But neither Larry nor his deputy found any evidence of injection sites and, so far, all pathology results were negative. (Even Matilda Turner’s fears of impending maternity were confirmed as groundless; if conception had occurred, pregnancy had not.) Their kidneys and livers had been swollen, suggesting the digestion of a toxin, but no trace remained as to what that toxin was. This was unusual. In fact, he had only seen it once before, when the Somerton Man’s body was brought in. That case had been his greatest career failing, and the reason the Turner family deaths carried an additional burden.
On occasion over the course of their long working lives, Peter Duke and Larry Smythson had met for a drink on Friday afternoon at one of the hotels in town. The occurrence was not regular enough to be called a habit, but—perhaps because each man was, in his own way, a stickler for routine—the meetings were immediately comfortable and always fell along familiar lines. On the afternoon of February 5,1960, an astute observer would have noted the pair at a back table of the Wellington Hotel on the square, looking for all the world like a couple of old friends shooting the breeze. A listener, though, would have drawn a different conclusion. Larry had just finished running through an exhaustive list of the tests he’d completed and the negative results they’d returned. Wearily, he said, “What about Mrs. Turner? Have you found anything in her past that would point to knowledge of a toxin of this kind?”
Peter Duke, who had been sitting back in a leather lounge chair listening, recognized in the question the depth of Larry’s defeat. Here was a man whose life’s work had been built around letting science speak for itself. That he was looking now toward the biography of the suspect, considering speculative factors like motive and capability, was a tacit admission that he had lost faith in science to find the answer. Duke brightened; he faced no such constraint—indeed, he put great stock in the role of deduction to arrive at a solution. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it turns out her father was a well-known naturalist, and she herself a budding scientist.” He leaned closer. “Furthermore, a colleague in London rang me in the middle of the night and said he wasn’t supposed to know anything about it—official secrets, war business—but he had it on good authority that she’d been involved in a special unit operating in France.”
“That might explain it,” said Larry thoughtfully. “All manner of experimental chemicals were used during the war. To source and apply a poison like that—rare, untraceable—implies knowledge above and beyond what’s normal.”
“A spy in our midst.”
Thinking again of the mysterious Somerton Man on the beach, Larry gave a hopeless wave of his hand. “She wouldn’t be the first.”
Summer became autumn. The risk of fire in the Hills receded and the porous hours that wrapped around the end of the days grew shorter and cooler. On a fine, crisp day in April, Henrik Drummingtraveled on foot, as he always had, up the long, winding driveway to the house. He’d brought Barnaby with him, for old times’ sake. After Mrs. Turner-Bridges and her baby finally returned to Sydney and the house stood quiet and empty once more, Henrik had stepped in, offering to adopt the old retriever. “We’re a right pair,” he told an acquaintance. “We sit together in the evenings and reflect on happier times.” (He’d have taken Smarty, too, but the ginger tabby had already been rehomed with the Baker family over at the brewery, where he’d put on a sour show of pique before yielding to the irresistible temptation of the grain store rats.)
The wind had picked up since dawn—the sort of wind that would be a worry in February, when the temperatures were soaring and the fields were covered with tinder-dry grasses, but in April gave him a job to do. Brown leaves were falling from the plane trees near the house and for the next few weeks it would be a daily task to gather and then cart them to the dumping ground at the top of the east field, near the line of gums. Henrik hadn’t been paid for a couple of months—he wasn’t sure if he was still employed—but he couldn’t bear to think of the leaves piling up. He had worked at the Wentworth place from before the Turners arrived; he’d been one of the men engaged to get it ready for them. Henrik knew the property as well as he knew his own. Better in some respects.
Autumn became winter, and in July the coroner began an inquest into the Turner deaths. Duke and his team, including the police prosecutor, presented their arguments.
Larry Smythson’s medical evidence was frank but disappointed. He described the postmortem examination of the bodies and opined that death was by heart failure, which, given the otherwise normal condition of their hearts, could not be from natural causes. The most likely cause of death was by a poison that could not be found on analysis.
Mrs. Turner’s state of mind proved a central part of the policecase, and evidence was given by eighteen witnesses, including one unnamed person whose testimony the coroner kept sealed due to its sensitive nature. That Mrs. Turner could execute such an intricate plan was supported by her history of service during the war, along with character references from former friends in England describing her as “resolute” and “determined” and “capable.” That her mother had died by suicide when Isabel was at an impressionable age was not without relevance; so, too, her father’s familiarity with rare and exotic fungi.
Toward the end of the hearing, the Misses Edwards, who had sat through every day, were determined to say their part, each of them offering testimony on a similar theme.
“She was a proper English lady. Those children were always well dressed, and she had them put their shoes on for lessons. You don’t like to think of a person suffering in such a way, but if anyone could pull off something like this, so neatly, it was her.”
The coroner was unable to make findings, so the cases remained officially open. But it was merely a formality. Everyone knew by then what had happened: the sorry story of a woman—an outsider—driven by a combination of loneliness and temporary psychological illness to commit the most unspeakable crime.
***
Epilogue
On a Saturday in late August 1960, Peter Duke found himself driving the bends of Greenhill Road to meet a man about a trailer he’d seen advertised and hoped to buy. He was early, and without consciously making the decision to do so, turned toward Tambilla, headed along Willner Road, and parked out the front of the farm gate with its fancy sign:halcyon. He walked up the driveway, taking in the birdsong and the sound of water rushing. It had been a wet season. The creek was full and the sky was heavy.
The house, when he reached it, was not the place he remembered. It had taken on the air of abandonment that all empty houses do after a time. The rooms no longer rang with the busy noise of a family going about their lives: the clatter of the piano, the squeal of children playing, a new baby’s cry. The doors were sealed, and a haze of wind-blown dirt rendered the windows dull.
The garden, too, was bare-boned and still. If autumn was the busiest time, winter was the quietest. The roses had been pruned, leaving only their gnarly stumps, and the plane trees had lost their leaves, their naked branches cold and gray.
Movement in his peripheral vision drew Duke’s gaze up and toward the east, where a small, distant figure stood at the top of the field beneath the gums. Somehow, before he even noticed the retriever standing behind the man, he knew that it was Henrik Drumming.
Henrik was unaware that he was being observed. He was leaning on the wooden handle of his shovel, taking in the pile of leaves he’d built over the autumn; he’d been waiting weeks for a dry enough patch to set it alight, same as he did at this time every year. Mrs. Turner was on his mind, and the poem she used to recite each August, about the bleak midwinter and the frosty wind moaning and the earth as hard as iron. She would get a wistful look when she delivered it, and he knew it was because she spoke of home.
As Henrik Drumming struck the match and threw it onto the heap, Duke began his walk back down the driveway. When he reached the bottom he saw a couple—a man and woman—leaning over the fence, gazing up toward the house as if observing a weird and wonderful display at Barnum’s American Museum.
“Did you know the family?” called the man, who was old and well-dressed enough to have known better.
The woman was holding a bunch of golden wattle that Dukefigured she’d picked from the trees lining the street beyond. “We read about it in the papers,” she said, “and wanted to see where it happened.”
“I never met them,” said Duke truthfully.
He didn’t add that he nonetheless knew them very well. That he would never forget the Turner family of Halcyon, their lives and terrible deaths beside the creek that Christmas Eve.
Instead, he turned and walked back to his car, and left the couple gawping at the house, and he wondered idly if he would ever learn what poison Mrs. Turner had used, or turn up the remains of little baby Thea, so that she could be laid to rest with her family and so be brought back home.
***
25
Sydney
