The Wychford Poisoning Case

Dr Purefoy stroked his lean jaw with the palm of his hand. ‘No, I don’t think so, Sheringham. It all seems perfectly straightforward. Do you mean about the cause of death?’

‘Well, yes. That or anything else.’

‘Because that, of course, isn’t in doubt for a minute. As clear a case of arsenical poisoning as there could possibly be. Actually more than a fatal dose found in the man’s body after death, and that’s very rare indeed; a great deal is always eliminated between the time of swallowing the dose and death.’

‘How much would you say he had been given, then?’

‘Well, it’s impossible to say. Might have been as little as five grains; might have been as much as twenty. Making a pure guess at it, I should say about eight to ten grains. He didn’t vomit nearly as much as one might expect, James told me, which points to a comparatively small dose.’

‘A fatal dose being about three grains?’

‘Yes, two and a half to three. Two and a half is reckoned an average small fatal dose, but it would have been ample for Bentley, I imagine.’

‘Why for him particularly?’

‘Well, he was rather a poor creature. Undersized, delicate, poor physique; a bit of a little rat, to our way of thinking.’

‘And very fussy about his health, I gather?’

‘Exactly. One of those maddening patients (we all have ’em) who think they know a sight more about their ailments and the right drugs to cure them than their doctor does. Oh, quite impossible people; and I understand from James that Bentley was as bad a specimen of the tribe as you’d hope to see.’

‘Oh? In what way?’

‘Well, you prescribe for ’em and all that, and then find that the prescription can’t be used because the fellow’s already been prescribing for himself before he came to you at all, and the two prescriptions clash; and then you prescribe something else, and the fellow goes and takes something perfectly different that he thinks is going to suit his case better. Oh, hopeless! That’s just the lunatic Bentley was. Always dosing himself from morning to night: never happy unless he was stuffing some drug or other inside his skin.’

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