Last Writes (12 page)

As Martin told Detective Inspector Sloan from ‘F’ Division of the Berebury Constabulary not very long afterwards, his aunt began to complain of pain in her throat and suddenly struggled to get her breath and then before she could speak again she had tumbled to the floor. ‘And then, Inspector, she started to have convulsions. She was trying to talk but no words came.’

‘We thought she’d had a stroke,’ said Gerald, older than the other two and more experienced in both life and death. ‘She had quite a high colour – her face went a sort of rose-pink.’

‘Then she seemed to fall in to something like a coma,’ volunteered Paula, still in something of a daze herself. ‘And she died in no time at all.’

‘We’d sent for an ambulance straightaway, of course,’ said Gerald a trifle defensively.

‘They were very quick in coming, thank goodness,’ contributed Paula. She was sitting, pale-faced in her chair, her hands trembling slightly now and her eyes full of unshed tears.

The ambulance men had been very quick in sending for the police, too.

Very quick indeed.

‘We wondered at first about getting her out into the fresh air,’ said Martin to Inspector Sloan, ‘but she died before we got her further than the garden room and the ambulance men wouldn’t move her afterwards. They said we weren’t to touch her either.’

‘I see, sir.’ The detective inspector made another note. He had already examined the garden room and noted that one of the trestle tables had been pushed roughly to one side. An amateur gardener himself, he had noted, too, the plant collection there with more than passing interest – and less revulsion than the deceased’s relatives. He spotted several varieties of sundew with their hairy leaves designed to trap and digest insects. There was a group of Venus flytraps on another table and a whole assembly of pitcher plants, too, every one of them neatly labelled. Specialist was the word that came into his mind rather than anorak.

‘And we didn’t,’ insisted Gerald firmly. ‘Touch her, I mean.’

‘And I also understand that none of you was alone with her here at any time,’ said the inspector, looking round. There would be a better place to interview them all separately later but probably not a better time than here and now.

‘That’s right,’ said Gerald, looking round at the others. ‘Isn’t it?’

Paula and Martin nodded in agreement. Martin said, ‘All three of us arrived together and we hadn’t any one of us left this room. There hadn’t really been any time.’

‘None at all, actually,’ confirmed Gerald.

‘We hadn’t even got as far as her garden room until we carried her in there,’ said Paula tremulously. Still choking back tears and searching for comfort, she added, Pollyanna-like, ‘At least she died at home and among her precious plants. I know that’s just what she would have wanted.’

What the police wanted was something quite different.

‘And I don’t mean just knowing the motive,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan to Detective Constable Crosby when, after a lot of hard work, they came together the next day to review the case. ‘There’s means and opportunity as well.’

‘No shortage of motive anyway, sir,’ agreed Crosby readily. ‘None at all, in fact. The deceased’s solicitor confirms that they are each due to receive an equal proportion of her estate and from what I have established already they all three of them could do with getting their hands on their share as soon as possible.’ The constable, who was unmarried, added, ‘Matrimonial trouble, one way or another, the lot of them.’

‘Potassium cyanide kills very quickly,’ remarked Sloan, squinting down at one of the reports. ‘That’s why some of those defendants at the Nuremberg Trials had glass capsules of it parked in their mouths against a guilty verdict. It’s highly soluble in almost anything liquid.’

‘Forensics say that the cake was really moist in the middle – quite underdone, in fact – and that’s what did the trick,’ offered the constable. ‘It was still a bit damp. Me, I like cakes that way. More filling.’

‘Secret agents used to be given the poison, too, in case
they were ever caught and tortured.’ Sloan trawled through his memory. ‘I think they were supposed to crush the glass with their teeth when danger threatened and it would dissolve in their saliva and kill them.’

‘And she got it from the piece of cake,’ reported Crosby. He pushed a piece of paper in Sloan’s direction. ‘At least that’s what the forensic chemists say about what was in all those evidence bags we sent them.’

Sloan also read what the forensic chemists had to say about the availability of one the most deadly of poisons. It seemed to turn up in a wide variety of places from metal-cleaning to apricot and almond stones. He flipped through the pages of his notebook. ‘According to what each of the three of them who were there said …’

‘And are prepared to swear to,’ supplied Crosby, who had taken down the statements.

‘… they all had a chance of doctoring her piece of cake without either of the others seeing them do it. Literally behind the old lady’s back,’ Sloan added gloomily.

