Ngaio Marsh - Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

Miggs (uneasily) : A few.

Golding: How many?

Miggs: I don’t remember offhand. Not many.

Golding: Nurse Miggs, have you ever been dismissed— summarily dismissed—from a post?

Miggs: I didn’t come here to be insulted.

Judge: Answer the question, nurse.

Miggs: There’s no satisfying some people. Anything goes wrong—blame the nurse.

Golding: Yes or no, Miss Miggs? (He glances at the paper from Dr. Swale.) In July 1969, were you dismissed by the doctor in charge of a case under suspicion of illegally obtaining and administering a drug and accepting a bribe for doing so?

Miggs (breaking in) : It wasn’t true. It was a lie. I know where you got that from. (She points to Dr. Swale.) From him! He had it in for me. He couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t prove anything.

Golding: Come, Miss Miggs, don’t you think you would be well advised to admit it at once?

Miggs: He couldn’t prove it. (She breaks down.)

Golding: Why did you leave Fulchester Grange?

Miggs: I won’t answer. It’s all lies. Once something’s said about you, you’re done for.

Golding: Were you dismissed?

Miggs: I won’t answer.

Golding: Were you dismissed for illegally obtaining drugs and accepting a bribe for so doing?

Miggs: It wasn’t proved. They couldn’t prove it. It’s lies!

Golding: I have no further questions, my lord.

Judge: Mr. Defense Counsel? (O’Connor shakes his head.) Thank you, Miss Miggs. (She leaves the witness box.) Have you any further witnesses, Mr. Defense Counsel?

O’Connor: No, my lord.

Judge: Members of the jury, just let me tell you something about our function—yours and mine. I am here to direct you as to the law and to remind you of the salient features of the evidence. You are here as judges of fact; you and you alone have to decide, on the evidence you have heard, whether the accused is guilty or not of the charge of attempted murder…

You may think it’s plain that the liver which the dog ate was poisoned. The prosecution say that whoever poisoned that liver must have known that it might have been eaten by the late Major, and was only given to the dog by accident. The vital question, therefore, you may think, is who poisoned that liver. The prosecution say that Miss Freebody did. They say she had the opportunity to take the meat from the safe, poison it and replace it, having for some reason or other changed the paper in which it was wrapped. They say she had a motive—her antagonism to the Major as evidenced by the threatening letters which she wrote. But, say the defense, and you may think it is a point of some weight, the fact that the Major actually died before your eyes of cyanide poisoning at a time when the accused would have had no opportunity to administer the poison is evidence that someone else wanted to and did kill the Major. So if someone other than the accused did kill the Major in the second attempt on his life, how can you believe that the accused rather than the culprit of the second attempt was guilty of the first attempt?

Remember that before you can bring a verdict of guilty you must be satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the accused did make this attempt on the life of the late Major. Will you now retire, elect a foreman to speak for you when you return, and consider your verdict.

Clerk: All stand.

(The jury leave the room. Time passes, and the jury return to their seals.)

Clerk: Members of the jury, will your foreman stand. (The Foreman rises.) Just answer this question yes or no. Have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?

Foreman: Yes.

Clerk: Do you find the accused, Mary Emmaline Freebody, guilty or not guilty on the charge of attempted murder?

Foreman (answers either “guilty” or “not guilty.”) :

Clerk (if guilty) : Is that the verdict of you all?

Judge (if not guilty) : Mary Emmaline Freebody, you are free to go.

Court Reporter (if guilty) : Mary Freebody was remanded in custody for psychiatric reports.

At the end of the broadcast of Evil Liver the jury decided that Miss Freebody was not guilty, but nothing is recorded of their analysis of the prosecution’s case or of their opinion about who in fact was guilty. But we can act as armchair detectives and examine the case against Miss Freebody as well as other possible solutions .

SOLUTION 1

Miss Freebody poisoned the dog and, during the trial, murdered Major Ecclestone . The evidence supporting Miss Freebody’s guilt in the poisoning of the dog is given in detail by the prosecution. Everything is circumstantial but nonetheless persuasive: she had threatened the Major and his dog because of the death of her cat; a tin of wasp exterminator containing cyanide was found on her property; and she could have poisoned the liver shortly after it was delivered. In short, motive, means, and opportunity. It might be argued that only a mentally disturbed person would so openly have warned her victim, but (if we can trust Dr. Swale) Miss Freebody was obviously mentally disturbed.

The jury found Miss Freebody not guilty probably because it seemed impossible for her to have killed Major Ecclestone during the trial. She could not have been near enough to him to have placed the cyanide capsule into his plastic medicine case. Not only did Nurse Miggs swear that Miss Freebody was constantly under observation, but common sense indicates that nothing like that could have happened without someone noticing. Is there any way that Miss Freebody could have gotten the capsule to the Major? First, it would have been necessary that someone be her agent. Second, the agent would have to have been someone with access to cyanide. Third, the agent must have been someone Miss Freebody could trust, either because she could exert pressure or because the agent had a motive for helping her. Is there anyone who fits those qualifications? Yes, indeed—Nurse Miggs is the obvious candidate. As a nurse she had access to cyanide. She worked for twenty years in a hospital for people with mental problems, and she also had private patients. Miss Freebody, we have noted, was certainly unbalanced and could well have been one of those patients. Perhaps Miss Freebody threatened to reveal Nurse Miggs’s past. Or perhaps Nurse Miggs had a strong motive herself. She had a festering resentment against Dr. Swale, and having heard the testimony emerging against him saw her opportunity to make him a suspect in a murder. Is it any wonder that she and Miss Freebody became “good friends” during the trial? The murder of Major Ecclestone would avenge them both.

All of this seems a strong case until we look closely and see that there is little evidence. To take the successful murder first, no one testified that Nurse Miggs had gotten near enough to the Major to slip a capsule into his container; had she left Miss Freebody long enough to do so, someone surely would have seen her. As for most of the rest—Miss Freebody’s being treated as a mental patient in the care of Nurse Miggs and so on—it’s just unsubstantiated speculation. The evidence that Miss Freebody poisoned Bang, the Alsatian, is stronger, but I find it unconvincing, especially in regard to the tin of wasp exterminator. Even a slightly deranged person would have known better than to toss such an incriminating bit of evidence onto her own property. As Miss Freebody herself pointed out, it has all the indications of a plant. If it was not part of a frame-up, it must have been discarded by someone who wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

SOLUTION 2