Many years earlier utterson had been a junior defence counsel representing Travis Hardwicke CIE, erstwhile district governor of the East India Company, after Hardwicke had been found alone with the body of Percy Sullivan, a rival businessman, in the rear of the company’s club rooms in St James’s Square. Sullivan’s head had been bludgeoned; the weapon, a poker, was still in Hardwicke’s grasp; Hardwicke himself was in a state of shock; and no one else was found in the vicinity. Notwithstanding the absence of any clear motive, it seemed an open-and-shut case of murder.
But when Hardwicke was interrogated by his legal team he insisted repeatedly and persuasively that he had acted in self-defence. He said that the victim had lured him to the deserted club with malicious intent; he said that Sullivan had for years been consumed by jealousy and ambition; he referred to the man’s substantial history of fraud and misrepresentation; and he claimed that Sullivan had long been hounding him with threats and blackmail.
Hardwicke’s command of detail was immaculate. He remembered incidents with astonishing precision; he never faltered or contradicted himself; and, moreover, he clearly believed everything he said.
And yet he was completely mad. In the Chancery his claims were swiftly put to the sword through evidence from former colleagues and disaffected relations. Hardwicke, it soon became clear, had been cultivating Sullivan as a nemesis for years, in order to project upon him all the sinister motives infecting his own heart; thus he had been able to fabricate events, memories and even documents while being blissfully unaware of his own part in the contrivance. He was, in effect, a divided self, unable to distinguish reality from his own fictions, and unconscious of his own actions even as he was performing them.
Though the case, a sensation in its day, had rapidly faded from the public memory, it had deeply impressed upon Utterson’s mind the distorting power of the imagination. And as a consequence he had resolved never to be caught accepting any man’s testimony without incontrovertible evidence (and even then to reserve an element of suspicion). It was through such means that he became renowned as a man uncorrupted by rashness or sentimentality – a grinding stone upon which others might file away their delusions.
And yet now Utterson had to ask if he himself was deluded. If his own grip on reality had loosened. If he needed to challenge his own identity.
Had he really gone insane?
But again and again, as many times as he prosecuted the case in his mind, he could not shake the foundations of his central convictions. The written statements of Henry Jekyll and Hastie Lanyon had really existed. Nor was he naturally given to fancies. So everything in the documents was true. By drinking a potion Jekyll had transformed himself into Hyde. As Hyde, he had committed many unspeakable crimes. And he had killed himself in the body of Hyde.
Which meant that the claimant was an impostor. He had to be. There was simply no other explanation.
With his faith even firmer now that he had resisted a self-inflicted barrage, Utterson marched with renewed energy back to Gaunt Street, found the trunk containing Jekyll’s receipts, and confronted Poole.
‘You were the one who rounded up the powders and chemicals for Dr Jekyll’s potions, were you not?’
‘Some of the time,’ the butler admitted.
‘Can you say from which chemist he drew his supplies? In the last year of his life especially?’
‘If you mean before my master disappeared,’ Poole said, ‘there were a number of wholesalers he used, but in the main it was Maw & Co. of C— Street.’
‘The one with the red and blue lanterns?’
‘The same, sir.’
‘Then prepare a light dinner, Poole, and I shall return, if all goes well, by eight o’clock.’
But at Maw & Co. he discovered that the man who customarily filled Jekyll’s orders, a certain Mr Halliday, had long since retired to Bethnal Green. Undaunted, Utterson took the train out to the old man’s house.
The chemist, who was scarred of hands and caustic of personality, seemed bemused by the lawyer’s questions.
‘You’re seeking what?’
‘A recipe of Jekyll’s, for a potion he mixed numerous times before his death.’ Utterson handed across some of the doctor’s orders.
‘You think I can identify a potion by the ingredients alone?’
‘I am relying on your assistance.’
‘Jekyll was an odd one,’ Halliday reflected. ‘He asked for some queer combinations.’
‘The potion I have in mind was particularly queer, giving off a pungent smell and a visible effervescence. Its effects were swift and dramatic.’
‘Not saying it killed the doctor, are you?’
‘Not directly, no.’
‘Then why do you want it, precisely?’
Utterson sighed. ‘I was Jekyll’s lawyer and his dearest friend. I need to prove that the mixture in question had a conspicuous effect on his personality.’
‘Not a bad thing if it did,’ said Halliday, though he did not elaborate. Finally he peeled one of the receipts from Utterson’s collection. ‘I think this is the one you might be seeking.’
Utterson inspected the ingredients: phosphorous, ethanol, cocaine, psilocybe and other elements – indeed a peculiar mix.
‘Jekyll spoke of a certain quantity of salt.’
‘Possibly sodium chromate.’
‘He suggested that this particular salt, which was essential to his formula, was impure.’
Halliday grunted. ‘At Maw’s we sold no impure salts. Perhaps he obtained it from elsewhere.’
‘Might you know where?’
‘Jekyll did not tell me everything.’
‘Then do you have any idea how it might have become impure?’
‘As I said to you, Jekyll ordered a great deal of sodium chromate – it yellowed his fingers. It might have become contaminated if it were stored in a vessel containing the residue of other powders. At any rate, that’s the salt I’d be looking for if I were you.’
‘Does Maw & Co. sell this salt, by any chance?’
‘Of course,’ said Halliday, ‘but it would not be tainted, I tell you, unless their standards have fallen since my days.’
‘Then I shall have to work with what they have.’
He hastened back to Maw & Co., rounded up the necessary supplies and hefted them in a crate to Gaunt Street, where his dinner was still simmering on the stove.
‘Never mind that, Poole,’ he said. ‘Come upstairs with me.’
The butler dutifully followed his master to the business room, where Utterson laid out the various ingredients.
‘Do you recognise these salts and tinctures?’
The butler looked uncertain.
‘These are the same ingredients that Jekyll used in his last and most infamous experiment.’
‘Sir?’
‘That’s right – and now I intend to mix them into a potion, in order to prove that a man is capable of transforming into another being, just as your former master turned himself into Edward Hyde.’
Poole blinked. ‘My master . . . turned himself into Mr Hyde?’
‘Shocking, Poole, but true! That is the secret I have concealed from you for the last seven years. The man we found dead in the dissecting rooms that night was not just Mr Hyde – it was Dr Jekyll as well. And tonight, right here in this house, I shall prove it to you. I shall mix this potion in front of you, and I shall transform into another man!’
‘Sir—’
‘Doubt it all you like, Poole, but wait – wait and see!’
Swiftly he measured out his liquids and powders and mixed them together in a graduated glass, from whence issued vapours and odours. And when the concoction turned vivid purple, then vegetable green, just as Hastie Lanyon described in his statement, Utterson knew the compound was true.
‘And now, Poole,’ he said, hoisting the glass, ‘you must bear witness to the folly of your former master. You must not avert your eyes; you must not shudder or recoil; above all you must use all your powers to prevent me from leaving this room, for I have in my hand the keys of hell and of death, and a monster inside me is about to be uncaged!’
‘Sir—’
‘Shut the door, Poole – and behold!’
And with that, Utterson tilted his head and in one gulp drained the contents of the foaming glass.