“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Sergeant Kelly from where he was standing with his elbow resting on the file cabinet. “Either it kills, or it doesn’t.”
“I think I understand,” said Duke, lifting the jar to inspect the sample inside. “A luckless girl’s best friend. But not our poison.”
Then, in a bin at the back of the Turner house, police found five identical empty bottles. “Bingo,” said Jerosch, calling Doyle over to have a look.
Sometimes referred to by police as “the poisoner’s poison,” thallium is a colorless, tasteless, and odorless substance, the ingestion of which causes symptoms in common with many other ailments. Being easily obtained—used often in rat baits—in the middle years of the twentieth century, it was the poison of choice for those inclined to domestic murder, and, in the 1950s, a rash of crimes in which wives killed their husbands had lit up investigative bureaus across Australia.
Meg Summers was able to confirm that Mrs. Turner had bought the Thall-Rat back in the winter. The shopkeeper, who had been called from the house to speak with officers, had the disorientated air of a busy person nonetheless inclined to helpfulness. “If you give me a minute, I’ll be able to look it up in the register. A half dozen or so, from memory.”
“Is that an unusually large quantity?”
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Most people around here have trouble with rats in the winter, especially in a house that size.”
Duke was closing his notebook when another idea occurred. “Did Mrs. Turner usually make purchases of that sort?” he asked. “It seems more the purview of a farm manager.”
“I suppose it’s a little odd. Henrik has been working up there for as long as I can remember, and he usually keeps things shipshape.”
Duke thought of the bottle of sleeping pills. There was something intimate in it: the act of a man giving another woman his wife’s pills. He thought, too, of the missing entries from Mrs. Turner’s journal.Duke had been handed the journal by a secret source a couple of weeks after the deaths and had read it from cover to cover. The entries themselves didn’t offer much in the way of motive, but those stubs made him wonder—a guilty confession hastily made and then removed?—and he pondered whether there might be a reason for the shift in dynamics between Mrs. Turner and her farm manager.
Having ascertained by now that Meg Summers was a repository for community confidences, Duke pushed his luck; alas, he had misjudged her commitment to discretion. She looked like she’d been slapped.
“Sergeant Duke, I’m sure I have no special insight into the intimacies of Mrs. Turner’s life and no intention whatsoever of raking over the coals of the dead.”
It had been a misstep, and Duke retreated hastily. Whether or not Mrs. Turner and Henrik Drumming had been romantically involved was probably immaterial to the investigation, and it wasn’t wise to put his witnesses offside. The copious quantity of empty Thall-Rat bottles was their biggest lead: if a betting man, Duke would’ve put money on the fact they’d found the poison they were looking for.
Marcus Summers, who’d been making a delivery to Halcyon as picnic preparations were underway, recalled seeing Mrs. Turner stir “lots of sugar” into the iced tea she was preparing for her family. “There was a cake, too,” he added, “with thick frosting.” Nora Turner-Bridges, who had also witnessed her sister-in-law assembling the lunch, didn’t dispute the claim but scoffed at the idea there was anything untoward in it: “Issy had a sweet tooth, as did young Evie. My niece couldn’t be made to drink anything unless it had a pound of sugar stirred through.”
The theory had appeal for Duke: the thermoses had been empty when the family was found, and only crumbs of cake remained. A sticking point was the time thallium took to kill. More usual was three weeks of slow application, a little in the victim’s cup eachevening: it wasn’t traditionally the sort of poison that could be used to induce deaths in an entire family in an afternoon. Duke made a note to speak with Larry Smythson about the likelihood that Mrs. Turner had found a different way to administer the drug. It was certainly possible that thirsty children on a hot summer’s day could be convinced to drink more than a tiresome husband taking a teaspoon in his daily tea.
While he waited impatiently for Larry to complete his tests, Peter Duke wondered about motive: What could incite a woman to kill her own children? There was the mercy defense that Annie had intuited in the Kilburn case, in which the woman had lost the will to live but couldn’t bear to leave her kids without a mother, but there were other colors in the palette of human motivations that warranted consideration.
It was his office receptionist, Helen, who put him in mind of revenge. She was stirring milk into the tea she’d just poured in the kitchen of the police headquarters, tapping the spoon on the rim of her cup, when she said, apropos of nothing, “That situation up there in the Hills reminds me of Medea.”
“What’s that?” Duke, who had been scanning the newspaper for coverage of the Turners and only half listening, wondered whether she might be referring to an old case that had slipped his mind. “Medea?”
“The daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis.”
Peter frowned.
“The niece of Circe. Granddaughter of the sun god Helios.”
And then he realized. “It’s a myth.”
“In a play, by Euripides, one of my dad’s favorites. Medea kills her children to punish Jason.”
“Her husband.” Duke was catching on.
“He abandoned her for another woman, and then he banished Medea and her sons from Corinth. She kills his new wife, too, whichobviously didn’t happen here.” She gave her teacup a final chiming strike.
Detective Duke supposed that for a woman who’d spent the first half of her life on the other side of the world, being abandoned to a farm on the outskirts of Tambilla while her husband headed abroad might feel a bit like banishment. And certainly, the consensus in the public bar at the Tambilla Hotel was that Thomas Turner hadn’t any business leaving his pregnant wife alone for so many months on end. Talk was rife that the man had taken up with another woman overseas.
Reverend Lawson tried to persuade his flock that they must avoid being “tattlers and busybodies.” “Let us all remember Proverbs 11,” he beseeched from his pulpit. “A man who lacks judgment derides his neighbor, but a man of understanding holds his tongue.” But although the good people of Tambilla took in the message on Sunday morning, by Monday they were back to speculating. And thanks to a telephone call from officers at Charing Cross station, Duke’s men determined that they weren’t far wrong: Mr. Turner did indeed have a girlfriend in London, one Miss Rose Spencer, with whom he’d been consorting on and off for the past twelve months.
Whether Mrs. Turner knew about her husband’s dalliance, Duke wasn’t sure. There was no evidence to that effect, and while young Matthew McKenzie was able to confirm that John Turner had discovered the infidelity, he did not know whether the boy had shared the information with his mother. Nora Turner-Bridges was adamant that Isabel hadn’t mentioned a word. “Not only that: I can’t believe it of my brother. There were always women chasing after him, but it meant nothing—Issy wouldn’t have let that bother her.”
Evidently, if Mrs. Turner was concerned, she hadn’t felt comfortable disclosing the fact to her husband’s sister.
Duke asked around town, in the hope that Mrs. Turner might have revealed the secrets of her heart to someone else. But while it wasn’t easy to find anyone to say a bad word against her, neitherdid he turn up someone who might be labeled a confidante. In fact, it was noteworthy, as far as Duke was concerned, how few close friends Isabel Turner seemed to have. Meg Summers frowned when he asked about it and looked almost guilty by the time she arrived at her answer. Duke had seen this before, the regret of good people who have failed to spot another in need. “Now you mention it,” she said, “I wouldn’t say she was especially close to anyone around here.”
