by Ngaio Marsh
Dr Shaw thrust his hands in his pockets and stuck out his lower lip.
‘I’m not a toxicologist,’ he said. ‘Mordant is, and we’ve taken the king-pin’s opinion. Watchman, on his own statement, had a strong idiosyncrasy for cyanide. He told Parish and Cubitt about this the night before the tragedy.’
‘Yes. I saw that in the files. It’s good enough, you think?’
‘We’ve got no precedent for the affair. The experts seem to think it good enough. That dart was thrown with considerable force. It penetrated to the bone, or rather, it actually entered the finger at such an angle that it must have lain along the bone. It’s good enough.’
‘There was no trace of cyanide in the mouth?’
‘None. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility of his having taken it by the mouth.’
‘O Lord!’ sighed Alleyn, ‘nor it does. Did the room stink of it?’
‘No, it stank of brandy. So did the body. Brandy, by the way, is one of the antidotes given for cyanide poisoning. Along with artificial respiration, potassium permanganate, glucose, and half a dozen other remedies none of which is much use if the cyanide has got into the bloodstream.’
‘Have you a pair of scales?’ asked Alleyn abruptly. ‘Chemical scales or larger but accurate scales?’
‘What? Yes. Yes, I have. Why?’
‘Fox, my opposite number, will be here in a minute. He’s calling at the police station for the fragments of broken tumbler. I’ve got a rather fantastic notion. Nothing in it, I dare say. We’ve a pair of scales at the pub, but I thought you might be amused if we did a bit of our stuff here.’
‘Of course I would. Wait a moment while I get rid of that hypochondriacal crone. Shan’t be long. Don’t move. She only wants a flea in her ear.’
Dr Shaw went into the waiting-room. Alleyn could hear his voice raised in crisp admonishment.
‘—pull yourself together, you know.…sound as a bell…takeup a hobby…your own physician…be a sensible woman.’
A doorbell rang and in a moment Fox and Superintendent Harper were shown into the surgery.
‘Hallo, hallo!’ said Harper. ‘What’s all this I hear? Thought I’d come along. Got an interesting bit of news for you.’ He dropped his voice. ‘I sent a chap up to London by the milk train. He’s taken the dart to Dabs and they’ve just rung through. The prints are good enough. What do you think they’ve found?’
‘I can see they’ve found something, Nick,’ said Alleyn, smiling.
‘You bet they have. Those prints belong to Mr Montague Thringle who did four years for embezzlement and came out of Broadmoor twenty-six months ago.’
‘Loud cheers,’ said Alleyn, ‘and much laughter.’
‘Eh? Yes, and that’s not the best of it. Who do you think defended one of the accused and shifted all the blame on to Thringle?’
‘None other than Luke Watchman, the murdered KC?’
‘You’re right. Legge’s a gaolbird who owes, or thinks he owes, his sentence to Watchman. He’s just dug himself in pretty, with a nice job and a lot of mugs eating out of his hand, and along comes the very man who can give him away.’
‘Now I’ll tell you something you don’t know,’ said Alleyn. ‘Who do you think was implicated with Montague Thringle and got off with six months?’
‘Lord Bryonie. Big scandal it was.’
‘Yes. Miss Darragh’s unfortunate cousin, the Lord Bryonie.’
‘You don’t tell me that. Miss Darragh! I’d put her right out of the picture.’
‘She holds a watching-brief for Thringle-alias-Legge, I fancy,’ said Alleyn, and related the morning’s adventure.
‘By gum!’ cried Harper, ‘I think it’s good enough. I reckon we’re just about right for a warrant. With the fact that only Legge could have known the dart would hit—what d’you think? Shall we pull him in?’
‘I don’t think we’ll make an arrest just yet, Nick.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I think the result would be what the high-brows call a miscarriage of justice. I’ll tell you why.’
II
But before he had finished telling them why, an unmistakable rumpus in the street announced the arrival of Colonel Brammington’s car. And presently Colonel Brammington himself came charging into the room with Dr Shaw on his heels.
‘I saw your car outside,’ he shouted. ‘A galaxy of all the talents with Aesculapius to hold the balance. Aesculapius usurps the seat of justice, poetic justice with her lifted scale.’
