Black Coffee

CHAPTER 4

Dr Carelli stepped forward quickly, and picked up the tube Barbara had dropped. Glancing at it before handing it back to her with a polite bow, he exclaimed, ‘Hello, what’s this? Morphine!’ He picked up another one from the table. ‘And strychnine! May I ask, my dear young lady, where you got hold of these lethal little tubes?’ He began to examine the contents of the tin box.

Barbara looked at the suave Italian with distaste. ‘The spoils of war,’ she replied shortly, with a tight little smile.

Rising anxiously, Caroline Amory approached Dr Carelli. ‘They’re not really poison, are they, doctor? I mean, they couldn’t harm anyone, could they?’ she asked. ‘That box has been in the house for years. Surely it’s harmless, isn’t it?’

‘I should say,’ replied Carelli dryly, ‘that, with the little lot you have here, you could kill, roughly, twelve strong men. I don’t know what you regard as harmful.’

‘Oh, good gracious,’ Miss Amory gasped with horror as she moved back to her chair, and sat heavily.

‘Here, for instance,’ continued Carelli, addressing the assembled company. He picked up a tube and read slowly from the label. ‘“Strychnine hydrochloride; one sixteenth of a grain.” Seven or eight of these little tablets, and you would die a very unpleasant death indeed. An extremely painful way out of the world.’ He picked up another tube. ‘“Atropine sulphate.” Now, atropine poisoning is sometimes very hard to tell from ptomaine poisoning. It is also a very painful death.’

Replacing the two tubes he had handled, he picked up another. ‘Now here—’ he continued, now speaking very slowly and deliberately, ‘here we have hyoscine hydrobromide, one hundredth of a grain. That doesn’t sound very potent, does it? Yet I assure you, you would only have to swallow half of the little white tablets in this tube, and—’ he made a graphic gesture. ‘There would be no pain—no pain at all. Just a swift and completely dreamless sleep, but a sleep from which there would be no awakening.’ He moved towards Lucia, and held out the tube to her, as though inviting her to examine it. There was a smile on his face, but not in his eyes.

Lucia stared at the tube as though she were fascinated by it. Stretching out a hand, she spoke in a voice that sounded almost as though it were hypnotized. ‘A swift and completely dreamless sleep—’ she murmured, reaching for the tube.

Instead of giving it to her, Dr Carelli glanced at Caroline Amory with an almost questioning look. That lady shuddered and looked distressed, but said nothing. With a shrug of the shoulders, Carelli turned away from Lucia, still holding the tube of hyoscine hydrobromide.

The door to the hallway opened, and Richard Amory entered. Without speaking, he strolled across to the stool by the desk, and sat down. He was followed into the room by Tredwell, who carried a tray containing a jug of coffee with cups and saucers. Placing the tray on the coffee table, Tredwell left the room as Lucia moved to pour out the coffee.

Barbara went across to Lucia, took two cups of coffee from the tray, and then moved over to Richard to give him one of them, keeping the other for herself. Dr Carelli, meanwhile, was busy replacing the tubes in the tin box on the centre table.

‘You know,’ said Miss Amory to Carelli, ‘you make my flesh creep, doctor, with your talk of swift, dreamless sleep and unpleasant deaths. I suppose that, being Italian as you are, you know a lot about poisons?’

‘My dear lady,’ laughed Carelli, ‘is that not an extremely unjust—what do you say—non sequitur? Why should an Italian know any more about poisons than an Englishman? I have heard it said,’ he continued playfully, ‘that poison is a woman’s weapon, rather than a man’s. Perhaps I should ask you—? Ah, but perhaps, dear lady, it is an Italian woman you were thinking of? Perhaps you were about to mention a certain Borgia. Is that it, eh?’ He took a cup of coffee from Lucia at the coffee table, and handed it to Miss Amory, returning to take another cup for himself.

‘Lucrezia Borgia—that dreadful creature! Yes, I suppose that’s what I was thinking of,’ admitted Miss Amory. ‘I used to have nightmares about her when I was a child, you know. I imagined her as very pale, but tall, and with jet-black hair just like our own dear Lucia.’

Dr Carelli approached Miss Amory with the sugar bowl. She shook her head in refusal, and he took the bowl back to the coffee tray. Richard Amory put his coffee down, took a magazine from the desk and began to browse through it, as his aunt developed her Borgia theme. ‘Yes, dreadful nightmares I used to have,’ Miss Amory was saying. ‘I would be the only child in a room full of adults, all of them drinking out of very elaborate goblets. Then this glamorous woman—now I come to think of it, she did look remarkably like you, Lucia dear—would approach me and force a goblet upon me. I could tell by the way she smiled, somehow, that I ought not to drink, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to refuse. Somehow, she hypnotized me into drinking, and then I would begin to feel a dreadful burning sensation in my throat, and I would find myself fighting for breath. And then, of course, I woke up.’

Dr Carelli had moved close to Lucia. Standing in front of her, he gave an ironic bow. ‘My dear Lucrezia Borgia,’ he implored, ‘have mercy on us all.’

