Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 110, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 673 & 674, September/October 1997

Poisoned with Politeness by Gillian Linscott

© 1997 by Gillian Linscott

Gillian Linscott is the creator of English suffragette detective Nell Bray, the protagonist of a series published in Britain and the U.S. For her short stories she goes half a century further back, to mid Victorian times. This is her second story for EQMM to feature the duo of journalist detective Thomas Ludlow and his disreputable friend from the world of horses, Harry Leather.

Harry Leather’s laborious writing dinted the page like hoofprints in mud. His note arrived on a windy afternoon in the April of 1867 at the offices of the newspaper where I was earning my blameless living as a subeditor. The messenger who brought it to my desk had the air of a man who’d rather not be responsible for a communication smeared with mud and various other stains that included, from the smell, neat’s-foot oil and strong porter. The wonders of the penny post had made no impression at all on Harry Leather. A man who, without blinking, would bid fifty guineas he hadn’t got for a horse he fancied, grudged expenditure on stamps. A groom taking a cob to market might hand his message to a carrier who’d pass it to a gentleman’s coachman whose second cousin delivered turnips to Covent Garden and so, in the fullness of time, it would get to me. The address at the top of the note was a livery stables in Buckinghamshire. Luckily, several men in the subeditors’ room owed me favours, so by the following afternoon I was walking from the railway station along an avenue of budding elm trees, with an assurance from the porter that I couldn’t miss the stables.

It was pleasant country and, although no more than twenty miles from London, the spring seemed to be coming in earlier and more softly there. Blackbirds sang and primroses gleamed as bright as pieces of china in the grass by the roadside. After a mile of road muddy enough to make me wish I’d worn stouter boots I came to a public house called The Woodman’s Rest and a knot of cottages. Between the public house and one of the cottages was the entrance to a driveway, flanked by stone pillars with gates of elaborate ironwork closed across it. Squire’s place, I thought, but not your hospitable hail-fellow country squire of the old school. Those firmly closed gates said that visitors were not welcome and the entrance to the drive, which you’d expect to be churned up with carriage tracks, looked as if no hoof or foot had fallen on it for weeks. On the opposite side of the road a board advertising horses kept at livery and hacks for hire marked my destination and my friend’s latest place of business. Harry is a groom, horse breaker, jockey, dealer — anything you care to name to do with horses, with a few chances on the side to earn an extra guinea that doesn’t necessarily have the word honest attached to it, and he seldom stays in one place for more than six months at a time. He was at me as soon as I’d set foot in the yard.

“What’s been keeping you Mr. Ludlow? This rate, they’ll have her sentenced and hanged before you get a look in.”

He led the way through the tack room to a smaller room crammed with sacks and feed bins, dusted off the top of a bin with his handkerchief, and invited me to take a seat, then settled himself on another bin, empty pipe in his hand.

“Why the hurry? If this young woman who’s done a murder is going to be hanged in any case, I don’t see why they need my help to do it.”

Harry knew very well that my amateur interest was in cases that had a flavour of the extraordinary about them. I was annoyed to be classed with the sort of ghoul who’d come to witness the downfall of some hapless country girl.

“It’s not your help in getting her hanged that’s wanted. It’s getting her off being hanged.”

“But you said in your note she’d done a murder.”

He nodded.

“And you want me to get her off? Why?”

“Because she’s not a bad young woman and the one she killed was as spoiled and cussed a creature as you’d find in a long day at a bad market.”

A ray of sunshine, flecked with motes of bran, shone through the window on Harry’s lined and weather-beaten face. I knew that his morality seldom coincided with a preacher’s, but this was a staggerer even from him.

“If I understand you aright, you’re asking me to be an accessory in perverting the course of justice.”

He looked at the ceiling. “I knew a racehorse once named Course of Justice. Never won anything to speak of.”

The story he told me had its origins in the big house behind the locked gates. I’d been right in thinking it was the local squire’s mansion, also that its squire was not of the old sporting kind.

“Mr. Haslem. He’s thirty or so, but the sort that’s never been young. Thin, fidgety kind of a man. Plenty of money from his father, but leaves the estate work to a bailiff. They say he’s writing a book about something in Latin. Goodness knows how he came to marry her, except I suppose she wasn’t a bad-looking woman on her good days, but a temper on her like an army mule in a thistle patch.”

“Are we talking about the person who was murdered?”

“Yes, we are. Veronica, her name was.”

