[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘You mean that paper, being an absorbent material …’

  ‘Exactly. Everybody’s fingers perspire to a certain extent, and, after a time, the damp from those fingers impregnates the paper and makes the prints useless from the point of view of identification. If this has happened on these letters, cold iodine fumes may be the answer. Anyway, now we know who she is, we’ll nobble her one way or another.’

  ‘I’m doubtful whether Mrs Schumann will have left fingerprints on those letters, anyway,’ said Laura, when she and her employer were discussing Maisry’s visit. ‘If I’d been in her place, I should have rested my hand on blotting-paper when I wrote to the newspaper, and then put on thin gloves before I folded the letter and stuck it in the envelope. As for the letter to Celestine, it wouldn’t matter how many of her prints were on that. She signed it in her own name, and there’s never been any query as to where it came from. So long as the same prints are not on both letters, she’s as safe as houses.’

  ‘Houses have been known to be undermined,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but I confess that my faith in the fingerprint clue is less strong than it was.’

  There was no fingerprint clue. There were no fingerprints except those of the office staff at Swansea on the letter whose advertisement the unfortunate Irish girl had answered, and of the advertiser’s reply to her there had never been any sign, for, except for the half of the return ticket to Swansea which at first had seemed a valuable piece of evidence, her sodden handbag had been found empty. Police, assisted by willing helpers from among the campers who had been staying in the vicinity of the pond in which the victim had been found, discovered the girl’s suitcase about a mile and a half from the body. It had been hidden at the entrance to a culvert which bridged a stream.

  The girl’s landlady in Swansea identified its contents as having been those of her lodger, but nothing was found which could provide a pointer to the killer. The letter which, presumably, had caused the girl to travel to Hampshire, must have been in the handbag and was never found.

  (3)

  ‘Well,’ said Maisry, reporting the failure of his mission to the Chief Constable, who had been dining with Dame Beatrice, ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but the exhumation. We’re not likely to get her on any other charge, so far as I can see.’

  ‘I don’t like exhumations,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘but if you and Dame Beatrice are sure of your facts, we certainly can’t allow this maniac to go on indiscriminately murdering innocent girls and women.’

  ‘Indiscriminately is not quite the right word,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She does discriminate. Her victims have to become part of a pattern. As to her being a maniac, that will have to be decided later.’

  ‘Well, you can’t say that her behaviour is normal, my dear Beatrice.’

  ‘Neither was that of Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and Joan of Arc – not that I am making any real comparisons, of course.’

  ‘I should hope not, indeed!’

  ‘My point is that abnormal behaviour, which, I take it, means beyond that which would generally be expected, seemingly beyond the scope of the general run of women – is not necessarily an indication of insanity. In any case, I doubt very much whether Mrs Schumann is insane in the legal sense. I am perfectly certain that she knew what she was doing when she did it, and that she knew that it was wrong.’

  ‘If she murdered her husband, though, that would not conform to the pattern to which you referred. Whatever happened to him, he certainly was not garrotted and then strangled. The doctor would have noticed it’ – he smiled ironically – ‘if that had been the case. Besides, all the other victims have been women. It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Oh, I think it might. Herr Schumann was killed to leave the way for her to marry James.’

  ‘But James preferred the daughter,’ said the Chief Constable.

  ‘Yes, but he only became engaged to her in order to choke the mother off, it seems,’ said Maisry. ‘Putting two and two together, as Dame Beatrice and I have done, there could have been no commitment to the daughter until James realised that, in spite of his expressed distaste for her advances, Mrs Schumann was still determined to pursue him. We believe that she continued with this campaign, even after he had announced his engagement to the daughter, and I personally think – and Dame Beatrice upholds my opinion – that on the day of Karen Schumann’s death there was a show-down between her and her mother, and Mrs Schumann, long the toad under the harrow in what, to her, must have been a depressing household, went berserk and murdered her daughter. She half-strangled her in the cord of the dog-whistle and then (in a panic, most likely) finished the job off.’

  ‘Then, you mean, she set about diverting suspicion from herself by moving the body and leaving the message which was found on it? I see.’

  ‘There was no fake about the message,’ said Maisry. ‘She’d been told by her daughter that James had once called her a misguided little Arian. She told Dame Beatrice so, in order to direct suspicion towards James for daring to prefer her daughter to herself. At least, that’s the way it looks.’

  ‘It sounds quite feasible, I suppose.’

  ‘Everything else follows from it. Machrado seems to have been, well, a trifle kittenish with James in Mrs Schumann’s presence, and that led directly to her death. Again, the note left on the body was intended to incriminate James. “Hell hath no fury”, you know, sir.’

  ‘Quite. But, of course, Phillips strongly suspected James at first, you know. You are certain, I suppose, that he is cleared? You see, even if we get permission to exhume Herr Schumann’s body – and that may not be easy – it seems to me there is nothing to prove that, if Schumann was murdered, and ten to one you’ll find no indication of that, you know, James isn’t just as likely to have done it as the widow. You seem, if I may say so, to have swallowed his story hook, line and sinker, but there’s no more proof that he didn’t commit all these murders as that Mrs Schumann did. What do you say to that?’ He looked at Dame Beatrice. She replied:

  ‘There is one point – I will not call it proof – which indicates that James was not responsible. Once we had traced the source of the messages – that is to say, once we had worked on the connection between the nationalities of the victims and the heresies implicit in the numerals which formed part of the messages – it became so unlikely that James would have given such a pointer to himself that my own always very slight suspicions of him vanished.’

