Behold Here's Poison (26 page)

'Mrs Matthews, your sister-in-law must have felt other symptoms than these. Did she not complain to you of cramp, or a creeping in her arms, or even of extreme cold in her feet and hands?'

'I can't remember her mentioning anything beyond sickness and giddiness. She may have said she felt chilly, but I should expect that. I gave her a hot-water bottle.'

'And yet,' said Hannasyde, 'when Miss Matthews passed the butler in the hall, on her way up to her room, he was struck by her appearance, and thought that she seemed to be out of breath, as though she had been running.'

'So he says!' Guy interpolated scornfully. 'Servants will make up any tale to create a sensation!'

'If he made it up, Mr Matthews, it is an odd coincidence that the shortness of breath which he described should be one of the symptoms of nicotine poisoning. Did you not notice it, Mrs Matthews?'

'If I did I should only have thought it due to faintness,' replied Mrs Matthews.

'Your sister-in-law did not complain to you of feeling very ill?'

Mrs Matthews gave a little tinkling laugh. 'Poor Harriet was never one to minimise her own ailments,' she said. 'I daresay that she may have said that she felt very bad, but I was so accustomed to her habit of exaggerating the least disorder, that I am afraid I didn't set a great deal of store by what she said. It seemed obvious to me that her stomach was thoroughly upset, and I did exactly what I should have done for one of my own children.'

The Superintendent's calm voice, with its undercurrent of implacability, broke in on this. 'Yet Mrs Beecher, who had known Miss Matthews for seven and a half years, states that she was never one to give way easily.'

Mrs Matthews' eyes snapped. 'Mrs Beecher knows nothing about it! It was hardly to be expected that my sister-in-law would confide in the cook. Stella, you know what an absurd fuss your aunt used to make if she had as much as a cold in her head, don't you?'

'Mrs Matthews, I am sure your daughter will corroborate any statement you ask her to, but you should realise that her testimony when prompted in that manner, is not likely to weigh with me.'

'It comes to this, Superintendent: you prefer to believe the servants' words sooner than mine!' said Mrs Matthews.

'It comes to this, Mrs Matthews: you have not been frank with me; you are still not being frank. It is only fair to tell you that I am not satisfied with your evidence. I must warn you that your continued refusal to remember circumstances which I am convinced cannot have slipped your memory may have very serious consequences.'

Guy, who had been standing quite still, with his back to the door, suddenly walked forward into the middle of the room, and said: 'Stella, let mother sit down. Look here, Superintendent, my mother had nothing whatsoever to do with either of these murders, and I'm not going to stand by and see her bullied by you, or anyone else! What the Beechers say is utterly beside the point. They neither of them like my mother, and they're under notice to leave. My aunt didn't complain of any of the things you've mentioned to my sister and me at breakfast, and we neither of us thought that she looked particularly ill.'

'That is quite possible,' said Hannasyde. 'Some little time elapsed between your seeing your aunt at breakfast and the butler's meeting her in the hall. I appreciate your feelings in the matter, Mr Matthews, but you are doing no good by this sort of interruption.'

'There's one thing you seem to be leaving out of account,' said Guy, disregarding this warning. 'Both my sister and I can certify that my aunt complained of feeling ill at breakfast, before ever she had seen my mother. If you imagine there was nicotine in the medicine my mother gave her, I would remind you that it was given at least an hour after she began to feel ill—and, since you set so much store by what Beecher says—after he had met her in the hall, and been struck by her appearance.'

'I am quite aware of that, Mr Matthews.'

'It is utterly absurd,' said Mrs Matthews, pressing her handkerchief to her lips, 'but the Superintendent seems to think that I could have put that dreadful poison into your aunt's early-morning teapot.' She gave a wan smile, and added: 'If it were not such a painful thought, so wounding to one's feeling, I could laugh at it! I haven't the least idea what was done with the early tea-trays, and I didn't wake until the housemaid came into my room, so how I could have tampered with your aunt's teapot, I entirely fail to see.'

'You say that you only awoke when the maid came into your room, Mrs Matthews, but she states that you were already awake when she went in. Are you quite sure that you are telling me the truth?'

'I suppose,' said Mrs Matthews tragically, 'that you are at liberty to insult me as much as you choose. It only remains for you to arrest me. Indeed, I am astonished that you haven't done so already.'

