Note 140 — Chapter VII

When we bear in mind how small a space even 200 grains of arsenic would occupy—not more than that of an ordinary seidlitz powder—the suggestion of L’Angelier carrying this means of suicide about him, when keeping the supposed appointment on the Sunday night, is by no means improbable. And when his evident tendency to attempt self-destruction, when irritated or depresssed, is remembered, it is within the range of probability, that, if either the meeting took place and ended with a quarrel, or he failed to obtain a meeting, in the excited state of mind which either circumstance would have created, he in desperation swallowed the drug very shortly before he returned to his lodgings, only to die. This is a far more probable suggestion than that set up by the defence, that he had been dosing himself with arsenic on the road from Stirling to Glasgow. The difficulty is that purchases of arsenic by L’Angelier could not be proved. But, looking to the careless way in which it was exposed in the shops of some of the firms with which he had relations (evidence of Fleming and Townsend), he might have got it from thence, without its being known, or he might have purchased it in Edinburgh on his visit there, where he could not be easily recognised. He certainly had an unwholesome hankering after this drug.—G. L. B.