Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  I don’t get to visit many crime scenes and my immediate reaction was that they were, after all, not that interesting. I found myself in a hotel room, very much like my own. Hanging on a hook on the outer door (still guarded on the far side by an unsuspecting policeman) was a standard hotel-issue dressing gown of cheap white towelling. The double bed was unmade and a large pair of pyjamas was strewn over the floor in a way that most mothers disapprove of. A capacious and probably very expensive suitcase was over by the wall. It was locked, but I knew that most people never change the original combination. I set the three little wheels to 000 and it opened smoothly and discreetly to reveal its contents. There were shirts, some packets of what appeared to be prescription medicines, some improbably large pants, a tie, a couple of shiny, unread paperbacks in Russian – no clues there. I shut the case and re-fastened the catch.

  On the dressing table, I found something worthy of my attention. There was a box of high-grade chocolates, with only one missing. Lots of yummy flavours – though, strangely, no peach truffles. This was odd, but in all other respects it looked a sound selection. I pictured Grigory Davidov going into Apollinaire to purchase this, his last ever box of chocolates. I pictured him choosing these chocolates that, tragically, he would never live to enjoy. I pictured him carrying them home, perhaps planning (as you do) the order in which he would eat them. I can’t be certain, but I think a small tear may have run down my cheek at this point. I doubted that the police would bother to count chocolates, and I knew that the ghost of my former chocolate buddy would be looking down at me kindly. He would not want these chocolates to go to waste.

  The next thing that I remember clearly is that I was sort of floating round the room with milk chocolate and creamy filling melting slowly in my mouth.

  The chocolate concentrations in my body restored to safe levels, I returned to my investigations with a new energy and purpose. I checked the pockets of Davidov’s jacket hanging in the wardrobe. There was a wallet in it with credit cards and quite a lot of cash. If he was happy to keep this much lying around, was it likely that it was cash in the envelope in the safe? Since the cash had no soft fondant centre, it was at no risk from me anyway. I replaced the wallet and closed the wardrobe door.

  I had to admit that I wasn’t coming up with much, and was obliged to reward myself with more chocolate just to keep going. The dressing gown was almost the last thing that I tried. What I found wasn’t much, but it was very odd. In the left-hand pocket there were three things. A couple of pound coins and, bizarrely, a receipt from a kosher restaurant in North London. Well, no reason why you shouldn’t have a Jewish oligarch. I checked the date on the receipt and it was only a few days beforehand – that is to say, Davidov had been in London immediately before coming to France. And paying cash for smoked salmon followed by mehren tzimmes with knaidel.

  There was a noise outside, reminding me that the police might also want their turn in the room at some stage. And I figured they would probably like some privacy when they did. I silently tiptoed back through the door, clutching a box with its two remaining chocolates. I pulled Davidov’s door shut and then, very softly, closed my own and locked it.

  It was at this point that I realized I was also still clutching the receipt and the coins. I might have gone back and returned them, but through the connecting doors (one locked, one not) came the very distinct sound of police activity in French. If I was going to take the receipt or the chocolates back, then it would have to be later. It was all evidence that they might need. On the other hand I did not wish to get arrested as an accessory of some sort while attempting to do my civic duty. I ate the last two chocolates while I wondered what to do.

  I turned the coins over a couple of times as if they might tell me something, but they didn’t. They were just regular pound coins bearing the Queen’s head and, I now realized, my slightly sticky fingerprints. The receipt seemed to be for a meal for one and excluded service. Davidov had drunk a Diet Pepsi with the meal. He had not had a dessert, but had ordered an espresso. I still wasn’t certain what I had found, but I was pretty sure it was important.

  Still, it’s annoying knowing only half the story.

  * * *

  I found Ethelred back on the garden terrace, surveying such view as there was, sipping another coffee.

  He listened attentively to my account, which omitted any reference to orange creams or praline enrobed in bitter chocolate.

  ‘There was no sign of the missing envelope, I suppose?’ he said.

