Arsenic For Tea: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery (A Wells and Wong Mystery) (9 page)

Daisy grinned and waved him out, but as soon as the door slammed behind him her face grew serious. We stared at each other, listening to the rain and the horrid noises filtering down from upstairs. It was pitch black outside now; it felt as though the house was a little wooden box that we were all stuck in together, alone on a deep dark sea.

‘What we must do now,’ said Daisy, above the noise of the storm, ‘is get closer, and see what we can discover.’

Up the twisting stairs we went, and along the first-floor landing, to lurk outside Mr Curtis’s door. We could hear Lady Hastings and Mrs Doherty fussing about inside. I knew we shouldn’t be there – and I knew I didn’t want to be. Mr Curtis kept making those horrid wails and groans – they nearly drowned out the storm outside. Flashes of lightning kept on striking the hallway full of shadows – they made me jump every time.

‘Honestly, Hazel,’ Daisy said, but she did not say it with feeling. I think she was beginning to feel as nervous as I was.

Then Uncle Felix came back with the doctor from Fallingford village. Unlike Felix, who looked smooth even with rain dripping from his hair and his trousers soaked and muddy, the doctor was fat and bald and flustered, and very out of breath. He rushed past us, saying, ‘Out of my way, young ladies, out of my way!’

Uncle Felix paused beside us; we both tensed, but he only frowned and wiped his wet monocle on his wet pocket-square.

‘We left O’Brian in the village,’ he told us. ‘Awful weather – he’s better off at home. But at least Dr Cooper’s here now.’

‘What’s wrong with Mr Curtis, Uncle Felix?’ asked Daisy, seeing an opportunity. ‘Will he be all right?’

‘Stop angling, Daisy,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘I’m not going to tell you anything.’

Daisy looked shocked. ‘But – Uncle Felix!’

‘Daisy, this isn’t a game. This is serious. Now I want you both to go up to the nursery and stay there until you’re told otherwise. All right?’ He glared at us through his monocle, now back in his eye, and then jerked open Mr Curtis’s door and strode in.

Daisy was left gasping. ‘I . . .’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him this weekend! He
never
tells me to go away!’

I thought back to those strange, worrying things that Uncle Felix had said to Mr Curtis in the maze.
Was
he simply behaving like a grown-up? Or . . . like a suspect?

‘What do we do now?’ I asked Daisy. ‘Go upstairs, like he told us to?’

‘Obviously not,’ she said. ‘That big Spanish chest over there opens, and there are some lattice bits that make perfectly good air-holes. If we hide in there we can stay and listen.’

I didn’t want to do that at all – but I
did
want to find out what was going on. ‘All right,’ I said.

We climbed in. Our elbows and knees bumped in the dark, and I felt very hot and claustrophobic. But Daisy was right – there were small holes in the side of the chest that we could breathe through, and almost see out of (if we squinted). Thunder rumbled and boomed, the rain lashed down against the windows, and Mr Curtis groaned and groaned.

And then his bedroom door opened and someone came bursting out. It was Lady Hastings, and she was simply howling. She held a handkerchief to her face, which had tear-tracks all down it, and ran into her room, sobbing. And a few minutes later, just as I was beginning to wonder if I should ever move about freely again, two more people came out after her.

It was the doctor and Uncle Felix, and they weren’t running or crying, but they did look very solemn. Uncle Felix pulled the door of the room to behind them, and they stood close together, facing each other. Daisy elbowed me in the ribs, and I held my breath.

‘It is serious, Mr Mountfitchet,’ said the doctor. ‘Very serious indeed. I wish I didn’t have to be the bearer of bad news, but I would say that now is the time to . . . to begin preparing for the worst. I have seen several of these cases before: as soon as this stage is reached – the purgings, the convulsions – there is very little hope left.’

‘
Several
of these cases?’ Uncle Felix repeated. ‘You have a diagnosis, then, Dr Cooper?’

