Adders on the Heath

'Please do not comment. Confine yourself to answering my questions.'

'I thought as how I were.'

'Why did you not go at once for the police or a doctor?'

'Us was too busy, that's for why. Chap was dead all right. Nothing to be done for him, and us had our day's work to think of.'

'You are a very stupid man. Didn't you realise that you might get into serious trouble for not reporting a death?'

'Us was gooing to report it all right, not as it were any business of ourn. Us tossed up to see who ud do the reporting. I lorst, and that's why I be here.'

'What happened when Mr Richardson and Mr Bradley arrived?'

'Oo, us had just knocked off for a spell when us heard 'em. Fell in the ditch, or summat, they did. So I hollers at 'em, thinking to save meself a job, and one of 'em ketches his foot agin the dead 'un, so I uncovers un where us laid him in the brocken and axes 'em to report, which I takes it they did. Very took aback, 'em was when they see the corpus. I noticed that particularly.'

'I have asked you before not to comment. You have nothing more to tell the court?'

'Noo, sir, I reckon that be all.'

'Very well. You may stand down, unless the jury have anything to ask you.'

The jury looked at one another, but no one was bold enough to venture a question, so the witness, passing a finger around the inside of his Sunday collar and scratching the side-seam of his Sunday trousers, thankfully abandoned his public position and rejoined the ranks of the anonymous.

* * *

'Well, there's one thing,' said Denis, when they left the coroner's court, 'if the doctors are right about the poisons-and, of course, they are right-that lets you out most beautifully, apart from what I said before.'

'Does it?' Richardson sounded more than doubtful. 'What makes you think so?'

The poisons themselves, of course. How could you get hold of potassium cyanide?'

'Quite easily. You forget I've worked in prep, schools. The stinks lab. in my last school probably contained enough lethal matter to kill the whole Regiment of Guards.'

'But you didn't touch chemistry, did you?'

'No, but that doesn't mean a thing. The stuff was on the premises. Any member of the staff could have got at it. He had only to hook the key to the cupboard.'

'If he'd known the stuff was there!'

'But we all knew. Young Borgia, who was the lab. assistant, was always boasting about the poisons cupboard. He used to take a delight in telling the boys that he could do in the whole school if he wanted to. The science master heard him and complained to the Old Man.'

Dame Beatrice intervened.

'It is still to be proved that the school possessed stocks of potassium cyanide and of hydrocyanic acid,' she said.

'The trouble is that it did,' said Richardson, gloomily. 'The science bloke ran a photography club and the art chap knew all about engraving.'

Denis looked concerned, but Dame Beatrice cackled.

'To employ one master who needed to have access to poisons might be accidental; two, in the same school, looks like carelessness on the part of the Head,' she misquoted. Laura grunted. She was always somewhat discountenanced when Dame Beatrice, like the Devil, used scripture (in the most elementary sense of the word) to prove her argument.

'Here,' she said, suddenly becoming cheerful again, 'New Forest indicates adders. Aren't adder-bites treated with potassium-something-or-other?'

'Indeed, yes. They may be treated by an injection of potassium permanganate solution, but that is not quite the same thing as potassium cyanide,' Dame Beatrice mildly pointed out.

'No, perhaps not, but can't you see what must have happened? Those two men must have been bitten by adders and some clot gave them the wrong injection as an antidote. I don't believe that either of them was poisoned deliberately.'

'A most ingenious theory,' Dame Beatrice admitted. 'It is medically sound and may well serve as a working hypothesis.'

'Golly!' said Laura, overawed, in the Hyman Caplan fashion, by this evidence of her own genius. 'Do you really mean it?'

'I do, but there remains the unescapable theory that if both men were bitten by adders and if both, according to your idea, were given treatment which resulted in death, coincidence is overdoing matters.'

'But there's nothing wrong with the idea?'

'No, no. It is most ingenious. The inquests are to be resumed three weeks from today. That should give us ample time and scope to free Mr Richardson's mind of fears and forebodings, and, I hope, to hit upon the truth.'