He broke into the conversation with violent abruptness.
‘Those Forsyth cuttings, Mrs Welbeck,’ he said. ‘Now is just about the time to take them. If you care to come down the garden I will get them for you.’
He saw a relieved glance pass between Ethel and young Welbeck. Evidently the boy understood the situation and was chafing at his mother’s tactlessness. Mrs Welbeck, brought up all standing, gasped slightly and then veered off with obliging readiness on the new tack. She accompanied her host down the garden and chattered cheerfully about horticulture while he selected and trimmed the cuttings. She complimented Mr Mummery on the immaculacy of his garden paths. ‘I simply
cannot
keep the weeds down,’ she said.
Mr Mummery mentioned the weed-killer and praised its efficacy.
‘That stuff!’ Mrs Welbeck started at him. Then she shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t have it in my place for a thousand pounds,’ she said, with emphasis.
Me Mummery smiled. ‘Oh, we keep it well away from the house,’ he said. ‘Even if I were a careless sort of person—’
He broke off. The recollection of the loosened stopper had come to him suddenly, and it was as though, deep down in his mind, some obscure assembling of ideas had taken place. He left it at that, and went into the kitchen to fetch a newspaper to wrap up the cuttings.
Their approach to the house had evidently been seen from the sitting-room window, for when they entered, young Welbeck was already on his feet and holding Ethel’s hand in the act of saying good-bye. He manoeuvred his mother out of the house with tactful promptness and Mr Mummery returned to the kitchen to clear up the newspapers he had fished out of the drawer. To clear them up and to examine them more closely. Something had struck him about them, which he wanted to verify. He turned them over very carefully, sheet by sheet. Yes – he had been right. Every portrait of Mrs Andrews, every paragraph and line about the Lincoln poisoning case, had been carefully cut out.
Mr Mummery sat down by the kitchen fire. He felt as though he needed warmth. There seemed to be a curious cold lump of something at the pit of his stomach – something that he was chary of investigating.
He tried to recall the appearance of Mrs Andrews as shown in the newspaper photographs, but he had not a good visual memory. He remembered having remarked to Brookes that it was a ‘motherly’ face. Then he tried counting up the time since the disappearance. Nearly a month, Brookes had said – and that was a week ago. Must be over a month now. A month. He had just paid Mrs Sutton her month’s money.
‘Ethel!’ was the thought that hammered at the door of his brain. At all costs, he must cope with this monstrous suspicion on his own. He must spare her any shock or anxiety. And he must be sure of his ground. To dismiss the only decent cook they had ever had out of sheer, unfounded panic, would be wanton cruelty to both women. If he did it at all, it would have to be done arbitrarily, preposterously – he could not suggest horrors to Ethel. However it was done, there would be trouble. Ethel would not understand and he dared not tell her.
But if by chance there was anything in this ghastly doubt – how could he expose Ethel to the appalling danger of having the woman in the house a moment longer? He thought of the family at Lincoln – the husband dead, the wife escaped by a miracle with her life. Was not any shock, any risk, better than that?
Mr Mummery felt suddenly very lonely and tired. His illness had taken it out of him.
Those illnesses – they had begun, when? Three weeks ago he had had the first attack. Yes, but then he had always been rather subject to gastric troubles. Bilious attacks. Not so violent, perhaps, as these last, but undoubtedly bilious attacks.
He pulled himself together and went, rather heavily, into the sitting-room. Ethel was tucked up in a corner of the chester-field.
‘Tired, darling?’
‘Yes, a little.’
‘That woman has worn you out with talking. She oughtn’t to talk so much.’
‘No.’ Her head shifted wearily in the cushions. ‘All about that horrible case. I don’t like hearing about such things.’
‘Of course not. Still, when a thing like that happens in the neighbourhood, people will gossip and talk. It would be a relief if they caught the woman. One doesn’t like to think—’
‘I don’t want to think of anything so hateful. She must be a horrible creature.’
