The Terriford mystery

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Sitting there, in front of the now bright fire, she could visualize with horrid clearness the fat glass-stoppered bottle with the red label on which was printed in black letters the word “Arsenic.”

The bottle—which contained a sufficient quantity of the deadly poison to have killed every one in the village—stood on the top shelf of her drug cupboard, in a tiny room next door, known all over the village as “Miss Prince’s medicine room.”

As residuary legatee to her father, everything that had belonged to him at his death had passed into her possession, and she had chosen to take with her to her new home the drugs that had been in his dispensary.

In a country medical practice every little counts. Thanks to Miss Prince, the poorer folk in Terriford had hardly ever had occasion to consult Dr. Maclean. He had spoken to her of the matter only once—years ago—soon after his arrival. She had said what had been far more true then than it was to-day—that the working folk were so miserably poor that it would be sheer cruelty to ask them to send for the doctor for every trifling ailment. Further, she had asserted that often she relieved him of work for which he could never expect any payment, and Dr. Maclean had admitted, somewhat reluctantly, the force of the argument.

But while the knowledge of that stoppered bottle on the top shelf of the drug cupboard which she generally, but not invariably, kept locked, made her feel acutely anxious, she tried to persuade herself that it could not be her duty to force herself into this, to her, horrible affair. Not only was the thought of appearing in the witness-box at a great trial terrible to one with Miss Prince’s old-fashioned feminine outlook on life, but she was well aware that she would certainly be severely censured, by both counsel and judge in the case, for keeping such poisons as arsenic and strychnine in her house.

She faced the grim certainty that she, and she alone, could supply the missing link in the chain of circumstantial evidence now tightening around Harry Garlett. But would that link be missed? Never having liked him, and having now no doubt as to his guilt, she equally had no doubt as to his fate. Was it essential that she, his wife’s oldest friend, should hound him to his death?

She asked herself with a sharp feeling of self-rebuke why she had been such a fool as to keep a poison which she never had any reason to use? But there it was, she had kept it.

Getting up at last, she took off a small bookshelf “The Student’s Handbook of Forensic Medicine and Public Health,” and turning to the entry “Metallic Irritants,” she quickly made herself mistress of what information was there.

She learned that white arsenic—that is the type of arsenic in her possession—was not only colourless and odourless, but almost devoid of taste, thus very easily administered in powdered sugar, and even she, with her wide knowledge of drugs, received a certain shock when she discovered that a pinch of arsenic holds no less than seventeen grains, two grains being a fatal dose.

Now Miss Prince, in common with almost every one in the neighbourhood, had severely blamed Dr. Maclean for his lack of suspicion, but, as she read the little black volume by which her father had set such store, she realized that the old doctor had not been so much to blame after all. For, whereas in many cases the symptoms of arsenical poisoning point to an irritant administered, all sorts of anomalies may and do occur. In fact the symptoms are frequently so misleading that death due to the action of arsenic has even been described as spontaneous internal inflammation!