"Yes'm," replied Bowers, who was pressing his hands together. The curve of his slicked hair bad come into shreds. "When the governor went out, which wasn't often, he hired a car at the garage and I drove him."
"He talked with my husband," continued Mrs. Antrim, nodding carefully at the pattern in the carpet. "The doctor gave him bromide; ordinary nerve-sedative. I manage the doctor's surgery: I mean the dispensing part of it. I studied medicine; I don't mind death, as a rule."
She looked sharply sideways, and back again, and held the cigarette to her lips.
"Well, I took down off the shelf what I thought was the bromide bottle; ordinary ten-fluid-ounce bottle. It was labelled bromide, it was in the right place, and it looked In any case, I weighed out what I thought was a quarter-ounce of bromide, as the doctor had directed me, and put it into a half-ounce bottle. That's the bottle you've got there.
"It wasn't until this evening that I was in the surgery again. Then I noticed that the ten-ounce bromide bottle on the shelf was now about half-full, whereas the night before it had been almost empty after I took out the dose. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Then I began to get panicky especially when I found that the label was a little gummy, as though something had been pasted over it.
"I looked everywhere on the shelves. The only sign of something wrong was that the bottle of strychnine had been pushed back out of line on the shelf. It was the same size as the bromide bottle. Its label was gummy. And it was nearly empty, just as I remembered the bottle from which I had given Mr. Hogenauer the dose.
"Then I knew. Somebody had switched the bottles. Some body had pasted a bromide label over the strychnine, and a strychnine label over the bromide. And, in mistake for bromide, I had given Mr. Hogenauer 120 grains, or a quarter-ounce, of pure strychnine salts. And, after I had done that,
somebody went into the surgery again, pulled off the fake labels, and put the bottles back in their proper places.
"It would have been easy to get into the surgery," she added blankly. "There's a French window, and we never keep it locked up until the time my husband goes to bed at night."
True or not — and I supposed they were true — here were some very startling statements. I had to keep a wooden face, but I wondered how I could question her without betraying myself. Ordinary G.P.'s as a rule, do not keep such an enormous quantity of strychnine at hand; they have no use for it, since in its medical form it comes in preparations already made up. And above all they do not usually keep it in ten-fluid-ounce bottles displayed conspicuously on a shelf.