山核桃大街谋杀案（11）

时间：2025-03-03 03:10:30

（单词翻译:单击）

Chapter Ten
Miss Tomlinson was a severe-looking young woman of twenty-seven, with fair hair, regular
features and a rather pursed-up mouth. She sat down and said primly:
“Yes, Inspector? What can I do for you?”
“I wonder if you can help us at all, Miss Tomlinson, about this very tragic matter.”
“It’s shocking. Really quite shocking,” said Jean. “It was bad enough when we thought Celia
had committed suicide, but now that it’s supposed to be murder . . .” She stopped and shook her
head, sadly.
“We are fairly sure that she did not poison herself,” said Sharpe. “You know where the poison
came from?”
Jean nodded.
“I gather it came from St. Catherine’s Hospital, where she works. But surely that makes it seem
more like suicide?”
“It was intended to, no doubt,” said the inspector.
“But who else could possibly have got that poison except Celia?”
“Quite a lot of people,” said Inspector Sharpe, “if they were determined to do so. Even you,
yourself, Miss Tomlinson,” he said, “might have managed to help yourself to it if you had wished
to do so.”
“Really, Inspector Sharpe!” Jean’s tones were sharp with indignation.
“Well, you visited the Dispensary fairly often, didn’t you, Miss Tomlinson?”
“I went in there to see Mildred Carey, yes. But naturally I would never have dreamed of
tampering with the poison cupboard.”
“But you could have done so?”
“I certainly couldn’t have done anything of the kind!”
“Oh, come now, Miss Tomlinson. Say that your friend was busy packing up the ward baskets
and the other girl was at the outpatients’ window. There are frequent times when there are only
two dispensers in the front room. You could have wandered casually round the back of the shelves
of bottles that run across the middle of the floor. You could have nipped a bottle out of the
cupboard and into your pocket, and neither of the two dispensers would have dreamed of what you
had done.”
“I resent what you say very much, Inspector Sharpe. It’s—it’s a—disgraceful accusation.”
“But it’s not an accusation, Miss Tomlinson. It’s nothing of the kind. You mustn’t
misunderstand me. You said to me that it wasn’t possible for you to do such a thing, and I’m
trying to show you that it was possible. I’m not suggesting for a moment that you did so. After
all,” he added, “why should you?”
“Quite so. You don’t seem to realise, Inspector Sharpe, that I was a friend of Celia’s.”
“Quite a lot of people get poisoned by their friends. There’s a certain question we have to ask
ourselves sometimes. ‘When is a friend not a friend?’ ”
“There was no disagreement between me and Celia; nothing of the kind. I liked her very much.”
“Had you any reason to suspect it was she who had been responsible for these thefts in the
house?”
“No, indeed. I was never so surprised in my life. I always thought Celia had high principles. I
wouldn’t have dreamed of her doing such a thing.”
“Of course,” said Sharpe, watching her carefully, “kleptomaniacs can’t really help themselves,
can they?”
Jean Tomlinson’s lips pursed themselves together even more closely. Then she opened them
and spoke.
“I can’t say I can quite subscribe to that idea, Inspector Sharpe. I’m old-fashioned in my views
and believe that stealing is stealing.”
“You think that Celia stole things because, frankly, she wanted to take them?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Plain dishonest, in fact?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Ah!” said Inspector Sharpe, shaking his head. “That’s bad.”
“Yes, it’s always upsetting when you feel you’re disappointed in anyone.”
“There was a question, I understand, of our being called in—the police, I mean.”
“Yes. That would have been the right thing to do in my opinion.”
“Perhaps you think it ought to have been done anyway?”
“I think it would have been the right thing. Yes, I don’t think, you know, people ought to be
allowed to get away with these things.”
“With calling oneself a kleptomaniac when one is really a thief, do you mean?”
“Well, more or less, yes—that is what I mean.”
“Instead of which everything was ending happily and Miss Austin had wedding bells ahead.”
“Of course, one isn’t surprised at anything Colin McNabb does,” said Jean Tomlinson viciously.
“I’m sure he’s an atheist and a most disbelieving, mocking, unpleasant young man. He’s rude to
everybody. It’s my opinion that he’s a communist!”
