Sweet Poison

by Douglas Clark

  They turned on to the upper landing. Almost immediately a door—obviously more modern than the rest of the woodwork, but a fair copy as far as Masters could tell—confronted them. Above the bell push was a small brass plate which said simply: ‘Partridge’. Above the lock was Mundy’s seal. Wax imprints of the official concentric circles design. Green looked closely. The varnish on the door round the penny-sized blobs was slightly singed and roughened by the heat of the wax when applied. Satisfied that nobody had tampered with it he broke it away and held out his hand for the key.

  Inside was luxury. The plaster on each wall was panelled. The mouldings were picked out in gold. All woodwork was white, and the wallpapers heavily embossed. Much of the flat was just as it must have been when the house was built. The library was still there—the first door on the left of the landing. Now the bookshelves which rose eight feet high were no longer full, but those which did not contain books had been tastefully tricked out with bric-à-brac and photographs; others with radio, record player and discs. The long, round-topped windows had chains instead of sash cords.

  ‘From the looks and smell of this place I shouldn’t think she ever used it,’ Brant said. ‘No flower vases or pot plants, you’ll notice. And that fireplace hasn’t been used for years.’

  ‘A woman living alone?’ Masters reflected. ‘Perhaps not.’

  Brant was right. There were signs of habitation only in the sitting-room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. ‘I thought she had her food sent up?’ Green said.

  Masters was poking round the kitchen. ‘She did. But it was dished up, in here, on to Wedgwood. She didn’t eat off the dining-room delf. And the washing-up was done in here, too. See all the do-dahs—powder, dish cloth, towel and what not?’

  Brant said: ‘She must have brewed up in here, too. Tea caddy, coffee grounds and so on. I expect she disliked cooking even though she’d got a fully equipped kitchen. There’s no solid food anywhere except a tin of biscuits.’

  Masters toed the pedal bin and peered in. ‘Bonio packet. Cake papers. Waxed carton—Throscum Home Made Peppermint Creams, one pound. Two empty king-size packets and the debris from an ash-tray. That’s all, I think.’

  ‘Don’t touch! We’ll give them a going over.’ Brant was opening cupboards, using his handkerchief. ‘She kept Ovals here for the doggie-woggies, too. Not much else.’

  ‘No chocolate drops for the little dears?’ Green asked.

  ‘Not as far as I can see.’

  There were three bedrooms, all large, elegant rooms. The main one had built-in wardrobes all the way round except for gaps at doorways, windows and fireplace. Several of the doors were plate mirrors. The air was heavy with perfume.

  Green said: ‘What a pong. Cross between a brothel and a public lavatory.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Brant retorted.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me you’ve never been into a public lavatory?’

  Masters interrupted. ‘What d’you think those are for?’

  ‘What?’

  Masters pointed round to each of the white-painted wardrobe doors. In the centre of each panel was stuck a pale pink strip of paper, six inches long and nearly three-quarters of an inch wide. Once noticed, they stood out, stark against their background.

  ‘Perhaps she was thinking of changing the décor of her boudoir,’ Green said, ‘and pasted those tushy pink bits up to give her some idea of what it would be like to live inside a toothpaste tube.’

  ‘Nobody in their right minds would ruin paintwork like this.’ Masters stepped to the nearest strip and examined it closely. ‘Rough texture. Not like wallpaper at all.’

  Brant said: ‘Donkey’s breakfast.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Green asked.

  ‘You know. That rough wallpaper—sawdust glued on to give a rough finish.’

  ‘Donkey’s breakfast?’

  ‘That’s what it’s called.’

  ‘These strips are where the smell comes from. Sniff,’ Masters demanded.

  Green and Brant complied. Green said: ‘Ashes of dustbins all right.’

  Brant put a hand up to feel the texture of the paper. Ran his finger along the length. He stood for a moment and then sniffed the air, sniffed the end of his finger and finally the paper strip. ‘It’s impregnated.’

  Green said: ‘Tell us something we don’t know.’

  ‘Not just soaked in the stuff, though.’

  His tone made Masters come closer. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I ran my finger along it, and the smell got stronger.’

