Run Afoul (19 page)

Elisha Tweedie's place turned out to be a complex of three single-floored buildings, set in an extremely botanical garden, and surrounded by a low wall. The one at the front, Forsythe told Wiki, was the dispensary, and that at the back was the place he had called his “factory,” while the third, which was set on the other side of a brook, was the house where he and his family lived.

When they came around the end of the wall, it was to see a boy, aged about seventeen and with bristling red hair, standing knee-deep in the stream. He was scrubbing pieces of equipment, including a pestle and mortar. They walked onto the bridge that crossed the stream, stopped, and looked down.

Forsythe said with disgust, “What was in them basins and stuff? Ain't you worried about gettin' poison in that creek?”

The boy looked up, his expression resentful but unsurprised. He said, “That mix-up weren't my fault, Lieutenant. I never touched the mortar.”

“So how d'you reckon it happened, huh?”

The boy shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Was Mrs. Dixon there when it happened?”

Mrs. Dixon, Wiki remembered, was the gossipy woman who had bought the strychnine for mice. The boy said, “Yup.”

“Wa'al, if you didn't do it, she might've spoke up in your defense.”

“Doubt it,” the boy said in his offhand way.

“D'you know where she is?”

“At home, if she ain't in town shopping. Can't think of nowhere else.”

“What about your father?”

“In the dispensary, of course. What else did you think?”

Forsythe looked as if he would have liked to deliver the boy a clip about the ear, but instead he growled, “Wa'al, then,” and headed for the building closest to the road, with Wiki close behind.

The sign outside the porch read
E
LISHA
T
WEEDIE
, D
RUGGIST
& A
POTHECARY
,
and was hung from the traditional red and white striped barber's pole. It looked extremely odd in the tropical setting, and once they had crossed the veranda and gone inside, it was like entering a different world.

The place was dim, and smelled of aromatic spirits. Posters and shallow glass-fronted cases displaying spectacles and small items of household medical equipment hung from the walls on either side of the customers' area of the shop. At the far end, Dr. Tweedie was standing behind a wide counter that extended from one side of the room to the other, blocking him off from his clients. He was wearing a leather blacksmith's apron, and had evidently been making up medicine at a marble-topped bench set against the back wall, because his hands were stained. The marble was very scarred and discolored, evidence of years of use. On the wall above it, racks held glass jars, many of them wondrously shaped. Some of the exotic contents were strangely colored, while others were a crystalline white.

Wiki, who found
pakeha
glass almost as fascinating as
pakeha
guns, studied the jars with great interest. On their labels words like
and
were printed in elaborate script. The bottle of white strychnine powder, he noted, was full. On the side walls, wide shelves stacked with items of equipment were neatly labeled on their forward edges. There were gaps in the ranks, and undoubtedly the utensils the boy was washing in the creek would be placed there, once cleaned.

Like his son, Dr. Tweedie looked neither pleased nor surprised to see them. He said, “How can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“I'm fine,” said Forsythe, his tone rather aggressive. He indicated Wiki, and said, “'Tis Wiki Coffin, here, what wants to consult.”

“He does?” Dr. Tweedie tipped his head a little on one side, studying Wiki with an air of grave curiosity.

“Aye,” said Wiki, and put the box on the counter. Taking off the lid, he said, “Could you tell me what killed this rat?”

The apothecary picked up the rat by the tail. He peered at the body as it slowly revolved before his face, and then dropped it back in the box.

“It was poisoned,” he said in his Scotch accent.

“With strychnine?”

“Probably, though it's hard to tell. It's a ship rat,” he added.

Wiki wondered how he knew that, but instead of asking said, “In court, yesterday, I heard you say that the bismuth medicine was contaminated with strychnine because you inadvertently used the wrong mortar.”

“Aye, that's so,” said the apothecary, looking perfectly calm about it.

“But the analyst testified that there was too little poison in the mixture to kill a person. Would there have been enough to kill a rat—if, for instance, some of the medicine was spilled, and the rat lapped it up?”

Dr. Tweedie frowned. He looked at the rat again, and then back at Wiki. “It's possible,” he admitted.

Forsythe, who was shifting from foot to foot and scowling down at the rat, said, “How long would it take this rat to die from strychnine poisoning?”

“About a week—or even longer, if the dose was small.”

“That long?” exclaimed Wiki, appalled.

“It's not a fast-acting poison—not like others I could name.”

“Ah,” said Forsythe, and nodded as if this confirmed something. Then he lost interest, going over to the pharmaceutical posters and reading their ominous messages with his eyebrows going up and down.

Wiki asked, “Would the rat have had to drink a lot of the bismuth to get a fatal dose?”

“Definitely,” said Tweedie, and nodded.

Somehow, thought Wiki, it was hard to see it happening, because Jack Winter, for all his faults, was too clean and tidy to leave a puddle of spilled medicine around for long. Trying to think of an alternative, he queried, “What about the pills? Could eating one of those kill a rat?” Dr. Olliver, he remembered, had suggested that a rat might have eaten the pill that was lost under the credenza.

