Death of a Ghost (20 page)

‘I see,' said the Inspector hastily and busied himself with his notebook.

‘Well,' he said at last, ‘where was the bottle?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Oh come, Mr Potter, where was it usually kept?'

‘I don't know.' The Inspector's victim had the disconcerting air of speaking the literal truth about something in which he was not interested. ‘I never found out. It used to worry me. Good God, the things that used to worry me! I've been mad. I used to hunt when she was out. It was all so tidy – it should have been easy. I never found anything. Yet whenever she wanted it I used to find her like that. It's gone on for years.'

‘Years?' Campion and the Inspector felt they were peering in at a secret. The vision of the tragic, ineffectual husband protecting his masterful wife in his small worried way seemed indecent, sad, and to be covered.

‘Not so much at first, of course, but often lately.'

‘She only did it when she was upset?'

‘Oh, yes. She was very strong. She never let it take hold of her. It was only when things got too bad.'

‘I see.' The Inspector rose. ‘Thank you for your information, Mr Potter. It has been very valuable. I shall try not to bother you any more than I can help. By the way, did your wife ever consult a doctor about this – er – habit of hers?'

‘A doctor? No, I don't think so.' Mr Potter seemed mildly surprised. ‘She and I were the only people who knew about it, I think, although the others must have guessed, and she did not consider it important at all. I used to worry.'

‘What was it?' enquired Oates. ‘Whisky?'

‘I don't know. I never saw it. I told you.'

‘Most extraordinary,' commented the Inspector. ‘Where did she buy it?'

‘I don't think she did buy it.'

Mr Potter made this extraordinary announcement with the same air of detachment which had characterized him throughout the interview.

Inspector Oates paused half-way across the room.

‘Where did it come from, then?'

‘I told you, I don't know,' said Mr Potter with patient disinterest. ‘Lately, whenever my wife was distressed I used to find her unconscious, usually with a glass by her side, but although I hunted everywhere I never found any supply. On one occasion I found her in the dining-room at this house – you were there, I remember – but that was the only time. Apart from that it was always in the studio. I don't think she bought any alcohol, because it is expensive, you know, and our resources were so very small that it would have been impossible for her to spend even a few shillings without me knowing. We were impossibly poor. That seemed to matter very much too. Oh, dear God, I am tired.'

He lay back and closed his eyes.

Campion and the Inspector went out. The younger man wiped his forehead and stretched as though his clothes had become tight.

The Inspector sighed.

‘It's things like that that make me believe in capital punishment,' he said briefly. ‘We'll get this bird, Campion, and we'll string him up.'

–

‘N
ICOTINE
,' said the Inspector, displaying his copy of the analyst's report, ‘one of the most pernickety poisons in the world, specially prepared by Providence, no doubt, to delay police officers in the execution of their duty.'

Campion and the Inspector were in the library at Little Venice. It was the morning of the Sunday following the Friday on which they had interviewed Mr Potter.

In the circumstances it seemed to Mr Campion that the Home Office chemists had been unusually expeditious and he said so. ‘I thought they were liable to take six weeks on a job like this,' he remarked.

‘Not when the whole department is up in the air.' The Inspector spoke succinctly. ‘We all want this thing cleared up before the Press decides to scream itself into a fit. Unfortunately, all we seem to be able to do is to create a lot of excitement all round. In this instance it's done a bit of good. Those beggars can do with a bit of hustling. Still, it's interesting, isn't it? The nicotine, I mean. It's getting fashionable just now, yet up to a few years ago there was only one known instance of it being used criminally.
^fn1
Know anything about it?'

‘Not much,' said Campion. ‘A small dose is fatal, isn't it?'

‘Ten to twenty milligrammes of the alkaloid does the trick in three to five minutes … paralyses the respiratory system, among other things.' Oates spoke savagely. ‘I saw the stuff in the lab. last night … I always sweat these things up as I go along. You'd be surprised how much I know about arsenic,' he added with apparent irrelevance. ‘Criminals ought to stick to arsenic. These fancy poisons let us in for no end of trouble. Still, this nicotine is colourless, volatile stuff which goes yellow if you leave the cork out, and if you keep it long enough it goes solid. That's practically all I learnt on the subject from our boys.'

