Vicious Circle

by Douglas Clark

  “Can I just interpolate here that when I mentioned means, I was referring to possession of a crop of convallaria. I was not referring to the physical act of feeding the toxin to the victim. That—the mechanics of the job, if you like—would be a subsidiary point which you might consider could equally well be a part of the opportunity which, at its simplest, is usually considered to be synonymous with proximity. By that I mean that the suspect could be proved to have been, at the critical time, in the vicinity of the victim.

  “In considering that a knowledge of herbal remedies seems to be a feature of those who are born and brought up in Eastern Europe—certainly more so than in this country, for many decades at any rate—I was obliged to consider Frau Hillger who, until a year or two ago, had lived her entire life to the east of Berlin. She, as a girl child of yesteryear, would have been taught all the housewifely habits of her forebears—or so I assumed. So I visited Frau Hillger at her home. Mrs Rainford was at the house and was in the act of pouring a glass of sherry for Frau Hillger when we arrived. Frau Hillger was sitting in the sunshine in the garden, so we were conducted through the house by Mrs Rainford to talk to her. As I said, Mrs Rainford was busy pouring drinks in the dining room. As we passed through I noted that bottles of gin and vodka were openly on view.

  “Whilst Mr Green and I spoke to Frau Hillger in the presence of her niece, I asked our two sergeants to stroll down the garden for two reasons. First I did not wish to overwhelm Frau Hillger by the presence of four large policemen, and second I wished to ascertain whether there were lilies of the valley growing in the garden. There were.”

  Rainford grunted. “So you reckoned Mimi had the means and the opportunity, but no motive.”

  “Quite right—if by opportunity you mean simply proximity.”

  “That’s what I did mean.”

  “I now come to an incident of which I think none of you, other than members of my team, is aware. This morning, while I was talking to Josef Kisiel, I was told that Mr Patrick Dean had received a phone call from a woman who called herself Mrs Leafe but who was, in fact, unknown to him.”

  “An anonymous phone call, you mean?” asked the Chief Constable. “What was it all about?”

  “The gist of her message was that somebody was trying to cover up the fact that Mrs Carlow had been murdered by Josef Kisiel who had always vowed to see her in hell.”

  “Nice,” murmured Bennett. “And, I suspect from what little I know of you, helpful to you. Theo, here, says you can make any titbit fit into your jigsaw. What deductions did you draw from that call to Dean? That Josef Kisiel was guilty of murder?”

  Green gave him a pitying look. “Come off it, mate. We don’t jump to hasty conclusions.”

  “Sorry. I merely asked.”

  “Because murder had not, at the time of the inquest, been established, it had not been mentioned publicly. The inquest took only a minute or two and then Dean deferred the hearing. Consequently no public interest had been aroused. I imagine very few people knew that Dean was sitting instead of Mr Bennett. And yet our unknown caller mentioned murder and Josef Kisiel and a cover-up.”

  “What sort of a woman was she? Could Dean tell?” asked Whincap.

  “His secretary accepted the call and put Mrs Leafe through because ‘she sounded like a client’. I took that to mean it was not an uneducated voice. Dean himself described the voice as articulate and just the opposite from what he had imagined anonymous callers would sound like. From those two observations we deduced that she could be a woman whom one might meet in the circles in which people like you gentlemen are accustomed to move. Lest you should feel slighted at the idea of any of your acquaintances stooping to such depths, I will remind you of what I mentioned a few moments ago. The woman mentioned murder, Josef Kisiel and his hatred of Elke Carlow, and a cover-up.”

  “Crikey,” said Bennett, “she must have been one of us. I mean, murder had been mentioned as a possibility among us; nobody outside a fairly small circle would know about the enmity Josef had for Elke; and I doubt whether anybody not known to us would—or could—have unravelled the family convolutions which might lead one to suppose—or suggest—that a cover-up could take place.”

  “Quite,” said Masters. “So having arrived at that point I had to decide which—if any—of the articulate women in your circle would phone a message like that to Dean.”

