The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  ‘No,’ Gil said.

  ‘I must remember to get some more poison labels.’

  He went on looking at the green fluid in the ordinary medicine bottle. ‘That’s poisonous, is it?’

  ‘Almost everything I’ve got here is poisonous in large doses. It’s all so concentrated. That’s why I put such a lot of water in when I’m making up medicines. I’ve seen the way you’ve looked at me — don’t argue, Gil, you know you have.’ She was laughing as she spoke, in a stumbling sort of way. ‘As though I was cheating the customer by filling up with water. But if I didn’t, there’d be an awful lot of corpses in the Brookchurch area.’

  ‘How — how much of that would kill someone?’ He nodded slowly at the bottle.

  ‘Hard to say. It’s bitter stuff, so I can’t imagine anyone would take enough to kill them by accident. I suppose a tablespoon would about do it. It comes’ — she seemed to be driven on, wanting to tell him things, to keep talking — ‘from Deadly Nightshade, you know.’

  ‘The stuff the kids pick sometimes, and then there’s something about them in the papers?’

  ‘We still have our half-dozen deaths a year that way, in this district. The atropine is the poisonous agent. Very hard to detect, too. If someone’s poisoned by belladonna, it doesn’t show in the way arsenic and that type of metallic poison does. Unless you were looking for it at a post-mortem, you might not find it.’

  He could not tell whether she was thinking aloud, telling him something she thought might interest him, or trying to convey something important to him.

  ‘And yet,’ he said dully, ‘it’s a medicine?’

  ‘Most medicines are the same. Take too much, and they can kill you.’

  She waved at the array of bottles at one end of the bench, all neatly labelled.

  He laughed, although none of it was funny. There was something awfully serious creeping up on him. But he heard himself saying:

  ‘Finishing off a few old enemies, Aunt Laura?’

  She nodded approvingly at him. ‘Just deliver the knock-out doses to their respective addresses, will you? Never mind Mrs. Howick’s — I’ll take it in myself this evening.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Only half an hour before lunch. There was a big surgery this morning. I can fit one or two of our old chronics in, though.’

  The two of them went out companionably into the sunshine. Illness seemed an odd, improbable thing on a day like this. People lying in bed, people suffering, people being a nuisance to themselves and to everyone else . . . It was all wrong. On a day like this you wanted to feel that everything was going to work out wonderfully, and that there would never be anything to spoil it.

  ‘We forgot to do anything about that bottle of belladonna,’ said Aunt Laura.

  ‘I’ll go back —’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. It was unlike her to be so slipshod, but somehow he had expected it. ‘Remind me this afternoon,’ she said, ‘to put a proper label on it. We don’t want any accidents, do we?’

  ‘No,’ said Gil.

  Chapter Three

  In this courtroom the past was being gradually reconstructed. The questions, the probing demands and swift challenges, were all meant to evoke the incidents of that past August. Before each witness a picture was summoned up; some scene was re-created and he was asked to describe the progress of the drama. The whole purpose of a trial was dramatic: it was the equivalent of a play, in which events were presented for the benefit of those twelve solemn-faced creatures in the jurybox.

  Presented inaccurately, thought Laura. Distorted, with the wrong emphasis. True and yet not true. True on the face of things but all making the wrong impact.

  The court, it had been emphasised in the opening speech for the prosecution, was concerned with matters of fact. And all the facts were there. But they did not add up to what the prosecution claimed they did.

  ‘Call Doctor Francis Whiting.’

  Poor Whiting. Laura was amused by the quick apologetic glance he flashed at her. It was hard lines on all of them, having to give evidence against her while she sat and watched. Don’t blame me, old Whiting was saying; they’re going to ask me what I found, and I shall have to tell them, but there’s nothing personal in it. You know me.

  She heard him explaining, in his usual hurried, vaguely deprecating way, how he had been called in, why it was he who was called and not the local doctor, and what he found.

  The re-creation of the scene — the all-important scene — the dead body in the bedroom . . .

  ‘On the bedside table was a medicine bottle with a label on it, on which the name ‘Mrs. Swanton’ was written. There was also the printed instruction, ‘One tablespoonful four times a day’. The dead woman was lying on the floor. She had been violently sick, and had also suffered from diarrhœa. On examination of the body I found certain symptoms which suggested the possibility of poisoning. The skin was extremely dry, and the pupils were dilated. The police having been sent for, I waited for them to arrive, and reported my opinion that the condition of eyes and skin, together with the vomiting and diarrhœa, were consonant with atropine poisoning.’

  Doctor Whiting looked more and more distressed. He answered one or two routine questions, and then stepped down. This sort of thing was not what he was used to. In all his years in the district, nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Yet at the same time he was slightly proud as he went away. In spite of the parochial, humdrum nature of his medical practice, he had spotted the symptoms right away. He hadn’t thought, as many an old fogey might have done, that the dead woman had just had a stomach upset, or taken some medicine which disagreed with her. He had known at once — he could almost believe he had sensed it in the atmosphere — that there had been foul play. Suicide or murder. He had looked at that body and the mess around it, and had diagnosed atropine poisoning. And he had been right. It was terrible to think of, but at least he had proved what a good doctor he was.

