The girl who stood in the doorway was about twenty-three years old, about five feet two inches tall, and, in a firmly compact way, appealingly shaped. A hairdresser had made her blonde. She wore a short, flowered dress that hugged a little too closely the firm, vital body. Over the dress was a flannel jacket that obviously belonged to a different ensemble. Hatless, the blond, untidy hair was held back from her face by a scarlet ribbon. A splash of scarlet marked the childish mouth. With a small nose and grey, good-natured eyes, the face was full of an eager and naïve expressiveness. She was standing on tiptoe, her hands clutched together, smiling up with an almost desperate vividness at the man who had opened the door to her.
But in spite of that desperate lightheartedness and in spite of powder and eye shadow the fact that she had recently been crying was the first thing one would have noticed about her.
The man was tall, dark, and about thirty-three years old. He looked resigned rather than friendly. It was not her first ring at his bell, nor her second, nor indeed her third that had brought him to the door. But when his telephone had suddenly rung he had answered it. She had told him then, speaking from the porter’s booth downstairs, that she knew he was in because of the light that showed under his door.
“Please,” she had said, “please, Toby, I must see you. I know it’s awfully late, but if it isn’t convenient for me to come in, couldn’t you come out for a few minutes? Please, please, it’s terribly important. There’s a coffee stall on the corner across there; could you meet me there in five minutes’ time?—I mean if you don’t want me to come up, if you’ve got people there or something. I won’t keep you long. But really, really, Toby, it’s important. Please, Toby, if only you’ll——”
“All right, come along up, Lou. Sorry, I didn’t know it was you when you rang. No, no, it’s quite all right; come up.” Putting the telephone down, Toby Dyke looked at the clock. It was then twenty minutes before midnight.
Now, as he greeted with a brief smile the girl who stood there on the small square of landing, caution and reserve were in his manner. But she pretended not to notice. When she came into the flat it was as if she had been shot into it, she walked with such startling vigour of movement. In the middle of Toby’s carpet she did a few little dancing steps and her head twisted this way and that as she took bright glances at the easy chairs, the littered writing table, the striped curtains, the mess of cigarette ash on the hearth before the unlit gas fire, the worn carpet. But her brightness, her little, jigging dance steps, her affectation of a birdlike pout as, with her head on one side, she took her first whimsical survey of his home surroundings were the merest transparency of a covering drawn over some fear and agonized despondence that possessed her.
“It’s awfully hot up here,” she said; “you ought to open a window. Look, you’ve only a tiny bit open; I don’t know how you can stand it. It’s June, you know, Toby. Why don’t you open something? You’ve no idea how hot it feels.”
“I’ll call it June when it starts to feel like June.” He sat down on the arm of an easy chair and held out a paper packet of cigarettes to her. He had a narrow face, sallow and dramatic as a gipsy’s. “You’ve been crying, Lou,” he said.
Lou Capell did another jigging twist on one heel. “Well, a bit,” she said, “but I’ve got a cold too; that’s really what’s wrong with my face. Horrible, getting a cold in summer, isn’t it? I always hate summer colds; somehow you can’t settle down to make a real, comforting sort of fuss over them like you can in winter. I like your flat, Toby. I’ve never been here, have I? You asked me up here to tea once, but when I came you were out. And it’s ages since I’ve seen you.” Thickened by her cold, chaotically, the words tumbled out.
“Well, what’s it all about?” said Toby.
She replied: “Oh goodness, it’s nearly twelve o’clock! You must think me the most terrible nuisance. But I know so few of the kind of people who…” She wriggled her whole small, muscular body in a rush of embarrassment. “So few people are sensible about things, you know. They’re curious, or they’re—well, they misunderstand you, or they make you feel a fool somehow. That’s why I came to you.”
“I see. Well, what is it all?”
She took another look round the room before she answered and seemed to have all her attention caught by a corner of the mantelpiece. Keeping her gaze fixed firmly upon it, she answered offhandedly: “I wish you’d let me sleep here, Toby.”
