Vicious Circle

by Douglas Clark

  Green was about to reply when Berger said, “Phone box coming up, Chief.”

  “Let’s hope it hasn’t been vandalized.” Masters felt into his change pocket. “We shall want some ten pence pieces.”

  “I’ve got three,” said Reed as the car halted. “Shall I make the calls, Chief, or will you?”

  “I will.”

  Green, Reed and Berger listened as Masters spoke on the way to Dean’s office. When he’d finished, Green said: “It all fits, George. Means and opportunity are both there, but you haven’t mentioned motive. Or if you have, I’ve missed it.”

  “Me, too,” said Berger.

  “Deliberately,” said Masters. “It’s tricky. What I mean is, it’s real enough to me, but I’m going to have to pick my way through it for all those characters at HQ and I’d rather only do it the once if you people will bear with me.”

  “Fair enough. There’s no time now, anyhow. We’re at Dean’s place.”

  Dean, too, listened patiently to Masters’ story. When it was over, he merely said that he was grateful for the job they had done. He would now be able to reconvene his court and bring in a verdict that would hand over all responsibility to the police.

  “That was painless enough,” said Green when they were back in the car. “He’ll not be allowed to name names in court, but he can bring in person or persons unknown, add that he understands we have somebody in custody and call it a day. And talking of custody, when do we do it?”

  Masters paused for a moment before replying.

  “That’s going to be the most difficult bit, Bill.”

  Green grimaced. “We’ll have to do it. We can’t expect Theo Rainford to . . .”

  “Unthinkable.”

  “We do it, then. And the magistrates’ court tomorrow.”

  “I can see no alternative.”

  “Bail?”

  “On no account. The same thing could happen again.” Masters glanced at his watch. “Why not now?”

  “The C.C. will be waiting.”

  “Not yet. I said between six and six thirty. He’s gathering a few characters—Rainford, Bennett and Whincap.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked him to. I’d like them all to hear and not be in any doubt.”

  “Okay. Warrant?”

  “In for questioning, I think. Arrest later.”

  “Would you like me to do it? Me and the lads?”

  “I said it was the most difficult bit. I don’t want to appear to be ducking out.”

  “You won’t be. Besides, we’ll need your seat in the car.”

  “You mean—literally—that you’d rather have my room than my company?”

  “Summat of the sort. Look, if we drop you at the gate of the college grounds, can you walk up? Then we can go straight on.”

  “If you’re sure?”

  Green grinned. “This,” he said, “will likely be the last time I perform this service. I’ll do it without you.”

  “Fair enough. I was forgetting.”

  Reed asked: “What’s going on, Chief? The D.C.I.’s last lift? Is he retiring?”

  “The D.C.I. is not leaving the team,” said Masters firmly. “He’ll be here to plague us for a long time yet.”

  “That’s good hearing, Chief. For a moment I thought we were going to be denied the doubtful pleasure of his quotations.”

  “You mind your own barrer, young Reed,” said Green, not displeased by the sergeant’s comment. “And if you can’t push it, shove it.”

  “See what I mean, Chief? Where would we be without such helpful advice so generously and so courteously given?”

  “Where, indeed?”

  Berger said: “I grew momentarily sad, too. No more buying drinks for senior officers, no more watching fried spud being scoffed for breakfast, no more . . .”

  “That’s enough,” growled Green. “That’s the gate to the college just ahead. Dump his nibs and let’s be on our way.”

  *

  They were gathered round the coffee table at the end of Harrington’s office away from his desk. Harrington himself had brought his desk chair, and the two sergeants had the C.C.’s normal visitors’ upright chairs. The rest occupied the modern, low, armless pieces that, at a pinch, could be pushed together to form a settee of infinite length. P.C. Gibson, the HQ messenger, had brought in a trolley with bottles of beer and glasses.

