In the Teeth of the Evidence

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Dr Schmidt sniggered faintly.

  ‘In the matter of young Cyril Tressider, for example,’ went on Mr Smith, ‘I can conceive nothing more unnecessary than the existence of this wearisome child. He is an orphan; his only relations are Mr and Mrs Tressider who, however amiably disposed they may feel towards the boy, are financially embarrassed by his presence in the world. If he were to be quietly Removed, who would be the loser? Not himself, for he would be spared the sins and troubles of life on this ill-regulated planet; not his relations, for he has none but his uncle and aunt who would be better for his disappearance; not his tenants and dependants, since his good uncle would be there to take his place: I suggest, Mr Tressider, that the small sum of one thousand pounds would be profitably spent in Removing this boy to that happy land “far, far beyond the stars”, where he might play with the young-eyed cherubim (to quote our glorious poet), remote from the accidents of measles or stomach-ache to which, alas! all young children are so unhappily liable here below.’

  ‘A thousand?’ said Tressider, and laughed, ‘I would give five, gladly, to be rid of the youngster.’

  Dr Schmidt sniggered. ‘We should not like to be rapacious,’ he said. ‘No. One thousand pounds will amply repay the very trifling trouble.’

  ‘How about the risk?’ said Tressider.

  ‘We have abolished risk,’ replied Mr Smith. ‘For us, and for our clients, the word does not exist. Tell me, the boy resides with you at your home in Essex? Yes. Is he a good little boy?’

  ‘Decent enough kid, as far as that goes.’

  ‘No bad habits?’

  ‘He’s a bit of a liar, like lots of kids.’

  ‘How so, my friend?’ asked Dr Schmidt.

  ‘He romances. Pretends he’s had all kinds of adventures with giants and fairies and tigers and what not. You know the kind of thing. Doesn’t seem able to tell the truth. It worries his aunt a good deal.’

  ‘Ah!’ Dr Schmidt seemed to take over the interview at this point. ‘The good Mrs Tressider, she does not encourage the romancing?’

  ‘No. She does her best. Tells Cyril that he’ll go to a bad place if he tells her stories. But it’s wonderful how the little beggar persists. Sometimes we have to spank him. But he’s damnably obstinate. There’s a bad streak in the boy somewhere. Unsound. Not English, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Sad,’ said Dr Schmidt, sniggering, so that the word became a long bleat. ‘Sa-a-d. It would be a pity if the poor little boy should miss the golden gates after all. That would distress me.’

  ‘It would be still more distressing, Schmidt, that a person with a failing of that kind should be placed in any position of importance as the owner of the Tressider estates. Honour and uprightness, coupled with a healthy lack of imagination, have made this country what it is.’

  ‘True,’ said Dr Schmidt. ‘How beautifully you put it, my dear Smith. No doubt, Mr Tressider, your little ward finds much scope for imaginative adventure when playing about in the deserted grounds of Crantonbury Place, situated so conveniently next door to your abode.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot,’ said Tressider.

  ‘Our organisation,’ explained Dr Schmidt, with a wave of the hand. ‘It is melancholy to see these fine old country mansions thus deserted, but one man’s loss is the gain of the little boy next door. I should encourage little Cyril to play in the grounds of Crantonbury Hall. His little limbs will grow strong running about among the over-grown bushes and the straggling garden-beds where the strawberry grows underneath the nettle. I quote your Shakespeare, my dear Smith. It is a calamity that the fountains should be silent and the great fish-pond run dry. The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud – Shakespeare again. Nevertheless, there are still many possibilities in an old garden.’

  He giggled and pulled at his thin beard.

  If this fantastic conversation had never taken place, how was it that Tressider could remember every word so clearly. He remembered, too, signing a paper – the ‘Removal Order’, Smith had called it – and a cheque for £1,000, payable to Smith & Smith, and post-dated October 1st.

  ‘We like to allow a margin,’ said Mr Smith. ‘We cannot at this moment predict to a day when the Removal will be carried out. But from now to October 1st should provide ample time. If you should change your mind before the Removal has taken place, you have only to leave word to that effect at Rapallo’s. But after the Removal, it would be too late to make any alterations. Indeed, in such a case, there might be – er – unpleasantness of a kind which I should not care to specify. But, between gentlemen, such a situation could not, naturally, arise. Are you likely to be absent from home at any time in the near future?’

