‘Did you,’ said the Coroner, ‘find any arsenic present?’
Sir Francis, who could not have been unaware of the sensation of which he was the centre, appeared quite unconscious of it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘None.’
A curious little sighing breath went round the court.
‘Arsenic was not present even in minute traces?’ persisted the Coroner.
‘There was no arsenic present at all.’
‘The medicine in fact contained nothing but the ingredients which we have already heard enumerated in the prescription?’
‘That is so.’
An irrepressible buzz broke out. I heard various characteristic comments from those immediately surrounding me.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Frances murmured.
‘Well, I knew that already,’ Glen muttered in a tone of disgust. I really believe Glen had been the only completely indifferent person in court.
‘That’s a nasty smack for them,’ was Harold’s observation.
I said nothing. Rona, equally characteristically, said nothing; but I noticed that she exchanged a small smile with her brother.
The Coroner was plainly disconcerted – so disconcerted, in fact, that he did not at once attempt to quell the buzz of comment and speculation. It was plain that the authorities had confidently counted on arsenic being found in the medicine. Evidently the test had been concluded only just in time to allow Sir Francis to reach the court, without having warned the police of his negative result.
There was another of the whispered conferences with which we were becoming so familiar. The Coroner seemed to realise that Sir Francis Harbottle was still on the witness stand, and looked at him in a puzzled way before saying:
‘Oh – er – thank you. Sir Francis. I think that is all. You have nothing more to tell us? No. Then we won’t keep you any longer.’
I noticed with surprise that Alec had slipped away from his seat, had drawn Superintendent Timms out of the conference, and was speaking to him earnestly. The Superintendent looked even more astonished for a moment than I felt; he listened, nodded and went back to the Coroner. Alec returned to his seat beside me.
‘What on earth…?’ I was beginning, when he hushed me, with a significant look towards the Coroner.
I saw that gentleman listen with an appearance of testiness to the Superintendent’s whisper, and then take up and open the letter which all this time had been lying on the table in front of him. As he read it I saw his expression become fixed in almost incredulous amazement. He stared at it for some moments, then excitedly called the attention of the others to it. There was a positive hum from the little group. Evidently something quite unexpected had happened, and we were all agog to know what it was.
At last the Coroner waved the others back, and cleared his throat. The court instantly became silent.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the Coroner, addressing the jury, ‘I have just received the most remarkable communication – a veritable voice from the tomb. It is a letter, addressed to me here, in this court, and I am assured that it was unmistakably written by the hand of Mr John Waterhouse himself. I will read it to you at once.’
chapter eleven
Secret Cupboards and Secret Ladies
‘The letter,’ continued the Coroner somewhat dubiously, appears to have been posted in London yesterday evening. London, SW – that is to say, the south-western district, though I really don’t know what conclusions we may draw from that. Here are its contents.
‘TO THE CORONER,
‘The Courthouse,
‘Anneypenny, Dorset.
‘SIR: The fact that this letter has been delivered to you indicates that an enquiry has been instituted into the cause of my death. To avert any possible misconception over this matter is the purpose of this letter.
‘Dr Brougham has told me that I am suffering from summer diarrhoea. That is not the case. I am suffering from arsenical poisoning. I could have enlightened Dr Brougham, but after thinking the matter over fully I have decided not to do so, for reasons which appear to me adequate. In any case he could not help me; I know as much, and perhaps more, about arsenical poisoning and the treatment for it, and can do all that is necessary or useful. I do not at the moment expect to die: but if this letter is ever posted, it will mean that I was wrong.
‘First I must say that the whole thing is entirely my own foolish fault. I have been experimenting lately with certain arsenical and other compounds as a means of destroying fruit-tree pests. My experiments have been made not on whole trees, in the form of washes, but on individual specimens of the pests at my desk. I have been keeping the various compounds, in bottles and jars, in a secret cupboard which I made in my library when I was carrying out some repairs there. Usually I return the poisons to that cupboard as soon as I have finished with them, but by an unfortunate mischance I must have carried a small bottle of arsenic in solution upstairs to my bathroom when I went up one day last week (I cannot remember which) to wash my hands. I do not know whether I put the bottle absentmindedly into the cupboard myself, or whether I left it out and it was put in there later by a maid; but it certainly arrived there.
‘Yesterday morning I had two or three sharp attacks of indigestion. I drank a large dose from a bottle of medicine which Dr Brougham had sent round, hoping it would relieve me, but if anything it made me worse. I then remembered that I had in my possession an herbal infusion which had been given to me by a native in India; I had a short bout of indigestion when I was in that country, and I remembered that a dose or two of this infusion had relieved it very much. I thought I would try it again. The bathroom is not well lighted, and the medicine cupboard is in a rather dark corner. I remembered the bottle quite well: it was dark brown in colour. I saw a dark brown bottle in the cupboard, rather dusty, and assumed that it was the one. I was in considerable pain at the time, and did not examine the bottle as closely as I should have done before taking a dose of it. I realised, however, that the stuff tasted bitter and quite unlike my recollection of it, and I
assumed that it had gone bad and poured the rest of it away down the basin. My subsequent illness I attributed to the gastric symptoms from which I had understood from Dr Brougham that I am suffering. It was not till today that I began to realise what must have happened. I have visited the library and found that the bottle of arsenic is not in the secret cupboard, which seems proof of what I have done. I retrieved the empty bottle from the bathroom, where I had left it, and put it in the cupboard. The police can find it there. It has not been rinsed, and if it shows traces of arsenic this will be proof positive, since, if I were now present in your court, sir, I could swear that that is the bottle from which I drank.
