‘So perhaps ... if he died from arsenic and not from cantharides,’ Professor Shaw said tentatively, ‘and there is only one sweetmeat missing, then presumably that is the one that Miss Keith took, and we must discover where the arsenic was, before anyone else takes any.’
‘And find out who the poisoner is,’ added Urquhart, with an edge to his voice.
‘It is harder to see than cantharides,’ Dr. Pagan said carefully, looking about him. ‘It could have been in the wine, in which case we may well find some deposit at the bottom of the jug, or even at the bottom of the glass.’
There was a sudden crunch and a tinkle.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Christopher Urquhart, ‘I’m afraid I have trodden on the glass.’
They all looked down at the pieces as he moved his long, elegant foot back. Urquhart gave a helpless little shrug, which Charles suddenly realised would have looked more at home on Professor Shaw, as if Urquhart had borrowed it for a moment.
‘We must talk to Mrs. Keith, and to Barbara, and to Peter, and see what Professor Keith had that no one else had,’ Shaw began again. ‘How long would it have ... taken?’ he asked the doctor, who spread his hands out.
‘It seems to have been a massive dose,’ he said. ‘It would have taken effect quite quickly. It may have depended on how much he had eaten already, though. Sometimes a lot of food in the stomach draws the poison out.’ He seemed struck by an idea, and knelt again with caution to feel under the campaign bed, first on one side of Professor Keith, and then, stepping over his corpse with a kind of curtsey of respect, on the other side. There he drew out, with some satisfaction, a chamber pot, over which the white cloth was still starched and fresh. Shaw blanched a little: Urquhart choked and turned away. Dr. Pagan drew off the cloth.
‘Well, he had partly emptied his stomach, anyway,’ he remarked, swishing the contents round the pot like someone about to read the tealeaves. ‘This is all very healthy in appearance, and I think must have been expelled before the onset of the poison.’
‘Enough! Enough!’ cried Urquhart, his handkerchief muffling his words. Dr. Pagan looked at him for a moment, then replaced the cloth and the pot with what Charles could have sworn was a sly smile. Urquhart went to stand by the window, and took several gulps of fresh air. The breeze as he opened it wider flicked at the papers on the desk, turning the notebook pages, and ruffled the edges of Professor Keith’s cravat and the handkerchief over his face, as if he were sighing. Charles did not think he was the only one to shiver, this time.
‘The burgh sergeant will no doubt be along soon,’ Dr. Pagan reminded them, ‘and I shall ask Mrs. Nicolson to pop in to help with the laying-out – in cases such as this, particularly in a gentle household, it is often difficult and distressing for the ladies of the house to deal with the matter unaided, and Mrs. Nicolson has seen everything.’
‘She is to be with my wife, when her time comes!’ Professor Shaw was a little distressed at the thought of his midwife laying out murder victims, however gentle the household.
‘Oh, she is entirely respectable, my dear sir,’ Dr. Pagan reassured him. ‘She is a very good person, moreover. Now, I have an appointment with a patient at one o’clock, and I’m afraid I must be going. I have told Mrs. Keith that I shall call again to see Miss Keith this evening, to see how she has managed the day, and as I say I shall send a message to Mrs. Nicolson to wait upon Mrs. Keith. If you need me, you have only to send word, of course.’
He bowed, and left the room, closing the door behind him. In a moment they heard him ring downstairs for his hat and gloves, and the distant thud of the front door closing. In the study, Professor Keith moved as much as any of them for a long moment. Then,
‘Well, what now?’ asked Urquhart. ‘Will you tell me who it is who has admitted to the cantharides? though I think I can guess.’
‘I expect you can,’ said Shaw mildly. ‘Shall we go downstairs? I am not sure that I want to stay in this room any longer.’
‘That is something I can agree with,’ said Urquhart with feeling. Charles shifted to open the door for them. ‘There’s a thing, though,’ said Urquhart, as he passed the desk. ‘This other box – what is it, crystallised fruits? Are they from the same source? For look, there is one missing there.’
Professor Shaw looked at Charles.
