Very soon she was back, holding in her hand a newspaper.
An inquest of the kind that was held on Colonel Crofton is a godsend to
any local sheet, and Radmore saw at a glance that this county paper had
made the most of it.
"Will you read it here, if you're not in a hurry? I don't want it taken
away; so while you're reading it, I'll go and do some potting over
there."
She disappeared into a glass-house built across a corner of her garden,
and he settled down to read the long newspaper columns.
Soon his feeling quickened into intense interest. The local Essex
reporter had a turn for descriptive writing, and, as he read, Godfrey
Radmore saw the scene described rise vividly before him. He seemed to
visualise the intensely crowded little court-house, the kindly coroner,
the twelve good men and true, and the motley gathering of small town and
country folk drawn together in the hope of hearing something startling.
Yet the facts were simple enough. Colonel Crofton had died from either an
accidental, or a deliberate, over-dose of strychnine. And his death had
been a terrible one.
The outstanding points of interrogation were: Had he consciously added
to a tonic which he was taking an ounce or more of the deadly drug? Or,
as some people were inclined to believe, had the local chemist by some
mistake or gross piece of carelessness, put a murderous amount of
strychnine into a mixture which had been prescribed for his customer
about a fortnight before?
But for the fact that a bottle of nux vomica had been actually found on
the ledge of the dead man's dressing-room window, it would have gone hard
with the chemist.
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