Читать книгу Crime and Mr. Campion - Margery Allingham - Страница 20

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“Nicotine,” 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.^[1] Know anything about it?”

“Not much,” said Campion. “A small dose is fatal, isn’t it?”

[1]	Tardieu records a case in which Count Bocarmé and his wife were convicted of murdering M. Fougnies by administering the alkaloid which Bocarmé manufactured himself. Vide: L’Étude Méd. Lect. sur l’Empoisonment.

“Ten to twenty milligrams of the alkaloid does the trick in three to five minutes—paralyzes 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 14.80 milligrams Alkaloid Nicotiana Tabacum,” he read. “Yes, well, that’s clear enough. It ought to be simple to trace the source, once you get your lists 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 age.”

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 plain-clothesman 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 tableloads 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 salt 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 fingerprint 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 this number was called from a public box somewhere about that time. There was some hitch in the connection 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 callbox?”

“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 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 halfway 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. Don’t 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.”

“Well, I’m damned!” Oates leant back in his chair, and for a moment he was silent.

“There’s no solid evidence, though,” he said at last. “No case—nothing we could have taken to court even if that business was reopened. As I said at the time, it was the impulsive, spontaneous nature of that knifing which licked us at the outset. The luck was all on his side. This, thank God, is premeditated. That gives us an equal chance.”

“You agree with me, then?”

“I? Good heavens, no. I’ve got an open mind. I suspect everyone and no one until I get proof.” Oates grinned as he spoke. “The old official attitude is a great stand-by. Got any more revelations up your sleeve?”

Campion remained serious.

“I can’t guess at the motive,” he said slowly. “In Max Fustian’s life young Dacre and Mrs. Potter were surely the most unimportant people on earth.”

“To get back to facts,” said Oates without rudeness, “where was Fus—this suspect of yours between four-thirty and five o’clock last Thursday?”

“Where he took the trouble to tell me he was,” said Campion. “At Meyer’s Art Gallery, enthusing over a duchess’s pastels. Old Meyer is by way of being a friend of mine, and I dropped in to see him yesterday. He was very full of his private view and told me all I wanted to know without any prompting. Max came into the gallery about five-and-twenty to five. Meyer noticed the time because it was so late. He’d been expecting him all the afternoon. The exhibition shut at half past six, but Max stayed on chatting to Meyer until nearly seven. Then they both went out and had a drink. Meyer was very gratified but a trifle surprised by the great man’s condescension, I fancy. Max does not usually behave so graciously.”

“Miss Cunninghame left here at four-thirty,” observed the inspector. “Fustian entered Meyer’s at five-and-twenty to five and stayed there for a couple of hours, by which time Mrs. Potter was dead, discovered, and we had arrived. That only gives him the five minutes between four-thirty and four thirty-five to get busy in. Not long enough to do anything, my boy.”

“Long enough to phone,” said Campion.

“How d’you mean?”

Campion sat forward in the chair he had resumed.

“When Miss Cunninghame left here at four-thirty she heard the phone bell ring. You traced that call and found that it came from a box in Clifford Street. Max entered Meyer’s gallery at four thirty-five. Meyer’s gallery is in Clifford Street, and there’s a callbox twenty yards down the road—the only one in the street.”

“That’s not evidence.”

“I know it’s not, but it’s suspicion. Dozens of people may have seen him in the callbox. He was looking pretty conspicuous, you remember. Besides, practically everyone round there knows him by sight. It ought not to be difficult to find witnesses.”

“What’s this leading to?” The inspector’s interest was genuinely aroused. “Suppose we do prove that the phone call she had came from him—which won’t be easy, by the way—what then? Did he poison her over the telephone? You’ve been reading thrillers again.”

The pale young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles remained unusually serious.

“This bit is pure theory,” he said, “but I’m open to bet anything you like it’s true. Look here, we know from our own observation and from Potter himself that when Mrs. Potter was suddenly confronted by a crisis she used to pour a tumblerful of neat whisky down her throat and pass out. We know that Potter thought that had happened this time. He said so. Suppose it had happened.”

“But her usual supply of liquor had the addition of a small quantity of alkaloid nicotine?”

“Yes.”

“It’s worth thinking about,” Oates conceded cautiously. “She received her shock, or whatever it was, over the phone, the telephoner relying upon her to react to it in the usual way and so fix the moment of the murder at a time when the murderer had a watertight alibi. It’s not bad, Campion.”

“I think that’s how it happened.” Campion spoke softly. “After all, think of it. It all worked out so neatly. Mrs. Potter was bound to be in at four-thirty because Miss Cunninghame was due to leave at four-fifteen and always stayed over her time by ten minutes or so. Then Potter was away—the only day in the week he was always out—so the woman could take the stuff and die alone. Of course he couldn’t hope for Potter to come in early and wash out the glass, but he could expect that Fettes would diagnose heart failure or acute alcohol poisoning.”