  Tressider shook his head.

  ‘No? Forgive me, but I think you would be well advised to spend – let us say the month of September – abroad. Or perhaps in Scotland. There is salmon, there is trout, there is grouse, there is partridge – all agreeable creatures to kill.’

  Dr Schmidt sniggered again.

  ‘Just as you like, of course,’ went on Mr Smith. ‘But if you and perhaps your wife also—’

  ‘My wife wouldn’t leave Cyril.’

  ‘Yourself, then. A holiday from domesticity is sometimes an excellent thing.’

  ‘I will think about it,’ said Tressider.

  He had thought often about it. He also thought frequently about the blank counterfoil in his cheque-book. That, at least, was a fact. He was thinking about it in Scotland on September 15th, as he tramped across the moors, gun on shoulder. It might be a good thing to stop that cheque.

  ‘Auntie Edith!’

  ‘Yes, Cyril.’

  Mrs Tressider was a thin woman with a strong, Puritan face; a woman of narrow but fixed affections and limited outlook.

  ‘Auntie, I’ve had a wonderful adventure.’

  Mrs Tressider pressed her pale lips together.

  ‘Now, Cyril. Think before hand. Don’t exaggerate, dear. You look very hot and excited.’

  ‘Yes, Auntie. I met a fairy—’

  ‘Cyril!’

  ‘No, really, Auntie, I did. She lives in Crantonbury Hall – in the old grotto. A real, live fairy. And she was all dressed in gold and lovely colours like a rainbow, red and green and blue and yellow and all sorts of colours. And a gold crown on her head and stars in her hair. And I wasn’t a bit frightened, Auntie, and she said—’

  ‘Cyril, dear—’

  ‘Yes, Auntie, really. I’m not ’zaggerating. She was ever so beautiful. And she said I was a brave boy, just like Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, and I was to marry her when I grew up, and live in Fairyland. Only I’m not big enough yet. And she had lions and tigers and leopards all round her with gold collars and diamonds on them. And she took me into her fairy palace—’

  ‘Cyril!’

  ‘And we ate fairy fruit off gold plates and she’s going to teach me the language of the birds and give me a pair of seven-league boots all for myself, so that I can go all over the world and be a hero.’

  ‘That’s a very exciting story you’ve made up, darling, but of course it’s only a story, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, ’tisn’t only a story. It’s quite true. You see if it isn’t.’

  ‘Darling, even in fun you mustn’t say it’s true. There couldn’t be lions and tigers and leopards at Crantonbury Hall.’

  ‘Well . . .’ the child paused. ‘Well, pr’aps I was ’zaggerating just a teeny, weeny bit. But there was two leopards.’

  ‘Oh, Cyril! Two leopards?’

  ‘Yes, with golden collars and chains. And the fairy was ever so tall and beautiful, with lovely goldeny eyes just like the leopards’. She said she was the fairy of the leopards, and they were fairies too, and after we’d had the fairy feast the leopards grew wings and she got on their backs – on one of them’s back, I mean – and flew right away over the roof.’

  Mrs Tressider sighed.

  ‘I don’t think Nanny ought to tell you so many fairy tales. You know there aren’t any fairies, re
ally.’

  ‘That’s all you know about it,’ said Cyril, rather rudely. ‘There is fairies, and I’ve seen one, and I’m to be the King of the Fairies when I’m bigger.’

  ‘You mustn’t contradict me like that, Cyril. And it’s very naughty to say what isn’t true.’

  ‘But it is true, Auntie.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that, darling. I’ve told you ever so many times that it’s very nice to make up stories, but we mustn’t ever forget that it’s all make-believe.’

  ‘But I did see the fairy.’

  ‘If you say that any more, Auntie will be very cross with you—’

  ‘But I did, I did. I swear I did.’

  ‘Cyril!’ Mrs Tressider was definitely shocked. ‘That is a very wicked word to use. You must go straight to bed without your supper, and Auntie doesn’t want to see you again till you have apologised for being so rude and telling such naughty stories.’