Lucia did not react to Carelli’s joke. She appeared not to have heard him. There was a pause. Smiling to himself, Dr Carelli turned away from Lucia, drank his coffee, and placed his cup on the centre table. Finishing her coffee rapidly, Barbara seemed to realize that a change of mood was called for. ‘What about a little tune?’ she suggested, moving across to the gramophone. ‘Now, what shall we have? There’s a marvellous record here that I bought up in town the other day.’ She began to sing, accompanying her words with a jazzy little dance. ‘“Ikey—oh, crikey—what have you got on?” Or what else is there?’

‘Oh, Barbara dear, not that vulgar song,’ implored Miss Amory, moving across to her, and helping to look through the gramophone records. ‘There are some much nicer records here. If we must have popular music, there are some lovely songs by John McCormack here, somewhere. Or what about “The Holy City”?—I can’t remember the soprano’s name. Or why not that nice Melba record? Oh—ah, yes—here’s Handel’s Largo.’

‘Oh, come on, Aunt Caroline. We’re not likely to be cheered up by Handel’s Largo,’ Barbara protested. ‘There’s some Italian opera here, if we must have classical music. Come on, Dr Carelli, this ought to be your province. Come and help us choose.’

Carelli joined Barbara and Miss Amory around the gramophone, and all three of them began to sort through the pile of records. Richard now seemed engrossed in his magazine.

Lucia rose, moved slowly and apparently aimlessly across to the centre table, and glanced at the tin box. Then, taking care to establish that the others were not observing her, she took a tube from the box and read the label. ‘Hyoscine hydrobromide.’ Opening the tube, Lucia poured nearly all of the tablets into the palm of her hand. As she did so, the door to Sir Claud’s study opened, and Sir Claud’s secretary, Edward Raynor, appeared in the doorway. Unknown to Lucia, Raynor watched her as she put the tube back into the tin box before moving over to the coffee table.

At that moment, Sir Claud’s voice was heard to call from the study. His words were indistinct, but Raynor, turning to answer him, said, ‘Yes, of course, Sir Claud. I’ll bring you your coffee now.’

The secretary was about to enter the library when Sir Claud’s voice arrested him. ‘And what about that letter to Marshall’s?’

‘It went off by the afternoon post, Sir Claud,’ replied the secretary.

‘But Raynor, I told you—oh, come back here, man,’ Sir Claud boomed from his study.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Raynor was heard to say as he retreated from the doorway to rejoin Sir Claud Amory in his study. Lucia, who had turned to watch the secretary at the sound of his voice, seemed not to realize that he had been observing her movements. Turning, so that her back was to Richard, she dropped the tablets she had been holding into one of the coffee cups on the coffee table, and moved to the front of the settee.

The gramophone suddenly burst into life with a quick foxtrot. Richard Amory put down the magazine he had been reading, finished his coffee quickly, placed the cup on the centre table, and moved across to his wife. ‘I’ll take you at your word. I’ve decided. We’ll go away together.’

Lucia looked up at him in surprise. ‘Richard,’ she said faintly, ‘do you really mean it? We can get away from here? But I thought you said—what about?—where will the money come from?’

‘There are always ways of acquiring money,’ said Richard, grimly.

There was alarm in Lucia’s voice as she asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said her husband, ‘that when a man cares about a woman as much as I care about you, he’ll do anything. Anything!’

‘It does not flatter me to hear you say that,’ Lucia responded. ‘It only tells me that you still do not trust me—that you think you must buy my love with—’

She broke off, and looked around as the door to the study opened and Edward Raynor returned. Raynor walked over to the coffee table and picked up a cup of coffee, as Lucia changed her position on the settee, moving down to one end of it. Richard had wandered moodily across to the fireplace, and was staring into the unlit fire.

Barbara, beginning a tentative foxtrot alone, looked at her cousin Richard as though considering whether to invite him to dance. But, apparently put off by his stony countenance, she turned to Raynor. ‘Care to dance, Mr Raynor?’ she asked.

‘I’d love to, Miss Amory,’ the secretary replied. ‘Just a moment, while I take Sir Claud his coffee.’

Lucia suddenly rose from the settee. ‘Mr Raynor,’ she said hurriedly, ‘that isn’t Sir Claud’s coffee. You’ve taken the wrong cup.’

‘Have I?’ said Raynor. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Lucia picked up another cup from the coffee table, and held it out to Raynor. They exchanged cups. ‘That,’ said Lucia, as she handed her cup to Raynor, ‘is Sir Claud’s coffee.’ She smiled enigmatically to herself, placed the cup Raynor had given her on the coffee table, and returned to the settee.

Turning his back to Lucia, the secretary took some tablets from his pocket and dropped them into the cup he was holding. As he was walking with it towards the study door, Barbara intercepted him. ‘Do come and dance with me, Mr Raynor,’ she pleaded, with one of her most engaging smiles. ‘I’d force Dr Carelli to, except that I can tell he’s simply dying to dance with Lucia.’

As Raynor hovered indecisively, Richard Amory approached. ‘You may as well give in to her, Raynor,’ he advised. ‘Everyone does, eventually. Here, give the coffee to me. I’ll take it to my father.’

Reluctantly, Raynor allowed the coffee cup to be taken from him. Turning away, Richard paused momentarily and then went through into Sir Claud’s study. Barbara and Edward Raynor, having first turned over the gramophone record on the machine, were now slowly waltzing in each other’s arms. Dr Carelli watched them for a moment or two with an indulgent smile, before approaching Lucia who, wearing a look of utter dejection, was still seated on the settee.