Free The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford

that of course was the point things had got to downstairs—not in so many words, as the men down there were all being strictly non-committal. They had put Iris and Mac out of the library and had closed the door. I could hear their voices as Steve Donaldson and I came down the stairs after the doctor had left and Lowell was asleep, a yellow satin coverlet thrown over her exotic red figure on the white curtained bed.
    Iris and Mac were in the drawing room, Iris sitting erect and detached on the gold damask sofa by the fire, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like someone finding herself alone suddenly in a terrible wasted land, drawing into herself, building up an impenetrable wall, remote and untouchable. Mac on the other hand was pacing back and forth like a caged animal, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, his black tie slightly cock-eyed, distressed and a little sore too. He gave Steve what my younger kid would call a dirty look, and so should I for want of a better word, and looked appealingly at me. I nodded reassuringly. He blew his nose hard, picked up the decanter and poured himself a drink. Just as he put his thumb on the trigger of the syphon Captain Lamb appeared in the door.
    He came quickly across the room as he saw what Mac was doing.
    “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have to take that along. Is this the setup your husband had on the desk when you came in, Mrs. Nash?”
    “Except that the syphon was empty,” Iris said calmly. “I rinsed it out, as much as you can do without taking it apart. I filled it with water from the pantry faucet and recharged it.”
    Captain Lamb picked it up. It was one of those patent arrangements—dark blue with a yellow stripe round its shoulder, chromium cap and trigger. Iris was looking at it. Her eyes shifted to the decanter on the low table. Captain Lamb picked it up, took Mac’s drink out of his hands and poured it back into the decanter.
    “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”
    Mac looked startled. “You—”
    “All the rest of us have been drinking it,” Steve Donaldson said evenly. “It seems to me you fellows are jumping to some pretty quick conclusions.”
    He was repeating, curiously enough, Colonel Primrose’s exact admonition to him.
    Captain Lamb looked at him steadily. “We aren’t jumping to any conclusions. We are following our regular routine in cases where the cause of death is unknown.”
    It sounded like a sentence from the Coroner’s Act, or something.
    “Look,” Mac said suddenly. “He’s been acting darned queer lately, if you ask me. Maybe he… killed himself. He—”
    Captain Lamb nodded. “That’s one of the possibilities we have to consider.”
    “I think you can save yourselves that trouble,” Iris said quietly. “My husband wouldn’t possibly have committed suicide.—But the doctors have told him for years that he would kill himself if he didn’t stop drinking. Dr. Clem Lewis at Johns Hopkins told him so again last month. I advise you to see him.”
    Captain Lamb nodded and wrote the name down in his notebook. He took the decanter and syphon. Mac and Steve and I watched him cross the room and go out into the hall, closing the door behind him. Iris was staring into the fire, her hands clenching the edge of the sofa until her knuckles stood out shiny white. Suddenly she got up and stood facing us, her face white and drawn under the burnished copper of her bright hair. She wanted to speak. I thought she was going to, but she didn’t. She looked first at Mac, then at Stephen Donaldson, and turned back to the fire. I looked at Steve. His face was drawn. He was staring at her back as she stood there, the flames licking up the dry log on either side of her, lighting up the cloth of gold tissue of her slim sheathed body, bare to the waist in back, her smooth skin only a paler gold than her gown.
    “Iris,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to alarm you, but—”
    She turned, a quick smile in her green eyes.
    “I