There remained, because of this dictum, a grimness to Starr’s thoughts, and he drove in silence to the Bucklands’, where Nina Buckland told him that Ernest had left. With one of the (dancing) blondes. Nina’s friendly eyes showed plainly that she thought it a trifle queer: Bertha’s solitary departure, Ernest’s not so solitary departure, then Bertha’s return with Starr. But she smiled socially, and swam back among her guests and dahlias.
They found Ernest waiting with Madam Tuffman in the full nightmare of her parlor. Early dinner guests were imminent, and Madam Tuffman was in wine velvet, complete with bosom and train, while a broad diamond choker concealed the valleys of her throat. She rose and held out a hand.
“So good of you to bring her back, Doctor.” Her lively dark eyes turned upon Bertha. “We were worried, dear.”
Ernest said heavily: “Better dress, Bertha. You knew we were dining early.”
Bertha looked at Starr, and he said: “Yes, do. I have some things to discuss with Ernest and his mother.” He watched her leave the room; then he said to Madam Tuffman: “May I use the telephone, please?”
“Certainly, Doctor.”
He left them in their curious silence and went into the hall. He called his office.
He said to his secretary, Miss Wadsworth, that if she didn’t mind, he would like to return to the Middle Ages, or at least to some points somewhat back. Would she gather some hydrogen sulphide T.S., some litmus — yes, litmus — and the small charcoal grill that was used for steak? Would she embark at once with them in a taxi and hurry to the Tuffmans’? He wanted to make an immediate if primeval test, without the use of tubes and retorts. For what? For a mixture of arsenite and acetate of copper... Yes.
He rejoined Madam Tuffman and her son in the parlor, and they sat on satin and gilt beneath the unshaded bulbs of a vast ormulu chandelier. He said without preamble: “Mr. Tuffman, your wife is suffering from chronic poisoning. I believe its nature to be arsenite and acetate of copper. Her condition is serious, but not necessarily fatal. We are in time.”
For a moment Ernest looked stunned, and then he said savagely: “Are you suggesting an attempt at murder, Doctor? The murder of my wife?”
“Yes, Mr. Tuffman. That’s right.”
Madam Tuffman broke suddenly: “I have known it all along! It has been my horror — all these months. But I would not believe it. Even against my common sense, I kept telling myself it could not be true. There are but the three of us — my son, and Bertha, and me. I would say again and again that Bertha would not take her own life, because by doing so she would also be taking the life of her child. I knew it was no doing of mine. I would not, I do not, believe that it is Ernest. Doctor, the murderer cannot be here!”
“The murderer is here, Mrs. Tuffman.”
“Mother—”
“No, Ernest, you must let me finish. For the past year this has been on my heart like a stone. I love you, but I do not know you. Bertha loves you, but she does not know you. Whatever I have gone through, she has gone through more. She is young. I am too old to know about her sort of love any longer — the infinite variety of its sacrifices. I understand none other than my feeling for you.”
“Mother—”
“Wait, Ernest. Bertha has kept silent. She has suffered this poison to bring her slowly closer to death with every day. She has refused to be examined by Doctor Starr, in dread that the finger would be pointed to you, whom she loves; or to me, whom you love. She has been prepared to face death all these terrible months, Ernest, if you wanted it that way.”
“That’s a lie!” Ernest blazed with rage. “I love her. I love her more than anything.”
Starr said quietly: “I must ask your patience until Miss Wadsworth gets here. She is bringing certain things.”
Minutes passed, while Starr, with oblique pointers, prepared Madam Tuffman and her son with documented precedents for his belief. Bertha’s case, he said, was not unique, although today it was so rare as to offer no other existent probable parallel. He touched first upon the idiosyncrasy of certain people to certain poisons, their allergy to them: many men could stand a medicinal dose of a given poison which would prove dangerous, if not fatal, to anyone who was allergic to it.
In Bertha’s case, Starr believed the idiosyncrasy to be strong. The mixture of arsenite and acetate of copper had, if his thoughts were correct, been administered to her in the form of dust, and also as an arseniureted hydrogen gas which had been emitted into the air. He spoke of a Dr. G. Kirchgasser, of Coblenz, who had collected twenty-one cases of such poisoning, some of which had proven fatal. Dr. Kirchgasser’s paper on the subject was still on record. Dr. Kirchgasser had stressed the fact that his cases were all of people who were allergic to the poison. Many others had lived and come under its influence in similar conditions, and had not been affected at all.
Miss Wadsworth arrived, laden, and Starr suggested that they all go upstairs. He rapped on the door of Bertha’s and Ernest’s room, and asked whether they might come in.
The colors of the room struck him like a blow. They alone seemed to make any sound in the deathlike stillness. With a penknife he scraped a strip of vivid green from a hand-blocked leaf of the lurid wallpaper. He immersed a piece in a glass of water. He lit charcoal. He touched litmus into the glass and considered the reaction faintly acid. Some drops of hydrogen sulphide T.S. turned the solution a pale yellow. The vapor from a piece of the paper thrown on the burning charcoal suggested an odor of garlic.
He said to Madam Tuffman: “Your artist in London’s Soho had the misfortune, or ignorance, to select one of the most poisonous pigments of his day. The commercial variety of this particular pigment was known to have contained fifty-nine per cent of arsenic, and I believe that in his own mixing the artist must have used even a more lavish hand. As I have said, the known cases of chronic poisoning at that period from wallpaper of this type were noted. These particular rolls were kept through the years in your attic, cased, so its lethal properties remained intact until the rolls were opened, put up, and its poison disseminated in the form of a fine dust and a gas.”
Bertha was suddenly radiant, with a whole world that was hers again. “Then the murderer, Doctor—”
“Exactly. From now on, you have nothing to fear, because the source has been traced: The murderer is — this room!”
Margery Allingham
They Never Get Caught
The eternal triangle... Meet a man who has decided to become a widower — only a foolish, fatuous wife stands in the way of his heart’s desire; and the husband is an expert chemist...
“Millie dear, this does explain itself, doesn’t it? Henry.” Mr. Henry Brownrigg signed his name on the back of the little blue bill with a flourish. Then he set the scrap of paper carefully in the exact centre of the imperfectly scoured developing bath, and leaving the offending utensil on the kitchen table for his wife to find when she came in, he stalked back to the shop, feeling that he had administered the rebuke surely and at the same time gracefully.
In fifteen years Mr. Brownrigg felt that he had mastered the art of teaching his wife her job. Not that he had taught her. That, Mr. Brownrigg felt, with a woman of Millie’s staggering obtuseness, was past praying for. But now, after long practice, he could deliver the snub or administer the punishing word in a way which would penetrate her placid dullness.