“You met her?”

He sucked on his pipe.

“I quarrelled with her.”

“Over a horse, I suppose.”

“What else? One day at the start of March, about two weeks before it happened, she came down the drive in her victoria, going visiting. Two bays she had to pull it. I was outside the gate here and I could see one of the bays was lame. Her coachman knows me, so he pulled up without asking her first and said would I have a look at it, see what was wrong. Well, madam sticks her head out of the window and starts screeching at him for stopping without her permission. I take no notice of her and start feeling the bay’s leg. Off fore, swollen like a puffball and hot as a boiling kettle. I say to the coachman he shouldn’t be driving a horse in this state, and he looks back over his shoulder at her and whispers to me that she insisted because she had to go visiting. So I take my hat off and go up to her and say, civil enough, that the horse isn’t fit to be driven and I’ll hire her another. She curses me up hill and down dale and tells the coachman to drive on or she’ll dismiss him on the spot. So off they go with the bay limping like a man with a wooden leg. I’d have taken the whip to her first, but the coachman’s got a family to feed.”

“And two weeks after that she was dead?”

“Yes, two weeks after that she was dying of convulsions in the house of a lady she was visiting, after she’d stepped out of that very same victoria she cursed at me from.”

“And from that incident, you conclude that Mrs. Veronica Haslem deserved murdering.”

“There’s a curse on the man or woman that drives a lame horse. It says so in the Bible.”

I’d heard him quote that text before but have never met the Biblical scholar who could find it anywhere from Genesis to Revelation. But to tell that to Harry would make a very atheist out of the man, and the swarm of sins clustering round his head is black enough without that. Instead I asked him to tell me more about Mrs. Haslem’s death.

“She was going to pay an afternoon call on a lady that lives a good two hours’ drive away. She has her lunch in her room, changes into her costume for paying calls, and gets into her victoria with the hood up and my friend driving from the box, as usual.”

“Travelling alone?”

“Yes. The coachman swears that they didn’t stop anywhere along the way, nobody got in with her and she never called out to him or said anything the whole journey.”

“What was the weather like?”

“Nasty biting wind. She was all wrapped up in rugs, of course, so she was all right, at least she should have been. Anyway, they arrive at the house, the coachman draws up and goes to help her out. He notices she seems a bit unsteady on her feet and her voice is croaky but there’s nothing new about that. He watches her go up the steps to the door, the butler opens it, and she goes inside. The coachman drives round to the stables, sees to the horses, then goes into the kitchen for a cup of tea. But he’s no more than taken a gulp of it when there’s this confloption upstairs and a maid comes flying in to say get the doctor because Mrs. Haslem’s taken ill in the drawing room.”

“What were the symptoms?”

“She said she felt her throat burning and asked for water but she couldn’t keep it down. She was groaning and clutching at her stomach and shouting out that she’d been poisoned. All this in the drawing room with a lot of other ladies there.”

“Did she say who she thought had poisoned her?”

“She did, several times over. She said Miss Thorn had put poison in her travelling flask because she wanted to get rid of her and marry her husband.”

“Miss Thorn being...?”

“The governess. Anyway, they carried her up to the bedroom. The doctor was out on his rounds, and by the time he got there she was in convulsions. She was dead before they could get word to her husband.”

“Where was he?”

“Up in London all day, buying books.”

“Was there any evidence for this business about poison in the travelling flask?”

He looked ill at ease.

“Well, there was a flask and Miss Thorn did have it in her hands. There’s no getting away from it.”

I said he’d better tell me the worst of it and get it over. On that cold March afternoon, at two o’clock, the victoria was drawn up and waiting at the front door. Mrs. Haslem came down the steps. Behind her Miss Thorn, holding the Haslems’ eight-year-old son by the hand. The boy, she said, wanted to see his mother driving away. The coachman settled Mrs. Haslem in the victoria, positioning the foot warmer for her, tucking a blanket round her. While this was going on, the boy was on one side, talking to his mother, Miss Thorn on the other.

“The coachman’s just getting up on the box, ready to drive off, when Mrs. Haslem says, quite sharply, ‘Have you taken my flask, Miss Thorn?’ At first the governess looks as if she wants to deny it, but Mrs. Haslem says, ‘Don’t try to lie to me. You’ve got it there behind your back.’ ”

“And had she?”

“She had. So she has to hand it over, looking shamefaced.”

“What sort of flask?”

