The Problem of the Green Capsule

by John Dickson Carr

  “And did you see me?” questioned Professor Ingram.

  “Eh?” said Harding, whose eyes were on Marjorie.

  “I say, did yon see me in the dark?”

  “Oh, definitely. I think you were trying to look at your watch, bending over it. You were there all right.”

  Harding had regained such an extraordinary sparkle and animation that it was as though he were about to strut up and down with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat.

  But Elliot had begun to feel that he was groping in an even worse fog. The case was a psychological morass. Yet he was willing to swear that these people were telling the truth, or thought they were telling the truth.

  “You see before you,” explained Professor Ingram, “a corporate alibi of truly remarkable soundness. It is impossible for one of us to have committed this crime. That is the bed-rock on which you must build your case, whatever it is. Of course, you may choose to doubt our stories; but nothing is easier to test. Reconstruct! Sit us down here in a row, as we were before; turn out the lights; turn on that Photoflood bulb in the other room; and you will see for yourself that it is absolutely impossible for any of us to have left the room without being seen.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that sir, unless you’ve got another Photoflood bulb,” said Elliot “The other one has just burned out. Also——”

  “But—!” exclaimed Marjorie. She checked herself, staring with puzzled eyes at the closed doors.

  “—also,” continued Elliot, “you may not be the only persons with alibis. There’s one thing in particular I’d like to ask you, Miss Wills. A little while ago you said you were certain that clock in the office had the right time. Why are you certain of it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Elliot repeated the question.

  “Because it’s broken,” replied Marjorie, drawing her attention back. “I mean, the thingummyjig you set the hands by was broken clean off, so you can’t alter the clock at all. And it’s an accurate time-keeper; it’s never been a second out since we’ve had it”

  Professor Ingram began to chuckle.

  “I see. When was it broken, Miss Wills?”

  “Yesterday morning. Pamela—that’s one of the maids—broke it off when she was tidying up Uncle Marcus’s office. She was winding the clock, and carrying an iron candlestick in the other hand, and she bumped it against that other little pin and broke it clean off. I thought Uncle Marcus would be furious. You see, we’re only allowed to tidy up his office once a week. He’s got all his business accounts in there, and particularly a manuscript he’s working on that we mustn’t touch. But he didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “He wasn’t furious, I mean. Just the opposite. He walked in in the middle of it. I said we could send the clock down to Simmonds’ in town and get it mended. He stood looking at the clock for a minute, and all of a sudden he burst out laughing. He said, No, no, let it alone: it was now set with the right time, couldn’t be altered, and was a joy to behold. (It’s an eight-day clock; it was wound up then.) He also said Pamela was an excellent girl, and would be a blessing to her parents in their old age. That’s how I remember so well.”

  Now, why, reflected Detective-Inspector Elliot, does a man stand in front of a clock and suddenly roar with laughter? But he had no time to consider. As though to overload his troubles to the breaking-point, Major Crow appeared from the door to the hall.

  “May I see you for a moment, Inspector?” he requested in a curious voice.

  Elliot went out and shut the door. It was a spacious hall, panelled in light oak, with a broad, low staircase and a floor so highly polished that it reflected the edges of the rugs. One bridge-lamp was burning, making a pool of light beside the staircase and shining on a telephone on its stand.

  Major Crow kept his deceptively mild appearance, but his eye looked wicked. He nodded towards the telephone.

  “I’ve just been talking to Billy Emsworth,” he said.

  “Billy Emsworth? Who’s that?”

  “The fellow whose wife had a baby to-night. The one Joe Chesney attended: you know? I know it’s very late, but I thought Emsworth would probably be still sitting up celebrating with a friend or two. He was, and I talked to him. I didn’t give anything away; I was only offering congratulations, though I hope it doesn’t occur to him to wonder why I should ring up at two o’clock in the morning to do it.” Major Crow drew a deep breath. “Well, if that clock in the office is right, Joe Chesney has an absolutely cast-iron alibi.”

  Elliot said nothing. He had expected it.

  “The brat was born about a quarter past eleven. Afterwards Chesney sat down and talked with Emsworth and his friends until close on midnight. They all looked at their watches as he was leaving. When Emsworth saw him to the door, the church clock was just striking twelve; and Emsworth stood on the front steps and made a speech about the dawn of a newer, fairer day. So the time of his going is established. Now, Emsworth lives at the other side of Sodbury Cross. It’s absolutely impossible for Joe Chesney to have been here at the time of the murder. What do you think of that?”

  “Only, sir, that they all have alibis,” said Elliot—and told him.

  “H’m,” said Major Crow.

  “Yes, sir,” said Elliot

  “This is awkward.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Damned awkward,” amplified the Chief Constable with a slight roar. “Do you think they’re telling the truth about it’s not being too dark to follow everybody’s movements?”

  “We must test it out, naturally.” Elliot hesitated. “But I noticed myself that that brilliant light in the other room makes all the difference. I honestly don’t think it was dark enough so that one could have slipped out without being seen. To tell you the honest truth, sir—I believe them.”

