would have been expected at the theatre last night. Lydia met Josephine and got back to the theatre in good time, so any of the people we’ve got here could feasibly have been at King’s Cross and not been missed.’
Fallowfield nodded. ‘Any of them could have passed through the scene dock and tampered with the whisky, and any of them could have come up here later on.’
‘But why do both, I wonder? If the whisky was in the decanter, from which only Aubrey was going to drink, he was already as good as dead. What would be the point of taking an extra chance to go to his office, assuming that the same person did both?’
‘To make sure he couldn’t get out and call for help, I suppose, Sir.’
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‘I would have thought the choice of poison made certain of that.
It must have acted immediately on entering his system. From what I’ve seen of his body, no one could have helped him, even if they’d found him alive.’
‘But what else could it be?’
‘I would have said to incriminate him with Elspeth’s murder weapon if it weren’t for the locked door. If somebody wanted to set Aubrey up, that would explain why the knife was swapped for the hatpin but the door instantly undermines the suicide theory and I don’t think we’re dealing with someone who would have panicked and locked it by mistake. No, those other things on the desk are central. The flower again, and the tin; they’re like the dolls in that railway carriage. It’s almost as if he or she is leaving an explanation at each scene – a message for us, or some sort of justification.’
‘I suppose whoever it was could have come here to fetch something, as well, something that might have been incriminating.’
‘Yes, Bill – that could easily be it, in which case McCracken’s ruled out because those letters would never have been left in the desk.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’d better get back – the lads will have arrived by now. I need to talk to Lydia, and then I’ll pay a call on Mrs Aubrey while you bring McCracken in for questioning.’ He handed Fallowfield a piece of paper. ‘That’s a list of the phone numbers from Aubrey’s blotter – I want to know who they all are as soon as possible, so get someone back at the Yard onto that right away. And can you have a look at the Wyndham’s side of this bridge? Find out exactly where it goes and how easy it is to get to from the other side.’
‘Right-o, Sir, I’ll do it now. I just hope I don’t end up on stage in the middle of a performance.’
‘I can’t help feeling that the performance has been up here tonight – and we’ve missed it. I’ll see you in a bit.’
Penrose went back down the corridor and found that the disquieting calm of Aubrey’s room had been dispelled by forensics at work. By the desk, a couple of officers were carefully packing the empty whisky bottle and tumbler, preserving them for analysis.
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Another was perched on a set of steps, leaning out over the body to photograph it from above. Unexpectedly, the flash from the camera illuminated Aubrey’s face, and the image of death that it framed in that momentary explosion of light was so intensely familiar and so suddenly thrust upon him that he had to blink to rid himself of it, and to anchor himself firmly in the present.
‘Archie – there you are. You know, when I dressed for the theatre tonight this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’ Without any further preamble, Spilsbury joined Penrose by the body. ‘It’s nicotine, without a doubt. You can tell by the brown mucus around the nostrils. I’ll expect to find a fairly hefty dose in the stomach and kidneys when we open him up – but you can be certain that’s what killed him.’
‘Can you say when it was taken?’
‘Not long ago. The tiniest measure can cause death in a few minutes. In animals, it has much the same effect as hydrocyanic acid –
a quarter of a drop can kill; for a man, one or two drops will be fatal. Exposure to nicotine in small doses through smoking or chewing tobacco can build up a tolerance to the toxic effects, and he obviously was a smoker, but nobody’s immune. A lethal amount would be the equivalent of absorbing all the nicotine in three or four cigarettes. That’s all, but what was it Goethe said?
“There’s no such thing as poison – it just depends on the dose.”’
‘Nicotine is used as an insecticide, isn’t it? I remember it as a child. My father swore death to the aphids on his roses, but he used to throw a blue fit if I went within fifty yards of the stuff.’
‘Yes, every gardener has some tucked away. It’s a fairly simple chemical process to extract the neat stuff from tobacco leaves, but there’s no need to go to all that trouble now – it’s readily available.
You could walk into a shop and buy more than enough to manage this, and the toxicologist will be able to tell us the likely brand.
You know, it’s becoming an increasingly fashionable way to do yourself in. I’ve had three times as many suicides from a dose of nicotine over the last twelve months as in the previous year. It’s a nasty way to oblivion, but it has the advantage of being a quick one. Is that what you’re looking at here? Suicide?’
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‘I’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘The door was locked from the outside and, in any case, it doesn’t fit with what I know of him. He was intelligent enough to find a less painful way if he wanted to kill himself. He could have taken it without being aware of it, I suppose?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve known several cases of people drinking insecticides by accident. In its natural state, it’s a sort of colourless, oily liquid but it soon changes on contact with air and looks remarkably like whisky. Of course, it takes so little to kill you that even if you realised what you’d done it would be too late. One swig would do it. An easy mistake, but an expensive one.’
‘In that case, there’s a decanter and glass downstairs that he drank from just before he died. It’s in the scene dock.’
‘Fine, we’ll go there next.’
‘So it could be murder?’
‘Well, it’s not a common choice for a planned killing, I have to say. I only know of one other case – a French count who killed his brother-in-law by forcing him to ingest nicotine – but that was nearly a hundred years ago. It’s usually self-inflicted or a practical joke gone wrong – snuff in beer, ridiculous amounts of cigars smoked in a row for
