The Documents in the Case (29 page)

Sir James handed me a glass cylinder, filled with a colourless solution. I sniffed at it, but it had no smell.

‘I shouldn’t taste it if I were you,’ said Sir James, a little grimly. He struck a match and lit a Bunsen burner, the flame of which played upon a small mass of something held above it by a platinum projection.

‘Sodium chloride,’ said Waters. ‘In fact, not to make unnecessary mystery about it, common salt. Shall I switch off?’

He snapped off the lights, and we were left with only the sodium flame. In that green, sick glare a face floated close to mine — a corpse-face — livid, waxen, stamped with decay — sharp-shadowed in the nostrils and under the orbits — Harrison’s face, as I had seen it in ‘The Shack’, opening a black mouth of complaint.

‘Spectacular, isn’t it?’ said Sir James, pleasantly, and I pulled myself together and realised that I must look just as ghastly to him as he to me. But for the moment the face had been Harrison’s, and from that moment Lathom was nothing to me any more.

Sir James settled down to his experiment with comfortable deliberation. He placed the cylinder containing the solution in the polariscope, adjusted the eyepiece and looked. Then he turned to Waters.

‘So far,’ he said, dryly, ‘the laws of Nature appear to hold good. Do you want to see?’

‘I should like Mr Munting to see,’ said Waters. ‘Here you are. Wait a minute. We’ll take the cylinder out for a moment. Come along. You shall do it yourself.’

My heart was thumping. To my excited imagination it seemed to shake the table as I took Sir James’s place before the polariscope.

‘We’ll start,’ said Waters, ‘with the analyser parallel to the polariser. Right you are. You see your beam of light? Now here’s the adjustment. Turn it yourself.’

I turned it, and the light vanished.

‘Hold on to it,’ said Waters, cheerfully, ‘so that you can be sure there’s no hanky-panky. I’m putting the muscarine solution in again. Now then!’

As he slipped the glass cylinder into place the circle of light returned.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I see it.’

‘Convincing demonstration of a miracle,’ said Waters, ‘and the lopsidedness of things in general. That’s all right, then. Now we’ll have a look at the stuff that killed Harrison. No. Respect for our governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. We’ll let Sir James have a go first.’

Sir James, with a shrug, took my place at the instrument. Waters put his hand on my arm.

With maddening deliberation, the analyst set the first cylinder carefully on one side and took up the other. My mouth was dry as I watched him. He put the cylinder into the polariscope and looked. There was a pause. Then a grunt. Then his hand came up, feeling for the adjustment. There was another pause and an exclamation of impatience. Then his eye was jerked back from the eyepiece and his head peered round to examine the exterior of the instrument. Waters’s grip on my arm became painful in its tightness. Sir James’s hand came round again, feeling, this time, for the cylinder. He took it out, held it up, looked at it and replaced it with very great care. He looked again, and there was a long silence.

Then came Sir James’s voice, queer and puzzled.

‘I say, Waters. There’s something funny here. Just have a look, will you?’

With a final squeeze, Waters loosened his grip of me and took Sir James’s place before the instrument. He moved the cylinder back and forth once or twice and said, in a judicial tone, ‘Well!’

‘What do you make of that?’ said Sir James.

‘One of two things,’ said Waters, briskly, ‘either it’s a suspension of the laws of Nature, or this muscarine of yours is optically inactive.’

‘What do you suggest?’ demanded Sir James.

‘I suggest,’ said Waters, ‘that this is a synthetic preparation in racemic form.’

‘But how could—?’ Sir James broke off, and in the corpse-light I watched his face as he revolved the possibilities in his mind. ‘You know what that means, Waters.’

‘I might hazard a guess.’

‘Murder.’

‘Yes, murder.’

There was another pause, in which the silence seemed to become absolutely solid. Then Sir James said, very slowly:

‘The man was murdered. My God, this is a lesson to me, Waters. Never to overlook anything. Who would ever have thought—? But that’s no excuse. I shall have to — I must verify it first, though. Do the preparations again. But — what put you on to this?’

‘Let’s go and get a drink,’ said Waters, ‘and we’ll tell you all about it. You’d better have a look at this first, Mr Munting.’

I looked through the instrument. Dead blackness. But if the thing had shown all the colours of the rainbow, I should have been in no state to draw any conclusion from it. I sat stunned while somebody switched on the lights, extinguished the Bunsen burner and locked all the apparatus up again.