Toby Dyke gave a start. “I thought you said you only wanted to come up for a few minutes.”
“Oh, that isn’t what I came to ask you,” she said, “but I’m terrified of hotels. I slept in a hotel last night. It was awful; I never got to sleep all night. I locked my door but I felt simply terrified. I’m always like that in hotels. I don’t know why it is, but they just terrify me. I wish you’d let me sleep here tonight, Toby. I could put those two chairs together and I’d be perfectly all right. I promise I shouldn’t be any bother.”
“I thought you’d a flat of your own,” said Toby.
“Yes, but Druna’s there. You know Druna, don’t you?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
She looked surprised. “Druna Merton—she and I share the flat together.”
“Well, what’s she been doing to you?”
“Doing to me?”
With the obvious patience that expresses impatience, he nodded.
She laughed, saying: “Why, Druna’s marvellous. If you haven’t met her I must fix it. You’d think her simply marvellous. I’ll fix it as soon as all this is over.”
“All what?” said Toby. “And if Druna’s marvellous, why can’t you go back there tonight?”
The shadow of defensiveness came into her eyes. “Druna is marvellous. I mean, she’s got one of those awfully calm, sure characters and immense strength—I mean strength of will, you know—she isn’t all muddled and silly like me. She knows exactly what she wants and she’ll do anything to get it. I always admire that enormously, don’t you? But sometimes, somehow, I don’t feel like…”
“Bullies you, does she?”
“Good heavens, no! No, honestly, Toby, I admire Druna enormously. For one thing, I like beautiful people; I simply like being able to look at them. I’m grateful to them. But all the same, sometimes…” And all at once it looked as if she were going to cry.
Frowning, Toby puffed smoke in her direction. Suddenly, raising his voice, he called out: “George!”
From the little kitchenette that opened out of the sitting room a voice made an indistinguishable reply.
Lou Capell jerked her head round. “I hadn’t realized there was anyone else here.”
“Don’t mind about George. He’s a person,” said Toby, “of deep and catholic sympathy.” He raised his voice again: “How’re you getting along with that coffee, George?”
“Comin’.”
“Now, Lou”—and Toby put some sternness into the look with which he surveyed the excited poise of her body and her tear-marked face—“what’s the trouble? When you’ve told me I’ll tell you whether or not you can sleep here.”
“But I can’t tell you what the trouble is. I mustn’t tell anyone!”
Toby sighed. Lou echoed the sigh noisily and threw herself down into a chair.
“Toby,” she said, “would you lend me fifteen pounds?”
It was just then that George, carrying a tray with three large cups and coffee in a tall, brown jug, joined them in the sitting room.
George was a short man, broadly made, with stubby, pink hands and a pink expanse of face. In its rosiness his features made only gentle corrugations. He had fair hair and mild blue eyes and wore a high-necked jersey tucked into trousers of a worn and shiny blue. Photographs of him, full face and profile, as well as a record of his fingerprints, were in the possession of Scotland Yard; but so, doubtless, are those of many other excellent people.
“This is George,” said Toby.
Setting the tray down, George bent his rubbery-looking face above the cups. “Milk, miss? Sugar?”
Lou smiled brightly up at him as if she were desperately trying to think of something bright to say. But there seemed to be a paralysis in her thoughts. Her fingers, clutching the worn, red leather bag with a broken strap that she carried, revealed her tension and embarrassment. Instead of speaking she hummed a scrap of tune. Then she appeared to realize how the humming gave her away. “Are you an American?” she managed to bring out.
“Don’t start inquiring into George’s origins,” said Toby; “they’re everything they oughtn’t to be. Same thing with his past.”
“I mean because he makes such good coffee,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean I’ve ever had American coffee, but they’re always saying we can’t make it, and that generally means something, I suppose.”
