Arsenic For Tea: A Wells and Wong Mystery

  Uncle Felix’s shoulders tensed – and next to me, Daisy suddenly went stiff, as though they had both heard the same invisible sound.

  ‘What?’ I whispered, as quietly as I could.

  ‘Shh! Wait!’ hissed Daisy.

  ‘Humour me,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘Take some samples. I can take them up to the laboratory in London tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ said Dr Cooper. ‘I doubt that very much. Fallingford and the surrounding countryside is flooded – and you know that this sort of flood isn’t liable to die down for days. And anyway – forgive me for being blunt, but I doubt whether this man has even a few hours left. I simply can’t get fluid into him as quickly as he loses it. Any tests will be quite irrelevant.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I want you to take them, and give them to me. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Dr Cooper. ‘I only meant . . . Forgive me – I must get back to the patient.’

  ‘All right,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘Thank you. Now – please excuse me.’

  He strode off towards his bedroom, and Dr Cooper ducked back into Mr Curtis’s. As soon as the doors had closed behind them, Daisy burst up out of the chest like a jack-in-the-box. The air opened up above me and I took a grateful gasp. But I couldn’t think what Daisy was doing. What if someone came out and caught us?

  ‘Daisy!’ I said, crouching half out of the chest.

  ‘Oh, there’s no time, Hazel! Quick! We have just been given the most important clue. We must get to the library immediately!’

  I decided that this was one of those times where it was important to let Daisy have her head, so I crawled out of the chest and chased after her. She barrelled down the main stairs and across the hall into the library. Thank goodness, there was no one there.

  When she was inside, Daisy leaped across the room and clawed at the leather-bound books like a tiger. She ripped one off a shelf, threw it to the floor (Daisy adores books, but she does ill-treat them in a most upsetting way) and began to rifle through it. ‘Here!’ she cried. ‘Look at this!’

  I squinted at the open page. It seemed to be from the ‘A’ section of some sort of medical textbook. ‘Arsenic Poisoning’, I read.

  Symptoms: numbness, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea (often bloody), convulsions (often violent), severe dehydration, severe thirst, abdominal pain.

  Symptoms first present fifteen to thirty minutes after ingestion, beginning with warmth and tightness of the mouth and throat. Nausea and stomach pains follow, after which violent purging begins. Vomiting should be encouraged at the earliest possible opportunity, but cases where the patient has ingested more than four grains are generally fatal. A mere two grains have been known to kill. Death may occur any time between two and forty-eight hours after ingestion, and is caused by circulatory collapse.

  Note: can often be mistaken for the symptoms of DYSENTERY.

  I went cold all over. It couldn’t be . . . Daisy was imagining things again. Except . . .

  Except that none of the rest of us were ill. Except that all the symptoms I had seen – and Dr Cooper had mentioned – matched those we had just read about. Except that there was a tub of arsenic rat poison in the hall cupboard, and everyone knew about it.

  Except that it all made sense.

  I gasped at Daisy, and she looked up at me, her mouth a round O of shocked excitement.

  ‘I’m right!’ she cried. ‘I knew it, the moment Dr Cooper said dysentery. I’ve read about this in a book. Hazel, this is serious. Mr Curtis isn’t just ill. He’s been poisoned!’

  I gulped. There was a thick feeling at the back of my throat. The drumming of the rain was so loud that I could hardly hear the inside of my head. It sounded as though it was trying to batter its way into the house. What if we were stuck here? I thought all of a sudden. What if we were flooded, and what if Daisy really was right?

  ‘Hazel, this case has just taken a fascinating turn. A real poisoning! And here we are, on the spot, ready to detect it! We must unlock the dining-room door now and—’

  ‘There you are!’ said a voice behind us.

  We both jumped, and Daisy slammed the book shut. Miss Alston was standing in the doorway, her hair bushier and more unkempt than ever. She looked pale and tired.

  My heart began to pound. I glanced sideways at Daisy, but her face was giving nothing away. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never be able to appear as cool and collected as Daisy.

  ‘Sorry, Miss Alston,’ she said, as though she were apologizing for a torn skirt.