  “Who are we waiting for?” Harrington sounded slightly querulous. He did not seem best pleased at being kept in his office until after half-past six in the evening. Masters suspected that he would have preferred to be at home with the prospect of a large gin before dinner rather than bottled beer in the company of the mixed bag that now confronted him.

  “Dr Whincap,” said Rainford. “He’s left his surgery so he should be here any minute.” Masters eyed the local D.C.S. closely. Rainford had not spoken to him since they had entered the office. The grapevine had probably been working and Rainford was more than likely aware of the presence of the suspect at HQ. That fact would not make him happy. But he was chatting fairly readily with Bennett who, though behaving very quietly, was nevertheless as cheerful as usual.

  “The doctor’s here, sir.” P.C. Gibson showed Whincap into the office.

  “Good evening, everybody. Sorry to be the last.” Whincap took the chair beside Rainford. “Now, what’s going on? Your message, Chief Constable, told me very little except that there were some new developments in the Elke Carlow business.”

  “I shall leave D.C.S. Masters to tell you what those developments are, gentlemen. I should add that he has given me merely the gist of what he wishes to say, but he particularly asked that I should invite you here to listen to the full report he is now about to make because he feels that you are all—each in his separate way—interested in the outcome of his investigation. I shall not, therefore, hold matters up any longer except to say that I hope you will all help yourselves to beer as and when you want it. There’s plenty on the trolley and more where that came from.” He turned to Masters. “If you’d like to begin, Mr Masters . . .?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Masters proceeded to speak without notes. On the coffee table in front of him he had one sheet of A4 size paper lying face downwards and on top of it, as if to hold it in place or to prevent it being inadvertently picked up and examined, were his pipe, matches and brassy tin of Warlock Flake.

  “Gentlemen, you are all aware that Mrs Carlow died of a fatal overdose of cardiac glycosides. I use that term because that is how the pathologist’s report describes what Dr Whincap, in his on-the-spot diagnosis, described as an overdose of digitalis.

  “There was no disagreement between the two doctors as to the cause of death and so, when we arrived to investigate the case, we accepted unreservedly that Mrs Carlow had in fact died as Dr Whincap stated she had.

  “The problems facing us were, basically, only two in number. The first, where had the extra dose come from and second, had Mrs Carlow ingested it herself or had it been fed to her without her knowledge.

  “As you all know by now, Dr Whincap had on several previous occasions been called to treat his patient for what was undoubtedly overdosage of her medicine. On each occasion he was satisfied that Mrs Carlow had intentionally overdosed herself. She was, in fact, a stubborn old woman who would not stick to the dosage pattern laid down for her. Out of his concern for his patient, the doctor instituted a system of daily rationing which ensured that not only did Mrs Carlow not have the opportunity to overdose herself, but also that she should not miss taking the daily tablet which was so important for her well-being. When a doctor makes provisions such as that, there is every reason to assume that the precautions he took to make sure that there was no cache of spare digoxin left in the house were absolutely foolproof. So we could be satisfied from the outset that the drug used to overdose Mrs Carlow did not come from an obvious source such as a hidden supply of formerly prescribed tablets.”

  Whincap moved to a more comfortabl
e position on his chair, as though the words just spoken by Masters had relieved some tension that had been holding him fixed on the rack.

  “So we had to find another source of the excess drugs or . . .” Here Masters paused a moment. “. . . or find another drug: a drug which would mimic the action of digitalis so closely as to deceive Dr Whincap and, indeed, Dr Dampney.

  “Please remember that his experience of his patient and the fact that he was maintaining her on digoxin led Dr Whincap to stipulate digitalis poisoning. The pathologist, warned of these circumstances, did not disagree with Dr Whincap. He merely gave a more general name to the toxic substances—cardiac glycosides.

  “Now, I said we had to find another drug that mimics the action of digitalis, and this path was not denied us because there are many sources of cardiac glycosides which in themselves are numerous. Digitalis as you probably all know occurs in the leaves and seeds of various species of foxglove. But other plants produce toxic glycosides, too. Strophanthus, oleander, squill and convallaria are some of them.

