The Pot of Curare
After leaving the Chief Constable in the village, Wendover took the
road to Whistlefield. Sir Clinton’s obvious anxiety had impressed him;
and he drove fast. He was not altogether pleased at having Ardsley
thrust upon him as a companion; for he disliked the toxicologist.
Whenever he saw Ardsley’s grim, clean-shaven face he had a vision of
tortured animals, and a spasm of repugnance attacked him. His
knowledge of the Vivisection Act was negligible, and his imagination
pictured helpless beasts strapped to tables and writhing under the
knife of the vivisector. For politeness’ sake, he forced himself to
make conversation.
“It’s to be hoped we can manage this for Driffield without a hitch,”
he said. “He seems to be afraid of leaving the stuff lying loose. You
can find it all right, I suppose?”
“I can go straight to the place where it used to be kept,” Ardsley
assured him coldly, paying no attention to the speculative part of
Wendover’s speech.
He seemed to feel no desire to continue the conversation; and Wendover
felt that he had suffered a snub.
“Surly devil!” he commented inwardly. “He won’t even meet one
half-way.”
He had no time to brood over the matter, however, for very soon they
reached Whistlefield.
“You’d better do the talking,” Ardsley advised, as they got out of the
car and approached the door of the house. Wendover nodded in agreement
and rang the bell. When the maid appeared he asked if Ernest Shandon
was disengaged. The maid seemed doubtful.
“He’s in the study, sir, and he left word that he wasn’t to be
disturbed.”
Wendover thought of asking for the secretary; but it struck him that
since they had come to commandeer the drug, it would be best to see
one of the family. After all, it was private property, even if it was
dangerous stuff.
“Is Mr. Hawkhurst at home?”
The maid showed them into a room and asked them to wait until she
could find him.
“If he isn’t, then ask Miss Hawkhurst to see us for a moment if she
can,” Wendover directed.
In a few moments, Arthur Hawkhurst entered the room, looking rather
surprised when he saw who his two visitors were.
“Fairly travelling round and seeing the country, aren’t you, Wendover?
Morbid curiosity, I think, haunting the scene of crime like this.”
He nodded to Ardsley. Quite obviously the double murder had not
affected his spirits to any extent. Wendover was not much surprised.
The boy had never been a favourite with either of his uncles; and
though he seemed lacking in decent respect for the victims, Wendover
put it down to Arthur’s slightly unbalanced mentality.
“I’d have preferred a shade less cheeriness, I must say,” he thought
to himself, “but I suppose it would have been mere hypocrisy in his
case, and one must make some allowance for his brain being a bit
abnormal just now.”
He came to the point at once.
“We’ve been sent up by Sir Clinton Driffield to see if something is in
that museum of your uncle’s. He wants to know if it’s been removed by
any chance.”
“What the devil does he know about the museum?” demanded Arthur. “He
never saw it when he was here in the afternoon. What does he want with
it anyway? And what is it that he does want? Does he think one of the
blokes upstairs had offended one of the Mayan idols and got a settler
by way of squaring the account?”
“No,” Wendover said, hastily. “Nothing of that sort.”
“Well, what is it then? I’ll get it for you.”
“Don’t trouble, please. Dr. Ardsley knows the look of it and it will
be easiest for us to go to the museum and look round ourselves.”
“Oh, indeed!” Arthur grew distinctly hostile. “You seem to take a good
deal on yourselves. Why not wait till you’re asked, before wandering
about in people’s houses?”
Wendover felt that the matter was becoming awkward. The boy seemed to
have flown into a passion, one of these storms of emotion to which he
had been subject since his illness. And then another thought crossed
Wendover’s mind, though he tried to dismiss it. Why should Arthur be
so anxious to prevent them entering the museum? Curare had not been
mentioned. Surely young Hawkhurst could have no suspicion of what they
wanted; and yet he seemed determined to put difficulties in the way.
It was with great relief that he saw Sylvia come into the room. After
greeting her, he turned away from Arthur and explained the matter to
the girl.
“Of course. Come along at once,” she invited them, ignoring Arthur’s
lowering face. “Anything we can do to clear up this miserable affair
ought to be done.”
She led them through the house to the museum. It was, as Ardsley had
said, mainly filled with rubbish—odds and ends which might possibly
call up recollections in the mind which had gathered the stuff, but of
very little interest to a casual visitor. It was a miscellany of
souvenirs rather than a museum; and the items seemed to be lying on
the shelves without any system whatever.