Then I found myself straggling after the other two, while they talked about something or other. I had an idea that I came into it, and presently Waters turned back and thrust his arm into mine.

‘What you want,’ he said, ‘is a double Scotch, and no soda.’

I don’t very well remember getting home, but that, I think, was not due to the double Scotch, but to bewilderment of mind. I do remember waking my wife up and blurting out my story in a kind of confused misery, which must have perplexed and alarmed her. And I remember saying that it was quite useless to think of going to bed, because I should never sleep. And I remember waking this morning very late, with the feeling that someone was dead.

I have written all this down. I don’t know whether it is necessary, because, of course, Sir James will be doing something about it by now. But I promised a statement, and here it is.

One other thing has happened. As I was reading it through to see if it was coherent, the telephone rang. My wife answered it. I heard her say:

‘Yes? — Yes? — Yes? — who is it speaking, please? — Oh, yes — I’m not sure — I’ll go and see — Will you hold the line a minute?’

She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, almost in a whisper:

‘It’s Mr Lathom, asking to speak to you.’

‘Oh, God!’ I said.

If I warned him now — there would still be time — and the man had been at school with me — and we had lived in the same rooms — and he was a great painter — something would be lost to the world if they hanged Lathom.

Elizabeth did nothing. She stood with the receiver in her hand.

‘Tell him—’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell him I am out.’

She turned back to the instrument.

‘I am so sorry, my husband is out. Can I give any message? No, very well. You’ll ring up again. Good-night.’

She came over and stood by me.

‘Elizabeth, tell me, am I an unutterable sweep?’

‘No. There was nothing else you could do.’

I want to know whether Lathom knows the sort of woman he did it for. I want to know how much she really knows or suspects. I want to know whether, when she wrote that letter which drove him to do it, she was deceiving him or herself. I want to know whether, in all these months, he has been thinking that she was worth it, or whether, in a ghastly disillusionment, he has realised that the only real part of her was vulgar and bad, and the rest merely the brilliant refraction of himself. What is the good? Whatever he realised, he must have gone on telling himself she was worth it, or he would have gone mad.

Perry would say that this was God’s judgement. Life outraged, vindicating itself against the powers of death and hell. Or no, Perry expressly refuses to recognises judgements. Besides, if Lathom had known just a little more about chemistry, he could have defeated the judgement. Ignorance is no excuse in law. Nor in the law of Nature. Well, we know that. All the same, if I were in Lathom’s place, I would hate to have been tripped up by a miserable asymmetric molecule.

I hope Lathom will not ring up again.

1. Note by Paul Harrison
   

This statement concludes the evidence, which I have to lay before you. You have already, I understand, received a brief communication from Sir James Lubbock, confirming the account of his experiment with the synthetic muscarine. Munting’s narrative is of some value as indicating the lines on which such an experimental proof, though unusual and somewhat technical in character, might be presented to a jury of reasonably intelligent persons.

The unsatisfactory part of the case is, as you will see, that which concerns the woman, Margaret Harrison. As the letter No. 46 shows, she has taken pains to protect herself against any suspicion of complicity. Although, morally, she is quite equally guilty with Lathom, and though I have personally no doubt that the letter is an impudent hypocrisy, it will probably be difficult to bring home to her a guilty knowledge of the actual commission of the crime. That she instigated and inspired it is, to my mind, certain; but Lathom will strenuously deny this, and I have failed to secure any reliable evidence against her. I trust that you will use every possible endeavour to prevent this abominable woman from getting off scot-free.

I re-open this parcel to add that I have received a message from Mrs Cutts. Lathom, she tells me, has given a week’s notice to his landlord. This may mean everything or nothing, but prompt action seems advisable.

Sir Gilbert Pugh, Director of Public Prosecutions, turned the last page of the manuscript, and sat for a few minutes in silence. Mentally he watched his expert witnesses displaying an asymmetric molecule to a jury of honest tradesmen, under a withering fire of commentary by the counsel for the defence.

He sighed. This sort of case always meant a lot of work and bother.

‘Simmons!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get me the Chief Commissioner on the phone.’

[Pinned to the portfolio at some subsequent date.]

Extract from the ‘Morning Express’ of November 30th, 1930

MANATON MURDERER HANGED

The execution took place in Exeter Gaol, at 8 a.m. today, of Harwood Lathom, who was convicted in October of the murder of George Harrison at ‘The Shack’, Manaton, by poisoning him with muscarine.

THE END

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Dorothy L. Sayers: The Documents in the Case 1

2011 by SET