“I follow all that,” said Ferens. “The way she got her tentacles on to him and wouldn’t let him go seems to me to be in character, but why on earth didn’t he give her her money when he was at Gramarye? He went there every week.”
“Hannah supplied the answer to that one,” replied Macdonald. “Years ago, the Warden had arranged the etiquette for the doctor’s visit. It was highly ceremonious. Hannah admitted him and marched him upstairs to the Warden in the dispensary. Hannah, in her capacity as nurse, stood at attention all the time while doctor saw the children. If any were in bed, Hannah accompanied doctor and Warden to the dormitories, in the correct hospital tradition. Hannah’s eyes were likely to be on them all the time—or almost all the time—and Hannah saw doctor to the front door.”
“Wait a minute,” said Ferens. “About that medicine which you surmised was laced—”
“It was laced. Brown told me so,” said Macdonald. “I was right there.”
“Then he dispensed it himself?”
“No, he didn’t. He was much too crafty. It came up from the chemists.”
“Then how in Hades did he get the alcohol into it? You say Hannah was watching him all the time.”
Macdonald took a script from his pocket. “This is an accurate account of Hannah’s evidence. See if you can spot the loophole,” he said.
Ferens read it carefully. “I don’t see how he could have done it. One can argue she may have kept the medicine in the closed half of the cupboard so that Hannah didn’t see it, but how could he have got at it?”
“When Hannah watched the children go downstairs, all respectful like, and when the Warden was copying the chemist’s list in her private note book,” said Macdonald. “If Hannah had seen him fiddling in the medicine cupboard, it would have seemed quite natural. ‘Him had many a good laugh over our medicine cupboard.’ With Hannah out of the room for a couple of minutes, and the Warden busy writing, Brown took his chance and laced the indigestion mixture. To save you further worrying, I may as well tell you that he did come up that hill after he had thrown Monica Emily’s senseless body in the mill stream, and emptied her bag of its contents, so that these could be destroyed. With the keys he had taken from her bag he let himself in by the garden door, went up to the dispensary and emptied out the doped medicine, replacing it by a harmless mixture. Then, because he knew Miss Torrington’s mania for hiding things in odd places, he put the innocent mixtures in Hannah’s cupboard, confidently expecting she’d hand them over to the appropriate authorities. He also removed the bottle of brandy. It sounds complicated, but it was a very logical ingenious plan. It was Hannah throwing the medicine away that scuppered it.”
“I still don’t see why that mattered,” said Anne.
“You’ve an innocent mind, Mrs. Ferens. Brown was wise enough to tell me he had prescribed medicine for the Warden. It was on the chemist’s list. And it was an essential part of his plan that the innocent bottles should be found by us, so that no suspicion should arise in that quarter. I told him that I couldn’t find the bottles. He then began to panic, and determined that something had gone amiss. He guessed by this time that Hannah had disposed of the bottles in her cupboard. So he toiled up the hill, arrayed ghostlike in the Warden’s best cloak which he had taken away with him the earlier night he was in the house, and proceeded to hide appropriate mixtures for me to find. His main argument was sound enough. There was no direct evidence. No one had seen him knock the Warden over the head and roll her body into the mill stream. If anybody in the village knew the truth about his one-time relations with the Warden and guessed at his possible guilt, they were obviously going to keep quiet over it. And the explanation of death being due to falling in the mill stream while under the influence of alcohol was just the sort of explanation a jury would accept.”
“But why couldn’t he leave it alone?” said Ferens.
“Because I was being tiresome over the medicine bottles,” said Macdonald. “Brown wasn’t stupid. He knew I should ask all about deceased’s previous falls—her famous dizziness. Each occurred shortly after a meal. ‘To be taken three times a day. After meals.’ ‘Ter die,’ as the prescriptions have it. He’d have noticed that himself, and thought I might notice it, too. So it was essential that the medicine must be found, in some improbable place, before I really set-to on a full dress search. If he could only prove the medicine had been harmless, he felt there wasn’t any concrete evidence against him.”
“And provided the village kept mum, he was quite right,” said Reeves. “The way he handed over the money—a few pounds at a time in pound notes—was almost foolproof. You can’t prove what a man’s spent or not spent in ready money. It’s only cheques, or large withdrawals of cash, which can be proved. It’s anybody’s money, so to speak. And as to motive—anybody in the village could have been credited with a motive.”
Ferens suddenly laughed. “But only a medical man could induce dizziness three times a day, after meals. Well, I congratulate you both. I do admire other people’s brains.”
Anne turned to Macdonald: “Did anybody talk to you about Dr. Brown—any of your chief witnesses?”
“No. They all avoided mentioning him, or bringing him into their statements as one might have expected them to do.”
“I must remember that,” she said
