The Pale Horse

  “Yes. I do. I think he’s the man who plans it all.”

  “Perhaps. He sounds as though he’d have the kind of brains for that, I agree. But surely he wouldn’t have done anything so crude as killing Father Gorman himself!”

  “He might have if there was sufficient urgency. Father Gorman might have had to be silenced before he could pass on what he had learnt from that woman about the activities of the Pale Horse. Besides—”

  I stopped short.

  “Hallo—you still there?”

  “Yes, I was thinking… Just an idea that occurred to me…”

  “What was it?”

  “I’ve not got it clear yet… Just that real safety could only be achieved one way. I haven’t worked it out yet…Anyway, I must go now. I’ve got a rendezvous at a coffee bar.”

  “Didn’t know you were in the Chelsea coffee bar set!”

  “I’m not. My coffee bar is in Tottenham Court Road, as a matter of fact.”

  I rang off and glanced at the clock.

  I started for the door when the telephone rang.

  I hesitated. Ten to one, it was Jim Corrigan again, ringing back to know more about my idea.

  I didn’t want to talk to Jim Corrigan just now.

  I moved towards the door whilst the telephone rang on persistently, naggingly.

  Of course, it might be the hospital— Ginger—

  I couldn’t risk that. I strode across impatiently and jerked the receiver off its hook.

  “Hallo?”

  “Is that you, Mark?”

  “Yes, who is it?”

  “It’s me, of course,” said the voice reproachfully. “Listen, I want to tell you something.”

  “Oh, it’s you.” I recognised the voice of Mrs. Oliver. “Look here, I’m in a great hurry, got to go out. I’ll ring you back later.”

  “That won’t do at all,” said Mrs. Oliver, firmly. “You’ve got to listen to me now. It’s important.”

  “Well, you’ll have to be quick. I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Pooh,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You can always be late for an appointment. Everybody is. They’ll think all the more of you.”

  “No, really, I’ve got to—”

  “Listen, Mark. This is important. I’m sure it is. It must be!”

  I curbed my impatience as best I could, glancing at the clock.

  “Well?”

  “My Milly had tonsilitis. She was quite bad and she’s gone to the country—to her sister—”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “I’m frightfully sorry about that, but really—”

  “Listen. I’ve not begun yet. Where was I? Oh yes. Milly had to go to the country and so I rang up the agency I always go to—the Regency—such a silly name I always think—like a cinema—”

  “I really must—”

  “And said what could they send? And they said it was very difficult just now—which they always say as a matter of fact—but they’d do what they could—”

  Never had I found my friend Ariadne Oliver so maddening.

  “—and so, this morning a woman came along, and who do you think she turned out to be?”

  “I can’t imagine. Look—”

  “A woman called Edith Binns—comic name, isn’t it?—and you actually know her.”

  “No, I don’t. I never heard of a woman called Edith Binns.”

  “But you do know her and you saw her not very long ago. She had been with that godmother of yours for years. Lady Hesketh-Dubois.”

  “Oh, with her!”

  “Yes. She saw you the day you came to collect some pictures.”

  “Well, that’s all very nice and I expect you’re very lucky to find her. I believe she’s most trustworthy and reliable and all that. Aunt Min said so. But really—now—”

  “Wait, can’t you? I haven’t got to the point. She sat and talked a great deal about Lady Hesketh-Dubois and her last illness, and all that sort of thing, because they do love illnesses and death and then she said it.”

  “Said what?”

  “The thing that caught my attention. She said something like: ‘Poor dear lady, suffering like she did. That nasty thing on her brain, a growth, they say, and she in quite good health up to just before. And pitiful it was to see her in the nursing home and all her hair, nice thick white hair it was, and always blued regularly once a fortnight, to see it coming out all over the pillow. Coming out in handfuls. And then, Mark, I thought of Mary Delafontaine, that friend of mine. Her hair came out. And I remembered what you told me about some girl you’d seen in a Chelsea coffee place fighting with another girl, and getting her hair all pulled out in handfuls. Hair doesn’t come out as easily as that, Mark. You try—just try to pull your own hair, just a little bit of it, out by the roots! Just try it! You’ll see. It’s not natural, Mark, for all those people to have hair that comes out by the roots. It’s not natural. It must be some special kind of new illness—it must mean something.”