Hannasyde did not answer immediately, and Guy, who at the mention of the early tea had shot one swift, horrified look at his sister, now removed his hand from the back of his mother's chair, and said jerkily: 'Nobody's going to arrest you, mother, I can assure you. You're very clever, Superintendent, but it was I who poisoned my aunt, not my mother.'

'Guy, you fool!' Stella cried.

He paid no attention to her, but looked squarely at Hannasyde. Mrs Matthews said tensely: 'That's not true! Don't listen to him! I know it's not true!'

Hannasyde met Guy's bright, defiant eyes with an enigmatical look in his own. 'How did you poison your aunt, Mr Matthews?'

'In her tea,' replied Guy. 'The tea she had at breakfast. I was down first. I knew my sister always has coffee. When I told you I drank tea that day, I lied. I didn't. I drank coffee.'

'No, Guy, no!' said his mother. 'You don't know what you're saying! Superintendent, my son is only trying to shield me! There's not a word of truth in what he says! You can see for yourself —'

'Did you also poison your uncle, Mr Matthews?' inquired Hannasyde.

'Yes, in the whiskey-and-soda,' replied Guy recklessly.

'Stop being theatrical!' Stella said angrily. 'What good do you think you're doing, making dramatic gestures? You did not drink coffee that morning, or any other morning! You don't like coffee! You're behaving like someone in a penny novelette!'

Guy paid no heed to this, but continued to address the Superintendent. 'Well, have you got a warrant for my arrest?' he demanded.

'No, I'm afraid I haven't,' replied Hannasyde.

'Then you'd better go and apply for one!' said Guy.

'When I am satisfied that I have sufficient grounds for doing so, I will,' promised Hannasyde.

'I don't know what more you want!' said Guy, in a somewhat flattened voice.

Sergeant Hemingway came into the room at that moment, and handed his superior a sealed envelope.

'Excuse me, please,' Hannasyde said formally, and tore open the envelope, and spread open the single sheet it contained. He ran his eye down the typewritten lines, and then looked up, and at Guy, who said at once: 'You're wasting your time trying to badger my mother. I've told you what happened. Now get on with it, and arrest me!'

'I am sorry, Mr Matthews, but you have not shown me sufficient grounds for applying for a warrant for your arrest. You have stated that you put the poison in your aunt's tea, but Miss Matthews did not swallow the nicotine which killed her.'

These words produced a sudden, surprised silence. Guy broke it. 'What do you mean, she didn't swallow it? She must have swallowed it!'

'Yes, I thought you didn't know quite as much about it as you pretended, Mr Matthews,' said Hannasyde. 'The nicotine did not pass through the stomach. It was absorbed through the tissues of the mouth.' He held up the paper in his hand. 'This is the analyst's report, which I've been waiting for. The medium through which your aunt was poisoned was a tube of toothpaste.'

'A-tube-of-toothpaste?' Guy repeated, blankly, and then was silent.

Hannasyde folded the report again, and put it away in his pocketbook. The deliberation of his movements seemed to fascinate Stella; her eyes followed them in a kind of numb bewilderment while a jumble of thoughts chased one another through her brain. These found expression presently in one sentence, blurted out unwarily. 'Then anyone might have done it!'

'I don't think so, Miss Matthews.'

Mrs Matthews said with something of her usual smoothness: 'Stella darling, just sit down and be quiet. You don't know anything about this, my dear child, and you must not keep on interrupting.' She turned towards Hannasyde, and said graciously: 'You see now how absurd your suspicions were, Superintendent. We won't say any more about it, however. Naturally I understand that your duty compels you to suspect everybody. But this is most amazing news! A tube of toothpaste! You mean, I suppose, that the poison was injected into it. A hypodermic syringe, no doubt. I don't think that anyone in this house owns such a thing. It is a very, very terrible thought that my poor sister-in-law should have —'

Guy made an impatient gesture, as though to silence her. 'How was it done?' he asked. 'Are you at liberty to tell us that?'

'Certainly,' said Hannasyde. 'The poison was in all probability injected, as your mother seems to have realised, by means of a hypodermic syringe, inserted into the bottom end of the tube, and driven up a little way through the paste. The paste at the bottom of the tube is untainted, and it is obvious that the paste at the top end must also have been free from poison.'

