A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  But now, if not bed, I need at least to lie down on the sofa, and sleep. I need to. I need to.

  Chapter Twelve

  For all her determination not to be stuck day after day in bed, Harriet realized next morning that she did not in the least want to get up. And when John poked his head in at the door to say he would bring her breakfast before he left for the office, she succumbed. And then ate scarcely any of the little rack of toast he left her with, and failed to finish her coffee.

  She lay there vaguely cursing herself for her lassitude. A relapse? All right, I suppose I might have expected something like this. But why did it have to happen when, with a description of the poisoner secured, however sketchy, things seemed to be going well at last? Answer? Because things were going well.

  And then oblivion again. Until Mrs Pickstock tapped on the door and, neat head of grey curls half-in, half-out, said brightly, ‘Hubby thought you were a bit off-colour today so he asked me to keep a special eye on you.’

  So it was Four-bean and Ginger soup again.

  One good sign, Harriet thought, as, watched at every spoonful by the proud shopper at Organics ‘R Go, she actually managed to finish the bowl. I’m obviously better than I was last time I was presented with this appalling stuff. So progress. I’m making a little progress.

  She found, though, that she had no inclination to test this by getting up and getting dressed. Then later Mrs Pickstock came positively barging in holding the newly delivered Evening Star.

  ‘Look, look,’ she jabbered out, voice squeaking with excitement. ‘They’ve found who it was who poisoned you. A Majestic Insurance security man saw her. It ... it was a woman after all. It’s all in the paper. I took a peek as I came up the stairs. A wicked-looking woman who crept up to where you were asleep, dear, and poured that terrible poison into the drink you had there, the Camp-something. And then ... then she just crept away and no one stopped her. I must say I think they ought to — ’

  ‘Mrs Pickstock, do let me see it,’ Harriet managed to say quite calmly, despite her rising exasperation.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, dear, I quite forgot you won’t know anything about it. Here you are then. Here you are. Yes, you’ll be in the news again today. I wonder if we won’t have more of those reporters banging on the door, not that you knew anything about the first lot. Hubby said you mustn’t on any account be disturbed by them. Perhaps now we’ll have the television, too. But I’ll chase them away. Don’t you worry.’

  Ignoring the bright babble, Harriet saw that almost half the Star front page had been devoted to a full-colour picture of the familiar dimly dark face of Bruce Grant, the man who had identified ‘the Poisoner’. The Star’s capital P positively leapt from the columns.

  She looked again at Grant’s full-colour face.

  Familiar, yes, yet not quite familiar. All right, it may be because all I’ve seen of him is on that monitor screen that I’m missing some subtle diff — No. No, I’ve got it. In the photo here that permanently sullen look I saw has gone. Instead, plainly now I’ve noticed it, there’s an expression of self-satisfaction. Yes, that’s it. The cat that’s got the cream. A real cliche expression illustrated.

  So what cream has the cat got?

  In a moment she knew.

  He’s got attention. He’s someone now, getting his picture in the paper. As if he’s a star footballer. At one bound he’s left the dull routine of a security man, stuck all day or all night at whatever post he’s been assigned to, and he’s a celebrity. Someone who’ll be recognized in the street. He’s famous, or so he thinks. And, yes, didn’t he say to Pat in the interview room that it got bloody boring standing at the Club gate all morning? So ... so, can it be that he thought eventually, in that slow way of his, that his life would be set glowing with excitement if he had actually seen the Poisoner that the Star, as well as Radio Birchester and Birchester TV and even the more sensational of the nationals were headlining?

  But what does that mean? Can it ... can this be right? Is it possible that Grant made up the story he produced at the Meads PS?

  But, if he did, why did he invent that particular woman? Can he have seen someone somewhat like her at the pool? Have even seen them come near to me there? And based his firm identification on them? Is that possible?

  No. No, I won’t pass this idea on. I’d better not. It may be, for God’s sake, just another of those hit-or-miss fantasies I plagued Pat with earlier. Thinking, when I was at my most feeble, that John had put the poison in my drink, then believing because of a coincidence in the surnames of the next two victims, MNO, that the whole thing was an Agatha Christie conspiracy against me.