Ardsley evidently knew exactly where to go. Leaving the others, he
moved across to one of the cases on the wall, opened it, and took down
from a shelf a little pot of unbaked earthenware.
Arthur had followed him suspiciously.
“What’s that you’re doing?” he demanded, abruptly.
“The Chief Constable asked me to find this for him,” Ardsley replied,
examining the material in the pot as he spoke.
“You’re not taking any of it, are you?”
Young Hawkhurst put the question with obvious distrust. He had his
eyes fixed on the toxicologist’s hands, as though he feared that
Ardsley might remove some of the stuff under their very eyes.
“No,” Ardsley retorted, with a certain sharpness in his tone. “I’ve
nothing further to do with it.”
He handed the little vessel to Wendover as he spoke; and seemed to
dissociate himself from any further connection with the matter.
Arthur’s eyes fixed themselves on the pot. He was still, apparently,
disturbed by the way things were going.
“I don’t care about this way of doing things,” he complained. “Here
you come along. For all we know you’ve no authority whatever behind
you. And you go straight to this stuff and want to take it away with
you, by the look of it. I know what it is. It’s curare—Indian
arrow-poison. And you propose calmly to walk off with it! We can’t
have that sort of thing. It’s dangerous stuff. You’ve no right to take
it: I object.”
Wendover tried to throw oil on the waters.
“We aren’t going to take it away,” he explained, turning to Sylvia.
“Sir Clinton asked us to pick it out—that’s all. He’ll be here shortly
and you can learn from himself what he intends to do. But in any case,
I think it ought to be in a safer place than this. As you say”—he
turned again to Arthur—“it’s dangerous stuff.”
Sylvia agreed immediately.
“It was rather careless to leave it about like that if it’s
poisonous,” she confirmed.
Wendover’s mind had been busy in the meanwhile. He had noted for Sir
Clinton’s benefit that Arthur evidently knew the nature of the stuff,
although there was no label on the specimen. If Arthur knew, then the
chances were that other people knew also. He glanced at the contents
of the pot in his hand, and he thought he could detect that some of
the stuff had been removed. The original surface seemed to have been
disturbed. Then he remembered that Ardsley had volunteered an account
of how he had run short of curare and had taken some of Roger’s
specimen. That might account for the disturbance. Another thought
occurred to him, and he asked permission to inspect the museum.
“Do you mind if I look round the shelves?” he asked Sylvia. “I’ve
never been in this place before, you know. Your uncle seems to have
collected a lot of specimens.”
Sylvia accompanied him in his tour of inspection; but she could throw
little light on the various objects.
“Hardly anything’s labelled, as you see,” she pointed out.
“Once or twice I offered to label them all for Uncle Roger; for it
seems so silly to have a lot of things there with no explanation,
doesn’t it?”
They moved down the room, scanning the shelves. Ardsley remained near
the door, grimly aloof from the rest of the group. Arthur hovered
uncertainly about the room, evidently keeping his eye on the visitors
as though troubled by suspicions of their motives.
“This is a dreadful business about my uncles,” Sylvia said in a low
voice, when she and Wendover had moved away from the others. “I was
terribly shocked when I got back here and heard what had happened. I’m
not going to pretend I was very fond of either of them—they always
seemed to me different from the rest of us, somehow—but I liked them
in a way; and it was horrible to come back and find that while I’d
been enjoying myself in the afternoon, they’d been . . .”
She hesitated, evidently disliking the word—“murdered.”
Wendover nodded understandingly. He quite appreciated her feelings.
Neither of the dead men had been of the type that would attract the
admiration or even the respect of a girl like Sylvia. Their
disappearance would leave no real gap in her world. But after all,
they were relations of hers and the sudden incursion of violence and
death into her family was bound to leave its impression.
“You’re not frightened, are you?” he asked.
“No, of course not. But it seems a frightful affair, doesn’t it? It
leaves one dazed, somehow—like a bad dream. Only one doesn’t wake up.
We all seem to be going about trying to persuade ourselves that the
world’s just the same as ever; but somehow I don’t seem to succeed.
It’s too horrible for that.”
Wendover did his best to soothe her. Behind the pretence of
indifference he could see that she was badly shaken. Quite obviously
she was trying to minimise her feelings so as not to make him
uncomfortable. They continued their tour of the collection, and she
tried to interest herself in explaining to him the various objects in
it.
When they had completed their inspection, Wendover suppressed a sigh
of relief.
“Well,” he said to himself, “there are no poisoned arrows there, at
any rate. This pot of stuff seems to be the only danger-point in the
whole lot.”
