Antidote to Murder

by Felicity Young

  When he returned from taking the call, he told her his special cold mixture was out of stock and that Joseph needed him to fetch some from the warehouse and bring it to the shop immediately. Borislav removed his fez and smoking jacket and replaced them with an outdoor coat and bowler from a hat stand in the hall.

  “I’m so sorry, Dorothy, but I really must go,” he said. “If there’s anything more you wish to discuss, you know where to find me.”

  She barely had time to thank him as he hurried her to the door, pecked her on the cheek, and apologised again for his hasty departure.

  Dody sank into the passenger seat of the Benz, her cautious optimism spoiled now by an undercurrent of unease. What was wrong with her paper? She and Borislav had known each other for ten years. He had never held back praise for her work—or criticism for that matter. She knew she could always count on him for an honest opinion. Why, then, was he holding back now?

  She asked Fletcher to take her to the mortuary. Something told her this might not be such a good day after all.

  * * *

  Dody stood the required three feet away from the autopsy table next to her fellow assistant, Henry Everard. Like hounds on the leash, they strained for a word from the Great Man, either a request for assistance or an interesting note to take. Only when invited could they step over the white line that Dr. Bernard Spilsbury had personally painted on the green-tiled floor.

  The assistants’ struggle to view the proceedings was further hampered by the thick fug of smoke that almost engulfed their mentor. Dr. Everard’s role was to ensure that Spilsbury was never without one of his strong-smelling Turkish cigarettes. Dody’s part in the procedure was to act as secretary, translating Spilsbury’s mutterings onto small index cards in terms that could be understood by the legal profession should the case go to court. Lacking in experience and formal forensic qualifications other than a diploma in general autopsy, Dody was rarely permitted to perform medico-legal autopsies in her own right and then only with written permission from Spilsbury. On rarer occasions still, and much to his chagrin, the less experienced Everard was required to assist her.

  The angles of Spilsbury’s face were classically handsome. Tall and slim, he was comparatively young for his senior position in the Home Office. His graceful movements over the bodies on the slab sometimes made Dody think of a conductor controlling a beautiful piece of music.

  Spilsbury turned his head away from the body and allowed his cigarette end to fall to the floor. Everard crushed the butt into the tiles with the toe of his boot and fumbled in his pocket for a fresh one. Most women would say Everard was handsome, too, his dark good looks enhanced by a luxurious combination of trimmed side-whiskers and wavy, collar-length hair. Dody was not most women.

  Everard inhaled. The cigarette paper crackled in the echoing stillness of the autopsy room. Like resentment, she thought.

  He placed the cigarette between Spilsbury’s lips.

  “The background, if you please, Dr. McCleland,” Spilsbury asked.

  “This is Billy Kent, aged three, the third youngest of seven children belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Bert Kent of Whitechapel. Billy’s death was regarded as suspicious by the family’s panel doctor,” Dody said. A panel doctor was one supplied by the newly introduced Health Insurance Scheme and who provided medical access to those who could not otherwise afford it. “The doctor called me in to examine the corpse at the family’s tenement. He informed me that last year the couple lost another child to starvation and he was worried this death might be a case of insurance fraud.”

  Everard flicked a recalcitrant lock of hair from his forehead and turned his eyes to the mortuary room ceiling. “Why in God’s name do these women continue to breed?”

  Dody felt her spine stiffen. “The expense makes preventatives virtually unobtainable, Doctor. When you consider the appetites of their demanding husbands and that of a wife’s obligation to obey, these women have little choice.”

  “Pregnancy is a natural state, Dr. McCleland,” Spilsbury said, “one that should not be interfered with.”

  “But managed, surely, for the welfare of all.”

  The corner of Everard’s mouth twitched. “You condone infanticide and abortion. Is that what you are saying, Doctor?”

  Dody’s teeth bit into the stem of her pipe; despite its empty bowl, it helped her to concentrate. Dr. Spilsbury saw the habit as unladylike and she was the only doctor not permitted to smoke in the autopsy room. “I do not mean that, Dr. Everard; you know that I do not,” she said.

