The Four cuff-links
"This-?" I said. I moved over automatically, and took the bottle. It was labelled in neat handwriting, "Potassium bromide. Half a teaspoonful in half a glass of water when required. L.D.A."
The woman, despite her fierce ease of manner, was nearly at a collapse after the long strain.
"At least I shall be able to get out of here," she said. "That bottle, officer, contains strychnine salts. You can see, or your — your coroner will be able to see, that poor Mr. Hogenauer died of strychnine poisoning. Bit there's one thing I must tell you now. If there's any fault in this, it's mine. My husband had nothing to do with it. He's just beginning his career… " She beat her fist softly on the arm of the chair, and her voice grew jumpy again. "I don't know what happened, but it's all my fault."
"You're Mrs. Antrim, aren't you?"
She stared up. "You know about it already? Then Larry — my husband — Dr. Antrim-?"
"I saw him at the Chief Constable's this evening," I said evasively. "What happened?"
"That's what I don't know! Mr. Hogenauer was a patient of my husband's. He came to the house last night… " She paused, and looked at Bowers in appeal. "You remember. You were with him. You're Mr. Hogenauer's servant, aren't you?"
"Yes'm," replied Bowers, who was pressing his hands together. The curve of his slicked hair bad come into shreds. "When the governor went out, which wasn't often, he hired a car at the garage and I drove him."
"He talked with my husband," continued Mrs. Antrim, nodding carefully at the pattern in the carpet. "The doctor gave him bromide; ordinary nerve-sedative. I manage the doctor's surgery: I mean the dispensing part of it. I studied medicine; I don't mind death, as a rule."
She looked sharply sideways, and back again, and held the cigarette to her lips.
"Well, I took down off the shelf what I thought was the bromide bottle; ordinary ten-fluid-ounce bottle. It was labelled bromide, it was in the right place, and it looked In any case, I weighed out what I thought was a quarter-ounce of bromide, as the doctor had directed me, and put it into a half-ounce bottle. That's the bottle you've got there.
"It wasn't until this evening that I was in the surgery again. Then I noticed that the ten-ounce bromide bottle on the shelf was now about half-full, whereas the night before it had been almost empty after I took out the dose. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Then I began to get panicky especially when I found that the label was a little gummy, as though something had been pasted over it.
"I looked everywhere on the shelves. The only sign of something wrong was that the bottle of strychnine had been pushed back out of line on the shelf. It was the same size as the bromide bottle. Its label was gummy. And it was nearly empty, just as I remembered the bottle from which I had given Mr. Hogenauer the dose.
"Then I knew. Somebody had switched the bottles. Some body had pasted a bromide label over the strychnine, and a strychnine label over the bromide. And, in mistake for bromide, I had given Mr. Hogenauer 120 grains, or a quarter-ounce, of pure strychnine salts. And, after I had done that,
somebody went into the surgery again, pulled off the fake labels, and put the bottles back in their proper places.
"It would have been easy to get into the surgery," she added blankly. "There's a French window, and we never keep it locked up until the time my husband goes to bed at night."
True or not — and I supposed they were true — here were some very startling statements. I had to keep a wooden face, but I wondered how I could question her without betraying myself. Ordinary G.P.'s as a rule, do not keep such an enormous quantity of strychnine at hand; they have no use for it, since in its medical form it comes in preparations already made up. And above all they do not usually keep it in ten-fluid-ounce bottles displayed conspicuously on a shelf.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, "but that's rather a lot of poison, isn't it? How much of the stuff have you got there?"
"Sometimes as much as two ounces. I–I don't, suppose I can make it clear to you, but my husband specializes in nervous and heart diseases. That's the reason for the strychnine formate.{"Strychninae Formas (C,H,2O2N2, H.COOH) occurs in the form of a white crystalline powder composed of small acicular crystals. It is soluble in water (about 1 in 5) and in alcohol. Strychnine formate is used as a nerve stimulant and muscular tonic with other formates in the preparation of compound syrups and elixirs. It has been administered hypodermically in doses of 0.001 gramme (%7 grain)"-British Pharmaceutical Codex (1934), p. 1019.} He does a tremendous lot of work with it; he's consultant for the Ken Hill Hospital, and he's very keen on handling their cases. Ordinarily, of course, a doctor hasn't time to make up his own strychnine solutions, but Larry insists on doing it. The-the bottle had the required red label. I don't want you to think
She looked round dazedly for a place to put the cigarette, and I took it out of her hand and threw it into the empty grate. She leaned her head quietly against the back of the chair, but the muscles of her throat were working. "I wonder," she said, "whether I could have some brandy? I've been locked up in this room "
"Sorry, ma'am," Bowers told her hoarsely, "but the poor old governor was a t.t. There's nothing in the house, only…" I could have sworn there was a tear in the corner of his eye. He nodded towards the glass and the bottle of mineral-water on the centre table. It was the "Eisenwasser" with the blue-and-red label, the same sort of bottle as those over which l; had stumbled at the back gate of the house.
