Laura drew a trembling breath, and her big blue eyes, bright with the abnormal glitter of terror, searched Clare’s face.
At last she said, ‘Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you don’t understand what was meant to happen. After all, you don’t know about me, do you?’
‘It’s true, I don’t know much about you,’ Clare replied.
‘They didn’t tell you – the Lynams?’
‘Since I don’t know what you’re referring to …’
‘Oh, you’d know if they had. And you’d have realized at once that it wasn’t Sir Peter Poulter who was meant to die. That was just an accident. They meant to kill me, Miss Forwood.’
‘They? The Lynams?’ Clare’s voice was angry now and there was a scowl on her heavy forehead.
‘Of course!’ Laura cried, her stiffness suddenly vanishing and her whole body beginning to tremble violently. ‘And I can prove it – because, you see, there’s something peculiar about me and the Lynams know it. Fanny and Basil – they know all about it. And that’s why they thought they were safe to try and kill me like that.’
‘Peculiar?’ Clare said. The word stirred a memory of something that Basil had said.
‘Yes – awfully peculiar,’ Laura said. ‘Awfully.’
‘But what is this peculiarity?’
‘I can’t taste phenylthiourea!’
There was anti-climax in it for Clare. The statement was so meaningless to her that at first hearing it seemed impossible that it could in fact have meaning for anyone.
Sitting down, folding her hands in her lap and looking sternly at Laura, she waited for a repetition of the gibberish, or an explanation.
Laura looked dazed for a moment, as if to her it were astonishing that explanations could be necessary. Then sitting down too, she said carefully, ‘Phenylthiourea is an organic compound which is intensely bitter. About one person in four is unable to taste it in concentrations of about fifty parts per million. They can, however, frequently taste it if raised in concentration to four hundred parts per million.’ Her voice changed, losing the sound of a repeated lesson. ‘Only very unusual people can’t taste it at all! Only one in thousands and thousands!’
‘And how,’ Clare enquired with great detachment, ‘does one set about finding out if one is one of these unusual people?’
She did not mean to be callous. She could see the girl’s terror, and fear was an emotion with which in theory she had great sympathy. But contact with it roused something in herself that scared her so much that she struggled instantly to repress it.
‘It happened to me when I was at the university,’ Laura said a little more quietly. ‘Basil Lynam was doing some sort of genetical experiment. He wanted students to come and taste various things and I was one of the ones who volunteered. There were hundreds of us, but I was the only one who couldn’t taste the stuff at all.’
‘This phenol …?’
‘Phenylthiourea.’
‘And so you think Basil remembered this about you?’
‘Of course.’
Clare feared that this at least was true.
‘It all sounds very complicated and unlikely,’ she said.
‘Not to him, he’s a scientist,’ Laura said. ‘It’d be quite natural for him to think of something like that.’
‘To think of it, possibly, but hardly to do it.’
Laura’s body jerked in a long shiver. ‘It was Fanny who did it – or made him do it.’
‘That hardly makes it less unlikely,’ Clare said. ‘As I understand it, what you’re saying is that Basil and Fanny, for some mysterious reason, decided to kill you – though Fanny had never even seen you and Basil’s contact with you had been slight – ’
‘But there’s nothing mysterious about it, Miss Forwood, nothing!’ Laura cried. ‘You can see how Fanny is about Kit, can’t you? He’s the child she never had. He’s the object of all her strongest emotions. She hates me, not because of what I am, but because of Kit’s love for me. I threaten her very existence.’
‘But in the car you told me – ’
‘That was before I knew about the phenylthiourea. I’d let her deceive me.’
‘Very well,’ Clare said patiently. ‘You’re saying then that Fanny has such a possessive love for Kit that she was filled with murderous hatred of the woman whom he had decided to marry, that she discussed this with her husband, and that he either shared her feelings sufficiently or is so completely dominated by her – ’
‘He is, he is, that’s easy to see!’
‘He’s so completely dominated by her then, that he was ready to supply her with a strange and ingenious method of murdering you, together with the peculiar chemical and presumably the arsenic also, that were required by this method. And this method consisted of poisoning a quantity of food which was going to be offered to a number of people, not only to you, by adding something which would make it taste so unpleasant to everyone but you that there was no risk of anyone but you eating enough of the food to be even taken ill.’
