Reginald,” Holmes replied. “You have been playing a dangerous game with antimony. You dosed Mr. Harrowgate’s water, and tonight you intended the same for Mr. Allardice. Fortunately for us all, you have now taken the only poisoned glass at the table.” The Baronets eyes darted from Holmes to Allardice, then to me. For a moment he seemed about to bluster, but the weakness in his limbs betrayed him. He scurried to the sink and vomited. Afterwards he sank back in his chair, and covered his face with his hands whilst Holmes was making a pot of tea. “You have no proof,” he muttered. Holmes’s voice was cold. “On the contrary, I have the residue from both your glass and Harrowgate’s water supply, each containing the same compound. I have also the evidence of the tampered pipe in Inverness Terrace and witnesses of tonight’s events in Allardice and Watson here. The police will be most satisfied.” There was silence in the room save for the ticking of the clock. At last Sir Reginald raised his head. “I was ruined,” he said hoarsely. “The tontine was my only hope. With Denstone and Winthrop dead, I thought why should I not be the last? Why should I watch others profit while I starve?” Holmes’s expression did not soften. “Because, Sir James, the price of your scheme was murder and that is a currency in which the law is rich.” Holmes asked “By the way, how did you kill Denstone and Winthrop?” Sir Reginald Poynter looked at him. “I had nothing to do with those deaths and you can’t prove otherwise.” Holmes shrugged and said simply “ I would conjecture you tampered with the Brandy on Denholmes boat and he fell in a weakened state whilst vomiting overboard. As for Winthrop I wouldn't guess, but nevertheless, I’m sure we have enough proof tonight to provide justice for Denstone and Winthrop.” Poynter was taken quietly that night into custody, thanks to an arrangement Holmes had made in advance with Inspector Lestrade. The tontine, much diminished in honour, would continue among the remaining three, but its shadow lingered. As we sat the next day, before our fire in Baker Street, I remarked upon the cold precision of the whole affair. “It is human greed in its most mathematical form, Watson,” Holmes replied. “A tontine reduces the span of human life to a set of diminishing fractions and to the wrong sort of mind, the quickest way to the whole is to erase the parts. The last days of that October passed in a grey, unbroken drizzle, as though London itself sought to wash away the sordid traces of the case. Initially, Sir Reginald Poynter’s arrest was handled with discretion due to his rank; the Times referred to it merely as “a private matter connected with an inheritance dispute.”
The law, however, is not given to indulgence where calculated murder is concerned. He was committed for trial at the Old Bailey, and there the facts were stated with chilling clarity, and Poynter, confronted with Holmes’s evidence, offered no defence save a plea for mercy on the grounds of financial desperation. On the advice of Holmes, Denholme’s body was exhumed and was found to contain Antimony. The outcome meant that the full weight of justice inevitably fell. Of the other members of the tontine, Major Blackwood bore the news with soldierly stoicism, though he remarked to me that “thirty odd thousand pounds is a fine prize, but not worth the Noose.” Allardice, who had so nearly been Poynter’s final victim, sent Holmes a case of vintage port in gratitude. An ironic gesture which my friend accepted with the faintest of smiles. As for Harrowgate, he withdrew even further into his cloistered life in Bayswater, writing Holmes a series of long, anxious letters on the sanitary dangers of lead piping, which my friend tolerated with a degree of patience I could scarcely match. It was on the evening after Sir Reginald Poynter’s committal that we were again in our familiar sitting room, the lamplight gleaming on the litter of papers and chemical apparatus which marked the close of an investigation. Outside, the rain pattered against the windows; inside, the air was warm with the mingled scents of tobacco and the remains of our supper. Holmes sat opposite me, his long, lean figure half reclined, eyes half-closed, the blue smoke of his cigarette curling upward. “You see, Watson,” he said at length, “this was not merely a crime of greed, but one of design. Many men have killed for gain, but few have had their motive set before them from youth, nurtured by the very structure of a financial scheme. A tontine is a slow fuse and for certain temperaments, it burns too slowly. Poynter had watched the candle of life burn down in others, and the coin pile up for himself, until patience became impossible.” “I had not thought,” I said, “that the simple friendship of undergraduates could bear such poisoned fruit.” “Friendship,” Holmes observed dryly, “is often the first casualty when money is made the condition of survival. Recall how neatly the tontine arranges the moral temptation: each death benefits the survivors. In a man already burdened by debt and habituated to gambling both of which sharpen the appetite for sudden gain.It requires but little to tip the scale. Sir Reginald’s only novelty was the patience with which he applied his means. Poison is the weapon of a calculating mind, not the impetuous one.”