COPElAND & BOwEN | 15
police pathologist, who thought that Turing had drunk cyanide dissolved in water, said only
that the apple might have been used to take away some of the taste.^10 In fact, though, the pres-
ence of a half-eaten apple on Turing’s bedside table offers no clue about how he died, since it was
his long-standing habit to eat a few bites of apple last thing at night.^11
A small cramped laboratory adjoined Turing’s bedroom: the ‘nightmare room’, he called
it.^12 In it the police found a glass jam (jelly) jar containing cyanide solution.^13 Charles Bird,
the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination, thought that Turing must have
drunk this cyanide solution.^14 However, the police sergeant attached to the coroner’s office,
Leonard Cottrell, who examined Turing’s body at the scene of death, reported that there was
‘no sign of burning about the mouth’—as might have been expected if Turing had drunk the
poison—and said that he smelled no more than a ‘faint’ trace of bitter almonds (cyanide) around
Turing’s mouth.^15 Quite possibly this faint odour came from the exhaled froth that Cottrell
noted on the lips, rather than from a residue left by downing gulps of the strong-smelling con-
tents of the jam jar.
Some sort of experiment was going on in the nightmare room. Cottrell found a pan full of
bubbling liquid, with electrodes that were wired via a transformer to the central light fitting in
the ceiling. He noted a ‘strong smell’ of cyanide in the nightmare room.^16 Sara suspected that
Turing might have died from inhaling cyanide gas from the experiment.^17 This is a possibility.
Illicit drug ‘cooks’ working in small confined drug laboratories can die from accidental expo-
sure to cyanide gas emitted from their chemical stews.^18
figure 1.5 Plaque marking Turing’s house ‘Hollymeade’ in Wilmslow.
Posted by Joseph Birr-Pixton to Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Turing_Plaque.jpg. Creative Commons Licence.