‘They did not mention fruit,’ Charles said, as blandly as he could. ‘Only the treacle things, I think.’
Urquhart poked at and then lifted the box.
‘No confectioner’s name – yet I cannot see a student diligently standing over a pot of sugar and orange peel. Well! You must tell me all you know, downstairs.’
He ushered Professor Shaw through the door first, and followed him, while Charles brought up the rear. He glanced back into the room as he closed the door, and for a second stopped, as Urquhart reached past him to turn and remove the key.
The notebook on the desk had disappeared.
Urquhart presented the key to Professor Shaw, who took it with an anxious look and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, without another word, they set off downstairs. His mind racing, Charles followed.
George was alone in the parlour, examining the modest watercolours on the wall with all the interest of a starving man asked to examine silk for an evening dress. On the whole, he seemed pleased to see them return, and even before they said anything he tipped his head towards the French window.
‘He’s gone,’ he said, succinctly. Then, feeling he needed to do more to relieve himself of this responsibility, he added, ‘I couldn’t stop him. He said he needed to look for something in the garden. I left the window open in case he came back – didn’t feel right, locking a man out of his own house.’
‘Well, never mind that now,’ said Urquhart. ‘Let us all sit down so that you can tell me who your poisoners are.’
Charles met George’s eye as his brother turned pale, and gestured him to sit on the sofa. When the Professors had found chairs, Charles sat on the sofa too, far enough from his brother to see his face, but near enough to feel like a support. With academic economy, Professor Shaw summarised for Professor Urquhart Charles’ own summary of his visit to Picket, Boxie and Rab, while Urquhart made a face that said he had expected as much. George, on the other hand, seemed increasingly relaxed, and Charles, tense as he was himself, wanted to shake him.
‘Well, it is clear enough that the Sporting Set, in whatever combination, is responsible for what has happened to Miss Alison,’ said Urquhart at the end of Shaw’s account. ‘But I am not convinced that they had anything to do directly with Keith’s death. Picket is as thoroughly nasty a student as I have taught in many a long year, but his kind of nastiness does not consist in the elimination of his enemy. He would prefer instead to keep Keith in his power, angry, frustrated, and if possible afraid. Do you not agree?’
Looking faintly sick, Shaw nodded his innocent, froglike head. His eyes were large and anxious.
‘And arsenic is not the weapon of one who means only to frighten,’ Urquhart went on, ‘it is the weapon of one wishing to eliminate the victim quickly. They would know that: I explained about arsenic-eating and so on when we read the Lives of the Caesars in their first year. I remember even then Picket took a particular delight in that book. Nero was a special favourite of his.’
There was a long pause as they reflected on this: even George had heard of Nero.
‘Well,’ Urquhart seemed to have taken charge. ‘The physician as good as said he was sending round the town sergeant, so we had better decide what we want to tell him.’
‘Oh! The truth, I would have thought,’ said Shaw simply.
‘Oh, of course.’ Urquhart’s voice was smooth and easy. ‘But it would be easier for him if we could straighten things out a little, first. And he will wish to hear from Mrs. Keith, which obviously is not something the dear lady would be comfortable with at the moment. It would be better if we talked with her ourselves and then passed on what she had to say to the sergeant when
he comes.’
‘Of course,’ Shaw agreed. ‘She would find it very distressing, being questioned by a virtual stranger at a time like this.’
Charles almost opened his mouth to offer to call the maid to find Mrs. Keith, but caution kept him quiet. He was desperate now to find out what was going on and, if necessary, to protect his wretched brother. He wanted to hear what Mrs. Keith had to say, but a mere student might well be asked to leave, if he happened to draw attention to himself. He felt awkward, though, when Professor Urquhart levered himself elegantly off his chair and went to pull the bell. He stayed standing, touching at his cravat in front of a pier glass, until Barbara had fetched Mrs. Keith. They all stood then as she entered, and bowed very formally, though her answering curtsey was slight and automatic.
‘My dear Mrs. Keith,’ Urquhart advanced and led her to her usual upright armchair. ‘How are you? And how is Miss Keith?’
