Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

‘Archie – there you are. You know, when I dressed for the theatre tonight this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’ Without any further preamble, Spilsbury joined Penrose by the body. ‘It’s nicotine, without a doubt. You can tell by the brown mucus around the nostrils. I’ll expect to find a fairly hefty dose in the stomach and kidneys when we open him up – but you can be certain that’s what killed him.’

‘Can you say when it was taken?’

‘Not long ago. The tiniest measure can cause death in a few minutes. In animals, it has much the same effect as hydrocyanic acid –

a quarter of a drop can kill; for a man, one or two drops will be fatal. Exposure to nicotine in small doses through smoking or chewing tobacco can build up a tolerance to the toxic effects, and he obviously was a smoker, but nobody’s immune. A lethal amount would be the equivalent of absorbing all the nicotine in three or four cigarettes. That’s all, but what was it Goethe said?

“There’s no such thing as poison – it just depends on the dose.”’

‘Nicotine is used as an insecticide, isn’t it? I remember it as a child. My father swore death to the aphids on his roses, but he used to throw a blue fit if I went within fifty yards of the stuff.’

‘Yes, every gardener has some tucked away. It’s a fairly simple chemical process to extract the neat stuff from tobacco leaves, but there’s no need to go to all that trouble now – it’s readily available.

You could walk into a shop and buy more than enough to manage this, and the toxicologist will be able to tell us the likely brand.

You know, it’s becoming an increasingly fashionable way to do yourself in. I’ve had three times as many suicides from a dose of nicotine over the last twelve months as in the previous year. It’s a nasty way to oblivion, but it has the advantage of being a quick one. Is that what you’re looking at here? Suicide?’

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‘I’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘The door was locked from the outside and, in any case, it doesn’t fit with what I know of him. He was intelligent enough to find a less painful way if he wanted to kill himself. He could have taken it without being aware of it, I suppose?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve known several cases of people drinking insecticides by accident. In its natural state, it’s a sort of colourless, oily liquid but it soon changes on contact with air and looks remarkably like whisky. Of course, it takes so little to kill you that even if you realised what you’d done it would be too late. One swig would do it. An easy mistake, but an expensive one.’

‘In that case, there’s a decanter and glass downstairs that he drank from just before he died. It’s in the scene dock.’

‘Fine, we’ll go there next.’

‘So it could be murder?’

‘Well, it’s not a common choice for a planned killing, I have to say. I only know of one other case – a French count who killed his brother-in-law by forcing him to ingest nicotine – but that was nearly a hundred years ago. It’s usually self-inflicted or a practical joke gone wrong – snuff in beer, ridiculous amounts of cigars smoked in a row for a bet, that sort of thing. I had a child not long back who blew bubbles for an hour through an old clay pipe and died. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be murder, but it’s unusual.’

‘What are the symptoms?’

‘He would have collapsed almost immediately. If you’re right about that decanter, he did well to make it up the stairs at all.

Death would have followed in anything from five to thirty minutes.’

‘And in between?’

‘Briefly, the nicotine will have acted as a stimulant, but that will have given way to a depression of the central nervous system, lowered blood pressure, slowed heart rate and death from paralysis of the respiratory muscles.’

‘So he suffocated? That’s the cause of death?’

‘Asphyxia, yes. Along the way, he’ll have gone through nausea, 151

abdominal pain, heart palpitations and increased salivation; he’ll have experienced a burning sensation in the mouth, mental confusion and dizziness. Everyone is affected slightly differently, but you don’t need a post-mortem to tell you some of what he went through; it’s all too obvious here.’

‘And his eyes?’

‘I’m impressed, Archie. Yes, nicotine poisoning often affects the eyes – that’s true of a heavy smoker, not just these extreme cases.

It’s known as tobacco blindness – the sudden appearance of a rapidly growing dark patch in the field of vision, not dissimilar to alcohol.’

‘There was a lot of it in the trenches.’

‘Exactly. It was very common then, mostly because of home-grown or badly cured tobacco. That stuff often has a lower com-bustion temperature than properly prepared tobacco, so less of the nicotine is destroyed.’

‘If I told you that Bernard Aubrey spent his war underground and was clinically claustrophobic as a result, what would you say?’

Spilsbury stepped out of the way as his colleagues prepared to remove Aubrey’s body from the room. ‘Well, he died not being able to breathe or, in all probability, to see, so with the possible exception of being buried alive – which presents obvious practical difficulties – I’d say he had the worst death imaginable.’ He gestured to the desk where the bayonet had been found. ‘Are you linking this to the girl on the train?’

Penrose nodded. He had two deaths and two victims which, on the face of it, could not have been more different: a young girl and a man facing old age; a stabbing with relatively little suffering and an agonising, degrading end. But he was starting to see more connections and, although the theatre was the most obvious link, the past seemed to him more significant. Aubrey had died surrounded by reminders of the war – a war which was also the backdrop to an illegal and inevitably painful adoption. And even the causes of death, apparently so contrasting, had in common a spiteful appropriateness to their victim: Elspeth’s murder had undermined every-152

thing that mattered to her, had scorned her innocence; Aubrey, a man of wealth and authority all his life, had been physically humiliated and had died gasping for air. In both crimes, there was a terrifying lack of humanity, a mockery of the dead which chilled him even more than the loss of life itself.

153

Eleven

Penrose stood at the door to the Green Room, and was not surprised to see that his cousins’ efforts to comfort everyone with tea and brandy had had very little effect: Lydia was dreadfully pale and clearly shocked to the core, while Josephine and the woman to whom he had been introduced earlier were united in solicitous concern for her. It was Marta who spoke first.

‘What the hell has happened, Inspector?’ she asked with a flash of anger which took him by surprise. ‘How can you have allowed her to walk in on something like that? You should have gone to find him, not Lydia.’

‘I’m truly sorry you’ve had to go through this,’ he said to Lydia with genuine compassion, ‘and I don’t want to cause anybody any further distress, but I do need to talk to you briefly about what happened tonight.’ He turned to the others in the room. ‘And to anybody else who saw or spoke to Bernard Aubrey in the last twenty-four hours.’

Marta was not so easily dismissed. ‘Can that really not keep until the morning? Right now, I’d like to take Lydia home to get some rest. She’s had enough.’

Penrose, who had already missed out on one vital interview that evening through having been made to wait, had no intention of letting it happen again, but he was saved the discourtesy of insisting.

‘It’s fine, darling, honestly it is,’ said Lydia, taking Marta’s hand.