  “You don’t think the three of them concocted’ the story among themselves?”

  “Anything is possible. Still——”1

  “You don’t think so?”

  Elliot was cautious. “At least,” he decided, “it would seem that we can’t just concentrate attention on members of this household. We’ve got to go much farther afield. That phantom outsider in the dinner-jacket is probably real after that. Hang it, why shouldn’t he be?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Major Crow coolly. “Because Bostwick and I have just found evidence—evidence, mind—which shows that the murderer is either a member of this household or closely connected with it.”

  While Elliot experienced again that irrational sensation that something was vitally wrong, that he was looking at the case through distorted eyeglasses, the Chief Constable drew him towards the stairs. Major Crow, in fact, had assumed a somewhat guilty manner.

  “It was irregular. Most irregular,” he said, clucking his tongue hollowly; “but it’s done now and a good job too. When Bostwick went upstairs to see whether this fellow Emmet was well enough to have a word with us, he thought he would just have a look in the bathroom. In the medicine-chest of that bathroom he found a box of castor-oil capsules.”

  Here he looked inquiring.

  “Not necessarily important, sir. I understand they’re pretty common.”

  “Granted. Granted! But wait. Tucked away at the back of the shelf beside the mouth-wash, he found a one-ounce bottle a quarter full of pure prussic acid.…

  “I thought that would knock you in a heap,” said Major Crow with some satisfaction. “I know it did me, particularly when you now tell me everybody in the house has got an alibi. It was not, mind you, the weaker solution of potassium cyanide; it was the simon-pure article, the fastest-working poison on earth. At least, that’s what we think it is. West is going to have it analysed for us, but he’s fairly certain now. It was standing there in a bottle actually labelled, ‘Prussic Acid, HCN.’ Bostwick took one look at it and couldn’t believe his eyes. He took the cork out of the bottle, but when he caught one faint whiff of it he stuck the cork back again faster than he’s ever moved before
in his life. He had heard that one good deep inhalation of pure prussic acid will kill; and West says that’s true. Look at this beauty.”

  Very gingerly he felt in his pocket. He produced a tiny bottle in which the cork had been pushed down almost level with the neck, and he tilted it to show a colourless liquid inside. To the bottle had been fastened a gummed piece of paper on which the words “Prussic Acid, HCN” were crudely printed in ink. Major Crow put it down on the telephone-table under the light and backed away as though he had just lit a particularly dangerous cannon-cracker.

  “No fingerprints,” he explained. “Don’t get too close to it,” he added nervously. “Can’t you smell it even now?”

  Elliot could.

  “But where did anybody get the stuff?” he said. “You heard what Dr. West said. Pure prussic acid is practically inaccessable to a layman. The only person who could get it would be——”

  “Yes. A technician. Say a research chemist. What’s this fellow Harding, by the way?”

  It was here, either by good or by bad fortune, that Harding walked out of the Music Room.

  He had seemed in a particularly cheerful, bouncing frame of mind when Elliot left him. This did not greatly lessen, though he was not far away from the bottle on the table and must have been able to read its label. He leaned one hand against the door-post, as though he were about to have his photograph taken. Then he came over, smiling and respectful, and addressed the Chief Constable.

  “HCN?” he inquired, pointing to the bottle.

  “That’s what the label says, young man.”

  “Do you mind my asking where you found it?”

  “In the bathroom. Did you put it there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you use this stuff in your business, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Harding promptly. “No, I honestly don’t,” he added. “I use KCN—potassium cyanide—and lots of it. I’m working out an electro-plating process which will make imitation silver indistinguishable from the real thing. If I can market it myself, and get sufficient backing so that I don’t have to tie up with sharps, I’m going to revolutionise the industry.” He spoke without any hint of boasting; he was stating a fact. “But I don’t use HCN. It’s no good to me.”

  “Well, frankness is frankness,” said Major Crow, unbending a little. “All the same, you could make HCN, couldn’t you?”

  Harding spoke with such intensity, and such an intense shaking of the jaws as he formed his words, that Elliot wondered whether he had been born with an impediment in his speech: which, like other disadvantages, he had overcome. Harding said:

  “Of course I could make it. So could anyone else.”

  “Don’t follow you, young man.”

  “Well, look here! What do you need to manufacture HCN? I’ll tell you. You want prussiate of potash; not poisonous; buy it anywhere. You want oil of vitriol, which is better known as sulphuric acid; take some out of the nearest motor-car battery, and who’s the wiser? You want plain water. Put those three elements together in a distilling process that a little golden-haired child could manage with implements out of grandma’s kitchen, and you get—the stuff in that bottle. Anybody, with an elementary book on chemistry propped up in front of him, could do it.”

  Major Crow glanced uneasily at Elliot. “And that’s all you’ve got to do to get prussic acid?”

  “That’s all. But don’t take my word for it. The trouble is—well, sir, there’s something wrong. D’you mind telling me: you say you found that stuff in the bathroom. I’m not surprised; I’m past surprise; but do you mean you just picked it up in the bathroom, like a tube of toothpaste or something?”

  Major Crow spread out his hands. The same thought had occurred to him.

