The Fiend in Human by John MacLachlan Gray

Author:John MacLachlan Gray [Gray, John MacLachlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Whitty seats himself at the tea-table, noting that china and silver have already been laid out by his hostess’s companion on a pressed linen table-cloth, with milk, lemon, sugar and an array of cakes. Everything – cups, spoons, napkins – appears immaculate and orderly, as if to offset the nature of the activities taking place elsewhere.

Like the reception room, the sitting-room has been decorated in shades of red, excepting the glass cupola in the corner looking onto the garden, where stands a lush fern identical to its colleague in the reception room: hence, the relative health of the many large plants in the house despite the almost total lack of daylight, their having been alternately placed here. Seated beneath the fern, Mrs Marlowe pours. For not the first time, Whitty experiences the discomfiting feeling that he is acting according to her script and not his own, that any strategy he might undertake will be incorporated into her overall design, like a musician improvising on a theme.

‘Cream and sugar, Mr Whitty?’

‘Sugar, please, Mrs Marlowe. Two spoons.’ He replies as though confident that the white granules in the bowl are indeed sugar.

She stirs his tea with a silver spoon in her capable fingers. Are they the hands of a murderess? Did those hands stir arsenic into her husband’s tea, day after day?

Thinks Whitty: Poison is the most intimate violence, and the most repellent, for the murderer must be sufficiently trusted that the victim will accept food or drink. Hence, it is said, poison is the weapon of women, to whom the role of providing food customarily falls. Arsenic is an especially appropriate weapon for the weaker sex: unlike strychnine, whose effects are felt after a short while, arsenic may be administered over a period of weeks, so that the victim gradually falls ill and dies, unaware of the cause of his symptoms, while the murderer feigns womanly concern, giving him his medicine, tucking him in each night as innocent and ignorant as a baby …

‘Be careful, Sir. Be careful of what you are thinking.’ Surprisingly, this warning comes, not from the lady before him, but from her bleak little guardian, hovering in front of the cabinet.

‘Mr Whitty, I believe you have met my companion, Mrs Button.’

‘Indeed, Madam, though I do not believe we have been introduced.’

‘Mrs Button, this is Mr Whitty. A journalist with an enquiring mind.’

‘That is not all that is on his mind.’

‘That will be sufficient, Mrs Button.’

The little witch executes a stiff curtsey. ‘Good-day to you, Sir.’

‘And to you, Madam. A pleasure to have met you.’

In a house of illusion, odd and disturbing encounters are only to be expected.

Mrs Marlowe sips her tea. She has not taken sugar. ‘As a newspaperman, Sir, I ask you: What is your professional opinion of Mr Acton’s report on the debilitating effects of self-abuse? The gentleman writes that it is the cause of idiocy and death, and that it is rampant among the upper classes, and that Britain is losing her leaders of

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