A Broken Vessel by Kate Ross Page B

weeks had gone by, and there’d been no response, she might have given up hope and determined to die. But this was too soon.”
    “Perhaps she did get an answer, in some way we don’t know about. Whomever she wrote to may have got a message to her last night, saying he wanted nothing more to do with her.”
    “He would have had to be remarkably intrepid, to smuggle a message to her at the refuge. The place seems little better than a prison. But here’s another question: why didn’t she leave a note?”
    “Not all suicides do.”
    “No. But not all suicides are as articulate as this one was. After writing an eloquent letter like this”—he took it out of his pocket and held it up—“can you conceive she would take her own life without leaving a note of explanation or regret—some expression of her feelings?”
    “It’s happening again—the same confounded thing as that business at Bellegarde! Here’s a perfectly cut-and-dried affair— a straightforward suicide—and you stir up a hornets’ nest of complications!”
    “Wasn’t that how we solved the Bellegarde murder?” Julian asked mildly.
    “But that was obviously a murder!”
    “This is, at the very least, a highly unconvincing suicide. How did Mary get the laudanum? Harcourt and Mrs. Fiske both said, with magnificent vagueness, that the inmates are so corrupt and clever, they could have found some means or other of spiriting laudanum into the refuge. But it appears the matrons watch them like hawks, searching their rooms and looking in on them at all hours of the night. It’s all very well to say that since Mary had the laudanum, she must have had some means of obtaining it. One could equally say that if she had no means, she must not have obtained it.”
    “What are you saying? Somebody sneaked into Mary’s room last night and forced her to drink the stuff?”
    “Well, she did have a room to herself. Florrie told Sally she was the only one of the inmates who slept alone.”
    “Heavens above, man, think about what you’re saying!” MacGregor paced back and forth, waving his hands. “Anybody meaning to kill Mary that way would have had to pour out a whacking great dose of laudanum, mix it with water or spirits— you can’t drink laudanum neat—and then force her to drink it down. It seems like a pretty clumsy and dangerous way to commit a murder.”
    “People do commit murder by opium poisoning.”
    “Once in a month of Sundays, yes. But they do it by adding opium to the victim’s food or drink by stealth. In this case, an empty laudanum bottle was left by Mary’s bed. That’s a funny thing for a poisoner to do.”
    “It’s a very natural thing, if the poisoner wants the death to look like a suicide.”
    ‘But wouldn’t it be much simpler if Mary drank the laudanum herself?”
    “No, Doctor, it would be much more complicated. For one thing, what happened to the cordial?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The dose of cordial Mrs. Fiske gave her before she went to bed.”
    “She drank it, I suppose, then used the empty glass to take the laudanum, just as the coroner said.”
    “But, my dear fellow, think how preposterous that is! Why would anyone take a strengthening cordial just before committing suicide?”
    “Well—she probably wasn’t thinking clearly. When a despairing young girl sets out to end her life, you can’t expect her to go about it rationally.”
    “Nobody who saw her that evening thinks she looked despairing or irrational. Even Mrs. Fiske said she seemed more or less as usual. Anyway, this isn’t a question of rationality—it’s intuition.” He pressed a hand to his heart “You don’t take a medicine to fortify your body just before taking a poison to destroy it. Nobody would do such a thing. No, the natural thing would have been for her to pour out the cordial into the washbasin by her bed. But that was found clean and dry. And apparently the cordial wasn’t poured out anywhere else. I’ve seen