A Beautiful Blue Death

Chapter 4

Thomas McConnell had moved to London from Scotland, where he had grown up, shortly after the conclusion of his formal medical education. He was a doctor. He opened a practice on Harley Street within six months of his arrival, advertised as a specialist in surgery, and set about making his name. This he had done quickly and impressively; he was open to new techniques, and his skill with a scalpel was surpassing. By the time he was thirty, he had one of the leading practices in all of London.

And then, when he was thirty-one, he married. More specifically, he married up—to Lady Victoria Phillips, who was nineteen at the time. McConnell was handsome, had a fair amount of money, and came from a good family. But in each of these respects, the civilized world agreed, he was infinitely inferior to Toto Phillips, who had beauty, fortune, and a name by any standard you cared to choose.

She married Thomas McConnell in the year she came out, because, her friends knew, he was different from the men of her milieu and generation. Those men had been her friends from birth, and they would always be her friends. But she could never have married any of them. Thomas was manlier, less dandy, less corrupted by money, and he had ideas: about books, about plays, about the cities of the Continent, about beauty, about her beauty, about her. Their wedding was a celebrated one, because while he had married up, he hadn’t married so far up as to disqualify him from benefit. The Prime Minister—Toto’s father’s friend from public school—had come, along with half of Debrett’s.

For the first three years, Thomas and Toto were happy. It was during this time that Lenox first met McConnell. Lady Jane was, after a fashion, Toto’s mentor—they were first cousins but treated each other as aunt and niece, Toto’s mother having succumbed to a fever when her daughter was only eleven. So Lenox was thrown together with the young couple a good deal. Thomas had reduced his practice, and he and his wife went out most evenings and traveled widely together. He accepted with goodwill her social schedule, and she accepted with equal goodwill their yearly visits to his family in Scotland.

But the first three years had ended, and the halcyon days of their marriage had ended with them. Thomas had all but abandoned his practice by then, and he began to drink too much. Toto had taken to spending six months of the year at Longwell, her father’s estate in Kent, just outside of London, while her husband remained in the city.

There had been a further deterioration, to the point, after five years of marriage, that the couple rarely appeared in public and were said not to be on speaking terms. But something had relented—either they had given up or they had resolved to make the best of things—and they were now, aged thirty-six and twenty-four, settling into the long view of life. It could end in two ways, Lenox had always thought: either in cold politeness, or in a new, quieter kind of love. Toto was so young, and McConnell so idealistic. But perhaps they would learn to compromise. At any rate, they had seemed kinder to each other the last few times he had seen them together. Lady Jane thought so too, and she was reliable about things like that.

But there had been a casualty of the past six years. Toto was still one of the most important women in London’s highest social circles, but Thomas was no longer as brilliant as he had been, in any sense of the word. He no longer performed surgery, and, perhaps more sadly, he no longer possessed the golden shine of a handsome young man with ideas and ambition. He had been through the worst of the drinking, but he still drank far too much to wield a scalpel. There had been so much money after he married Toto that he no longer needed the practice, so it had eventually been sold for a song to a young Phillips cousin. All that work, building the practice up, his own place—that, too, absorbed by his wife’s family.

He now studied all sorts of minor subjects in his spare time, from chemicals to psychology. For a while now marine life had been predominant among these interests—McConnell collected samples of rare cold-weather fish and mammals, the prize of his collection being a perfect Eastern Dolphin. Every few years he took trips, sometimes 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 fiancé, 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: bella indigo, the beautiful blue. The name is ironic: the veins in the victim’s extremities, depending on their size, turn red. The idea is that to have blue veins is bella, or beautiful, because the fact that they haven’t turned red means you’ll live.”

“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 bella indigo,” he said, and tapped a drop of the liquid into the small bowl. For a moment nothing happened, and then suddenly the entire bowl was yellow.

“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.”