  ‘You mean the action of rubbing releases the smell?’

  ‘It must do.’

  Masters tried it for himself. Then Green. The perfume in the room grew heavier. Green said: ‘Very interesting, but I don’t think it helps us find her murderer.’

  They visited the other bedrooms. Both were unused. Unmade beds covered with cream and gold floor-touching drapes. Brant said: ‘Nothing in either of those. They’re clean as a whistle.’

  In the bathroom was a medicine cupboard. Masters opened it and went through the shelves of common household medicines—T.C.P., plasters, Panadol, two or three ointments and a corn cure, hydrogen peroxide.

  Green said: ‘I’ll bet she used gallons of that stuff from what Mundy said about her hair.’

  Finally, Masters took out a small white cardboard carton through which he could feel the bottle inside. The packet copy said: ‘Nonavom. (S.4A) bottle of 50 tablets’, in big letters, and then in small print: ‘Clinical indications: Nausea and vomiting: pregnancy, motion, pre- and post-operative sickness.’

  Green said: ‘Aye, aye. Scheduled poison. Prescription only. Non-repeatable. Don’t tell me she was in the pudding club.’

  ‘She wasn’t. It would have said so in the post-mortem report.’

  The packing leaflet was folded closely round the bottle. Masters opened it out. ‘Nonavom depresses the secretory and motor activity of the gastro-intestinal tract and produces gastric anaesthesia, thus reducing local reflex irritation. These actions allay nausea and vomiting.’

  Then followed a warning to patients: ‘The daily dose should not exceed three tablets and not more than one tablet should be taken at any one time or dizziness may ensue. Tablets should be swallowed with water. If nausea, vomiting, sickness, vertigo and dizziness do not diminish after taking one tablet, do not continue with treatment, but consult your physician immediately.’

  ‘Count the tablets in the bottle,’ Masters said to Brant.

  They stood by while Brant did so. Counting silently with him they knew there were forty-nine left before he said so. Green said: ‘Only one gone. No chance of an overdose there.’

  ‘Not a hope in hell,’ Masters agreed. ‘But ask Meeth when he prescribed them for her, just the same. And if he’ll tell you, without pleading ethics, what illness they were for. You’ll probably find she was car-sick or air-sick or wanted one if she crossed the Channel on a boat.’

  ‘Right. If I’m to see him as well, I’d better push off now. Where’ll I find you when I get back?’

  ‘Round here. I want a word with Compton, the dance professional, the woman who did the cleaning and various others. The lads will be going over this place for an hour or two.’

  Green lit a Kensitas. Brant stopped him dropping the match into the soap tray. ‘You’ll lead us a merry dance if you go leaving material clues about.’

  ‘Garn tittle! What could a match have to do with necrosis of the liver?’

  Shortly after Green had gone, Hill appeared. ‘Funeral at two o’clock in the church across the way. The families are expected about eleven, and will be staying in one of the bungalows. No kids coming. There’s a meeting with the solicitor after the funeral.’

  ‘Reading the will?’ Brant said.

  ‘Not in this case,’ Masters replied. ‘Not until we’re satisfied that nobody will be profiting from bumping her off. But if those are the arrangements, I’ll not bother to see the stepdaught
ers and their husbands until after the funeral—when they’ve finished their business meeting.’

  ‘Anything in here?’ Hill asked.

  ‘We’re just going into the sitting-room.’

  This room was basically just as lovely as the others. It even had some good furniture, but the final bits and pieces, those that give a clue to the character of the owner of a room, were tawdry. Seaside resort china, a fair amount of chromium, paperbacks of the real romance type, plastic roses, one cushion—it made Masters wince—was tinsel embroidered in lovers’ knots with the initials C and F intertwined. And photographs—up to a dozen of them in imitation leather frames with transparent plastic ‘glass’—scattered about.

  Brant said: ‘This must be her. Blonde. Liked herself, didn’t she? One, two, three . . . seven photos of her in her own room.’