  ‘Come on upstairs,’ Miss Alston said. ‘Your friends are wondering where you’ve got to.’

  ‘Oh, all right, Miss Alston. We’re coming.’

  We were taken up to the nursery, and there was nothing we could do about it. Investigating the dining room would have to wait.

  The rain was beating on the roof above our heads, sounding as though it was about to burst through and drown us all, and Beanie was huddled on her bed, shaking, while Kitty comforted her. ‘Honestly, Beans,’ she was saying as we came in. ‘He’ll get better!’

  Daisy and I simply looked at each other.

  9

  Hetty, looking just as tired as Miss Alston, her red hair escaping from her cap in a frizz, brought supper up to us on a tray. It was boiled eggs and soldiers. ‘Oh, really,’ said Daisy in disgust. ‘We aren’t ill. Why are we being sent an invalid’s supper?’

  ‘Daisy!’ said Miss Alston warningly, and Daisy was quiet – but privately I agreed with her. Even though people in stories always lose their appetite when something dreadful happens, in real life it is not like that at all. The worse things get, the hungrier I am. I can’t help it. By that time – it was nearly eight at night – my stomach was rumbling dreadfully. I could have eaten another enormous tea.

  ‘But he will get better,’ Beanie kept saying, like one of those dolls with a voice inside. We all pretended we hadn’t heard.

  Daisy was itching to talk about what we had discovered, but there never was a chance. Miss Alston was always hovering around – just as though she knew, and wanted to keep us here! I thought. It was infuriating.

  Then there was a tap on the door, and Miss Alston was called outside. She closed the door behind her, but I heard her speaking to someone – Hetty – in the hallway. Once again, we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without her knowing about it. I stared at the bars on the nursery windows and tried very hard to be sensible and calm. This was not last year again. Mr Curtis was not dead. We would wake up next morning and look out of the window and he would be jogging round the grounds again. Then he would leave Fallingford as planned, and we would be glad, and everything would be ordinary again.

  The door opened again and Miss Alston came in. Her expression was very odd. We all stopped what we were doing and looked at her.

  ‘Girls,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news. Mr Curtis has died.’

  1

  I wrote all that last night. I knew that we were really and truly on a case – and compared to that, bedtime did not matter at all. After we heard what had happened to Mr Curtis, Beanie had proper hysterics, and we all had to crowd round and comfort her and tell her that it was all right; she would be all right.

  ‘But what if we die too?’ she sobbed. ‘Kitty, I don’t want you to die!’

  ‘Honestly, Beans, it isn’t catching,’ said Kitty.

  ‘But how do you KNOW?’ wailed Beanie, and that was another twenty minutes gone.

  I crouched on my bed and wrote furiously, because I knew that I had to get it down quickly, before any of it went out of my head. Mr Curtis may have been awful, but he had still been a person. If we were right about what had happened to him, then someone was responsible for the fact that he was not a person any more, and that was terrible. All the things Daisy and I had seen over the last few days had suddenly become extremely important. Any one of them might mean something, and any one of them might help reveal the murderer.

  You see, I had realized something. It was
no good hoping that a mystery murderer had crept in from outside, poisoned Mr Curtis’s tea and vanished into the night. I had seen for myself the wet tracks made by Mr Curtis and Lady Hastings when they came in from the rain on Saturday afternoon – and also noticed that there had been no other such tracks anywhere in the house. No one had come in after them, and no one but the weekend guests and Chapman had been in the dining room when Mr Curtis had been taken ill. The rain absolutely ruled out anyone but the people inside Fallingford House, I thought, and I felt a bit sick.

  There was a murderer on the loose again; and they were very close to us. If we went hunting them, would we be safe?

  It was still raining too. As I wrote I heard the water bucketing down, hammering against the roof above me like fists. Water leaked through into buckets on the nursery landing, drip-drip-drip like soft footsteps. What if we were trapped here? Fallingford House was on a hill, and Dr Cooper had said that the countryside around it was flooding. What if the police couldn’t get to us? I wrote and wrote, but all I wanted to do was talk to Daisy.

