I still had the edge of the sheet in my hands when I heard someone unlock the door, and the room filled with the yellow fizzle of electric lights.
“What are you doing in here?” a voice demanded.
I spun round to confront the glowering (and gloriously moustachioed) face of Dr. Vikram Munjal.
6
Acute Toxicity and Prolonged Exposure
The study of toxins should be foremost in an Investigator’s education. Many poisons can mimic common illnesses, so an Investigator must be able to distinguish symptoms that are suspicious from those that are merely unfortunate.
—H. M. Hardcastle, Principles of Detection
“Dr. Munjal!” I took a step backward—or tried to, bumping right into his meat-and-flies experiment. The flies spun into the room, a glittering green fog. “Quick, don’t let them out!”
Apparently that wasn’t what he expected me to say. He stared for a moment, then reached back and shut the door. “They’ll stay with the flesh,” he said. He was older than Father, with dark olive skin and very dark eyes behind his rain-spotted spectacles. “You’re Arthur Hardcastle’s girl, aren’t you? You were coming to lunch with Caroline.”
I nodded guiltily.
“You’d better explain what happened here.”
I dithered, but decided lying served no point. “It wasn’t Caroline’s fault,” I began.
“Ah. LaRue. That girl . . .” He shook his head in understanding. “But my daughter knows better than to fool about in here. I’m very sorry they tried to scare you.” His expression was full of sympathy. “Are you all right?”
“Of course,” I said stoutly, partly to cover my own twinge of guilt and partly to hide how relieved I was that he’d shown up. “The flies—what kind are they?”
“Calliphora,” he said, looking oddly at me. “Blowflies. I’m attempting to devise a more accurate method for determining time of death.” I nodded. Or I grimaced. I was sure I’d be fascinated to read about it someday. “Well, Miss Hardcastle, shall we get you out of here?”
Oh, yes, please. But my work wasn’t done, and I couldn’t leave empty-handed! I seized my last chance. “Wait, Doctor—” He was halfway to the door again, so I blurted out, “Why did you say Minerva Wodehouse died of natural causes?”
He turned back, frowning. “I beg your pardon?”
“My neighbor who died—why didn’t you perform a proper autopsy?” When he didn’t answer right away, I refreshed the witness’s memory. “An elderly woman, found in her bathtub on Wednesday.” I stood very straight, professional-to-professional, not at all like a foolish child who’d got herself locked inside his morgue.
“No, no, I remember. Young lady, I do not believe we should be discussing this.” He started to turn off the electricity again, and that’s when he noticed all the paperwork I’d left lying about. Now, here was a lesson Miss Judson would appreciate: clean up after yourself. His hand came down from the switch, slowly. “What were you doing in here?”
“Trying to find your report.”
He straightened up the decapitated? file and sat on the edge of his desk. He didn’t speak for a long time, and when he finally did, what he said surprised me. “I knew your mother, you know.”
I shook my head. My eyes stung a little. “How?”
“From the teaching hospital, in medical school. Each of us outcasts in our class.” Dr. Munjal gestured to himself and I understood what he meant: the female student, and the one from India. “She was wickedly clever. She’d have made a fine doctor.”
“It’s too bad she had to give it up, to get married and have me.”
His mouth quirked. “She would not have thought so,” he said. “Very well, for your mother’s sake, and because anyone who has spent—how long?—locked up in here deserves something to show for it, what do you want to know?” He lifted his case onto the desk beside him and unlatched the top. “Here we are. Minerva Wodehouse. Heart failure.” He handed me a sheet of paper, marked all over with beautiful official stamps and insignia, with his tight, tidy signature at the bottom. office of the police surgeon, it said at the top.
I devoured it carefully, not wanting to miss, or misinterpret, a single morsel. There was a brief description of where Miss Wodehouse had been found (bathtub), and the time that the police were notified (7:20 a.m., thanks to “call from concerned neighbor” [ahem]). “How do you know she didn’t drown?”
“There would have been water in her lungs, and froth in her mouth and nose,” Dr. Munjal said. “Heart failure was more likely, given her age and other factors.”
I would come back to those “other factors” later. “But that just means she could have been dead before she went into the water. Doesn’t it?” I added, trying not to seem confrontational.
“Well,” he said, drawing out the word, “normally, yes. If she had been found in a pond, or something of that nature, we would wonder if she had not hit her head, or perhaps suffered a stroke and fallen in. But people do not generally fall into their baths.”
“I think she was killed somewhere else and then dumped in her bathtub to make it look like natural causes.”
He drew back. “Now, Miss Hardcastle, don’t get carried away.”
“I never get carried away.” In my mind that was an offense akin to being fanciful, so I was quite sure I wasn’t guilty. “I am deducing, based on rational observations of the evidence.”
“Deducing,” he said faintly, rubbing his temples. “I am sure I will regret saying this, but is there anything else you’ve deduced?”
Until then, I’d thought the conversation was going well—we were enjoying a meeting of the minds about his fascinating work. But that look of exasperation was entirely too familiar (I’ll give you a “knack” for disruption!), and it made me defensive. “You can’t know she wasn’t murdered. Not without a proper autopsy.”
“Miss Hardcastle, it wasn’t warranted. When an eighty-year-old woman dies in the bath, with all the symptoms of a heart attack, in all likelihood, it’s a heart attack.”
“Seventy-nine,” I corrected. “And don’t some poisons look like a heart attack? Like digitalis,” I improvised, from his file.
“Yes, but do you know what else looks like a heart attack?” He gave me a pointed look. “A heart attack.”
“Did she have a history of heart problems?”