He bent his efforts to infusing at least a semblance of harmony into
the company, but it was not a very successful attempt. Sylvia seconded
him to the best of her ability; but Arthur still maintained his
suspicious attitude; and Ardsley seemed disinclined to emerge from his
state of unfriendly neutrality. It was a relief to them all when the
door of the museum opened and Ernest Shandon ushered in the Chief
Constable. Stenness followed close on their heels.
“This is Sir Clinton Driffield, Miss Hawkhurst,” Wendover hastened to
say, when he remembered that they had not met in the afternoon. Sir
Clinton bowed to the girl and then, with a word of apology, he turned
to Wendover.
“Got the stuff?” he demanded; and his face cleared when Wendover held
up the little earthenware pot. A glance at Ardsley confirmed that it
was the right thing; and Sir Clinton seemed to pay no further
attention to it at the moment.
“I’m afraid I disturbed your uncle, Miss Hawkhurst. He was busy in the
study, and I was rather loath to interrupt him; but he very kindly
came out at once.”
Ernest, in the background, fumbled for a moment with his eyeglasses.
“I was very busy,” he admitted. “But of course I wasn’t so busy that I
couldn’t stop. In fact, I was just turning over papers and going
through the safe with Stenness. It wasn’t really important, or at
least not so important that it couldn’t be put aside for a time, and
Sir Clinton said he wasn’t going to stay more than a few minutes. So I
just left things, of course. I’d just been looking over Roger’s will.
We happened to come across it on the top of a pile of things in the
safe. I couldn’t understand it—to tell you the truth. These lawyers
are terrible fellows for putting in long words—like ‘hereinafter’ and
‘heritable’ and ‘moveable’ and ‘accretion,’ and so on. And all about
‘survivor or survivors’ and ‘beneficiaries’ and a lot of complicated
things besides. If it hadn’t been for Stenness I don’t think I could
have made out what it was all about.”
He blinked helplessly at the group, and then continued with a tinge of
pride in his tone.
“Roger made me one of his trustees. Neville was another of them. And
there’s a third, the head of his firm of lawyers, I think, or at any
rate, a lawyer.”
Then, in a rather discouraged voice:
“I suppose that’ll mean a lot of bother—signing papers and all that
sort of thing.”
Sir Clinton waited patiently for the end of Ernest’s speech; and then
he came to the point at once.
“If you’re an executor that simplifies matters, Mr. Shandon. I want to
take away this article here”—he indicated the pot in Wendover’s
hand—“but only for a day or two, probably. You’ll get it back again in
due course. It’s only a loan, you understand.”
Ernest evidently felt the dignity of his new position. He put out his
hand for the pot, examined it carefully through his glasses, then
handed it over to Sir Clinton, though with a certain reluctance.
“Have I any right to part with it, Stenness? You know what the will
says.”
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, Mr. Shandon,” the secretary
reassured him. “Besides, if the Chief Constable wants it in connection
with this afternoon’s affair”—he glanced interrogatively at Sir
Clinton—“I’ve no doubt he could get power to take it, whether you want
to give it up or not.”
Ernest seemed to feel that he had got into deeper waters than he cared
about.
“Well, if Stenness says that, I suppose it’s all right. He understood
the will and he ought to know. He explained it all to me very
carefully just a few minutes ago, so he knows what’s what. I could
understand him all right. Why can’t lawyers use plain language like
Stenness, instead of wrapping it all up in ‘hereinafters’ and
‘aforesaids’? It’s a stupid sort of way to write. I can’t think what
they do it for.”
Rather to Wendover’s surprise, Sir Clinton showed no great eagerness
to be gone. He pulled from his pocket the tin box which had been found
in the Maze and slowly removed the cover.
“You’re an expert with air-guns, I think, Mr. Hawkhurst?” he asked
pleasantly, as though appealing to an authority. “Would you mind
having a look at these things and telling me what you make of them?
Don’t touch the points,” he added quickly. “They’re very dangerous.”
Arthur Hawkhurst had been listening with a frown to Sir Clinton’s
negotiations for the pot of curare; but he seemed to be flattered by
the Chief Constable’s direct appeal to him. He came forward, took the
box in his hand, and examined the contents minutely.
“May I take one out to look at it?”
“Of course—but be careful,” Sir Clinton agreed.
Arthur removed one of the darts and inspected it.
