Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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There is a man hurrying down the street, his eyes fixed ahead and his coat swinging as his feet hit the pavement. As a train whistle sounds, steam rises and in the shadows, someone is watching.
They see him getting onto the 742 train from Slough to London. They're not quite in time to prevent him getting on the train. but they see him and they see which carriage he gets into.
As he sits down, his heart thumps. He breathes deep because he's made it. He has outrun his past. Except little does he know that his past isn't behind him at all. In fact, it's racing alongside him. We'll wait for him at the next station, all thanks to a futuristic machine.
It's kind of playing a role in the capture of a wrongdoer or an evil person. A really good demonstration of the capacity of this new technology.
I'm Marc Fennell, and this is the story of a murder and a strange new technology that helped catch a killer before anyone really understood what it could do. A machine that would go on to change the world, but at the time, no one saw it coming. So let's start with this. Happy New Year. It is the 1st of January, 1845.
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Chapter 2: What crime sets the stage for this story?
And then they notice something on the table.
There's a half empty glass of what looks like beer and a bottle of beer next to it. And so this liquid that she'd very clearly been consuming just before her death comes under immediate suspicion as the cause of death.
Because it turns out that something was put in that beer that definitely should not have been there.
What has been slipped into this glass of beer that Sarah had been drinking is a treatment for varicose veins. It contains a lot of prussic acid, and this acid is what had been used to kill her.
Now, prussic acid, you might know it by its more familiar name, hydrogen cyanide, which, if you've ever read Agatha Christie, is never a great sign. It's a poison. It's fast, it's brutal, and it stops your body from using oxygen. So in effect, you suffocate even while you are still breathing.
And thoughts immediately turned to murder, particularly given the fact that a man was walking out of the property, you know, as the screams were first heard.
In the ruckus, Sarah's neighbours spotted a man leaving her cottage when they went round to check on her. And unfortunately for him, his fashion choices made him pretty memorable.
All the kind of contemporary reports of him say that he's dressed like a Quaker. And in 19th century terms, that meant usually black or white or sometimes brown clothing. He was wearing a long great coat, but he was also wearing a kind of distinctively Quaker hat. And that meant a kind of broad brimmed hat. This is what really catches people's attention at the time.
And that's the kind of how they perceive this man who's seen walking away from the scene of the crime and towards the station.
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