  Now there was an expert in the box.

  ‘Am I not right in saying, Sir Everett, that it is harder to detect the presence of belladonna than, say, arsenic, in the human system?’

  ‘Atropine, the active principal of belladonna, is an alkaloid poison. Such poisons do not linger in the body in the same way as the metallic poisons — the minerals — but there are nevertheless quite accurate tests . . .’

  The jury listened fascinated to curt technicalities, to stories of drops in cats’ eyes. One member of the jury looked as though he, too, might be sick at any moment when the analysis of the dead woman’s vomit was described to him.

  Really, thought Laura, death is so messy. It was not a new thought to her. She was familiar with the unpleasantness of death’s concomitants; but today, unexpectedly, she felt a sympathy for those people who were being forced to consider it for, perhaps, the first time. It was only a momentary flicker; for why should she feel sympathy for those twelve human beings who might prove, in the end, to have no sympathy for her?

  ‘And a fatal dose would consist of . . .?’

  Facts and figures — so compelling, so misleading. Not misleading in the sense that it was not true that the woman was dead. Of course she was dead. Of course she had died of drinking belladonna. One bitter tablespoonful was, as this efficient-sounding man with the Scots burr in his self-satisfied voice was assuring the court, quite sufficient to bring about death. Particularly as the dead woman had been, for one in her condition, undernourished.

  The handwriting on the bottle was identified as that of Gilbert Drysdale. The contents were established to be a tincture of belladonna.

  Prosecuting counsel was holding forth once more.

  ‘The Crown has called this medical evidence first in order to establish in your minds the assurance that the cause of death was atropine poisoning. It is as well to have this settled at the outset, and it has not been contested by my learned friend for the defence. What we now propose to show you is the means by which this poison was administered. The quest
ion of suicide has been raised — it was considered, quite rightly, by the police in the early stages of their investigation. But, as I told you in my opening speech, a letter from Manchester altered their approach.’

  Gladys June Bannister was called. She was a small, sharp-featured woman who might have been in her late forties or early fifties. She gabbled the oath with a fierce determination, and glared spitefully at Laura.

  ‘On the 29th of July I got a letter . . .’

  The letter was produced for the benefit of the court, and a handwriting expert vouched for its authenticity.

  Another scene being conjured up. Another link in the improbable yet terribly convincing story. Laura listened to the hard Northern voice, crackling with a vindictiveness that would have been comic if it had not been so earnest and self-righteous. ‘Murderess,’ said the voice, grinding out the syllables.

  ‘. . . and then, well, not hearing from her like she said, I got worried, see, and when I saw that bit in the papers I got in touch with the police right away. She ought to have known better. I’d warned her against trying anything like that, and she must have known what a risk she was running, but you couldn’t tell her anything . . .’

  Laura shook her head, musing. Along with the picture that was being built up for the benefit of the jury, there was another picture in her own mind. She thought, ironically, of Charlotte as she had been up in that bedroom — of the way things had been moving purposefully towards her . . .

  Chapter Four

  Charlotte, confined to bed, had been feeling very sorry for herself.

  Cystitis, Laura had called it, as though that settled everything. Give the ailment a name, and that was that. ‘Quite a common urinary infection,’ she had glibly said. That made it no better. It sounded as nasty as it felt. The patient’s discomfort and humiliation — for there was something humiliating about it which could not be dismissed by a technical name — meant nothing to the doctor.

  Charlotte looked with distaste at the box of pills on her table, and at the medicine bottle. The bottle was almost empty.

  She picked up a tattered detective novel which Mrs. Swanton had found somewhere in the house and brought to her. A few pages had been torn out, but this did not seem to make much difference. Charlotte could, in any case, never follow the reasonings of detective inspectors in novels like this — particularly when those inspectors interlarded their deductions with lectures on old lace, the Chinese theatre or the poems of John Donne. It was all too complicated. Every now and then one of the characters would say something which was obviously meant to be terribly significant and which would later prove to be a vital clue; but Charlotte had never been able to retain such items in her mind or fit them into any coherent pattern.

  She was instinctively certain that real murders were not like this. Living people were not so ingenious in their methods of taking life. Hitting someone on the head in a rage was an understandable thing: that she could understand, and, indeed, she shivered when she thought how easily she herself might land up in the dock for acting impetuously. There were so many people you felt like hitting on the head. Or shooting someone — that, too, was easily imagined, even though she had never held a gun in her hand. If she ever did get hold of a gun, it would be sure to go off.

  But all these red herrings and misunderstandings were silly. She could not be bothered to go on reading. In real life there were surely not these interminable complexities, these innumerable suspects. All the murders you read about in the Sunday papers were brutal and straightforward. There was never any subtlety — only pitifully clumsy attempts to cover the thing up once it was done.

  All impetuous and mad . . . like someone pushing someone else out of a railway carriage.

  No. She must not think of that. Somehow there had been a mistake. She had been dozing. She could not have seen what she thought she had seen. Laura could not have attempted anything so insane.

  She tried to thrust the blurred, nightmarish vision out of her mind. But the printed page before her was no distraction.

