Having decided to become a detective, Frances soon realised that she had no idea of how to go about it. She was naturally anxious that detective work might lead her into areas inappropriate for both her sex and class, but with the reputation of the business at stake, decided that considerations of propriety might have to be cast aside. She knew that there were private detectives who advertised their services in the newspapers, but recoiled from the idea of entrusting family business to a stranger. Even had she been able to find a reliable, recommended man, her father, parsimonious to a fault, would never have sanctioned the considerable expense involved.
At the breakfast table next morning she sat deep in thought, reviewing all that she knew about Percival Garton, mainly what had been learned from the local gossips, who had flooded into the shop on the previous after noon with rumours eagerly transmitted over their teacups. A wealthy man of independent means, and in his late forties, Garton had lived in Bayswater for more than nine years. Seized with violent convulsions at about midnight on Monday 12th January, he had expired an hour afterwards, in great agony. Garton had been born in Italy where his parents and sisters still resided, but his younger brother Cedric had been visiting Paris and was travelling to London to represent the family at the funeral. Frances took out her notebook and jotted down all the facts she knew. So engrossed was she that she quite forgot to take breakfast. A looming shadow at her side was Sarah, with a disapproving look, and Frances, feeling suddenly shrunk to the size of a nine year old, hastily helped herself to a boiled egg and bread and butter.
Frances then turned to her father’s collection of books, relying principally on theBritish Pharmacopoeia, Squire’s Companion to the Pharmacopoeia andTaylor’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence. She did not believe for one moment that her father could confuse the concentrated extract of nux vomica with the more liquid tincture, and the fact that Herbert had observed the making of the mixture put any error of that kind beyond possibility. Despite Inspector Sharrock’s insinuations, the extract had always been kept in the back stockroom, and to use this instead of the tincture would have been a deliberate act, not a moment of inattention to detail. Even if by some incomprehensible mischance, the extract had been used, one or two teaspoonfuls of the resulting mixture would still not have contained a fatal amount ofstrychnia, but Frances knew too well that people often took additional doses of medicine in the mistaken belief that if a teaspoonful did them good, then four would be four times as beneficial.
The timing of the attack also interested her. The symptoms of poisoning bystrychnia could be apparent within minutes of it being taken, but only if it was present in its pure form. When taken as tincture or extract, onset could sometimes be delayed by an hour or two. She would have to wait for the analyst’s report to confirm what, if anything, had been found in the medicine.
Her thoughts led her into darker waters. If the medicine had been correct when it left the shop, then poison might have been introduced into it later. This could scarcely be an accidental act. Self destruction did not appear likely in a man of Garton’s obviously conten
