The Piccadilly Murder

by Anthony Berkeley

  “Well, Benson, seeing that all these elaborations only strengthened his own interests, and not suspecting for a moment that Mrs. Sinclair had other interests of her own behind them, agreed without hesitation to everything, and in due course the plan was put into effect. Every detail had been worked out in advance by Mrs. Sinclair, even to Benson calling the waitress over and giving her his own empty cup. Mrs. Sinclair, under pretext of keeping a supervisory eye on things, was to dress up as a waitress, as you no doubt know, and visit the table in that capacity, when Benson was to order a glass of kirsch for Miss Sinclair with her coffee, a liqueur of which she knew Miss Sinclair to be particularly fond.”

  “She took an enormous risk there,” remarked Lady Milborne thoughtfully. “Those girls all know each other. A strange face would be observed at once.”

  “It was a risk, of course, but not such a very large one. And one of the other waitresses actually did speak to her, but she had her story pat. She said without hesitation that she was a new waitress and employed in the grillroom, but had been sent upstairs with an order for a client who had just gone up to the lounge. The police have found that out since, but at the time the girl’s suspicions were not roused in the least. Mrs. Sinclair carried off what might have been an awkward moment perfectly naturally; she really was a magnificent actress.

  “And the rest followed almost exactly on the lines that I ventured to suggest to your brother,” continued Mr. Chitterwick, not without pride, and recounted again his theory of how the poison had been administered, the traces removed, prussic acid left in the empty coffee cup, and the incriminatingly marked phial inserted in Miss Sinclair’s hand.

  “And you really guessed all that?” exclaimed Lady Milborne with proper admiration.

  “It was the only theory I could find to explain the facts,” said Mr. Chitterwick modestly. “I had to employ inductive methods, of course,” he added in a deprecatory tone, as if anybody could have done that.

  “And you knew it was Judith all the time?”

  “Oh, no. Dear me, no. I must admit that at one time I very strongly suspected Miss Goole. Very strongly indeed. But the question of motive bothered me considerably. I could see no possible reason for Miss Goole wishing Miss Sinclair dead and plenty for wishing her alive. Similarly with Benson. I suspected him quite early as being the man in the case, but I could not believe that he was the murderer; it would of course have been sheer madness for him to kill Miss Sinclair before she had made a will in his favour. I was really led to Mrs. Sinclair by a combination of elimination and motive, but even then I was not quite certain until we came to the fact of those photographs having been removed from the shop in my name. She was the only possible person who could have effected that. But with her usual prudence she sent a messenger, a chance loiterer glad to earn an easy shilling, instead of going herself. When I got no answer to my knock on her door I was almost sure she had gone out to do that.”

  “You wanted the photographs for identification?”

  “Yes, there was one enlargement of Benson, and one of Mrs. Sinclair herself. But matters reached such a swift climax that all that part of the work passed into the hands of the police.”

  “Who were able to have Judy identified as a woman who had hired a room at the Piccadilly Palace the day before the murder?”

  “Where she changed into her waitress’s clothes, as I had surmised—exactly.”

  “But they haven’t been able to find out where she got the poison, have they?”

  “No. We think that very probably she had it by her for years, having secured it when she did so in order to make use of the opportunity, when it should arise, without fear of detection, but with no definite object in view at the time. Indeed, it may very well be that the chance possession of prussic acid suggested to her the whole crime.”

  Lady Milborne uttered a mirthless laugh. “It’s still almost incredible to me. I’d always looked on Judy as—— Oh, well. And now you think she’d probably have killed Miss Goole as well?”