Dr Shaw put a small pair of scales on the table and grinned. Colonel Brammington took one of Alleyn’s cigarettes and hurled himself into a chair.
‘Curiosity,’ he said, ‘was praised by the great Doctor as one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. His namesake, the rare Ben, remarked that he did love to note and to observe. With these noble precedents before me I shall offer no excuse, but, following the example of Beatrice, shall like a lapwing run, close to the ground, to hear your confidence. An uncomfortable feat and one for which my great belly renders me unfit. Have you any matches? Ah, thank you.’
Harper, with his back to the chief constable, turned his eyes up for the edification of Fox. He laid a tin box on the table.
‘Here you are, Mr Alleyn.’
‘Good.’ Alleyn weighed the box speculatively in his hands and then emptied its contents into the scale.
‘What is that?’ demanded Colonel Brammington. ‘Glass? Ah, the orts and fragments of the brandy-glass, perhaps?’
‘That’s it, sir,’ said Alleyn.
‘And pray why do you put them on the scales?’
‘Sir,’ murmured Alleyn politely, ‘to find out their weight.’
Colonel Brammington said mildly, ‘You mock me, by heaven. And what do they weigh?’
‘Two ounces, forty-eight grains. That right, Dr Shaw?’
‘That’s it.’
Alleyn returned the fragments to their box and took a second box from his pocket.
‘In this,’ he said, ‘are the pieces of an identically similar glass for which I gave Mr Pomeroy one and sixpence. They are his best glasses. Now then.’
He tipped the second shining heap into the scales.
‘Yes, by George,’ said Alleyn softly. ‘Look. Two ounces, twenty-four grains.’
‘Here!’ exclaimed Harper. ‘That’s less. It must be a lighter glass.’
‘No,’ said Alleyn. ‘It’s the same brand of glass. Abel took the glasses for the brandy from a special shelf. I’ve borrowed two more, unbroken. Let’s have them, Fox.’
Fox produced two tumblers. Each of them weighed two ounces, twenty-four grains.
‘But look here,’ objected Harper. ‘We didn’t get every scrap of that glass up. Some of it had been ground into the boards. Watchman’s glass should, if anything, weigh less than the others.’
‘I know,’ said Alleyn.
‘Well, then—’
‘Some other glass must have fallen,’ said Colonel Brammington. ‘They were full of distempering draughts, red-hot with drinking. One of them may have let fall some other glass. A pair of spectacles. Didn’t Watchman wear an eyeglass?’
‘It was round his neck,’ said Dr Shaw, ‘unbroken.’
‘There seems to have been no other glass broken, sir,’ said Alleyn. ‘I’ve asked. Did you find all the pieces in one place, Harper?’
‘Like you’d expect, a bit scattered and trampled about. I dare say there were pieces in the soles of their boots. Damn it all,’ cried Harper in exasperation, ‘it must weigh lighter.’
He weighed the glass again, peering suspiciously at the scales. The results was exactly the same. The fragments of Watchman’s glass weighed twenty-four grains heavier than the unbroken tumbler.
‘This is rather amusing,’ said Colonel Brammington.
Alleyn sat at the table and spread the broken glass over a sheet of paper. Fox gave him a pair of tweezers and he began to sort the pieces into a graduated row. The oth
er men drew closer.
‘It’s the same tumbler,’ said Colonel Brammington. ‘There, you see, are the points of one of those loathsome stars.’
Alleyn took a jeweller’s lens from his pocket.
‘Ah!’ muttered Colonel Brammington, staring at him with a bulging and raffish eye. ‘He peers, he screws a glass into his orb and with enlarged vision feeds his brain.’
‘We always feel rather self-conscious about these things,’ said Alleyn, ‘but they have their uses. Here, I think, are three, no, four small pieces of glass that might be different from—well, let’s weigh them.’
He put them in the scales.
‘Thirty-one grains. That, Harper, leaves a margin of eleven grains for the bits you missed. Any good?’
‘Do you think these bits are a different class of stuff, Mr Alleyn?’ asked Harper.
‘I think so. There’s a difference in colour and if you look closely you can see they’re a bit thicker.’
‘He has written a monograph on broken tumblers,’ cried Colonel Brammington delightedly. ‘Let me look through your lens.’
He crouched over the table.
