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His lips twitch in a smile. “Did you catch any criminals?”
“Hell, yeah. I proved it was my dad sneaking cookies instead of me.” I pause, magnifying glass in hand. “Although now I have to wonder whether my parents didn’t set that one up for me. Dad never was much for cookies.”
I move to the papers we’d brought from Ware’s office. One has the traced note. Another has my rough diagram of the fingerprint.
I show both to Gray, and I’m about to tell him what to look for when he says, “It is a match.”
I nod. “The whorl there”—I tap with the forceps—“and the ridges over here”—another tap—“seem to match. Detective McCreadie will want to do a proper comparison with the actual box, but I think we can safely say that the fingerprint belongs to the victim.”
“Sadly.”
“Yep.”
We finish the external exam and find nothing new. From what we can tell, Ware died of poison contained in an item he willingly ingested.
After that, it’s time for breakfast, over which we bring Isla up to speed. Then Isla and I take the food samples up to her laboratory.
“I’ll test the pastry flakes,” she says, “although they really may be too small and, as you said, the poison was more likely in the jam.”
“And all we have of that is a smear.”
“Which I cannot test.”
As she begins, I tell her what Gray and I had been discussing: chemical methods of poison detection.
“He told me to ask where you got your training,” I say.
She pauses and smiles, as if at the memory. “That is a story. Let me get this started, and I’ll tell you.” She prepares the sample and then says, “It was before I married. I was interested in poison, and I had begun a correspondence with one of the up-and-coming chemists in the field—Thomas Scattergood. He invited me to come and train under him, and I was utterly delighted… until I realized he likely thought me a man, as I always corresponded with my initials. Obviously, I could not go and put him in such a spot. I was about to decline when Hugh found out.”
Her smile returns, and I realize this aspect of the story holds a large share of the credit for that smile. “Hugh went to my mother. He wished to escort me to Yorkshire to at least meet with Mr. Scattergood. That, of course, was not possible. I could not be escorted by an unrelated man. So he offered…” She swallows and fusses with the experiment. “He offered to remedy that.”
“Bymarryingyou?”
“He was being foolish. Young and reckless. Of course my mother said no. She took me herself, as Duncan was in school and Lachlan abroad. She insisted I go and speak to Mr. Scattergood in person and see what he said. He was shocked to see I was a woman, but he recovered with aplomb and invited me to train under him for a few weeks. Mother remained with me—even staying in the laboratory when there were no other womenpresent to act as chaperones.” She starts the burner. “I am very fortunate, to have such good friends and family and mentors.”
“All of which you deserve. So you learned poison detection from Mr. Scattergood.”
“I did. We had one case of possible criminal poisoning while I was there. Suspected strychnine.” She passes a sly smile my way. “Do you know one of the ways to test for that?”
I shake my head.
“It leaves a bitter taste.”
“The poison tastes… Wait. You saidtest.Please tell me you don’t mean tasting the tissue.”
“Heavens, no. You taste the extract that comes from boiling the tissue.”
I stare at her. “You drink a brew made from human tissue… that’s been sent through the mail?”
“You sip it. Judiciously. My goodness, Mallory. The look on your face. You are not nearly dedicated enough to the pursuit of science.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m a cop. I’ll throw myself in the line of fire and wrestle the bad guy to the ground. You can sip tea made from moldering human organs.”
“Such a lack of dedication.” She adjusts the beaker under the flame. “What would my brother say?”
“That he’ll stick with cutting off the tissues foryouto drink.”
She shakes her head with a smile. “That reminds me of a jest Lachlan and I played on poor Duncan, shortly after Duncan declared he wished to follow our grandfather into medicine. I found an old book on diagnosing illness by drinking a patient’s urine, and we tried to convince Duncan that’s what he’d need to do.”
