Bodies from the Library 3. Группа авторов
been stoppered with wax, as it had come from the wholesalers. The bottle contained 50 tablets, each containing 10 grains of veronal.
The analyst gave evidence. He had examined the body of deceased and found that she had died from taking an overdose of veronal. From the amount of the drug found in the viscera he concluded that she had taken at least 100 grains, or about twice the minimum fatal dose.
He had also analysed the tablets remaining in the bottle, and had found them to contain each exactly 10 grains of veronal. There were five tablets left in the bottle. If Mrs Belford had started taking the tablets on October 28th and had taken one each night regularly, there should have been 15 remaining. If Mrs Belford had taken ten tablets instead of one on the night of December 1st, that would account for the amount of veronal estimated to have been present in the body.
The coroner said that this appeared to be a very clear case. Deceased, who seemed to be in her usual health on December 1st, had been found dead on the morning of December 2nd of acute veronal poisoning. From the circumstance that there were 10 tablets fewer in the bottle than there ought to have been, there seemed to be no room for doubt that the unfortunate lady, failing to obtain her accustomed relief from pain and sleeplessness, had unhappily taken an overdose, the effects of which had been intensified by the kidney complaint from which she suffered. No blame could attach to Dr Lovatt who, unable to wean his patient from the drug that gave her so much relief, had frequently warned her against its misuse. There was no evidence whatever that Mrs Belford had at any time had any intention of doing herself an injury. On the day before her death, she had spoken cheerfully about the return of her husband from Germany. Mr Belford, with whom they must all feel the deepest sympathy, had testified to the uniformly harmonious relations between himself and his wife, and there was no evidence that the deceased had any domestic or financial trouble playing upon her mind.
The jury brought in a verdict of Death by Misadventure.
On December 18th, Mr Belford, having adjusted matters satisfactorily with all his creditors, came down to breakfast with a good appetite. Beside his plate lay a type-written envelope. He opened it and saw, with a curious pang of apprehension, the printed heading:
SMITH & SMITH—REMOVALS.
(There was no address.)
Dear Sir,—with reference to your esteemed order of the 25th October for a Removal from your private address, we trust that this commission has been carried out to your satisfaction. We beg you to acknowledge your obliging favour of five hundred pounds (£500) and return herewith the Order of Removal which you were good enough to hand to us. Assuring you of our best attention at all times,
Faithfully yours,
Smith & Smith
He turned curiously to the enclosure. It bore his signature, but he had no recollection of having seen it before. It ran:
I, Adrian Belford of (here followed his address) hereby confess that I murdered my wife, Catherine Elizabeth Belford, in the following manner. Knowing that she was in the habit of taking each night a tablet containing 10 gs. of veronal, a compound of diethyl barbituric acid, I opened a bottle of these tablets and removed 10 of them, substituting a single tablet, containing 10 gs. of a new barbituric acid compound which, giving a similar chemical reaction to veronal, is ten times more powerful in hypnotic effect. The result of this would be that, on taking this tablet, as she was in due course bound to do, my wife would consume a dose of 10 gs. of the new compound equal to 100 gs. of the ordinary tablets, or twice the minimum fatal dose. The fatal tablet was prepared for me, in anticipation of these events, by the Gesellschaft Schmidt of Berlin, during my visit to Germany last May, of course in ignorance of the purpose for which it was required. My reason for committing this crime was that I had misappropriated certain trust monies belonging to the Ingleborough estate, and desired to replace them from the estate to which I was entitled under my late wife’s will.
I make this confession, being troubled in my conscience.
Adrian Belford
17th December 193—
With shaking hands Belford thrust letter and enclosure into the fire.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) needs little introduction. Though she wrote comparatively few novels and short stories, they form an impressively consistent and enjoyable body of work, second only perhaps to that by Agatha Christie.
Without Sayers, Sherlockian scholarship would not be the flourishing pseudo-academic field it is today. And the Detection Club—founded by her contemporary Anthony Berkeley—would have languished as nothing more than a dining society for crime writers without the many collaborative books and radio serials that Sayers initiated as one of the Club’s most active members and as its President. Without Sayers’ reviews and penetrating insights into the art and artifice of the detective story, the genre would surely not have developed internationally as a field of academic study. And without the protean aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey there would almost certainly be no Campion, no Dalgliesh and no Lynley, to name but a few of the detectives whose character and approach bear some mark of Sayers’ sleuth.
Sayers also wrote widely in many genres and, for some of her admirers, her crime stories and her studies of the genre are merely a distraction from even greater achievements: her analyses of Christian doctrine and her translations of Dante. For the majority, however, the reverse is certainly true.
There is the Wimsey canon—twenty-one short stories and eleven novels, several of which were memorably televised, first with Ian Carmichael (Lord Peter Wimsey, 1972–1975), and subsequently with Edward Petherbridge (A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery, 1987). There are also the delightful stories of Montague Egg, a travelling wine salesman, and various non-series stories, the foremost being the extraordinary ‘Blood Sacrifice’. As with the best of her contemporaries, Sayers draws on tropes of the genre—the impossible crime, the invisible weapon and so on—to create puzzles that remain as entertainingly baffling today as when they were first published, in some cases nearly a century ago. And as with Charles Dickens, her work is peppered with memorable characters, not the least of whom is the detective novelist Harriet Vane, in many ways a self-portrait of Sayers.
‘Smith and Smith, Removals: I. The House of the Poplars’ by Dorothy L. Sayers is a previously unpublished manuscript held by the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL, USA, which has the largest and most comprehensive collection of published and unpublished resources by and about Sayers worldwide. The original manuscript is twenty-eight handwritten pages with revisions by Sayers; the Wade Center manuscript number is DLS/MS-187. It was the first of two stories written by Sayers in the 1920s featuring the removals firm of Smith and Smith. The other, ‘The Leopard Lady’, was collected in In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939) and filmed with Boris Karloff for the American television series Lights Out in 1950.
Christopher Bush
It can be an absorbing undertaking, when the means are available, to trace to their original sources events which have proved momentous and to discover how trivial were the small beginnings that set them in motion. Even the hydrogen bomb can be traced directly back to a murder in Sarajevo. All our lives are shot through with the most incredible of coincidences. You happen to change the direction of a walk and you meet someone who changes the direction of your life.
The Hampstead Murder was a case in point. A man in Scotland wrote a letter to The Times and, by chance, The Times found it interesting enough to print. Because of that letter, which had nothing whatever to do with murder, a woman was strangled in a London suburb. You may not recall that murder. It created no excitement and never got into the headlines. The woman was found with a noose around her neck, and the killing could have been accomplished in a matter of seconds. As murders go, it was