“What pills?” Tweedie stared. “The pills Dr. Olliver made up? Good God, my lad, those pills would do no harm to man nor beast!”

“Even though they contained opium?”

“I assure you they were safe.”

“The analyst—Dr. Ohlsson—mentioned something about the pills being
finished.
What did he mean?”

“Once the pills are made, it's usual to coat them with something to keep them from sticking together in the bottle, and to make them easier to swallow. Common flour makes a nice cheap coating, though carriage varnish is popular. Men who can afford it ask to have their pills finished in gold leaf.”

“Gold?”

“The vanity of man prevails even in the extremity of illness,” Tweedie informed him dryly.

“Good heavens,” said Wiki, wondering greatly. Then he went on, “The analyst said something about licorice root.”

“You have an excellent memory, my boy. Dr. Olliver's pills were finished with licorice root powder, which is an excellent coating for anything containing Peruvian bark, as it goes very sticky in the heat.”

“What about the carbonate of ammonia? Would that kill a rat?”

Tweedie laughed, and shook his head.

“So, if the rat was poisoned by any of Astronomer Grimes's medicine, it would have to be the bismuth?”

“Definitely.”

“Even though it was so dilute?”

“The rat might have eaten the bismuth several times. Strychnine is a cumulative poison—with repeated applications the amount of strychnine in the body builds up until there is enough in the system to finish the job.”

“It's hard to believe that this rat was given more than one chance to get at the bismuth,” Wiki objected.

“It's much more likely that someone laid poison for rats,” Dr. Tweedie agreed. “Do you have many rats on your ship?”

Thousands,
thought Wiki, and said, “The ship is being smoked for rats right now. While we were on passage the steward threatened to lay poison, but if he did do it, it certainly didn't work.”

“There may be more dead rats in the bilges than you think.”

“That's possible.” Wiki remembered what it had been like down in the black bowels of the ship. “But that means the steward had the wherewithal to add poison to the medicine,” he pointed out.

Dr. Tweedie exclaimed, “That's ridiculous! You know perfectly well it was my fault that the medicine was contaminated—and that it was Robert Festin who was charged with the crime, not the steward!”

Wiki watched him, feeling surprised. With the mix-up of the mortars on his conscience, Dr. Tweedie should have been uneasy, awkward, and anxious, but instead, he had been remarkably calm. Now, for some reason, he looked rattled.

He said casually, “Of course you're right—it was Festin who was charged, and not Jack Winter. However, the fact remains that if you hadn't confessed to the mix-up of mortars, the court could have concluded that
someone
added strychnine to the mixture, but didn't know enough to do it properly. The intention of murder would have been assumed.”

Tweedie hesitated, and then said reluctantly, “I suppose it's possible that the coroner could have come to that conclusion.”

“Other men would have kept quiet instead of confessing to something that was so likely to have a bad effect on business.”

The apothecary went red. “I would have been boneheaded not to come forward! The juicy story that a patient had died after taking my medicine would have gone around the port in no time at all, and got a bit more embellished every time it was told. As it is, I might lose some business—but if I had kept silent and my blunder had been discovered later, it would have looked a great deal worse!”

And Mrs. Dixon, the woman who had bought the poison, was a gossip. As a frequent customer, she might have unconsciously noticed that Tweedie's lad had put the mortar in the wrong place, and then remembered it later.

Wiki looked at the rat. It lay there in the box, arched in its last agony.

“And strychnine
is
a poison,” he said slowly.

“A very active poison, as everyone knows,” Dr. Tweedie grimly agreed.

Fifteen

It wasn't until some moments after they had walked out of the apothecary shop that Wiki realized that his memory wasn't so wonderful, after all, because he had forgotten the dead rat. However, he did not turn back. He and Forsythe strode on in silence along the hot, dusty road, and then the southerner said, “That rat got poisoned before we got to Rio, and the bismuth ain't nothin' to do with it.”

Wiki frowned. “What gives you that idea?”

“It took a week to die, and it's been dead for at least four days—any goddamned fool could see that. So it was poisoned eleven days ago, and we've only been here for six.”

“So you, too, think that Jack Winter must have laid poison for rats?”

“Nope,” said Forsythe with an air of utter certainty. “Jack Winter put strychnine on those top two fish, and the rat got at the remains. Then it staggered around for the next few days, until it finally dropped dead.”

“So what was his motive?” Wiki inquired dryly.

“I told you, he wanted to get at Wilkes and Smith.”

“As you said yourself, he would have used a dose of salts.”

“Mebbe so, but I still reckon Jack Winter was
bloody
lucky that Tweedie 'fessed up about the mix-up with the mortars.”

“Oddly enough,” Wiki said thoughtfully, “Tweedie was very insistent that it was Robert Festin—
not
Jack Winter—whose skin he saved.”

“Wa'al, you told me that Festin is famous round here.”

“And the strychnine got into the medicine
somehow,
so Tweedie must have been telling the truth—but why did the coroner come so easily to the conclusion that he wasn't guilty of misadventure? After all, he had confessed to it! He should have been tried for manslaughter, even if it was obvious that the verdict was going to be a not guilty one, just to satisfy the letter of the law.”