  2

  At last Beanie and Kitty were quiet. They were huddled together in Beanie’s bed, and Beanie was making little snuffling noises as she slept. Daisy had been pretending to sleep too, but as soon as we heard Beanie’s snores she sat up in bed, eyes wide.

  Watson! she mouthed. Detective Society meeting. Outside. Now! It is a very good thing I have been practising my lip-reading.

  I crept out of bed (the old broken floorboard halfway across the nursery groaned, and I made an apologetic face at Daisy), and together we slipped out. We heard snoring from Miss Alston’s little room, and a creak as she rolled over in bed.

  It was a very cold, early hour of the morning, and the house was a little circle of calm within the howling storm outside. Daisy motioned towards the servants’ stairs. In the darkness they did look like a secret passage. I imagined us vanishing down them and never coming out – but that was silly, shrimp-like fear, of course. I took a deep breath and followed Daisy carefully down twenty steps. On the twenty-first (I counted) she stopped, and I bumped into her in the darkness.

  ‘Halfway down,’ she breathed, clicking on her torch so that it lit her face eerily. I jumped. ‘Perfect. Mrs D, Hetty and Chapman are asleep. No one else even remembers these stairs are here – Mummy doesn’t like thinking about them: she says they’re too dirty to bear. So we won’t be disturbed. Sit down, Hazel. It’s time to go over the facts of the case.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, sitting down on a very hard and uncomfortable stair.

  ‘We know that Mr Curtis is dead,’ said Daisy, ticking things off on the fingers of her free hand. ‘That’s quite unarguable. And what we think is that he has been murdered. What Dr Cooper said suggests that he was poisoned. We know there’s arsenic in the hall cupboard, and we know that arsenic poisoning fits with his symptoms. That must be the most likely cause. But how do we prove it? And if he was poisoned, who did it?’

  ‘If Mr Curtis was poisoned, I think it must have been someone in the house,’ I said. ‘It’s awful, but nothing else fits. If he had been poisoned at breakfast or lunch, he would have begun to feel ill hours before he did – so he must have been poisoned at tea. It was raining by then, and we didn’t see any wet tracks, did we, the way we would if someone from outside had crept in through the French windows and poisoned the tea things before we went into the dining room? Besides, he didn’t eat anything, and the only thing he drank was that cup of tea. Since no one else is ill, it must just have been that cup that was poisoned, rather than the whole teapot – and that means that the murderer must have been in the room when he drank it. Everyone was crowding round the tea table – any of them could have dropped something into the cup before it was handed to him, couldn’t they? They’re all suspects, Daisy!’

  I stopped and took a deep breath. It was an unusually long speech for me, and my stomach had been turning over as I said it. I was telling Daisy that any of her family might be a murderer, and I was terribly afraid that she was going to shout at me, or tell me that I was wrong. Even after more than a year of being friends, I never quite know how Daisy will take things.

  ‘Golly!’ she said, after a pause. ‘Yes. Remember Mr Curtis saying that the tea tasted foul?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, breathing a very quiet sigh of relief. ‘It’s awful, but it must be true. So what do we do now?’

  ‘Do? Why, Hazel, you chump, it’s perfectly obvious. You may be all right at thinking, but you’re absolutely no good at all at doing. You’ve just confirmed the scene of the crime, and we believe we’ve identified arsenic as the murder weapon. We must visit the dining room immediately and recover that cup – it will certainly still retain traces of arsenic, and it may even have the murderer’s fingerprints on it.’

  I peered at her. ‘But the door’s locked, Daisy!’

  ‘I know that,’ said Daisy. ‘And I know Uncle Felix still has the key. But we don’t have to use that one. There’s a whole set hidden in the umbrella stand for when we want to break into the pantry after Mrs D has gone home for the night. Come on – all we need to do is fish out the ones in the stand and we’ll be in that room in a trice.’

