dangerous ones, off the coasts of Greenland and the fjords. Upon returning he would present his findings to the Royal Academy (he was a member) and contribute his lecture to their journal.
But it wasn’t medical work. The only work he did of that sort was the kind that had brought him face-to-face with the corpse of Prudence Smith. For the pleasure of it, he helped Lenox when he was asked and, though he tried not to betray it, felt an inkling of that old pleasure again, of real work, the excitement of the human mind examining the human body.
He was of middling height and weight, with curly blond hair, a face that was at the moment unshaven, and which told of his drinking. His eyes were lidded but occasionally sharp. He had been putting a golf ball across the cavernous ballroom in his house to a waiting footman when Lenox arrived to pick him up. Now, when Lenox beckoned him toward Prue Smith’s body, he roused himself out of observation and stepped in the room toward the bed.
She was, Lenox saw, almost a beautiful girl, with dark hair. He put her age at around twenty-five, a good age to marry.
McConnell leaned over her and then, before he touched her, said, “Do I need to worry about fingerprints?”
“I don’t think so,” Lenox said. “The process doesn’t work well on bodies yet; it’s too new. In fact, I think fingerprinting will be lost here—too many prints all over the place. Except for the glass, which was wiped clean. Interesting, that.”
Thomas stood up.
“Do you assume, then, that the poison was what really killed her?”
Lenox thought for a moment. “If it was suicide, which I gravely doubt, it was undoubtedly poison. If it was murder, the murderer would be stupid to masquerade the death as suicide by poisoning and then kill her in another way. There wouldn’t be any benefit to it.”
“Unless he thought that the bottle of poison would go unquestioned.”
“That’s why I brought you. But I imagine you’ll find it’s poison.”
“So do I,” said Thomas. “Even so.”
He pulled a pair of gloves from his breast pocket and put them on. The first part of the body that he examined was the face, which was drained of color.
“We can rule out a few of the common poisons,” he said. “They would have left her blood close to the skin. She would have been flushed.”
Lenox didn’t respond.
Thomas unbuttoned her shirt as low as he decently could, to verify that the chest wasn’t flushed either. He then lifted her shirt and prodded her stomach, without any visible effect. Next he pulled her shirt back down, licked his thumb, and drew it across her neck and her lips.
“No makeup on the neck,” he said. “Or lividity—that is, bruising. She wasn’t strangled. And the lips look normal.”
“Would you like me to step out for a moment?” Lenox asked.
“No,” McConnell said. “Not unless you feel you need to.”
He then pulled her clothes off entirely, so that her body was naked except for her underclothes. He ran his hands over her ribs and looked up and down each leg. He lifted each leg to a 45-degree angle and ran his hand across the underside of her knees. Then he rolled her onto her side and examined her back.
“Puzzling,” he said. “Most poisons—”
“Yes?” said Lenox.
“Never mind. I’ve got it.”
McConnell lifted both of her arms and examined the vein at each inner elbow.
“As I thought!” he said. “Red!”
Lenox knew better than to answer. McConnell probed her body thoroughly, tested each limb for stiffness, and checked the back of her neck. Then he stood up, lifted her clothes back over her body, and removed his gloves.
“What would you like to know first, Charles?”
At this moment Jenkins reappeared in the doorway. “I’ve got the fiance, James, in the kitchen. Mr. Barnard was none too pleased to have him pulled away, but I—what did you find out?” he said. “About the body?”
McConnell looked pointedly at Lenox.
“What killed her, Thomas?”
“She was neither stabbed nor strangled nor shot. She was, in fact, poisoned. She ingested the poison between twelve and one this afternoon, because she died at around two, based on the stiffness of her body, and the poison used takes a little over an hour to kill. Between one-forty-five and two, I think. She fell asleep, I believe, which would follow logic, as the poison I suspect has a pronounced sedative effect. Her body has not been moved since her death, and she was not active in the hour between ingestion of the poison and death. Otherwise, her ankles would look puffy and red.”
“I see,” Lenox said.
“There is one further point. She was killed by a relatively rare poison:
“Is it a common poison?” Lenox asked.
“On the contrary, the murderer probably used it because it’s so much harder to trace than something like arsenic or strychnine. And in fact, if you will permit me a moment of theater, I have a suspicion.”
Thomas pulled one of his gloves back on and walked to the desk. From his jacket pocket he extracted a miniature glass bowl and a packet of granules. It was a characteristic of Mc-Connell’s that he always had useful kits or medicines in his pockets. He placed the bowl on the desk, tapped a few grains of the powder into it, and picked up the unmarked glass bottle from the desk.
“I believe this is the poison we’re meant to think killed the girl.”
Lenox nodded.
“Look for the color purple. That will be
“Just what I thought,” he said. He looked at Lenox. “This is a bottle of poison. Probably arsenic or, if not, some related substance. Worth trying to trace, as you can occasionally find who bought it from the ledgers that apothecaries keep, especially if it was bought in London. But this much is certainly true: The contents of the bottle I am holding did not kill the girl on the bed.”
Chapter 5
It’s murder, isn’t it?” said Jenkins.
“Yes,” said Lenox. He walked slowly back down the hall toward the kitchen, feeling tired. It was past eight by now and he had a good deal left to do. At the least, he had to talk to the fiance and then to Barnard. Tomorrow he would begin in earnest. This moment was never altogether pleasant: when murder was confirmed and a case truly began.
The kitchen was a very hot square room with a low wooden ceiling. It smelled heavily of starch and meat, but it was clean. On one side of the room there was a large open fire, whose flames were just beginning to die into embers. Hanging from pegs above it were cured ham, sides of beef, and baskets of onions and garlic, and other food was piled high in open cupboards all around the room. In the middle of the floor was a long wooden table, crudely made, where the food was prepared, with steam still rising from it because the maids had rinsed it with boiling water at the end of the day. Evidently Barnard was eating out. And sitting by it was a short lean man with his head in his hands, making muffled noises every now and then. Lenox stood by the table, while McConnell and Jenkins stood behind him.
“James?” said Lenox.