  “I think it very probable,” said Mr. Chitterwick gravely. “You see, Miss Goole had commited not only the indiscretion of visiting the Piccadilly Palace to see her own plan in operation, whereby she became, unknown to Mrs. Sinclair, a witness of its unexpected sequel, but the further indiscretion, too, of trying to blackmail Mrs. Sinclair on the strength of what she had seen. Mrs. Sinclair, not knowing that Miss Goole had actually been present, considered that she was drawing on her imagination and refused to be intimidated. Unfortunately, however, I let slip my belief that I had seen Miss Goole in the Piccadilly Palace, and that was quite enough to sign her death warrant; Mrs. Sinclair would never feel safe so long as an actual witness of her actions was alive. But with her usual ability to take advantage of any circumstances she combined the elimination of Miss Goole with a detailed and singularly convincing attempt to throw the blame on her too, as she saw my own suspicions getting nearer and nearer the truth. She wrote the letter herself, came up to London, posted it, and then came on to Chiswick to keep an eye on me. I must admit that forged letter took me in completely for a few minutes, but thank heaven I had my doubts raised in time. I am quite convinced that we only saved Miss Goole in the nick of time. And so, now, is she.”

  “But the man, Benson. He must have known that Judy had murdered Miss Sinclair?”

  “He did. His trouble was that he thought (this, of course, was what she told him subsequently) she had done so through his agency. In other words, that the liquid he poured into Miss Sinclair’s coffee was the prussic acid (in reality, of course, it was pure water). Naturally, after that, he could not give her away, but had to shield her as much as himself; their interests, indeed, were identical. Besides, my own evidence against Major Sinclair was equally strong against himself. Mrs. Sinclair had cleverly put him in the position of having, if he wished to save his own skin, to stand by and connive at, even assist her in, the judicial murder of her husband. He is a scoundrel and a base fellow,” said Chitterwick with indignation, “but I could well believe him when he told me that those two months were just hell on earth for him.”

  “But why didn’t Judy do that, Mr. Chitterwick? Put the prussic acid in the phial she gave Benson, I mean. That would have saved all the trouble and risk of dressing up as a waitress, and so on.”

  “It would have been too unsafe. Prussic acid is the quickest poison and therefore the best for her purpose, but it has a very strong and characteristic smell. If Benson had only sniffed at the phial she gave him he would have recognized it at once and refused to administer it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t, and that is how she was able to bamboozle him into thinking he had administered it.”

  “And then he went back to America, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. She had him in a cleft stick, of course, and simply issued her orders. According to his own account he tried his best to get her to let him at least exonerate Major Sinclair anonymously, which she completely refused, but I doubt very much whether he made anything of a fight; she was by far the stronger character. Anyhow, what was arranged was simply that he was to behave in future exactly as he would have done had he been quite innocent and never left America. It was foreseen that the lawyers would have difficulty in tracing him and, of course, he would not answer any of their advertisements, but once he was definitely found he was to behave just as would be expected of him—in other words, come over here and, if Major Sinclair was dead by then, take possession of the estate; if he were not, pretend to be desperately anxious to help him. That, of course, is what he did. But he overdid it, just as he overdid Eccles’s voice on the telephone, mimicking on that occasion the Oxford accent into something amounting almost to a caricature of the real thing.”

  “Oh, yes, that was him, of course, on Mrs. Sinclair’s instructions.”

  Mr. Chitterwick meditated a moment. “I always thought that incident a valuable clue, though its significance did not seem quite to hav
e been appreciated. It showed, you see, that the person or persons behind the crime were very intimately connected with Major Sinclair, a conclusion which was, of course, corroborated by the fact that they had been able to obtain his fingerprints on the phial without suspicion. That was another thing which, to my mind, definitely ruled the unknown cousin out as the murderer, even before I realized that the man in the Piccadilly Palace could not have placed the phial in Miss Sinclair’s hand.”

  “I don’t know how you ever found out what you did,” sighed Lady Milborne.

  “Oh, but I made a great number of mistakes,” Mr. Chitterwick hastened to assure her. “A very great number. For a long time I was under the impression that the crime had been arranged by the man in such a way that he could clear himself if suspicion ever did fall on him. I was wrong there. Quite wrong. Though, curiously enough, this very mistake of mine led me on to further conclusions which were perfectly correct.