  But I’ll still keep it in mind. I’ll go over the idea again.

  When I feel my head is clearer.

  *

  But before she had come to feel her mind was in less of a state of fluffy confusion she was subjected to a new shock. The phone beside the bed shrilled out, waking her from a restless half-sleep. It was Pat Murphy. But she found she could respond only listlessly to his first anxious inquiries about her wellbeing. ‘Yes, I’m okay, Pat, more or less, thank you.’ And, in the relapse into weariness which she now seemed entrapped in, her energy was slipping away yet more rapidly as she waited for him to tell her why he was calling.

  ‘Listen then, Harriet, there’s something you could maybe help me with. We’ve been working away again at the witnesses round the Club pool, in the light of Grant’s evidence. So this is what I’m doing. I’ve tasked my lads and lasses with getting just two answers from those people, by phone if they can: Did you see last bank holiday Monday an old woman in a green cloak-like garment with straggly white hair and a hooked nose? And for such female witnesses that they do have to go and see: Does the person you are addressing fit that description, taking into account she may be wearing altogether different clothes? Well, so far we’ve got no answers to question number one, and we’re well through the list, phones here in the incident room going like crazy. No one, so far, has seen Grant’s bent old woman. Doesn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t there, of course. If she’s the sneaky creature Grant made her out to be, she could have crept in somehow, round the back or something, right?’

  ‘Yes, Pat. I suppose so.’

  ‘But now,’ Pat’s voice came ringingly in her ear, ‘what we did get was one response to question number two, or a sort of response. But we need only the one if it turns out that this is our woman. Though, I may say, that doesn’t look too likely. The lady, name of Dora Long, Mrs Dora Long, elderly widow of a former Majestic director, has got the long white hair all right and, according to the DC who saw her, she’s even got a bit of a hooky nose and she’s certainly arthritic. So she may go about — Grant’s words — bent over. But the DC was a fella, and not too good on describing females. Well, I’d like, of course, seeing how it just may be the big breakthrough, is to go and have a look at Mrs Long meself. But you know the pressure I’m under, Harriet. A hundred and one priority tasks. Here from six in the morning, and it’s past midnight before I’ve done writing up my Personal Record.’

  Harriet, by now, knew what was coming.

  She was going to be asked to interview Mrs Long. And she quailed at the thought. What if that tentative identification turned out to be good? Am I going to come face-to-face with the woman Bruce Grant saw creep up to me and put aconitine into my Campari soda? If he did.

  All right, I was asleep when it was done, but I may not have dropped off altogether when she began to approach. I may have seen her, though I’ve no recollection of it. Except perhaps, just perhaps, those flashes of something black and white are linked to something I saw as I lay there on the recliner before sleep descended?

  Can I do this? Can I face it? Oh God, I feel so tired.

  She must have failed to reply to whatever final question Pat had asked, because she heard him saying urgently Harriet? Harriet?

  ‘Yes, Pat, yes.’

  ‘Ah, I knew you would. I knew it. It’s a lot to ask, but I knew
you’d say yes if you could do it at all.’

  Oh my God, he thinks when I said yes I wasn’t just acknowledging that I was hearing him. He thinks I’ve agreed. I’ve agreed.

  Well, haven’t I really after all? It’s something I must do. Something I ought to do. It may all come to nothing. But Pat’s relying on me. And if anyone has a duty to assist to the utmost in the hunt for the Star’s capital-P Poisoner, it’s their first victim, the survivor.

  ‘Yes, Pat, I’ll go and see her. When do you think I should?

  *

  By next morning at eleven, the time Pat had arranged for her to see Mrs Long — her house, it turned out, was only some five minutes from Harriet’s — she felt she had enough energy to walk the short distance. She had said nothing about what she intended to do to stem John, and she had done no more than leave a note for Mrs Pickstock, safely banging about in the kitchen.

