The Problem of the Green Capsule

by John Dickson Carr

  “You’d heard about it?”

  “H’mf, yes,” said Dr. Fell, sniffing. “My waiter, a very good fellow who is too stone-deaf to hear a bell but has lip-reading down to a fine art, told me all about it this morning. He got it from the milkman, who got it from I forget precisely whom. Besides, I—well, I knew Chesney in a way.” Dr. Fell looked troubled. He scratched the side of a small and glistening nose. “I met Chesney, and I met his family, at a reception six months or so ago. And then he wrote me a letter.”

  Again the doctor hesitated.

  “If you know his family,” said Elliot slowly, “that makes it easier. What I’ve come to you about isn’t only the case; it’s a personal problem. I don’t know what in hell’s got into me, or what to do about it, but there it is. Do you know Marjorie Wills, Chesney’s niece?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fell, fixing him with a small sharp eye.

  Elliot got to his feet.

  “I’ve fallen for her,” he shouted.

  He knew that he was cutting a weird figure, standing up and yelling the news as though he were throwing a plate in the doctor’s face; and his ears felt on fire. If Dr. Fell had chuckled in that moment, if Dr. Fell had told him to lower his voice, he would probably have stood on his peevish Lowland dignity and walked out of the room. He could not help it; that was how he felt. But Dr. Fell merely nodded.

  “Quite understandable,” he rumbled, with a broad and rather surprised agreement. “Well?”

  “I’ve only seen her twice before,” shouted Elliot, facing him and determined to have this out. “Once was at Pompeii and once was at—never mind that, for the minute. As I say, I don’t know what in hell has got into me. I don’t idealise her. When I saw her again the other night, I could hardly remember what she looked like from the first two times. I have certain knowledge that she’s probably a poisoner and a pleasant sleek bit of treachery. But I walked in on that crowd in a place at Pompeii—you don’t know about that, but I was there—and she was standing in a kind of garden, with her hat off and the sun on her arms; and I just stood there and looked at her, and then I turned round and walked out. It was the way she moved or spoke or turned her head: something, nothing. I don’t know what.

  “I wouldn’t have had the cheek to follow their party and try to scrape an acquaintance, though that’s what this fellow Harding evidently did. I don’t know why I couldn’t have forced myself to do it. It wasn’t merely because I had just heard them all arranging things about her being married to Harding. So help me, I didn’t even think of that. If I thought about Harding at all, I supposed it was just my cursed luck, and let it go at that. All I knew was, first, that I had fallen for her, and, second, that I would have to get the idea out of my head; because it was all nonsense. I don’t suppose you understand.”

  The room was quiet except for the wheezing of Dr. Fell’s breath, and the splash of the rain outside.

  “You have a very low opinion of me,” said the doctor gravely, “if you suppose I don’t understand. Go on.”

  “Well, sir, that’s all. I didn’t get the idea out of my head.”

  “Not all, I think?”

  “All right; you want to know about the second time I saw her. It was a fatality. I knew in my bones it was bound to happen. See a person once, try to forget it or get away from that person, and you bump into the person every time you turn around. The next time I saw her was just five days ago, at a little chemist’s shop near the Royal Albert Docks.

  “When I saw them at Pompeii, I overheard Mr. Chesney mention the name of the ship they were travelling back by, and the sailing date. I left Italy the next day, overland, and got home well over a week before they did. Last Thursday, the 29th, I happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Royal Albert Docks on a case.” Elliot stopped. “I can’t even tell you the truth, can I?” he asked bitterly. “Yes, I made the excuse to be there on that particular day, but the rest of it must have been coincidence—or you shall judge for yourself.

  “This chemist’s poison-register had been called into question. He seemed to have been getting rid of more drugs than was natural or normal; that was why I was there. I went in and asked to see his poison-register. He showed it to me quickly enough, and sat me down to look at it in a little dispensary at the back of the shop, screened off from the counter by a wall of bottles. While I was looking at it, a customer came in. I couldn’t see the customer, and she couldn’t see me; she thought there was nobody else in the shop. But I knew that voice right enough. It was Marjorie Wills, wanting to buy cyanide of potassium ‘for photographic purposes.’ ”

  Again Elliot stopped.