  ‘But, Auntie—’

  ‘That will do,’ said Mrs Tressider, and rang the bell. Cyril was led away in tears.

  ‘If you please, ma’am,’ said Nannie, catching Mrs Tressider as she rose from the dinner-table, ‘Master Cyril don’t seem very well, ma’am. He says he has a bad stomach-ache.’

  Cyril did seem feverish and queer when his aunt went up to him. He was flushed and feverish, and his eyes were unnaturally bright and frightened. He complained of a dreadful pain under his pyjama-girdle.

  ‘That’s what happens to naughty little boys who tell stories,’ said Mrs Tressider, who had old-fashioned ideas about improving the occasion. ‘Now Nannie will have to give you some nasty medicine.’

  Nannie, advancing, armed with a horrid tumblerful of greeny-grey liquorice powder, had her own moral to draw.

  ‘I expect you’ve been eating them nasty old crab-apples out of the old garden,’ she remarked. ‘I’m sure I’ve told you time and again, Master Cyril, to leave them things alone.’

  ‘I didn’t eat nothing,’ said Cyril, ‘’cept the fairy feast in the palace with the leopard lady.’

  ‘We don’t want to hear about the leopard-lady any more,’ said Mrs Tressider. ‘Now, own up darling, that was all imagination and nonsense, wasn’t it? He does look feverish,’ she added in an aside to Nannie. ‘Perhaps we’d better send for Dr Simmonds. With Mr Tressider away, one feels rather anxious. Now, Cyril, drink up your medicine and say you’re sorry . . .’

  When Dr Simmonds arrived an hour later (for he had been out when summoned) he found his patient delirious and Mrs Tressider thoroughly alarmed. Dr Simmonds wasted no time with liquorice powder, but used the stomach pump. His face was grave.

  ‘What has he been eating?’ he asked, and shook his head at Nannie’s suggestion of green apples. Mrs Tressider, white and anxious, went into details about the child’s story of the leopard lady.

  ‘He looked feverish when he came in,’ she said, ‘but I thought he was just excited with his make-believe games.’

  ‘Imaginative children are often unable to distinguish between fact and fancy,’ said the doctor. ‘I think he very probably did eat something that he shouldn’t have done; it would be all part of the game he was playing with himself.’

  ‘I made him confess in the end that he was making it all up,’ said Mrs Tressider.

  ‘H’m,’ said Dr Simmonds. ‘Well, I don’t think you’d better worry him about it any more. He’s a highly-strung child and he’ll need all his strength—’

  ‘You don’t mean he’s in any danger, Doctor?’

  ‘Oh, I hope not, I hope not. But children are rather kittle little cattle and something has upset him badly. Is Mr Tressider at home?’

  ‘Ought I to send for him?’

  ‘It might be as well. By the way, could you let me have a clean bottle? I should like to take away some of the contents of the stomach for examination. Just to be on the safe side, you know. I don’t want to alarm you – it’s just that, in a case of this kind, it is as well to know what one has to deal with.’

  Before morning, Cyril was collapsed, blue in the face and cold, and another doctor had been called in. Tressider, when he hurriedly arrived by the midnight train, was greeted by the news that there was very little hope.

  ‘I am afraid, Mr Tressider, that the boy has managed to pick up something poisonous. We are having an analysis made. The symptoms are suggestive of poisoning by solanine, or some alkali of that group. Nightshade – is there any garden nightshade at Crantonbury Hall?’ Thus Dr Pratt, a specialist and expensive.

  Mr Tressider did not know, but said he thought they might go and see next day. The search-party was accordingly sent out in the morning. They discovered no nightshade, but Dr Pratt, prowling about the weed-grown kitchen garden made a discovery.

  ‘Look!’ he said. ‘These old potato-plants have got potato-apples on them. The potato belongs to the genus Solanum, and the apples, and sometimes even the tubers themselves, have occasionally given rise to poisonous symptoms. If the boy had happened to pluck and eat some of these berries—’

  ‘He did, then,’ said Dr Simmonds. ‘See here.’

  He lifted a plant on which a number of short stalks still remained to show where the potato-apples had been.

  ‘I had no idea,’ said Tressider, ‘that the things were as poisonous as that.’

