‘I’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘The door was locked from the outside and, in any case, it doesn’t fit with what I know of him. He was intelligent enough to find a less painful way if he wanted to kill himself. He could have taken it without being aware of it, I suppose?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve known several cases of people drinking insecticides by accident. In its natural state, it’s a sort of colourless, oily liquid but it soon changes on contact with air and looks remarkably like whisky. Of course, it takes so little to kill you that even if you realised what you’d done it would be too late. One swig would do it. An easy mistake, but an expensive one.’
‘In that case, there’s a decanter and glass downstairs that he drank from just before he died. It’s in the scene dock.’
‘Fine, we’ll go there next.’
‘So it could be murder?’
‘Well, it’s not a common choice for a planned killing, I have to say. I only know of one other case – a French count who killed his brother-in-law by forcing him to ingest nicotine – but that was nearly a hundred years ago. It’s usually self-inflicted or a practical joke gone wrong – snuff in beer, ridiculous amounts of cigars smoked in a row for a bet, that sort of thing. I had a child not long back who blew bubbles for an hour through an old clay pipe and died. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be murder, but it’s unusual.’
‘What are the symptoms?’
‘He would have collapsed almost immediately. If you’re right about that decanter, he did well to make it up the stairs at all.
Death would have followed in anything from five to thirty minutes.’
‘And in between?’
‘Briefly, the nicotine will have acted as a stimulant, but that will have given way to a depression of the central nervous system, lowered blood pressure, slowed heart rate and death from paralysis of the respiratory muscles.’
‘So he suffocated? That’s the cause of death?’
‘Asphyxia, yes. Along the way, he’ll have gone through nausea, 151
abdominal pain, heart palpitations and increased salivation; he’ll have experienced a burning sensation in the mouth, mental confusion and dizziness. Everyone is affected slightly differently, but you don’t need a post-mortem to tell you some of what he went through; it’s all too obvious here.’
‘And his eyes?’
‘I’m impressed, Archie. Yes, nicotine poisoning often affects the eyes – that’s true of a heavy smoker, not just these extreme cases.
It’s known as tobacco blindness – the sudden appearance of a rapidly growing dark patch in the field of vision, not dissimilar to alcohol.’
‘There was a lot of it in the trenches.’
‘Exactly. It was very common then, mostly because of home-grown or badly cured tobacco. That stuff often has a lower com-bustion temperature than properly prepared tobacco, so less of the nicotine is destroyed.’
‘If I told you that Bernard Aubrey spent his war underground and was clinically claustrophobic as a result, what would you say?’
Spilsbury stepped out of the way as his colleagues prepared to remove Aubrey’s body from the room. ‘Well, he died not being able to breathe or, in all probability, to see, so with the possible exception of being buried alive – which presents obvious practical difficulties – I’d say he had the worst death imaginable.’ He gestured to the desk where the bayonet had been found. ‘Are you linking this to the girl on the train?’
Penrose nodded. He had two deaths and two victims which, on the face of it, could not have been more different: a young girl and a man facing old age; a stabbing with relatively little suffering and an agonising, degrading end. But he was starting to see more connections and, although the theatre was the most obvious link, the past seemed to him more significant. Aubrey had died surrounded by reminders of the war – a war which was also the backdrop to an illegal and inevitably painful adoption. And even the causes of death, apparently so contrasting, had in common a spiteful appropriateness to their victim: Elspeth’s murder had undermined every-152
thing that mattered to her, had scorned her innocence; Aubrey, a man of wealth and authority all his life, had been physically humiliated and had died gasping for air. In both crimes, there was a terrifying lack of humanity, a mockery of the dead which chilled him even more than the loss of life itself.
153
Eleven
Penrose stood at the door to the Green Room, and was not surprised to see that his cousins’ efforts to comfort everyone with tea and brandy had had very little effect: Lydia was dreadfully pale and clearly shocked to the core, while Josephine and the woman to whom he had been introduced earlier were united in solicitous concern for her. It was Marta who spoke first.
‘What the hell has happened, Inspector?’ she asked with a flash of anger which took him by surprise. ‘How can you have allowed her to walk in on something like that? You should have gone to find him, not Lydia.’
