A Red Herring Without Mustard

But I am not one of them.

As any chemist worth her calcium chloride knows, it’s not just fish that smell fishy. Offhand, I could think of several substances that gave off the smell of deceased mackerel, among them propylamine.

Propylamine (which had been discovered by the great French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas) is the third of the series of alcohol radicals—which might sound like boring stuff indeed, until you consider this: When you take one of the alcohols and heat it with ammonia, a remarkable transformation takes place. It’s like a game of atomic musical chairs in which the hydrogen that helps form the ammonia has one or more of its chairs (atoms, actually) taken by the radicals of the alcohol. Depending upon when and where the music stops, a number of new products, called amines, may be formed.

With a bit of patience and a Bunsen burner, some truly foul odors can be generated in the laboratory. In 1889, for instance, the entire city of Freiburg, in Germany, had to be evacuated when chemists let a bit of thioacetone escape. It was said that people even miles away were sickened by the odor, and that horses fainted in the streets.

How I wish I had been there to see it!

While other substances, such as the lower aliphatic acids, can be easily manipulated to produce every smell from rancid butter to a sweaty horse, or from a rotten drain to a goat’s rugger boots, it is the lower amines—those ragged children of ammonia—that have a most unique and interesting characteristic: As I have said, they smell like rotten fish.

In fact, propylamine and trimethylamine could, without exaggeration, be given the title “The Princes of Pong,” and I knew this for a fact.

Because she has given us so many ways of producing these smelly marvels, I know that Mother Nature loves a good stink as much as I do. I thought fondly of the time I had extracted trimethylamine (for another harmless Girl Guide prank) by distilling it with soda from a full picnic basket of Stinking Goosefoot (Chenopodium olidum), an evil-smelling weed that grew in profusion on the Trafalgar Lawn.

Which brought me back to Brookie Harewood.

One thing I was quite certain of was this: that the riddle of Brookie’s death would be solved not by cameras, notebooks, and measuring tapes at the Poseidon fountain, but rather in the chemical laboratory.

And I was just the one to do it.

I was still thinking about riddles as I slid down the banister and landed in the foyer. Nursery rhyme riddles had been as much a part of my younger years as they had anyone else’s.

Thirty white horses upon a red hill

Now they tramp, now they champ

Now they stand still.

“Teeth!” I would shout, because Daffy had cheated and whispered the answer in my ear.

That, of course, was in the days before my sisters began to dislike me.

Later came the darker verses:

One’s joy, two’s grief,

Three’s marriage; four’s a death.

The answer was “magpies.” We had seen four of these birds land on the roof while having a picnic on the lawn, and my sisters had made me memorize the lines before they would allow me to dig into my dish of strawberries.

I didn’t yet know what death was, but I knew that their verses gave me nightmares. I suppose it was these little rhymes, learned at an early age, that taught me to be good at puzzles. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts. Take this one, for instance:

As I was going to St. Ives

I met a man with seven wives.

Each wife had seven sacks

Each sack had seven cats

Each cat had seven kits.

Kits, cats, sacks, wives

How many were going to St. Ives?

The usual answer, of course, is “one.” But when you stop to think about it, there’s much more to it than that. If, for instance, the teller of the rhyme happened to be overtaking the man with the traveling menagerie, the actual number—including sacks—would be almost three thousand!

It all depends upon how you look at things.

Mrs. Mullet was having her tea at the window. I helped myself to a digestive biscuit.

“The Hobblers,” I said, diving in with both feet. “You said they’d have my blood for sausages. Why?”

“You keep clear o’ them lot, miss, like I told you.”

“I thought they were extinct?”

“They smells just the same as everybody else. That’s why you don’t reck’nize ’em till somebody points ’em out.”

“But how can I keep clear of them if I don’t know who they are?”

Mrs. M lowered her voice and looked over both shoulders. “That Mountjoy woman, for one. God knows what goes on in ’er kitchen.”

“Tilda Mountjoy? At Willow Villa?”

I could hardly believe my good fortune!