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fact that he was engaged to be married appears to have given him no comfort. His fiancée was extraneous to his real problems. Meanwhile, with what might have appeared to him to be callous indifference to their only son’s debts – his precious motor-car had been seized in part satisfaction of an account due to a firm of Edinburgh stockbrokers and was standing forlornly in a Dalkeith garage – his parents were stolidly making preparations for their silver wedding party. Charles Hutchison, paterfamilias, was a solid man of good report, a Freemason, and employed on the estates of the Duke of Buccleuch, at Dalkeith. The refreshments were to be of the finest, and the coffee was purchased specially, on the day of the party, in order to be fresh, from a Musselburgh grocer named Clapperton.
    That evening, Friday February 3rd, 1911, after supper, John Hutchison, lanky, stooping son of the house, politely handed round coffee to the well-fed, grateful guests. Three abstained, but fifteen drank deep. All too soon, the scene disintegrated into a groaning battlefield, with vomiting, purging figures in panic and disarray. Some ran out into the freezing garden, and lay where they fell. Others writhed on sofas and on the floors of the bespattered house. Of those who administered relief to the sufferers, none was more attentive with bowl and cloth than John Hutchison, himself unaffected by the sudden malady. His fiancee was among those stricken. Two local doctors were summoned to the disaster and they called in a consultant physician from Edinburgh, but they failed to save Charles Hutchison, who, hearty on his celebration day, had quaffed down a full cup of coffee, nor Clapperton, the grocer, appreciative of his own product. Both died within a few hours.In due course, everyone else recovered, although Mrs Hutchison’s case was touch-and-go.
    Professor Harvey Littlejohn, who held the chair of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, conducted the double post-mortem on Sunday February 5th, with the doctors who had tried to save the two victims in attendance. He found no natural cause of death, and his suspicion of arsenical poisoning was soon confirmed by chemical analysis of certain portions of the intestines. Freemasonry was very well represented at Mr Hutchison’s funeral. The chief mourner at Eskbank Cemetery was John Hutchison, and none saw anything save grief in his demeanour. Many of those present, including the last-named, moved on that same afternoon to attend the Clapperton funeral at Musselburgh. There was an assemblage of some five hundred, among whom, no doubt, were a few shaken silver wedding guests.
    On February 10th, it was officially announced that arsenic had been found in the remains of the party coffee. It was not present in Mr Clapperton’s stock in his shop, to which no suspicion was attached, nor in the portion of ground coffee left unused at the house. It was not present in either the milk or the sugar served with the coffee. In other words, arsenic was found in the coffee pot or pots, or in the discarded cups which had still contained coffee, or in both. Therefore, a hand must have doctored the pots, or slipped arsenic into each and every cup somewhere on its way from pot to recipient, which would seem to be a tricky manoeuvre to perform 15 times.
    Shock and bewilderment informed Dalkeith. Some inexplicable accident was the subject of discussion. John Hutchison was not at first a suspect, although it was no secret that he had been the bearer of the poisoned coffee. He must have proffered an excuse for his own immunity. His person was not searched until it was too late. His concern for the victims was very convincing. The realisation that he had dispensed drugs from his uncle’s shop did, however, eventuallyconcentrate the minds of the police investigators. Going over to Musselburgh, they found that a bottle of arsenic had disappeared from the shelves, with no record of sale in the