That Isabel Turner had been admired was not in doubt. Duke and his team had conducted extensive interviews in the days following the deaths and were told variously that Mrs. Turner was “energetic,” “clever,” “beautiful,” and “kind.” Mrs. Summers, trying perhaps to repair the impression that she’d failed to notice the other woman’s plight, added that Mrs. Turner had come to see her in the shop some years ago “for tea and sympathy,” and that she’d confessed to feeling lonely and isolated with her husband away so often for work.
There was a flare of excitement within Duke’s team when the new lead came from Reverend Lawson that Mrs. Turner had spoken of doing something that would deprive her children of their mother—it wasn’t proof, but it helped to reinforce the theory they were working with. For Duke, it also echoed what Annie had said about the Kilburn case: “The poor woman didn’t want to leave her children behind.”
While Mrs. Turner’s journal was not the smoking gun Duke might have wished it to be, there was some debate among the officers as to whether more could be read into the daily weather notes than met the eye. And then there was the possibility presented by the missing entries. They had been removed for a reason; perhaps if Duke’s men could find them, they might contain a confession. A search was instigated, but police knew they were clutching at straws.
And then, finally, it came. The evidence Duke had been hoping for. It didn’t always happen that way, but every so often the right piece of information fell into place like the key to a jigsaw puzzle.This testimony was an account from a source “close to the parties,” whom police refused to name publicly due to the sensitivity of the subject matter. The witness described having recently had to stop Mrs. Turner from harming her own baby.
Duke called upon the psychiatrist who’d given evidence in the Kilburn case, and the gentleman provided a compelling description of a condition called postpartum psychosis.
“Far more than the so-called baby blues,” he explained, “the symptoms can include delusions, agitation, paranoia, confusion, disconnection from the baby, and insomnia. In some cases, sadly, it can lead to depression and hopelessness.”
Could a woman suffering in such a way behave violently toward her baby? Duke asked, to which the doctor assented.
“It’s just a pity she didn’t consult a professional,” he couldn’t refrain from adding. “We might have been able to save the lives of those poor kiddies.”
Duke was often surprised at how quickly townspeople caught wind of what was happening in an investigation. Like any small town in which tragedy has occurred, the social fabric of Tambilla tore a bit that Christmas and needed mending. The people were rattled, tired of having their town written about in newspapers, of looking askance at one another, of trying quietly to convince themselves—and loudly to convince one another—that they couldn’t have done anything more. Once the citizens of Tambilla realized police were looking seriously at Mrs. Turner, it was as if a tacit agreement was reached whereby they could alleviate their own remorse and assuage their community’s guilt in one fell swoop.
When Duke and his officers conducted a further round of interviews, it seemed that people had begun to see things through a different lens.
“And really,” Mrs. McKendry added to an account she’d just given of Mrs. Turner’s “unusual” contributions to the Country Women’sAssociation cake stalls, “it’s a bit odd, isn’t it, to marry a man who approaches you on a bridge, to agree to move to the other side of the world. It isn’t... well, it isn’tstable.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking about,” said Mrs. Fisher, who was interviewed in her kitchen, a flyer from the recent Billy Graham tour on the fridge behind her. “I told her there was bad luck attached to that house and she didn’t so much as blink. Completely unaffected! She thought she knew better. If only she’d listened.”
Mrs. Pigott voiced sad agreement: “She should never have renamed that house. They were tempting fate.”
Even Mrs. Pike, who had heretofore remained stubbornly loyal to her former employer, appeared to reconsider. “The way she took against the portrait of Mr. Wentworth. That struck me as odd—paranoid—to mind so much about a painting. It makes you wonder whether she had some reason. I’m not saying what it might be, just some sort of guilty conscience.”
Mrs. Pigott noted that Mrs. Turner had sent and received more packages through the post office than the other residents of Tambilla. “International, most of them.” At that, she raised her thin eyebrows as if a conclusion could easily be drawn. “There were more lately than ever.”
Mrs. Pike agreed that Mrs. Turner had seemed unusually occupied over the past weeks and months. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it’s different when you look back after something like this, isn’t it?” When asked to expand, the housekeeper frowned and said, “It seemed to me that she was busy putting her affairs in order. Sorting papers, throwing things away.”
“Pages from a journal?”
“I couldn’t say for sure—I never looked; I’m no snoop—but it’s certainly possible.”
