Statement by Paul Harrison
I was in Africa when the news of my father’s death reached me. The work on which I was engaged was nearly completed, and I at once made arrangements for handing over the concluding portions of the job and returning to England. It took a little time to settle all this and to arrange for my journey to the coast, and it was not till the 6th of January, 1930 , that I arrived in London.
From the moment that I heard the cause of death assigned, I was positively convinced that there was no accident about it. My father’s expert knowledge of fungi was very great; and he was a man of almost exaggerated precision in matters of this kind. It was entirely incredible to me that he could ever have mistaken a stool of Amanita muscaria for Amanita rubescens , even in the gathering of it; far more so that he could have peeled and prepared the fungus for eating without noticing the difference. To the average coroner’s jury, accustomed to dealing with schoolchildren and trippers, such a mistake would no doubt seem perfectly natural; but my father was no more likely to take Muscaria for Rubescens than to take a piece of cast-iron for a piece of chilled steel. I immediately scouted the whole idea of accident. Two possibilities remained for me to investigate. Either my father, in his unselfish devotion to the worthless woman he had married, had destroyed himself by a painful method which would look like accident and so disarm suspicion; or else he had been murdered. In either case, I was determined that the woman should not benefit by the crime which she had caused.
Feeling as I did towards Margaret Harrison, I could not bring myself to take up my residence at my father’s house. I therefore took a room at an hotel in the Bloomsbury district, which has the advantage of being central, and set myself to examine the problem under all its aspects.