Statement of Paul Harrison [Continued]
Disregarding the hysterical tone of his last few sentences, I felt that on the whole Munting was right, and had behaved with more discretion and public spirit than I had credited him with.
It was obvious to me that Lathom was losing his nerve. As to his guilt, I had by now no shadow of a doubt. The blatant way in which he had marked his trail, right up from Manaton to London and back again, and his determination to let Munting know all about it, were actions entirely inconsistent with the carelessness of an innocent man. The trouble was that he was now on the alert. At any minute he might take alarm and bolt. On this account, I decided to waste no valuable time in checking his alibi. The fact that he had produced it with such confidence left me no hope of breaking it down; moreover, some of the inquiries were of a sort that could only be made satisfactorily by the police.
It was evident that I must abandon the whole idea of a return to Manaton. Only one possibility was left, namely, that the poison had been left in such a place that my father was bound to add it to the dish of fungi himself; and that this manoeuvre had been carried out before Lathom left for London.
I knew that all the foodstuffs in The Shack had been carefully analysed and found harmless, with the exception of the half-eaten dish of fungi itself. I was, therefore, forced to conclude that the poison had been added to the beef-stock in which the fungi were stewed. Anything else would be dangerous, for the presence of muscarine in, say, the salt or the coffee would be a circumstance so suspicious as to impress even the coroner’s jury.