‘I see.’ Henry frowned. ‘Well, after the potted shrimps we had the beef—and very good it was, too.’
‘I understand that Cook has an excellent relationship with the butcher. She got him to send round the largest and best fillet he had,’ said Milsom.
‘The vegetables, as I recollect, Inspector, were Brussels sprouts and glazed carrots.’ The man on the Belgium desk at the Foreign Office was being driven to despair by what was coming out of Brussels at the moment but Henry saw no reason to say so.
‘We think we can give the vegetables a clean bill of health, sir.’
‘Finished up in the kitchen, were they?’ divined Henry. ‘I say, Inspector, what about the horseradish sauce? It brought a tear to my eye.’
‘Home-made, Mr Tyler, by Cook, according to Mrs Beeton’s recipe, with cream, white wine vinegar, a little caster sugar and some mustard—and horseradish, of course.’
‘I have heard,’ said Henry slowly, ‘that on occasion—by accident, usually—aconite has been known to have been mistaken for horseradish.’
‘Picked by Cook herself in the kitchen garden,’ said Inspector Milsom with evident approval. ‘She says that when she asks the gardener for produce she feels she doesn’t always get the best.’
‘Human nature doesn’t change, does it?’ said Henry absently. They knew quite as much about human nature at the Foreign Office as they did down at any police station. ‘Besides, coming back to your problem, Inspector, nearly everybody had some of the horseradish sauce.’
‘Exactly, sir. Our problem is that while Mrs Iverson appears to have ingested that from which she died at the dinner party there is no dish which some or all the guests did not share.’
‘Difficult,’ agreed Henry, ‘and made more so, I imagine, by the fact that both the Coroner and the Chairman of the Magistrates’ Bench were there.’
Detective Inspector Milsom said with deep feeling that this had not helped in the investigation so far. ‘They both insist that there was no way in which their hostess could have been poisoned before their very eyes—and both the parlour-maid and the cook swear that she didn’t take anything afterwards. What with the doctor going straight out and the deceased going down to the kitchen to thank both staff for a very good meal there wasn’t time—even if she took it herself, which is unlikely from all I hear.’
‘That means Edith and Cook liked her,’ said Henry at once. ‘And I understand there were no money troubles …’
‘None,’ said the Inspector stoutly. ‘She was very well off, was Mrs Iverson.’
‘And yet …’ began Henry.
‘Yes?’ The policeman leaned forward.
‘It does seem almost staged, doesn’t it?’
‘Just what the Chief Constable said …’ The Detective Inspector lowered his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I shouldn’t have said that.’
Henry Tyler waved a hand airily. ‘My dear fellow, we spend our time here working on things that shouldn’t have been said, but unless they are,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘nobody gets anywhere. That case of pneumonia?’
‘Genuine,’ said the Inspector. ‘The doctor had visited the man earlier in the day and said he would be back later that night when he thought the pneumonia would have reached its crisis.’
‘Mrs Iverson hadn’t been beastly to Miss Amy Hall, I take it?’
‘Kindness itself, I understand, sir.’ He coughed. ‘That doesn’t mean that Miss Hall enjoys being a poor relation. Very few people do, sir. However, both staff agree Miss Hall fitted in as well as anyone could in the circumstances. Cook is a most observant woman and parlour-maids have to be of a noticing cast of mind otherwise they wouldn’t be any good for the job, would they, sir?’
Henry confessed it was something that hadn’t crossed his mind before.
‘Like detective constables,’ said the Inspector generously. ‘Constable Bewman here pointed out that each guest had their plate handed to them by Edith but I can’t see how that gave a murderer any scope.’
Henry frowned. ‘She would have done it in a preordained way, of course,’ he mused. ‘The lady on the host’s right first, and then the one on his left. My sister was served after them, I think, and then Miss Amy and Mrs Iverson.’
‘That would have meant,’ said the Inspector alertly, ‘that anyone who knew where you were all sitting would have been able to work out who would get which plate in the pile.’
‘Oh, yes, Inspector.’ Henry Tyler smiled faintly. ‘It’s an interesting little puzzle when you think about it like that. The quickness of the hand deceiving the eye and all that. Except that we don’t know whose hand.’