  He did not see a room at the Beau Nash Hotel. He saw a dingy shop in the dingy afternoon light, and breathed the dim chemical smell he would always associate with this case. There was creosote on the floor; the tops of squat glass jars were faintly luminous; and across the shop, in shadow, was a flyblown mirror. In that mirror he saw Marjorie Wills’s reflection, her eyes upturned, when she edged along the counter requesting potassium cyanide “for photographic purposes.”

  “Probably because I was there,” Elliot went on, “the chemist began to ask her questions about why she wanted it, and the use of it. Her answers showed that she knew about as much about photography as I know about Sanskrit. There was a mirror across the shop. Just as she got to the point of being badly confused, she happened to glance in the mirror. She must have seen me, though I didn’t think at the time she got a proper look and I’m still not sure. All of a sudden she called the chemist a—well, never mind—and ran out of the shop.

  “Yes; a pretty business, eh?” he added savagely.

  Dr. Fell did not comment.

  “I think that chemist is a wrong ’un,” Elliot said slowly, “though there was nothing I could find. But on top of this, Superintendent Hadley handed me—me—the Sodbury Cross poisoning case: of which (thank you) I had already read up every detail in the back files of the newspapers.”

  “You didn’t refuse the case?”

  “No, sir. Could I have refused it anyway? At least, without telling the Superintendent what I knew?”

  “H’m.”

  “Yes. You’re thinking I ought to be kicked out of the Force; and you’re quite right.”

  “Good God, no,” said Dr. Fell, opening his eyes wide. “That confounded conscience of yours will be the death of you yet. Stop talking such rubbish and get on with it.”

  “Driving down here last night, I thought of every possible way out. Some of them so daft that they make me squirm when I think of it this morning. I thought of systematically ditching the evidence against her. I even thought of taking her and running off to the South Seas with her.”

  He paused; but Dr. Fell only nodded sympathetically, as though he understood the sound reason of such courses; and it was with an enormous sense of relief flooding through him that Elliot continued.

  “I hoped the Chief Constable—Major Crow, his name is—wouldn’t notice anything. But I must have acted queerly from the start, and I put my foot in it time after time. The worst was when the girl almost recognised me. She didn’t quite recognise me: that is, she didn’t connect me with the mirror in the chemist’s shop. But she knows she’s seen me before and she’s still trying to remember where.

  “For the rest of it, I tried to go into the case without prejudice—compromise again, eh?—and treat it exactly as I would treat an ordinary case. Whether I succeeded or not I don’t know, but you notice I’m here to-day.”

  Dr. Fell considered. “Tell me. Putting aside the chocolate-shop murder, did you find anything last night that led you to believe she might be guilty of killing Marcus Chesney?”

  “No! That’s just it: quite to the contrary. She’s got an alibi as big as a house.”

  “Then what in the name of Beelzebub are we arguing about? Why aren’t you carolling like a lark?”

  “I don’t know, sir, and that’s a fact. It’s only that the case is too queer and funny and fishy to be taken at o
ne swoop. It’s a box of tricks right from the start.”

  Dr. Fell leaned back, taking several puffs at his cigar, an expression of fierce concentration on his face. He shook his shoulders loose and took several more puffs at the cigar, as though for great weightiness of utterance. Even the ribbon on his eyeglasses was agitated.

  “Let us,” he said, “examine your emotional problem. No; don’t shy away from it. This may be infatuation or it may be the real thing, but in either case I want to ask you a question about it. Suppose this girl is a murderess. One moment! I say: suppose this girl is a murderess. Now, these crimes are not crimes for which we can readily find an excuse. Even I find it necessary to concentrate tensely before being able to excuse them. They are not natural crimes; they are calculated abnormalities, and the person who perpetrated them is about as safe to have about the house as a king cobra. Very well. Supposing this girl to be guilty—do you want to know it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Still, you agree that it might be just as well to find out?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Good,” said Dr. Fell, taking a few more puffs at his cigar. “Now let us look at it the other way. Suppose this girl is completely innocent. No; do not loose me a strangled breath of relief; be practical in your romanticism. Suppose this girl is completely innocent. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “You say you have fallen for her?”