  ‘Talk about seeing yourself as others see you,’ Hill snorted. ‘She’s smashing here, isn’t she? Hair looking like an explosion in a mattress factory and frock . . . What’s that French word they use when they mean topless but don’t want to say it?’

  Masters supplied it. ‘Décolleté.’

  ‘That’s it. You know, I’ve always wanted to see a waiter drop an ice cream down the front of one of those.’

  ‘There’s perfume in this room too, but not as much as the bedroom.’

  ‘There are some of those strips as well. Look! One just inside the door. Two by the window.’ Brant stepped over to the mantelpiece. ‘And another here. Behind the electric clock.’

  ‘I wonder why the perfume’s weaker?’

  Hill said, surprisingly: ‘Oh, did she use those?’

  ‘You know what they are?’

  ‘Yes. Micro-encapsulated perfume strips.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

  ‘They’re a new American idea for scent makers. They can give them as samples or hand them to women to sniff when they’re choosing scent at the counter.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell me what they are.’

  ‘Little blobs of perfume, encased in cellulose and stuck on to paper. That’s why the surface looks a bit rough. If you scratch your nail along them you rupture the cellulose and release the perfume. I don’t know how long they last, but if you do it once every day they’re supposed to keep a room sweet-smelling for so many months. If they don’t pong as much in here as they do in her bedroom it means she scratched these more often and they’re nearly played out, or those in the bedroom are newer.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do they matter?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. I’m interested because I’ve never met them before.’ Hill looked closely at Masters. The Chief Inspector was not speaking with his usual incisiveness. Hill couldn’t guess that Masters’s mind was momentarily elsewhere. In a prison cell with Joan Parker. The girl he had been instrumental in sending down for three years for manslaughter. The girl Masters wanted, dreamed of, built plans round. Would a few strips like this sweeten a cell, sweeten life, overpower the sourness and carbolic harshness of the prison atmosphere? He couldn’t take them to her himself: as a policeman he was forbidden communication with a prisoner under sentence. But his mother or Mrs Huth, who visited Joan regularly, could take them. To stick on the wall with the photographs she was allowed—or on the photographs themselves if the authorities disapproved of desecrating their colour wash. He must get some. Joan would love to smell the scent of flowers again. He said to Hill: ‘Who sells them?’

  ‘Dunno, Chief. Big London stores, I expect. Chap I knew was asked if he’d like to buy some as an advertising gimmick for something he was selling.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Masters was thinking Compton might know. If these were used for advertising, probably some commercial traveller calling on the camp had left them.

  Brant was opening a bow-fronted, figured walnut cabinet. He said: ‘Drinks and sweets in here, Chief. Have we to test the bottles?’

  ‘Only the opened ones.’ Masters squatted beside Brant. ‘Quite a store.’

  ‘And quite a sweet tooth. Four boxes of sweets. How anybody ever eats peppermint creams, I don’t know. So sickly.’

  Masters stood up. ‘I must say I prefer the wafer mints, myself. I suspect those are her dance prizes.’

  Hill said: ‘Dog hairs everywhere. No wonder she needed perfume strips. I’ll bet those two poodles stank the place out. They always do in flats where they can’t get out into a garden when they want.’

  Masters stood in the middle of the room and rubbed a fill of Warlock Flake. He was wondering what this flat had been like under the control of the first Mrs Partridge: business woman, school teacher and mother. Somehow he felt that her successor had degraded the place. A parasite, battening on the fruits of the labour of other people. A dead parasite. But one whose killer he was committed to tracking down. For a moment he felt sympathy with Green, who very often stated that sometimes murderers were public benefactors, ridding the earth of vermin. He knew this was no good—not his own philosophy. The law is the living skeleton of a living society, and without its living skeleton the whole structure would collapse. Masters believed in tracking down and subjecting to the full rigour of the law all murderers, whether apparent public benefactors or not. He was as keen to put his finger on Fay Partridge’s killer as he ever had been to arrest any other assassin. But he decided he must be careful not to let Joan Parker know where he first saw the perfume strips. If she learned where he’d got the idea of giving them to her, it might rob the gift of all pleasure. He’d have to pretend to his mother and Mrs Huth that he’d seen them in some store. Practise a little of what a lawyer would call suggestio falsi—what others, less legally minded, would call white lies.

