Elliot could.
“But where did anybody get the stuff?” he said. “You heard what Dr. West said. Pure prussic acid is practically inaccessable to a layman. The only person who could get it would be——”
“Yes. A technician. Say a research chemist. What’s this fellow Harding, by the way?”
It was here, either by good or by bad fortune, that Harding walked out of the Music Room.
He had seemed in a particularly cheerful, bouncing frame of mind when Elliot left him. This did not greatly lessen, though he was not far away from the bottle on the table and must have been able to read its label. He leaned one hand against the door-post, as though he were about to have his photograph taken. Then he came over, smiling and respectful, and addressed the Chief Constable.
“HCN?” he inquired, pointing to the bottle.
“That’s what the label says, young man.”
“Do you mind my asking where you found it?”
“In the bathroom. Did you put it there?”
“No, sir.”
“But you use this stuff in your business, don’t you?”
“No,” said Harding promptly. “No, I honestly don’t,” he added. “I use KCN—potassium cyanide—and lots of it. I’m working out an electro-plating process which will make imitation silver indistinguishable from the real thing. If I can market it myself, and get sufficient backing so that I don’t have to tie up with sharps, I’m going to revolutionise the industry.” He spoke without any hint of boasting; he was stating a fact. “But I don’t use HCN. It’s no good to me.”
“Well, frankness is frankness,” said Major Crow, unbending a little. “All the same, you could make HCN, couldn’t you?”
Harding spoke with such intensity, and such an intense shaking of the jaws as he formed his words, that Elliot wondered whether he had been born with an impediment in his speech: which, like other disadvantages, he had overcome. Harding said:
“Of course I could make it. So could anyone else.”
“Don’t follow you, young man.”
“Well, look here! What do you need to manufacture HCN? I’ll tell you. You want prussiate of potash; not poisonous; buy it anywhere. You want oil of vitriol, which is better known as sulphuric acid; take some out of the nearest motor-car battery, and who’s the wiser? You want plain water. Put those three elements together in a distilling process that a little golden-haired child could manage with implements out of grandma’s kitchen, and you get—the stuff in that bottle. Anybody, with an elementary book on chemistry propped up in front of him, could do it.”
Major Crow glanced uneasily at Elliot. “And that’s all you’ve got to do to get prussic acid?”
“That’s all. But don’t take my word for it. The trouble is—well, sir, there’s something wrong. D’you mind telling me: you say you found that stuff in the bathroom. I’m not surprised; I’m past surprise; but do you mean you just picked it up in the bathroom, like a tube of toothpaste or something?”
Major Crow spread out his hands. The same thought had occurred to him.
“This house is mouldy,” said Harding, studying the fine and gracious hall. “It looks all right; but there’s something chemically wrong with it. I’m an outsider. I can tell. And now—er—if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to the dining-room to get a drink of whisky; and I’m praying to the saints there’s nothing chemically wrong with that.”
His footsteps clacked loudly on the bare parquetry, defying bogles. The pool of light trembled by the staircase, the pool of poison trembled in the small bottle; upstairs a man with concussion of the brain lay muttering, downstairs two investigators looked at each other.
“Not easy,” said Major Crow.
“No,” admitted Elliot.
“You have two leads, Inspector. Two solid, definite leads. To-morrow young Emmet may be conscious and able to tell you what happened to him. You have that ciné-film—I’ll have that developed for you by to-morrow afternoon; there’s a chap in Sodbury Cross who does that kind of work—and you will be able to tell exactly what happened during the show. Beyond that, I don’t know what you have, and notice that I say ‘you.’ I have my business to attend to. Tomorrow, I promise you on my word of honour, I butt in no longer. It’s your case, and I wish you joy of it.”
Elliot had no joy in it, for private reasons. But for public reasons the matter had been squeezed down into one issue that stood out as clear and black as a fingerprint:
The murder of Marcus Chesney had probably been committed by someone in this house.
Yet everyone in this house appeared to have an unshakable alibi.
Who, therefore, had committed it?
And how had it been committed?
“I can see all that,” the Chief Constable agreed. “So go your virtuous way and clear it up. All the same, there are four questions of my own that I’d give twenty pounds to have answered, here, now, and on the nail.”