‘Yet …’ responded Milsom.
Detective Constable Bewman scratched his head. ‘But even if you knew beforehand who was going to get—say—the fifth plate how could you put poison on it and not on the other plates?’
‘Difficult,’ agreed Henry Tyler, ‘isn’t it?’
‘But not impossible,’ growled Milsom. ‘According to the pathologist, the timing is wrong for her being poisoned except at the meal. He’s prepared to swear to that.’
Henry Tyler screwed up his eyes in an effort of recollection. ‘There were some glazed onions and Duchesse potatoes round the fillet … our host put those on the individual plates before he handed them to Edith.’
‘We thought of that, sir,’ said the Inspector, a touch of melancholy in his voice. ‘Both were brought in from the garden—home grown—and never left the kitchen until Cook gave them to Edith for the table. Apparently the doctor’s very particular about his potatoes. Never lets seed be used that’s more than two years out of Scotland.’
‘Quite right,’ said Henry stoutly. ‘I think the same should go for the Scots race, too.’
‘Not everyone had the same pudding,’ said the Inspector with a certain tenacity. ‘Some had one and some had the other.’
‘And some, Inspector, I fear, had both.’
‘And those that had the Normandy pudding,’ said Detective Constable Bewman, ‘had the wine sauce that went with it.’
‘It was a splendid sauce,’ said Henry appreciatively.
‘Consisting, I understand,’ said Milsom heavily, ‘of a small glass of brandy, ditto of Madeira, a gill of water, an ounce of unsalted butter and a little caster sugar.’
‘You should try it sometime, Inspector,’ said Henry.
‘It was handed round,’ said Milsom, ignoring this frivolity, ‘by Edith in a sauce boat on a tray.’
‘No room for monkey business there,’ agreed Henry. ‘Or with the fruit and nuts.’
‘Two bowls of each were placed within easy reach of all the guests,’ said Milsom. ‘In theory I suppose the nearest piece of fruit could have been doctored but I don’t see myself how the murderer could have been sure the victim would have picked it.’
‘No.’ Henry noted how the Detective Inspector’s speech had now widened to include words like ‘poison’ and ‘murderer’. ‘I can’t tell you if Mrs Iverson had any port.’ He grinned. ‘I did and it was splendid.’
‘Vintage,’ said Milsom. ‘Nineteen twelve and nothing wrong with it at all.’
‘Just as well to check, though,’ agreed Henry gravely.
‘The doctor had decanted it himself,’ the policeman informed him, reddening slightly, ‘before the guests arrived.’
‘You can’t be too careful with a really crusty port,’ said Henry.
‘Someone,’ said Inspector Milsom meaningfully, ‘seems to have been altogether too careful, to my way of thinking.’
Henry Tyler nodded. ‘Careful and very clever, Inspector. It takes a great deal of prestidigitatory skill to poison someone before your very eyes, so to speak.’
‘That’s not a word that I know, sir, but I think I take your meaning.’
‘We are talking of the art of the conjuror …’
‘Ah,’ said Milsom.
‘Where did the patter come in, then?’ enquired Detective Constable Bewman. ‘You would have all been talking n
ormally like, wouldn’t you, sir?’
‘Yes … that is, I suppose so.’ Henry cast his mind back to the small talk of a small town. ‘Conversation was very general. The nearest thing to a conjuring trick was the new bell-push that had been fitted under the carpet for Mrs Iverson.’
‘That was the doctor’s idea, sir. Cook tells me he’d seen it somewhere and wanted one for his wife. The parlourmaid likes it because it saves her …’
‘Just a minute,’ said Henry, a thought beginning to burgeon in his mind. ‘You, Constable, said something about a conjuror’s patter.’
‘You don’t get that many silent ones, sir,’ responded Bewman stolidly. ‘Not on stage, anyway.’
‘It did occur to me that the doctor did choose an odd moment to draw attention to the bell’s being there. It would have been much more subtle just to have allowed his wife to demonstrate it when the time came and then to turn it into a talking point.’