‘I’m truly sorry you’ve had to go through this,’ he said to Lydia with genuine compassion, ‘and I don’t want to cause anybody any further distress, but I do need to talk to you briefly about what happened tonight.’ He turned to the others in the room. ‘And to anybody else who saw or spoke to Bernard Aubrey in the last twenty-four hours.’
Marta was not so easily dismissed. ‘Can that really not keep until the morning? Right now, I’d like to take Lydia home to get some rest. She’s had enough.’
Penrose, who had already missed out on one vital interview that evening through having been made to wait, had no intention of letting it happen again, but he was saved the discourtesy of insisting.
‘It’s fine, darling, honestly it is,’ said Lydia, taking Marta’s hand.
‘I’d rather do it now. The sooner I stop having to talk about it, the sooner I can start trying to get that image out of my head.’ She smiled unconvincingly, as if recognising the naivety of her words, and turned to Penrose. ‘Although somehow I don’t think it will be 155
that easy, do you Archie? Can I still call you Archie, by the way, or does it have to be Inspector now that this is official?’
‘Archie’s fine. And I won’t keep you any longer than I have to.’
‘All right, but can I have a minute to pull myself together?’ She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror which ran along one wall. ‘I know it’s not the time to mention it, but I feel worse now than I ever have on my deathbed. I just need to pop to my dressing room for a moment.’
Penrose nodded, trying not to look too impatient. As soon as Lydia had left the room, accompanied by a seething Marta, Lettice took the seat opposite her cousin.
‘Can we tell you about our encounter with Aubrey before they get back,’ she whispered, nodding towards the door and glancing conspiratorially at Josephine, who understood immediately what she was getting at. ‘Something happened that would only upset Lydia even more, and I’d rather not mention it in front of her tonight.’
‘Go on. Josephine told me it wasn’t exactly an amicable meeting.’
‘No, not at all. In fact, it couldn’t have been frostier.’ She gave an uncharacteristically succinct account of the afternoon’s meeting, missing out many of the more entertaining asides which had been shared with Josephine over dinner, but leaving Penrose in no doubt as to how unpopular Aubrey had made himself.
‘So, by the time the meeting was over, Terry was put out, to say the least?’
‘Oh, face like a slapped arse, dear,’ confirmed Ronnie. ‘He was absolutely furious.’
‘But powerless to do anything about it, presumably.’ And impo-tence had a habit of making people dangerous, he thought. He had seen that quality in Terry’s performance earlier – a barely suppressed anger which had made his portrayal of the increasingly vulnerable Richard all the more convincing. But was it enough to drive him to murder? And did he have it in him to kill so mali-ciously? Arrogance, yes, he could believe that was in character, but spite? He turned to Josephine. ‘How serious do you think it is for Terry to miss out on a film like that?’
156
She shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say, really. Artistically, it could take his career in a whole new direction, but I’m not sure he’d want that long-term. He’d be starting at the bottom again, you see, whereas on stage he’s so established and highly thought of that he can do virtually what he likes. There are very few people who’d dream of standing in his way in the theatre.’ And one of those was now dead, Penrose thought as Josephine continued. ‘Financially speaking, though, it’s a different matter. There’s simply no comparison between the money he could make in a film and what he gets for a stage role. And the girls were saying earlier that he seems more money-driven these days. I don’t know why that should be. He’s never struck me as the greedy type, except for praise, of course.’
‘That’s useful to know, but I don’t quite see why you were so reluctant to tell me all this in front of Lydia. What does she have to do with Terry?’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Lettice said quickly. ‘We just didn’t want Lydia to find out about Aubrey’s plans for her – or rather the lack of them.’ She stopped guiltily as the door opened again, but it was only Fallowfield.
‘Aubrey’s address, Sir,’ he said, handing Penrose a piece of paper. ‘His wife’s expecting you, and there’s a car waiting outside.’
‘Thanks, Sergeant. How did she take it?’
‘Calmly, I’d say, Sir. I don’t mean she wasn’t shocked, but she didn’t strike me as the type to go in for hysterics. She insisted she didn’t need anybody to wait with her until you got there, but there’s a maid in the house, so she’s not on her own.’