  Then it dawned on Elliot.

  “Oh, leave me out of it,” he said. “I don’t flatter myself that I would ever stand a chance with her. You should see the expression on her face when she looks at Harding. I saw it. I tell you, sir, the hardest thing I had to do last night was to be fair to Harding. I’ve got nothing against the fellow; he seems decent enough. I can only say that there’s something in my upbringing which, whenever I talk to Harding, sets my teeth on edge.”

  He felt his ears tingling again.

  “I had all sorts of visions about that, too, last night. I imagined myself dramatically arresting Harding for the murder—yes, handcuffs and all—and her looking at me, and all the claptrap that just naturally comes into a bloke’s head. But emotional knots don’t get cut as easily as that. Not for any human being they don’t. Harding is a red herring if I ever saw one. You ruddy well can’t commit a murder when you’re in one room with two people looking at you, and the real murderer is also in sight in another room. Harding may be a fortune-hunter (I think he is), but that’s just the line of human cussedness that things take in this world. Harding had never heard of Sodbury Cross until he met the Chesneys in Italy. So forget Harding and, in particular, forget me.”

  “In addition to your conscience,” observed Dr. Fell critically, “you must also get rid of your confounded humility. It is an excellent spiritual virtue; but it is a virtue that no woman can endure. However, we’ll pass that. Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “How do you feel now?” asked Dr. Fell.

  And Elliot suddenly realised that he felt better; so much better that he wanted a cup of coffee and something to smoke. It was as though his wits focused and clarified. He did not understand it; yet even the room appeared in different colours.

  “Harrumph,” said Dr. Fell, scratching the side of his nose. “So what shall we do? You forget, you know, that I have been given only the barest outline of the case; and in your natural enthusiasm you have fired most of the arrows clear over my head. But what will you do? Will you make a fool of yourself by going back and explaining to Hadley? Or shall we have a go at the facts and see what happens? I am at your service.”

  “Yes!” roared Elliot. “Yes, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

  “Good. In that case, sit down there,” said Dr. Fell grimly, “and kindly tell me just what in blazes did happen.”

  It took half an hour, for Elliot, clothed in hardheadness again yet somehow not ashamed of himself, kept his mind busy with the smallest facts. He concluded with the little bottle of prussic acid in the medicine-chest of the bathroom.

  “—and that’s about all. Though we didn’t get away from the house until three o’clock. Everybody denied having anything to do with the prussic acid; swore they knew of no such thing in the bathroom; and said it wasn’t there when they dressed for dinner that night. I also looked in on this fellow Wilbur Emmet, but naturally he was in no shape to be any good to us.”

  He had a vivid recollection of that bedroom, as tidy yet as unattractive as Emmet himself. He remembered the lanky form twisted in the bed-clothes, the harsh electric light, the elaborate array of hair-creams and neckties on the dressing-table. On the work-table there was a pile of letters and receipted bills. Beside it stood the little straw suitcase in which Emmet carried an assortment of syringes, tiny shears, and curious articles which to Elliot’s eye resembled surgical tools. Even the wall-paper was of a yellowish-red pattern which suggested peaches.

  “Emmet was talking a lot, but you couldn’t make out one intelligible word he said: except that he would sometimes say, ‘Marjorie!’ and they would have to quiet him. That’s all, sir. I’ve now told you every single thing I know, and I wonder if you can make any sense of it. I wonder if you can explain what’s so infernally wrong about it.”

  Dr. Fell nodded slowly and emphatically.

  “I think I can,” he said.

