Death at the Bar

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Will and Decima together,’ said Cubitt. ‘I’ve suggested they call themselves the Decimbrists.’

  ‘Where are the lads of the village?’ demanded Watchman. ‘I thought I heard the dart game in progress as I went upstairs.’

  ‘Abel’s rat-poisoning in the garage,’ said Parish. ‘They’ve all gone out to see he doesn’t give himself a lethal dose of prussic acid.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Watchman ejaculated. ‘Is the old fool playing around with cyanide?’

  ‘Apparently. Why wouldn’t we have a drink?’

  ‘Why not indeed?’ agreed Cubitt. ‘Hi, Will!’

  He went to the bar and leant over it, looking into the Public.

  ‘The whole damn place is deserted. I’ll get our drinks and chalk them up. Beer?’

  ‘Beer it is,’ said Parish.

  ‘What form of cyanide has Abel got hold of?’ Watchman asked.

  ‘Eh?’ said Parish vaguely. ‘Oh, let’s see now. I fetched it for him from Illington. The chemist hadn’t got any of the stock rat-banes, but he poked round and found this stuff. I think he called it Scheele’s acid.’

  ‘Good, God!’

  ‘What? Yes, that was it—Scheele’s acid. And then he said he thought the fumes of Scheele’s acid mightn’t be strong enough, so he gingered it up a bit.’

  ‘With what, in the name of all the Borgias?’

  ‘Well—with prussic acid, I imagine.’

  ‘You imagine! You imagine!’

  ‘He said that was what it was. He said it was acid or something. I wouldn’t know. He warned me in sixteen different positions to be careful. Suggested Abel wore a half-crown gas mask, so I bought it in case Abel hadn’t got one. Abel’s using gloves and everything.’

  ‘It’s absolutely monstrous!’

  ‘I had to sign for it, old boy,’ said Parish. ‘Very solemn we were. God, he was a stupid man! Bone from the eyes up, but so, so kind.’

  Watchman said angrily, ‘I should damn well think he was stupid. Do you know that twenty-five drops of Scheele’s acid will kill a man in a few minutes? Why, good Lord, in Rex v. Bull, if I’m not mistaken, it was alleged that accused gave only seven drops. I myself defended a medical student who gave twenty minims in error. Charge of manslaughter. I got him off but—how’s Abel using it?’

  ‘What’s all this?’ inquired Cubitt. ‘There’s your beer.’

  ‘Abel said he was going to put it in a pot and shove it in a rathole,’ explained Parish. ‘I think he’s filled with due respect for its deadliness, Luke, really. He’s going to block the hole up and everything.’

  ‘The chemist had no business to give you Scheele’s, much less this infernal brew. He ought to be struck off the books. The pharmacopœial preparation would have been quite strong enough. He could have diluted even that to advantage.’

  ‘Well, God bless us,’ said Cubitt hastily, and took a pull at his beer.

  ‘What happens, actually, when someone’s poisoned by prussic acid?’ asked Parish.

  ‘Convulsion, clammy sweat, and death.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Cubitt. ‘What a filthy conversation!’

  ‘Well—cheers, dear,’ said Parish, raising his tankard.

  ‘You do get hold of the most repellent idioms, Seb,’ said his cousin. ‘Te saluto.’

  ‘But not moriturus, I trust,’ added Parish. ‘With all this chat about prussic acid! What’s it look like?’

  ‘You bought it.’

  ‘I didn’t notice. It’s a blue bottle.’

  ‘Hydrocyanic acid,’ said Watchman with his barrister’s precision, ‘is, in appearance, exactly like water. It is a liquid miscible with water and this stuff is a dilution of hydrocyanic acid.’

  ‘The chemist,’ said Parish, ‘put a terrific notice on it. I remember I once had to play a man who’d taken cyanide. “Fool’s Errand,” the piece was; a revival with whiskers on it, but not a bad old drama. I died in a few seconds.’

  ‘For once the dramatist was right,’ said Watchman. ‘It’s one of the sudden poisons. Horrible stuff! I’ve got cause to know it. I was once briefed in a case where a woman took—’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ interrupted Norman Cubitt violently, ‘Shut up, both of you, I’ve got a poison phobia.’

  ‘Have you really, Norman?’ asked Parish. ‘That’s very interesting. Can you trace it?’