  “This house is mouldy,” said Harding, studying the fine and gracious hall. “It looks all right; but there’s something chemically wrong with it. I’m an outsider. I can tell. And now—er—if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to the dining-room to get a drink of whisky; and I’m praying to the saints there’s nothing chemically wrong with that.”

  His footsteps clacked loudly on the bare parquetry, defying bogles. The pool of light trembled by the staircase, the pool of poison trembled in the small bottle; upstairs a man with concussion of the brain lay muttering, downstairs two investigators looked at each other.

  “Not easy,” said Major Crow.

  “No,” admitted Elliot.

  “You have two leads, Inspector. Two solid, definite leads. To-morrow young Emmet may be conscious and able to tell you what happened to him. You have that ciné-film—I’ll have that developed for you by to-morrow afternoon; there’s a chap in Sodbury Cross who does that kind of work—and you will be able to tell exactly what happened during the show. Beyond that, I don’t know what you have, and notice that I say ‘you.’ I have my business to attend to. Tomorrow, I promise you on my word of honour, I butt in no longer. It’s your case, and I wish you joy of it.”

  Elliot had no joy in it, for private reasons. But for public reasons the matter had been squeezed down into one issue that stood out as clear and black as a fingerprint:

  The murder of Marcus Chesney had probably been committed by someone in this house.

  Yet everyone in this house appeared to have an unshakable alibi.

  Who, therefore, had committed it?

  And how had it been committed?

  “I can see all that,” the Chief Constable agreed. “So go your virtuous way and clear it up. All the same, there are four questions of my own that I’d give twenty pounds to have answered, here, now, and on the nail.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Major Crow put off his official dignity. His voice rose in a kind of wail.

  “Why were those chocolate-boxes changed from green to blue? What is wrong with that confounded clock? What was the real height of the bloke in the top-hat? And why, oh, why was Chesney fooling about with a South American blow-pipe dart that nobody has seen before or since?”

  1 “No device,” Dr. Fell once said, “is more useless or exasperating than deceit by conspiracy to tell the same lie.” Therefore I think it only fair to state that there was no conspiracy of any kind among the three witnesses. Each spoke independently, and without collusion with either of the other two.—J.D.C.

  Chapter X

  THE GIRL AT POMPEII

  At eleven o’clock on the following morning Inspector Elliot drove into Bath and pulled up near the Beau Nash Hotel, which is in the court just opposite the entrance to the Roman baths.

  Whoever said that it is always raining in Bath basely slanders that noble town, where the tall eighteenth-century houses look like tall eighteenth-century dowagers, and turn blind eyes to trains or motor-cars. But (to be strictly accurate) it was pouring torrents on this particular morning. Elliot, when he ducked into the entrance to the hotel, was in such a hideously dispirited frame of mind that he had to confide in somebody or throw up the case and tell his Superintendent why.

  True enough, he had had little sleep the night before. And he had been again at routine inquiries since eight o’clock this morning. But he could not get out of his mind the picture of Wilbur Emmet—with his plastered hair, his red nose and blotchy complexion—twisting in delirium and muttering words not one of which became audible. It had been the final bedevilment of last night.

  Elliot went to the hotel desk, and inquired for Dr. Gideon Fell.

  Dr. Fell was upstairs in his room. Despite the hour, it is regrettable to state, Dr. Fell was not yet up and about. Elliot found him sitting by the breakfast-table in a flannel dressing-gown as big as a tent, drinking coffee, smoking a cigar, and reading a detective-story.

  Dr. Fells’ eyeglasses on the broad black ribbon were clamped firmly to his nose. His bandit’s moustache bristled with concentration, his cheeks puffed in and out, and gentle earthquakes of deep breathing animated the huge purple-flowered dressing-gown as he attempted to spot the murderer. But at Elliot’s entrance he rose in a vast surge
that almost upset the table, like Leviathan rising under a submarine. Such a radiant beam of welcome went over his face, making it shine pinkly and transparently, that Elliot felt better.

  “Wow!” said Dr. Fell, wringing his hand. “This is excellent. By all that’s holy, this is wonderful! Sit down, sit down, sit down. Have something. Have anything. Hey?”

  “Superintendent Hadley told me where to find you, sir.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Dr. Fell, giving a spectral chuckle, and sitting back broadly to contemplate his guest as though Elliot were some refreshing phenomenon he had never seen before. His delight animated the whole room. “I am taking the water. The term has a fine, spacious, adventurous sound. Cras ingens iterabimus aequor. But the actual performance falls short of swashbuckling: and I am seldom tempted to strike up a drinking-song after my tenth or fifteenth pint”

  “But are you supposed to take it in that quantity, sir?”

  “All drinkables are supposed to be taken in that quantity,” said Dr. Fell firmly. “If I cannot do the thing handsomely, I am not going to do it at all. And how are you, Inspector?”

  Elliot tried to screw up his courage.

  “I have been better,” he admitted.

  “Oh,” said Dr. Fell. The beam left his face, and he blinked. “I suppose you’ve come about that Chesney business?”