“Ah!” said Inspector Sharpe. “Bad!” He shook his head.
“He backed up Celia, I think, because he hasn’t got any proper feeling about property. He
probably thinks everyone should help themselves to everything they want.”
“Still, at any rate,” said Inspector Sharpe, “Miss Austin did own up.”
“After she was found out. Yes,” said Jean sharply.
“Who found her out?”
“That Mr.—what-was-his-name . . . Poirot, who came.”
“But why do you think he found her out, Miss Tomlinson? He didn’t say so. He just advised
calling in the police.”
“He must have shown her that he knew. She obviously knew the game was up and rushed off to
confess.”
“What about the ink on Elizabeth Johnston’s papers? Did she confess to that?”
“I really don’t know. I suppose so.”
“You suppose wrong,” said Sharpe. “She denied most vehemently that she had anything to do
with that.”
“Well, perhaps that may be so. I must say it doesn’t seem very likely.”
“You think it is more likely that it was Nigel Chapman?”
“No, I don’t think Nigel would do that either. I think it’s much more likely to be Mr.
Akibombo.”
“Really? Why should he do it?”
“Jealousy. All these coloured people are very jealous of each other and very hysterical.”
“That’s interesting, Miss Tomlinson. When was the last time you saw Celia Austin?”
“After dinner on Friday night.”
“Who went up to bed first? Did she or did you?”
“I did.”
“You did not go to her room or see her after you’d left the common room?”
“No.”
“And you’ve no idea who could have introduced morphia into her coffee—if it was given that
way?”
“No idea at all.”
“You never saw morphia lying about the house or in anyone’s room?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? What do you mean by that, Miss Tomlinson?”
“Well, I just wondered. There was that silly bet, you know.”
“What bet?”
“One—oh, two or three of the boys were arguing—”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Murder, and ways of doing it. Poisoning in particular.”
“Who was concerned in the discussion?”
“Well, I think Colin and Nigel started it, and then Len Bateson chipped in and Patricia was there
too—”
“Can you remember, as closely as possible, what was said on that occasion—how the argument
went?”
Jean Tomlinson reflected a few moments.
“Well, it started, I think, with a discussion on murdering by poisoning, saying that the difficulty
was to get hold of the poison, that the murderer was usually traced by either the sale of the poison
or having an opportunity to get it, and Nigel said that wasn’t at all necessary. He said that he could
think of three distinct ways by which anyone could get hold of poison, and nobody would ever
know they had it. Len Bateson said then that he was talking through his hat. Nigel said no he
wasn’t, and he was quite prepared to prove it. Pat said that of course Nigel was quite right. She
said that either Len or Colin could probably help themselves to poison any time they liked from a
hospital, and so could Celia, she said. And Nigel said that wasn’t what he meant at all. He said it
would be noticed if Celia took anything from the Dispensary. Sooner or later they’d look for it and
find it gone. And Pat said no, not if she took the bottle and emptied some stuff out and filled it up
with something else. Colin laughed then and said there’d be very serious complaints from the
patients one of these days, in that case. But Nigel said of course he didn’t mean special
opportunities. He said that he himself, who hadn’t got any particular access, either as a doctor or
dispenser, could jolly well get three different kinds of poison by three different methods. Len
Bateson said, ‘All right, then, but what are your methods?’ and Nigel said, ‘I shan’t tell you, now,
but I’m prepared to bet you that within three weeks I can produce samples of three deadly poisons
here,’ and Len Bateson said he’d bet him a fiver he couldn’t do it.”
“Well?” said Inspector Sharpe, when Jean stopped.
“Well, nothing more came of it, I think, for some time and then, one evening in the common
room, Nigel said, ‘Now then, chaps, look here—I’m as good as my word,’ and he threw down
three things on the table. He had a tube of hyoscine tablets, and a bottle of tincture of digitalin, and
a tiny bottle of morphine tartrate.”
The inspector said sharply:
“Morphine tartrate. Any label on it?”
“Yes, it had St. Catherine’s Hospital on it. I do remember that because, naturally, it caught my
eye.”
“And the others?”
