Free Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham Page A

will not be forgotten when I pass over!”
    She would glance at Cook, and give one of her coy little laughs, as if to indicate that she and Cook had a little secret which they shared between them. Possibly Cook saw visions of inheriting large sums of money, and retiring to live in modest comfort. Perhaps she thought she might even get the house. If she did, she was a stupid woman.
    It was not that his aunt was mean, or even ungrateful for services rendered. It was simply that she had an entirely erroneous idea of the current value of money; when it came to tips, she continued to think in terms of Victorian days. Quite often she would describe the details of some journey she had made; how she had caught this or that train; how she had arrived at Paddington and commissioned a porter to carry her bag for her; how they had found a taxi.
    “So I gave the porter tuppence for himself,” she would say in passing, and no doubt she thought she had remunerated him very handsomely indeed.
    Bartels went into the drawing room and glanced at the evening paper for a while, and smoked a cigarette. There was nothing in the paper of particular interest. He tossed it aside and glanced round the room; then got to his feet and strolled over to the glass-fronted bookcase in which aunt Emily still kept the books of her late husband.
    Bartels had only the dimmest recollections of his uncle Robert. He recalled a sombrely dressed figure who came and went with a mysterious black bag, who sometimes, when Bartels was a very small child, had come and gazed at him and made him put his tongue out, or had placed a glass thing in his mouth—“a cigarette,” uncle Robert had called it, with a wink at his mother.
    Then the years passed and he never came again, and Bartels learnt that the physician had been unable to cure himself.
    The bottom two shelves were filled with a collection of novels ranging from bestsellers of pre-1914 vintage to Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. The other two shelves held a number of fat medical works of reference, one or two volumes on the history of medicine, and a French and a German dictionary.
    Sandwiched between the dictionaries was a red book called Forensic Medicine and Toxicology.
    Bartels opened the bookcase and took it out.
    The mentality of the poisoner was one which Bartels had never been able to fathom. He and I had frequently argued about capital punishment. Bartels was against it, except in very rare cases, declaring that in most cases the victim of a murder crime did not know that he was about to die, whereas capital punishment involved an almost sadistically long period of waiting and of fear.
    “But poisoners,” Bartels said to me once, “they’re different. I just can’t get inside the mind of a man who poisons his wife, for example. Imagine the mentality of a person who sees his wife waking up in the morning, and hears her say, ‘I think I feel a little better today,’ who sees her looking brighter and more hopeful, and then slips out and puts more of the stuff in her drink.”
    Doubtless it was only morbid fascination that made him take the book out of the case, and sit down with it, and glance through some of the pages.
    He noted some of the more common poisons, and their reactions.
    Hydrochloric Acid, or spirits of salt, is a corrosive. The symptoms resemble, but are not so severe as, those produced by sulphuric acid. The smallest quantity that has proved fatal is one teaspoonful. In two cases, both young girls, this was sufficient to cause death. Recovery has, however, taken place after an ounce and a half of the commercial acid has been taken, calcined magnesia having been administered ten minutes after it was swallowed. Death has occurred in two hours; the usual period is from eighteen to thirty hours…
    Oxalic Acid. When swallowed in poisonous doses, oxalic acid produces local effects which resemble those produced by the mineral acids; but unlike them, it exercises a special influence on the