  Everard’s eyes widened momentarily. In anyone else the expression might have indicated jest, but she’d had enough disagreements with Everard to know full well when he was not joking.

  If Spilsbury sensed the antagonism between his assistants, he never showed any sign of it. He shot them both a basilisk-type stare. “The autopsy room is not the venue for debate. Nor is this an acceptable topic of discussion between males and females.”

  How can conditions ever improve for the working classes without such discussion? Dody wondered, looking from one man to the other, barely managing to keep the thought to herself. They might be united in their goal to put a stop to criminal abortion and infanticide, but their reasons for it were quite different.

  “Pass me the bucket, please, Everard.” About to put out his hand, Spilsbury seemed to have second thoughts and shook off both his clumsy rubber gloves first. “Curse these wretched things, they mask all feeling,” he muttered. Quick, ambidextrous fingers snipped loose the stomach and poured the contents into the bucket.

  “This child looks like it was well on the way to starvation, too,” Everard commented as he and Dody peered at the bucket’s slime green contents.

  “There’s something in this.” Dody pointed with the nib of her pen to smears of white amongst the green. “Shall I prepare a slide, Doctor?”

  She took Spilsbury’s grunt as a yes and moved to the instrument trolley for a spoon and a glass beaker.

  “It’s obvious what it is, isn’t it?” Everard commented. “Flakes of lead paint—probably given to the child in some kind of drink—that’s how it’s usually done. And we’ve already ascertained that this corpse presents with all the signs of plumbism.”

  Indeed, the blue line across the top of the child’s gums was identical to that of the girl Dody had recently seen in her clinic, Esther Craddock. “I don’t think it is quite the usual method, Doctor,” she said with the pleasure of proving him wrong. “The police found tablets in the parents’ room, tablets which Mr. and Mrs. Kent claimed they had never seen before.”

  Spilsbury looked up. “Tablets? Where are they?”

  “On the instrument trolley.”

  “Show me.”

  Dody took the box, tipped some of the tablets into her palm, and held them under the electric light for him to scrutinise. “They were found in a matchbox hidden under a pile of dirty clothes.”

  “Interesting,” Spilsbury said. “They could indeed be lead. Lead oxide. And the smooth surface, other than those two small dents”—he pointed out some tiny marks on the surface of one of the tablets—“indicate that they have been professionally manufactured using a pill press and not hand-rolled as per usual. Send them to the lab, Dr. McCleland, and make sure they do indeed match the contents of the child’s stomach.”

  As she stared back down at the pills in her hand, a connection began to form somewhere at the edge of her consciousness. “These tablets are familiar . . .” She racked her brains and spoke her thoughts aloud. “A girl at the Clinic had some very similar. Esther . . .” She hesitated. Even amongst colleagues, doctors were bound to respect their patients’ privacy. “A scullery maid, three months along. She had been taking lead for some time and wanted me to provide her with something more efficacious. I hope I have persuaded her away from that path.” Dody paused. “And I’m sure I’ve come across something like them in the B
ook of Lists. Tablets taken by a woman who had also undergone physical abortion.”

  “Are you sure? This is not the norm. I’ve never known people like this using lead in tablet form.” Everard joined the discussion under the light and severed the thread of her thought. “The poor are opportunists, using what they have at hand—paints, plaster, piping—whatever they think will do the job.”

  “Then someone is making the despicable task much easier for them, possibly instructing them with dosage, too. Inform the coroner, Dr. McCleland. Visit the family and see if you can find out where they got the lead tablets from.”

  “It might be worth asking the Whitechapel chemist, Mr. Borislav, if he knows the Kent family, or anything about the tablets’ manufacture,” Dody said.

  “Yes, Vladimir. I’ve known him since university,” Everard said.

  “He tutored me at medical school,” Dody said, her resentment of Everard’s acquaintance with Borislav tempered by the knowledge that the chemist had little respect for her colleague.