‘I have decided to say nothing about this arsenic to Dr Brougham or to anyone else, for these reasons. I do not expect to die; and if I recover, I should regret having made an unnecessary fuss. If I do die, I have no doubt that Dr Brougham will take it for granted that my death is due to the gastric trouble which he has diagnosed and will therefore issue a certificate in the usual way and no question will be raised. If on the other hand, I divulge the presence of arsenic, and death, if it occurs, is known to be due to arsenical poisoning, the company with which my life is insured would be morally compelled to investigate the possibility of suicide.
‘How could it be proved that I did not commit suicide? My life is insured for a very large sum. My finances, it will certainly be shown, are none too sound. I should not be there to explain that I was on the point of accepting an extremely lucrative offer in Indo-China to re-establish them, or that I had said nothing about this offer to anyone else, in accordance with my usual habit, in case the thing fell through at the last moment. No, the argument of my insurance company would be that I had purposely over-insured my life, with the deliberate intention of committing suicide when I could no longer pay the premiums; and I am not sure that a jury would not agree with th
em. In that case my wife would get practically nothing. I shall therefore keep the whole business to myself, in the confident expectation that there will be no need to have done anything else.
‘That, sir, is the explanation of why you are now holding an inquest on me, and I shall be mightily obliged if you will read this statement of mine to the jury, if you are sitting with one: if not, I ask that it shall be read in open court.
‘Yours very truly,
‘JOHN WATERHOUSE.’
It may be imagined what effect the reading of this document had upon all of us, to say nothing of the jury. Speaking for myself, I can say that I was filled with an enormous relief, mingled with a curious feeling of disappointment; that the latter was unworthy I must admit, but I must equally confess to it. And what is more, I would swear that it was shared by everyone in the room. Much though we might deplore it, we could not help the feeling that somehow we had been cheated.
The Coroner, too, seemed to resent the lost opportunities of drama.
‘As I said,’ he continued in a disapproving voice, ‘this letter appears to have been posted in London yesterday. How this could have occurred is not clear. I take it that the deceased sent the document under cover to a friend, with instructions to post it in certain circumstances. I have received no indication that the person who posted it is willing to come forward and assist justice, but I sincerely hope that he, or she, will realise that it is a bounden duty to do so. In the meantime –’ He broke off to confer once more with those around him.
‘In the meantime,’ he concluded, ‘the police will wish to make certain investigations. There is a post-scriptum, which I have not thought necessary to read to you, giving exact indications where this – h’m! – secret cupboard is to be found. Also no doubt the police will wish to test the letter for fingerprints. I need scarcely remind you that we can take nothing for granted. The court is therefore adjourned until…yes, until today week. Everyone will attend then at the same time as this morning.’
Hubbub, until then with difficulty restrained, at once broke out. It was amid a veritable surge of excitement that we struggled out of court. Everywhere people were giving their impressions of this new development to other persons who were less willing to receive than to give their own; reporters were elbowing sober citizens out of their way in frantic efforts to reach telephones before anyone else; the crowd outside was eagerly questioning everyone within reach.
‘You’ll lunch with us, of course,’ I said to Alec as we fought our way through the door, bearing Frances like some precious casket of jewels between us.
‘No lunch for me today, my son,’ Alec grinned back. ‘Nor for you either – unless you’d rather not come to Oswald’s Gable and have a look-see for that secret cupboard.’
‘You’re going to do that without the police?’ I asked.
‘With the police,’ Alec corrected. ‘The Scotland Yard minions are waiting for us there – at this minute. And so is a worthy architect, whom I had the foresight to appoint to meet me there at just about this time.’
I looked at him. ‘You seem to have known a lot about what was in that letter of John’s.’
Alec cast a wary glance at Frances’ back, now a safe distance ahead of us.
‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘After all, I posted it.’
2
Somehow we made our excuses to Frances, having seen her to our own door and exchanged with her expressions of relief that the bogey of the medicine bottle had, after all, proved to be but a bogey. Luckily Frances’ mind seemed so occupied with this that we were able to evade any questions as to our immediate intentions – which I gathered Alec would not have been disposed to answer. ‘Well, sorry to miss the sherry and all that, but I have to push off now,’ he said casually enough. ‘Little job of work, and I’ve pulled in Douglas to help me.’
Frances looked at him vaguely from the doorway.
‘Sherry? What sherry?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Any sherry. The sherry you drink with your friends.’
‘Frances doesn’t drink anything,’ I put in fatuously. ‘Surely you knew I had a teetotal wife, Alec.’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ Alec mumbled, abashed as one is on forgetting an ethical foible on the part of another.