  ‘I think so.’ Cubitt rubbed his hair and then looked absentmindedly at his paint-grimed hand. ‘As a matter of fact, my dear Seb,’ he said, with his air of secretly mocking at himself, ‘you have named the root and cause of my affection. You have perpetrated a coincidence, Sebastian. The very play you mentioned just now, started me off on my Freudian road to the jim-jams. “Fool’s Errand,” and well named. It is, as you say, a remarkably naîve play. At the age of seven, however, I did not think so. I found it terrifying.’

  ‘At the age of seven?’

  ‘Yes. My eldest brother, poor fool, fancied himself as an amateur and essayed the principal part. I was bullied into enacting the small boy who, as I remember, perpetually bleated: “Papa, why is mamma so pale” and later on: “Papa, why is mamma so quiet? Where has she gone, papa?”’

  ‘We cut all that in the revival,’ said Parish. ‘It was terrible stuff.’

  ‘I agree with you. As you remember, papa had poisoned mamma. For years afterwards I had the horrors at the very word. I remember that I used to wipe all the schoolroom china for fear our Miss Tobin was a Borgian governess. I invented all sorts of curious devices in order that Miss Tobin should drink my morning cocoa and I hers. Odd, wasn’t it? I grew out of it but I still dislike the sound of the word and I detest taking medicine labelled in accordance with the Pure Food Act.’

  ‘Labelled what?’ asked Parish with a wink at Watchman.

  ‘Labelled poison, damn you,’ said Cubitt.

  Watchman looked curiously at him.

  ‘I suppose there’s something in this psycho-stuff,’ he said. ‘But I always rather boggle at it.’

  ‘I don’t see why you should,’ said Parish. ‘You yourself get a fit of the staggers if you scratch your finger. You told me once, you fainted when you had a blood test. That’s a phobia, same as Norman’s.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Watchman. ‘Lots of people can’t stand the sight of their own blood. This poison scare’s much more unusual. But you don’t mean to tell me, do you, Norman, that because at an early age you helped your brother in a play about cyanide you’d feel definitely uncomfortable if I finished my story?’

  Cubitt drained his tankard and set it down on the table.

  ‘If you’re hell-bent on your beastly story—’ he said.

  ‘It was only that I was present at the autopsy on this woman who died of cyanide poisoning. When they opened her up, I fainted. Not from emotion but from the fumes. The pathologist said I had a pronounced idiosyncrasy for the stuff. I was damned ill after it. It nearly did for me.’

  Cubitt wandered over to the door and lifted his pack.

  ‘I’ll clean up,’ he said, ‘and join you for the dart game.’

  ‘Splendid, old boy,’ said Parish. ‘We’ll beat them tonight.’

  ‘Do our damnedst anyway,’ said Cubitt. At the doorway he turned and looked mournfully at Parish.

  ‘She’s asking about perspective,’ he said.

  ‘Give her rat-poison,’ said Parish.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Cubitt and went out.

  ‘What was he talking about?’ demanded Watchman.

  Parish smiled. ‘He’s got a girl-friend. Wait till you see. Funny chap! He went quite green over your story. Sensitive old beggar, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ agreed Watchman lightly. ‘I must say I’m sensitive in a rather different key where cyanide’s concerned, having been nearly killed by it.’

  ‘I don’t know you could have a—what did you call it?’

  ‘An idiosyncrasy?’

  ‘It means you’d go under to a very small amount?’

  ‘It does.�
�� Watchman yawned and stretched himself full length on the settle.

  ‘I’m sleepy,’ he said. ‘It’s the sea air. A very pleasant state of being. Just tired enough, with the impressions of a long drive still floating about behind one’s consciousness. Flying hedges, stretches of road that stream out before one’s eyes. The relaxation of arrival setting in. Very pleasant!’

  He closed his eyes for a moment and then turned his head to look at his cousin.

  ‘So Decima Moore is still here,’ he said.

  Parish smiled. ‘Very much so. But you’ll have to watch your step, Luke.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s an engagement in the offing.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Decima and Will Pomeroy.’

  Watchman sat up.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Well—why not?’

  ‘Good Lord! A politically minded pot-boy.’

  ‘Actually they’re the same class,’ Parish murmured.

  ‘Perhaps; but she’s not of it.’

  ‘All the same—’

  Watchman grimaced.