  I clutched the receiver and my head swam. Things, half-remembered scraps of knowledge, drew together. Rhoda and her dogs on the lawn—an article I had read in a medical journal in New York—Of course… Of course!

  I was suddenly aware that Mrs. Oliver was still quacking happily.

  “Bless you,” I said. “You’re wonderful!”

  I slammed back the receiver, then took it off again. I dialled a number and was lucky enough this time to get Lejeune straightaway.

  “Listen,” I said, “is Ginger’s hair coming out by the roots in handfuls?”

  “Well—as a matter of fact I believe it is. High fever, I suppose.”

  “Fever my foot,” I said. “What Ginger’s suffering from, what they’ve all suffered from, is thallium poisoning. Please God, we may be in time….”

  Twenty-two

  Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative

  I

  “Are we in time? Will she live?”

  I wandered up and down. I couldn’t sit still.

  Lejeune sat watching me. He was patient and kind.

  “You can be sure that everything possible is being done.”

  It was the same old answer. It did nothing to comfort me.

  “Do they know how to treat thallium poisoning?”

  “You don’t often get a case of it. But everything possible will be tried. If you ask me, I think she’ll pull through.”

  I looked at him. How could I tell if he really believed what he was saying? Was he just trying to soothe me?

  “At any rate, they’ve verified that it was thallium.”

  “Yes, they’ve verified that.”

  “So that’s the simple truth behind the Pale Horse. Poison. No witchcraft, no hypnotism, no scientific death rays. Plain poisoning! And she flung that at me, damn her. Flung it in my face. Laughing in her cheek all the while, I expect.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Thyrza Grey. That first afternoon when I went to tea there. Talked about the Borgias and all the build up of ‘rare and untraceable poisons’; the poisoned gloves and all the rest of it. ‘Common white arsenic,’ she said, ‘and nothing else.’ This was just as simple. All that hooey! The trance and the white cocks and the brazier and the pentagrams and the voodoo and the reversed crucifix—all that was for the crudely superstitious. And the famous ‘box’ was another bit of hooey for the contemporary-minded. We don’t believe in spirits and witches and spells nowadays, but we’re a gullible lot when it comes to ‘rays’ and ‘waves’ and psychological phenomena. That box, I bet, is nothing but a nice little assembly of electrical show-off, coloured bulbs and humming valves. Because we live in daily fear of radio fall out and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we’re amenable to suggestion along the line of scientific talk. The whole setup at the Pale Horse was bogus! The Pale Horse was a stalking horse, neither more nor less. Attention was to be focused on that, so that we’d never suspect what might be going on in another direction. The beauty of it was that it was quite safe for them. Thyrza Gr
ey could boast out loud about what occult powers she had or could command. She could never be brought into court and tried for murder on that issue. Her box could have been examined and proved to be harmless. Any court would have ruled that the whole thing was nonsense and impossible! And, of course, that’s exactly what it was.”

  “Do you think they’re all three in it?” asked Lejeune.

  “I shouldn’t think so. Bella’s belief in witchcraft is genuine, I should say. She believes in her own powers and rejoices in them. The same with Sybil. She’s got a genuine gift of mediumship. She goes into a trance and she doesn’t know what happens. She believes everything that Thyrza tells her.”

  “So Thyrza is the ruling spirit?”

  I said slowly:

  “As far as the Pale Horse is concerned, yes. But she’s not the real brains of the show. The real brain works behind the scenes. He plans and organises. It’s all beautifully dovetailed, you know. Everyone has his or her job, and no one has anything on anyone else. Bradley runs the financial and legal side. Apart from that, he doesn’t know what happens elsewhere. He’s handsomely paid, of course; so is Thyrza Grey.”