  *

  Green was worried. He couldn’t conceal it from himself as he made his way to the Meeths’ house. Masters had guessed at the reason, and the mere fact of talking about it had eased the strain a lot, until that bottle of Nonavom had appeared. Why the hell hadn’t Larry Meeth mentioned last night that he’d prescribed a schedule 4A poison for Fay Partridge? Only one tablet had gone from the bottle in the bathroom, but what if that hadn’t been the only bottle? Or what if he’d prescribed some other equally potent drug that he’d also conveniently forgotten to mention last night? Green knew Masters. When it came to a murder hunt he was merciless. If he considered it necessary he would take the two Meeths apart in his search for the truth. And Green had no wish to see Meg Meeth tangle with Masters. Masters had too happy a knack of coming out on top. And Green liked Meg Meeth. He had no wish to disguise it. Couldn’t have done if he’d wanted to. Masters had cottoned on quickly enough. That was the hell of it. Green wouldn’t be able to soften any blow without being accused of being the devil who tries to look after his own. The one ray of sunshine about finding that bottle of Nonavom was that it gave him a positive excuse for calling at the doctors’ house. Usually he never minded descending on people in the hope of finding a worthwhile reason for his visit after his arrival. That was part of the job. But with Meg Meeth he’d be a bit wary of showing up just to ask why she disliked Fay Partridge. It was as good as telling her she was under serious suspicion and asking her to confirm that suspicion.

  He opened the wrought-iron gate and walked up the flagged path between beds of new flowering snapdragons, red, yellow and pink. He wondered whether he should walk in, as a patient would. Where would that leave him on the question of entering without permission? The surgery was a house, too. He decided he’d better ring. It was safer. He felt low. He’d got the Meeths well to the forefront of his mind as suspects now. To the extent of observing the technicalities. He sucked his teeth as he waited on the doorstep and gazed unseeingly at a floppy hollyhock that appeared to have outgrown its strength and was too weary to stand upright.

  ‘This is an unexpected pleasure.’ Meg Meeth was in a lightweight linen suit this morning. Fawn, with a white blouse. Very businesslike. Very fetching in Green’s eyes.

  ‘Can I speak to you both for a few minutes?’


  ‘Over a cup of pre-round coffee? Come in. Larry’s making out his list. In his surgery. You know your way.’

  *

  ‘Nonavom?’ said Laurence Meeth. ‘I’ve never prescribed it for her.’ He got up and went to his filing cabinet. ‘Here’s her card.’ He handed it over without inspecting it. ‘Dates and clinical record, with prescriptions.’

  Green studied it. The last entry was in February. Domiciliary visit. Mild flu. Prescription—50 tabs Panadeine Co. No mention of Nonavom. He said: ‘Was this the last time you saw her professionally—at her home—when you made the crack about the dogs?’

  ‘I see Meg has been sharing our private joke. But, yes, to both questions.’

  ‘You’ve not missed anything off this—by mistake perhaps?’

  ‘No. I repeat, I never prescribed Nonavom for Mrs Partridge. And what if I had? She can’t have died of an overdose of that particular drug, because most of its constituents would leave traces in the body, and none were found. I know atropine sulphate is a poisonous alkaloid of belladonna and scopolamine hydrobromide is dicey stuff. But anybody who takes them to excess might as well write a letter of intent, because both produce similar toxic effects, and too much of them together would induce terrible thirst, dilatation of the pupils, flushing and dryness of the skin, and a desire to urinate without the ability to do so. As time went by they would increase the pulse rate, cause stertorous breathing, raise the body temperature, and most likely cause an outbreak of rash on the face and trunk. None of these happened to Fay Partridge. And another thing. With both belladonna and scopolamine, the symptoms set in promptly and last possibly for several days in fatal doses. So unless Fay Partridge—and her dogs—took a large overdose of Nonavom in Rob Wintle’s poodle parlour that morning, with half the inhabitants of Throscum looking on, you can rule out your find on that score, too.’