“They seem to be just ordinary-pattern air-gun darts. They’d fit any
of the guns we have. But someone seems to have been monkeying with
them—boring holes in them and filling them up with some dirt or other.
And the feathering’s all filthy, too.”
He completed his examination and handed the box back to Sir Clinton.
“Anybody else claim to be an expert?” asked the Chief Constable.
Sylvia looked at the tiny missiles with a shudder.
“They’re just ordinary darts so far as I can see,” she said. “And was
it one of these things that killed my uncles? They seem such harmless
little things. I’ve fired them often and often at targets myself. One
would never dream they could be deadly.”
Sir Clinton closed the box and put it down on the mantel-piece behind
him. He seemed suddenly to have been struck by a fresh idea.
“You said ‘any of the guns we have,’ Mr. Hawkhurst. I’d like to know
how many air-guns you have on the premises.”
Arthur looked at him distrustfully.
“I can’t tell you on the spot,” he admitted, grudgingly. “We have half
a dozen that I could lay my hands on; but we’ve got more than that
lying about somewhere or other. They get left in odd places. The
gardeners sometimes use them for shooting rats for amusement and so
on, and one never knows where the guns are till one asks for them.”
Sir Clinton seemed rather taken aback.
“You seem to have a regular armoury,” he said.
“I’m keen on air-guns,” Arthur explained. “You’re not going to take
_them_ away, are you?”
Sir Clinton waved the suggestion aside at once.
“Of course not. I only asked out of curiosity. I knew you were
interested.”
Arthur seemed to be relieved by this.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said in a much more cordial tone. “So long
as you leave me one of them, it’ll do all I want.”
“Now, Dr. Ardsley, if you’ll just show me where this pot used to
stand, I think we shall be able to go,” Sir Clinton said, turning to
another matter and dismissing the air-gun question.
At this, Ernest came forward.
“I think I can show you where it stood,” he volunteered. “I remember
Roger bringing it back from South Africa. He used to keep it on a
shelf in his study in his last house, I remember; the third shelf from
the top, to the right of the door. Then when he came here, he had such
a lot of stuff that he’d collected that he found he’d got to make a
museum of it; so he put it all together in this room. I’ve been over
it all with him—I helped him to arrange it, I remember. But it seemed
to me very dull. Not a bit interesting. But, of course, if you like, I
could show it to you and tell you all about it. Perhaps it might
interest you, though I found it dull. People’s tastes differ so much.
One never can tell, can one?”
Ardsley had paid no attention to Ernest’s flood of information. He had
gone down to the proper shelf and now he pointed out the empty space
to Sir Clinton. The Chief Constable examined the place carefully, but
said nothing.
At length he went to the windows of the room and inspected the
catches.
“Anyone could have got in here without much trouble,” he commented.
“You don’t seem much afraid of burglars, Mr. Shandon.”
“No,” Ernest admitted, refixing his eyeglasses with care and looking
wisely at the window-fastenings. “You see, we’ve never had any
burglary here. It may seem strange, for of course Whistlefield’s a bit
isolated and it might be a good place to burgle. I never burgled
myself, you know, so I don’t really know about these things. There’s a
lot of silver, of course,” he added. “Perhaps it is strange that we
never had a burglary. Now I come to think of it, it would be quite an
easy house to get into. We ought to have burglar alarms put on.
Really, things are an awful bother. Can you recommend a good
burglar-alarm, Sir Clinton?”
The Chief Constable deprecated the proposed task with a smile.
“Really, Mr. Shandon, I’ve had no particular experience. You’d better
have a look at a few and choose the one you think most satisfactory.”
Ernest’s face expressed as clearly as print his inward comment: “More
trouble!”
“I don’t know, Sir Clinton; perhaps I’d better get some. But then, you
know,” he added with a touch of relief, “we’ve never had a burglary
yet. Hardly worth while fitting alarms, perhaps. It’s such a nuisance
getting the things, and then getting workmen up to fit them—turn the
whole place upside down and all that—and then having to remember to
set them at night before one goes to bed. You don’t think it’s worth
while, do you?” he ended, hopefully.
Sir Clinton shook his head.
“You’re in charge now, Mr. Shandon, you know. You must do what you
think best yourself.”
He turned to Ardsley and Wendover.
“I think we must be getting on the road again.”
They took their leave and got into Wendover’s car again.
“We’ll drop you at your house,” said Sir Clinton to the toxicologist.
“It was very good of you to take all this trouble to help us. I feel a
good deal easier in my mind now that I’ve got this.”
He tapped the little jar of curare which he had brought away with him.