  ‘None,’ I replied. ‘But surely Davidov had had that stolen?’

  ‘So he claimed,’ said Ethelred. ‘I had hoped that was just a ruse.’

  ‘Hoped?’ I said.

  Ethelred shrugged. ‘I meant, I had wondered if it was a ruse . . . but obviously not,’ he said. He had turned his attention to the receipt. ‘I assume that it is your plan to let the police have this in due course?’

  ‘I thought I might sneak it back tonight,’ I said.

  ‘That would be wise.’

  ‘It’s odd that Davidov would put this stuff in his dressing gown,’ I said.

  Ethelred shook his head. ‘Don’t forget that men don’t usually carry handbags,’ he said. ‘All sorts of stuff ends up in your pockets. You empty your trouser pockets before you hang the trousers up. You have to transfer the stuff somewhere. A bedside table is good, but dressing gown pockets are often handy too.’

  ‘But why,’ I said, ‘would Davidov pay a visit to London and seek out an obscure kosher restaurant for a fairly ordinary meal? What is . . .’ I checked the bill again, ‘. . . mehren tzimmes with knaidel, anyway?’

  ‘Carrot pudding with dumplings,’ said Ethelred knowledgeably. It’s the sort of strange stuff he knows. He’s useful at pub quizzes. ‘Very nice, I’m sure; but, as a clue, it’s not much to go on.’

  ‘Perhaps Davidov already knew Gold,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he had been over to London and had taken him to this restaurant.’

  ‘Where only one of them decided to eat? It’s bizarre, though perhaps only marginally less bizarre than an oligarch popping over from Moscow to enjoy a solitary dinner in Finchley.’

  ‘Maybe they had separate bills,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ethelred.

  A hotel minion appeared for long enough for me to order a hot chocolate. While I waited for it to arrive, Ethelred and I sat in silence surveying the bedraggled winter garden. Even in summer it can’t have looked much but now, with the grass overgrown and the token swimming pool hidden under its washed-out blue nylon cover, it looked melancholy and resentful. The last few roses had clearly had a suicide pact with the geraniums. Only the miserable, drooping laurels were genuinely content with their surroundings.

  The garden must have developed into what it was through a series of random and entirely uncoordinated developments on the part of successive managers. One had evidently been a fan of concrete. Another had apparently tried to soften this with a row of fairy lights along the back wall – blatant Christmas decorations, but not this year’s. The new summer house was a feeble attempt at the picturesque. The swimming pool was an unsubtle but inadequate ploy to gain a higher rating from the tourist authority; I wouldn’t have been tempted, even at the height of summer.

  A high brick wall separated this small earthly paradise from that of another hotel on one side and from a narrow lane on the other. On the side bordering the lane, a wooden gate offered, in happier times, an exit to the street and all chocolate shops beyond. On the remaining side, behind the hotel, damp water meadows, full of flaccid weeds, stretched away towards the misty Loire.

  It struck me that, even if the gate was locked, the wall was just climbable and I said so in passing to Ethelred.

  ‘They have a policeman watching the garden, just in case you’re thinking of making a break for it,’ he said. He pointed towards the token summer house, where a chilly and disgruntled officer sat, rubbing his hands. I had not been thinking of making a break for it, but suc
h a move had clearly been pre-empted.

  ‘How much longer are they going to keep us here?’ I muttered.

  ‘Maybe not much longer,’ said Ethelred. ‘They seem to be halfway through their second round of questioning.’

  ‘Just so long as no other silly tosser gets murdered,’ I observed.

  ‘Hardly likely,’ said Ethelred. ‘Oh, I do have one piece of information for you, by the way – hot off the press. The police now know how Mr Davidov died.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t very subtle,’ said Ethelred. ‘Somebody had put cyanide in his chocolates.’

  Ten

  I have always found poison immensely convenient.