Toby, taking a cup of coffee from George, murmured thoughtfully: “Fifteen pounds. Quite a lot of money to a hard-working journalist.”
Her eyes swung round to him. “It feels awful having to ask for it, but I’ve got to find it! And I can’t tell anybody why. That makes it ten times worse. But I’ll pay it back. That’s why I came to you, Toby—at least partly. I thought you’d know you could rely on me to pay it back.”
George observed: “When you lend money you didn’t ought to expect it back. Then if you do get it back it’s a nice surprise and if you don’t nobody’s any the worse. That’s the only way to keep your nature from gettin’ soured.”
Her eyes dropped, and she sat silent.
Toby said fretfully: “You’re such a hopeless young fool about things. If I knew what the trouble was——”
She cried out shrilly: “Please, please, Toby, I’ll pay it all back! I’ll pay it back quite soon. I’ve had an idea about a job; I think I could——”
“Here!” said Toby harshly. He got out his chequebook and wrote quickly. “Not been trying some way of getting rich quick?” he asked abruptly.
She giggled. But as he glanced at her she smothered the sound with a look of stubborn primness. In her red-rimmed eyes there shone a look of almost animal gratitude. As Toby handed her the cheque tears welled up in them, and all at once her muscles relaxed so that her stocky body in its cheap, flowered dress and jacket of grey flannel had a look of complete collapse.
“Oh dear,” she moaned, “I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to.”
But she twisted sideways in her chair and, with her face pressed hard against its back, sobbed helplessly.
Toby and George sat sipping coffee.
Presently Toby said: “You’d better tell me about it now. Has someone managed to get some sort of a hold on you? Is it that woman Druna?”
She sat up abruptly. “Druna?” Her voice was thick from her tears and her cold. “Why d’you keep on about Druna? What’ve you got against her?”
“Sounds a pretty good bitch to me.”
“That’s an absolutely ridiculous prejudice. You don’t know anything about her. And, Toby, I’m not going to answer any questions. Oh goodness”—and she gasped for breath—“my nose has got itself completely blocked up. I’d better put some stuff up it—d’you mind? It ’ll improve it for a bit. It’s past eleven, isn’t it? Yes, of course it is—only one mustn’t use this stuff more than once every three hours, and I used it last about eight o’clock.”
She searched hastily in her bag and brought out a small, flat bottle.
“One oughtn’t to cry when one’s got a cold,” she said. “The two together give one something like death by suffocation.”
Toby waited silently while she tilted her head back and, with the tube fixed into the cork, squirted a few drops of liquid up each nostril. After that she blew her nose hard and then, as an afterthought, powdered it. Certainly when she spoke next her voice was clearer.
“Toby, you’re always so awfully, awfully good to me, and I’d tell you the whole thing—in fact I’d like to; it’d be a relief to tell it to a reasonable person—only, you see, I’ve promised.” That last word had the final and inviolable sound that it has on the lips of a child. Snatching up her cup, she swallowed down all that was left in it. “And may I sleep here tonight?”
At the spurt of laughter with which Toby answered her she smiled naïvely.
“Thanks ever so much.” But then her face clouded. “You do mean I can, don’t you? Laughing like that, I mean—that does mean…”
“All right, all right,” he said, “though why you can’t simply go to a hotel… Is it the cost?—because if so——”
“No, no, I told you, I’m terrified of hotels. I know it’s silly of me, but I simply lie awake and tremble—it’s terrible.”
He grunted. “And this Druna of yours? Why is it you’re afraid of her?”
