‘There is always our old friend arsenic,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and it is a treacherous friend to a murderer. It leaves long-term traces of itself in hair and fingernails, neither of which, in the grave, is likely to receive the attentions of a barber or a chiropodist, even a ghostly one.’
‘Arsenic? Surely no poisoner uses that any more? I mean, it’s so readily obtainable from all sorts of things you can find in any gardener’s shed that anybody can get hold of it. It would be suspected and tested at once in any cases of unexplained death.’
‘But Dr Rant’s death was not unexplained. From what we have been told, he was, perhaps unintentionally, heading for suicide anyway.’
‘Then why should anybody help him along by killing him?’
‘That, as you would say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. There must be an answer to it and, although this is nothing but speculation, I think the answer may be that the Castercombe chemist, now deceased, may have been suffering from impaired eyesight.’
Laura looked resignedly at her employer, but then her expression changed.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘But that wouldn’t be murder if he misread Dr Rant’s prescriptions. The worst that could be brought in is criminal negligence.’
‘The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are markedly similar to those of gastro-enteritis.’
‘But that fact has been known for donkey’s years! Somebody would have smelt a rat in Dr Rant’s case.’
‘Dr Rant’s weakness for alcohol was also well known. That, coupled with his dangerous practice of taking a drug as well, causes me to think that nobody who knew him would have been surprised by his death.’
‘We know that Dr Rant was unpopular with the villagers, but if he was poisoned it’s unlikely that anyone outside the house was responsible. How would they have got at his food and drink?’
‘You see where all this leads us, do you not?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura soberly, ‘it leads us straight back to Bryony, Morpeth, Susan and Dr Mortlake. They all benefited from the death of Dr Rant. The girls got their freedom, the house and most of the money, Mortlake got his own medical practice and Susan, although she seems a long shot, got the job and the companionship she wanted. Oh, I know the two sisters didn’t take on the Pharaoh hounds until some time after their father’s death, but there’s no proof that Susan hadn’t made their acquaintance and so heard of the plans they had made for when their father handed in his passport. She may then have made her own plans.’
‘Susan, however, falls into the same category as the villagers, ’ Dame Beatrice pointed out. ‘She had no entrée to Crozier Lodge until after Dr Rant’s death, and therefore, so far as I can see, no opportunity to poison him.’
‘There is something we’re leaving out of our calculations, though,’ said Laura. ‘Wasn’t there some rumour that Rant had inherited a lot of money from an old lady in the Midlands and was more or less hounded out of the place because of all the gossip and ugly rumours which were being circulated?’
‘The same objection stands as in the case of the villagers and Susan. They may have had the means and the motive, but they lacked the opportunity.’
‘I don’t agree. The old lady’s relatives, hopping mad at having the cup of opulence dashed from their lips, could have traced Rant to Abbots Crozier easily enough. I suppose he was in the Medical Register and the telephone book and so forth. It might have proved a longish job to track him down, but they could have done it.’
‘Oh, yes, as you point out. What then?’
‘They could have posed as patients and gone to his surgery. That would have got them inside Crozier Lodge. There they could have polished off the man who had done them out of the lolly. Ten to one he wouldn’t have known them if they had never turned up at the old lady’s bedside while he was attending her, so he wouldn’t have suspected that any dirty work was afoot. Weren’t we told that the villagers, in the end, avoided him and that most of his work was tending the sick or injured holidaymakers? He wouldn’t have suspected a thing when this lot blew in.’
‘You think of everything,’ said Dame Beatrice admiringly, ‘but you seem to gather your theories out of thin air,’ she added. ‘We do not even know whether there were any dispossessed relatives.’
‘And we don’t even know for sure that Dr Rant was murdered,’ retorted Laura.
‘As I believe I said once before, if Dr Rant was not murdered, my own theories collapse like pricked balloons,’ said Dame Beatrice.
The fourth conversation had been held in the evening of the day before the exhumations were to take place. Detective-Inspector Harrow was in conference with Detective-Sergeant Callum. They had returned to the Axehead police station after they had superintended the erection of tarpaulin screens around the two graves and the digging operations which were the preliminaries to the work of the morrow.
‘Even if we do find out from Sir Ranulph that both were murdered, I can’t see how it’s going to get us any nearer to finding the murderer, sir,’ said Callum.
‘Or that the same person murdered both of them,’ said Harrow. ‘In fact, on the face of it, it seems very unlikely that the same person did. The bank here has been very helpful and there is no indication at all that Rant had obtained any money by blackmail. Yet Dame Beatrice seems certain that blackmail is at the bottom of this business and that the murderer, whoever he is, killed because he was being blackmailed. Even supposing that somebody poisoned Dr Rant a bit quicker than he was already poisoning himself, we’ve found nothing to connect his death with that of the other two.’
‘Money must come into it somewhere, though, sir.’
‘One thing Dame Beatrice has done for us is to produce this flint object.’
‘Do you think it will fit the hole in that fellow’s head, sir?’
‘That’s for Sir Ranulph to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve been doubtful about the verdict at that inquest from the beginning, but, given the evidence, such as it was, I suppose the coroner had no option but to direct his jury to find as they did. Neither you nor I, I take it, would have taken off his trousers and thrown them to a dog to pacify it, but it takes all sorts. Anyway, we’re both convinced that nothing of the sort happened. We’ve both seen the dog and Pollyanna could take its correspondence course. It’s almost indecently friendly and couldn’t scare a child of two.’
‘Some people are terrified even if the most affectionate dog jumps up at them, sir. I don’t know which of the phobias you would call it.’
‘I can understand a child or a nervous woman being alarmed, but not a grown man and certainly not to the extent that has been suggested. The myth about the trousers was unbelievable from the first and, very soon, so was the theory that the fellow had slipped on the stones in the riverbed, knocked himself out and was drowned before he could save himself. No. Dame Beatrice may be dead right about one thing. If a stone killed the chap, this could easily be the one.’ He picked up the neolithic dagger and looked it over critically. ‘It fits the hand all right, although I think it would fit Dame Beatrice’s small hand better than it does mine.’
‘She seemed a bit vague as to where she found it, sir, I thought.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. She said that Mrs Gavin went paddling and noticed that the thing looked different from the other pebbles. She admitted that they had been looking for it.’
‘After all this time, sir? Oh, well, perhaps it wasn’t the first time she and Mrs Gavin had been to Watersmeet to look for it. There’s no proof it was the murder weapon, though.’