Campion was looking at the report.

‘By applying the Stas-Otto process to the contents of the stomach we isolated 14.89 milligrammes alkaloid Nicotiana Tabacum,' he read. ‘Yes, well, that's clear enough. It ought to be simple to trace the source once you get your list of suspects. You can't go and buy this muck by the pint, I take it.'

The Inspector glanced at the younger man curiously and when he spoke his voice was weary.

‘Anyone can buy a box of cigars,' he said.

‘A box of cigars?' Mr Campion's pale eyes widened. ‘Can the alkaloid be extracted easily?'

‘As far as I can see, yes.' Oates was very grave. ‘In fact, I gather that either of us, with very little knowledge and practically no unusual paraphernalia, could get enough trouble out of a box of Havanas to keep the analysts busy for months, so, although we shall consider the question of source with our customary thoroughness, I don't expect much help in that direction. We're up against brains, Campion. It may make it more interesting, but it's putting years on my life.'

Mr Campion hesitated and opened his mouth as though to speak, but thought better of it, and Oates did not notice him.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘We'll go down to that damn studio. We've got no business here, anyway. I seem to have been using this room as an office ever since the crime. Mrs Lafcadio doesn't resent it, either. Bless her! Now and again she sends me a cup of tea!'

The two men went through the hall and down the staircase to the garden door.

The Potter studio was forlorn and deserted save for the plainclothes man encamped in the tiny porch.

The Inspector unlocked the door and they went in.

Without the dignity of tragedy the room looked smaller than when Campion had first seen it. The atmosphere was close and smelt abominably of damp, although the place had been unoccupied so short a time. While it was not actually untidy, the bookshelves and the side tables had a slightly ruffled appearance, betraying a recent search amongst their contents.

Oates stood looking round him in mild exasperation.

‘There you are,' he said. ‘Nothing at all. Not a sign of a bottle or a flask in the whole outfit. Not a trace of alcohol in the place.'

‘Could she have got it from the house in a glass?' Campion spoke without much enthusiasm and the elder man shrugged his shoulders.

‘And put the stuff in herself? Well, she might, but I don't think so. Hang it all, what did she get the nicotine out of? There's not a phial, not a pill bottle, nothing that might have contained it. Besides, someone must have seen her go into the house – Lisa, for instance, whose window looks straight out on this doorway.'

Campion nodded absently. ‘You've made a thorough job of it, I suppose?'

‘Well, I had Richardson and Miss Peters. You know 'em, don't you?'

Campion had a vision of the stout, lazy-looking man with the delicate hands and the sharp, inquisitive eyes, followed by the tiny birdlike woman whose hands moved so quickly yet so methodically through drawers and table-loads of litter. The legend concerning them was that they were relations of the Recording Angel whom nothing ever escapes.

‘That settles it then,' he said. ‘There's nothing here.'

‘I know that.'

‘They found no alcohol and no poison?'

‘Poison!' The Inspector spoke explosively. ‘My good boy, this garden is lousy with poison. Rennie has about two stone of pure white arsenic to start with. There's a quart and a half of dilute hydrochloric acid in the shed behind the scullery – Dutch mordant. Potter used it in his lithography.

‘Then we found spirits of salts over the sink, to say nothing of a small chemist's shop of patent medicines, all of which seemed pretty dangerous to me. But not a sign of the sort of stuff we were looking for.'

‘It's the choice of poisons that makes it so obviously murder, I suppose?' said Campion slowly. ‘Now you've spotted it.'

‘Exactly,' Oates cut in. ‘If that young doctor hadn't been particularly honest, or even if he hadn't had his suspicions aroused by the Dacre business, it's a hundred to one he'd have called it heart failure – which is always true up to a point, when you come to think of it – issued a certificate and left it at that. Someone was being clever, darn clever, let's hope a bit too clever by half.'