  ‘The murderer, whether it was Mrs Schumann or not, could hardly have thought it likely that you would trace any connection between the dates on the messages and the heresies with which they were connected.’

  ‘It took us some time to trace the connection, of course, but time was on the murderer’s side in the sense that, the greater the number of deaths she could bring about, the greater the chances became that we should come to the conclusions which, in the end, we did come to, and that those conclusions would automatically implicate James because of his studies in theology.’

  ‘I still can’t see why they don’t,’ said the Chief Constable discontentedly. ‘Well, if you’re both set on having Schumann’s body disinterred, we’d better get on with it. You’ll have to back me up, Beatrice, you know, if the powers that be are going to allow us to do it.’

  ‘As to why they do not implicate Edward James,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘there is the almost unassailable evidence of the dog-whistle which lured away Laura’s wolf-hound and led him to find the body of Karen Schumann.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘I propose to leave no stone unturned before we actually get to the stage of approaching the Home Secretary for an exhumation order. As I see it, we ought to get in touch with the doctor who issued the death certificate, and ask him a question or two, before we do anything so drastic as desecrating a grave. I don’t care for the idea of that at all. There is no connection whatever between murdering a man by poison and strangling several young women. We shall need safer ground to
tread on than we’ve got at present before we proceed to extremes.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Maisry. ‘It is always a good idea to take precautions. The only trouble is that in taking precautions we’re also taking up time. We don’t want another young woman to be murdered.’

  ‘Quite, quite. So you’d better get cracking, what?’

  (4)

  The doctor was not pleased.

  ‘But, my dear chap,’ he said to Maisry, ‘if there had been the least thought in my mind that there was anything suspicious in Schumann’s dying like that, I should have been on to you fellows at once.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Maisry. ‘Still, you would have had to be very certain before you came to us, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, one has to think of one’s other patients, you know. I mean, I myself am absolutely convinced, as I was at the time, that Schumann’s death was a perfectly natural one, given the circumstances of his illness, although I’ll admit I had not expected him to succumb to it like that, but, for the sake of argument, suppose I’d refused to issue a certificate and had called for an inquest, and then, when all the proceedings were over, nothing out of the ordinary had been found wrong with the poor chap, what do you suppose would have been the effect on my other patients and, particularly, on their relatives? Nobody is going to trust a doctor whose aim and object seems to be to suspect that the family corpses have been poisoned! If it will help to clarify the thing in your mind, I can lend you the case-notes, always remembering, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, that they are highly confidential.’

  ‘I’d prefer a résumé of them, if you don’t mind, sir,’ said Maisry, taking out his notebook, ‘because, although I’ll bear in mind that they are of a confidential nature, I’ll need to discuss them with the Chief Constable and with Dame Beatrice, and there are things my own notes can tell me better than a verbatim report, which, as we have your permission, sir, is also being taken.’ He nodded towards the corner of the room where his shorthand-writing sergeant was busy.

  ‘I see. Oh, well, then, half a minute.’ The doctor rang the bell for his receptionist. ‘Hope you needn’t keep me too long. I’ve evening surgery at half-past six and a confinement lying in wait over at Burley. Oh, Miss Warner, will you look up Schumann, Heinrich Otto, and bring it in here?’

  The case-notes were perfectly straightforward. Heinrich Schumann had suffered for two years from gastric trouble and had brought with him from his previous doctor, now retired from practice, a history of this illness which dated from 1939, the year, Dame Beatrice noted, in which Schumann had lost his job. So far, so good. It was not at all unlikely that the shock and, as he must have seen it, the unfairness of his dismissal from his school, would have brought on an anxiety neurosis with its physical complement of an ulcerated stomach.

  ‘I don’t see anything in this which would justify me in asking for an exhumation order,’ said Maisry unhappily. ‘The illness seems to have taken a normal course, doesn’t it?’

  ‘So far as was known, yes. Would you care to ask what use veterinary surgeons make of something they call butter of antimony?’ suggested Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Antimony? You still think Schumann was poisoned, then?’

  ‘There have been similar cases. Proof, admittedly, is difficult, but there is a remarkable similarity between the course of Schumann’s illness and that of a certain Mrs Ann Smith, who came to Liverpool from Devonshire and lived on Merseyside with various relatives and a man named Winslow who acted as manager of some rooms above the shop and restaurant. These rooms were let to members of the family and to other lodgers. To summarize the story, it is only necessary to say that, after a comparatively short time, Mrs Smith’s sister’s husband, a certain Mr Townsend, and two of his sons, died.

