Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

“No one is certain. At least three hours at a guess. It’s been maybe two since I first saw them and the bodies were cooling by then.”

“Best I straighten them, if I may? Much longer and we’ll have to wait until they unstiffen again.”

“If it will make no difference to what we might learn about how they died…”

“You’ve noted how they’re lying and can say so if asked? And that their eyes be closed. Nobody did that, did they?”

Thomas far outranked her in life but she had a greater skill than he at this, and they both accepted the equality that gave them. So her interruption did not matter and he said simply, “I’ve noted, and no, nobody closed their eyes.”

“That’s enough then. Cleaning them can come later,” and briskly, firmly, she straightened both bodies out of their sprawl, then moved on to young William, still curled into his nest of cushions. “You’ve noted him, too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.” She straightened the boy and rolled him onto his back, moved and prodded and did with him much as she had with his parents, before sitting back on her heels and saying up at Thomas, “His eyes be open, you see. That’s the usual way with dead folk that didn’t die easy.”

“You’re saying his parents died easily and he didn’t? That they didn’t all three die the same way?”

“Aye. Him and her, they died the same as each other, surely.” Mistress Wayn nodded to the elder Shellastons. “The boy, he went otherwise. I can smell it on him. He took dwale would be my guess, only I’m not much guessing. It’s good for some things, carefully used, but only outwardly. Taken inwardly, it takes not much to kill.”

“Poison,” Thomas said. “You’re saying the boy was poisoned. What about his parents? They had to have been poisoned, too.”

“You’d think it,” Mistress Wayn said. “It would seem the most likely but they’re chancey things, poisons.” She sounded almost regretful over it. “What kills one person only makes another sick and there’s no way to know beforehand which way it will be. That I can still smell on him -” She nodded at young William. “- tells me he had enough to be almost certain of killing him, being a child. Why he didn’t taste it as he started to drink it down, that’s a question I don’t have answer to. As for his parents and what they drank…” She shrugged.

“You don’t think it was the same thing?”

“There’s no smell of it and it would have to have been more than the amount that killed the boy to kill them quick and quietly. No, whatever they drank down was different, I’d say. I don’t know what. It’s that they made no outcry and show no sign of suffering I don’t understand. Poisons hurt. I’d guess by the way the boy was curled in on himself he was hurting when he died, but with them it’s more like they fell to sleep and died without waking up.”

“There are potions that do that. Bring on a sleep so deep it turns into death.”

“Aye.” She still sounded unsatisfied. “But why one kind for them and another for the boy? Why weren’t they drinking all the same?”

“Wine made the boy sick,” Thomas said absently.

“So two different bottles had to be poisoned.” She pushed a half-full, stoppered one lying near young William with her foot. “But still, why two different poisons? And he didn’t just fall to sleep, neither,” she added with a nod at the boy.

Thomas noticed there was no nonsense about the Devil from her. To her it was plain that poison had killed these three and, like him, she had no doubt that poison was a thing that came from a human hand.

Or poisons, it must have been, according to her.

Different poisons by different hands?

Three murders planned – Master and Mistress Shellaston’s separate from their son’s – by two different people with two different poisons, with it only being chance they happened together?

Or…

A sudden, ugly guess rose up in Thomas’s mind.

Something of it must have shown in his face because Mistress Wayn asked sharply, “What?”

He shook his head. “I need more questions answered first, before I say.”

But at least now he had a better thought of what the questions were.

An hour later, as the day drew in to grey twilight, when he had asked some of those questions and had answers, he gathered in a sideroom of the inn bespoken from the innkeeper for the sake of privacy with Master Hugh, Giles, the other servants, and Mistress Wayn, along with the innkeeper and a few village men for witness. Thomas had not put it that way but had merely asked the innkeeper if there were a few worthy men in the village who might care to join them for hot, spiced cider and talk this cold evening. That he meant to guide the talk he did not say.

After Mistress Wayn had overseen the moving of the bodies respectfully to her house for cleaning and shrouding, he and Giles, without asking Master Hugh’s leave – and by his expression he would not have given it if asked – had searched through the carriage, generally seeking, finding specifically, and now asking, “Bartel, the wine Master and Mistress Shellaston were drinking, where did it come from?”

“It was his own. Being a wine merchant, he could lay hands on good stuff when he wanted.”

“Was it a new bottle he had…”

“Bottles,” said Bartel. “Three at least.”

That accorded with what Thomas had found in a hamper in the carriage. Safely cushioned among various wrapped food bundles, there had been an empty bottle, a mostly empty bottle, and a full, tightly corked one.

“Could anyone have been at those bottles before they were put into the carriage?”

“Been at them? I filled them from a cask at the manor if that’s what you mean, and put them in the hamper and put it into the carriage.” Bartel straightened with sudden suspicion. “Hoi, hold up there. You’re not saying I put something in them, are you? There were folk around all the time can say I never had chance to.”

“Nor do I think you did. I just wanted to know that no one else had chance at them either.”

Bartel subsided, not fully happy.

“There was a bottle that had held cider beside young William and then there are these.” Thomas held up two pottery vials, slight enough to have fit in a belt pouch. “Do any of you know these?”

No one did, but Bartel’s suspicion had been catching. All the Shellaston servants looked wary now and Master Hugh was frowning.

Thomas held one of them higher. “This one held poppy syrup sweetened with sugar, Mistress Wayn tells me. Master Shellaston favoured sweet wine, I gather?” Heads agreed he had, and indeed it had been malmsey in the bottles. Thomas held up the other small bottle. “This one held dwale, otherwise called nightshade, enough of it to kill if drunk straight down. And young William must have, because there was half the cider left in the bottle and no dwale in it.’

Thomas regarded the empty vial sadly for a moment, then handed it with the other to Giles to keep. “We found it under young William. The other one was in the bottom of the box used for a step into the carriage. The box that has what’s needed to keep the carriage in good order on the road.” Spare parts for mending wheels and harness, grease for axles, tools and other odds and ends that might be useful. “It was Mistress Wayn who noticed and showed me the black grease smear on the back of young William’s hand that he had mostly wiped off- black grease he could have come by in the carriage nowhere else but in that box. From one of the rags probably, when he hid the other vial there, the one with poppy syrup, after his parents were unconscious. Or after he’d killed them. Before he drank the potion of dwale in the other vial, a potion strong enough it brought him to death almost immediately.”