“I’m not!” she said irritably. “It’s just that sometimes one doesn’t want to run into a particular person. Perhaps it’s because—well, I don’t know how to put it, but sometimes she makes me feel horribly—lost. I know what a fool I am and that almost everyone I meet is tons more intelligent than I am, and I’m terribly grateful to a person like you that you can put up with me at all. Yes, really, Toby,” she said gravely, “I am. It’s awful being a fool. You’ve no idea how awful it is sometimes. Sometimes I think I’ll try and do something about it but I know it’s no good really. All I’ve got is an awful lot of energy. I have, you know; I’ve got lots more than most people. And that’s rather awful too. You jump out of bed in the morning and find everyone else in the most frightful tempers and you dash round the house getting things done and being bright and gay and you only make the others worse than they are already. I don’t know what on earth I’ll do when I marry. Men are awful in the mornings, aren’t they? Only I don’t expect I’ll ever marry. I think it might be a good idea for me to go in for nursing, don’t you, Toby?”
Toby let her run on. She reached out her cup for more coffee and, with a cold-bleared yet vivid smile at George, said: “One thing that’d be good about it is that I’d learn something about the human body. It’s awful how little I know about it really. I don’t let on usually, of course, but really I know next to nothing. I don’t mean that I mind letting on to someone like you, but d’you know, I’d never let on to Druna. She knows such an awful lot about things like that; she knows the technical names for things and everything. But a nurse is taught all those things properly, isn’t she? I don’t mean that that’s why I want to take it up”—she gave a deprecatory giggle—“but all the same, I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”
“I think,” said Toby, “that if you’re staying here the night the sooner you get to bed with that cold of yours the better.”
She started to protest that that would mean turning them out of their sitting room since it was in the sitting room that she was determined to sleep. Nothing, she said, would persuade her to allow either of them to disarrange themselves because she happened to be staying there.
“And, really,” she said, “it isn’t late, and it’s such ages since I’ve seen you, Toby; it’s nice to be able to talk.”
“No,” said Toby, “it’s quite late enough. You run along off to bed.”
“But I’m going to sleep in here,” said Lou. “You needn’t argue about it. It’s definite.”
“Is it?” said George, and it was in George’s room that she slept, while George arranged blankets and cushions for himself on the sitting-room floor.
“Who is she, Tobe?” said George, after she had gone and he and Toby had been left in peace to finish the coffee.
The worried laugh with which Toby answered mixed itself up with a yawn. “I met her first about two years ago. It was at some sort of a party. She’d had a very little to drink but she was pretty helpless already. It frightened her rather. I took her away and walked her round the place and counselled her, and after that she attached herself to me and tried to get me to instruct her in everything about life—including facts of same.”
“What’s she do?” said George, prodding with his spoon at some sugar.
Toby replied: “Looks for jobs, mostly, and lives on the dole. Now and then she’s a secretary for a bit or a shop girl or a doctor’s superior young lady who opens the door and books appointments. She hasn’t any parents. So far as I know the only relations she’s got are a brother and sister-in-law in Surrey, and she’s not too keen on them. She likes her company a bit colourful. Wonder what’s frightening her now. Might be blackmail; she’s just the sort of idiot who could be made to believe that some perfectly innocent affair had got to be paid for through the nose. I ought to have made her tell me what it was. I’ll have another go in the morning.”
He threw the stub of his cigarette onto the cold hearth, rose and trod on it.
“Part of her trouble, of course,” he said, “is that she’s got a spontaneous humanity that’s really quite unusual. She’ll do anything for anybody. A nice kid.” He yawned again. “Pretty often I’d like to murder her.”
When somebody did murder Lou Capell Toby was among the first to hear of it.
Lou had left the next morning before either George or Toby was awake. She had left George’s room neatly tidied, with a note propped up on the chest of drawers thanking them both for their kindness.
Toby had spent the afternoon and some of the evening at the newspaper office where he sometimes put in an appearance.
It was at about a quarter to nine that he received a telephone call at his flat. A faint voice which he did not recognize said to him: “Toby Dyke? I am speaking from Wilmer’s End. Lou Capell is dead—murdered. Did you hear what I said?—murdered. Your cheque has been removed. But hadn’t you better come here?”
The speaker rang off.