  I am not the only writer to appreciate its merits. Agatha Christie was a great one for cyanide. In several of her books, she enjoys her first poisoning so much that she offers us a second before the end. I rarely poison more than one of my characters at a time, but I do poison them whenever the opportunity arises.

  Poison has many advantages for the murderer. Unlike a gunshot, it is silent. Unlike a knife or axe, the murderer does not get covered with an inconvenient amount of the victim’s blood. The fastidious killer does not need to take his hands to the victim’s flesh, which is more or less essential for a strangling. Poison requires no physical strength and less courage than almost any other weapon. With a slow-acting poison, the murderer can be far away before the victim has the first inkling that anything is amiss. This is often helpful. Of course, a succession of inconsiderate Acts of Parliament have made poisons more and more difficult to obtain, but since rat killer and antifreeze are lethal enough in the right dose, this fact alone should not deter the aspiring poisoner.

  Many of the best real-life crimes are poisonings. George Orwell pointed out that of the eight most celebrated cases from the age he describes as ‘our great period in murder’ (1850–1925), no fewer than six were poisonings. More recently one of our most prolific killers used diamorphine to kill an estimated two hundred and fifty victims – though, frankly, you could never get away with that number of deaths in fiction.

  I have to confess to a weakness for cyanide myself. It is, apart from for a faint smell of bitter almonds, not easily detected in food or drink. A 50mg dose will cause death by anoxia within five minutes. Once you’ve taken it, there’s not much going back. It’s the one you choose when your suicide is not just a cry for help.

  Arsenic takes longer, but is a good certain killer from multiple organ failure. Both As2O3 and As2O5 are colourless, odourless and readily soluble in water. Two of Orwell’s golden-age murderers (Seddon and Cotton) employed arsenic to good effect. In Strong Poison Dorothy Sayers adds it to an omelette. It’s a reliable standby for the busy author.

  Aconite is one of the older ones and has sometimes been called the Queen of Poisons. It is a white powder that dissolves in alcohol, which is fine except for victims who are teetotallers. The consumer experiences a numbness and tingling in the mouth immediately after swallowing, followed by a parched sensation in the throat. The feeling spreads to the hands, feet and then to the whole body. Death is usually from a failure of the respiratory system after anything from eight minutes to four hours. One fiftieth of a grain is sufficient to kill a real or fictitious person.

  I reserve strychnine only for those I really dislike. It is not a nice poison. Shortly after taking it, the victim feels that he or she is going to suffocate, as indeed is the case. Eventually. First the facial muscles start to contract and the face is pulled into a hideous grin called the Risus Sardonicus. Then other muscles start to contract causing violent and spasmodic contortions of the whole body. Cruelly, in between each paroxysm, there is a short remission, during which the exhausted victim can believe briefly that the worst is over. But it isn’t. With a livid face and clenched jaws, the victim dies of suffocation after two to three hours.

  Occasionally it’s good to go for one of the lesser-known poisons. Agatha Christie uses an eserine-based eye medicine in Crooked House and taxine in A Pocket Full of Rye. Dr Crippen selected hyoscine in his wife’s case (but it didn’t work, so he had to shoot her after all, which was a shame). It pays to keep people guessing.

  Poisonings are not always deliberate. The Bradford Sweets Poisoning of 1858 is one of the more famous examples. William Hardaker (Humbug Billy as he was known) succeeded in poisoning two hundred of his customers with peppermint-and-arsenic humbugs. The supplier of Billy’s humbugs was one Joseph Neal. Neal had intended, he later said, to adulterate his sweets only with plaster of Paris – which was cheaper than sugar and not terribly harmful. He delegated its purchase, however, to his lodger, James Archer, who had only a vague idea of what he was after. The pharmacist who normally supplied Neal was sick and left his assistant to locate the ‘daft’, as it was known, and package it up for Archer. Had he said clearly that the ‘daft’ was in the cellar next to the arsenic, then the assistant might have realized that he needed to be careful. Instead, James Archer came home proudly clutching twelve pounds of arsenic – enough to kill roughly two thousand people. This Neal used along with forty pounds of sugar, four pounds of gum and a dash of peppermint essence to produce the next batch of sweets. Billy noticed that the batch looked a bit different and cannily negotiated a discount. In the end it was surprising that only twenty of his customers died.