“It’s neat,” said the inspector. “Very neat. And it sounds feasible. But it’s too full of holes, and pure hypothesis anyway. How did he get the nicotine into the spirit, or, having done so, how did he know that she wouldn’t take the stuff before he rang up?”

Campion considered.

“I think the answer to that last question is that the poisoned spirit had not been in her possession very long,” he said at last. “Even Max, who’s the most optimistic soul on earth, wouldn’t risk her taking it too soon. Therefore the answer to the first question is that he got the stuff here some time on Thursday.”

“Was he here on Thursday?”

“No.”

“Or during the week?”

“No. I admit all this, but after all she was a secretive woman. It might have come by post. He might almost have given it to her in town. There are so many possibilities here that we can’t work ’em all out. That’s why I join with you in feeling that our only hope is to find the container, the thing that originally held the stuff.”

The inspector glanced round the little room.

“We’ll find it,” he said with sudden decision. “We’ll find it. Until then I reserve judgment. But it’s a glimmer, my boy, it’s a definite glimmer. Come on. We’ll search this darn place ourselves.”

The inspector revealed a thoroughness which surprised Campion, although he had not the neatness of the trained police searchers. Every piece of furniture in the overcrowded room was carefully examined, every loose floorboard prized up, every conceivable corner where a hidden cupboard might have been concealed laid bare.

The living room, the scullery, and the shed without all went through this gruelling examination by turns. Again and again Campion found himself confronted by little domestic secrets of the Potter household, little economies, little slovenlinesses which he felt were private and which brought home unbearably the pathos of the tragedy. However unlovable a character Mrs. Potter had been, her destroyer had also annihilated a home which without her became a desolate collection of rubbish.

They refused Belle’s kindly offer of lunch and worked on until half past three in the afternoon, when their work ended. Hot, dishevelled, and defeated, they smoked a cigarette in the untidy room.

“We’re sunk,” said the inspector. “I’m glad I made sure myself, though. You can see for yourself that Richardson and Miss Peters were right. There’s nothing here.”

Regretfully Campion agreed, and they were still sitting in despairing silence when Lisa knocked at the door.

“Mrs. Lafcadio says you must have some tea,” she said, planting a tray on the table. “As you wouldn’t come in, I’ve brought it down.”

She stayed to pour out for them, and Campion was acutely aware of her bright inquisitive eyes peering first at the disordered room and then at themselves.

Idly he went over ground already explored.

“After Mrs. Potter died and before I arrived, no one but you and Mrs. Lafcadio and Fred Rennie came in here at all?” he enquired.

“I have told you, no,” said Lisa with some dignity. “I have also told you,” she added, nodding to the inspector.

He smiled at her wearily as he returned his teacup to the tray. “You have, Miss Capella,” he said. “Until you’re tired, I’m afraid.”

Campion frowned. “Someone must have come,” he said. “Someone must have come—to the door only, perhaps. That’s it, Lisa. Did someone come to fetch anything at that time? Anything at all?”

“I have told you,” the old woman began brusquely. “No one came except the boy from the art gallery.”

Both men sat staring at her. The inspector’s hand was halfway to his lips, the cigarette hanging from his fingers, while Campion sat up stiffly, his face completely expressionless. Not unnaturally Lisa was taken aback by the sensation she had created. Two spots of colour appeared in her yellow cheeks.

“It was nothing,” she said. “He often comes at that time. I gave him the blocks and he went. I didn’t let him see inside the studio, of course. It was when Mrs. Lafcadio had gone to telephone.”

The inspector pulled himself together. His eyes were hard and concentrated on the woman’s face.

“I ought to have heard of this before,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. When exactly did the boy come?”

Lisa’s dark eyes were frightened.

“Mrs. Lafcadio had gone to telephone,” she repeated. “I had just come in here and seen Mrs. Potter. There was a knock. I was startled, I think. I went to the door. When I saw who it was I was glad it was only the boy. I told him to wait. I shut the door so he wouldn’t see anything. Then I got the blocks. They were wrapped up in their cloth, and I gave them to him and he went away. That is all.”

“All right,” said Oates soothingly. “All right. What were the blocks?”

“Wood blocks—wood engravings.” Lisa found the inspector’s ignorance very disconcerting. She began to speak very clearly, as though to a foreigner, which indeed he was. “Big heavy squares of wood. She cleaned and printed them for him.”

“For whom?”

“For Mr. Max. I am telling you. His boy came for them. I gave them to him.”

The inspector looked at Campion, his face twisted into a travesty of a smile. “She gave them to him,” he said.