  Chapter XI

  THE UNNECESSARY QUESTION

  “But before I do,” continued Dr. Fell, pointing aggressively with the cigar, “I should like to clear up one point on which I either cannot have heard you correctly, or else somebody has committed a bad howler. It deals with the end of Chesney’s performance. Chesney (imagine) has just opened those double-doors to announce that the show is over. Got the scene?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Professor Ingram then says to him, ‘By the way, who was your hideous-looking colleague?” To which Chesney replied, ‘Oh, that was only Wilbur; he helped me plan the whole thing.’ That is correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You have other testimony on the point besides Miss Wills’s?” insisted the doctor. “The others confirmed it?”

  “Yes, sir,” returned Elliot, puzzled. “I went over all that with them just before I left the house.”

  Dr. Fell’s colour had changed slightly. He sat with his mouth open, the cigar poised in the air, while he stared at his companion with widening eyes. He said, with a kind of thunderous whisper like wind along an Underground tunnel: “Oh, Bacchus! Oh, Lord! Oh, my sacred hat! This won’t do.”

  “But what’s wrong?”

  “Get out that list of Chesney’s ten questions,” urged Dr. Fell excitedly. “Cast your eye over it. Study it. Be appalled by it. Don’t you see anything wrong?”

  Elliot stared from Dr. Fell’s face to the list, made uneasy by the other’s intense eagerness. “No, sir, I can’t say I do. Maybe my brain isn’t working properly——”

  “It isn’t,” the doctor assured him seriously. “Look at it, man! Concentrate! Don’t you see that Chesney has asked a totally unnecessary and even absurd question?”

  “Which one?”

  “Question number four. ‘What was the height of the person who entered by the French window?’ Hang it all! That was one of a short list of questions he was carefully preparing to ask them; shrewd questions, catch questions, questions to take them by surprise. Yet, before he even begins to ask those questions, he calmly announces to them just who the person was. You follow that? As you quote Miss Wills as saying, they all knew Wilbur Emmet’s height. They lived with him; they saw him every day. So, when they heard beforehand who the visitor was, they couldn’t possibly go wrong on question four. Why, therefore, does Chesney spill the beans all over the floor by presenting them with the answer before he even asks the question?”

  Elliot swore uneasily. Then he began to reflect.

  “Steady, though. What about a catch in that, sir?” he suggested. “Suppose
Emmet had instructions—Professor Ingram suggested this—to hunch down inside the raincoat, so that his height appeared three inches less than it actually was? So Mr. Chesney set a trap for them like that. When he carefully told them it was Emmet, he expected them to fall into the trap and give what they knew to be his height: six feet. Whereas actually the height of the man hunched down inside the raincoat was to be only five feet nine.”

  “It is possible,” Dr. Fell scowled. “I will agree, with my hand on my heart, that there may have been more traps in that little show than even you seem to realize. But as for having Emmet crouch down—you know, Inspector, I can’t quite believe it. You describe the raincoat as long and tight-fitting. The only way a person could take away three inches from his height would be to bend his knees and shuffle across the stage with short steps. Now, I will almost defy anyone to do that without his knees jutting out like pistons under the coat, carrying himself oddly and making obvious to the audience just what he is doing. Everyone seems, on the contrary, to convey a kind of tense straightness and rigidity about the fellow’s bearing. Anything is possible, I admit; but——”

  “You mean the man was five feet nine after all?”

  “Oh,” said Dr. Fell with some dryness, “there is the startling and unusual possibility that he really was six feet. Two witnesses say so, you know. At every point where Professor Ingram disagrees with them, you automatically believe the professor. Probably you are right to do so; but we mustn’t—h’mf—we mustn’t fall into the error of treating Professor Ingram as an oracle or an augur or a mouthpiece of Holy Writ.”

  Again Elliot reflected.

  “Or,” he suggested, “Mr. Chesney may have been nervous or rattled, and blurted out Emmet’s name without intending to.”

  “Hardly,” said Dr. Fell, “when he immediately called Emmet in and made a row when Emmet didn’t appear. H’mf, no. It’s difficult to believe that, Inspector. The conjuror doesn’t spill his cards all over the floor so easily, or get rattled and call the audience’s attention to the particular trap-door through which he dropped his assistant. Chesney never struck me as that sort of chap.”