Laura nodded her head several times. ‘That’s it – that’s it exactly.’
‘But heavens above!’ Clare said. ‘Don’t you see what you’re suggesting? If you were right that Fanny and Basil are so insane and cruel that they could act in this way against you, that would be terrible enough. But what you’re saying is that when they knew that you had been attacked by one of your bad headaches and were not going to come to the party, they could still go on and offer this poisoned dish to their friends. Not only that, but you believe that when they saw that one of their other guests actually had this same idiosyncrasy as you and that he was prepared to eat spoonfuls of phenol – phenyl – ’
‘Phenylthiourea.’
‘Yes – to eat spoonfuls of it with relish, so that he was certain to get all the arsenic intended for you, they were ready to let him do this.’
‘They’re mad,’ Laura said. ‘Quite mad. At least, Fanny is. She probably enjoyed watching poor Sir Peter taking the poison. After all, if she was mad enough to try to kill me in that way, she was mad enough for the other too – mad and evil.’
‘Evil?’ Clare said thoughtfully. It was the sort of word that embarrassed her. ‘Well now, putting the question of evil aside, what about probability? I mean mathematical probability, about which I’m sure you know far more than I do. If an inability to taste this substance with the difficult name is really as unusual as you tell me, then wasn’t it improbable in the extreme that two people with this inability should actually be in the same small house in the same small village at the same time?’
‘Of course, of course,’ Laura said, striking the arms of her chair with the palms of her hands. ‘It’s almost incredible. But it isn’t impossible. Don’t you see? There was only a chance of it in thousands – but there
was
a chance. You could calculate the improbability of it, but you’d still have to say that it
could
happen.’
‘All the same, it would be an amazing coincidence.’
‘But coincidences do happen – the most amazing coincidences!’
Remembering what the detective-inspector had said about coincidences, Clare nodded unwillingly. He had said that it could be a great mistake to look for a pattern in everything, and that coincidences did happen. That was what was always said about them. Coincidences do happen. She gave a sigh.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course they do, though it’s annoying of them sometimes. I suppose we’ve got to accept it as a fact that there’s at least some bitter substance that neither you nor Sir Peter Poulter could taste, though most other people found it overpoweringly strong. I certainly did. But I’m perfectly convinced that Fanny and Basil would never try to poison you – or anybody – in that way of all ways and that you’ve nothing whatever to fear from them. This talk of ours has made me quite sure that if a murder of any sort was intended by anyone, then Sir Peter was always to have been the victim. The coincidence was that
you
should have been in the house, not that
he
should have been.’
Laura made a curious little grimace. She appeared to think that Clare was putting her in her place, reminding her that Sir Peter was a person of rather more note than herself.
‘You just don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry – I thought you would. That’s why I came.’
‘I at least understand Fanny Lynam a great deal better than you do,’ Clare said. ‘I know that she isn’t a murderess. There’s a lot more of the murderess in me than there is in her.’
Laura stood up. She gave a faint smile and a faint shake of the head, as if in a half-secret mockery of Clare’s limitations.
‘Shall I tell you what I really thought about Fanny?’ she said. ‘Shall I tell you how she really struck me with her creepy old house and her dog and her cat and her terrible clothes and that awful mirror in her sitting-room, that takes all the colour out of one’s face and makes one look like a corpse?’
‘You told me in the car that you liked her,’ Clare reminded her.
Laura repeated her small, secret smile. It struck Clare this time as malicious and dangerous.
‘Do you always say just what you really think?’ Laura asked. ‘The truth is that I thought her the nearest thing to an authentic witch that I’d ever met. And I can just see her brewing her horrible potions over the fire.’
An angry laugh broke from Clare. ‘You have a very vivid imagination,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you thought of that until this moment. And there’s one thing you haven’t told me yet. Where does Kit stand in all this?’
‘Of course he knows nothing about it,’ Laura answered.
‘He doesn’t even know that you can’t taste that bitter stuff?’
‘Not unless Basil or Fanny mentioned it.’
‘Yet there must be a lot of people who know that fact about you.’