Toby set the telephone slowly down and sat staring before him. …
The death that came to Lou Capell was a horrible one. It was so horrible that the young man who had to describe to the police how he had found her body had turned, in spite of his recent medical degree, a blanched mauve in the face, while his hands were restrained from trembling only by an effort obvious to all.
The police had been summoned to Wilmer’s End by a hysterical telephone call from Mrs Clare.
Wilmer’s End was a house about a mile and a half out of the small town of Larking in Surrey. It was one of those houses that present to the road the appearance of little more than a roomy cottage. Bricks and weather tiles of an old, warm red and honeysuckle over the doorway heightened this impression. Yet it had, in fact, an amazing number of rooms, several bathrooms, electric cooking and garage space for at least three cars. It was known in Larking to be the property of Roger Clare of the publishing firm of Roger Clare and Thurston. Larking also knew that he had recently divorced his wife and left her to live at Wilmer’s End without him.
When Inspector Vanner and Sergeant Gurr arrived Eve Clare herself was waiting in the doorway. She was in a wild impatience to tell her story and to shift responsibility. One of those very slim women with quick, delicate movements, in whom even restlessness has grace, Eve Clare was thirty-five, and though she looked neither less nor more than her age it was natural to speak of her as if she were astonishingly youthful looking. She had a small head that she carried high, with hair of a shining fairness, tinged with copper, cut so that it made the most of her head’s subtle modelling. Her skin had a golden, sun-toasted freshness; her eyes were light blue under narrow, curved brows; her mouth was broad, sensitive and egotistical. She was very unsuitably dressed for a murder in a pale green linen dress with scarcely any back to it and had gaily coloured beach sandals on her slim, brown, stockingless feet.
She would have started the story standing there in the doorway with half a dozen people clustering behind her had not the inspector, glancing round, interrupted with a peremptory request to be taken straight to the body.
“Very well,” said Eve, “Charlie can show you.” She grasped by the wrist the young man who stood beside her. “This is Doctor Widdison, Inspector, who’s the only one of us who’s actually seen her. He must take you up. Come along, it’s this way.” She started a few steps down the paved path that ran along the front of the house.
The inspector stopped her. He was a compact, brooding man with an assumed decisiveness of speech and action.
“Do I understand,” he said in his firm, cold voice to Charlie Widdison, “that it’s impossible to get into the room except by the window?”
The young man said: “Er, yes.” A fluting voice and a habit of hesitation gave his speech a disturbing preciousness. “I climbed up by the—balcony. It’s quite easy. But I left the door locked and came down the same way because I—thought it was the right thing to do. I mean, I left everything as I—found it.” Though his rather beautiful face was exceedingly pale and his hands, long and elegantly bony like the rest of him, fidgeted wildly with a coat button his large brown eyes had an odd look of eagerness.
This look, in different degrees, was to be seen on the faces of all who were listening from the doorway.
“What made you go up?” said the inspector.
The young doctor answered a different question. “You mustn’t take me too—seriously, and I’m aware, of course, that on the very short inspection I made of things I’m not qualified to give an authoritative—opinion. But I think, you see, it’s strychnine.”
“What made you go up?”
“Strychnine, you see, is a thing that——”
“What made you go up?”
A woman’s voice in the doorway said on a note of nervous laughter: “I wonder if he always asks every question three times.”
Eve Clare said: “I asked him to go up, Inspector.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she replied, her voice growing vicious, “all the people whose clothes don’t matter as much were out of the way! I thought you said”—it was obvious that the mere manner of authority was enough to rouse her to headstrong temper—“that you wanted to go straight up!”
“All in good time, madam.” He gave a look that slid slowly down from her bright hair to the crimson toenails that showed through the bars of her sandals.
She recognized the implications of the look and was quick to sneer back at him. “If you don’t like climbing we can get you a ladder.”
“Why didn’t Doctor Widdison use a ladder?”