‘Dysentery, I should say,’ Doctor Cooper replied. ‘A fairly clear-cut case. The loss of fluids, the stomach pains. As I say, I have seen—’

‘Dysentery? You’re sure?’ asked Uncle Felix, his voice sharp.

‘As sure as I can be without a closer examination of the matter – er – evacuated. Anything else would be pure speculation. After all, this is a reputable household.’

Uncle Felix’s shoulders tensed – and next to me, Daisy suddenly went stiff, as though they had both heard the same invisible sound.

‘
What?
’ I whispered, as quietly as I could.

‘Shh! Wait!’ hissed Daisy.

‘Humour me,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘Take some samples. I can take them up to the laboratory in London tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ said Dr Cooper. ‘I doubt that very much. Fallingford and the surrounding countryside is flooded – and you know that this sort of flood isn’t liable to die down for days. And anyway – forgive me for being blunt, but I doubt whether this man has even a few hours left. I simply can’t get fluid into him as quickly as he loses it. Any tests will be quite irrelevant.’

‘Nevertheless, I want you to take them, and give them to me. Is that clear?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Dr Cooper. ‘I only meant . . . Forgive me – I must get back to the patient.’

‘All right,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘Thank you. Now – please excuse me.’

He strode off towards his bedroom, and Dr Cooper ducked back into Mr Curtis’s. As soon as the doors had closed behind them, Daisy burst up out of the chest like a jack-in-the-box. The air opened up above me and I took a grateful gasp. But I couldn’t think what Daisy was doing. What if someone came out and caught us?

‘Daisy!’ I said, crouching half out of the chest.

‘Oh, there’s no time, Hazel! Quick! We have just been given the most important clue. We must get to the library immediately!’

I decided that this was one of those times where it was important to let Daisy have her head, so I crawled out of the chest and chased after her. She barrelled down the main stairs and across the hall into the library. Thank goodness, there was no one there.

When she was inside, Daisy leaped across the room and clawed at the leather-bound books like a tiger. She ripped one off a shelf, threw it to the floor (Daisy adores books, but she does ill-treat them in a most upsetting way) and began to rifle through it. ‘Here!’ she cried. ‘Look at this!’

I squinted at the open page. It seemed to be from the ‘A’ section of some sort of medical textbook. ‘
Arsenic Poisoning
’, I read.

Symptoms: numbness, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea (often bloody), convulsions (often violent), severe dehydration, severe thirst, abdominal pain.

Symptoms first present fifteen to thirty minutes after ingestion, beginning with warmth and tightness of the mouth and throat. Nausea and stomach pains follow, after which violent purging begins. Vomiting should be encouraged at the earliest possible opportunity, but cases where the patient has ingested more than four grains are generally fatal. A mere two grains have been known to kill. Death may occur any time between two and forty-eight hours after ingestion, and is caused by circulatory collapse.

Note: can often be mistaken for the symptoms of DYSENTERY.

I went cold all over. It couldn’t be . . . Daisy was imagining things again. Except . . .

Except that none of the rest of us were ill. Except that all the symptoms I had seen – and Dr Cooper had mentioned – matched those we had just read about. Except that there was a tub of arsenic rat poison in the hall cupboard, and everyone knew about it.

Except that it all
made sense
.

I gasped at Daisy, and she looked up at me, her mouth a round O of shocked excitement.

‘I’m right!’ she cried. ‘I knew it, the moment Dr Cooper said dysentery. I’ve read about this in a book. Hazel, this is
serious
. Mr Curtis isn’t just ill. He’s been poisoned!’

I gulped. There was a thick feeling at the back of my throat. The drumming of the rain was so loud that I could hardly hear the inside of my head. It sounded as though it was trying to batter its way into the house. What if we were stuck here? I thought all of a sudden. What if we were flooded, and what if Daisy really
was
right?

‘Hazel, this case has just taken a fascinating turn. A real poisoning! And here we are, on the spot, ready to detect it! We must unlock the dining-room door now and—’

‘There you are!’ said a voice behind us.