The detective constable nodded and patted his notebook. ‘That’s right, sir. I’ve got it all written down here.’

‘One at a time, too,’ mused Sloan. ‘First Martin cuts the cake out of sight of the others, then Gerald collects his tea from the tray himself and after that Paula goes behind the deceased’s back to pour some of her tea back into her cup from the saucer. Or so she says,’ he said, automatically adding the policeman’s customary caveat. ‘The two men don’t seem to have bothered about there being tea in their saucers.’

The detective constable, who didn’t trouble about tea that had slopped over in his saucer either, handed over a
couple more documents to Sloan. ‘Our famous specialised search team – they’re a cocky lot, aren’t they, sir? Think they’re God’s gift to detectives, they do …’

‘Never mind about that, Crosby,’ Sloan said repressively.

‘Well, they went through the sitting room and that garden room – thank goodness those awful plants haven’t got flowers, my hayfever’s been terrible this week – without finding anything at all that showed any sign of having held cyanide.’ He had tried to write down something about a fine-tooth comb in his report but placing the hyphen had troubled him. ‘They examined all the ground outside the windows, too, in case it – whatever it was – had been chucked out of one of them. Nothing there either.’

‘No broken glass at all anywhere?’ asked Sloan, still withholding comment on the Force’s subsection devoted to leaving no stone unturned in their searches – and, of course, the furthering of their own reputation within the constabulary.

‘Not a single shard, and they said to tell you that they were very sorry but that it didn’t happen often that they didn’t find anything at all.’

‘There must have been something,’ said Sloan irritably. ‘Even those insect-eating plants couldn’t have dissolved glass.’

Crosby turned over yet another report. ‘The doctor said there was nothing like that in her mouth when he did the post-mortem.’

Sloan sniffed. ‘Potassium cyanide, I would remind you, Crosby, is not the sort of substance you carry in your bare hands if you want to live.’

‘No, sir.’ The detective constable looked up and said,
‘Although if it’s for suicide and you can hide enough of it in a phial in your mouth without anyone seeing it’s there, then you can’t need a lot of it to do the trick.’

‘Got it in one, Crosby. You don’t.’ Sloan waved one of the other reports in front of him. ‘At least that’s what Forensics say here.’

‘So, sir,’ he said slowly, ‘is what we’re looking for what the cyanide was in? The vehicle, you might say …’

‘It is,’ said Sloan weightily. ‘We’ve got the motive and the opportunity. What we want now is the means of delivering justice to the culpable, otherwise known as hard evidence.’

The detective constable looked puzzled. ‘How will it help if we find what the poison was in, sir?’

Sloan sighed. ‘Because, Crosby, whoever poured the potassium cyanide onto the old lady’s piece of cake will have had to handle the container him or herself. And drop the stuff on her slice from whatever it was in behind her back and out of sight of the other two.’

‘Fingerprints, then,’ offered the detective constable, adding, ‘and we’ve got those from all three of them.’

‘They can hardly have worn gloves in the process, can they?’ sighed Sloan. Detective Constable Crosby had never been considered the sharpest knife in the drawer: it was just the inspector’s bad luck that there had been no one else on duty and available when the call to Church Hill Cottage had come in. ‘Certainly not indoors on a warm afternoon. Even the old lady would have noticed those let alone the other two, unless that is they were all in it together, which I doubt.’

‘Tricky,’ agreed Crosby, ‘because they wouldn’t have had that long to operate.’

‘No, and if they could have done that without leaving any traces of their DNA on whatever the cyanide was in – let alone fingerprints – then I’m a Dutchman.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘At least they couldn’t very well have swallowed it, whatever it was. Even an empty container would have been too dangerous by half to do that.’

‘And we know for sure that none of them had anything on their persons before we let them go because I was there,’ agreed Crosby. ‘They were all thoroughly searched from head to toe.’

‘Thanks to Polly Perkins as well,’ said Sloan piously, giving credit where credit was due. Woman Police Sergeant Perkins had thoroughly examined a still-distraught Paula before she left her aunt’s sitting room and was absolutely certain that there was nothing at all that could conceivably have had poison in it on or about her person.

Crosby shuffled the pile of papers that had accumulated on the desk between them and said wistfully, ‘It’d be nice to catch out that team that searched the premises, sir, wouldn’t it?’