‘They are different,’ he said. ‘You are quite right, my dear Alleyn. What can it mean? The iodine bottle? No, it was found unbroken beneath the settle.’
‘What did you discover at Woolworth’s, Fox?’ asked Alleyn.
‘Nothing much, Mr Alleyn. I tried all the other places as well. They haven’t sold any and they say there’s very little shop-lifting in Illington.’
‘Veil after veil will lift,’ remarked Colonel Brammington, ‘but there will be veil upon veil behind. What is this talk of shop-lifting?’
‘I’ll explain, sir,’ began Alleyn.
‘On second thoughts, pray don’t. I prefer, Alleyn, to be your Watson. You dine with me tonight? Very good. Give me the evidence, and let me brood.’
‘But don’t you wish to hear Mr Alleyn’s case, sir?’ asked Harper in a scandalized voice. ‘Your position—’
‘I do not. I prefer to listen to voices in the upper air nor lose my simple faith in mysteries. I prefer to take the advice of the admirable Tupper and will let not the conceit of intellect hinder me from worshipping mystery. But nevertheless give me your plain plump facts. I will sing, with Ovid, of facts.’
‘You will not have Ovid’s privilege of inventing them,’ rejoined Alleyn. ‘I have brought a copy of my report on the case. It’s up to date.’
Colonel Brammington took the file and seemed to become the victim of an intolerable restlessness. He rose, hitched up his shapeless trousers and said rapidly in a high voice, ‘Well, goodbye, Shaw. Come to dinner tonight.’
‘Oh, thank you very much, sir,’ said Dr Shaw. ‘I’d like to. Black tie?’
‘As the fancy takes you. I shall make some gesture. Broadcloth and boiled linen. You come, Harper?’
‘Thank you, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve got to—’
‘All right. I see. Three then. You, Alleyn, Shaw, and—ah—’
‘Fox,’ said Alleyn.
‘Ah, yes. Splendid. Well, au revoir.’
‘I was going to ask you, sir—’ began Harper.
‘O God! What?’
‘It doesn’t matter, sir, if you’re in a hurry,’ Harper opened the door with emphasized politeness. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Oh, goodbye to you, Harper, goodbye,’ said Colonel Brammington impatiently, and plunged out.
‘If that,’ said Harper sourly, ‘is the modern idea of a chief constable it’s not mine. You wouldn’t credit it, would you, that when that gentleman’s brother dies, he’ll be a Lord? A Lord, mind you! Bawling hurricane. Where’s he get the things he says, Doctor? Out of his head or out of books?’
‘Not having his brains, his memory, or his library, I can’t tell you,’ said Dr Shaw.
III
Alleyn, Fox and Harper went to the police station. Here they had a long reiterative conversation. They compared Alleyn’s casts with the shoes Watchman wore on the day of his death, and found that they tallied exactly. They went over the case step by step. Alleyn expounded, the others listened. They laid their collection of oddments on Harper’s table; the brandy-bottle, the broken glass, the iodine bottle, the stained newspaper, the small china vessel from the rat-hole and the bottle of Scheele’s Acid. Harper gave Alleyn a stoppered bottle.
‘Ah,’ said Alleyn, ‘that’s the stuff out of the rat-hole jar. I want you to get it analysed. Perhaps Dr Mordant would do it. No, I suppose that would be too unofficial. It had better go up to London.’
‘You think our murderer got the stuff from the garage?’ asked Harper.
‘I do.’
‘But the thing was full.’
‘Because it was full,’ said Alleyn.
‘You reckon that was water,’ asked Harper slowly.
‘Yes, Nick.’
‘I see,’ said Harper.
‘The poison-party,’ said Alleyn, ‘was attended by Abel, who put the prussic acid in the china pot and stopped the hole; by Will, by Miss Moore, by Legge, who only looked in for a moment, and by a couple of fishermen who were on their way to the public bar and who don’t come into the picture. Subsequently Abel warned everybody in the place about what he had done, so that the actual attendance at the poison-party may not give us our answer. On the other hand it is possible that one of them lagged behind and pinched the poison. They all profess to have forgotten in what order they left. Now prussic acid in Mr Noggins’ fifty per cent solution is a highly volatile liquid. Judging by the stench, its fumes have accounted for at least one rat, so probably it was not removed immediately. On the other hand it seems it would evaporate considerably in something under an hour. I’m not sure on this point. We’ll experiment. The experts say in their report, under an hour. Very good. My contention is that the murderer must have nipped into the garage, within an hour after Abel left it, and taken the poison which would be kept in a tightly-corked bottle until it was needed.’