“Yes, sir?”
Major Crow put off his official dignity. His voice rose in a kind of wail.
“Why were those chocolate-boxes changed from green to blue? What is wrong with that confounded clock? What was the real height of the bloke in the top-hat? And why, oh, why was Chesney fooling about with a South American blow-pipe dart that nobody has seen before or since?”
1
“No device,” Dr. Fell once said, “is more useless or exasperating than deceit by conspiracy to tell the same lie.” Therefore I think it only fair to state that there was no conspiracy of any kind among the three witnesses. Each spoke independently, and without collusion with either of the other two.—J.D.C.
At eleven o’clock on the following morning Inspector Elliot drove into Bath and pulled up near the Beau Nash Hotel, which is in the court just opposite the entrance to the Roman baths.
Whoever said that it is always raining in Bath basely slanders that noble town, where the tall eighteenth-century houses look like tall eighteenth-century dowagers, and turn blind eyes to trains or motor-cars. But (to be strictly accurate) it was pouring torrents on this particular morning. Elliot, when he ducked into the entrance to the hotel, was in such a hideously dispirited frame of mind that he had to confide in somebody or throw up the case and tell his Superintendent why.
True enough, he had had little sleep the night before. And he had been again at routine inquiries since eight o’clock this morning. But he could not get out of his mind the picture of Wilbur Emmet—with his plastered hair, his red nose and blotchy complexion—twisting in delirium and muttering words not one of which became audible. It had been the final bedevilment of last night.
Elliot went to the hotel desk, and inquired for Dr. Gideon Fell.
Dr. Fell was upstairs in his room. Despite the hour, it is regrettable to state, Dr. Fell was not yet up and about. Elliot found him sitting by the breakfast-table in a flannel dressing-gown as big as a tent, drinking coffee, smoking a cigar, and reading a detective-story.
Dr. Fells’ eyeglasses on the broad black ribbon were clamped firmly to his nose. His bandit’s moustache bristled with concentration, his cheeks puffed in and out, and gentle earthquakes of deep breathing animated the huge purple-flowered dressing-gown as he attempted to spot the murderer. But at Elliot’s entrance he rose in a vast surge that almost upset the table, like Leviathan rising under a submarine. Such a radiant beam of welcome went over his face, making it shine pinkly and transparently, that Elliot felt better.
“Wow!” said Dr. Fell, wringing his hand. “This is excellent. By all that’s holy, this is wonderful! Sit down, sit down, sit down. Have something. Have anything. Hey?”
“Superintendent Hadley told me where to find you, sir.”
“That’s right,” agreed Dr. Fell, giving a spectral chuckle, and sitting back broadly to contemplate his guest as though Elliot were some refreshing phenomenon he had never seen before. His delight animated the whole room. “I am taking the water. The term has a fine, spacious, adventurous sound.
Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.
But the actual performance falls short of swashbuckling: and I am seldom tempted to strike up a drinking-song after my tenth or fifteenth pint”
“But are you supposed to take it in that quantity, sir?”
“All drinkables are supposed to be taken in that quantity,” said Dr. Fell firmly. “If I cannot do the thing handsomely, I am not going to do it at all. And how are you, Inspector?”
Elliot tried to screw up his courage.
“I have been better,” he admitted.
“Oh,” said Dr. Fell. The beam left his face, and he blinked. “I suppose you’ve come about that Chesney business?”
“You’d heard about it?”
“H’mf, yes,” said Dr. Fell, sniffing. “My waiter, a very good fellow who is too stone-deaf to hear a bell but has lip-reading down to a fine art, told me all about it this morning. He got it from the milkman, who got it from I forget precisely whom. Besides, I—well, I knew Chesney in a way.” Dr. Fell looked troubled. He scratched the side of a small and glistening nose. “I met Chesney, and I met his family, at a reception six months or so ago. And then he wrote me a letter.”
Again the doctor hesitated.
“If you know his family,” said Elliot slowly, “that makes it easier. What I’ve come to you about isn’t only the case; it’s a personal problem. I don’t know what in hell’s got into me, or what to do about it, but there it is. Do you know Marjorie Wills, Chesney’s niece?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Fell, fixing him with a small sharp eye.
