Authors: Kim Wright
Chapter Twelve
The Tucker House
12:50 PM
Joined by Inspectors Seal and Morass, the Thursday Night Murder Games Club convened in the front parlor of the Tucker house just after luncheon to discuss the events of the day thus far.
“She escaped you?” Trevor was saying skeptically. “You honestly expect me to accept that a 40-year-old woman wearing a sari managed to outrun two far younger men, both conditioned to the standards of Scotland Yard?”
“She out jumped us, is more like it, Sir,” Davy said. “Right over the garden wall she went in a mad scramble and by the time Detective Abrams and I had gathered our wits enough to run ‘round it…”
“I don’t blame you for looking at us like that, Welles,” Rayley said wearily. “If I hadn’t seen it myself I would never have believed it. The woman moved like a monkey.”
“Perhaps her circumstances have forced her to become good at evading men,” Emma said. “Especially men in authority.”
“It is not the fact she escaped us that chews at my copper’s pride,” said Rayley. “It is the fact she escaped us so easily. Almost casually. Emma’s right. This lady has been on the run in one form or another all her life.”
“At least this time we know where to find her,” Trevor said. “I will return to the school as soon as I can.”
“You shall return to the wall, you mean,” said Rayley, with a sly smile.
“No,” said Emma. “What he means is that he shall return to the curiously enchanting Mrs. Hoffman with her strange teas and men’s trousers. You know our Trevor. Always the first to sacrifice himself for the greater good.”
“That is quite enough,” said Trevor. Teasing was the norm among the six regulars, but they couldn’t forget that Morass and Seal were present, and following the banter with entirely too much interest. Trevor had briefly considered commandeering the only desk in the parlor to illustrate to Seal that it was Scotland Yard and not the Viceroy who was really in charge here. But upon reflection had elected instead to merely sit in one of the circled chairs and direct the discussion. He would not allow a mere 48 hours of living among the Raj to turn him into a poser or, worse yet, a bully.
“We shall move on to Tom and hope he can report more success,” Trevor said, pointedly rustling his papers to remind them all this was an official meeting. “Please tell me that you are now able to say definitively that poison was the murder weapon.”
“Define definitively,” Tom said with a rakish grin. “The blood samples were in far too deep a state of decomposition to yield the sort of proof a British courtroom would require, but, thanks to Inspector Morass, I was quickly able to identify the shrub Davy found growing in the Weaver garden. Tell them what it is called, Inspector. Wait….wait for it. I promise you shall love this part.”
“The leaves were from a local plant that natives call ‘The Suicide Tree,’” Morass said. “So named because its kernels, if brewed or ground up, release a toxin strong enough to stop the human heart.”
“Remarkable, is it not?” said Tom, before any of the others could react. “The suicide tree. Here in the botanical line up of suspects, we have a plant which virtually steps forward with a full confession.” He consulted his notes. “Otherwise known as Cerbera Odollam, the suicide tree looks a bit like a hedge, yielding a plant which resembles a mango. When you first split open the kernels, the pulp inside is white but it turns violet the minute it is exposed to air, then black.”
“They say the taste is quite bitter,” said Morass, “but it can be concealed easily enough in the local food, which features heaps of spices.”
“And who is this ‘they’ who can report so readily on the taste?” Seal asked. Evidently he resented the fact that the lowly Morass had provided what appeared to be a valuable piece of the puzzle, for his voice was cold and skeptical. “I would imagine that anyone who dined on this particular fruit is not present to testify.”
“It doesn’t kill everyone who takes it,” Morass replied, his own voice cheerful and agreeable.
“No,” said Tom. “Many, but not all. Apparently the suicide tree is most popular among young people with dashed romantic hopes. The Romeos and Juliets of Bombay, if you will. While Cerbera Odollam disrupts the heartbeat, certain strong and healthy hearts recover, much as we saw the heartbeat of Amy Morrow resume last night after her shock. But in the Weaver-Sang case, the dosage was certainly enough to kill two people in their seventies.”
“Residue from this plant was on the dropper Davy recovered?” Trevor asked hopefully.
“I would love to tell you it was,” Tom said. “But my tests were inconclusive. Apparently Cerbera Odollam is odorless, colorless, and next to impossible to detect in an autopsy. In other words, the perfect murder weapon.”
“It sounds like we’re narrowing in a bit,” said Davy, “for the kernels and leaves you tested were from a plant growing in the Weaver garden, where Adelaide went each day to work. She was standing right beside that tree, come to think of it, the first time I saw her. ”
“But what possible incentive could a woman like Adelaide have to kill Mrs. Weaver and her bodyguard?” Emma asked, with a frown. “You heard Miss Hoffman. It sounds as if Adelaide found her way to their door quite by chance, because Mrs. Weaver wanted an English-looking nurse. A rather insulting reason to have been hired, but not an incentive to murder. And presumably she was happy to have the job.”
“How long does it take the fruit of the suicide tree to work?” Trevor asked.