‘Horrible. Brookes was saying the other day—’
‘I don’t want to hear what he said. I don’t want to hear about it at all. I want to be quiet. I want to be quiet!’
He recognised the note of rising hysteria.
‘Tiddley-winks shall be quiet. Don’t worry, darling. We won’t talk about horrors.’
No. It would not do to talk about them.
Ethel went to bed early. It was understood that on Sundays Mr Mummery should sit up till Mrs Sutton came in. Ethel was a little anxious about this, but he assured her that he felt quite strong enough. In body, indeed, he did; it was his mind that felt weak and confused. He had decided to make a casual remark about the mutilated newspapers – just to see what Mrs Sutton would say.
He allowed himself the usual indulgence of a whisky-and-soda as he sat waiting. At a quarter to ten he heard the familiar click of the garden gate. Footsteps passed up the gravel – squeak, squeak, to the back-door. Then the sound of the latch, the shutting of the door, the rattle of the bolts being shot home. Then a pause. Mrs Sutton would be taking off her hat. The moment was coming.
The step sounded in the passage. The door opened. Mrs Sutton in her neat black dress stood on the threshold. He was aware of a reluctance to face her. Then he looked up. A plump-faced woman, her face obscured by thick horn-rimmed spectacles. Was there, perhaps, something hard about the mouth? Or was it just that she had lost most of her front teeth?
‘Would you be requiring anything tonight, sir, before I go up?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Sutton.’
‘I hope you are feeling better, sir.’ Her eager interest in his health seemed to him almost sinister, but the eyes behind the thick glasses, were inscrutable.
‘Quite better, thank you, Mrs Sutton.’
‘Mrs Mummery is not indisposed, is she, sir? Should I take her up a glass of hot milk or anything?’
‘No, thank you, no.’ He spoke hurriedly, and fancied that she looked disappointed.
‘Very well, sir. Good-night, sir.’
‘Good-night. Oh! by the way, Mrs Sutton—’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mr Mummery, ‘nothing.’
Next morning Mr Mummery opened his paper eagerly. He would have been glad to learn that an arrest had been made over the week-end. But there was no news for him. The chairman of a trust company had blown out his brains, and all the headlines were occupied with tales about lost millions and ruined shareholders. Both in his own paper and in those he purchased on the way to the office, the Lincoln Poisoning Tragedy had been relegated to an obscure paragraph on a back page, which informed him that the police were still baffled.
The next few days were the most uncomfortable that Mr Mummery had ever spent. He developed a habit of coming down early in the morning and prowling about the kitchen. This made Ethel nervous, but Mrs Sutton offered no remark. She watched him tolerantly, even, he thought, with something like amusement. After all, it was ridiculous. What was the use of supervising the breakfast, when he had to be out of the house every day between half-past nine and six?
At the office, Brookes rallied him on the frequency with which he rang up Ethel. Mr Mummery paid no attention. It was reassuring to hear her voice and to know that she was safe and well.
Nothing happened, and by the following Thursday he began to think that he had been a fool. He came home late that night. Brookes had persuaded him to go with him to a little bachelor dinner for a friend who was about to get married. He left the others at eleven o’clock, however, refusing to make a night of it. The household was in bed when he got back but a note from Mrs Sutton lay on the table, informing him that there was cocoa for him in the kitchen, ready for hotting-up. He hotted it up accordingly in the little saucepan where it stood. There was just one good cupful.
He sipped it thoughtfully, standing by the kitchen stove. After the first sip, he put the cup down. Was it his fancy, or was there something queer about the taste? He sipped it again, rolling it upon his tongue. It seemed to him to have a faint tang, metallic and unpleasant. In a sudden dread he ran out to the scullery and spat the mouthful into the sink.