  ‘She’s a little fool,’ he said, ‘but you may be right,’ and lay back again. ‘Oh well!’ he added comfortably.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘There’s another female here,’ said Parish, and grinned.

  ‘Another? Who?’

  ‘Norman’s girl-friend of course. My oath!’

  ‘Why? What’s she like? Why are you grinning away like a Cheshire cat, Seb?’

  ‘My dear soul,’ said Parish, ‘if I could get that woman to walk on the boards every evening and do her stuff exactly as she does it here—well, of course! I’d go into management and die a millionaire.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s the Honourable Violet Darragh. She waters.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘She does water-colours. Wait till you hear Norman on Violet.’

  ‘Is she a nuisance?’ asked Watchman apprehensively.

  ‘Not exactly. Well, in a way. Pure joy to me. Wait till you meet her.’

  Parish would say no more about Miss Darragh, and Watchman, only mildly interested, relapsed into a pleasant doze.

  ‘By the way,’ he said presently, ‘some driving expert nearly dashed himself to extinction against my bonnet.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. At Diddlestock Corner. Came bucketing out of the blind turning on my right, beat me by a split second, and hung his silly little stern on my front bumpers. Ass!’

  ‘Any damage?’

  ‘No, no. He heaved his pygmy up by the bottom and I backed away. Funny sort of fellow he is.’

  ‘You knew him?’ asked Parish in surprise.

  ‘No.’ Watchman took the tip of his nose between thumb and forefinger. It was a gesture he used in cross-examination. ‘No, I don’t know him, and yet—there was something—I got the impression that he didn’t want to know me. Quite an educated voice. Labourer’s hands. False teeth, I rather fancy.’

  ‘You’re very observant,’ said Parish, lightly.

  ‘No more than the next man, but there was something about the fellow. I was going to ask if you knew him. His car’s in the garage.’

  ‘Surely it’s not—hallo, here are others.’

  Boots and voices sounded in the public bar. Will Pomeroy came through and leant over the counter. He looked, not toward Watchman or Parish, but into a settle on the far side of the Private, a settle whose high back was towards them.

  ‘ ‘Evening, Bob,’ said Will cordially. ‘Kept you waiting?’

  ‘That’s all right, Will,’ said a voice from beyond the settle. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter when you’re ready.’

  Luke Watchman uttered a stifled exclamation.

  ‘What’s up? asked his cousin.

  ‘Come here.’

  Parish strolled nearer to him and, in obedience to a movement of Watchman’s head, stooped towards him.

  ‘What’s up?’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s the same fellow,’ muttered Watchman, ‘he must have been here all the time. That’s his voice.’

  ‘Hell!’ said Parish delightedly.

  ‘D’you think he heard?’

  ‘Of course he heard.’

  ‘Blast the creature! Serves him right.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  The door into the private bar opened. Old Abel came in followed by Norman Cubitt. Cubitt took three darts from a collection in a pewter pot on the bar and moved in front of the dart board.

  ‘I’ll be there in a moment,’ said a woman’s voice from the passage. ‘Don’t start without me.’

  Abel walked into the ingle-nook and put a bottle on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Well, souls,’ he said, ‘reckon we’m settled the hash of they vermin. If thurr’s not a corpse on the premises afore long, I’ll be greatly astonished.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Advance by Watchman

  The bottle was a small one and as Sebastian Parish had remarked it was conspicuously labelled. The word ‘POISON’ in scarlet on a white ground ran diagonally across on an attached label. It struck a note of interjection and alarm and focused the attention of the five men. Few who read that warning escape a sudden jolt of the imagination.

  Parish said, ‘Mr Watchman thinks you are a public danger, Abel. He’s afraid we’ll all be poisoned.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’ll poison himself,’ said Watchman.

  ‘Who, sir? Me?’ asked Abel. ‘Not a bit of it. I be mortal cautious sort of chap when it comes to this manner of murderous tipple, Mr Watchman.’

  ‘I hope you are,’ said Cubitt from the dart board.

  ‘You’re not going to leave it on the mantelshelf, father?’ asked Will.

  ‘No fear of that, sonny. I’ll stow it away careful.’

  ‘You’d much better get rid of it altogether,’ said Watchman. ‘Don’t put it away somewhere. You’ll forget all about it and some day someone will take a sniff at it to find out what it is. Let me take it back to the chemist at Illington. I’d very much like to have a word with that gentleman.’