Guy said softly: 'By Jove, that's clever! It might have been done at any time, then. Aunt Harriet has been working her way down the tube for days, till at last she reached the poison! Gosh!'

'It's awful!' Stella said. 'It's devilish!'

'One can only be thankful poor Harriet knew nothing about it,' remarked Mrs Matthews in a saintly voice.

'For God's sake don't talk as though she were a sheep being driven to the slaughter-house!' exclaimed Stella, quite pale with disgust.

'Stella dear, you forget yourself,' said Mrs Matthews repressively. She transferred her attention to the Superintendent. 'One is terribly shocked, of course, but what my son says is right. This appalling thing may have been done at any time.'

'But not, Mrs Matthews, by any person,' replied Hannasyde.

She spread out her hands. 'Anyone who was familiar with this house could have found the opportunity to do it, Superintendent.'

'Possibly,' agreed Hannasyde. 'But few people can have had any motive for killing Miss Matthews.'

Guy muttered: 'O God, we're just where we were before!'

'Ah, Superintendent,' said Mrs Matthews, sadly shaking her head. 'What, after all, do we know of each other's lives? Even I who was so close to my poor sister-in-law would hesitate to say that she had no enemies of whom I knew nothing. She was a strange, eccentric woman! I have sometimes wondered whether there might not have been something in the past to account for many of her oddities. So often an apparently warped nature —'

'If you, who were so close to her, do not know of anything sinister in her past, I think we may assume that there was nothing,' interrupted Hannasyde, with an inflection of contempt in his voice. 'The discovery of the medium through which the poison was administered has not enlarged the field of suspects, as a moment's reflection will, I think, show you.'

Stella grasped a chairback, and said desperately: 'But not one of us three had a motive for killing Aunt Harriet! Not a real motive! This is like a nightmare! Things don't happen like this! Leave me alone, mother: I won't be quiet!' She shook off her mother's hand, laid warningly on her arm, and said, trembling: 'I don't pretend to know who did it. Perhaps she knew something that—that made her dangerous. Supposing it were something about that man you're looking for—the one who disappeared?'

'Well?' said Hannasyde.

'Oh, I don't know!' she said wretchedly. 'How can I know? But why don't you try and find out? My cousin told us about that man, and how you believe he had something to do with my uncle's death. Perhaps Aunt knew something about him. After all, we haven't always lived here; we don't know what may have happened in the past. My mother is quite right! You didn't know my uncle, or how Aunt Harriet hated him. Perhaps she was in a plot to murder him, and then—oh, I know this sounds far-fetched, but it isn't as far-fetched as thinking that my mother could murder aunt in that awful, coldblooded way just to get this house to herself!' Her voice broke, but she controlled it and added: 'I had as strong a motive as my mother!'

'So had I,' said Guy. 'A much stronger one than either of yours, too.'

'No, that isn't true,' Stella answered. 'You were the only one who really liked Aunt Harriet! You always stood up for her when Mummy and I ran her down. And she didn't interfere with you. She was awfully fond of you!'

'So much so that she left me her money. Don't forget that bit,' interrupted Guy.

'You didn't want her money! Superintendent, it's all rubbish about my aunt's money! She only had quite a little, and now that Uncle Gregory's dead my brother can do what he likes with his own capital!' She stopped short, aware of the implication of her own words, and grew whiter than ever. 'No. I don't mean—I didn't —'

The door opened. 'What a charming reunion!' remarked a mellifluous voice. 'I'm so glad. I'm not too late to join in. I should not have liked to have missed the dear Superintendent.'

'Oh, Randall!' gasped Stella, and released the chairback, and fled towards him, and clung to his arm.

He looked down at her with a curious lift to his brows. Guy, staring in astonishment at his sister's behaviour, saw a gleam in the blue eyes, hard to interpret.

Randall laid his hand on Stella's, but only to remove it from his sleeve. 'My precious, you really must have some regard for my clothes,' he said with gentle reproach. 'Much as I love you, I cannot permit you to maul this particular coat.' He drew her hand through his arm, and walked forward with her, his fingers still lightly clasping hers. 'Now what has been happening to upset my little cousin Stella?' he inquired of the room at large. 'Have you been accusing her of murdering my late aunt, Superintendent?'