Twenty-two
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative¹
I
“Are we in time? Will she live?”
I wandered up and down. I couldn’t sit still.
Lejeune sat watching me. He was patient and kind.
“You can be sure that everything possible is being done.”
It was the same old answer. It did nothing to comfort me.
“Do they know how to treat thallium poisoning?”
“You don’t often get a case of it. But everything possible will be tried. Ifyou ask me, I think she’ll pull through.”
I looked at him. How could I tell if he really believed what he was say-ing? Was he just trying to soothe² me?
“At any rate, they’ve verified that it was thallium.”
“Yes, they’ve verified that.”
“So that’s the simple truth behind the Pale Horse. Poison. No witchcraft³,no hypnotism, no scientific death rays. Plain poisoning! And she flung thatat me, damn her. Flung it in my face. Laughing in her cheek all the while, Iexpect.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Thyrza Grey. That first afternoon when I went to tea there. Talkedabout the Borgias and all the build up of ‘rare and untraceable poisons’;the poisoned gloves and all the rest of it. ‘Common white arsenic,’ she said,‘and nothing else.’ This was just as simple. All that hooey! The trance andthe white cocks and the brazier and the pentagrams and the voodoo andthe reversed crucifix—all that was for the crudely superstitious⁴. And thefamous ‘box’ was another bit of hooey for the contemporary-minded. Wedon’t believe in spirits and witches and spells nowadays, but we’re a gull-ible lot when it comes to ‘rays’ and ‘waves’ and psychological phenomena⁵.
That box, I bet, is nothing but a nice little assembly of electrical show-off,coloured bulbs and humming valves. Because we live in daily fear of radiofall out and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we’re amenable⁶ to sugges-tion along the line of scientific talk. The whole setup at the Pale Horse wasbogus! The Pale Horse was a stalking horse, neither more nor less. Atten-tion was to be focused on that, so that we’d never suspect what might begoing on in another direction. The beauty of it was that it was quite safefor them. Thyrza Grey could boast out loud about what occult powers shehad or could command. She could never be brought into court and triedfor murder on that issue. Her box could have been examined and provedto be harmless. Any court would have ruled that the whole thing was non-sense and impossible! And, of course, that’s exactly what it was.”

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