“So… it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Murder often doesn’t,” Colonel Primrose said. “Well, the alternative then. Let’s assume the enteric capsules were not used in the murder of Randall Nash. The poison was in his whiskey… somehow. He drank it here, when he got back to the house after twelve o’clock last night. He died within a few minutes. You then have other possibilities.”
Yates nodded. “They are more reasonable, furthermore, from the point of view of the money. They are—eliminating Wilkins again, for the same reason—Iris Nash, and Lowell Nash. Lowell Nash could have known about that metal cleaner, of course.”
“There is one other possibility,” Colonel Primrose said placidly. “It doesn’t make much sense if we rest on the money motive. But it’s a very definite possibility. Miss Lavinia Fawcett.”
He glanced around at me and chuckled at the expression on my face.
“Miss Lavinia has been watched, of course. She came here this afternoon, about twenty minutes past four. Edith St. Martin had just come. A. J. left the room and went out to the kitchen. Wilkins says he talked to her, alone, for a few minutes in the back entry. We know also, on Lowell’s word, and I imagine it’s true, that she was here last night.”
“She’d hardly, however, have access to cyanide of potassium?”
Colonel Primrose nodded coolly.
“She’s just the person who seems to have had,” he said. “She had an envelope of it, with a skull and crossbones inked on it, in her medicine cupboard. I’ve sent it along to Kavanaugh to make sure.”
Mr. Selman Yates looked at him intently. “The other stuff, for the enteric capsules—the salol?”
“You can buy it in any drug store. However, A. J. took it for rheumatism. Miss Lavinia worked in his bank, she had the free run of his house.—However, it’s just an idea.”
He turned to me, his black eyes sparkling.
“And this is where you come in, Mrs. Latham.”
I’d never seen him so blandly suave. In fact, it was all so smooth indeed that I should have suspected something long before I did.
“We want you to help us out here. You see, of course, that it’s vitally important to make out, if we can, just how Randall Nash was poisoned. Well, all we’ve got to go on, outside of motive and theory and such abstractions—I suppose you could call them—is what actually happened here.”
He paused an instant, looking at me, and went on cheerfully.
“Now it’s my theory that I slipped up badly, perhaps, last night, on just that point—the point of what happened. I was somewhat mixed up in it myself, I didn’t realize what had occurred, and so on. Now, we’ve got the idea that we might try to reconstruct—go through the business again, from the time you and Iris and Donaldson and I came in the outside door there when we got back from the Assembly.”
Mr. Yates reached under the desk and brought out a black leather satchel. I watched him, understanding about half of this. He opened it, and brought out, to my astonishment, the four objects that had been on that desk the night before, when Iris came into the room, and when Randall Nash lay sprawled lifeless on the rug in the dark periphery of the light cast by the reading lamp: the silver tray, the Waterford decanter, still half-full of Scotch, the amber glass with the silver rim, and the blue patent syphon with the chromium top and the gold band round its shoulder.
“Now then, Mrs. Latham. Will you put them just where they were when Iris came in?”
Mr. Yates had switched off the table lamp between the windows. The only light in the room was the round yellow disk on the desk under the green porcelain shade.
“Surely,” I said. I got up and went to the desk. They stood across from me, watching intently.
I put the tray on the edge of the polished surface, a little outside the light. “As nearly as I can recall,” I said, “this was just here. The decanter was on it, and the syphon.”
I put them in place, and looked at Colonel Primrose. He nodded. And again, looking into those sparkling parrot’s eyes of his, I should have known. And it was all so simple… and so dreadful.
“The syphon was just in the edge of the light. And this”—I took the amber glass—“was lying in the light, like this, on its side, as though it had been knocked over when Randall got up.”
I went to the door and looked back, and nodded. “I think that’s about it.”
I’d kept my eyes steadfastly off the chalked outline of Randall Nash’s body, still visible on the rug. I didn’t, somehow, want to know if Iris
should
have seen it when she went in there.
“Very good, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said briskly. He came around the desk and across the room. “Now then. I want you to show us exactly what Iris did, and tell us what the rest of us did, when we came in. I’ll go out to the door with you.”
I hesitated.