‘Out of character you might say?’ suggested the Inspector. ‘And what, might I ask, sir, was he doing at the time he was talking about the bell?’
‘Oh, he wasn’t doing the talking at that point, Inspector. It was Mrs Iverson who was telling us about it after he mentioned it.’
‘So,’ reasoned the Inspector, ‘all the guests were looking at her?’
‘I suppose we were.’
‘So,’ said Milsom patiently, ‘what was the doctor doing while she was talking?’
Henry Tyler cast his mind back to the fatal evening. ‘He was carving the fillet of beef. He’d just begun. He took off the first slice—you know, the rather well-done, brown bit at the end—and laid it on one side of the serving dish and then he cut the next slice off for the first lady and so on.’
‘We can’t work out how he could have killed his wife while he was sitting at the opposite end of the table,’ said Constable Bewman naively.
‘You have rather got it in for the doctor, haven’t you?’ said Henry easily.
‘It’s common knowledge that most male murderers are widowers,’ growled Milsom. ‘What we don’t like, Mr Tyler, is that Mrs Iverson was poisoned in full view of the Coroner and the Chairman of the Bench.’
‘“Aye, there’s the rub,” as William Shakespeare so wisely said,’ murmured Henry.
‘And Miss Chalder is a very good-looking girl.’
‘Ah, so that’s the way the wind blows, is it?’ said Henry, his mind beginning to stray. ‘Mind you,’ he added fairly, ‘doctors are able to get their hands on poison more easily than most of us.’
‘Oh, didn’t I say, Mr Tyler? It wasn’t a medical poison that was used to kill Mrs Iverson.’
‘No?’ If Henry thought that there was a contradiction in terms about the words ‘medical poison’ he did not let it show in his face.
‘More of a horticultural poison,’ said the Inspector, ‘although not intended as such.’ He consulted his notebook. ‘The substance was called ethylene chlorohydrin, if that means anything to you, sir.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Henry regretfully.
‘Used to speed the germination of seeds and potatoes,’ said the Inspector, ‘and as a cleaning solvent.’
‘And it’s odourless,’ chimed in Constable Bewman helpfully.
‘So there was no need to have anything highly scented or smelling strongly on the table,’ said Henry at once.
‘I hope you never take it into your head to commit a murder, sir,’ said the Inspector. ‘You do seem to have an eye for essentials.’
‘And how much of this—er—horticultural poison does it take to kill a human being?’ asked Henry, ignoring this last.
‘Not a lot,’ said the Inspector quietly. ‘Something under a fifth of a teaspoonful—say four or five drops—added to which it is highly soluble.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Henry Tyler, in the last analysis a Ministry man, ‘that this stuff, whatever it is, is something that ought to be put a stop to.’
‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the Inspector smoothly. ‘And after the fruit and nuts?’
‘We all moved back into the drawing-room for coffee,’ said Henry, ‘and I performed my party trick with the cream and the back of the spoon.’ He looked up. ‘It’s not a conjuring trick, Inspector.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, sir.’
‘It’s a question of how to get the cream to float on top of the coffee.’
‘Very difficult, I’m sure, sir.’
‘Not when you know how.’
‘I think that is going to be the case with the ethylene chlorohydrin, sir.’
‘Er—quite, Inspector. Well, with the coffee it’s all a matter of putting the sugar in first and stirring well. That increases the surface tension on the top of the coffee—or is it the specific gravity?—so that when you dribble the cream slowly over the back of the spoon it stays on the top.’
‘And Bob’s your uncle, so to speak?’ said the Inspector, paying unconscious tribute to an old nepotism.
‘It worked,’ said Henry. ‘Whether it distracted everyone else long enough to slip five drops of something into Mrs Iverson’s coffee, I wouldn’t know, Inspector.’
‘But we would, Mr Tyler. You see, Mrs Iverson never drank coffee. And we have it on the authority of those sitting near her that she did not drink it that evening.’ He coughed. ‘If I may say so, your sister was particularly emphatic on the point.’