‘But how the hell would he get it? The jar had Abel’s prints. It hadn’t been touched.’
‘Do you remember—?’
‘By God!’ shouted Harper. ‘Don’t tell me. I’ve got it.’
He broke into a stream of oaths through which his enlightenment struggled for expression.
‘That’s it,’ said Alleyn. ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’
‘Looks like it!’ ejaculated Harper. ‘It blasted well shrieks of it. I’m a hell of a detective I am! Look at me! I missed the point about that evaporation business! Took Abel in to look at the pot and he said it was just the amount he’d poured in. Well, the damn thing was full. I never thought it might be water. I took photographs and sealed the place up just as it was. I did pour off this stuff and keep it. I’ll say that for myself. I made sure the poison had come out of the bottle in the cupboard. Blast it!’
‘Abel’s prints,’ Alleyn said, ‘were still on the key of the cupboard and on the knob. You can’t open the door without turning the key and the knob. Dr Shaw saw that, when he looked at the cupboard and waited until it had been tested for prints. If anyone else had been to the cupboard they would either have left their own prints, used gloves and smeared Abel’s prints, or else wiped them off entirely. Nobody could have been to the cupboard.’
‘I knew that, but all the same—Well, I suppose I thought they might have got at the bottle while—oh, hell!’
‘Anybody might have missed it, Mr Harper,’ said Fox. ‘I didn’t pick it till Mr Alleyn pointed it out.’
‘And I was lucky,’ said Alleyn. ‘I’d read Taylor on the cyanides during our trip down.’
‘Well,’ said Harper, ‘the coroner and Dr Shaw missed the point. Oates gave evidence of discovery of the stuff in the rat-hole. Old Pomeroy deposed it was the same amount he’d poured in. Nobody said anything about evaporation.’
‘Oates,’ Alleyn pointed out, ‘saw it the first night with Dr Shaw, before they knew the exact nature of the poison. Not much more than t
wenty-six hours after it was put there.’
‘He might have just dipped the dart in the stuff,’ said Harper. ‘I did think of that. But now—’
‘Now we know the dart must have been doctored a very short time before Oates sealed it up. You see where we’re heading?’
‘Yes,’ said Harper unwillingly. ‘I see, all right. But suppose Legge had the stuff on him and put it on the dart just before he threw it—’
‘He didn’t,’ said Alleyn. ‘Believe me, he didn’t. He’s a clumsy man. He fumbles. His hands are coarse and his fingers are thick. To get cyanide on that dart with seven pairs of eyes watching him, he’d need the skill and the hands of a conjurer. Even Abel Pomeroy, who thinks or wants to think Legge did the job, can’t offer an idea of how he did it. Parish who has thrown Legge in my teeth every time I’ve seen him, hasn’t an argument to offer. And on the other side we’ve got Will, Miss Moore, Miss Darragh and Cubitt all ready to swear with, I believe, perfect truth, that Legge, as he stood there under the light, had no chance of anointing the fourth or any other dart.’
‘But we can’t explain the poison in any other way.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Alleyn, ‘I think we can. This is our case—’
IV
Five o’clock had struck and they were still at the police station. Alleyn had gone over every word of his report with Harper. He had described each interview and had sorted the scraps of evidence into two groups, the relevant and the irrelevant. He had poured prussic acid solution into Abel’s little jar and, to reproduce rat-hole conditions, had placed it in a closed drawer. At the end of forty-six minutes half had evaporated.
‘So you see,’ said Alleyn, ‘if the liquid you found in the tin is water, as I believe it is, it looks as if the murderer must have visited the garage within forty-six minutes. Now on that night—the night on which Watchman chipped Legge and Will Pomeroy lost his temper—Legge gave an exhibition of dart-throwing which lasted only a few seconds. This took place a few minutes after Abel had set the poison in the garage. The argument followed. Legge went into the public bar where he brought off the trick with the darts. He then returned and joined the others in a game of Round-the-Clock—’