“Flat silver one. The sort a gentleman would carry in his pocket out hunting.”

“Did the coachman see Miss Thorn put anything into it?”

“No.”

“She’d have had a chance, though, wouldn’t she, while Mrs. Haslem was talking to the boy?”

“She’d have had to be quick about it, but yes, I suppose she would.”

“What did Mrs. Haslem have in the flask? I suppose it would be something to keep out the cold on a long journey.”

“Short or long journey, summer or winter, it was all the same to her. Brandy.”

“In other words, Mrs. Haslem was a habitual drinker?”

“Habitual! She drank the way a horse eats grass. That time I had that argument with her, I could smell the brandy coming off her breath.”

“Did anybody else touch the flask?”

“There was only the boy and the coachman there. The coachman says he didn’t, and I don’t suppose the boy would poison his mother.”

“And you’ve told me they didn’t stop on the journey. Where did the brandy in the flask come from?”

“Mrs. Haslem’s own bottle she kept in her room. She’d sent her maid to buy a couple of bottles the day before.”

“Why did she have to do that? Surely her husband would keep brandy in the house.”

“Only under lock and key. He was driven distracted by her drinking.”

“You say she had lunch in her room?”

“Chicken in aspic, bread and butter, China tea. And in case you’re thinking the poison might be in that, she didn’t finish her lunch so the maid did after she’d gone and she was as fit as a flea.”

“It looks like an open-and-shut case against Miss Thorn. What happened at the inquest?”

“Open verdict.”

“Astounding! Didn’t it come out about Mrs. Haslem accusing the governess?”

“Oh yes, it came out, in a manner of speaking. Only everybody round here knew the wicked tongue she had when the drink was in her. They felt sorry for her husband and anybody else who had to do with her.”

“What about the symptoms? What did the doctor say?”

“That she’d been very sick, had convulsions, and her heart had stopped — which it tends to do when you die.”

“Is this whole countryside in a conspiracy to protect the governess? It can only be a matter of time before she’s under lock and key.”

“You could think of something, though, couldn’t you, a gentleman of your experience? Just enough to give everyone an excuse for pretending to think she didn’t do it.”

His tone, soft as any sucking dove, was the one he used to get scared colts to come to his hand.

“Where is this paragon of a poisoner?”

“Still up at the hall.”

“What!”

“Mr. Haslem has kept her on. After all, someone has to look after the boy.”

I sat and thought for a while.

“If you want me to take any part in this, you must arrange for me to speak to the governess. Can you do that?”

“Yes. Give me a few hours.”

“Mr. Haslem too.”

“He’s not seeing people. Hasn’t been out of the house or had anyone calling since the inquest.”

“What about the doctor and the maid?”

“Dr. Gaynor’s easy enough, he’s just up the road. The maid’s gone back to her parents ten miles away.”

“Didn’t Mr. Haslem keep her on?”

“The fact is, she bolted straight after the funeral. The gossip from the hall is that some of Mrs. Haslem’s diamonds had gone missing.”

“Is the maid suspected of stealing them?”

“I don’t know, because Mr. Haslem wouldn’t have any inquiries made. I had that from the solicitor’s clerk.”

“But this is incomprehensible. The man’s wife is poisoned and he keeps the woman suspected of it in his household. Her jewellery’s stolen, he does nothing to recover it and lets the maid run away. Isn’t it more likely that the maid poisoned Mrs. Haslem to save herself from being found out about the jewellery?”

“It wasn’t the maid she accused.”

“Accused or not, I want to speak to the maid before anyone else.”

He lent me a cob to ride and a boy on a pony to show me the way. As we trotted along together under the green leaves I thought it was a poor thing if I could only lift the noose from one young woman’s neck to drop it round another’s, but Harry as usual had me caught and bitted whether I liked it or not.

Susan was the maid’s name. When we got to the cottage, which looked as if it hadn’t had a lick of paint or dab of plaster since Queen Anne’s time, she was in the kitchen with her mother making pies. There was a clutch of children toddling, crawling, and bawling round the open door, scrawny hens pecking unhopefully, their skin pink and shiny in patches where feathers had been scratched away. For a daughter of such a place, the position of lady’s maid must have been a considerable prize. When I came to the door she was laughing at something one of the children had said, a pretty, plumpish girl in her twenties, neater than you’d expect from the confusion round her, her dark hair tucked under a clean white cap. The laughter died away when she saw me, turned to misery when I introduced myself and asked if I might have a word about the late Mrs. Haslem.