  “I reckon you’re wrong,” said Rainford. “None of our womenfolk would try to implicate old Josef.”

  “Even though the menfolk tried to protect him from us?”

  “That’s the opposite of what I’ve just said.”

  “In one way, perhaps. But both could be considered efforts to bamboozle the investigation.”

  Rainford turned in despair to Whincap. “I told you this chap can see both sides of a coin at once.”

  “You’re not thinking well, Theo. There are two sides to every coin and you can’t blame George for seeing them. But to get back to what you said about none of the women you know wanting to implicate Kisiel. His nibs recognized that fact, so what’s the other side of that particular coin? I’ll tell you. If not to implicate Kisiel, then the call must have been intended to steer suspicion away from herself.”

  “Rubbish. You didn’t know who she was.”

  “We did, you know. She was one of very few women—and that doesn’t include the lasses like your daughter, otherwise the typist and Dean would have known it was a young voice—who are in some way intimately connected with your family circle. His nibs assumed—and I agreed with him—that Kisiel’s wife and daughter-in-law would not say he was a murderer. We reckoned Mrs Whincap senior wouldn’t say it about her son-in-law’s father. That only left Mrs Bennett, Mrs Rainford and Mrs Hillger. Now, I’ve been a copper long enough to know you can’t discount anybody, but I reckon you, Theo, and Bob here, would excuse us for not considering your respective wives too closely.”

  “Most certainly,” agreed Bennett.

  “And don’t forget,” continued Green, “that the phone call was from a woman who spoke precise English. Mrs Hillger fills that bill quite nicely.”

  Whincap nodded his agreement to this. Masters waited a moment as if to ascertain whether Green intended to continue and then continued: “I think, sir, that as a serving policeman you would also not have overlooked the lesson of statistics which tells us that members of the victim’s immediate family are more often than not guilty of domestic murder—as opposed to gang warfare and violence of that nature.”

  The Chief Constable coughed. “Quite right, Masters. Quite right.”

  “So we thought of Frau Hillger as the unknown caller who had so unwisely indicated to us that the murderer was more likely to be a woman than a man.

  “And so we concentrated our efforts on trying to support this belief. With this in mind, I visited Mr Kisiel a second time, to get to know how the Eastern Europeans had been accustomed to making their medicinal tinctures.” He turned to Rainford. “This is when the proof strength of gin and vodka came up.”

  “I can never understand this proof strength business,” said Bennett. “The percentages they put on bottle labels mean nothing to me.”

  “It is a little complicated,” admitted Masters. “But if I could digress for a moment, I’ll tell you the origins of it, and you might then understand it a little better.”

  “I’m hazy about it myself,” admitted the Chief Constable.

  “In that case, sir . . . way back, in the old days of Excise Officers and Customs Houses, any drink such as brandy had to be proved to be spirit for duty to be levied. The way the Customs men did it was to dampen a little gunpowder with the liquid to be proved. They then applied a match. If the dampened powder still burned, it proved there was a goodly percentage of alcohol in the liquid. If it failed to burn, then the percentage of water was greater. The proof figure was known. It was slightly under half of alcohol by weight and slightly over half by volume. Both figures run to several places of decimals. But that is whe
re these rather ungainly standards came from, and we still stick to them today. So gin or vodka of, say, sixty-five per cent proof would, in fact, contain only about thirty two or three per cent alcohol.”

  “I knew there was something funny about it,” said Rainford. “So gin or vodka would not do the trick.”

  “It would, actually,” said Masters. “When I mentioned this to Kisiel he told me that you simply put the spirit through several lots of the dried herbs, and just as if you were to make coffee stronger by putting it through several new lots of grounds, so you can make the convallaria infusion stronger. But perhaps Dr Whincap would confirm that.”

  “Right enough,” said Whincap. “The alcohol would still retain its properties until you got to a saturated solution. And I imagine that would be considerably more potent than a single infusion with a stronger spirit.”