Elliot got to his feet.
“I’ve fallen for her,” he shouted.
He knew that he was cutting a weird figure, standing up and yelling the news as though he were throwing a plate in the doctor’s face; and his ears felt on fire. If Dr. Fell had chuckled in that moment, if Dr. Fell had told him to lower his voice, he would probably have stood on his peevish Lowland dignity and walked out of the room. He could not help it; that was how he felt. But Dr. Fell merely nodded.
“Quite understandable,” he rumbled, with a broad and rather surprised agreement. “Well?”
“I’ve only seen her twice before,” shouted Elliot, facing him and determined to have this out. “Once was at Pompeii and once was at—never mind that, for the minute. As I say, I don’t know what in hell has got into me. I don’t idealise her. When I saw her again the other night, I could hardly remember what she looked like from the first two times. I have certain knowledge that she’s probably a poisoner and a pleasant sleek bit of treachery. But I walked in on that crowd in a place at Pompeii—you don’t know about that, but I was there—and she was standing in a kind of garden, with her hat off and the sun on her arms; and I just stood there and looked at her, and then I turned round and walked out. It was the way she moved or spoke or turned her head: something, nothing. I don’t know what.
“I wouldn’t have had the cheek to follow their party and try to scrape an acquaintance, though that’s what this fellow Harding evidently did. I don’t know why I couldn’t have forced myself to do it. It wasn’t merely because I had just heard them all arranging things about her being married to Harding. So help me, I didn’t even think of that. If I thought about Harding at all, I supposed it was just my cursed luck, and let it go at that. All I knew was, first, that I had fallen for her, and, second, that I would have to get the idea out of my head; because it was all nonsense. I don’t suppose you understand.”
The room was quiet except for the wheezing of Dr. Fell’s breath, and the splash of the rain outside.
“You have a very low opinion of me,” said the doctor gravely, “if you suppose I don’t understand. Go on.”
“Well, sir, that’s all. I didn’t get the idea out of my head.”
“Not all, I think?”
“All right; you want to know about the second time I saw her. It was a fatality. I knew in my bones it was bound to happen. See a person once, try to forget it or get away from that person, and you bump into the person every time you turn around. The next time I saw her was just five days ago, at a little chemist’s shop near the Royal Albert Docks.
“When I saw them at Pompeii, I overheard Mr. Chesney mention the name of the ship they were travelling back by, and the sailing date. I left Italy the next day, overland, and got home well over a week before they did. Last Thursday, the 29th, I happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Royal Albert Docks on a case.” Elliot stopped. “I can’t even tell you the truth, can I?” he asked bitterly. “Yes, I made the excuse to be there on that particular day, but the rest of it must have been coincidence—or you shall judge for yourself.
“This chemist’s poison-register had been called into question. He seemed to have been getting rid of more drugs than was natural or normal; that was why I was there. I went in and asked to see his poison-register. He showed it to me quickly enough, and sat me down to look at it in a little dispensary at the back of the shop, screened off from the counter by a wall of bottles. While I was looking at it, a customer came in. I couldn’t see the customer, and she couldn’t see me; she thought there was nobody else in the shop. But I knew that voice right enough. It was Marjorie Wills, wanting to buy cyanide of potassium ‘for photographic purposes.’ ”
Again Elliot stopped.
He did not see a room at the Beau Nash Hotel. He saw a dingy shop in the dingy afternoon light, and breathed the dim chemical smell he would always associate with this case. There was creosote on the floor; the tops of squat glass jars were faintly luminous; and across the shop, in shadow, was a flyblown mirror. In that mirror he saw Marjorie Wills’s reflection, her eyes upturned, when she edged along the counter requesting potassium cyanide “for photographic purposes.”
“Probably because I was there,” Elliot went on, “the chemist began to ask her questions about why she wanted it, and the use of it. Her answers showed that she knew about as much about photography as I know about Sanskrit. There was a mirror across the shop. Just as she got to the point of being badly confused, she happened to glance in the mirror. She must have seen me, though I didn’t think at the time she got a proper look and I’m still not sure. All of a sudden she called the chemist a—well, never mind—and ran out of the shop.