  Of course, Daisy is always right about this sort of thing – but as I stood up and followed her down the stairs I couldn’t help worrying. We were starting off on our detective path, just as we had last year – and at the end of that path, once again, was a real murderer. What if they noticed that we were investigating, and came after us next? I remembered our last murder case, and shuddered. I never wanted to feel so frightened again. But of course, I couldn’t say this to Daisy. The less safe Daisy is, the happier she is about it.

  3

  Down the little back stairs we crept – Daisy as daintily as Raffles, heel-toe, heel-toe, and me like a baby elephant – then across the first-floor landing, holding our breath, and down the main stairs.

  We crept (and I stumbled), and at last we were down in the hall, the grandfather clock ticking like the beat of a heart. Fallingford is so full of things that walking through it at night is a dangerous activity – there are bits of furniture and stray carpets everywhere. They made horrible shadows across the walls, and whenever I saw them out of the corner of my eye my heart pounded. The suit of armour looked like a person in the dark, and I gasped before I could stop myself. But Daisy remained calm. She went towards the umbrella stand (an elephant’s foot – a real one, all leathery and cracking: it gives me the horrors) while I stood nervously beside the dining-room door. I pushed the handle, just to pass the time, and to my great surprise it gave, and the door swung open.

  ‘Daisy!’ I hissed. ‘Look! It isn’t locked after all!’

  Daisy turned, hand still outstretched towards the umbrella stand. ‘Goodness!’ she said in surprise, ‘Uncle Felix is slipping. Well, that makes this far simpler for us.’

  It was just as we had left it – curtains open and tea things laid out. Dimly, I saw the remains of cakes and sandwiches, spilling crumbs all over the table. Cups were tilted over, and dark tea stains crept across the pale tablecloth. My stomach lurched, so that for a foolish moment I wondered if I had been poisoned too. Dying from eating tea was such a horrible way to go – like being tricked by something that ought to be nice.

  I picked up a scrap of paper that was sitting on the tablecloth and fiddled with it nervously. It was a bit of a printed page – at first I thought it was newspaper, but it was too thick and smooth under my fingers, like paper from a book. I peered at it, trying to make out words, but then Daisy seized my arm. I stuffed it into my pocket and turned to her.

  ‘Hazel!’ hissed Daisy, pointing to the chair where Mr Curtis had been sitting. ‘Look!’

  I squinted – and saw that the room was not quite as it had been after all. The tea might be all there, and the furniture might be pulled out the way it had been that afternoon – but there were two things missing. The teacup that Mr Curtis had drunk from, and his gold watch. It was like one of
Miss Alston’s memory games come to life.

  ‘Might they have been moved by someone when Mr Curtis was taken ill?’ I asked doubtfully. But I knew that they had been next to Mr Curtis’s chair when Uncle Felix locked the door. And the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that Uncle Felix had locked the door.

  Daisy clicked on her torch and flashed it about the room in jumpy patterns – at the dining table, at the other chairs, at the sideboard – but the fat gold watch and the thin golden cup were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Daisy, if they’re not here now . . .’

  I did not even have to finish my sentence. It meant, of course, that since we were all in the dining room, someone had come in and taken away Mr Curtis’s cup and watch – and only the cup and the watch. And that meant that our suspicions were absolutely right: Mr Curtis really had been poisoned.

  I took a deep, steadying breath.

  And then something at the other end of the dining room rustled.

  4

  Other than Daisy’s torch, there was only the wet half-light filtering through from outside to see by. Beyond its beam we could only make out shadows and shapes – and the dining room was long and crowded with tables and chairs.

  ‘Who’s there?’ asked Daisy. She is exceedingly brave sometimes. I couldn’t have spoken, even if I’d wanted to.

  The room had gone very quiet, apart from the patter of the rain, but I could feel that someone – whoever it was – was crouching at the far end, not moving, not making a sound. I remembered the unlocked door, and cold rushed down my spine.

  ‘Who’s there?’ hissed Daisy again.

  The person pushed over a chair.

  We screamed, and then we turned round and ran as though vicious dogs were snapping at our heels, out of the dining room and all the way up to the nursery. The stairs crunched and creaked as we did so, and I was terrified that someone would hear – but the pounding rain must have drowned out all noise.