“Iris could show you a lot better than I can,” I said.
He shook his head. “Doyle won’t let her, in the first place. We don’t want to upset her unnecessarily. Anyway, it’s your evidence we’re taking. Not Iris’s.”
“All right,” I said. We went out into the hall. Captain Lamb and Mr. Yates followed, standing back by the library door. We went on to the front door.
“You remember when we came in,” I said. “I was just behind Iris. Then you, and Steve Donaldson. We came on down here.”
We walked back up the hall. I stopped just short of the library door. The two men there moved past it, Mr. Yates closing the door three-quarters to. I nodded as he looked at me inquiringly.
“We stopped here,” I said. “Iris a step ahead of me. She saw the light through the door there. She sort of drew herself together, as if she’d got to face something that was pretty hard going.”
I felt, rather than saw from any visible thing, that that sounded quite differently from the way I’d meant it.
“I may have imagined that,” I said hastily. “I wouldn’t swear to it. Anyway, she stepped over to the door, and pushed it farther open.”
I swung the door open and stepped back.
“Just a minute,” Mr. Yates said. The three of them went into the library, and stood there to the left of the desk. “Go ahead, please.”
“I was still just behind her. The two of us looked in, and saw first that Randall wasn’t there, and second that that overturned glass was there on the desk. That’s when she gave a start. I’m sure it was the fact of the liquor being here at all, and the glass of course.”
Mr. Yates nodded. “She then came in… to where, exactly? Please do precisely what she did, do you mind?”
I wasn’t sure that I didn’t mind very much. But of course, I thought, if I did it she wouldn’t have to.
“All right,” I said. It was all as clear in my mind as if it had happened five minutes before.
I turned slowly and looked up the stairs, as she’d done, and turned back to an imaginary three people in the hall. “Please go on in,” I said. “I’ll bring the decanter.”
I walked from the door to the corner of the desk, picked up the glass and put it on the tray, took out my handkerchief and wiped up an imaginary spot on the mahogany surface, took the tray, turned to go back into the hall… and stopped short as three voices spoke almost simultaneously behind me.
I turned back to them. All three of them were staring at me as I’d gone mad. I stared at them the same way, still holding the tray there.
Colonel Primrose came over to me. There was a very odd expression on his face.
“Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Just where was I, all this time?”
I thought.
“You were out in the hall. You’d just taken my coat.”
He nodded, his black eyes snapping with intense interest. “And… she did that?”
I stared at him.
“She wiped off the table with her handkerchief?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “It’s a natural thing to do. She wiped up the whiskey that was spilled there. You expect things to spill when a glass is knocked over, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly. “It was certainly very stupid of me not to have.”
“Well,” I said. “
I
must be awfully stupid, but I don’t see…”
Then I went back to the table and put the tray down on it, and sat down abruptly in the chair there. I did see. And I saw that I’d contributed another stone to the terrible edifice of guilt they were raising against Iris Nash. She had washed the glass Randall had drunk out of—they knew that. But she had also wiped up the spilled liquor that would still have shown whether or not the potassium cyanide had been in that glass; and—I could easily hear Colonel Primrose and all of them stating it quite clearly—neither she nor I had mentioned the fact.
“What did she do with that handkerchief, Mrs. Latham?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I said. “She took it out into the pantry with the tray and the syphon, and left it on the shelf over the sink. It was sopping wet.”
“And where would it be now?”
I shrugged. “I suppose it’s in the laund—”
And I stopped dead.
His eyes were fixed calmly on me, waiting, and I knew at once I didn’t dare say I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought quickly enough.
“Where is it, Mrs. Latham?”
“It’s… upstairs,” I said. “In the blue room closet, in the pocket of my evening jacket.”
The two policemen stirred together. “Would you mind getting it, Mrs. Latham?” Mr. Yates said.
“I’ll send Buck,” Colonel Primrose said calmly. He went to the door. I saw the Sergeant there in an instant, his iron mask heavily adorned with court plaster in pastel strips.
“Have Wilkins show you the blue room, that Mrs. Latham was in,” Colonel Primrose said. “Bring down an ivory lace evening gown and jacket hanging there in the closet.”