“Would you come with me, sir, where we can be quiet.”

Mother, brothers, and sisters watched open-mouthed as she led the way up the stairs that rose straight from the kitchen, little better than a ladder. If I say we talked in her bedroom, I wouldn’t wish to impute to her a lack of propriety. The place was no more than a kind of open cabin at the top of the stairs with one wide bed that almost certainly accommodated several sisters as well as herself. All the time we talked I was half aware of her mother’s worried murmurs from below, trying to keep the children quiet. I asked her about the brandy.

“Every week, sir. She’d give me the money and I’d go into town without letting anyone know. Two bottles a week it was, three sometimes.”

“That last day, she had her lunch in her room?”

“Yes, sir, but she hadn’t much appetite. She never had these days.”

“Was there any sign that she was ill?”

“None at all, sir.”

“Did she fill the brandy flask while you were there?”

“Yes, sir. She rinsed it in the water from her ewer, then she opened the new bottle I’d bought from the shop and filled it up over the basin.”

“A new bottle, you’re sure of that?”

“Quite sure, sir. She had to break the wax seal on it.”

“And did she, or you, put anything else in that flask except brandy?”

“Oh no, sir.”

Her eyes met mine. Scared eyes, with tears beginning to wash over them but not, I thought, guileful.

“You know Mrs. Haslem died, almost certainly, as a result of what was in that flask.”

She looked down at her lap and nodded.

“Have you any idea how poison might have been introduced into the flask?”

“No, sir. I know what was said, but I don’t think she would. She was always kind to me.”

“Miss Thorn?”

Another tearful nod. I didn’t care for the situation at all, but there was no going back.

“There’s another matter. Did you know that after Mrs. Haslem’s death, some possessions of hers were found to be missing?”

An intake of breath. Her hands, which had been lying motionless in her lap, began twisting together.

“Do you know anything about them?”

She was crying in earnest now. Her hands came up to cover her face and a few muffled words squeezed out through her fingers.

“... didn’t mean any harm... gave them to me... for going to buy the brandy for her... because she didn’t need them any more.”

I stood, taken aback by the speed of her collapse, pitying her and thinking of the temptation it must have been.

“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to give them to me and I can take them back to her husband?”

I could make no promises about there being no prosecution, but I was inwardly determined to urge mercy on Mr. Haslem. She drew her fingers down just enough to look at me.

“You have them still?”

“Here, all of them.”

She looked over at a battered wooden chest on the other side of the bed.

“I’m engaged to be married, you see, sir. I was saving them for my wedding.”

The thought of a rustic bride glittering with Mrs. Haslem’s diamonds was almost ludicrous enough to force a smile, even in those circumstances. But I kept my face grave as she went heavily round the bed and threw back the lid of the box.

“There they are, sir. And these, and these, and these.”

They came at me in a soft avalanche across the bed. White silk and satin, cotton and broderie anglaise, pink ribbons, green ribbons, stockings, garters, and a dozen other frills and furbelows that only the goddess of lingerie or her devotees could name. Over them, from the other side of the bed, scared brown eyes looking up at me.

“What in the world are these?”

“Her things, sir. She said I could have them because she’d had new ones made. She told me I could keep them, sir.”

When I told Harry he laughed so hard he nearly fell off the feed bin.

“Well, are you taking them back to Mr. Haslem?”

“Can you imagine me riding back across country with an armful of lady’s cast-off unmentionables? Let her keep them for her wedding day.”

“So she didn’t take the diamonds?”

“I’m sure of it. The best actress in London couldn’t fake such simplicity. And I’m equally sure she put nothing in that flask.”

His grin faded. “Still looks bad for the governess, then?”

“Not good, certainly. Still, there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why does a lady married nine years or more take a fancy for a whole wardrobe of new underthings? The ones she gave her maid weren’t worn out by any means.”

“That, Mr. Ludlow, is a matter beyond our understanding. Unless...”

“Unless.”

The word hung there for a moment between us in the bran-flecked air, then he stood up. “Miss Thorn will be arriving any minute. She’s bringing the boy down to look at a pony.”