“Ah, a most apt question, for that is another reason I accept it as our most likely mean of death,” Tom said. “I say, Trevor, it has suddenly struck me that the reason you are our leader is not because you provide the best answers, but rather because you ask the best questions.”
“He is our leader because the Queen said he is,” Rayley said with another sly smile. He knew that Trevor was often uncomfortable ordering around a fellow full detective but, as he had told his friend many times, he was delighted with the arrangement. Rayley far preferred his role as puckish intellectual to Trevor’s exhausting task of managing the spectrum of personalities contained within the group.
“The poison?” Trevor rather testily reminded Tom. “One can only presume that it works more quickly than the lot of you do?”
“Anywhere between ten and forty minutes, depending upon how much is ingested,” Tom answered. “So Mrs. Weaver and Pulkit Sang most certainly could have taken in the poison at the Weaver house and survived their brief ride to the Byculla Club, only to expire there, in the foyer.”
“They would have sickened during the ride, it seems,” Emma said.
“The suicide tree doesn’t make you expel,” said Morass. “Not like other poisons. None of that agony and grabbing of the stomach, the diarrhea or the nausea. The heart just eventually slows and stops.”
“A most considerate type of toxin,” Rayley murmured. “And quite perfect for all those young lovers.”
“But really,” protested Geraldine. “I knew Rose, or at least the younger Rose, and I can’t see her playing the part you have written for her in this little script. She hated Indian food, refused anything at all spicy or flavorful, and most certainly would not have chosen a curry for breakfast. And would she and her servant, no matter who closely linked the two were, have eaten the same dish?”
“That is indeed problematic,” Trevor said.
“Not to mention that the method requires quite a bit of planning on the part of this Adelaide,” said Seal. “If we consider culling the plant, cutting open the pod, extracting the kernels and grinding their pulp. Then brewing and administering the residue by dropper. Would a half-wit know how to do all that?”
“No one said she was a half-wit,” Emma said. “Only troubled.”
“So let us imagine that she has the skill to adequately go through the required steps,” Tom said. “It only takes us back to Emma’s original question. What could possibly be her motive?”
They sat for a moment in silence.
“I do not want to condemn a girl I have never met,” Geraldine finally said. “Nor any of the other household servants. But I can easily imagine that anyone in the employ of Rose Everlee Weaver would fantasize about killing her a hundred times a day.”
“The lady was as bad as all that?” Trevor said with surprise. Gerry’s previous stories had yielded a picture of a woman who was petulant and annoying, but that in itself was hardly enough to prompt murder. If it was, the streets of London would be littered with feminine corpses.
“Her offenses to the spirits of those around her were never so large as to draw comment or to allow her victim just cause to rail back at her,” Geraldine said. “It was rather like a thousand little slights a day, until the accumulated effect was enough to drive anyone mad. Now that I consider it, Rose Weaver was a bit of a slow-acting poison in her own way.”
Trevor raised an eyebrow. “Then why would two men so readily marry her?”
He regretted the question even as he asked it, but Geraldine did not flinch. “Some men are challenged by critical, remote women, or so I have noticed. They marry them for the same reason others climb Mont Blanc.”
“But once a man summits Mont Blanc, he plants his flag and leaves as soon as possible,” Tom said airily. “While marriage to a cold woman goes on day after day, year after year.”
“Which brings us back to the husband,” said Rayley, as Trevor sighed and nodded.
***
Bombay Jail
1:16 PM
“We must make sure that they pin it on the Indian.”
“You are referring, I presume, to Pulkit Sang? Why do you not use his name? You know it as well as I do.”
“All right then, we must pin it on Sang.”
“But he is dead.”
“All the more convenient.”
Anthony Weaver looked at his stepson with distaste. He had never felt particularly close to Michael. The boy had been Rose’s child, through and through, and never more so than now, as he paced the cell in an aggrieved manner that implied he was the primary victim in this entire matter.
“I did not kill your mother,” Anthony said, although the minute the words left his mouth he heard how ridiculous they sounded and Michael turned toward him in exasperation.
“I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? The important thing is that the charges against you must be dropped immediately so that the papers in London will forget any of this ever happened. I face a confidence vote in the fall, you know.”
Ah
, thought Anthony.
So that is what brings young Michael so unexpectedly to my side. The fear that a family scandal might derail his political career before it even really begins.
“We have had a bit of luck,” Michael went on, stopping to stare out of the only window in the room. The view was uninspiring – a yard of dust baking in the midday sun. “There was an incident last night at the Byculla Club which may serve to divert attention from your upcoming trail. Two members of our dinner party suffered electrocution through some fluke of faulty wiring. I shall pause now for you to make the predictable joke about how very shocking you find that news to be.”
“I was not about to make such a joke, I assure you. The victims are dead?”
“A young lady lives. The man dining beside her was pronounced dead on the spot. He was my attaché, as fate would have it. The fellow had traveled from London with me.”
“Attache?” Anthony said. “An admirably vague word. My apologies on your loss.”
“Benson was a detective,” Michael said, resuming his agitated pacing. “Scotland Yard, at one time, but retired.”
“It was murder?”