  She longed for a Sunday paper — for the one Mrs. Swanton got, not Laura’s, which was full of articles about solemn books and sour, derogatory reviews of films which Charlotte knew she herself would have enjoyed enormously. It was not as though Laura ever read her paper. It hung about for a couple of days, hardly rumpled, and then was used for lighting the fire.

  Today was only Thursday, anyway. Thursday the 4th of August.

  It seemed only a short time since those first few days in Brookchurch which she had spent in bed. But then the room had been strange to her, and its strangeness had been a help: she had been saved from despondency by this room and Mrs. Swanton, and by the lazy comfort of those days. She had been wretched at first, but now, when she looked back, they took on an aura of tranquillity. In these new surroundings she had recovered her strength and thought how good and kind people were.

  That was before she realised just how much Laura hated her.

  Now the room was too familiar. She was trapped. She had got away, but Laura had fetched her back and was imprisoning her. The little room, once so fresh, had become a cell.

  That was nonsense. She must not let herself get silly. Below her window she heard Mrs. Swanton’s voice, cheerful and inconclusive as ever. Mrs. Swanton would not be a party to keeping her here against her will. If she really thought anything was wrong, she had only to ask Mrs. Swanton to fetch another doctor, to insist on being moved from here — even to get up and walk out, for her illness was not a major one . . . merely depressing, uncomfortable and debilitating.

  If only she had something to occupy her mind.

  Her eyes strayed to the open page of the detective novel, its spine cracked so that it lay sprawled limply open on the counterpane.

  ‘Detective-Inspector Fennimore raised one patrician eyebrow and said: ‘Of course it wasn’t a genuine Manet. You spotted that at once, I have no doubt, my good Simpson?’’

  Oh, really . . .

  She lay back again, and thought of Peter. Then of Walter. And then, with a vividness that took her breath away, of Peter again.

  She wanted Peter. She crossed her hands under the sheet upon her stomach, and felt an awful longing for her husband.

  Of course. It was only natural. He was her husband. Nobody else would do.

  For one preposterous moment she felt that she was being disloyal to Walter; and then the absurdity became too much for her, and she laughed out loud. It was a revelation. She was — after all this time it had dawned on her — a faithful wife. Truly faithful. She would not see Walter again.

  It was incredible that Walter should so quickly have receded. Only with difficulty could she recall the sound of his voice. Deliberately she tried to evoke the echo of his hoarse, arrogant endearments, and to feel the clutch of his hands. The memory left her unmoved.

  Just as the reality had left her unmoved.

  Yes, it was true. She had given herself to Walter, driven by her physical need for that ecstasy she had shared with Peter, unable to control herself any longer; and her body had been unawakened. Walter had not assuaged her hunger. There was only one man in the world who could do that now.

  She had never expected to turn into a good, faithful wife — it had not been held as an ideal by the circle of people in which she and Peter moved — but now she realised that that was exactly what she was meant to be. It gave her a funny feeling inside. She wanted to tell someone about her discovery because it was so very, very important.

  No good telling Walter. Walter would be unlikely to appreciate it.

  Poor man, she thought with infinite compassion.

  The lovely tranquillity of the revelation was still upon her when footsteps on the landing heralded the arrival of Laura, closely followed by Mrs. Swanton carrying a tray with lunch laid out on it.

  Laura looked brisk and determined, her whole bearing announcing that this visit was one of the least of her daily tasks.

  ‘How are we today?’ she asked
with impersonal cheerfulness, daring Charlotte to say that she did not feel too well.

  ‘Now don’t be long,’ said Mrs. Swanton, pushing things out of the way so that she could put the tray down. She squinted short-sightedly at the medicine bottle, which she had jarred perilously close to the edge of the table. ‘You haven’t got much of that left.’

  ‘I’ve got another bottle made up,’ said Laura, bending over Charlotte. ‘I meant to bring it when I came up.’

  ‘I’ll go and fetch it —’

  ‘No.’ Laura straightened up abruptly. ‘No, I can send it in later. There’s enough for a tablespoonful there.’

  Mrs. Swanton began to fuss about the room as though she would gladly stay for some time, putting things straight and then putting them crooked again. As soon as Laura had moved away from the bed, her mother went over to it and tucked Charlotte in, plumping up the pillows and then lifting the tray on to the bed.

  ‘There, now.’

  Charlotte warmed to that ready smile and the affection of those fluttering, eager hands.

  She said: ‘I’ve been lying here thinking . . .’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs. Swanton happily. ‘It does you good to have a chance of lying back and thinking about things, doesn’t it? I wish Laura would put her feet up in the afternoons sometimes.’

  ‘It would probably be a breach of my terms of service with the National Health people,’ said Laura, picking up the detective novel and studying the open page with remote contempt.

  Charlotte felt that she ought to defend herself by saying that she, too, thought the novel was rubbish. Instead, she said to Mrs. Swanton:

  ‘I do love Peter.’

  ‘Of course you do, dear.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve just found out how much I love him.’

  There were tears in Mrs. Swanton’s eyes. ‘I’m so glad.’ She kissed Charlotte. ‘Now get on with your lunch.’