  ‘Lord love you,’ said Abel, opening his eyes very wide, ‘us’ve not finished with they bowldacious varmints yet, my sonnies. If so be they’ve got a squeak left in ‘em us’ll give ‘em another powerful whiff and finish ‘em off.’

  ‘At least,’ said Cubitt, throwing a dart into double-twenty, ‘at least you might put it out of reach.’

  ‘Mr Cubitt has a poison-phobia,’ said Watchman.

  ‘A what, sir?’

  ‘Never mind about that,’ said Cubitt. ‘I should have thought anybody might boggle at prussic acid.’

  ‘Don’t fret yourselves, gentlemen,’ said Abel. ‘Thurr’ll be none of this brew served out at the Feathers Tap.’

  He mounted the settle and taking the bottle from the mantelpiece pushed it into the top shelf of a double cupboard in the corner of the ingle-nook. He then pulled off the old gloves he wore, threw them on the fire, and turned the key.

  ‘Nobody can call me a careless man,’ he said. ‘I’m all for looking after myself. Thurr’s my first-aid box in thurr, ready to hand, and if any of the chaps cuts themselves with a mucky fish-knife or any other infectious trifle of that sort, they gets a swill of iodine in scratch. Makes ‘em squirm a bit and none the worse for that. I learnt that in the war, my sonnies. I was a surgeon’s orderly and I know the mighty powers thurr be in drugs.’

  He stared at the glass door. The label ‘POISON’ still showed, slightly distorted, in the darkness of the little cupboard.

  ‘Safe enough thurr,’ said Abel and went over to the bar.

  With the arrival of the Pomeroys the private bar took on its customary aspect for a summer’s evening. They both went behind the counters. Abel sat facing the Private and on Cubitt’s order drew pints of draught beer for the company. A game of darts was started in the Public.

  The man in the settle had not moved, but now Watchman saw
his hand reach out for his pint. He saw the callouses, the chipped nails, the coarsened joints of the fingers. Watchman got up, stretched himself, grimaced at Parish, and crossed the room to the settle.

  The light shone full in the face of the stranger. The skin of his face was brown, but Watchman thought it had only recently acquired this colour. His hair stood up in white bristles, his forehead was garnished with bumps that shone in the lamplight. The eyes under the bleached lashes seemed almost without colour. From the nostrils to the corners of the mouth ran grooves that lent emphasis to the fall of the lips. Without raising his head the man looked up at Watchman, and the shadow of a smile seemed to visit his face. He got up and made as if to go to the door, but Watchman stopped him.

  ‘May I introduce myself?’ asked Watchman.

  The man smiled more broadly. ‘They are false teeth,’ thought Watchman, and he added: ‘We have met already this evening, but we didn’t exchange names. Mine is Luke Watchman.’

  ‘I gathered as much from your conversation,’ said the man. He paused for a moment and then said: ‘Mine is Legge.’

  ‘I’m afraid I sounded uncivil,’ said Watchman. ‘I hope you’ll allow me a little motorists’ licence. One always abuses the other man, doesn’t one?’

  ‘You’d every excuse,’ mumbled Legge, ‘every excuse.’ He scarcely moved his lips. His teeth seemed too large for his mouth. He looked sideways at Watchman, picked up a magazine from the settle, and flipped it open, holding it before his face.

  Watchman felt vaguely irritated. He had struck no sort of response from the man and he was not accustomed to falling flat. Obviously, Legge merely wished to be rid of him and this state of affairs piqued Watchman’s vanity. He sat on the edge of the table, and for the second time that evening offered his cigarette-case to Legge.

  ‘No thanks—pipe.’

  ‘I’d no idea I should find you here,’ said Watchman, and noticed uncomfortably that his own voice sounded disproportionately cordial, ‘although you did tell me you were bound for Ottercombe. It’s a good pub, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Legge hurriedly. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Are you making a long visit?’

  ‘I live here,’ said Legge.

  He pulled out his pipe and began to fill it. His fingers moved clumsily and he had an air of rather ridiculous concentration. Watchman felt marooned on the edge of the table. He saw that Parish was listening with a maddening grin, and he fancied that Cubitt’s ears were cocked. ‘Damn it,’ he thought, ‘I will not be put out of countenance by the brute. He shall like me.’ But he could think of nothing to say and Mr Legge had begun to read his magazine.