"Don't touch that, you fool!" I said. "That's probably the glass be drank from. He mixed himself what he thought was a bromide in that mineral-water — "
"Yes, I thought of that," said Mrs. Antrim, sitting up, quickly, "but how was it he didn't know straightaway he wasn't taking bromide? He couldn't have been mistaken like that. I don't suppose you know what strychnine salts are. They're easily soluble, but they're the most horribly bitter-tasting stuff you could find. He must have known something was wrong at the first sip. But he drank over half a glassful."
"He wouldn't have known it if he drank it in the mineral-water. That's the point. It tastes worse. Here-" I brought Bowers into it. "Go out and get Mrs: Antrim some real water from the kitchen."
Even in her daze and uncertainty, I thought that she looked at me in a curious way, and Bowers scurried out. I asked her if she wished to go into another room, but she refused, holding tightly to the arms of the chair. One thing was clear: I was in a much worse mess than before. I couldn't go out of the house, which was sanctuary, and at the same time I couldn't stay in. If the police discovered me here — and, in Bowers's or Mrs. Antrim's panicky condition, betrayal seemed likely — it was not merely that I should be clapped back into the police station, for sooner or later I could telephone to H.M. and prove my identity. But now I should be held as a material witness for the inquest: and I was to be married the next morning. The best course was to duck out of the house, get rid of my policeman's uniform, and trust to luck. Yet if I made one suspicious move, Bowers would be after me. I looked towards the window. Something momentarily flickered on the shutter. Faintly beyond, past the open sashes, was a noise of footsteps and muffled voices in the alley to indicate that my pursuers were tolerably close at hand. My safety was this lighted house, since they would look in all the dark corners first…
"What's the matter with you?" asked Mrs. Antrim suddenly and sharply. "What are you going to do? Will you just stand there? Don't you have to inform your superiors or whatever it is? I can't stand this much longer."
"Just one moment, madam. I shall have to have your story first, if you please…. How did you come to be here?"
"Oh — that." She shuddered. "Yes. Yes, I'll tell you that, but I can't understand why you stand there like a mummy. What was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, when I discovered this evening that the bottles had been changed-"
"At what time was that?"
"At about a quarter to eight. Thereabouts. I was expecting Larry — Dr. Antrim-home at any minute. And I had given all that strychnine to Mr. Hogenauer. And I couldn't alarm Larry: I tell you I couldn't! The only thing to do was to try to get in touch with Mr. Hogenauer. I didn't think he'd taken the stuff already, or we should jolly well have beard of it. But I couldn't telephone him: I knew he didn't have a phone in the house. That was pretty ghastly, if you like. I knew I had to come over here at once. I looked out of the window; we live next door to Col-" She paused, and lifted a hand to shade her steady, rather large and shinylidded eyes. She seemed puzzled. "You said, didn't you, that you saw my husband at Colonel Charters's?"
"Yes, ma'am. Routine business," I said briskly. "Go on, please."
"Two men I didn't know, one of them in an outrageous-looking hat, were just driving up in an open car. The colonel's Hillman was in the drive, and I knew he wouldn't mind if I took that to come over here. So I hid the two bottles in my room; it was sheer panic really, because they couldn't do any damage now; and I ran over to the colonel's. But just as I was leaving our house, I saw someone — I think it was Mr. Serpos, the colonel's secretary — come out of the house and get into the Hillman and drive away. I hailed him, but he didn't stop. So I had to catch a bus. It's a roundabout way, and takes ages, and afterwards I had to walk here from the bus-stop. It was past nine o'clock when I got here…."
"Yes?"
She spoke now in a monotonous voice. "I banged on the door, but there wasn't any answer. Then I went round the house and tried the back door, and looked in at the windows. I knew it had happened. I knew it even before I looked in through the shutter and saw that red hat sticking up over the back of the chair. I called out, but it didn't move."