Laura frowned. ‘I don’t think so. How could there be?’
‘What about all the other people who were guinea pigs for the same experiment?’
‘Oh, but –’ Laura paused, then shook her head. ‘That was years ago,’ she said, dismissing the suggestion. ‘I don’t see any of them now. And certainly none of them was at Fanny’s party. No – however much you may dislike the idea, Miss Forwood, I think you can be sure that it was Basil Lynam who remembered that fact about me.’
‘Which brings us back to that other fact, that it was Sir Peter who died and not you, and that there’s still no certain proof of how he got the poison that killed him.’
Laura gave an impatient shrug and turned towards the door. Clare was relieved to see her ready to go and said nothing to keep her, yet even as she followed her out of the room and then closed the hall door upon her, she was haunted by the feeling of having failed to say something to her that was of great importance.
It was only after some minutes of confused and angry recapitulation to herself of the whole interview that she realized what it was that she had forgotten to say. She had forgotten to ask Laura what she intended to do next with her suspicions.
This realization sent Clare to the telephone. She rang up Fanny, told her that certain important matters had come up and that she was coming down to see her again that same day.
She went by train, because of her dislike of driving in the dark. Basil met her at the station. He seemed to Clare to be quite his usual self and to be showing no signs that Sir Peter’s death and questioning by the police and the possibility that he, his wife or one of his friends might be suspected of murder, were more difficult to bear than any of the little everyday ills of life.
But still, as Clare knew, with Basil you never could tell. In his kind and friendly way, he was one of the most self-contained people she had ever known. He was concerned now that she might be tired and that she must be worried and was putting herself out on Fanny’s account. When Clare suggested that all these things might be said of him, too, he only smiled quite cheerfully and shook his head.
‘Our trouble is Kit,’ he said, and laughed, as if Kit, as a matter of course, were a subject of humour. ‘Kit in love – or perhaps not in love. I find I have a certain wish that he would make up his mind about it.’
‘He seemed to me to be very much in love,’ Clare said.
‘That was last Saturday.’
‘Is he as inconstant as that, then?’
‘I’m not sure. But something in his life isn’t as simple as he thought it was going to be.’
‘Well, presumably he was unprepared for a case of arsenical poisoning at his engagement party.’
‘No, poor boy. But I have a suspicion his troubles go deeper.’
She gave him a curious look. ‘Deeper than murder, Basil? You do say most startling things at times.’
‘But this isn’t Kit’s murder, is it?’ he said. ‘You don’t think that, do you?’
‘Why, no, I don’t think that had even occurred to me. For one thing …’
‘Well?’
‘D’you think Kit has ever heard of stuff called phenylthiourea?’
Basil seemed, for just an instant, to be a little surprised. He glanced round at her, his eyebrows raised. Then he looked back at the road ahead of them, which was not quite dark yet, but in that state of half-light when the headlights of a car only create a flicker of deceptive shadows.
‘So you’ve worked that out, have you?’ he said. ‘How did you manage that?’
‘Laura worked it out,’ Clare said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘Ah yes, I thought she’d get round to it sooner or later. But I didn’t think of her going to you with it.’
‘So you’ve known from the first?’
‘I don’t
know
even now,’ he said. ‘But it was obviously a possible explanation of Sir Peter’s ability to eat that lobster. Someone who knew of that idiosyncrasy of his might have thought it was a safe way to kill him without harming anyone else.’
‘But Laura believes that it was she who was meant to be poisoned.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘She is – I think she always was – a rather self-important young woman.’
A sudden sense of calm descended on Clare. She gave a sigh and muscles that without her realizing it had been tense for hours, so that she ached from head to foot, relaxed and let her have a feeling of peace and comfort.
‘I might have known you’d have it all in hand,’ she said.
‘Ah, but I haven’t,’ he said, ‘and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this visit of yours, because I haven’t yet explained any of this to Fanny. It isn’t the kind of thing she’ll grasp very easily. I’m so afraid she’ll simply transfer her certainty that she killed Sir Peter to an even greater certainty that she nearly killed Laura – and she may even persuade herself that she had an unconscious motive for doing this, so that she can’t really plead accident any more. And her conscience has been giving us all a rather terrible time as it is.’