  “Thank you. That clears up the point about strength of spirit and also tells us how the people of Poland went about making the tincture with the potable alcohol they had in their houses, rather than resorting to a stronger industrial spirit which would, I suspect, have been dangerous to use.”

  Masters took a sip from the untouched glass of beer in front of him.

  “How did Aunt Mimi get old Elke to take the stuff?” demanded Rainford gruffly. “You said that discovering that would be an important subsidiary to the means of poisoning her sister.”

  Masters inclined his head. “Did Mrs Rainford speak to you about the visit we paid to your aunt?”

  “She told me it all.”

  “Then you will recall that Frau Hillger prepared cold bortsch for lunch on the day her sister died.”

  “She mentioned it, yes.”

  “I wondered what she’d had,” said Whincap. “I didn’t ask at the time, but when I was dealing with . . .”

  “Must you?” demanded Bennett. “We all know bortsch is made from beetroot and we can guess what the vomit looked like.”

  “Shall we say,” said Masters, “that soup of that particular colour would provide excellent camouflage for a small fatal dose of slightly greenish-brown liquid.”

  “You mean she spooned the stuff into her sister’s plate?”

  Masters shook his head. “I’m sorry to tell you, Mr Rainford, that your wife’s aunt showed a great degree of cunning at this point. Or, at least, that is my reading of her actions.”

  “Mind reading, now, are you?”

  “Theo,” said the Chief Constable firmly, “you can ask questions, but not . . .”

  “That was a question, sir.”

  “A mean one, asked in a mean voice. I can understand that you are upset by all this, but it is hardly Masters’ fault that something nasty has cropped up within your family circle.”

  “Sorry,” grunted Rainford, apparently making the one word suffice for both his senior officer and Masters.

  “Go on, please,” said Harrington.

  Masters continued his narrative. “The cardiac glycosides are very unstable. So much I learned by reading. Heat destroys them. That is why the infusion is done with a cold drip—unlike coffee where boiling water is used.

  “Frau Hillger must have been aware of this, to have served a cold soup that day. I say that because I believe bortsch is usually served hot.”

  Rainford seemed to have recovered his equanimity. “I must say that Margarethe always serves it hot. Not that we have it all that often.”

  “The second thing which caused me to mention Frau Hillger’s cunning was the fact that in the Carlow household, chilli wine is always put on the table to take with soup.”

  “By jove!” said Bennett. “Chilli wine, eh? We always used to have that in the mess when I was in the army. It was the only thing that made some of the stuff they lobbed up even drinkable.”

  “We use it,” said the Chief Constable. “I always look after it—topping it up with dry sherry and so on. Those chillis last for years. They lose their red colour and go brown . . . good heavens! Are you saying she put this convallaria tincture in the chilli wine?”

  “Just so, sir. But then, having done that, she had to make sure her sister used it—or enough of it to bring about the desired results.”

  “How on earth did she manage that?”

  “Cunning again,” said Masters. “She played on her sister’s known irascible nature. The Scots are more accustomed to using the adjective contumacious than we in England are. Frau Hillger, I believe, regarded her sister as contumacious in that Mrs Carlow was stubbornly perverse. All of you gentlemen have assured me that this was so.”

  “And how!” said Whincap.

  “Frau Hillger on her own admission . . .” Masters spoke directly to Rainford. “This came out in the course of conversation in the presence of Mrs Rainford. Frau Hillger stated that when they sat down for lunch that day, she drew her sister’s attention to the fact that the chilli wine bottle was almost empty, and then added that nevertheless there would be enough for her sister. I believe Frau Hillger knew that Mrs Carlow would immediately disagree and demand that the bottle be topped up. Frau Hillger, of course, complied and then had the satisfaction of seeing Mrs Carlow sprinkle more and more of what she believed to be chilli wine into her soup—just to be contumacious in view of her sister’s supposed rationing of the condiment.”

  “Good God!” said Rainford. “You mean she played on old Elke’s weakness to ensure that the poor old girl took enough of the stuff to kill her?”