"How did you see it — the cap, I mean? How did you know what it was? You may as well know," I added quickly, "that we've been a good deal interested in what has been going on here."
"So?" she said with a curiously Teutonic inflection, and looked at me steadily. Then she spoke with quiet emphasis. "I think you are right. I think you would do vary well to investigate. That's what I was going to tell you. There will be trouble about this, but my husband is not going to be involved — or myself either, if I can help it… Well. I saw that hat because there was then a light in this room. But it wasn't a usual sort of light. I'll tell you about that in a second.
"I found out that the back door was open. So I came in. I had to know. The door to this room was locked, with the key on the inside. But you can see for yourself," she pointed, "it's an old-fashioned lock, with the key loose. You push a piece of paper under the door; then you push the key out from your side, and it drops on the paper, so that you can pull it through under the door. Oh, yes, I'm quite capable: thank you. I did that with a piece of newspaper I found in the scullery. Then I unlocked the door from the outside. Now look here."
She got up from the chair. She was small, with a sturdy figure like a swimmer's, but she was still unsteady on her feet. She went over to the fireplace, and pointed to the hearth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Bowers, with a glass of water in his shaky hand, had come back into the room. But she paid no attention to the water, and I believe Bowers drank it himself. She was pointing to an object lying on the brown tiling of the hearth, which I had seen when I threw her cigarette into the grate, but which I believed to be an ordinary fountain-pen. It was not. I picked it up, and it was a flash-light shaped like a pen-another of the knickknacks which apparently Hogenauer had loved-with its tiny bulb smashed.
"When I came in here," Mrs. Antrim went on coolly, "the room was dark except for this, which was switched on and the switch caught. It was lying here," she put her hand on the mantelshelf, "and there was a little stream of light going diagonally past Mr. Hogenauer's body… like this."
Placing the pen diagonally on the mantel, she drew an imaginary line in the air towards the desk. It passed about two feet over Hogenauer's head, slanted over the desk on a line with the lamp-cord, and ended on one of the open bookshelves against the wall.
"I was curious," said Mrs. Antrim, with a little colour in her cheeks now, "to know what book or books that light was pointing straight to. The answer was: to none. See for yourself. There's a gap in the shelf just where it ended, and a couple of books have been taken out. You can see by the curved markings in the dust."
I followed her to the other side of the desk. The missing books were the two middle volumes of a set, elaborately tooled and gilded, of an old work on aeronautics before the invention of the heavier-than-air machine: Astra Castra, Experiments and Adventures in the Atmosphere, 1865.
"Now why?" she cried, almost pleadingly. "Why should he be sitting here in the dark, dead, with a little light shinning across at a gap in the bookshelves? And that's not all. Look at his desk-on the blotter."
After this spurt she had backed away again, for none of us liked the grin of the little dead man growing stiff as whale-bone in the chair. It was beginning to haunt me. The desk was swept clean of litter, except for one thing. There was a tray of pens and pencils neatly arranged, and a large desk-blotter with brown leather edges. But on the blotter, in a heap as though they had fallen from the dead man's hands, lay four pairs of silver cuff-links.
Four pairs of cuff-links. Threaded through them was a length of heavy string, as though the dead man had been trying to tie them together like beads, knotting each in the middle and knotting them closely together. There was a loop at the end. I looked from that (at least) unusual exhibit up to the gap in the bookshelves, where there were missing two volumes of an early work on aeronautics. I also remember Bowers's statement, when we first came into the room, that most of the furniture had been changed around: the desk at a different window, the clock on a different wall, the position of all the chairs altered. We seemed to have got into a homely suburban Topsy-Turvy House.
"Well?" said Mrs. Antrim quickly.
I regarded her with great stolidness. "Just so, ma'am. Did you notice all this when you first came in? Or what did you do?"
She seemed a little taken aback. "Why — yes, I suppose so, subconsciously. I remembered it, anyhow. But first I turned on the big light over the desk, and made sure Mr. Hogenauer was dead."
"And how long should you say he'd been dead when you got here?"
"It's hard to say. But only a few minutes, I should think. I got here about a quarter-past nine. -The strychnine wouldn't have taken a long time to kill him: a long time for strychnine, that is. It's usually pretty lengthy and unpleasant. He couldn't have lasted more than half an hour after he'd drunk it; probably only twenty minutes. His health was bad, and he was going on for sixty. Say he drank it about quarter to nine."