  She still felt a knot of anxiety at the prospect of just possibly coming face-to-face with the woman who might have poisoned her. But she had thought out the situation carefully, and had come to the conclusion that, if there was to be any more to the interview than simply checking a rather too hazy identification, Pat would not have suggested it was something she could do for him. No doubt he had reckoned that a gradual return to proper police work, even if it was unofficial, would be good for her. And rid her of such wild notions as the MNO murders.

  But, she thought now, what if my idea, not mentioned to Pat, that Grant has fabricated his description of the Poisoner is really just another of my wild, brain-fuzzed notions? What if Grant, as far as he could, has accurately described my would-be murderer and the DC who saw her has truly identified her?

  She came to a sudden halt, there where she was, feeling herself locked rigid with something like pure fear.

  She fought against it. And after perhaps a minute found she was able to go forwards again.

  Three minutes later, when Mrs Long opened her door to her ring at the bell, she knew that at least she was not face-to-face with the old woman who, according to Bruce Grant, had poured poison into her Campari. Yes, this elderly woman, dressed in a well-cut pale blue suit, did have long hair, though it was pale grey rather than white. But it was carefully combed into a neat chignon. And, yes, though she was holding the upper part of her body at a slight angle, the result most probably of arthritis, she could hardly be described as being all bent over. And, yes, again, her nose, which was small, could just be seen as hooked.

  But the whole was so far from Grant’s witch-like picture that the DC who had sent back that report really must be too gullible ever to rise from his present humble rank.

  Still, an interview had been arranged and must be conducted.

  Conducted it was, over coffee and a plate of wafer-thin ginger biscuits, though Harriet, still feeling nauseous after her moment of panic on the way, could not bring herself even to try one of those.

  ‘Oh, my dear, so it was you who was poisoned at the Club,’ Mrs Long exclaimed when Harriet had told her, with all the tact she could summon up, that it had been thought she fitted a description of a woman seen, apparently, putting something into her Campari.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it seems I was the first victim of this Poisoner who’s been roaming the city. Only, by a wonderful piece of luck, my husband recognized the earliest symptoms and took immediate action.’

  Yet once more she felt John’s probing fingers in her throat.

  Will I ever banish this awful physical throwback, she asked herself unable to check a shudder.

  Mrs Long must have seen her look of distress because she immediately led the conversation in a new direction.

  ‘And you say that this security man — whatever was his name? I read it in the paper yesterday — actually claimed to have seen me pouring something into your drink?’

  ‘No, no. He didn’t go so far as to describe someone precisely like you. No, he gave us in fact a description of someone who was hardly the sort of person you would expect to find at the Majestic Social Club, a sort of ugly old crone dressed in some sort of green cloak.’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Long said, with a smile, ‘I really think I am not quite like that. And neither, for the matter of that, did I see anyone at the pool that morning who looked at all like it, though there were one or two rather odd people in the crowd there.’

  ‘Odd people?’ Harriet asked, with a sudden stir of interest.

  ‘Well, perhaps I’m being a little censorious. But people at the pool this summer have often been not quite the sort who used to come when my husband was a Majestic director. I even wondered, when there’s been a bigger crowd than usual as there was on the bank holiday, whether the men on the gate are as conscientious as they ought to be in examining membership cards.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘Yes, Mrs Long, I think that’s something I should bring to the attention of Detective Superintendent Murphy, the Senior Investigating Officer for the case. Thank you very much.’

  *

  It was early next afternoon, however, when the Evening Star was sent rattling through the letterbox, that Harriet’s ideas about Bruce Grant and the old crone he had, by dribs and drabs, described, took on a more solid shape. The paper’s front-page picture was devoted once again to the Poisoner. This time it was not a colour photo of Bruce Grant looking pleased with himself, but an artist’s full-colour impression of the person Grant had described. It was based, so the caption below said, on an extensive and searching new interview with Bruce Grant (see p. 2).

