Archibald Dunn

Archibald Dunn is 52 and has sold remedies and warnings at an apothecaryapothecary Old word for a pharmacist: a tradesman who prepared and sold medicines and drugs. on Argyle Street, in Glasgow, for twenty-eight years. He was born in Dundee, the son of a fishing captain and a seamstress, and learned the trade as an apothecary's apprentice at fourteen, scrubbing mortars. He opened his own shop at twenty-four, with money borrowed from an uncle, and kept it standing by a hair and a great deal of stubbornness. He cites the poisons law the way others cite the Bible, and checks the register twice before every sale.

He lives above his own shop, in a low-ceilinged apartment full of pharmacopoeia books, a tall-case clock that strikes half a minute late and a desk piled with old prescriptions. The smell of dried herbs rises up the stairs and permeates the curtains, and he no longer even notices. Dinner is barley soup with bread, in the kitchen, at seven. At the end of the day, when he closes the counter, he listens to a neighbor's bagpipes, played badly, and does not complain.

He has fair, rosy skin, full gray sideburns and thin-rimmed round glasses at the tip of his nose, over which he looks at his interlocutor as if checking a prescription. He wears a mustard-colored wool waistcoat with a watch chain and a white apron stained with powder, and his fingers are dyed blue from his work. He is meticulous, pompous and declamatory, and takes offense, in genuine astonishment, when anyone doubts his register.

About the neighbors who pass his counter, his account is professional: he remembers the French clerk by his face, because he came to the shop with vomiting and cramps in February and March, and he sold him paregoricparegoric Old medicine made from opium, taken against pain and diarrhea. elixir, recorded in the ledger. He says half of Glasgow buys rat poison, because the city's cellars belong to the rats, but that the law requires signing the register, with a witness, and in his shop nobody walks out with arsenic in plain sight.

Archibald knows that whoever sells poison is the first to be remembered when someone dies poisoned. When the detective asks what else he keeps besides the register, his voice rises, his finger points at the shelf and the next sentence is a quotation of the law. It may be the honest pomp of a man who follows the rules. It may be someone hiding behind the rule because the rest would not survive scrutiny. The detective will have to decide which.