The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [167]
“Mr. Picton,” Marcus said, asking the question that was in all our heads, “just what kind of ‘attacks’ were they that Mr. Hatch suffered?”
Mr. Picton smiled. “Yes, Detective. They were heart attacks.” As the rest of us received this news silently, our host stopped walking and reached into his jacket pocket. “After I got your messages, John, I went out to the old Hatch place. It’s falling down, now, and the garden’s terribly overgrown. But I was able to find this….”
Out of his pocket Mr. Picton brought a withered but still very distinctive-looking flower.
“Digitalis purpurea,” Lucius announced quietly. “Purple foxglove.”
“Oh, it wasn’t easy to kill him!” Mr. Picton said, in a tone that you might almost call excited. “Hatch was a strong old coot, and as I’m sure you know, Detective, digitalis induces many toxic side effects if given in doses that are insufficient to produce fatal overstimulation of the heart.”
Lucius nodded as we all started walking again. “Nausea, vomiting, blurred vision …”
“He held on to life almost as tightly as he’d held on to his money,” Mr. Picton went on, in the same energetic tone. “Lasted some three months, before she could finally get enough of the stuff into him without any of the servants noticing.” At the sound of his own words, Mr. Picton’s smile shrank up and his voice grew quieter. “The poor, unpleasant old soul. No one should have to go like that.”
“There was never any suspicion cast on Mrs. Hatch?” the Doctor asked.
Mr. Picton shook his head. “No. Not given the way she’d always acted toward her husband. But as it turned out, Hatch had been less fooled by his wife than had most of the town. She received virtually nothing in his will.”
“Who’d he leave it all to?” Mr. Moore asked. “The children?”
“Just so,” Mr. Picton said. “In trust, until they achieved their majority. And he named the local justice of the peace—not his wife—as trustee. Libby was to receive only enough money to support the family. Apparently, Hatch had become quite bitter about something toward the end. But his actions were foolish, because the arrangement of the estate only put the children at terrible risk.”
“Meaning that if anything happened to them,” Miss Howard said, “the fortune would pass to her?”
“Yes,” Mr. Picton answered. “And, bitter as he obviously was, I don’t think even Hatch knew what his wife was really capable of—ah! Here we are.”
We’d reached the front of what Mr. Picton later told us was called the “new” court house, being as it’d been occupied for less than ten years. It wasn’t a particularly interesting-looking building, just a big, gabled mass of stone with a square tower rising out of one corner; but my guess was that, whatever the architectural types might think of its design, as a jail it was probably top of the line: the walls were ponderously thick, and the bars across the cell windows in the basement were strong enough to contain even a seasoned escape artist.
“Well, with any luck at all, this will be our battleground before long!” Mr. Picton announced, looking up at one of the four clock faces what were set into each side of the tower’s roof and pulling out his watch to check it against the bigger time piece. Then his silvery eyes moved steadily around our group, taking, it seemed to me, the measure of each of us in turn. After that he smiled. “I very much wonder if you know what you’ve gotten yourselves into …”
Mr. Picton walked up the court house’s few steps, then held the big door open for us; and as we all filed in without a word, he kept on smiling, without ever telling us why.
The inside of the Ballston court house more than made up for the place’s run-of-the-mill exterior. The walls in the main hall were constructed of alternating types and colors of stone, set in pleasing patterns, and the double-height windows were framed in deep oak what was kept richly polished, as were the big mahogany doors to the main courtroom, located at the far end, and the smaller hearing room on the left. Sunlight was thrown across the marble floor from