‘Sorry, Frances. Well, come on, Douglas.’
‘We’ll be back as soon as possible; keep us something to eat,’ I said to Frances, and she nodded acquiescence. Fortunately Frances never had been a woman to ask unwanted questions. Inclined to cherish her own reserves, she respected those of others without feeling it necessary to suspect them.
On the short way to the Waterhouse home I succeeded in getting the facts from Alec.
Briefly, Waterhouse’s letter to the Coroner had reached the chief of the War Office Department, in which Alec was working, by post on the previous morning. It had been enclosed in an official letter to that same chief, envelope and letter both in Waterhouse’s own writing, which had been posted in Torminster on the previous day. The chief, knowing that Alec had relatives in that part of the country and was more or less familiar with the lie of the land, had sent for him and given his instructions.
The covering letter Alec had not seen. It had been of a confidential nature, but Alec had gathered that Waterhouse, while not exactly denying the truth of what he had written for the Coroner’s benefit, had hinted somewhat broadly that he himself was not altogether satisfied that the whole truth lay in the explanation as put forward to the Court; he had hinted, too, less broadly, that his poisoning might not inconceivably be a result of the activities which he had been undertaking on behalf of the department. This sounded quite incredible, but some indications had come his way that certain foreign agents regarded his work as a great deal more important than it really was. And he had added, Alec knew for a fact, a warning to the effect that Mitzi Bergmann had been meddling with his papers, and though he had no definite evidence against her, she had better be deported.
This letter, combined with the fact of Mitzi’s hurried removal from the country, had thrown the chief into something like panic. Alec had instructions to see the Scotland Yard men, call the pursuit off, somehow induce the Coroner to make sure that a verdict was returned in accordance with Waterhouse’s official explanation, and above all make sure that no breath of a whisper got about concerning Waterhouse’s connection with the department.
‘I saw the Scotland Yard fellers in Torminster yesterday,’ Alec concluded. ‘No trouble there. I told them what Waterhouse had written to the Coroner, and explained more or less how I came to know, and luckily they were ready to accept it as the truth. We couldn’t investigate till the letter had been delivered, of course, and I’d arranged with the post office to have it sent along so as to reach the Coroner in the middle of the proceedings. It looked better, and gave him time to get all his witnesses called and done with first. So we fixed to meet at the house, with the architect, at lunch-time today. The local men will be along, too, no doubt, so we ought to have a merry party.’
Not that the party was merry. On the contrary, it was somewhat tense. The local police were half disgruntled at being cheated of their mystery murder and half thrilled at being caught up into issues so far outside their own experience. The two Scotland Yard men, gentle and genial as ever, seemed totally unexcited.
The help of the architect was not needed to locate the secret cupboard, for Waterhouse’s instructions had been precise. It was, in fact, no more than a hinged piece of the skirting board in the library, which, when released by a secret bolt, operated through a small hole in the flooring a couple of feet away, lifted up to disclose a cavity in the wall some two and a half feet long by a foot or more deep.
There were bottles there, right enough. The task was to find the right one. For the little cavity was crowded with bottles, small and large, white, blue, black, brown and green. At the sight even the detective inspector was moved to ex
claim, in a respectful way, that the gentleman seemed to have collected enough poisons to wipe out half Dorsetshire. This was not, however, strictly accurate, for a closer examination revealed that most of the bottles contained stuff of the type which is fairly harmless when taken in small quantities and only noxious in inordinate doses.
I took Alec aside, smitten by a sudden inspiration. ‘Do you know what all that is?’ I said to him. ‘I’d bet anything you like it’s stuff that Waterhouse has removed from his wife from time to time. She’s a fixed hypochondriac, you know, and enjoys nothing better than dosing herself with a new drug. By the look of that cupboard Waterhouse kept a stricter eye on her hobby than one would have expected, and just quietly took away from her anything he didn’t approve of. It would be like him, too.’
‘Well, well,’ said Alec. ‘What things a feller will build a secret cupboard for.’
(I may add that this inspiration of mine probably hit on the truth; for I managed to extract later from Angela the information that she had often missed bottles of medicine, tablets and the like, and could not imagine what had happened to them. It had been most mystifying and irksome, she added.)
While the examination of the bottles was in progress, with the architect wandering round and about the library, tapping the walls and plying a two-foot rule as if in hopes of discovering another hidey-hole, we had been joined by Sir Francis Harbottle himself, who in a diffident way which I found most attractive presented himself and asked if he could be of any help.
His offer was promptly accepted, and the result was speedy. In less than five minutes of sniffing and tasting he fixed upon a certain empty bottle.
‘This contained arsenic,’ he said simply. ‘There are more than a few drops still left at the bottom. Besides, you can see the deposit quite distinctly. I’ll make an official analysis, of course; but I can tell you at once, gentlemen, with complete certainty, that there has been a strong solution of arsenic in this bottle.’ He held it up to the light and gazed at it earnestly. ‘Not very much. Perhaps not more than an inch. But quite definitely arsenic.’
Not to Be Taken Page 17