  “I think that is all there is to tell you. Oh, the phial. It would have been quite easy for Mrs. Sinclair to get the Major to handle it when his hands were in a state to leave good impressions. He might have washed them, for instance, and rubbed a little glycerine on them, as some people do, and then she would ask him to hand it to her. After the crime, with her usual attention to detail, she would replace it in the bathroom with another.

  “I think that’s all, isn’t it?”

  Lady Milborne did not answer immediately. She peeled a peach slowly and absently. Perhaps some memory was recurring to her of a solemn-faced little girl nearly all of whose games began by the prefix “Let’s pretend”; and however the others might manage it, in the case of the little girl, at any rate, the pretending had always been consummately done. But for all that one hardly expects people to go on pretending all their lives, thought Lady Milborne.

  “And she was so sure Lynn must be innocent,” she said aloud. “Just as sure as all the rest of us. Surer. And seemed so dreadfully cut up. We almost feared a breakdown at first.”

  Mr. Chitterwick nodded. “That was all in the character, you see. The loving, trusting wife. Dear me, dear me.”

  “But what I can’t understand is why she seemed so taken with the idea of getting you down to Riversmead and trying to make you realize that Lynn wasn’t guilty.”

  “Whose plan was that, by the way?” asked Mr. Chitterwick.

  Lady Milborne looked guilty. “I’m afraid it was mine.”

  “Well, what else could Mrs. Sinclair do but fall in with it? And enthusiastically. The character she was playing demanded it. She must keep in character at all costs.”

  “I understood from her,” said Lady Milborne rather mischievously, “that she was prepared to pay quite substantial costs. Is that true, Mr. Chitterwick?”

  “Er—well, I believe there was . . . Er—yes,” mumbled Mr. Chitterwick, looking supremely uncomfortable.

  “It was quite in character, of course,” said Lady Milborne gravely, though there was a twinkle in her blue eyes. “In fact, judging by fiction and the drama one might almost call the situation stereotyped and the offer conventional, mightn’t one?”

  “She was a good judge of her fellow creatures,” pronounced Mr. Chitterwick, with an effect of scientific treatment of the theme that was slightly marred by his lingering blush. “Of course, she knew perfectly well that I should refuse her—h’m!—her offer. Otherwise . . . Besides, I have no doubt she thoroughly enjoyed the situation. The perfect wife, as one might say. It gave admirable scope to her histrionic powers (and I must say she acted the scene magnificently), and at the same time it must have appealed immensely to her sense of humour. Yes, I have no doubt that she quite enjoyed that—er—episode.”

  “In fact, she acted it so magnificently that she succeeded in persuading you to do what you had quite made up your mind not to?” said Lady Milborne, with interest but not much grammar.

  “That is so. It was, in short, another instance of overelaboration. A tendency toward that has been the only flaw in the execution of her scheme, but that has occurred all through; and I think I may even say that it has been that which really helped me to reach the truth. Mrs. Sinclair was an artist in crime, but not a great enough artist to know just when to stop or to appreciate the value of simplicity. She thought she was on quite safe ground. She knew she could not make me doubt what I had actually seen with my own eyes, and it is quite possible that she wished to test me out under cross-examination. And if she had cut short her appeal that night at the right moment instead of adding an unnecessary breakdown, she would have achieved her effect and her object (which must have been that I should not reconsider my decision) as well.”

  “Perhaps she was carried away by her own acting,” suggested Lady Milborne.

  “That may be so; but in the end that lack of artistry cost her her life. A solemn thought.” Mr. Chitterwick sighed. “What must have been her feelings as she had to sit by and watch detail after detail that she had imagined would be hidden for ever dragged out into the light! Terrible! And yet she scarcely ever showed them. Only once, I think, when I let fall the fact of Miss Goole’s presence in the Piccadilly Palace, did she really forget herself.”

  “It must have been an appalling strain. And all to be a duchess! Good heavens, what’s a duchess?” demanded Lady Milborne indignantly.

  Mr. Chitterwick, not knowing, did not answer.

  THE END