A pony phaeton delivered them. A boy got out first, muffled up against the cold, then a young woman in a black coat and hat. I’d imagined that a person who could arouse such concern in Harry would have some special appeal — one of those fragile, flowerlike women. This was no flower. She was squarish in build and broad of shoulder. Her face was attractive in its way, but from an impression of common sense and openness rather than delicacy. Her hair was dark, her eyes a deep grey under straight black brows. If I’d been asked to sum her up in one word, that word would have been honest, the way a rock or a tree is honest because it has no other way to be. But then I’d seen people double-dyed in guilt who had the same air. She looked at me, then towards the boy, who was already well out of hearing, leaning over a stable door with Harry.

“So you’re the gentleman who’s come to ask me if I poisoned Mrs. Haslem? Mr. Leather says you’ll want to ask me questions. Ask anything you please.”

Her voice had a hint of the north country in it. I suggested that we should go into the tack room and sit down, but she wanted to stay outside where she could see young Master Haslem. It was a strange way of questioning. We stood there side by side in the yard as a bay pony was brought out and the boy mounted on it.

“Did you take Mrs. Haslem’s flask out of the victoria?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“If I could stop my employer’s wife making a scandal of herself before the whole county, it was my duty to do it. Mr. Haslem was ill with worry over it. It was bad enough with her friends near here. He didn’t want her to call on people who were more in society because the whole world would know, but she was a stubborn woman.”

No nonsense from Miss Thorn about not speaking ill of the dead. Her contempt was rocklike.

“So you decided to do something about it?”

“I decided to get the flask away from her. I wanted her to arrive at the house she was visiting as sober as she was ever likely to be.”

“Was this your own decision, or in consultation with Mr. Haslem?”

“He didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“Did you put anything in it?”

“No. I didn’t even unscrew the cap of the flask. I should have done that — poured it away on the gravel and let her dismiss me if she liked.”

“And perhaps saved her life.”

She gave me a questioning look.

“If there was poison in that brandy, you’d have saved her life by pouring it away.”

“How could I have known that? How could anybody know that?”

“You didn’t know?”

She took a step to face me.

“I swear to you, as I’d swear at God’s judgement seat if my soul depended on it, that I didn’t know.”

We followed Harry and young Haslem on the pony to the paddock at the back. All the time that he was walking and trotting the animal I was trying to work up to a question which there was no delicate way of asking. In the end I came flat out with it.

“Do you think it possible that Mrs. Haslem had a lover?”

A moment of shock, then anger.

“That’s a most improper question to put to me. I have no intention of answering it.”

And she moved smartly away to the paddock rail. Back in the yard afterwards she ignored me but smiled at the boy and his babble of enthusiasm for the pony, wrapped his scarf round his neck, and saw him settled in the phaeton. With her boot on the step she turned to me, icily polite.

“I’d offer to shake hands, but you might not want to take the hand of a woman they think is a poisoner.”

Then she was in her seat and away.

“Something wrong with your arm?” Harry asked.

He’d caught me with my hand half extended, responding too late to what she’d said.

“That accusation of her wanting to marry Mr. Haslem — was there any truth in it?”

“Well, the talk was he spent more time in the schoolroom than with his wife, but so would I have in his place.”

“I need to speak to him, whether he likes it or not.”

I requisitioned some of Harry’s business stationery and composed a careful letter, standing at the old desk in the corner of the tack room where he made up his accounts. The stable boy was sent up to the hall with it. By then it was late afternoon and Harry informed me that Dr. Gaynor would be back from his rounds. With the westering sun throwing long tree shadows across the road, I walked the mile to a substantial brick house in a couple of acres of ground.

The doctor was younger and more urbane than I’d expected in a country practitioner, a handsome man in his late thirties. He was working in his dispensary when I arrived but kindly invited me to sit down in his study over a glass of sherry, fastidiously amused by my amateur interest in murder and quite willing to discuss the Haslem case.

“A very sad affair. I take it you’ve heard the details from Mr. Leather.”

“You were called to Mrs. Haslem?”

“Far too late to be of any use. I was at a confinement on the far side of my practice. When the messenger came I galloped like the devil, but there was nothing I could do.”

“Are you in any doubt that she was poisoned?”

He looked at me over the sherry glass.

“Do you want me to tell you what I said at the inquest?”

“I suspect, like other people, you were not anxious to condemn a certain person.”

“Unprofessional on my part, if so.”

“But human. I think I have my answer.”

He sighed. “She was poisoned.”

“Did you form any idea as to the poison used?”

He swirled the sherry round in the glass.

“Your knowledge of toxicology is probably as extensive as mine.”

“Aconitine?” Another sigh. I prompted, “The symptoms suggest it and there have been a number of cases recently.”