  “We wondered whether any of these plants could have been the culprit. Our investigations did, in fact, point strongly to one of them. Consequently I asked Dr Dampney to try to isolate the peccant substance and to our great satisfaction he was able to do so. The culprit was convallaria.”

  “But that,” said Whincap, “that’s the common or garden lily of the valley.”

  “Convallaria is?” asked Bennett, astounded.

  “Gentlemen,” chided the Chief Constable.

  “Sorry,” said Whincap and Bennett together.

  “Please don’t apologize,” said Masters. “Though this is a presentation, it is not a lecture and I shan’t mind reasonable interruptions. As I go along, I may invite comment to clarify certain areas and I hope you will help where you can.

  “Convallaria is indeed lily of the valley, and wherever we have been during the last two days we have encountered these, all in full flower, and mostly brought on under glass.”

  “That’s old Josef Kisiel’s influence,” said Rainford. “Lily of the valley has some sort of ritual significance in Eastern Europe. For May Day or some such.”

  “Quite right. Mr Kisiel grows them on a commercial basis. But Mrs Marian Whincap, for instance, grows them in exactly the same way in her garden. We discussed them when we visited Helewou.”

  “You’re not implicating Marian, I hope?”

  Masters shrugged. “Does Mrs Rainford grow them in the same way?”

  “Yes.”

  “So did her mother.”

  “And my daughter Gwen,” said Whincap. “Of course, she’s married to young Kisiel.”

  “Quite. They are a common enough flower and for a number of weeks now the leaves have been through and the stolons have been breaking through the earth in great clumps.

  “The leaves, stolons and rhizomes are the dangerous parts of the plant, gentlemen. As I said, all have been available for some weeks now. And that point is important.”

  “Why?” asked Rainford.

  “Simply because those parts of the plants which yield the toxin have to be dried and then powdered before extraction can begin.

  “Extraction, itself, is simple to carry out. One simply pours alcohol through the powder and captures the resultant tincture. When prepared as medicine, of course, the amounts are carefully measured. Eight parts of dried leaf to one of alcohol is usual according to my text books.”

  “Text books?” asked Bennett. “You mean you carry them with you?”

  “A small library,” said Green. “Toxicology books, Martindale and the like. He calls them his recipe books. He dips into them for light reading in bed at night. They’ve proved mighty useful in more than one case like this.”

  Nobody commented on this revelation, so Masters continued.

  “We have shown you where the active ingredient of the toxin came from. The alcohol is equally easy to get hold of. You—we—all have it in our houses.”

  “Vodka or gin,” suggested Whincap.

  “Quite so. The text books quote the use of sixty per cent alcohol for the percolation. It need only be poured over the powdered vegetable as one does when using a filter paper in a funnel. In a domestic setting where such things may not be available, I am sure suitable alternative utensils can be found.”

  “Every house has a funnel,” said Bennett. “We have an orange plastic one. I use it myself for decanting vinegar from a litre bottle into the bottle we use on the table when we’re eating salads.”

  Masters nodded his acknowledgement of this contribution and waited while the Chief Constable added: “A bit of blotting paper would do the trick, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would, sir. Or a coffee filter paper.”

  “Ah! Yes! I’d forgotten those things are fairly common these days.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Rainford. “Sixty per cent alcohol is pretty potent stuff. Would vodka or gin be that strong?”

  “The same thought had occurred to me,” admitted Masters, “and I will deal with your question in a few moments, if I may—purely for the sake of continuity, and bearing in mind that I said earlier that when this particular tincture is being prepared as a medicine, amounts of ingredients, their strengths and proportions are critical. But when being prepared in secret as a poisonous substance, such niceties are not important.