We both jumped, and Daisy slammed the book shut. Miss Alston was standing in the doorway, her hair bushier and more unkempt than ever. She looked pale and tired.

My heart began to pound. I glanced sideways at Daisy, but her face was giving nothing away. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never be able to appear as cool and collected as Daisy.

‘Sorry, Miss Alston,’ she said, as though she were apologizing for a torn skirt.

‘Come on upstairs,’ Miss Alston said. ‘Your friends are wondering where you’ve got to.’

‘Oh, all
right
, Miss Alston. We’re coming.’

We were taken up to the nursery, and there was nothing we could do about it. Investigating the dining room would have to wait.

The rain was beating on the roof above our heads, sounding as though it was about to burst through and drown us all, and Beanie was huddled on her bed, shaking, while Kitty comforted her. ‘Honestly, Beans,’ she was saying as we came in. ‘He’ll get better!’

Daisy and I simply looked at each other.

Hetty, looking just as tired as Miss Alston, her red hair escaping from her cap in a frizz, brought supper up to us on a tray. It was boiled eggs and soldiers. ‘Oh, really,’ said Daisy in disgust. ‘
We
aren’t ill. Why are
we
being sent an invalid’s supper?’

‘
Daisy!
’ said Miss Alston warningly, and Daisy was quiet – but privately I agreed with her. Even though people in stories always lose their appetite when something dreadful happens, in real life it is not like that at all. The worse things get, the hungrier I am. I can’t help it. By that time – it was nearly eight at night – my stomach was rumbling dreadfully. I could have eaten another enormous tea.

‘But he
will
get better,’ Beanie kept saying, like one of those dolls with a voice inside. We all pretended we hadn’t heard.

Daisy was itching to talk about what we had discovered, but there never was a chance. Miss Alston was always hovering around – just as though she knew, and wanted to keep us here! I thought. It was infuriating.

Then there was a tap on the door, and Miss Alston was called outside. She closed the door behind her, but I heard her speaking to someone – Hetty – in the hallway. Once again, we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without her knowing about it. I stared at the bars on the nursery windows and tried very hard to be sensible and calm. This was not last year again. Mr Curtis was not dead. We would wake up next morning and look out of the window and he would be jogging round the grounds again. Then he would leave Fallingford as planned, and we would be glad, and everything would be ordinary again.

The door opened again and Miss Alston came in. Her expression was very odd. We all stopped what we were doing and looked at her.

‘Girls,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news. Mr Curtis has died.’

I wrote all that last night. I knew that we were really and truly on a case – and compared to that, bedtime did not matter at all. After we heard what had happened to Mr Curtis, Beanie had proper hysterics, and we all had to crowd round and comfort her and tell her that it was all right;
she
would be all right.

‘But what if we die too?’ she sobbed. ‘Kitty, I don’t want you to die!’

‘Honestly, Beans, it isn’t catching,’ said Kitty.

‘But how do you KNOW?’ wailed Beanie, and that was another twenty minutes gone.

I crouched on my bed and wrote furiously, because I knew that I had to get it down quickly, before any of it went out of my head. Mr Curtis may have been awful, but he had still been a person. If we were right about what had happened to him, then someone was responsible for the fact that he was not a person any more, and that was terrible. All the things Daisy and I had seen over the last few days had suddenly become extremely important. Any one of them might mean something, and any one of them might help reveal the murderer.

You see, I had realized something. It was no good hoping that a mystery murderer had crept in from outside, poisoned Mr Curtis’s tea and vanished into the night. I had seen for myself the wet tracks made by Mr Curtis and Lady Hastings when they came in from the rain on Saturday afternoon – and also noticed that there had been no other such tracks anywhere in the house. No one had come in after them, and no one but the weekend guests and Chapman had been in the dining room when Mr Curtis had been taken ill. The rain absolutely ruled out anyone but the people inside Fallingford House, I thought, and I felt a bit sick.