‘My daughter is – bearing up a little, I think, I thank you –’
At that there was a step at the French window, and Peter burst in. It occurred to Charles that he had rarely seen Peter Keith enter a room in a reasonable fashion: he was always on the crest of some emotion, almost as if it was brought on by the change of the surroundings itself.
‘Mamma!’ he cried, and fell to his knees beside her chair, taking her hand in his. ‘How is Alison? She has not – has not ...’
‘She is resting just now.’ Mrs. Keith seemed to draw some strength from reassuring her son. ‘She has taken a little tea, but she is still very weak indeed. Dr. Pagan has said that he will return this evening.’ The rings on her fingers scraped and clicked together as she gathered her son’s hands together. ‘We must be patient, Peter dear.’
There seemed, overnight, to be nothing of her: she was a huddle of bones, and the skin of her face and neck sagged. Urquhart sat near her, forward in his seat with his arms across his knees, and began with surprising gentleness.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘we believe we know what poison Miss Keith has taken, and who gave it to her, and why.’ Charles, standing against the wall, could see her face clearly: it was blank and stupid, but somewhere at the back of her eyes the girl who had read and learned and loved to think was stirring, and realising that she was needed.
‘Will you tell me?’
‘Some foolish students – the same who disturbed the party last night, with whom Professor Keith has been displeased for some time – they gave Miss Keith sweetmeats with Spanish fly in them.’
‘Spanish fly? But that is for blistering!’ Her mind’s eye seemed instantly to be seeing what blistering might do if applied internally to her daughter, and her face was wrung with pain.
‘Yes: but they did not know. They thought – forgive me, madam, but you know what boys can be – they thought that it would – ah, encourage her to flirt with them.’
Her gaze, which had wandered with her imagination, came back sharply to meet his eye.
‘I take your meaning, sir,’ she said shortly. ‘So, they were wrong and my daughter, though sick, has her honour intact.’ Peter raised his head from the arm of her chair, and she patted it like a child’s head, smoothing and soothing his tousled hair.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Professor Urquhart. ‘Now, I am afraid, to Professor Keith.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and you could almost feel the strain as she pushed her long-disused mind to work. ‘You said – you only said – Miss Keith, that you knew what and who and why.’
Urquhart drew breath, and looked at the floor, and then, eyebrows raised, at Professor Shaw. George, seated nearby to be helpful at the least opportunity, squinted as he tried to follow this: the arsenic had not been explained in front of him, and George was not a reasoned. Professor Shaw blushed and shrugged helplessly.
‘Dear Mrs. Keith,’ he said at last, ‘We have spoken with Dr. Pagan, and he believes that it was not Spanish fly that killed your husband: it was arsenic.’
‘Arsenic!’ Mrs. Keith went white, but she did not faint. ‘He has brought this on himself!’ she gasped. ‘On himself and on his daughter! He drove these students to hate us, taunting us and leaving bones at the gate and dead crows outside the windows and breaking the garden plants! And now he is dead, and Alison so ill, and in so much pain! Foolish, foolish man! Foolish, short-sighted ...’ She gulped another great breath of air, and Charles thought she was going to cry: both Urquhart and George had hands hovering over their handkerchief pockets. But she took another, gentler breath, and straightened as if she had been poked in the back.
‘Forgive me, gentlemen,’ she said with an effort. ‘I –’
‘Say no more, madam: it is quite understandable,’ said Urquhart. ‘But we think it would be a good idea if we talked over, here between ourselves, what happened when everybody left last night, what Professor Keith might have eaten that no one else did, when he went off to his study. Just so that we can have it straight in our minds.’
Whether this reasoning made sense to her or not, she obediently began to think.
‘He was very angry, you know,’ she said after a moment. ‘Angry that the party had been so broken up. Not that he had been enjoying it, I think, for he seemed to have a good deal on his mind. Maybe he suspected that these boys would do something.’ She looked up, testing their reaction, and Shaw and Urquhart nodded encouragingly. ‘He went off to his study almost as soon as the last guest had left. You – you came back for your gloves, did you not?’