‘I would remind you, Crosby,’ responded Detective Inspector Sloan stiffly, ‘that the function of policing is to catch the perpetrator of a crime, not to undermine the work of one’s colleagues.’

‘It must be somewhere, all the same, that container that had the poison in it,’ muttered Crosby.

‘True, Crosby. Very true.’ He sat back in his chair.

‘A cup of tea, sir?’

‘The best idea you’ve had so far, Crosby.’

The constable scraped his chair back and got to his feet. ‘Back in a jiffy, sir,’ he promised.

Sloan leant further back in his chair and considered the investigative trilogy of means, motive and opportunity once more. In this case motive and opportunity could be said to apply equally to all three cousins. The means of conveyance, though, still remained obscure and not yet associated with any one of them.

‘Here we are, sir.’ The constable arrived back with a tray of tea and a couple of buns. He set it down and then fished in his pocket for something. ‘Time to take my hayfever stuff.’

Sloan helped himself to a cup of tea from the tray while Crosby opened a box and took out a capsule. ‘Have a bun, too, sir. I’ll just sink this and then I’ll grab mine.’

‘No, you won’t Crosby,’ said Sloan suddenly, rising to his feet and pushing his own cup of tea to one side. ‘You’ll put that teacup down and come with me. At once. I’ve just remembered something.’

‘Yes, sir.’ He scrambled up. ‘Of course, sir. Where to, sir?’

‘Church Hill Cottage, Cullingoak,’ snapped Sloan. ‘Now, stop talking and get moving. There’s no time to lose. Oh, and pick up a murder bag.’

They were nearing the village before Crosby ventured to ask what it was that the detective inspector had remembered.

‘That gelatine is a protein,’ replied Sloan.

No wiser, the constable stayed silent until the police car was approaching Church Hill Cottage. ‘Dynamic entry, sir?’ he asked hopefully. Crosby enjoyed battering doors down.

‘Certainly not,’ said Sloan as the police car drew up in front of the cottage. ‘Follow me, Crosby.’

‘Where to now, sir?’ he asked as Sloan undid a seal on the front door.

‘The garden room. This way, Crosby.’ Sloan pushed open the doors to the room and straightaway made for the serried ranks of insect-eating plants.

‘What are you looking for, sir?’ asked the constable uneasily.

‘The
Nepenthes coccineas
,’ said Sloan absently, his eyes roving up and down one of the trestle tables. ‘Or perhaps the
Sarracenia drummondii
. You can ignore the others, Crosby.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the constable, showing every sign of ignoring all the plants. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t listening. He was walking up and down the garden room looking for the group he wanted. He stopped abruptly. ‘Come over here, Crosby. This is where they are. The lidded pitcher plants. Dozens of them.’

Manifestly uninterested, the detective constable ambled over towards Sloan. ‘Sir?’

‘I think, Crosby, you might find the remains of a gelatine capsule in one of these little fellows. Lift its lid very gently and look inside. You begin looking in them here at this end of the bench and I’ll start at the other end. Give me a shout if you see it.’

Crosby lifted the lid of the first plant and peered in. ‘All there is in this one, sir, is some water.’

‘Not water, Crosby. A solution of pepsin.’

‘Really, sir,’ he said, the yawn in his voice there if not openly expressed.

‘For drowning the insects in,’ said Sloan. ‘Neat system, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby lifted the lid on the next plant, peered inside it and then let the lid fall back again.

‘You see,’ explained Sloan, ‘pepsin is an enzyme that breaks down protein in slightly acid conditions and insects supply the protein the plant needs.’

‘And gelatine is protein,’ chanted Crosby, a lesson remembered.

‘Exactly. Now, keep looking for the remains of a gelatine capsule in the pitcher part of the plant.’

In the event it was Sloan himself who peeped into a fine plant of the
Nepenthes coccinea
family and saw something there that was most definitely not insectivorous. Reaching for the murder bag, he picked out a pair of tweezers and retrieved two halves of an empty, clear capsule. Laying them carefully on some tissue, he said, ‘That’s good. No sign of any denaturing of the gelatine by the pepsin yet.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘There would have been if it had been in your stomach, Crosby, or we had left it in this plant too long. All we need now is to know whose fingerprints are on it and Bob’s your uncle.’ He lifted the lid of the pitcher plant and then very gently let it close again. ‘An open and shut case, you might say.’