'Mushroom soup. Curried chicken and rice. Syllabubs. A savoury of chicken livers in bacon.'
'Canapes Diane,' said Dr. Quimper unexpectedly.
Lucy smiled faintly.
'Yes, Canapes Diane.'
'All right – let's go through it. Mushroom soup – out of a tin, I suppose?'
'Certainly not. I made it.'
'You made it. Out of what?'
'Half a pound of mushrooms, chicken stock, milk, a mix of butter and flour, and lemon juice.'
'Ah. And one's supposed to say 'It must have been the mushrooms.''
'It wasn't the mushrooms. I had some of the soup myself and I'm quite all right.'
'Yes, you're quite all right. I hadn't forgotten that.'
Lucy flushed.
'If you mean –'
'I don't mean. You're a highly intelligent girl. You'd be groaning upstairs, too, if I'd meant what you thought I meant. Anyway, I know all about you. I've taken the trouble to find out.'
'Why on earth did you do that?'
Dr. Quimper's lips were set in a grim line.
'Because I'm making it my business to find out about the people who come here and settle themselves in. You're a bona fide young woman who does this particular job for a livelihood, and you seem never to have had any contact with the Crackenthorpe family previous to coming here. So you're not a girl-friend of either Cedric, Harold, or Alfred – helping them to do a bit of dirty work.'
'Do you really think –?'
'I think quite a lot of things,' said Quimper . 'But I have to be careful. That's the worst of being a doctor. Now let's get on. Curried chicken. Did you have some of that?'
'No. When you've cooked a curry, you've dined off the smell, I find. I tasted it, of course. I had soup and some syllabub.'
'How did you serve the syllabub?'
'In individual glasses.'
'Now, then, how much of all this is cleared up?'
'If you mean washing up, everything was washed up and put away.'
Dr. Quimper groaned.
'There's such a thing as being overzealous,' he said.
'Yes, I can see that, as things have turned out, but there it is, I'm afraid.'
'What do you have still?'
'There's some of the curry left – in a bowl in the larder. I was planning to use it as a basis for mulligatawny soup this evening. There's some mushroom soup left, too. No syllabub and none of the savoury.'
'I'll take the curry and the soup. What about the chutney? Did they have chutney with it?'
'Yes. On one of those stone jars.'
'I'll have some of that, too.'
He rose. 'I'll go up and have a look at them again. After that, can you hold the fort until morning? Keep an eye on them all? I can have a nurse round, with full instructions, by eight o'clock.'
'I wish you'd tell me straight out. Do you think it's food poisoning – or – or – well, poisoning.'
'I've told you already. Doctors can't think – they have to be sure. If there's a positive result from these food specimens I can go ahead. Otherwise –'
'Otherwise?' Lucy repeated.
Dr. Quimper laid a hand on her shoulder.
'Look after two people in particular,' he said. 'Look after Emma. I'm not going to have anything happen to Emma…'
There was emotion in his voice that could not be disguised. 'She's not even begun to live yet,' he said. 'And you know, people like Emma Crackenthorpe are the salt of the earth… Emma – well, Emma means a lot to me. I've never told her so, but I shall. Look after Emma.'
'You bet I will,' said Lucy.
'And look after the old man. I can't say that he's ever been my favourite patient, but he is my patient, and I'm damned if I'm going to let him be hustled out of the world because one or other of his unpleasant sons – or all three of them, maybe – want him out of the way so that they can handle his money.'
He threw her a sudden quizzical glance.
'There,' he said. 'I've opened my mouth too wide. But keep your eyes skinned, there's a good girl, and, incidentally, keep your mouth shut.'
V
Inspector Bacon was looking upset.
'Arsenic?' he said. 'Arsenic?'
'Yes. It was in the curry. Here's the rest of the curry – for your fellow to have a go at. I've only done a very rough test on a little of it, but the result was quite definite.'
'So there's a poisoner at work?'
'It would seem so,' said Dr. Quimper dryly.
'And they're all affected, you say – except that Miss Eyelesbarrow.'
'Except Miss Eyelesbarrow.'
'Looks a bit fishy for her…'
'What motive could she possibly have?'
'Might be barmy,' suggested Bacon.
'Seem all right, they do, sometimes, and yet all the time they're right off their rocker, so to speak.'
'Miss Eyelesbarrow isn't off her rocker. Speaking as a medical man, Miss Eyelesbarrow is as sane as you or I are. If Miss Eyelesbarrow is feeding the family arsenic in their curry, she's doing it for a reason. Moreover, being a highly intelligent young woman, she'd be careful not to be the only one unaffected. What she'd do, what any intelligent poisoner would do, would be to eat a very little of the poisoned curry, and then exaggerate the symptoms.'
'And then you wouldn't be able to tell?'
'That she'd had less than the others? Probably not. People don't all react alike to poisons anyway – the same amount will upset some people more than others. Of course,' added Dr. Quimper cheerfully, 'once the patient's dead, you can estimate fairly closely how much was taken.'
'Then it might be…' Inspector Bacon paused to consolidate his ideas. 'It might be that there's one of the family now who's making more fuss than he need – someone who you might say is mucking in with the rest so as to avoid arousing suspicion? How's that?'
'The idea has already occurred to me. That's why I'm reporting to you. It's in your hands now. I've got a nurse on the job that I can trust, but she can't be everywhere at once. In my opinion, nobody's had enough to cause death.'
'Made a mistake, the poisoner did?'
'No. It seems to me more likely that the idea was to put enough in the curry to cause signs of food poisoning – for which probably the mushrooms would be blamed. People are always obsessed with the idea of mushroom- poisoning. Then one person would probably take a turn for the worse and die.'
'Because he'd been given a second dose?'
The doctor nodded.
'That's why I'm reporting to you at once, and why I've put a special nurse on the job.'
'She knows about the arsenic?'
'Of course. She knows and so does Miss Eyelesbarrow. You know your own job best, of course, but if I were