  Looking at it, Harriet realized that the artist must have got from Grant much the same basic details as Pat Murphy had squeezed out of him. There was the straggly whitish hair, the strongly hooked nose, the deep wrinkles and the dark-green cloak just visible round the shoulders. But now the eyes were shown as a glittering green and, on a noticeably pointed chin, there were distinctly three curling black hairs.

  It was these romantic additions that finally gave it to Harriet. She was looking at nothing less than the picture of a witch. A picture one might have found — had the artist? — as an illustration in an old-fashioned book of fairy stories, though perhaps made a little more evil-looking.

  Yes, surely Bruce Grant saw nothing at all of whoever put poison in my Campari soda. He invented the whole thing. He did.

  She dropped the paper to the floor at her feet, strode out of the hall and into the sitting-room, picked up the phone and punched out the number for Pat Murphy’s mobile.

  ‘Pat, your Bruce Grant made the whole thing up.’

  There was a moment’s silence at the far end.

  ‘Did he now? You know, I’m not surprised to hear it. But what makes you say so?’

  ‘Have you seen today’s Evening Star?’

  ‘I have. You mean the picture on page one? It’s pretty much the old harridan Grant described to us. So why do you say he invented her?’

  ‘Oh, I do, Pat. I do indeed. You see, that picture is not of anyone who could possibly have been at the pool that day. It’s a picture out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales or any cheap children’s book, or even from a comic based on those. It’s the picture of a witch, and nothing else.’

  ‘You’re right about that. By God, you’re absolutely right. You know, every time I had occasion to mention that description I got out of Grant, the word witch would come floating into my head, and I, like an eejit, did my best not to use the word so as to keep that description as factual as I could.’

  A rueful chuckle came down the line.

  ‘And, you know what,’ Pat suddenly bounced out, ‘if this is right and Grant concocted his whole story, something I see as distinctly possible, then, damn and blast, we’re looking for just anyone once again. Just anyone at all, man or woman.’

  ‘We are, Pat. We must be. We’re right back to the beginning.’

  She checked herself.

  ‘Or,’ she said cautiously. ‘Or perhaps not.’

  ‘What’s this? Another one of your wild ideas?’

 
She thought for a moment.

  ‘No, I don’t think this is. For one thing I’m not the only one who came across this.’

  ‘All right. Was John the other one? If he was, I’d be altogether more inclined to go along with it, whatever it is.’

  Then she realized who it was she was going to have to name as backing her up. Not solid John, but twittery, eighty-year-old — no, ‘in my eightieth year’ — Miss Earwaker.

  ‘Listen, Pat, and don’t jump down my throat when I tell you.’

  ‘Would I do such a thing now?’

  ‘All right, I’ll trust you. Pat, there’s a lady I’ve been talking to recently. She once taught the twins at their primary, and she was a great expert on wild flowers. Her name’s Miss Earwaker.’

  ‘Earwigger? Did you say Earwigger? Now, Harriet, I promised to let you have your say, but I warn you, you’re getting near the edge. Very near.’

  ‘Now, calm down, Pat. Calm down. I did not say Earwigger. I said — listen — Earwaker. It’s an odd name, but there are a number of Earwakers about. And this is the point. I thought of asking Miss Earwaker where in the countryside within reach of the city monkshood might be found. And — ’

  ‘Yes, that’s not a bad idea. Inquiries at city gardens have got nowhere. Tell your old girl to keep at it.’

  ‘Pat, she has. She took me to two possible sites, and at the second one, Halsell Common, on a rural bus route from the city, note, we found not only some monkshood plants, but a monkshood plant where someone had been digging at the roots and had located a tuber.’

  ‘A tuber?’

  ‘Like a potato, Pat, for heaven’s sake. And it’s the really poisonous part of the plant. And, more, we got a description from an old man out there of a person he saw digging at it.’

  ‘A witch-like old woman?’

  ‘Not at all. A man. And, more, a man wearing a grey three-piece suit and a tie. In other words, as likely as not, a man straight from the city here.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Harriet, when was this?’