  “You seem to have got it all taped to your satisfaction,” said Lejeune drily.

  “I haven’t. Not yet. But we know the basic necessary fact. It’s the same as it has been through the ages. Crude and simple. Just plain poison. The dear old death potion.”

  “What put thallium into your head?”

  “Several things suddenly came together. The beginning of the whole business was the thing I saw that night in Chelsea. A girl whose hair was being pulled out by the roots by another girl. And she said: ‘It didn’t really hurt.’ It wasn’t bravery, as I thought; it was simple fact. It didn’t hurt.

  “I read an article on thallium poisoning when I was in America. A lot of workers in a factory died one after the other. Their deaths were put down to astonishingly varied causes. Amongst them, if I remember rightly, were paratyphoid, apoplexy, alcoholic neuritis, bulbar paralysis, epilepsy, gastroenteritis, and so on. Then there was a woman who poisoned seven people. Diagnosis included brain tumour, encephalitis, and lobar pneumonia. The symptoms vary a good deal, I understand. They may start with diarrhoea and vomiting, or there may be a stage of intoxication, again it may begin with pain in the limbs, and be put down as polyneuritis or rheumatic fever or polio—one patient was put in an iron lung. Sometimes there’s pigmentation of the skin.”

  “You talk like a medical dictionary!”

  “Naturally. I’ve been looking it up. But one thing always happens sooner or later. The hair falls out. Thallium used to be used for depilation at one time—particularly for children with ringworm. Then it was found to be dangerous. But it’s occasionally given internally, but with very careful dosage going by the weight of the patient. It’s mainly used nowadays for rats, I believe. It’s tasteless, soluble, and easy to buy. There’s only one thing, poisoning mustn’t be suspected.”

  Lejeune nodded.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Hence the insistence by the Pale Horse that the murderer must stay away from his intended victim. No suspicion of foul play ever arises. Why should it? There’s no interested party who could have had access to food or drink. No purchase of thallium or any other poison is ever made by him or her. That’s the beauty of it. The real work is done by someone who has no connection whatever with the victim. Someone, I think, who appears once and once only.”

  He paused.

  “Any ideas on that?”

  “Only one. A common factor appears to be that on every occasion some pleasant harmless-seeming woman calls with a questionnaire on behalf of a domestic research unit.”

  “You think that that woman is the one who plants the poison? As a sample? Something like that?”

  “I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that,” I said slowly. “I have an idea that the women are quite genuine. But they come into it somehow. I think we may be able to find out something if we talk to a woman called Eileen Brandon, who works in an Espresso off Tottenham Court Road.”

  II

  Eileen Brandon had been fairly accurately described by Poppy—allowing, that is to say, for Poppy’s own particular point of view. Her hair was neither like a chrysanthemum, nor an unruly birds’ nest. It was waved back close to her head, she wore the minimum of makeup and her feet were encased in what is called, I believe, sensible shoes. Her husband had been killed in a motor accident, she told us, and left her with two small children. Before her present employment, she had been employed by a firm called Customers’ Reactions Classified for over a year. She had left of her own accord as she had not cared for the type of work.

  “Why didn’t you care for it, Mrs. Brandon?”

  Lejeune asked the question. She looked at him.

  “You’re a detective-inspector of police? Is that right?”

  “Quite right, Mrs. Brandon.”

  “You think there’s something wrong about that firm?”

  “It’s a matter I’m inquiring into. Did you suspect something of that kind? Is that why you left?”

  “I’ve nothing definite to go upon. Nothing definite that I could tell you.”

  “Naturally. We understand that. This is a confidential inquiry.”

  “I see. But there is really very little I could say.”

  “You can say why you wanted to leave.”

