There is something truly shocking about what happened to Dawn Sturgess, who died in Salisbury in July 2018 after applying some perfume to her wrist. You may not remember the name Sturgess, but the single word Salisbury will remind you, I suspect, of the attempted murder of retired Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal four months earlier.
What did Dawn Sturgess have to do with Skripal and the murky goings-on of international espionage? Precisely nothing, beyond geographical proximity and an apparently discarded scent bottle, which is what gives the case a shuddering “it could happen in our neighbourhood” sense. She was a blameless mother of three sharing her life with boyfriend Charlie Rowley, who reportedly found the bottle in a skip. Both became ill after contact with its contents, which turned out to be Novichok, a lethal nerve agent developed in the old Soviet Union in the 1980s. Rowley survived, and his evidence will be heard in the public inquiry which began this morning in Salisbury.
