“No? Well, you are not on oath. But Hannah Westlock remembers that when you brought the eggs in – you purchased them yourself, you know, Mr. Urquhart – you mentioned that one was cracked and particularly desired that it should be used for the omelette. In fact, you yourself laid it in the bowl for that purpose.”
“What about it?” asked Mr. Urquhart, perhaps a trifle less easily than before.
“It is not very difficult to introduce powdered arsenic into a cracked egg,” said Wimsey. “I have made the experiment myself with a small glass tube. Perhaps a small funnel would be even easier. Aarsenic is a fairly heavy substance – 7 or 8 grains will go into a tea-spoon. It collects at one end of the egg, and any traces on the exterior of the shell can be readily wiped off. Liquid arsenic could be poured in still more easily, of course, but for a particular reason I made my experiment with the ordinary white powder. It is fairly soluble.”
Mr. Urquhart had taken a cigar from his case, and was making rather a business of lighting it.
“Do you suggest,” he enquired, “that in the whisking together of four eggs, one particular poisoned egg was somehow kept miraculously separated from the rest and deposited with its load of arsenic at one end of the omelette only? Or that my cousin deliberately helped himself to the poisoned end and left the rest to me?”
“Not at all, not at all,“ said Wimsey.
“I suggest merely that the arsenic was in the omelette and came there by way of the egg.”
Mr. Urquhart threw his match into the fireplace.
“There seem to be some flaws in your theory, as well as in the egg.”
“I haven’t finished the theory yet. My next bit of it is built up from very trifling indications. Let me enumerate them. Your disinclination to drink at dinner, your complexion, a few nailparings, a snipping or so from your very well-kept hair – I put these together, add a packet of white arsenic from the secret cupboard in your office, rub the hands a little – so – and produce – hemp, Mr. Urquhart, hemp.”
He sketched the shape of a noose lightly in the air.
“I don’t understand you,” said the solicitor, hoarsely.
“Oh you know,” said Wimsey. “Hemp – what they make ropes of. Great stuff, hemp. Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much about – who are supposed to eat it for fun. It improves their wind, so they say, and clears their complexions and makes their hair sleek, and they give it to their horses for the same reason; bar the complexion, that is, because a horse hasn’t much complexion, but you know what I mean. Then there was that horrid man Maybrick – he used to take it, or so they say. Anyhow, it’s well known that some people do take it and manage to put away large dollops after a bit of practice – enough to kill any ordinary person. But you know all this.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard of such a thing.”
“Where do you expect to go to? Never mind. We’ll pretend this is all new to you. Well, some fellow – I’ve forgotten his name, but it’s all in Dixon Mann – wondered how the dodge was worked, and he got going on some dogs and things and he dosed ’em and killed a lot of ’em I daresay, and in the end he found that whereas liquid arsenic was dealt with by the kidneys and was uncommonly bad for the system, solid arsenic could be given day by day, a little bigger dose each time, so that in time the doings – what an old lady I knew in Norfolk called ‘the tubes’ – got used to it and could push it along without taking any notice of it, so to speak. I read a book somewhere which said it was all done by leucocytes – those jolly little white corpuscles, don’t you know – which sort of got round the stuff and bustled it along so that it couldn’t do any harm. At all events, the point is that if you go on taking solid arsenic for a good long time – say a year or so – you establish a what-not, an immunity, and can take six or seven grains at a time without so much as a touch of indi-jaggers.”
“Very interesting,” said Mr. Urquhart.
“Apparently these beastly Styrian peasants do it that way, and they’re very careful not to drink for two hours or thereabouts after taking it, for fear it should all get washed into the kidneys and turn poisonous on ’em. I’m not being‘ very technical, I’m afraid, but that’s the gist of it. Well, it occurred to me, don’t you see, old horse, that if you’d had the bright idea to immunise yourself first, you could easily have shared a jolly old arsenical omelette with a friend. It would kill him and it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I see.”
The solicitor licked his lips.
“Well, as I say, you have a nice clear complexion – except that I notice the arsenic has pigmented the skin here and there (it does sometimes), and you’ve got the sleek hair and so on, and I noticed you were careful not to drink at dinner, and I said to myself, ‘Peter, my bright lad, what about it?’ And when they found a packet of white arsenic in your cupboard – never mind how for the moment! – I said, ‘Hullo, hullo, how long has this been going on?’ Your handy foreign chemist has told the police two years – is that right? About the time of the Megatherium crash that would be, wouldn’t it? All right, don’t tell me if you don’t want to. Then we got hold of some bits of your hair and nails, and lo and behold, they were bung-full of arsenic. And we said ‘What-ho!’ So that’s why I asked you to come along and have a chat with me. I thought you might like to offer some sort of suggestion, don’t you know.”
“I can only suggest,” said Urquhart, with a ghastly face but a strictly professional manner, “that you should be careful before you communicate this ludicrous theory to anybody. What you and the police – whom, frankly, I believe to be capable of anything – have been planting on my premises I do not know, but to give out that I am addicted to drug-taking habits is slander and criminal. It is quite true that I have for some time been taking a medicine which contains slight traces of arsenic – Dr. Grainger can furnish the prescription – and that may very likely have left a deposit in my skin and hair, but further than that, there is no foundation for this monstrous accusation.”
“None?”
“None.”
“Then how is it,” asked Wimsey, coolly, but with something menacing in his rigidly controlled voice, “how is it that you have this evening consumed, without apparent effect, a dose of arsenic sufficient to kill two or three ordinary people? That disgusting sweetmeat on which you have been gorging yourself in, I may say, a manner wholly unsuited to your age and position, is smothered in white arsenic. You ate it, God forgive you, an hour and a half ago. If arsenic can harm you, you should have been rolling about in agonies for the last hour.”
“You devil!”
“Couldn’t you try to get up a few symptoms?” said Wimsey, sarcastically. “Shall I bring you a basin? Or fetch the doctor? Does your throat burn? Is your inside convulsed with agony? It is rather late in the day, but with a little goodwill you could surely produce some display of feeling, even now.”
“You are lying. You wouldn’t dare to do such a thing! It would be murder.”
“Not in this case, I fancy. But I am willing to wait and see.”
Urquhart stared at him. Wimsey got out of his chair in a single swift movement and stood over him.
“I wouldn’t use violence if I were you. Let the poisoner stick to his bottle. Besides, I am armed. Pardon the melodrama. Are you going to be sick or not?”
“You’re mad.”
“Don’t say that. Come, man – pull yourself together. Have a shot at it. Shall I show you the bathroom?”
“I’m ill.”
“Of course; but your tone is not convincing. Through the door, along the passage, and third on the left.”
The lawyer stumbled out. Wimsey returned to the library and rang the bell.