  “I had a feeling that there were things going on that I didn’t know about.”

  “You mean you didn’t think it was a genuine concern?”

  “Something of the kind. It didn’t seem to me to be run in a businesslike way. I suspected that there must be some ulterior object behind it. But what that object was I still don’t know.”

  Lejeune asked more questions as to exactly what work she had been asked to do. Lists of names in a certain neighbourhood had been handed out. Her job was to visit those people, ask certain questions, and note down the answers.

  “And what struck you as wrong about that?”

  “The questions did not seem to me to follow up any particular line of research. They seemed desultory, almost haphazard. As though—how can I put it?—they were a cloak for something else.”

  “Have you any idea what the something else might have been?”

  “No. That’s what puzzled me.”

  She paused a moment and then said doubtfully:

  “I did wonder, at one time, whether the whole thing could have been organised with a view perhaps to burglaries, a spying out of the land, so to speak. But that couldn’t be it, because I was never asked for any description of the rooms, fastenings, etc, or when the occupants of the flat or house were likely to be out or away.”

  “What articles did you deal with in the questions?”

  “It varied. Sometimes it was foodstuffs. Cereals, cake mixes, or it might be soap flakes and detergents. Sometimes cosmetics, face powders, lipsticks, creams, etc. Sometimes patent medicines or remedies, brands of aspirin, cough pastilles, sleeping pills, pep pills, gargles, mouthwashes, indigestion remedies and so on.”

  “You were not asked,” Lejeune spoke casually, “to supply samples of any particular goods?”

  “No. Nothing of that kind.”

  “You merely asked questions and noted down the answers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was supposed to be the object of these inquiries?”

  “That was what seemed so odd. We were never told exactly. It was supposed to be done in order to supply information to certain manufacturing firms—but it was an extraordinarily amateurish way of going about it. Not systematic at all.”

  “Would it be possible, do you think, that amongst the questions you were told to ask, there was just one question or one group of questions, that was the object of the enterprise, and that the others might have been camouflage?”

  She considered the point, frowning a little, then she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “That would account for the haphazard choice—but I haven?
??t the least idea what question or questions were the important ones.”

  Lejeune looked at her keenly.

  “There must be more to it than what you’ve told us,” he said gently.

  “That’s the point, there isn’t really. I just felt there was something wrong about the whole setup. And then I talked to another woman, a Mrs. Davis—”

  “You talked to a Mrs. Davis—yes?”

  Lejeune’s voice remained quite unchanged.

  “She wasn’t happy about things, either.”

  “And why wasn’t she happy?”

  “She’d overheard something.”

  “What had she overheard?”

  “I told you I couldn’t be definite. She didn’t tell me in so many words. Only that from what she had overheard, the whole setup was a racket of some kind. ‘It’s not what it seems to be.’ That is what she said. Then she said: ‘Oh well, it doesn’t affect us. The money’s very good and we’re not asked to do anything that’s against the law—so I don’t see that we need bother our heads about it.’”

  “That was all?”

  “There was one other thing she said. I don’t know what she meant by it. She said: ‘Sometimes I feel like Typhoid Mary.’ At the time I didn’t know what she meant.”

  Lejeune took a paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “Do any of the names on that list mean anything to you? Did you call upon any of them that you can remember?”

  “I wouldn’t remember.” She took the paper. “I saw so many…” She paused as her eye went down the list. She said:

  “Ormerod.”

  “You remember an Ormerod?”

  “No. But Mrs. Davis mentioned him once. He died very suddenly, didn’t he? Cerebral haemorrhage. It upset her. She said, ‘He was on my list a fortnight ago. Looked like a man in the pink of condition.’ It was after that that she made the remark about Typhoid Mary. She said, ‘Some of the people I call on seem to curl up their toes and pass out just from having one look at me.’ She laughed about it and said it was a coincidence. But I don’t think she liked it much. However, she said she wasn’t going to worry.”