Professor Shaw nodded and blushed again.
‘It was after that. He was like a bear with a sore head. He took his supper tray – Barbara leaves him a supper tray on the landing upstairs, so that he can decide whether he will go to his study or into the drawing room or up to his chamber, though mostly it is his study.’ She sighed, an old sigh. ‘He went off to his study as usual.’
‘And mightily relieved we all were,’ added Peter, straightening.
‘Peter,’ warned his mother, as if used to it.
‘Well, we were, Mamma. You called for a tray of tea, and I tidied some of the chairs back and dealt some cards, and Alison and I sat down for a game of rummy, and we all generally behaved as if the storm had passed.’
He spoke too loudly still, but at least he seemed more coherent. Charles wondered if he had found what he had been looking for in the garden.
‘Well,’ Mrs. Keith turned up her hands, ‘perhaps we relaxed a little. Then I said, “Oh, what about one of those nice sweets you were given, Alison?” and she said, “That’s a good idea,” and fetched them from the piano, where they had been left. But when I looked at them, I realised they were both kinds I don’t like, and Peter never eats sweet things, do you, dear? So Alison took one of the toffee treacly ones and bit into it, but she said it didn’t taste very nice. She swallowed the bit she had, I think, but she threw some of it into the fire, didn’t she?’
‘I thought she swallowed all of it, and it was the paper she threw into the fire,’ said Peter, but not as if it mattered. Mrs. Keith looked anxiously at Urquhart, and he nodded again.
‘So you sat up for a while?’ he prompted her.
‘Yes: Peter and Alison played a few hands, and I drank my tea, and then Alison said she wasn’t feeling very well, and she would go to bed. Peter and I weren’t long after, were we, dear?’
‘But you did not think that it was the sweetmeat that made Miss Keith feel sick, or did you?’
‘No, not at all, it never crossed my mind, anyway. Did you think it, dear?’
Peter shook his head slowly, meeting his mother’s gaze.
‘So when did you realise that it was more serious?’
Mrs. Keith’s brow creased upwards.
‘I heard her bell ring – I’m not sure when it was. I had certainly been asleep for a little, at least. I went along to see what the matter was so I was there before Barbara. Alison was looking very ill – I should be with her now,’ she said anxiously, glancing at the bracket clock.
‘She needs to rest, my dear mada
m,’ said Urquhart quickly. Mrs. Keith looked only partly reassured.
‘She was terribly, terribly thirsty. She said her mouth and her throat were burning, and when I looked closely with the candle, there were little blisters. I asked her if she had drunk something hot, I didn’t think of Spanish fly, but of course it’s obvious now. Barbara brought warmed milk with honey and thyme in it, and she gulped it down but she screamed with the pain, and I gave her a little wine then with laudanum in it, or was that before the milk? There was so much noise and rushing to and fro. That quietened her, the laudanum, a little in the end, and she slept for a while, and I stayed with her and slept too, I don’t doubt. But she was awake again – it was light, then, but only just – and crying, so we gave her all the same things again but it didn’t ease her so much – she slept, but she was tossing and turning and clutching her stomach, and – well, I’m sure you don’t want to hear everything,’ she finished slightly primly, and Charles assumed that the account had been going to include the infamous chamber pots that Dr. Pagan was so keen to sniff.
‘And, er, where was Professor Keith in all this?’ asked Professor Shaw diffidently.
Mrs. Keith looked surprised, and at a loss.
‘But you said there was a great deal of noise and confusion,’ said Urquhart. ‘Did he not appear? Was he not roused?’
‘Did anyone go to look for him?’ added Shaw. Charles could imagine that if anyone had been ill in Professor Shaw’s house, he would have been there in his nightcap, fretting and confused with everyone else, and liked him the better for it. Mrs. Keith, however, still looked bewildered.
‘He hates to be disturbed by this kind of thing. We were trying to keep quiet.’
‘But would he normally have come out of his study to ask for less noise?’ Urquhart chose his words delicately, though they could probably all picture the scene quite well.
Death in a Scarlet Gown (Murray of Letho Book 1) Page 19