  “Women’s medical school,” Everard corrected her.

  “He tutored students from many of the medical schools, Dr. Everard, sometimes even going to Edinburgh to lecture. He was not discriminatory.”

  “Well, jolly good for him.”

  Jets of smoke shot from Spilsbury’s nostrils. “Go and see this Borislav chap then, Dr. McCleland,” he said. “He’s in the right locale and might have his ear to the ground. Since the tightening of the pharmaceutical laws, there has been a rise in street gangs selling all kinds of dangerous ‘remedies.’ Take one of the tablets and show it to him. Make a note to that effect and add this case to the Book of Lists. And see if tablets with these unusual indentations were indeed recorded there before our time.”

  Dr. Spilsbury was an enthusiastic compiler of lists; or rather he delegated the task to Dody. As well as lists of unscrupulous pharmaceutical suppliers, he’d recently had Dody working on lists of persons suspected of practising illegal abortions, infanticide, and baby-farming. The Book of Lists, started in a haphazard way by Spilsbury’s predecessor, was growing more comprehensive weekly, and sometimes led to successful prosecutions.

  Dody stifled a sigh. She admired the zeal Spilsbury put into the task of bringing such carrion to justice, and yet after years of university studies, numerous unpaid medical positions, and a diploma in autopsy surgery, she sometimes felt a coroner’s clerk or agent of enquiry was more suitable for these duties than she. But she had worked hard to attain her position in the Home Office and was not about to complain and risk losing her one paying job, even if it was only part-time.

  Spilsbury stepped aside from the table and ordered Everard to sew up the body, a procedure that could have been performed by any one of the lowly attendants. She smiled to herself when she caught Everard’s low groan. Perhaps if Henry Everard had had to work as hard as she had to obtain his position, he, too, would have been more accepting of the minor tasks he was assigned.

  Dody moved over to a wooden filing cabinet at the far end of the autopsy room and retrieved the heavy leather-bound Book of Lists. In it she recorded the details of Billy Kent’s death and sketched a tablet with the unusual scorings. She was about to flick back the pages to see if similar tablets had been recorded before her time, when Everard let out a curse—“Hell’s teeth!”—and held up his hand. Blood trickled from his finger and ran down his wrist, daubing the ashen corpse with drops of red.

  Spilsbury cast his eyes aloft and indicated for Dody to take over.

  She picked up the dropped needle and thread. “Disinfect that well, Dr. Everard,” she said. “You know what damage a simple needle prick can do.”

  “I don’t need you to point that out,” he shot quietly. In a louder voice, he said. “Thank you, Dr. McCleland.”

  When she had finished with the corpse, she joined Spilsbury at the trough-like sink, where they washed their hands in silence with the leathery-smelling carbolic soap.

  Conversation was not one of the pathologist’s attributes. Recently, though, Dody had taken the opportunity to watch him testify in court and experienced once more the sensations that had sparked an earlier, short-lived, infatuation. At the mortuary he had less life about him than most of their patients, but in court, Dr. Bernard Spilsbury shone.

  “You will visit Billy Kent’s family this afternoon, Doctor?” he enquired.

  “Yes, sir, and inform the coroner that he has a case.”

  “Good. If you find anything of further interest, I’ll be in the lab at St. Mary’s until about ten tonight. Tomorrow I leave for Edinburgh for two weeks. You will save all but the most routine cases for me.”

  “Will the trains be running, sir?” Everard called out.

  Spilsbury turned to face him and dropped the towel he had been using on his hands. “Lord only knows. I’ll go by automobile if I have to. Damned strikers—food left rotting on the docks, mobs in the street, starvation. Can’t they see what they are doing to the country, to their own people?”

  Dody remained silent. At first she had been in support of the strikers, who worked long hours often under intolerable conditions, until she’d begun dealing with the innocent victims—mainly the children, slowly dying of starvation. If the strikes went on for much longer, famine was predicted.

  “They say the country’s a whisker away from revolution, and a foreign war is the only way to fix the situation. God help us all,” Spilsbury added.

