossible to separate and analyse. I should say the chances are more than a thousand to one against it.”

  “Then I’ve solved the riddle except for identification,” Manson said.

  * * *

  The Criminal Investigation Department of the Brighton Police was a hive of movement. It was the morning following Professor Mulholland’s pointer to the way in which Mortensen’s death might have been brought about.

  With his Deputy, Doctor Manson had returned to the seaside resort and acquainted Inspector Edgecumbe with the new turn in the investigation, and his suggestion for a new search for what he hoped would prove a final clew (and the word should not be spelled ‘clue’
!). It included inquiries at every chemist’s shop in the town and all wholesale and retail drug houses.

  “It’s a pretty big job, Doctor,” Edgecumbe said. “There are an enormous number of such places in the area. I haven’t the C.I.D. strength to complete such a search under three days.”

  “That’s too long to wait, Inspector, although, of course, we might strike lucky quite early on.” He thought for a moment. “There’s one way out. I suppose you have constables on beat duty. Or is that valuable agency in the prevention and detection of crime a thing of the past here, as it is elsewhere?”

  “We still have them.” Edgecumbe grinned.

  “Good! Then let each constable inquire of chemist’s shops on his beat if they have sold alcohol or keratin to anyone during the past few weeks. He need not make any investigation into the sale. Should he get a favourable reply let him telephone you here, and we will do the rest. Merry and Kenway will look after the main shopping centre. Where is it, by the way?”

  “Western Road.”

  Having seen the constables and C.I.D. men briefed, and Merry and Kenway started on their quest, the Doctor left the police station, turned left into East Street and after joining North Street dived into a narrow passage. At the end of this he found himself in The Lanes.

  Nowhere else in all Europe is there anything comparable with The Lanes of Brighton. They are an interwoven network of back alleys at the rear of the main thoroughfares set in the heart of old Brighton, turning and twisting round sharp, blind corners, winding one way and then turning back on themselves. The alleys are narrow, so much so that some have no more space than will allow two people to walk abreast, or pass each other. Their buildings range from Victorian to Regency and in some cases it would seem to an even earlier architectural period. Here and there the upper storeys overhang the lower in the manner of the Elizabethan period.

  And the buildings everywhere in The Lanes are shops: odd shops, queer shops, fantastic shops; some with wood showing through the blistered paint, some painted gaily in yellow, others in blue. And inside them as exciting and motley a collection as ever could be found in an Eastern bazaar.

  There are shops with a hotch-potch of paintings from Renoir to little Annie’s daubs; and shops with Regency period chairs side by side with a Victorian wash-stand complete with water jug and washing bowl! There are junk stores with iron and brass concomitants of an age long dead, with windows dusted over and rooms behind so piled up with wares that one has to climb or step over them to reach the proprietor waiting like a spider in his web at the rear: a proprietor hoping that somebody might want to purchase huge china dolls that once adorned great-great-great-grandmother’s mantelpiece, or a presentation of a Chinese garden in a flyblown and dust-impregnated glass case that would take up half the space in the lounge of a modern flat.

  Once, in the long ago a prowler among the heterogeneous confusion could pick up a bargain—a Rowlandson for a shilling, ‘only a kid’s drawing, sir’; but not today, since the shabbily dressed owner of junk has a lively suspicion of anyone picking up an article and asking its price. It is generally ‘sold, sir’ until he can check on its value!

  Yet, from its collection of odds and ends of a forgotten era money is made; one shop alone has a turnover of £100,000 a year; and the total revenue of The Lanes is probably well over £250,000 annually. Kings of many nations have prowled among its relics. Queen Mary roamed there; the Queen Mother pays regular visits. And now, Doctor Manson was prowling in The Lanes—

  Searching.

  He paused outside a window which showed a conglomeration of utensils of every kind and size, foreign stamps, prints and bric-a-brac. An artificial canary in a cage stood on a table outside the door. He dropped a penny in a slot and the canary burst into shrill song. A poesy of little girls scurried up and stood in front. Doctor Manson smiled and passed on. Twice he entered a shop and made an inquiry only to receive a negative shake of a head. The fourth visit fared a little better.

  “Afraid I haven’t one, sir,” the shopkeeper said. “It’s a little outside my line.” He grinned appreciatively at the Doctor’s comprehensive look round at the shop, and put in an addendum: “Though I’ve got damn near everything else you could ask for. I think you’d stand a chance at Lemmells. You see we mostly buy up the contents of old houses and we have to take a lot of junk in order to get something we want. We generally share out the things among those who think they can sell them.” Courteously, he stepped into the alley and pointed out the direction of the establishment he had mentioned.

  Lemmells proved to be a junk shop with some little semblance of order in its window and interior. Manson entered.

  “I wonder if by any chance you have—” Manson inquired.

