Black Coffee - Agatha Christie [11]
Barbara looked at the suave Italian with distaste. ‘The spoils of war,’ she replied shortly, with a tight little smile.
Rising anxiously, Caroline Amory approached Dr Carelli. ‘They’re not really poison, are they, doctor? I mean, they couldn’t harm anyone, could they?’ she asked. ‘That box has been in the house for years. Surely it’s harmless, isn’t it?’
‘I should say,’ replied Carelli dryly, ‘that, with the little lot you have here, you could kill, roughly, twelve strong men. I don’t know what you regard as harmful.’
‘Oh, good gracious,’ Miss Amory gasped with horror as she moved back to her chair, and sat heavily.
‘Here, for instance,’ continued Carelli, addressing the assembled company. He picked up a tube and read slowly from the label. ‘ “Strychnine hydrochloride; one sixteenth of a grain.” Seven or eight of these little tablets, and you would die a very unpleasant death indeed. An extremely painful way out of the world.’ He picked up another tube. ‘ “Atropine sulphate.” Now, atropine poisoning is sometimes very hard to tell from ptomaine poisoning. It is also a very painful death.’
Replacing the two tubes he had handled, he picked up another. ‘Now here –’ he continued, now speaking very slowly and deliberately, ‘here we have hyoscine hydrobromide, one hundredth of a grain. That doesn’t sound very potent, does it? Yet I assure you, you would only have to swallow half of the little white tablets in this tube, and –’ he made a graphic gesture. ‘There would be no pain – no pain at all. Just a swift and completely dreamless sleep, but a sleep from which there would be no awakening.’ He moved towards Lucia, and held out the tube to her, as though inviting her to examine it. There was a smile on his face, but not in his eyes.
Lucia stared at the tube as though she were fascinated by it. Stretching out a hand, she spoke in a voice that sounded almost as though it were hypnotized. ‘A swift and completely dreamless sleep –’ she murmured, reaching for the tube.
Instead of giving it to her, Dr Carelli glanced at Caroline Amory with an almost questioning look. That lady shuddered and looked distressed, but said nothing. With a shrug of the shoulders, Carelli turned away from Lucia, still holding the tube of hyoscine hydrobromide.
The door to the hallway opened, and Richard Amory entered. Without speaking, he strolled across to the stool by the desk, and sat down. He was followed into the room by Tredwell, who carried a tray containing a jug of coffee with cups and saucers. Placing the tray on the coffee table, Tredwell left the room as Lucia moved to pour out the coffee.
Barbara went across to Lucia, took two cups of coffee from the tray, and then moved over to Richard to give him one of them, keeping the other for herself. Dr Carelli, meanwhile, was busy replacing the tubes in the tin box on the centre table.
‘You know,’ said Miss Amory to Carelli, ‘you make my flesh creep, doctor, with your talk of swift, dreamless sleep and unpleasant deaths. I suppose that, being Italian as you are, you know a lot about poisons?’
‘My dear lady,’ laughed Carelli, ‘is that not an extremely unjust – what do you say – non sequitur? Why should an Italian know any more about poisons than an Englishman? I have heard it said,’ he continued playfully, ‘that poison is a woman’s weapon, rather than a man’s. Perhaps I should ask you –? Ah, but perhaps, dear lady, it is an Italian woman you were thinking of ? Perhaps you were about to mention a certain Borgia. Is that it, eh?’ He took a cup of coffee from Lucia at the coffee table, and handed it to Miss Amory, returning to take another cup for himself.
‘Lucrezia Borgia – that dreadful creature! Yes, I suppose that’s what I was thinking of,’ admitted Miss Amory. ‘I used to have nightmares about her when I was a child, you know. I imagined her as very pale, but tall, and with jet-black hair just like our own dear Lucia.’
Dr Carelli approached Miss Amory with the sugar bowl. She shook her head in refusal, and he took the bowl back to the coffee