  Personally, if it were me being murdered, I’d go for a very large dose of diamorphine. Interestingly, Harold Shipman, after a successful career poisoning others, chose to hang himself in Wakefield Prison. But there is, as they say, no accounting for taste.

  * * *

  Elsie is not somebody who was designed for speed, but one moment she was sitting next to me on the terrace and the next she was being violently sick in the bushes. It was a pale and repentant literary agent who resumed her place on the chair beside me. I tried to keep a straight face as she confessed how she had disposed of one key piece of evidence.

  ‘Had you paused long enough to ask me, I might have been able to reassure you,’ I said. ‘Grigory Davidov must have died almost instantly, after apparently consuming a single chocolate. You ate eleven half an hour ago. What does that suggest to you?’

  ‘The others were just regular chocolate? Hold the cyanide?’

  ‘That is a reasonable assumption. Had any of the truffles contained even a fraction of the poison in the one eaten by Davidov, you would be very sick indeed by now – and probably dead – rather than merely queasy.’

  ‘But Davidov had eaten only one from the box. Wasn’t it a bit of a coincidence that he ate the only poisoned one?’

  ‘I think that his chocolate must have been poisoned by somebody who knew him well – somebody who knew exactly which one he would choose first.’

  Elsie frowned.

  ‘There was no peach truffle left in the box,’ she said with a clear sense of grievance.

  ‘A poisoned peach truffle it was then,’ I said. ‘A lethal peach truffle precisely and knowledgeably targeted by somebody who had access to poisons.’

  ‘Well, you might have told me before,’ she muttered.

  ‘I didn’t know before, and I certainly had no way of predicting that you would start eating key pieces of evidence so shortly after lunch.’

  ‘I ought to sue the French police, leaving dangerous chocolate lying around like that.’

  ‘To be fair, they also had no idea until a few minutes ago that Davidov had been poisoned – let alone that it was in the chocolate. They had moreover locked the door and placed a twenty-four-hour guard on it to prevent anyone doing what you did. But I agree that in all other respects they were most negligent. Would you like to know, however, what else I have discovered?’

  Elsie did, but was prepared to admit it only by way of a slight moderation of her scowl.

  ‘I was able to find out a little more about Jonathan Gold’s murder. The sergeant is quite a devotee of crime fiction and had actually read one or two of my books in the Editions Sonatine translations. He became
quite chatty after a while and was willing to help me in my research for the next Fairfax case.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to write any more Fairfaxes?’

  ‘I’m not, but he doesn’t know that. What he told me was interesting. It would seem that Gold let his assailant in – there was no sign of the door or window being forced. It was late enough that he had already got changed for bed, though you implied he may have opted for an early night anyway.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, avoiding my gaze. ‘He must have been extremely tired.’

  ‘He was in his pyjamas in any case. His bloodstained dressing gown appeared to be thrown over him – possibly he was holding it when he fell or perhaps it had been loosely draped over his shoulders. There was no hole corresponding to the knife wound in the dressing gown anyway. The police theory is that he was in bed and got up to answer a knock at the door. He picked up the dressing gown as he did so, but never had time to put it on. There was no sign of any struggle – nothing broken, no furniture overturned – again suggesting that whoever entered the room was able to do so without arousing suspicion or alarm. Jonathan Gold must have been caught completely off guard. We have to assume that it was somebody he knew and that it was all over very quickly. The rooms on both sides of Jonathan Gold’s happened to be empty. Nobody seems to have heard anything. It was a single stab wound from a sharp, broad-bladed knife, delivered with some strength. There was no sign of the murder weapon, but the killer would have had several hours to dispose of it before the body was found.’