After this, he stood quite still for a moment or two. Then, with a curious deliberation, as though his movements had been dictated to him, he fetched an empty medicine-bottle from the pantry-shelf, rinsed it under the tap and tipped the contents of the cup carefully into it. He slipped the bottle into his coat pocket and moved on tip-toe to the back door. The bolts were difficult to draw without noise, but he managed it at last. Still on tip-toe, he stole across the garden to the potting-shed. Stooping down, he struck a match. He knew exactly where he had left the tin of weed-killer, under the shelf behind the pots at the back. Cautiously he lifted it out. The match flared up and burnt his fingers, but before he could light another his sense of touch had told him what he wanted to know. The stopper was loose again.
Panic seized Mr Mummery, standing there in the earthy-smelling shed, in his dress-suit and overcoat, holding the tin in one hand and the match-box in the other. He wanted very badly to run and tell somebody what he had discovered.
Instead, he replaced the tin exactly where he had found it and went back to the house. As he crossed the garden again, he noticed a light in Mrs Sutton’s bedroom window. This terrified him more than anything which had gone before. Was she watching him? Ethel’s window was dark. If she had drunk anything deadly there would be lights everywhere, movements, calls for the doctor, just as when he himself had been attacked. Attacked – that was the right word, he thought.
Still with the same old presence of mind and precision, he went in, washed out the utensils and made a second brew of cocoa, which he left standing in the saucepan. He crept quietly to his bedroom. Ethel’s voice greeted him on the threshold.
‘How late you are, Harold. Naughty old boy! Have a good time?’
‘Not bad. You all right, darling?’
‘Quite all right. Did Mrs Sutton leave something hot for you? She said she would.’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t thirsty.’
Ethel laughed. ‘Oh! it was
that
sort of a party, was it?’
Mr Mummery did not attempt any denials. He undressed and got into bed and clutched his wife to him as though defying death and hell to take her from him. Next morning he would act. He thanked God that he was not too late.
Mr Dimthorpe, the chemist, was a great friend of Mr Mummery’s. They had often sat together in the untidy little shop on Spring Bank and exchanged views on green-fly and club-root. Mr Mummery told his story frankly to Mr Dimthorpe and handed over the bottle of cocoa. Mr Dimthorpe congratulated him on his prudence and intelligence.
‘I will have it ready for you by this evening,’ he said, ‘and if it’s what you think it is, then we shall have a dear case on which to take action.’
Mr Mummery thanked him, and was extremely vague and inattentive at business all day. But that hardly mattered, for Mr Brookes, who had seen the party through to a riotous end in the small hours, was in no very observant mood. At half-past four, Mr Mummery shut up his desk decisively and announced that he was off early, he had a call to make.
Mr Dimthorpe was ready for him.
‘No doubt about it,’ he said. ‘I used Marsh’s test. It’s a heavy dose, no wonder you tasted it. There must be four or five grains of pure arsenic in that bottle. Look, here’s the mirror. You can see it for yourself.’
Mr Mummery gazed at the little glass tube with its ominous purple-black stain.
‘Will you ring up the police from here?’ asked the chemist.
‘No,’ said Mr Mummery. ‘No – I want to get home. God knows what’s happening there. And I’ve only just time to catch my train.’
‘All right,’ said Mr Dimthorpe. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll ring them up for you.’
The local train did not go fast enough for Mr Mummery. Ethel – poisoned – dying – dead – Ethel – poisoned – dying – dead – the wheels drummed in his ears. He almost ran out of the station and along the road. A car was standing at his door. He saw it from the end of the street and broke into a gallop. It had happened already. The doctor was there. Fool, murderer that he was to have left things so late.
Then, while he was still a hundred and fifty yards off, he saw the front door open. A man came out followed by Ethel herself. The visitor got into his car and was driven away. Ethel went in again. She was safe – safe!
He could hardly control himself to hang up his hat and coat and go in looking reasonably calm. His wife had returned to the arm-chair by the fire and greeted him in some surprise. There were tea-things on the table.
‘Back early, aren’t you?’