Campion sat down in the chair by the window table. He was so much more thoughtful than usual that Oates glanced at him sharply. He did not press for confidences, however, but contented himself by observing that the finger-print people had found nothing of interest.

‘The deceased's own prints were all over the phone,' he observed. ‘By the way, that woman Cunninghame stuck to her tale about the phone-bell she heard as she left that afternoon, so as a matter of routine I traced the call. It's hardly evidence. These exchange folk aren't reliable. How can they be? But apparently the number was called from a public box somewhere about that time. There was some hitch in the connexion at first and the supervisor was called. She got through to this exchange – that's how I was able to trace it at all. I saw both girls, but they couldn't help me much. They fixed the time, though. Four thirty-one. It bears out Miss Cunninghame, but gets us no further.'

‘Where was the call-box?'

‘Clifford Street. What's the matter? Tell you anything?'

Campion was sitting up in his chair, staring ahead of him. Presently he took off his spectacles.

‘Look here, Stanislaus,' he said, ‘I'd better tell you. Max Fustian killed Mrs Potter.'

The Inspector regarded him for a full twenty seconds.

‘Think so?' he said at last.

‘I'm sure of it.'

‘Got any proof?'

‘Not a trace.'

Oates hurled his cigarette-stub into the empty fireplace.

‘What's the good of that?' he demanded.

‘It's a comfort to me,' said Mr Campion.

The Inspector lit another cigarette.

‘Let's have the whole thing,' he said. ‘It's mainly second sight, I suppose?'

Campion rose to his feet and without hesitating to lay himself open to a charge of disordered imagination related to the listening policeman all the little details and scraps of suspicion which have been here set down. When he had finished Oates rubbed his moustache dubiously.

‘I like you, Campion,' he said at last. ‘You've got a nerve. I follow you all right, but if I may say so it's rather a case of an angel treading where even the fools fear to rush in. You've got no evidence at all.'

‘I know.'

‘Precious little in the way of definite suspicion!'

Mr Campion paused half-way across the room.

‘That's what's so infuriating, Oates. Yet I'm sure. Don't you see it's only the cold facts themselves which point away from him?'

‘I don't know what more you want,' said the Inspector glumly. ‘Still, I see what you mean. There's nothing more deceptive than facts. You find that out in the witness-box, God knows. However, let's consider your yarn about the first murder. I concede your point that for an intelligent man Max Fustian's confession was suspiciously ridiculous if he wanted it to be believed. But the facts, my boy, the facts! What about his alibi?'

Campion glanced shrewdly at his friend.

‘I wonder,' he said. ‘When you interviewed Donna Beatrice, did you ask her what they were talking about when the lights went out?'

Oates scowled. ‘I did, and I got a full account for my pains. Some awful interminable anecdote about a loony in a Turkish bath who mistook Miss Beatrice for a picture – that woman's mental, Campion.'

‘It was a long story?' the young man suggested.

‘It was.'

‘Did Donna Beatrice strike you as a person who would let anyone else get a word in edgeways?'

The Inspector shook his head.

‘It's no good, Campion,' he said. ‘If you're trying to tell me that Fustian slipped off as soon as the lights went out and left the woman talking, and came back again without her twigging, you're wasting your time and mine.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's not possible. Think of it. You're holding forth to me in the dark. Wouldn't you know if I was there or not?'

‘How could I tell?'

‘Well, damn it, man, you'd hear me breathing for one thing, shifting about, coughing perhaps or grunting as I tried to get a word in. If I moved off, even if I crept away, you'd hear me. Of course you would.'

Campion nodded.

‘I know,' he said awkwardly. ‘But she wouldn't. I only remembered the other day. She's as deaf as an egg without that contraption she wears, and she took it off for the party. Do you see, she wouldn't hear a thing and it was very dark.'

The Inspector sat up.

‘Took it off? What for?'

‘Vanity, I suppose.'