  ‘After this, the man Winslow seems to have acquired some sort of ascendency over Mrs Smith, so that, in the end, she was persuaded to leave the stock and goodwill of her business to him. Previously, when she first became ill, she had given him written authority to withdraw money from her Savings Bank. Other attempts on his part to possess himself of what she owned were disallowed, however. Now the similarity between her case and that of Heinrich Schumann is this: both were known to have been suffering from stomach ulcers. Neither, however, should have suffered such deterioration in health as to die of the illness so soon. In the case of Mrs Smith it was found that somebody – the evidence, although strongly presumptive against him, was not sufficient to convict Winslow – had been administering small doses of antimony to her over a period of time, and so had hastened, if he had not actually caused, her death.

  ‘Further, the poisoner Pritchard also used antimony to ensure the deaths of his wife and his mother-in-law, and Chapman, otherwise known as Klosowski, murdered three women by administering tartarised antimony, again over a period of time.

  ‘Now it is clear to me that Heinrich Schumann’s doctor did not expect him to die when he did. The treatment shown in these case-notes was the correct one for an ulcerated stomach such as the doctor describes, and it is clear that the patient responded satisfactorily to it until a few months before his death. All the same, the doctor had no suspicion that anything untoward was going on, but, bearing in mind the two cases I have cited, I think we will proceed with the exhumation. If nothing is found, so well and good, although not for my reputation, but if we find traces of antimony, then there will be a prima facie case, I think, against Mrs Schumann.’

  ‘If there is antimony in Schumann’s body, you think it was administered in the form of a purge for dogs, then?’

  ‘Well, Mrs Schumann is not a qualified veterinary surgeon, of course, but, no doubt, as a breeder of dogs, she has learned ways of avoiding the expense of calling on professional assistance. I shall be interested to see the body when it is disinterred.’

  ‘Its state of preservation, you mean, Dame Beatrice?’

  ‘Yes. In spite of the fact that Chapman’s first wife had been dead for five years when the body was exhumed from a common grave, it was in an excellent state of preservation. So were the remains of the second wife, after two years.’

  ‘Schumann has been dead just over five years,’ said Maisry. ‘I think I’ll be rather interested to see the body, too, but I do hope you’re right, otherwise it’ll be the back of the Chief Constable’s hand to me, to borrow an expression from our cousins in Eire. I wonder when Phillips will be back on the job with me? He’d like to be in on the findings, if there’s going to be an autopsy.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Come Away, Come Away, Death

  ‘He’s dead as a rat on the store-room floor …

  Oh, we say so, oh, we hope so!

  He’s dead as a rat on the store-room floor.

  He won’t never come back to us no more …

  Oh, poor old Joe!’

  * * *

  (1)

  ‘Antimony in all the parts examined,’ said Maisry, ‘and the body so well preserved, even after more than five years, that you can hardly believe it. It seems ridiculous that we can’t pin the girls’ deaths on her, but we shall question her about poor Schumann, and James will be questioned, too, of course, although she’s obviously the one who could have got hold of the poison, even if James administered or helped to administer it.’

  ‘Does James have to be brought into it?’ asked Laura.

  ‘I only said we should question him, Mrs Gavin. In fact, we’re going to get his story first, before we tackle Mrs Schumann.’

  ‘I don’t believe he’s guilty and, if he’s brought to trial, it will ruin his career, you know.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want that, if he’s innocent, of course, and he can have a solicitor present at the interview, as I expect he knows.’

  James declined to do this.

  ‘I don’t know why you think I can help you,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I have nothing to hide.’

  ‘You say that you were not surprised when Heinrich Schumann died.’

  ‘Why should
I have been? People as ill as he was do die ultimately, some sooner and some later.’

  ‘Are you surprised to hear that his death was brought about by poison?’

  ‘By poison? You mean he committed suicide?’

  ‘No, we think he was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered? Oh, that’s fantastic!’

  ‘Antimony is not a suicide’s poison, Mr James, and the particular form of it, liquor antimonii chloride, which we think was used in this case, is even more unpleasant to take than tartar emetic, antimony potassium tartrate. No, Mr James, it wasn’t suicide. The antimony was given to Heinrich Schumann in small doses over a period of time without his knowledge or consent, and, in the end, it killed him.’

  ‘He suffered from extreme sickness and diarrhoea, with severe abdominal pains, and was under constant supervision and treatment by the doctor. Surely, if he was being slowly poisoned, the doctor would have realised it?’ said James.

  ‘The use of antimony by murderers is extremely rare, and, as is the case with arsenic, the symptoms are similar to those of other illnesses. For instance, in the case of Chapman (real name Klosowski) his first wife was said to have died of tuberculosis, the second of intestinal obstruction coupled with the same symptoms as you yourself witnessed in the case of Schumann, and the third woman (he wasn’t married to her) was thought to have died of tuberculous peritonitis. There was every excuse for Schumann’s doctor to overlook the possibility that he was being poisoned, although a smarter man might have suspected it, I suppose.’

  ‘But – antimony! Wouldn’t you have to sign a book before a chemist would let you have stuff like that?’

  ‘There is a substance used by veterinary surgeons known as antimony butter.’

  ‘I don’t question that, but I am not a vet.’