Read Online The Man Who Killed Himself by Julian Symons - Free Book Online

People will express sympathy with axe-killers, stranglers, gunmen, even with those who chop their victims’ bodies into bits, but not with poisoners. Yet Armstrong was thought of by acquaintances as an agreeable little man, and Crippen was in many respects amiable. Some poisoners like Neill Cream are far from agreeable characters, but many more are commonplace, emotionally undeveloped people who find themselves in a position from which murder by poison seems the only, or at least the simplest, way out. Once this has been decided the controls operating in their everyday life cease to be effective. So Arthur stopped thinking about Clare as a person at all, and managed to regard her as solely an object to be removed.
    He spent a large part of his three days at Clapham reading about the effects of zincalium and deciding on the best way of using it. ‘If zincalium is used with sufficient care and cunning for homicidal purposes we may get a succession of mild attacks of the acute symptoms with remissions,’ he read in one textbook. There was no time for that, but happily the tooth powder should serve the same purpose of providing a case history which stretched back a little way in time. If there was one aspect of the affair that gave him satisfaction it was the ingenuity of using a preliminary emetic that was perfectly harmless. Had that been done before? He thought not. He was pleased to learn that zincalium was not an exceptionally painful poison. It was accompanied by ‘nausea, vomiting, general uneasiness and depression,’ but did not cause a burning sensation or have the drastic effects of some other metallic poisons. It would have been pleasant to use a drug that caused Clare to cease upon the midnight with no pain, thereby avoiding all unpleasantness, but one must use the means that are to hand. What really disturbed him was the possibility that he might not be able to distil enough zincalium out of the Wypitklere to achieve the desired result. He distilled the zincalium in the kitchen at Elm Drive while Joan looked on, fascinated.
    ‘E, whatever are you doing?’
    ‘Distilling this, my dear.’
    ‘I see that, but what’s it for?’
    He looked up. ‘You’ve heard me talk about Flexner in the department?’
    ‘The expert in all those terrible germs and poisons. But I thought he was down at that place, what is it, Porton?’
    ‘Most of the time he is, but he’s been in the office recently, advising the Chief about disposing of a rather awkward customer, a Rumanian. He’s given some advice which the Chief is slightly doubtful about, and I’m just checking one of his conclusions. You know what the Chief’s like. He thinks someone from the other side may have got at Flexner.’
    He poured the mixture into a beaker. ‘If everything’s in order there should be a sediment at the bottom and a colourless liquid at the top.’ He watched the sediment settle with satisfaction, strained off the liquid above it, and poured it away.
    ‘Is that the way it should be? That powder?’
    ‘Precisely.’
    ‘So Flexner hasn’t been got at?’
    ‘Evidently not.’
    ‘The Chief knows he can rely on you, doesn’t he?’
    He shook his head. ‘Not a bit of it. He’s probably got somebody else checking my conclusions. It may even be that this bit of research is a blind, and that we’re going to use quite a different method to deal with our Rumanian friend. But if the Chief hasn’t been fooling me there is enough of this powder here to kill a hundred people.’
    Here he was being optimistic, for the truth was that the textbooks he had consulted were extremely vague about the amount of zincalium needed. He would have to experiment, that was all. After the powder had dried he divided it carefully, putting the larger quantity into one envelope and the smaller into another. He sealed both packets and put the two of them into one big Manila envelope. Shades of Armstrong! But there was this difference, that he would burn the