The Craig Poisoning Mystery by A. E. Fielding

Author:A. E. Fielding
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839740640
Publisher: Red Kestrel Books
Published: 2019-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

POINTER was quite willing to be dismissed. He hurried down the stairs and out of the house as soon as he had verified the hour when a volume of Chambers’s Encyclopedia had been sent upstairs. The butler had brought it away on leaving the room for the night, and replaced it on the shelves. It had been the first volume. Walking away from the manor, Pointer wondered how much of this about a visitor having been admitted last night was true.

It was borne out by at least one pair of footprints found by him in the garden, the running pair, careless of anything but hurrying toward the light shining out of the sick-room. He put the thought aside for a moment.

So Ronald Craig had read up arsenical poisoning. That would explain his certainty. But he must have felt certain before sending for the particular volume. Before the doctor came yesterday morning, that meant just before writing the letter to Houghton. Yes, he had evidently found something very conclusive...that part of a letter which he did not seem to have sent on. Pointer’s mind went on to the rest of the interview with the Russian girl just now, as, deep in thought, he walked down to the rooms the nurse occupied at the other end of the village. So Countess Jura now claimed to have thrown away the contents of the medicine bottle from a feeling of horror when she believed that Ronald Craig was being poisoned, and suspected that the poison was in the medicine.

It was possible that she was telling the truth. But the fact remained that by her act she might well have made it exceedingly difficult to prove that there was no poison whatever in that medicine bottle. Yet, if that had been her intention, would she not have rinsed out the bottle? It would have been quite simple under pretext of washing her hand from the spilled medicine.

Yes, on the whole, Pointer inclined to think that the reason she gave just now might have been the real one. That medicine...was it to replace a poisoned one by an innocent one, that someone had come last night Was the Russian right in her certainty, if it really was her certainty, that the nurse had let in whoever it was who had come by the little side door? Was it the poisoner who had rushed over when the purpose was accomplished to recover the tell-tale vehicle? Then was it the nurse who was the accomplice of Mrs. Craig? Was he all wrong in his ideas about Miss Cornwall?

A minute later he was talking to the nurse, who seemed as pale as her stiffly starched apron.

“Why did you not tell me that you had let someone into the manor last night by the door leading down into the garden, past the children’s day nursery?” he asked sternly.

Her pupils dilated. “I—I—“ She stopped short. “Because of the fact that Mr. Craig died from poison,” she said finally, with every appearance of candor.

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