  “Moulds, sir. Yes, in fact I have several. Remains of a stock I bought off an old dispenser some years ago who went out of business.” He rooted in a drawer and produced three or four. “I’ve only this one of any size,” he said. “It presses a dozen at a time. But I’ve two for a different shape and somewhat smaller. They press only four in the one operation.”

  The moulds were of metal, and measured some three inches by two. The Doctor opened the top ‘lid’ of one and disclosed four shallow cavities in the lower section.

  “This is the kind of thing for which I am looking.” Manson inspected it with exaggerated care. There appeared to be a little white powder adhering to the edges of the cavities, and in crevices of the surface.

  “For an antiquated pattern it seems to be in good condition,” he said. “It looks as though it had been cleaned with a wire pan-scrubber.” He pointed out scratches on the lightened surface, which contrasted with the dark, and here and there rust, appeared on the outside.

  “It probably has, sir,” the shopkeeper admitted. “As a matter of fact I sold it a month ago to a customer. He wanted to try his hand at turning herbal powder into pressed form before he spent money on multi-moulds. But he brought it back last week saying that he couldn’t make it work well. I gave him five bob for it.”

  “I’ll take both of them,” Manson said; and counted out the £1 15s. asked. He felt in his pockets and produced a small roll of medical adhesive tape. Unwinding it, he sealed the edges of the upper and lower parts of one mould. The shopkeeper wrapped the purchase in brown paper.

  “Would you be able to identify your earlier customer if necessary?” Manson asked, and showed his warrant card.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “We may want you, then,” Manson warned.

  Back at the police station Merry had something to report. “There have been a number of purchases of alcohol, Harry,” he said. “Some are large amounts, obviously by commercial firms. They can be discounted. The most promising is one of three ounces sold by a Hove chemist. He says the purchaser seemed a little hazy about the stuff and asked to see how much made three ounces. Constable Hawkins reported it. I was just on my way down there.”

  Meanwhile, Kenway had had a more strenuous time. Some twenty chemists he had visited kept no stock of keratin for sale. In fact half of them had never heard of the substance. It was not until he struck a manufacturing chemist’s establishment in London Road that he had any luck. The manager said that although he did not do any retail business, he had actually sold a small quantity of white keratin to a man who had explained that he wanted something to bind herbal powder he wanted to capsule, and in which he was experimenting. The amount sold was four ounces.

  When compared, descriptions of the purchaser of the alcohol and the keratin tallied sufficiently to suggest they were one and the same person.

  * * *

  In London Superintendent Jones was heading another line of inquiry. Manson had had a talk with him before leaving for Brighton, and a course of action had been decided upon.

  “It isn’t a thing any lay person would know about in normal circumstances,” the Doctor had said. “Some kind of research must have been made. And it’s specialised, which should restrict our hunt considerably. Ther
e is the London Library in St. James’s Square as a possible, and the Medico-Legal Society’s Library. Then try the medical publisher in Gloucester Place who has a library for reference by medical students. Oh, and have a go at the honorary Technical Adviser to the Crime Writers’ Association; a bright spark may have pushed in an inquiry as a detective writer wanting to check on a possible plot. You might try, also, that Fleet Street paper’s library. Anyway, I’ll leave it to you, Old Fat Man. It’s like teaching grandmother to suck eggs to tell you how to get hold of evidence.”

  So Jones marshalled a squad of detectives and sent them on their errands.

  * * *

  In Brighton, Doctor Manson was inquiring about a laboratory.

  “Well, there’s the hospital Doctor,” Inspector Edgecumbe said. He looked at Manson. “No? Well, how about Beestons, the chemical manufacturers? They’ve got a staff of chemists and scientists.”

  “That sounds better,” Manson agreed.

  A telephone call elicited the reply that the firm would be glad to give the Doctor facilities in their Laboratory.

  On a bench in the Laboratory the Doctor laid out three bottles, a watch-glass and one of the contraptions he had bought in The Lanes. He set to work.

  With an ivory knife he removed from the contraption the leavings of white powder which he had seen and examined in the shop, scratching them off, laboriously, on to a sheet of glossy white paper borrowed from the Lab. He divided the scraping into two parts. One he emptied into a seed envelope which he sealed and initialled, securing a second initial from one of the firm’s chemists whom he had asked to watch the operation.

  The second moiety he slid on to the watch-glass. With a capillary tube he transferred a couple of drops of pure alcohol from one of the bottles and mixed it with the scrapings until the powder was dissolved. From a second bottle he drew a couple of drops of sulphuric acid, adding them to the dissolved powder. Together he and the chemist watched. There was no reaction; the powder remained a white cream. Doctor Manson took up a small bottle the label of which stated the contents to be manganese dioxide. With a pair of forceps he lifted a few granules of the manganese, added them to the cream, and stirred gently with a glass rod. The contents of the glass turned instantly to blue. As the two men watched the colour changed rapidly into purple, and then took slowly on a reddish tint which ended finally in orange-red. The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief.