Sweet Poison (12 page)

The doctor smiled wryly. ‘Yes, you’re right. I am too old to be up all night working on dead bodies.’

‘What did you discover?’ said Edward eagerly. ‘Oh, I am sorry, I ought not to harass you. I expect it’s all confidential until the inquest.’

‘It is,’ the doctor replied, ‘but in confidence I don’t mind admitting to you that the General was definitely poisoned.’

‘Cyanide?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so,’ said Edward, unable to suppress a note of triumph. ‘But how did it happen?’

‘God knows,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s not my problem, I am glad to say.’

‘Either he or someone else at the table must have broken a capsule of cyanide into his port sometime after I arrived – but how, and why? I mean, no one in their right mind would commit suicide at the end of a very good and very public dinner.’

‘But of course suicides are usually said to be of unsound mind,’ said the doctor.

‘Unsound to the point of wanting to make an exhibition of one’s own death? I can only imagine doing that if one was trying to make some point – to hurt someone or show someone up.’

‘And since the General did not know any of his fellow guests, that doesn’t make any sense.’

‘No,’ agreed Edward, ‘and in any case I have never heard of anyone committing suicide at a party. You are right – it just doesn’t make sense.’

‘There is something else which I suppose it doesn’t matter me telling you, but please keep it to yourself until after the inquest – the General had stomach cancer. Hawthorn, who did the post-mortem, with me more or less just there as an observer, says that he can only have had a few months or even weeks left to live.’

‘I thought so,’ said Edward, pulling himself into a sitting position. ‘Jeffries – that’s his man, you know – Jeffries told me he had been going to the doctor and the last time he went he came away cursing all doctors and saying he was finished with the lot of them. Presumably the doctor must have told him he could do nothing more for him.’

‘So the pills he had in his hand . . . ?’

‘I bet you anything you like they will prove to be painkillers.’

‘So,’ said the doctor, ‘he took a cyanide pill by mistake for a painkiller?’

‘I think it is the most likely explanation. He may have been contemplating taking cyanide if the cancer pain became too much for him to bear, but not, one imagines, at the Duke’s table. He was a very private man and would never have exposed his bodily weakness to strangers. However, assuming he had a cyanide pill – left over from the war perhaps – he mistakenly put it in with the pain relievers. Then, while drinking the port, he felt bad pain, fumbled for his pill box and . . .’

Edward and the doctor looked at each other in silence as they played over in their minds the awfulness of what had occurred.

Dr Best said, ‘At the end of the meal, after too much and unaccustomed rich food and wine coupled with tiredness – that might well be the time when he would get attacks of pain if he were ill.’

‘Of course, I had not met General Craig for several years before last night but I was shocked at how gaunt he was when I saw him. There was something fevered about his face and his eyes were protruding, I thought. I expect I am imagining it, after the event as it were, but still it does seem plausible. Poor man – all one can say is that if he died unexpectedly he was saved some of the fear and foreboding either of dying of the cancer or committing suicide.’

‘But the agony of his death!’ said the old doctor, shaking his head. ‘You saw his face, Lord Edward. Cyanide poisoning is a terrible way of dying.’

‘Will you tell Inspector Pride our theory? I can’t,’ said Edward. ‘He has made it quite clear he doesn’t like me. I think he thinks I’m an interfering young idiot with more money than sense.’

‘Well,’ said the doctor getting up to go, ‘if it is any comfort, I think you have a very good mind and you see a lot further than most people.’

‘Thank you, Dr Best. That is very kind of you. I might have to ask you to repeat your remarks to my brother, who thinks otherwise,’ he said, smiling.

Throughout the day Edward played host to a stream of visitors. Hermione, in particular, was embarrassingly attentive and it was a relief when her mother came to say that her maid had finished packing and they were leaving. ‘Please come and see us,’ the girl begged.

‘Oh yes, please do,’ echoed her mother, happy that for once Hermione’s attention had been captured by a young man of whom she could approve.

Inspector Pride did not ask to see Edward – rather to his chagrin – presumably content with the brief statement he had taken the night before. Edward spent the afternoon reading and dozing, trying not to devote too much time to futile speculation as to why General Craig chose to die when he did, in the way he did.

The following day, Monday, Edward’s knee was less swollen and he decided he must get out of bed and go down to breakfast if he wasn’t to die of boredom. Being trapped in his bedroom for more than a day was torture to him. He had no valet to help him dress – he had given Fenton a week off to go and paddle in the sea at Bournemouth – so John the footman helped him manoeuvre himself into his trousers. As they were engaged in this tricky operation, Edward thought to ask him if, as he was helping Bates serve Verity and himself cold ham, he had seen anything which, now he looked back, might indicate that the General was contemplating suicide. It was not really the done thing to question the servants, especially in his brother’s house, but he had known John for many years – almost as long as he had known Bates – and he felt he could talk to the man informally without putting him in an awkward position.

‘Nothing at all, my lord,’ said the footman.

‘And during dinner, before we erupted on to the scene, everything was normal? I mean, I know you were concentrating on serving the food but you didn’t notice anything strange?’

‘No, my lord,’ John said. ‘Of course, I have been thinking things over, especially since the Inspector –’

‘Oh, Inspector Pride has talked to you?’

‘Yes, my lord, he has talked to all the servants. Cook was very upset.’

‘Why?’

‘She took it, my lord, that the Inspector was accusing her of poisoning the General.’

‘But that’s absurd. The poison can only have been in the wine. When the General died he was not eating, he was drinking his port.’

‘Yes, but Inspector Pride has, if I may say so, my lord, a somewhat unfortunate manner.’

‘Ah yes, I see what you mean. Is she all right now?’

‘Yes sir. The Duchess took her in hand and was good enough to speak to us all and reassure us that none of us was under any shadow of suspicion. It was very good of her Grace and took a great weight off Mr Bates’s mind.’

‘Bates! Why should Bates be worried?’

‘The Inspector was very insistent inquiring about the port, my lord – who decanted it and how it was served.’

‘But that is ridiculous. There could be nothing amiss with the port in the decanter. We all drank that. The General must have had the poison in his glass.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Edward was silent as he pushed his left leg into the trouser, trying not to wince as his knee protested. When that was accomplished and he was pulling on a shabby cardigan which he thought he might be excused for wearing given his status as an invalid, he said, ‘So you noticed nothing in the behaviour of the General or any of the other guests at dinner – before I arrived, I mean – that you thought odd in any way?’

John considered for a minute. ‘I thought, if I may say so, my lord, that the Duke was having a little difficulty with the conversation.’

‘How do you mean exactly?’

‘Well, my lord, it’s not for me to say and I only presume to do so since you ask me, but I had the feeling that there were some long silences – I mean, as though the guests were not quite at ease. Please understand, my lord, I speak in confidence. As you say, my lord, Mr Bates and myself were busy with the food and the wine so I may well be mistaken.’

‘That’s very interesting, John. Did you tell Inspector Pride that this was your impression?’

‘Certainly not, my lord. It would not have been proper.’

Edward considered. ‘I expect you are right, John. The Duke particularly wanted to bring together gentlemen with very different views of the world and no doubt, since they did not have much in common, there was little in the way of small talk.’

‘The foreign gentleman spoke most of the time, my lord, and Mr Bates and myself commented that what he was saying did not seem to please . . . But I beg your pardon, my lord, Mr Bates would think I was being forward in presuming to say so much.’

‘That’s quite all right, John. I promise you that what you say will go no further. Such a terrible thing – it is natural that we should try and establish why and how the poor gentleman took his life.’

‘Indeed, my lord – nothing like it has ever happened at the castle and we are all most shocked.’