“As you say, the burning in the mouth. The convulsions.”

“So Mrs. Haslem was poisoned with aconitine. And as far as we can tell, that aconitine could only have been administered in the brandy she drank on her last journey. Can you as a medical man see any other conclusion?”

We went on discussing it, in a guarded way, over another glass of sherry. But no other conclusion emerged, beyond my conviction that the doctor too favoured mercy above justice for Mrs. Haslem’s murderer.

Back at Harry’s stables, a curt note had arrived from Mr. Haslem to say he’d see me at ten the following morning. Harry offered me the hospitality of his hayloft for the night and I treated him to a supper of chops and claret in The Woodman’s Rest. We chose a quiet corner so that I could report progress — or lack of it. “Aconitine. Does that make things worse for Miss Thorn?”

“Yes. It acts quite quickly, so there’s no hope that the poison might have been in what Mrs. Haslem ate at lunch or anything before. You’d expect the first symptoms within about half an hour, the tightness and burning in the Ups and throat. That fits quite well with her getting out of the victoria and then collapsing in the drawing room. In fact...”

“In fact what, Mr. Ludlow?”

I sat there with a piece of mutton chop on my fork, staring at his still-hopeful face.

“Harry, this is an odd thing. You said it took her two hours to be driven to the place she was visiting. Now, wouldn’t you expect her to be taking nips out of that flask the whole journey?”

“I would.”

“And yet if she’d drunk from it at the start of the journey, she’d have been in a much worse state by the end of it. She was well enough to speak and to walk up to the front door. That suggests she didn’t drink from the flask until near the end of the journey. Is that likely?”

“It doesn’t help, though, does it? It’s still the flask we’re looking at.”

“I need to talk to the coachman. Early tomorrow before I see Mr. Haslem. Can you arrange that?”

“Sure as sunrise.”

Mr. Haslem’s coach house was a shadowy building with a few shafts of morning sunlight coming through narrow windows. The dark bulk of an old-fashioned closed carriage took up a lot of the space. Beside it were the pony phaeton and a victoria with the hood up. The coachman was polishing the phaeton but straightened up when he saw us. Harry introduced me after his fashion.

“This is Mr. Ludlow. I don’t know what he’s going to ask you, but you tell him what he wants to know.”

The coachman stood like a man on trial.

“What happened to the victoria that day Mrs. Haslem died?”

He swallowed. “I drove it back, sir.”

“It must have been dark by the time you got it back here.”

“Pitch. It was past midnight.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Backed it into the coach house and left it. Next day I had it out to clean it and put it away again.”

“Has anyone used it since?”

“No. The victoria was hers. Nobody else seems to have cared to use it.”

“What happened to the rugs and the foot warmer and so on?”

“They’re still in there.”

We all three poked our heads under the hood. On the seat, a dark woollen blanket and canvas cover. I plunged my hand into the darkness beside the folded blanket. It touched fur.

“Ah.” I drew it out so that they could see it, the thing flopping heavily in my hand. Harsh fur, wolf’s or bear’s probably. “This is the fellow I was looking for.”

Harry moved in to look and drew back, disappointed.

“It’s only her travelling muff.”

“It was a cold day and she’d be wearing light gloves with her best visiting outfit. Naturally she’d have a muff for the journey.”

I slid my hands inside the fur’s silk lining. “Let’s have some more light here. One of the carriage lamps.”

A scrape of flint, a flare of light. I waited until they were back with the lamp then slid a hand out and let the muff dangle. Something small fell to the brick floor and burst open in the circle of lamplight. “Whatever you do, don’t tread on them.”

On the bricks was an enamelled box of the kind that ladies use to carry pills, with small white globes like chalky pearls scattered round it. Harry knelt, picked one up, sniffed.

“They’re only...”

If I hadn’t grabbed it, he’d have put it in his mouth.

“They’re what will keep Miss Thorn from hanging. Get some paper.”

We tore the wrapping from a new cake of harness soap, bundled the box and most of its contents together. A few minutes later I was walking up the steps to Mr. Haslem’s front door.

The butler showed me into a handsome study on the ground floor, with leather-bound books from floor to ceiling and classical texts and dictionaries ranged on a desk by the window. The man himself seemed less substantial than his books, thin and pale, with sunken eyes. He held himself painstakingly upright, like a marionette on a single string that might part at any moment and land him in a disjointed heap on his Turkey carpet. I’d explained myself to him in my letter — as far as a total stranger’s interest in a gentleman’s affairs can be explained — and came straight to the point.

