In a Gilded Cage - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,91

find me some paper and a pen, I’ll write the captain a note.”

“Is this to report some kind of crime?” he asked. “Or is the note of a personal nature?” His smirk implied that young women were prone to chase after Captain Sullivan. I thought about setting him straight on this, but instead I kept strictly to business.

“A crime.” I gave him a cold stare. “A case of poisoning.”

He went and produced a sheet of paper and an inkwell. I wrote,

Daniel. The poison was thallium. This jar of cream needs to be tested immediately. Emily Boswell is very sick. I’m summoning a doctor but he may not know how to treat a poison. If you know of a poisons expert, please send him immediately to Emily.

And I wrote down her address. “Please come yourself as soon as you can,” I added. Then I handed the note and the jar of cream to the policeman at the desk. “Captain Sullivan is to see these the moment he comes back. Will you keep them down here or take them up to his office?”

He looked rather surprised at the forceful way I was speaking, also that I knew where his office was. “I’ll take them to his office, miss. Don’t worry. I’ll see he gets them.”

When I came out of police headquarters, I was unsure what to do next. Find a doctor for Emily, I supposed. Would any doctor believe me if I told him she was suffering from thallium poisoning, and would he have any idea how to treat it if he did believe me? I took the El this time, knowing it to be quicker than the trolley. As I watched the second-floor windows of the buildings pass us by, some only a few feet away, I tried to make sense of everything that had happened. Someone must have bribed Ned to poison that face cream. But why kill Dorcas? And what about the opera singer Honoria? How did she come into this?

Then I thought I saw what might have happened. The poisoned face cream could have been intended only for Fanny. But Fanny had sung its praises to her friends. What if she had passed along the jar to Dorcas? And what if Dorcas had let her friend Honoria try it when she came to visit? It seemed more likely than somebody deliberately killing Dorcas and Honoria, didn’t it?

Fifi, Bella, Anson. I toyed with each of the names. How did they discover Ned, assuming that Ned had added the poison to the face creams he made. Anson might have had contact with McPherson’s drugstore, because Fanny liked the stomach mixture they made up. And Bella learned about it from Fanny. But what would induce Anson or Bella to think that Ned could be bribed to kill someone and that he would not go to the police? Unless . . .

Unless Ned were not being paid to kill Fanny. What if he had his own reason for wanting her dead? I couldn’t think what this could be, apart from a paranoid hatred of rich women. Was it possible that he was systematically killing off rich women because they had everything he had lacked growing up? It seemed rather improbable. Suddenly I thought of the first time I had been to McPherson’s drugstore. Emily had been to visit the older woman who worked with Emily behind the counter. She had become sick and died from very similar symptoms. Had she tried the face cream? Was it possible that Ned was not the good pharmacist he imagined himself to be and had created a mixture containing lethal elements? I knew that some face preparations contained arsenic. Maybe Ned had thought that thallium would be a good addition, and I had just heard from Daniel that a badly made tonic had been responsible for killing people. But then Emily had used the cream previously and suffered no ill effects. Just this current batch then.

The closely packed buildings gave way to a more genteel landscape. Out of the window I glimpsed Columbus Circle and the elegant area around the southern entrance to the park. Carriages were passing here, fashionable folk were strolling. Watching them made me think of that one particular black carriage. Who had tried to run me down? Not Ned. He would have no access to such a vehicle, and besides, it had proved rather easy to kill with a simple jar of face cream. Perhaps the carriage had been a mere accident