“That will suit us very well.”
They were shown into Dr. Harris’s study. Dr. Birch was a lively man with a gleam in his eye. He responded to Treadles’s questions with quick, to-the-point answers. Yes, his doorbell had rung shortly after seven that day and he had to dash off a quick note to the proprietor of the village inn, where there was an elderly traveler waiting for him, in pain and in need of morphine. And since his dogcart was already hitched, he drove, following Tommy Dunn to Curry House.
“It really was too bad that young Dunn couldn’t tell me anything relevant about Mr. Sackville, except that he couldn’t be roused and appeared to be in a bad way. Or I’d have been better prepared.”
“You’d have brought strychnine?”
“Most likely, if I’d suspected an overdose of chloral. And I would have if I’d been told about Mr. Sackville’s body temperature—that is a telltale symptom of chloral poisoning.”
“Isn’t strychnine a deadly poison in itself?”
“One of the deadliest. Administered to a healthy person, strychnine would cause fatal muscular convulsions. But that property makes it an effective antidote to chloral: It stimulates the heart’s function and stops the slide of decreasing body temperature.”
“Now, doctor, do you believe the chloral that killed Mr. Sackville to have been self-administered?”
“Dr. Harris and I spoke about it and we saw absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t have been so,” Dr. Birch answered confidently. “The chloral that Dr. Harris prescribed for Mr. Sackville was in the form of grains. It is very difficult to force a man to ingest anything he doesn’t wish to—and there were no signs of violence anywhere. The only explanation that makes sense is that Mr. Sackville miscounted the number of grains and paid for his mistake.”
The bespectacled Dr. Harris was more deliberate in his demeanor than Dr. Birch. But he confirmed without hesitation that Mr. Sackville’s gastric episodes had been ongoing, nothing unusual. And that he had indeed prescribed the chloral, for Mr. Sackville’s insomnia.
“When was the last time you saw Mr. Sackville in a professional capacity?” asked Treadles.
“Six weeks ago. He had a persistent cough and was worried that it might turn into pneumonia.”
“It didn’t, I presume?”
“No. Once the weather turned warmer, the cough cleared.”
“He didn’t consult you about his gastric attacks?”
“He mentioned them from time to time, but he was resigned. He’d been suffering from them since he was a young man and had accepted that they would continue to plague him for as long as he lived.”
“I see,” said Inspector Treadles.
He was about to ask another question when Dr. Harris said, “His new cook showed far greater interest in his digestion than he did. She came and conferred with me once, on her half day no less. Interesting woman. She wanted to cure Mr. Sackville of his ‘tummy aches’ by modifying his diet to exclude those items that could be proven to irritate his innards.
“Her plan was to start with one item known to be fine for him to eat and then add in other items one by one, with at least forty-eight hours between each addition, so that any single item that set him off could be pinpointed and eliminated right away—very sound methodology, that. But Mr. Sackville scoffed at her suggestion. He might suffer abdominal turmoil once in a while but he was still a man who like a good supper and a proper pudding with every meal. Having so limited a diet for any length of time was unthinkable for him.”
“So Mrs. Meek attempted to enlist the weight of your professional opinion in persuading Mr. Sackville to change his mind?”
“Precisely. I commended her for her dedication and initiative—I wish my own cook thought half so much of my digestion. But if I’ve learned anything in my years of dealing with patients it’s that it is nigh impossible to change a grown man’s habits. I told her I’d put in a word with Mr. Sackville the next time I saw him—but I never did see him again.”
“A shame,” said Treadles. “Let me now ask you the same question I posed to Dr. Birch. Do you believe that Mr. Sackville died because he took the wrong number of chloral grains?”