"Go on, ma'am. What did you do after you found he was dead?"
"First," she said grimly, "I looked round for the bottle labelled bromide. It was standing over there on the mantel. That was how I happened to hit that little flashlight with my elbow, and knock it off the mantel and smash it. No, and I don't mind telling you what I was going to do, either! I was going to wash that bottle and take it away with me-"
Bowers made a noise in this throat.
"And why not?" she asked defiantly. "I'd have done it, too, if the next awful business hadn't happened. I'd shut the door when I came in. So I picked up the bottle, and started out for the scullery to wash it. But the knob was loose, and wouldn't turn to unlatch the door. I suppose I must have been upset or frightened; anyhow, I began to yank and fiddle with it. Then the knob came off in my hand, and the rest of it, with that iron thingummyjig, fell out into the hall. If you can imagine anything more horrible happening to you, I'd like to have you tell me what it is."
"And the best thing that could have happened to you, too," cried Bowers accusingly. "Accessory after the fact. If you'd pinched that bottle and run away, you'd 'a' been accessory after the fact, that's what."
She looked at him coldly.
"That's about all, officer. I was shut up in here with that thing. Of course, I thought of getting out through one of the windows. But just look at them! Apparently poor old Hogenauer always kept the sashes up but the shutters closed. The bolts of the shutters have rusted in the sockets, and I couldn't budge them. If I got panicky, you can't blame me. I even thought of picking up a chair and trying to break the shutters open. It's all very well to be bold, bloody, and resolute; but I'm not strong enough for that sort of work, and, besides, I should have roused the whole neighbourhood. Still, I was just on the point of wanting to try it when I heard a horrible commotion out at the back somewhere, and dogs barking or men running or something. I was so jumpy that I simply reached up and unscrewed the light out of the socket, hot as it was. In a minute you came in at the back; and talked to some woman in the next house about a murderer being loose hereabouts." She made a grimace. "I think you know everything else, although I don't think you know how I felt being shut up in the dark with it."
"Thank you very much," I said with an official air, and only wished I had a notebook to make it look right. "There's just one thing, Mrs. Antrim. When Mr. Hogenauer was at your house last night, didn't he tell you he meant to go to Bristol this evening?"
She opened her eyes. "He certainly didn't tell me that. He may have told my husband. And, anyway, we're jolly sure he didn't go."
"We are. But," I said to Bowers, "that's what he told you?" "It is! And all the rest of the things I've told you is true, too!"
"But you didn't see him go; you didn't drive him to the station or anything like that?"
"I told you I didn't! I told you the last time I saw the governor alive was just after tea, maybe six o'clock, when he said I could go out if I liked. Then was when he said again to come in early, becos we would probably have a visitor that night."
Here I tried to get the muddle straightened. "He told you he intended to call on Dr. Keppel in Bristol, and that he had every reason to hope Dr. Keppel would be out. In fact, Keppel is here in Moreton Abbot somewhere, and Mr. Hogenauer believed that Keppel would come here to-night. Is that what you understood? Yes. But Hogenauer doesn't go to Bristol, and Keppel doesn't come here."
"Maybe 'e's come," muttered Bowers in a sinister voice, "and gone."
"You mean he might have had something against your employer?"
That word "employer" struck another note of suspicion, but Bowers only looked sullen. "How should I know? They always talked German."
"What's Dr. Keppel like?"
"Like? I dunno. Something like the governor, little and thin, except he's got a limp in the leg and a lot of greyish hair all stuck out. Besides, whoever changed them bottles, and put the poison in place of the bromide, was back in the doctor's house in Torquay. There's where you want to look, old cock."
"You little liar," said Mrs. Antrim.
It seemed doubtful whether I could spin out this questioning much longer, for they were both waiting for me to do something. Yet Bowers's dark hint about Dr. Keppel permitted me to do without suspicion exactly what I had been sent here to do: search the room, and particularly the desk, under pretext of looking for something missing. Though I searched with considerable thoroughness, there was nothing
at all in the room, either suspicious or otherwise. The desk itself was almost empty. The room was very neat except for a sprawled newspaper, evidently the paper Mrs. Antrim had used in her jugglery with the key to this room, lying beside the desk.