“I didn’t notice. They were not hospital stores, I should say.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, of course, there was a lot of talk and jawing, and Len Bateson said, ‘Come now, if you’d
done a murder this would be traced to you soon enough,’ and Nigel said, ‘Not a bit of it. I’m a
layman. I’ve no connection with any clinic or hospital and nobody will connect me for one
moment with these. I didn’t buy them over the counter,’ and Colin McNabb took his pipe out of
his teeth and said, ‘No, you’d certainly not be able to do that. There’s no chemist would sell you
those three things without a doctor’s prescription.’ Anyway, they argued a bit but in the end Len
said he’d pay up. He said, ‘I can’t do it now, because I’m a bit short of cash, but there’s no doubt
about it; Nigel’s proved his point,’ and then he said, ‘What are we going to do with the guilty
spoils?’ Nigel grinned and said we’d better get rid of them before any accidents occurred, so they
emptied out the tube and threw the tablets on the fire and emptied out the powder from the
morphine tartrate and threw that on the fire too. The tincture of digitalis they poured down the
lavatory.”
“And the bottles?”
“I don’t know what happened to the bottles . . . I should think they probably were just thrown
into the wastepaper basket?”
“But the poison itself was destroyed?”
“Yes. I’m sure of that. I saw it.”
“And that was—when?”
“About, oh, just over a fortnight ago, I think.”
“I see. Thank you, Miss Tomlinson.”
Jean lingered, clearly wanting to be told more.
“D’you think it might be important?”
“It might be. One can’t tell.”
Inspector Sharpe remained brooding for a few moments. Then he had Nigel Chapman in again.
“I’ve just had a rather interesting statement from Miss Jean Tomlinson,” he said.
“Ah! Who’s dear Jean been poisoning your mind against? Me?”
“She’s been talking about poison, and in connection with you, Mr. Chapman.”
“Poison and me? What on earth?”
“Do you deny that some weeks ago you had a wager with Mr. Bateson about methods of
obtaining poison in some way that could not be traced to you?”
“Oh, that!” Nigel was suddenly enlightened. “Yes, of course! Funny I never thought of that. I
don’t even remember Jean being there. But you don’t think it could have any possible significance,
do you?”
“Well, one doesn’t know. You admit the fact, then?”
“Oh yes, we were arguing on the subject. Colin and Len were being very superior and high-
handed about it so I told them that with a little ingenuity anyone could get hold of a suitable
supply of poison—in fact I said I could think of three distinct ways of doing it, and I’d prove my
point, I said, by putting them into practice.”
“Which you then proceeded to do?”
“Which I then proceeded to do, Inspector.”
“And what were those three methods, Mr. Chapman?”
Nigel put his head a little on one side.
“Aren’t you asking me to incriminate myself?” he said. “Surely you ought to warn me?”
“It hasn’t come to warning you yet, Mr. Chapman, but, of course, there’s no need for you to
incriminate yourself, as you put it. In fact you’re perfectly entitled to refuse my questions if you
like to do so.”
“I don’t know that I want to refuse.” Nigel considered for a moment or two, a slight smile
playing round his lips.
“Of course,” he said, “what I did was, no doubt, against the law. You could haul me in for it if
you liked. On the other hand, this is a murder case and if it’s got any bearing on poor little Celia’s
death I suppose I ought to tell you.”
“That would certainly be the sensible point of view to take.”
“All right then. I’ll talk.”
“What were these three methods?”
“Well.” Nigel leant back in his chair. “One’s always reading in the papers, isn’t one, about
doctors losing dangerous drugs from a car? People are being warned about it.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it occurred to me that one very simple method would be to go down to the country,
follow a GP about on his rounds, when occasion offered—just open the car, look in the doctor’s
case, and extract what you wanted. You see, in these country districts, the doctor doesn’t always
take his case into the house. It depends what sort of patient he’s going to see.”
“Well?”
“Well, that’s all. That’s to say that’s all for method number one. I had to sleuth three doctors
until I found a suitably careless one. When I did, it was simplicity itself. The car was left outside a
farmhouse in a rather lonely spot. I opened the door, looked at the case, took out a tube of
hyoscine hydrobromide, and that was that.”