I’d often wondered what color that gown was.
We waited. If only the maid had gone through the pockets and taken out the soiled handkerchiefs, I thought, the way Lilac does…
Colonel Primrose looked at me.
“You don’t seem to realize,” he said placidly, “that if the liquor in Randall’s glass was not poisoned, you’re clearing Iris of his murder—absolutely?”
There was complete silence in the room.
“I… suppose so,” I said.
Sergeant Buck’s square frame entered the room. He was holding my dress at arm’s length on a blue satin hanger. In the pleated pocket of the short jacket I saw a slight bulge, and knew the handkerchief was there. No maid had taken it to the wash.
Colonel Primrose pulled the crumpled white square out. Sergeant Buck handed my dress through the door to Wilkins, closed the door, and stood firmly planted in front of it.
“Is this Iris’s handkerchief, Mrs. Latham?”
I nodded, watching him fold it carefully, put it in an envelope he got out of the desk, moisten the flap, seal it. It was more than a handkerchief, more than a fragile wisp of lace and lawn. It was a woman’s innocence, her life, her soul… depending on what substance was held there inexorably in its cobweb threads.
“Take this to Dr. Kavanaugh, Buck. Ask him to test it for cyanide of potassium. We’ll wait here.”
We waited, while forty-three leaden minutes dragged by. Colonel Primrose and Mr. Selman Yates talked at first. I couldn’t have told what they were saying if my life depended on it.
There was one odd interlude. It was nearly ten o’clock when the door opened suddenly. We all turned, expecting the Sergeant. But it wasn’t him. It was Lowell.
“So sorry to interrupt,” she said. “I wonder if I…”
She stopped suddenly as her eyes fell on the exhibit on Randall Nash’s desk—the tray, the decanter, the syphon and the glass, there in the single yellow disk of light, almost as they had been the night before, except that the glass was upright now.
“Hullo!” she said.
She walked calmly over to the desk.
“Brilliant,” she said. “Reconstructing the scene—”
Her voice stopped as abruptly as if she had been struck in the face. Her lips parted suddenly, she caught her breath in a quick gasp, staring down as if hypnotized by the glaring spot in the darkened room, her eyes widening, her slim dark little figure shrinking back toward the white door frame. And suddenly she raised her hand to her mouth, turned and ran out of the room.
We all stared after her. I looked at Colonel Primrose. He had an oddly bewildered expression on his face. After a moment he got up and went out into the hall. He came back in a few moments, still troubled and as bewildered as before, I thought. He came in as Lowell had done, stood there a while in front of the desk, looking down at it as if to see, if he could, what she had seen, shook his head and sat down again. He sat there looking straight ahead of him, rubbing his chin until I thought he would wear a hole in it or I would go crazy, one or the other.
Sergeant Buck came in just when I’d decided I’d leave, I couldn’t stand it any longer. He took off his overcoat, laid it on a chair and put his hat on top of it. Then he came over to Colonel Primrose and handed him an envelope he took out of his inside pocket Colonel Primrose handed it to the Assistant District Attorney.
Mr. Selman Yates opened it, read the one short sentence on the sheet of note paper inside, and looked up.
“Mrs. Nash’s handkerchief,” he said quietly, “was saturated with a strong solution of whiskey and cyanide of potassium.” No one spoke. What that meant was perfectly apparent. The whiskey in the decanter had not been poisoned. The cyanide must therefore have been in the patent syphon. And Iris had prepared the syphon herself, before she went to the Assembly; and Iris had rinsed it out and recharged it when she returned.
Sergeant Buck followed me out of the library and closed the door. Colonel Primrose was still standing in front of Randall Nash’s desk, staring down intently at the instruments of death gathered there on it… trying, I knew, to penetrate to the heart of whatever had caused Lowell to act as she’d done.
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat.
“Maybe it ain’t as bad as it looks, ma’am,” he said stiffly.
“I hope not,” I said. I put on my hat, picked up my coat that I’d laid across the arm of the cherry damask love seat in the hall, and started to put it on.
He cleared his throat again, in his usual sinister way.
“You planning on going somewheres, ma’am?”