But there was something on the blotter. I picked up the string of cuff-links and put it to one side, to see whether there might be anything under the blotting-pad; and there were a few lines of very clear letters where something had been blotted on the white surface. There were other smudges and occasional letters criss-crossing, but these seemed to stand out. They appeared to be in English.
"Hold it up to a mirror!" said Bowers excitedly. "He was writing a letter this morning. I seen 'im at it."
"Writing a letter to whom?"
"I dunno. He posted it himself. But he wrote a lot of letters." Bowers pointed to the book of stamps. "Always at it. What's more, those words weren't on that blotter yesterday: I remember, becos I looked at the blotter to see whether it wanted changing. Hold it up to a mirror!"
I picked up the whole pad and went to the mirror over the fireplace. And, in small finicky handwriting, in English, and in as flat terms as could have been used, was the following barefaced message:
fast planes. I will make the attempt to-night, and I assure Your Excellency that I have every hope of success. The envelope is in the upper right-hand pigeon-hole of Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in view of Keppel's doubts, to have had two reliable men hero. But if I succeed in obtaining possession of the envelope we shall be in possession of knowledge which….’
Here it crossed another trail, and became indecipherable. I looked at it, yet I could not believe it. It was too stark and simple. "You will find the pirates' treasure buried under the old elm-tree in the archbishop's garden": it had the same sort of hissing melodrama. It was as casual as an invitation to dinner. It lay on a blotting-pad as openly as though somebody had drawn an arrow to indicate it. And, above all, it was in English.
But why not? Round the Service there has grown up a phantom legend of codes and ciphers and secret passwords and similar flummery. Its members do not in reality go about hissing at each other, nor does the cipher exist which C2 department cannot solve. I can still remember the disappointment I once felt to learn that King's Messengers are not accustomed to traveling in wigs, with a couple of forged passports: they travel in a railway compartment labelled, Reserved for the King's Messenger. When a man has something to say, he usually says it straight out. This was not wartime. There was no reason why even the Post Office, let alone the War Office, should ordinarily be curious about letters written from a neat little villa in a neat little suburb not far from the sea.
"It looks terribly official," said Mrs. Antrim after a pause. She spoke uneasily. "I say, you don't suppose?’
I looked at Bowers. "You never saw the names of any of the people he wrote letters to?"
"No, I didn't. All I know is that they weren't letters to anybody in a European country."
"How do you know that?"
"Stamps," said Bowers instantly, and with some shrewdness. "I collect stamps, and that's 'ow I notice sometimes. You ought to know that postage to here or to America is three-halfpence to European countries it's more, see? Every letter the governor sent out, or at least every letter I ever noticed, had a brown three-halfpenny stamp. - 'Ullo!"
He turned round. I had picked up the newspaper, and as a sort of official gesture was wrapping up the blotting-paper in it, when back came those confounded dogging footsteps in the alley behind the house. They must just have been passing the rear gate, evidently still unsuspicious, when near at hand there was the sharp crack of a window being raised. It was not difficult to identify it as the window of the house next to this, from which the irate female had addressed me a while ago. This time the female, evidently to attract the attention of the searchers in the alley, made a noise like a soda-water syphon.
"Have you got him yet?" she bawled in a hoarse stage-whisper.
There was a silence. "Not yet, Mrs. M'Corseter," answered the voice of the sergeant who had arrested me. "But we'll get him: don't worry. The neighbourhood is patrolled. He can't get away."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," said Mrs. M'Corseter fiercely, "great big hulking fellows like you! It's a shame, that's what 1 call it, it's a downright shame if decent people can't sleep in their beds at night without having homicidal maniacs running loose-"
"Eh?"
Mrs. M'Corseter proceeded to describe a butchered neighbourhood in a way which would have made anyone's flesh creep.
"Here, now!" said the sergeant, flustered. "There's no homicidal maniac, ma'am. It's only "
"Don't you try to deceive me," said Mrs. M'Corseter. "I'm a taxpayer, and I won't have it. It was a policeman that told me it was a nasty, dangerous crazy-man, with a razor all over blood; so don't you try to deceive me, young man! What's more, your policeman took very good care he didn't run up against any nasty, dangerous crazy-man. He didn't take any chances; not him! He went into `The Larches' next door, and he hasn't come out yet, and what he's doing there all this time I don't know
Again there was a thunderous pause.
"But I know," said the sergeant. "In you go, Dennis!"
There was a rush of feet, a creak as the back gate swung open, and then another holocaust of flying bottles. My two companions very slowly turned to stare at me.