‘Good old Wendy,’ said Henry. He frowned. ‘I say, Inspector, that does rather leave every avenue explored, doesn’t it?’
Detective Inspector Milsom assented to this sentiment with a quiet nod. ‘Every avenue that we can think of.’
‘What we want, Inspector,’ he said bracingly, ‘is a new avenue or a fresh look at an old one.’
‘Either would do very nicely, sir.’ With an ironic smile Milsom said: ‘Which do you recommend?’
‘Oh, a new look at an old problem,’ said Henry Tyler at once. ‘We don’t have new problems in the Foreign Office.’
‘The only matter which you have brought to our attention, sir, which seems to have escaped everyone else’s notice was the—er—untimely mention of the footbell.’
‘Which doesn’t get us very much furth—Wait a minute, Inspector, wait a minute.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Suppose it does?’ Henry ran his hands through his hair in a gesture of excitement that his sister would have recognized well. ‘Suppose it was meant to turn all eyes towards our hostess?’
‘And take them off your host?’ said Milsom astringently.
‘Exactly!’
‘Well?’
‘Well, if it was intended as a distraction, then that must have been the moment when he poisoned his wife. That follows, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s a thought worth considering, sir.’
‘Watch out, Inspector, if you can talk like that in response to one of my brainwaves we’ll have you working here.’
‘No, thank you, sir. We’ve got enough troubles of our own in Calleshire.’
‘I think you’re going to have one less in a minute.’ He brought his fist down on his desk with a bang. ‘Inspector, until this moment I have always felt that the benefit of a classical education was over-rated.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘But not now! Parysatis, wife of Darius, killed Statira, the wife of Artaxerxes, in much the same way as Margot Iverson was murdered.’
Detective Inspector Milsom leaned forward, his notebook prominent. ‘Tell me …’
‘Now I know what else it was Dr Iverson did when he went through to see to the claret before dinner.’ Henry rubbed his hands. ‘First he probably smeared a little horseradish sauce or even some colourless Vaseline on the righthand side of the carving knife. He then added a fatal dose of your ethylene stuff to it and put it back on the carving rest …’
‘With the other blade facing upward.’ Detective Constable Bewman could hardly contain his excitement. Then his face fell. ‘But why didn’t the first guest get the poisoned beef
?’
Detective Inspector Milsom said quietly, ‘Because the doctor laid the first slice of the fillet—the browned outside piece that you don’t give to guests—to one side of the carving dish … Mr Tyler said so.’
‘But put it on his wife’s plate later without anyone noticing,’ said Henry. ‘Only the left-hand side of the carving knife touched everyone else’s meat.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Parysatis did it with a chicken and I should have thought of it before.’
THE HARD SELL
‘Morning, Harry.’ Detective Inspector Sloan shifted his chair an inch or two to indicate to Inspector Harpe that there was room to sit beside him at the table in the police canteen.
‘Morning.’ The Inspector from Traffic set a mug of tea and a pile of ham sandwiches down on the table and pulled up a chair.
Sloan let him settle to food and drink before asking cautiously: ‘How’s life?’
‘Busy,’ he said, taking a bite.
This was not an unexpected reply since Inspector Harpe was head of ‘F’ Division’s Traffic Department and thus never without work. In addition to this he maintained a ceaseless campaign against drinking and driving—and an even more bitter one against those lawyers and magistrates whose view of what constituted random breath-testing did not coincide with his own.
Detective Inspector Sloan let the tea and sandwiches exert their customary beneficial effect on Harpe’s temper before venturing further comment.
‘All well in your neck of the woods?’ he enquired presently. ‘Like the motorway?’ After drinking drivers Inspector Harpe reserved his ferocity for fast ones and was in the habit of referring to Calleshire’s short stretch of motorway as The Route of All Evil.
Happy Harry grunted. ‘Had a fatal last night.’
Sloan nodded sympathetically. This, no doubt, accounted for some of his colleague’s taciturnity. Road traffic accidents, however trivial, were never exactly fun and where there was a death involved they were even less nice and, no matter what anyone said, policemen never did get inured to them. He said, ‘There’s always too many RTAs …’
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