“I spoke to Miss Thorn. She says she wanted to get the flask away from your wife and hadn’t discussed it with you.”

“Miss Thorn is trying to protect me. We had discussed it.”

“Discussed what exactly?”

His face creased up. He may have been a clever man with his books but he lied clumsily and painfully, like an inexpert angler with a fishhook through his finger.

“Discussed how to prevent my wife obtaining brandy.”

“Did you know she was going to take the flask out of the victoria.”

“Yes,” he said. But his face winced “no.”

“Have you and Miss Thorn ever discussed the properties of aconitine?”

“Aconitine?”

“A vegetable alkaloid. A poison.”

“No.”

“What happened to the flask Mrs. Haslem drank from?”

“I... I ordered it to be brought to me.”

“Were the contents analysed?”

“It was empty... quite empty.”

I’d come to him with one doubt left and now it had gone. Like everyone else, with just one exception, he was thinking only of the flask. I was on the point of explaining when he raised his hand to stop me. It was a surprisingly decisive gesture for a nervous man and when he spoke again his voice was firmer than it had been.

“Mr. Ludlow, since you have chosen to take an interest in my affairs, there’s something you should know. At present I am in mourning. When that period ends, I shall ask Miss Thorn to do me the honour of becoming my wife.”

He kept his eyes on me, nerved for my protest. There was a kind of desperate heroism about him.

“In that case,” I said, “you will be marrying a brave and loyal young woman. And an innocent one.”

Shock and relief together came flooding over his face. He almost collapsed and had to support himself on the corner of the desk. I took my hand out of my pocket and rolled a few of the little white globes across the blotter. He looked from them to me and back again, saying nothing.

“You were all looking in the wrong place. Your wife’s last words were that the poison was in her flask. She died believing that. But ask yourself if she might have been killed by a poison that was not in the flask and what’s the answer?”

“But she took nothing else since leaving the house.”

“Not quite. A lady is going visiting, to a fashionable house where she wishes to make a good impression. She won’t do that with brandy on her breath. So she’ll take the precaution of concealing in her travelling muff a little box of oil of peppermint lozenges. Those were the last things your wife took, not the brandy.”

He stared at them, still not speaking.

“My friend Mr. Leather is taking the rest to London to a laboratory that I know. If my suspicion is right, they will indeed contain oil of peppermint — and aconitine.”

“Then he killed her. Stole her jewels and killed her.”

The relief was there, but pain too. I didn’t say to him that there were more ways than one of stealing a woman’s jewels. Take them and sell them, my love, and with the money we shall run away together to that warm sweethearts’ nest in Paris. Or Venice, or Timbuktu, or the dreams of deluded women knew where. No part of her lover’s plan to take a. drinking and demanding woman along with him.

“Yes, he killed her. How long had you known about your wife and Dr. Gaynor?”

Two days later I was back with Harry at The Woodman’s Rest, thinking I’d earned some congratulations.

“Once I knew about the peppermint pills, there was very little doubt. Getting hold of aconitine wouldn’t be so difficult. Making it into pills would be — unless you had a dispensary at hand.”

“Pity he got away, wasn’t it?”

“That’s your friend the coachman’s fault, not mine.”

The foolish man had flown to the kitchen in high excitement to tell them all about the discovery. From there the news must have come within half an hour to the doctor’s ears, because when I went back to speak to him I found only a disordered house and an empty stable.

“Will they catch him?”

“Depends how hard they try, and that will probably depend on Mr. Haslem.”

“Nothing will get done then. After all, you can’t expect a man to parade in front of the world with horns on his head.”

“That means Miss Thorn will never be publicly cleared.”

“You can leave that to me. I’ll see the story’s put about where it matters.”

And I knew I could indeed leave it to him. The gossip from the stables gets up to the drawing room and down again as quickly as we can put out an edition of our paper. When the governess walked up the aisle with her employer, there’d be nobody whispering murder. I never heard the report of that event because Harry had moved on long before it could happen. Two things, though, I did hear. One was that Miss Thorn came into Harry’s yard, looking by his account “like a linnet let out of a cage,” and thanked him and me most warmly. The other was that Mr. Haslem bought the bay pony for his son at a price ten guineas over what Harry should have had the nerve to ask for it. I like to think that was a sign of gratitude as well.