“Ah! And method number two?”
“That entailed just a little pumping of dear Celia, as a matter of fact. She was quite
unsuspicious. I told you she was a stupid girl, she had no idea what I was doing. I simply talked a
bit about the mumbo jumbo Latin of doctors’ prescriptions, and asked her to write me out a
prescription in the way a doctor writes it, for tincture digitalin. She obliged quite unsuspecting. All
I had to do after that was to find a doctor in the classified directory, living in a far off district of
London, add his initials or slightly illegible signature. I then took it to a chemist in a busy part of
London, who would not be likely to be familiar with that particular doctor’s signature, and I
received the prescription made up without any difficulty at all. Digitalin is prescribed in quite large
quantities for heart cases and I had written out the prescription on hotel notepaper.”
“Very ingenious,” said Inspector Sharpe drily.
“I am incriminating myself! I can hear it in your voice.”
“And the third method?”
Nigel did not reply at once. Then he said:
“Look here. What exactly am I letting myself in for?”
“The theft of drugs from an unlocked car is larceny,” said Inspector Sharpe. “Forging a
prescription. . . .”
Nigel interrupted him.
“Not exactly forging, is it? I mean, I didn’t obtain money by it, and it wasn’t exactly an
imitation of any doctor’s signature. I mean, if I write a prescription and write H R James on it, you
can’t say I’m forging any particular Dr. James’s name, can you?” He went on with rather a wry
smile. “You see what I mean? I’m sticking my neck out. If you like to turn nasty over this—well
—I’m obviously for it. On the other hand, if. . . .”
“Yes, Mr. Chapman, on the other hand?”
Nigel said with a sudden passion:
“I don’t like murder. It’s a beastly, horrible thing. Celia, poor little devil, didn’t deserve to be
murdered. I want to help. But does it help? I can’t see that it does. Telling you my peccadilloes, I
mean.”
“The police have a good deal of latitude, Mr. Chapman. It’s up to them to look upon certain
happenings as a light-hearted prank of an irresponsible nature. I accept your assurance that you
want to help in the solving of this girl’s murder. Now please go on, and tell me about your third
method.”
“Well,” said Nigel, “we’re coming fairly near the bone now. It was a bit more risky than the
other two, but at the same time it was a great deal more fun. You see, I’d been to visit Celia once
or twice in her Dispensary. I knew the lay of the land there. . . .”
“So you were able to pinch the bottle out of the cupboard?”
“No, no, nothing as simple as that. That wouldn’t have been fair from my point of view. And,
incidentally, if it had been a real murder—that is, if I had been stealing the poison for the purpose
of murder—it would probably be remembered that I had been there. Actually, I hadn’t been in
Celia’s Dispensary for about six months. No, I knew that Celia always went into the back room at
eleven-fifteen for what you might call ‘elevenses,’ that is, a cup of coffee and a biscuit. The girls
went in turn, two at a time. There was a new girl there who had only just come and she certainly
wouldn’t know me by sight. So what I did was this. I strolled into the Dispensary with a white coat
on and a stethoscope round my neck. There was only the new girl there and she was busy at the
outpatients’ hatch. I strolled in, went along to the poison cupboard, took out a bottle, strolled
round the end of the partition, said to the girl, ‘What strength adrenalin do you keep?’ She told me
and I nodded, then I asked her if she had a couple of Veganin as I had a terrific hangover. I
swallowed them down and strolled out again. She never had the least suspicion that I wasn’t
somebody’s houseman or a medical student. It was child’s play. Celia never even knew I’d been
there.”
“A stethoscope,” said Inspector Sharpe curiously. “Where did you get a stethoscope?”
Nigel grinned suddenly.
“It was Len Bateson’s,” he said. “I pinched it.”
“From this house?”
“Yes.”
“So that explains the theft of the stethoscope. That was not Celia’s doing.”
“Good lord no! Can’t see a kleptomaniac stealing a stethoscope, can you?”
“What did you do with it afterwards?”
“Well, I had to pawn it,” said Nigel apologetically.
“Wasn’t that a little hard on Bateson?”