Perhaps no event demonstrated the restive state of the community quite like what occurred when Nora Turner-Bridges came downfrom the house one day in early January, bringing her new baby, Polly, into the main street.
“I’d only meant to take a walk,” she was to say later, still clearly shaken by the experience. “I’d been up at the house since before Christmas, and I needed to get out, to have a change of scene. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known what was going to happen. I didn’t mean for anyone to get upset. I didn’t need any more upset myself.”
Since the baby’s birth on Christmas Eve, Nora had been carrying her in a fabric wrap; having waited a long time to call herself a mother, she wasn’t about to let her tiny girl out of her arms. But there’s nothing as sure as that babies grow bigger, and within a few weeks, when she wanted to take a longer walk into town, she realized that it had become impractical to bear the child all the way, especially when there was a perfectly good perambulator sitting up at the house.
Nora had no way of knowing the immensity of affection that Becky Baker had for the contraption, nor how wretchedly the poor girl had suffered since news of the deaths reached her at the brewery. No way, either, of anticipating that Becky would be visiting her aunt Betty at the teahouse that very morning and was indeed watching from the window when Nora began her walk along the main street.
Mr. Ted Holmes, who was taking a tea break from the sign-writing work he was doing for Patterson & Sons Mechanics down the road, said that he wondered what on earth had come over the lass when she stood bolt upright, “as if she’d seen a ghost!” She ran, “hell for leather,” he said, out of the teashop, before her aunt could stop her, setting upon poor Mrs. Turner-Bridges.
“She was as flustered as I’ve seen a person look,” said Mrs. Pigott, who’d heard the screeching and come outside the post office to see what was going on. “Mrs. Turner-Bridges is a dignified woman, and her face was a picture of agony. Becky’s a good girl, but she looked like a banshee. She ripped the child from the pram—my heart was in my mouth; I thought she was going to drop her.”
The altercation was sorted out by police who, as good luck would have it, were on hand, having just finished another round of interviews. Mrs. Summers, too, was there to separate the girl from the baby, and afterward put in a kind word. “She cared for baby Thea very much. She never would have meant to frighten Mrs. Turner-Bridges, and certainly could never harm little Polly.”
But there was a note of concern in Meg’s voice; she’d been shaken. And even Becky Baker’s parents, her greatest defenders, were mortified by the trouble she’d caused. Charges weren’t laid—“Good Lord, no,” said Nora, “that’s the last thing I’d want”—but it was agreed quietly that something had to be done, and the local GP, Dr. Ralph McKendry, was called upon to prescribe a gentle sedative for the poor girl.
Duke, when he learned of the event, recognized that community anxiety had reached a fever pitch: with a glance at the calendar, the weeks that had passed them by, he reached again for the phone.
Since Christmas Eve, Dr. Larry Smythson had been working solidly on the Turner case. By the first week of February, he was fielding calls from Peter Duke at least once a day. Every time he was summoned to the telephone, he said the same thing he’d said the day before and the day before that: he had nothing yet to report; he’d be sure to get in touch as soon as he did. Dr. Smythson understood the pressure the police were under, and he wanted answers, too. But science couldn’t be rushed, and results would not be obtained any faster than the tests allowed.
Larry Smythson had worked at the West Terrace morgue for just over two decades but had stopped telling people what he did years ago. Not because he was embarrassed, but because he quickly became tired of the look of thrilled horror that would animate his questioner’s face when they learned of his occupation. He had trained as a doctor but never regretted his choice to work with the dead. He knew others in his field who had become inured to thesights and smells, who could chat as they worked about the film they planned to see on the weekend and the funny thing their kid had said before school that morning. But not Larry. Although he would never say it to anyone else, he considered his job sacred. The dead had lost their ability to communicate in any of the usual ways, yet many times they still had a story to tell. For some, it would be the most important story of their life. His was the great responsibility to coax from them their secrets, and he was good at it.
But although Larry made sure to use his calmest, most methodical tone when he spoke to Duke, the truth was, this case had him more puzzled than most. His job wasn’t to determine who; that was for police to decide during their investigation. His role was to supply credible, supportable answers as to how. And therein lay the problem. The bodies had come in all but untouched. He’d given each one a careful physical examination and found no evidence of trauma or violence. They hadn’t been shot or stabbed or strangled or suffocated, and yet they were all clearly dead. As Peter Duke had reasoned, the only sensible option was poison.