“For God’s sake,” she cried, “do you want to go up and look at her or don’t you? Why didn’t you use a ladder, Charlie?”
“Well, it’s quite—easy without one.”
A man detached himself from the group in the doorway. He was a small man of a mild and commonplace appearance. He wore an open-necked shirt and corduroy shorts. Muttering: “I’ll just go and get that ladder,” he made off round the house. Coming to himself with a start, Sergeant Gurr followed him. In a few minutes they returned, carrying a ladder between them.
The room in which Lou Capell lay dead with the arched rigidity, the congested face and staring eyes that had so shocked the nerves of Dr Widdison was on the first floor at the end of the house. The balcony outside the window was only a wooden one and looked as if it had been added to the building comparatively recently. A climbing rose sprawled over it; the scent of the roses, great, milky-white blooms, hung warm on the evening air; sweetly it penetrated through the open windows into the room where the girl lay dead.
The room was a large one, a room of bizarre contrasts, of stark black furniture and old, leaded panes, of dim silvery greys and splashes of scarlet.
In the middle of the silvery-grey carpet lay Lou. Her face had become a thing of horror. Her legs were thrust straight out; her back was arched; her whole body was rigid. She was wearing pyjamas. They were of cheap, artificial silk satin, trimmed with poor lace. Over them she wore a dressing gown, vividly flowered.
“You see, she’d been having a bath,” said Charlie Widdison. His tone was stiff and strange.
“Where’s the bathroom?” asked Inspector Vanner.
Charlie nodded at the corner of the room. The inspector strode across to the door there, opened it, took one glance round the shining black and silver of the small bathroom, closed the door and returned to stand beside the body. He chewed at his lips. The sergeant prowled round the room, peering at hairbrushes, vanishing cream, powder and discarded underclothes.
“Strychnine, you say?” said Vanner.
“I—should think so. That rigidity, you see, it’s got nothing to do with rigor mortis. She couldn’t have been dead more than half an hour when I first got in here.”
“You still haven’t told me why you broke in. What made you think there was something wrong?”
Charlie shifted his weight from one foot to the other. One hand was still tugging at a button on his striped flannel coat.
“She’d got a bad cold, you see, and told Mrs Clare she’d like to go to bed, and Mrs Clare said she’d have her dinner sent up to her. Then I gather what happened—was this. The maid or someone brought the dinner up on a tray and couldn’t get in. At first she thought Miss Capell was still in the bathroom and took the tray away again. But when she came back she still couldn’t get in and couldn’t get any answer either. So she fetched Mrs Clare, and Mrs Clare started calling and knocking. My room’s next door; I heard the noise and—came out. So Mrs Clare asked me to climb up by the balcony and see what had happened.”
“What time was that?”
“I think about eight-thirty, perhaps a little earlier. It was about half-past six when she went off to bed. Then she had her bath——”
“How d’you know?” Vanner snapped at him.
“Well, the bathroom’s quite—warm and steamy still, isn’t it?”
“Had a good look round, didn’t you, last time you were up?”
Charlie gave a vague nod. His large brown eyes for a moment met the inspector’s. “I mean I looked round a bit,” he said.
“Noticed that, I expect?” said Vanner.
Looking where the inspector was pointing, Charlie nodded.
“Touch it?”
Charlie shook his head.
Vanner stooped. With a handkerchief wrapped over his hand, he picked up from the carpet close to the bed a small, flat bottle. It had no stopper and a good deal of its contents had splashed onto the floor.
“‘Breathynne,’” he read from the label. “That’s stuff for a cold, isn’t it?” He gave it a cautious sniff. “Didn’t smell like that last time I used it for a cold. Here—no, don’t touch it, smell it.” He held the bottle out to Charlie.
Charlie sniffed at it. “No,” he said, “that isn’t Breathynne.”
Sergeant Gurr came up and wanted to have his smell at the bottle, too, but Vanner, wrapping the bottle tenderly in his handkerchief, strode out onto the balcony.