  ‘They are not as a rule,’ said Dr Pratt. ‘But here and there one finds a plant which is particularly rich in the poisonous principle, solanine. There was a classical case, in 1885 or thereabouts—’

  He prosed on. Mrs Tressider could not bear it. She left them and went upstairs to sit by Cyril’s bedside.

  ‘I want to see the lovely leopard lady,’ said Cyril, faintly.

  ‘Yes, yes – she’s coming, darling,’ said Mrs Tressider.

  ‘With her leopards?’

  ‘Yes, darling. And lions and tigers.’

  ‘Because I’ve got to be King of the Fairies when I grow up.’

  ‘Of course you have, darling.’

  On the third day, Cyril died.

  The expert’s analysis confirmed Dr Pratt’s diagnosis. Seeds and skin of the potato-apple had been identified in the contents of the stomach. Death was from solanine poisoning, a remarkable quantity of the alkali having been present in the potato-apples. An examination of other berries taken from the same plants showed that the potatoes in question were, undoubtedly, particularly rich in solanine. Verdict: Death by misadventure. Children, said the coroner, were very apt to chew and eat strange plants and berries, and the potato-apple undoubtedly had an attractive appearance – like a little green tomato – the jury had no doubt often seen it in their own gardens. It was, however, very seldom that the effects were so tragic as in the present sad case. No blame could possibly attach to Mr and Mrs Tressider, who had repeatedly warned the child not to eat anything he did not know the name of, and had usually found him an obedient child in this respect.

  Tressider, to whom nobody had thought to mention the story of the leopard lady, showed a becoming grief at the death of his little ward. He purchased a handsome suit of black and ordered a new saloon car. In this he went about a good deal by himself in the days that followed the inquest, driving, on one occasion, as far as Greenwich.

  He had looked up the address in the telephone-book and presently found himself rolling down a quiet riverside lane. Yes – there they were, on the right, two shabby green gates across which, in faded white lettering, ran the words:

  SMITH & SMITH

  REMOVALS

  He got out of the car and stood, hesitating a little. The autumn had come early that year, and as he stood, a yellow poplar leaf, shaken from its hold by the wind, fluttered delicately to his feet.

  He pushed at the gates, which opened slowly, with a rusty creaking. There was no avenue of poplars and no squat grey house with a pillared portico. An untidy yard met his gaze. At the back was a tumble-down warehouse, and on either side of the gate a sickly poplar whispered fretfully. A ruddy-faced man, engaged in harnessing a c
art-horse to an open lorry, came forward to greet him.

  ‘Could I speak to Mr Smith,’ asked Tressider.

  ‘It’s Mr Benton you’ll be wanting,’ replied the man. ‘There ain’t no Mr Smith.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Tressider. ‘Then which of the gentlemen is it that has a very high, bald forehead – a rather stoutish gentleman. I thought—’

  ‘Nobody like that here,’ said the man. ‘You’ve made a mistake, mister. There’s only Mr Benton – he’s tall, with grey ’air and specs, and Mr Tinworth, the young gentleman, him that’s a bit lame. Was you wanting a Removal by any chance?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Tressider, rather hastily. ‘I thought I knew Mr Smith, that’s all. Has he retired lately?’

  ‘Lord, no.’ The man laughed heartily. ‘There ain’t been a Mr Smith here, not in donkey’s years. Come to think of it, they’re all dead, I believe. Jim! What’s happened to old Mr Smith and his brother what used to run this show?’

  A little elderly man came out of the warehouse, wiping his hands on his apron.

  ‘Dead these ten years,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Gent here thought he knowed the parties.’

  ‘Well, they’re dead,’ repeated Jim.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tressider.

  He went back to the car. For the hundredth time he asked himself whether he should stop the cheque. The death of Cyril could only be a coincidence. It was now or never, for this was the 30th September.

  He vacillated, and put the matter off till next day. At ten o’clock in the morning he rang up the bank.

  ‘A cheque’ – he gave the number – ‘for £1,000, payable to Smith & Smith. Has it been cashed?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Tressider. Nine-thirty this morning. Hope there’s nothing wrong about it.’

  ‘Nothing whatever, thanks. I just wanted to know.’

  Then he had drawn it. And somebody had cashed it.