  Everard pulled the sheet over the body and joined them at the sink.

  “Have you had the chance to peruse our papers yet, sir?” he asked.

  “I have indeed. Very good, Everard.”

  Dody’s heart skipped a beat. “Papers? I thought our papers weren’t due until tomorrow.”

  “At the end of last week, actually,” Everard said, flicking water from his fingers and reaching for a clean towel. “Because Dr. Spilsbury has been called away, he wanted them in sooner—did I not inform you of that, Dr. McCleland?”

  “No, you did not,” she said coldly.

  Everard pressed a finger to his cheek. “Dear me, come to think of it, I didn’t, did I? Frightfully sorry; sir, this is my fault.”

  Spilsbury nodded; evidently Everard’s gallantry absolved him of all sin. Dody glared at Everard as they followed Spilsbury to his office, a large impersonal space off the autopsy room. Everard met her eye and shrugged.

  Spilsbury lifted a sheaf of typed foolscap from his desk and handed it to Everard. “As it will be some time now before I can look at Dr. McCleland’s paper, you may as well have yours back, Everard. Experiments showing that some foods are tumour-inducing in rats. Most interesting.”

  What? Dody all but gasped.

  Everard must have noticed her look of shock. “Care for a look?” he asked with aggravating nonchalance.

  She snatched the paper from his hand and leafed through it. Over the weeks he had openly quizzed her about her research paper. Once she had even caught him riffling through a draft copy she had left on a bench top, an act she’d put down at the time to harmless interest. She needed only a quick glance now to see that although the presentation was slightly different, much of the text was blatantly paraphrased from her own. More fool her for thinking her own profession above such deceit. No wonder Everard had orchestrated getting his paper to Spilsbury first.

  Using all her powers of restraint, she managed to halt the accusation before it spilled from her lips. An altercation in front of their mentor would do more harm than good. Besides, it would be almost impossible to prove that she had come up with the idea first. She couldn’t hand her proposal in now. What could she do?

  Spilsbury said, “I can’t guarantee that Dr. Eccles, our primary researcher in tumours, will be interested, but it is a feather in your cap, Everard, well done. As for your paper, Dr. McCleland, you may hand it in if you wish; otherwise, hang on to it until I come back.�
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  “I might just as well keep it for a bit longer, sir,” Dody said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Everard smirk.

  She whirled to face him. Now she understood Borislav’s strange reaction to her paper; it was because Everard had shown him his first. That her old friend might have labelled her as the plagiarist was almost as upsetting as the crime itself.

  “Yes, Dr. McCleland?” Everard challenged. When she failed to respond, he said, “Save us the suspense, then. Tell us something about your proposal.”

  She straightened and attempted to cover her inner fury with an outer aspect of cool dignity. She could not think clearly when she was angry and this answer required a quick, calm head.

  After a brief pause, she said, “Mine also involves rats, only I am interested in seeing if the creatures can be trained to sniff out the tuberculosis bacilli.”

  Johannes Fibiger was also investigating the correlation between cancer and TB. The sniffing talents of rats had been but a passing thought of Dody’s during the course of her reading and the idle observations of her new pets.

  The question now was, could she really assemble the information and put the proposal together before Spilsbury’s return? She had no choice. She had to.

  Spilsbury shook his head in apparent wonder. “Marvellous, Dr. McCleland, marvellous. A cheap method of diagnosis that has the potential to reach masses.”

  Praise indeed! Dody could hardly believe her ears. For a fleeting moment she wondered if Spilsbury knew more about the conflict between his assistants than he revealed. Playing us off against one another, she supposed, is one way of bringing out our best—or our worst.

  “Bravo,” Everard said drily. “What interesting reading. I can hardly wait.”

  Chapter Six

  The paper had taken several weeks to produce and now Dody had only two weeks to start and finish the new one. Despite the pressure, the more she thought about it, the more excited she became about her off-the-cuff proposal. The new challenge filled her with an electric charge she counted on to keep her going through the busy days ahead.