  “What I would like everybody to realize is that many of the herbal glycosides I have mentioned have been used for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. They had not been isolated and named, of course, but country folk knew that digitalis, for instance, was good for certain heart conditions and sufferers would chew the leaves or concoct simples of their own. Convallaria was—and is—particularly popular and widely used in Russia and Eastern Europe for heart conditions. Nowadays, perhaps, such medicines are prepared by the local pharmaceutical manufacturers, for the Polish, Russian and German pharmacopoeias certainly feature them and they specify that only the aerial parts of convallaria should be used in manufacture. But I am sure you will appreciate that in the large rural areas of these countries, the local people are not well supplied with modern medicines and so frequently brew their own herbal remedies. Particularly is this true of the elderly people.

  “You will have noted that I mentioned Poland, Russia, East Germany and Eastern Europe in general.”

  “Just the areas,” said the Chief Constable, “where they make such a thing of May Day and grow lily of the valley to celebrate it.”

  “Just so, sir. So you will appreciate, gentlemen, that my thoughts turned to those people now living round about here who originally hailed from those parts.”

  “Two of them,” said Bennett. “Josef Kisiel and Mimi Hillger.”

  “Three, chum,” said Green. “Old Elke Carlow herself was Prussian.”

  “Of course. But if you include her you are still entertaining the possibility of suicide.”

  “We were at the time his nibs is talking of.”

  “I see. Sorry.”

  “Not at all,” said Green graciously.

  “Shall we say that by the time we came to concentrate on murder there were two?” asked Masters. “You will all of you—with the possible exception of the Chief Constable—remember that everybody I spoke to at first strove to avoid telling me that Josef Kisiel had been a bitter enemy of Elke Carlow for more than forty years. So great was your concern to protect him that you, Theo, accepted a palpably false argument of suicide caused by rejection, you Mr Bennett, in company with Dr Whincap, did your damnedest to head me away from Kisiel, as did his son, and Mrs Marian Whincap accused me of suggesting she was guilty of some criminal act when I attempted to elucidate the standing between Mrs Carlow, Mr Josef Kisiel and all the other members of the family group.”

  Whincap and Bennett looked suitably contrite, but Rainford said hotly: “Because you’ve got a bloody devious way of going about finding your facts and impressions.”

  “You mean I ask the wrong—or unexpected—questions?” />
  “Yes.”

  “What would you rather I did? Subject the people I spoke to to long gruelling hours of interrogation, gaining a few crumbs of information by attrition?”

  “Well . . . no, not exactly.”

  “Remember, Theo,” said Green, “that you were allowed to be present when we spoke to your missus and your daughter. Everybody had somebody else present even though the doc got het up because he mistakenly thought we were grilling his practice nurse.”

  “I did apologize,” complained Whincap.

  “So you did. All I’m saying is that we didn’t put anybody through the hoop. Because his nibs asks unexpected and, therefore, awkward questions and then puts his own brand of interpretation on the answers doesn’t mean he’s browbeating anybody. Just the reverse, if anything. You’ve got to make allowances for egg-heads like him. They’re always full of bright ideas.”

  Rainford shrugged. The Chief Constable asked him: “You were present at some of the interviews, Theo. Have you any specific complaint about the way Masters conducted those you heard?”

  There was silence for a moment, and then, to his credit, Rainford said: “No, sir. All I’m sore about is the fact that I couldn’t do what he does and because my immediate family was on the receiving end.”

  “Thank you. Can we now get on, please?”

  “Josef Kisiel, then,” resumed Masters. “A known and implacable enemy of the deceased. A grower of lily of the valley, a Pole and, I assumed, a man with a knowledge of herbal remedies. He seemed the obvious suspect. Could the matter be brought home to him? He had the motive and the means. What about opportunity?

  “For the benefit of Dr Whincap and Mr Bennett I should mention that when investigating a case of murder we look for, and hope to prove, three things. Means, opportunity and motive. The last is not mandatory, but it helps all round and particularly when a case comes to trial because juries can accept and understand a motive.

  “I have said Kisiel had a motive and the means. We did not establish the necessary opportunity. It was necessary, therefore, to ascertain whether there could be another person who fulfilled the criteria.