Lord Edward Corinth stopped to steady himself as he was about to descend the great staircase. He had a stick in his right hand and he grasped the banister with the other. John had offered to assist him but Edward had told him not to fuss and that he could manage on his own, but the stairs were precipitous and he had no wish to go head over heels down them and break his neck. While he got his balance he looked at the portrait of his father which hung there, magnificently framed in gold piecrust. It was one of John Singer Sargent’s masterpieces. Either the painter or the Duke – almost certainly the latter – had chosen the hall below where he was now standing as the backdrop. The Duke was costumed, somewhat incongruously, in full hunting dress: tightly fitting shiny black boots, breeches, coloured waistcoat, black cravat and black topcoat trimmed with some type of fur. It looked to Edward as though his father had been so impatient to get out of the house and out of the painter’s presence that Sargent had only been able to catch him for a few moments at the front door before he went on out to his beloved horses and hounds, and yet, in other ways, it was very studied. Both painter and subject had been making a point but perhaps not the same point. Edward smiled wryly: certainly Sargent had captured the man’s arrogance. The Duke was standing feet apart, his right hand in the pocket of his jodhpurs, the other holding a hunting crop so that the whip curled along his leg, proclaiming his status not just as master of foxhounds but as monarch of all he surveyed. His youngest son’s eyes were drawn inexorably to his father’s face, deathly pale beneath a black silk top hat.

It was a face which combined weakness and strength of purpose in equal measure: the beaklike nose above thin red lips, the small eyes black like lumps of coal. A memory so vivid it made him clutch his forehead came to Edward out of nowhere. He was six years old. It had snowed heavily during the night and in the morning he had stolen out, unsupervised for once, to build a snowman. He had soon tired of it. The labour was much greater than he had bargained for. Suddenly, just as he was about to give up, his father had arrived dressed much as in the Sargent portrait. Seeing his son defeated and on the point of bursting into tears he had lifted him up and swung him over his head as easily as though he had been his hunting crop and called him ‘a jolly little man’. Then together they had completed building the snowman, his father finding an old trilby for the snowman’s head, a cigar stump for where his mouth should be, and three shiny black coals, one for a nose and two for cold beady eyes. Edward had been enchanted and had looked at his father in a new light, as a magic man. Only gradually did he come to appreciate that this half-hour with his father, playing in the snow, was to be unique. For months and then years afterwards he waited for his father to come and play with him again but he waited in vain. His father, except for that one time, made no sign that he knew his youngest son existed. Edward held no grudge against him. The Duke was a god, and gods, he knew from his studies, were capricious. He treasured this single moment of communion with the father he had feared but never known. Even now he occasionally dreamed of it.

Then there had been the war which they now called the Great War and the death of Edward’s eldest brother Franklyn almost as soon as he reached France. Franklyn, or Frank as he was known in the family, had joined a smart regiment in 1912 and welcomed the war, seeing it as a path to glory – a way of earning his father’s respect – or so his mother had told Edward many years later. He had seen himself leading a cavalry charge on his favourite mare, Star, named for the white mark on her face, but had discovered almost immediately that there were to be no cavalry charges in this horrible new kind of war. Instead, on 23 August 1914, at Obourg, north-east of Mons, he led his men – many from the towns and villages close to home, some he had known all his life – at a group of grey-clad soldiers on the edge of a wood. Waving his revolver in the air as though it was a magic wand, he had died moments later, shot through the head, one of the first British officers to be killed.

The Duke, his mother told Edward shortly before she herself died in 1922, had never shed a tear for his dead son, but for all that, he had been wounded to the heart. He had refused to permit his second son, Gerald, who had just left Eton, to join the army, and father and son had quarrelled bitterly but the father had prevailed. Edward, six years younger than Gerald and still at prep school, had known nothing of this. He had worshipped Frank from afar and had been enormously proud when just before he left for France he had come down to the school, dressed in his uniform, and had taken him and three of his friends to eat scones and jam in the Blackbird, the tea-room in the high street. Then, only a few weeks later, the headmaster had called him into his study and gravely broken the news to him that his brother was dead – that he had died a hero’s death. Edward had been unable to understand it. How could his brother, so strong, so solidly there one moment, be not there the next? His friends treated him almost with awe, patting his back and making embarrassed attempts to console him in the English way. ‘I say, bad show, Ned, what rotten luck.’