He called to one of the constables: “Where’s Doctor Syme?”
“Not got here yet, sir. He was up at the golf club but he’s on his way here.”
“Well, when he comes,” Vanner called back, “you can send him up the stairs. The door’s unlocked.” Returning into the room, he crossed straight to the door and unlocked it.
Charlie said apologetically: “I didn’t like to unlock the door myself because one’s always told to leave things—exactly as one found them.”
“Doctor Widdison,” said Vanner impressively, “I unlocked that door because it was locked merely in the ordinary course of events. The girl just locked herself in when she came to have her bath. So there’s no reason to bother about it.”
Charlie started to say something, but Vanner went on: “She administered this poison, strychnine or whatever it is, to herself.”
“Not suicide!”
“No, Doctor Widdison, not suicide. She administered it herself, but in the belief that it was her ordinary dose of Breathynne for her cold. You’d seen her use it during the day, I daresay?”
Charlie nodded. “I was just going to say… I was extremely careful not to touch anything when I was in here but I did—have a look round. I mean, it would have felt queer not to. If it was wrong of me I’m most awfully sorry.”
“So long as you really didn’t meddle with anything,” Vanner replied, “you’ll have done no worse than waste a bit of time. But——”
“Er, yes. But what I was going to say was, I noticed that——” And Charlie nodded his head in the direction of a small bureau set against the wall between two windows. Sounding more apologetic than ever, he added: “I—read it.”
What Charlie had read was a half-finished letter lying on a piece of blotting paper on the open flap of the bureau. Beside it lay a cheap fountain pen and Lou’s battered red leather bag. The fastening of the bag was undone; lipstick, powder compact, latchkeys, cigarette case, matches, were spilled out onto the polished black surface of the little desk.
Vanner looked down at the letter without touching it. Aloud he read: “‘Dear Eve…’”
Charlie informed him: “That’s Mrs Clare.”
Vanner nodded. “The writing,” he said, “is it the girl’s?”
“Oh yes,” said Charlie.
“Quite sure?”
But just then a step in the passage warned them of the arrival of the police surgeon.
Coming in briskly, a neat, grey-haired man with a curiously legal air about him, Dr Syme’s manner, when he was introduced to the dead, distorted thing on the floor, was a blend of politeness and curiosity.
“Doctor Widdison here,” said Vanner, as the newcomer changed the rimless spectacles he was wearing for another pair, “he says he thinks it’s strychnine.”
“Looks like it certainly, Doctor Widdison, looks like it.” Dr Syme lowered the new pair of glasses on his nose to take a glance over the top of them at the young man. “Play golf, Doctor Widdison?”
Behind Charlie the deep voice of Sergeant Gurr suddenly growled: “I just had an idea.”
Charlie shook his head at the other doctor’s question.
“Didn’t think I’d seen you at the club.” Dr Syme was kneeling now. “You ought to take it up while you’re still young, you know; makes all the difference to your game.”
Again Gurr ventured: “I was just thinkin’ that perhaps maybe…” He scratched the inside of one ear.
Vanner looked round at him impatiently.
Dr Syme went on: “Only took it up last year myself. Know what I’ve missed. You shouldn’t waste any more time over it, you really shouldn’t.”
“I was just thinkin’ that perhaps…” But this time Gurr stopped to give a sidewise nod of his head in the direction of Charlie Widdison.
With a flush when he realized what the sergeant meant, Charlie said quickly: “Oh, d’you want me to go? I—I’ll…” With no reluctance he made for the door.
“I was just thinkin’,” said Gurr hoarsely, “that maybe ’tisn’t strychnine after all. Maybe it’s brucine.”
There was an odd little silence. In Lou Capell’s bedroom the three men looked at one another with suddenly sharpened interest in their faces.
Outside in the passage the face of Charlie Widdison as he closed the door behind him just after the sergeant had spoken was that of a very puzzled man.