“Very hard on him. But without explaining my methods, which I didn’t mean to do, I couldn’t
tell him about it. However,” added Nigel cheerfully, “I took him out not long after and gave him a
hell of a party one evening.”
“You’re a very irresponsible young man,” said Inspector Sharpe.
“You should have seen their faces,” said Nigel, his grin widening, “when I threw down those
three lethal preparations on the table and told them I had managed to pinch them without anybody
being wise as to who took them.”
“What you’re telling me is,” said the inspector, “that you had three means of poisoning
someone by three different poisons and that in each case the poison could not have been traced to
you.”
Nigel nodded.
“That’s fair enough,” he said. “And given the circumstances it’s not a very pleasant thing to
admit. But the point is, that the poisons were all disposed of at least a fortnight ago or longer.”
“That is what you think, Mr. Chapman, but it may not really be so.”
Nigel stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“You had these things in your possession, how long?”
Nigel considered.
“Well, the tube of hyoscine about ten days, I suppose. The morphine tartrate, about four days.
The tincture digitalin I’d only got that very afternoon.”
“And where did you keep these things—the hyoscine hydrobromide and the morphine tartrate,
that is to say?”
“In the drawer of my chest of drawers, pushed to the back under my socks.”
“Did anyone know you had it there?”
“No. No, I’m sure they didn’t.”
There had been, however, a faint hesitation in his voice which Inspector Sharpe noticed, but for
the moment he did not press the point.
“Did you tell anyone what you were doing? Your methods? The way you were going about
these things?”
“No. At least—no, I didn’t.”
“You said ‘at least,’ Mr. Chapman.”
“Well, I didn’t actually. As a matter of fact, I was going to tell Pat, then I thought she wouldn’t
approve. She’s very strict, Pat is, so I fobbed her off.”
“You didn’t tell her about stealing the stuff from the doctor’s car, or the prescription, or the
morphia from the hospital?”
“Actually, I told her afterwards about the digitalin; that I’d written a prescription and got a
bottle from the chemist, and about masquerading as a doctor at the hospital. I’m sorry to say Pat
wasn’t amused. I didn’t tell her about pinching things from a car. I thought she’d go up in smoke.”
“Did you tell her you were going to destroy this stuff after you’d won the bet?”
“Yes. She was all worried and het up about it. Started to insist I took the things back or
something like that.”
“That course of action never occurred to you yourself?”
“Good lord no! That would have been fatal; it would have landed me in no end of a row. No, we
three just chucked the stuff on the fire and poured it down the loo and that was that. No harm
done.”
“You say that, Mr. Chapman, but it’s quite possible that harm was done.”
“How can it have been, if the stuff was chucked away as I tell you?”
“Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Chapman, that someone might have seen where you put those
things, or found them perhaps, and that someone might have emptied morphia out of the bottle and
replaced it with something else?”
“Good lord no!” Nigel stared at him. “I never thought of anything of that kind. I don’t believe
it.”
“But it’s a possibility, Mr. Chapman.”
“But nobody could possibly have known.”
“I should say,” said the inspector drily, “that in a place of this kind a great deal more is known
than you yourself might believe possible.”
“Snooping, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you’re right there.”
“Which of the students might normally, at any time, be in your room?”
“Well, I share it with Len Bateson. Most of the men here have been in it now and again. Not the
girls, of course. The girls aren’t supposed to come to the bedroom floors on our side of the house.
Propriety. Pure living.”
“They’re not supposed to, but they might do so, I suppose?”
“Anyone might,” said Nigel. “In the daytime. The afternoon, for instance, there’s nobody
about.”
“Does Miss Lane ever come to your room?”
“I hope you don’t mean that the way it sounds, Inspector. Pat comes to my room sometimes to
replace some socks she’s been darning. Nothing more than that.”
Leaning forward, Inspector Sharpe said:
“You do realise, Mr. Chapman, that the person who could most easily have taken some of that
poison out of the bottle and substituted something else for it, was yourself?”
Nigel looked at him, his face suddenly hard and haggard.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen that just a minute and a half ago. I could have done just exactly that.
But I’d no reason on earth for putting that girl out of the way, Inspector, and I didn’t do it. Still,
there it is—I quite realise that you’ve only got my word for it.”

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