  “That is my belief and that is why I said I thought her to have used a high degree of cunning. And, incidentally, we have recovered two or three tablespoons of used chillis from a small plastic bag of rubbish inside the large black sack waiting at the house for collection by the dustmen.”

  “That seals it then?” asked Rainford.

  “The beans will have to be tested forensically.”

  “Of course. But I heard you’d brought Mimi in for questioning. You’ve established means and opportunity, so I suppose you won’t have to bother about motive.”

  Masters picked up the paper which lay face downwards on the coffee table. As he turned it over, he said: “This is Frau Hillger’s confession. It was made voluntarily after she had been cautioned and after she had been advised not to make such a statement before seeing a solicitor. Both those points are noted at the beginning of the statement. It is signed by Frau Hillger.” He turned to the Chief Constable. “Do you wish to keep this, sir, or shall I tear it up?”

  “Tear it up? Why?”

  “I don’t like confessions of murder, particularly from elderly ladies, even less from foreign elderly ladies who have not had the benefit of advice from a solicitor.”

  “Well . . . er . . . I mean, I see your point.”

  “If we were to use it, her counsel would retract it, and he could suggest that we extracted it by less than fair means—for the reasons I have already stated.”

  Rainford said: “You’re really prepared to tear it up?”

  “I would prefer to do so, but it is the Chief Constable’s property.”

  Rainford looked from one man to the other. “I can’t ask you to destroy it, sir, because no matter what anybody says, Mimi is family as far as I’m concerned. But I’d like to say I’ve never before heard a police officer make a more generous gesture. I know he can prove the case quite easily without it, but getting rid of a confession to murder! That’s unbelievable.”

  The C.C. hesitated a moment and then said: “If we use the confession, the whole case is sewn up. But I’ll bow to Masters’ wishes if he can produce a motive. For my part, in spite of what he says about means and opportunity being enough to prove a case I believe that in a situation like this, motive will be of paramount importance. Little old ladies have to be shown to have motives before juries will accept them as bloodthirsty villains.”

  “Didn’t she say why she’d killed her sister?” asked Whincap. “In her confession, I mean.”

  Masters shook his head.

  “What about it, George?” asked Rainfo
rd. “It’s up to you.”

  “I realize that, unfortunately.”

  “No motive?” asked Bennett.

  “I believe I have one to satisfy my own mind,” said Masters. “But I must confess that the compilation of the factors which go to the making of it is more a matter for the shrinks than for me.”

  “Tell us,” said the C.C.

  “Right, sir. But when I said earlier you might be able to help me, I was referring to what I am about to say now. Dr Whincap, I think you are the most likely to be able to add a few words of guidance.”

  “I’ll do what I can, of course.”

  “Thank you. I shall be out of my professional ground now, so I shall try to make my points in as few words as possible.” He looked round his listeners. “First of all, I would like to speak about Elke Carlow. With the exception of the Chief Constable, you all knew her. I shall attempt to describe her personality as we who have listened to many of you on the subject—imagine her to have been.

  “I mentioned to Dr Whincap the possibility of mental illness in Elke Carlow. Basically, as I understood him, what he had to say was that he had never treated this patient for mental disorder not because he was convinced she was free from mental illness but because of the degree of the disorder if, indeed, it did exist.

  “Mental illness has a great number of causes and exists in all manner of forms. But so long as individual peculiarities of any mental illness do not result in conduct or behaviour markedly at variance with accepted social custom, society—in the shape of doctors—does not interfere with that person.

  “So there are all grades of such disorder from slight peculiarities up to legally certifiable behaviour. It follows, therefore, that there are among us a fair number of people who are not sufficiently abnormal as to be regarded as certifiable but who are, nevertheless, by ordinary standards, eccentric or peculiar.

  “Delusions, for instance, play a part in paranoia, a condition which is just one of the many mental illnesses. Some paranoiacs have delusions in which they believe themselves to be the subjects of annoyance or persecution by other people. Such delusions cause the persecutions to be attributed to actual known persons. By that I mean that the annoyance is not caused by some imagined or unreal source, but by specific persons who can be named by the mentally ill person.