Beatrice said in a muffled voice: “I only try to do my best, darling. It’s not easy.”
Pity, pity, pity.
The fly in the wine glass, the daddy-long-legs at the window, the butterfly in the fire. With dread and a feeling of foreboding Bartels saw the wave top the barrier and surge down upon him, and for a few seconds struggled against it with a hopeless ferocity. Then the waters were around him and over him, and he knew that he had lost. He rose from his chair and went over to the settee. He moved slowly and heavily.
I think that as he put his arms around her and told her that she was wrong, and that he did love her, there was already stirring within his mind, very faintly, and in an undefined form, the feeling that he might have to kill her.
It was the next day, 14 February, that, in accordance with his fortnightly habit, Bartels called upon his aunt Emily. Aunt Rose, pugnacious to the last, had died some years before, and uncle James, lost and at sea without that dominating character, had been buried beside her scarcely a year later.
But Cook was still in service, and greeted him in her usual sour manner, and told him that aunt Emily was at a seance but would be back in half an hour or so. He was hardly inside the door before he noticed a curious aromatic smell, half sweet, half acrid.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
“You may well ask,” replied Cook ominously; she was a fat, pale woman, with dark hairs on her upper lip and a slight but disconcerting cast in one eye. She disappeared into the kitchen without further words.
She had been with Bartels’ aunt for twenty-seven years, and there appeared no reason to believe that she would ever leave until his aunt died. There was a general understanding that his aunt would leave her what she called “a little something” in her will. Bartels remembered how sometimes, in the gentle, arch way his aunt Emily had of speaking, she would say in Cook’s presence, while he was still a boy:
“There! What a lovely cake old Cookie has made for you to take back to school! What should we do without her? Never mind, Cookie knows she will not be forgotten when I pass over!”
She would glance at Cook, and give one of her coy little laughs, as if to indicate that she and Cook had a little secret which they shared between them. Possibly Cook saw visions of inheriting large sums of money, and retiring to live in modest comfort. Perhaps she thought she might even get the house. If she did, she was a stupid woman.
It was not that his aunt was mean, or even ungrateful for services rendered. It was simply that she had an entirely erroneous idea of the current value of money; when it came to tips, she continued to think in terms of Victorian days. Quite often she would describe the details of some journey she had made; how she had caught this or that train; how she had arrived at Paddington and commissioned a porter to carry her bag for her; how they had found a taxi.
“So I gave the porter tuppence for himself,” she would say in passing, and no doubt she thought she had remunerated him very handsomely indeed.
Bartels went into the drawing room and glanced at the evening paper for a while, and smoked a cigarette. There was nothing in the paper of particular interest. He tossed it aside and glanced round the room; then got to his feet and strolled over to the glass-fronted bookcase in which aunt Emily still kept the books of her late husband.
Bartels had only the dimmest recollections of his uncle Robert. He recalled a sombrely dressed figure who came and went with a mysterious black bag, who sometimes, when Bartels was a very small child, had come and gazed at him and made him put his tongue out, or had placed a glass thing in his mouth-“a cigarette,” uncle Robert had called it, with a wink at his mother.
Then the years passed and he never came again, and Bartels learnt that the physician had been unable to cure himself.
The bottom two shelves were filled with a collection of novels ranging from bestsellers of pre-1914 vintage to Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. The other two shelves held a number of fat medical works of reference, one or two volumes on the history of medicine, and a French and a German dictionary.
Sandwiched between the dictionaries was a red book called
Bartels opened the bookcase and took it out.
The mentality of the poisoner was one which Bartels had never been able to fathom. He and I had frequently argued about capital punishment. Bartels was against it, except in very rare cases, declaring that in most cases the victim of a murder crime did not know that he was about to die, whereas capital punishment involved an almost sadistically long period of waiting and of fear.
“But poisoners,” Bartels said to me once, “they’re different. I just can’t get inside the mind of a man who poisons his wife, for example. Imagine the mentality of a person who sees his wife waking up in the morning, and hears her say, ‘I think I feel a little better today,’ who sees her looking brighter and more hopeful, and then slips out and puts more of the stuff in her drink.”
Doubtless it was only morbid fascination that made him take the book out of the case, and sit down with it, and glance through some of the pages.
He noted some of the more common poisons, and their reactions.
Idly, Bartels turned over the pages. It seemed heavy and dull. He replaced it on the shelf. Next to it, he noticed a smaller, blue book, called
Perhaps the fact that he had seen altrapeine among the bottles in the photographic darkroom in my flat caused him to pause and read about it.
Altrapeine, he read, was a synthetic poison with a cyanide basis…“it is a white powder, odourless and tasteless, and easily soluble in water. It exercises a specially fast and usually fatal influence on the action of the heart. The circumstances of death are to all intents and purposes similar to those associated with coronary thrombosis. There is little or no pain. Death occurs within a matter of seconds, and in the case of a woman of forty it took place after a dose of a quarter of a teaspoonful. This poison is exceptionally difficult to detect.”
Bartels laid down the book and gazed across the room. He remembered Dr Anderson once saying that coronary thrombosis was the most merciful death of all. That was when Beatrice had had severe pains in the left breast, and had half seriously, half jokingly, suggested that she might have angina pectoris.
Dr Anderson had told him, in private, that the pain had been caused by Beatrice getting into an emotional condition. He had never discovered the cause of the emotional condition, and had soon forgotten all about it.
Dr Anderson had said something else, chatting to him in the way doctors do. He had said that coronary thrombosis could cause angina pectoris.
If, therefore, Beatrice-What? He stopped the train of thought. But it crept back, stealthily, and he followed it to its conclusion. If Beatrice died very suddenly, in circumstances suggesting coronary thrombosis, Dr Anderson would remember the earlier suggestions of angina pectoris…It would confirm a diagnosis of coronary thrombosis.
He read the paragraphs again, and frowned.
