The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  “Damn your permutations, sir!” riposted Sir Charles with vigour. “And your combinations too.”

  Mr. Bradley turned to Roger. “Mr. Chairman, is it within the rules of this club for one member to insult another member’s underwear? Besides, Sir Charles,” he added to that fuming knight, “I don’t wear the things. Never have done, since I was an infant.”

  For the dignity of the chair Roger could not join in the delighted titters that were escaping round the table; in the interests of the Circle’s preservation he had to pour oil on these very seething waters.

  “Bradley, you’re losing sight of the point, aren’t you? I don’t want to destroy your theory necessarily, Sir Charles, or detract in any way from the really brilliant manner in which you’ve defended it; but if it’s to stand its ground it must be able to resist any arguments we can bring against it. That’s all. And I honestly do think that you’re inclined to attach a little too much importance to the answers to those three questions. What do you say, Miss Dammers?”

  “I agree,” Miss Dammers said crisply. “The way Sir Charles emphasised their importance reminded me at the time of a favourite trick of detective-story writers. He said, if I remember rightly, that if those questions were answered in the affirmative he knew that his suspect was guilty just as much as if he’d seen her with his own eyes putting the poison into the chocolates, because the odds against a coincidental affirmative to all three of them were incalculable. In other words he simply made a strong assertion, unsupported by evidence or argument.”

  “And that is what detective-story writers do, Miss Dammers?” queried Mr. Bradley, with a tolerant smile.

  “Invariably, Mr. Bradley. I’ve often noticed it in your own books. You state a thing so emphatically that the reader does not think of questioning the assertion. ‘Here’, says the detective, ‘is a bottle of red liquid and here is a bottle of blue. If these two liquids turn out to be ink, then we know that they were purchased to fill up the empty ink-pots in the library as surely as if we had read the dead man’s very thoughts.’ Whereas the red ink might have been bought by one of the maids to dye a jumper, and the blue by the secretary for his fountain-pen; or a hundred other such explanations. But any possibilities of that kind are silently ignored. Isn’t that so?”

  “Perfectly,” agreed Bradley, unperturbed. “Don’t waste time on unessentials. Just tell the reader very loudly what he’s to think, and he’ll think it all right. You’ve got the technique perfectly. Why don’t you try your hand at it? It’s quite a paying game, you know.”

  “I may one day. And anyhow I will say for you, Mr. Bradley, that your detectives do detect. They don’t just stand about and wait for somebody else to tell them who committed the murder, as the so-called detectives do in most of the so-called detective-stories I read.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Bradley, “Then you actually read detective-stories, Miss Dammers?”

  “Certainly,” said Miss Dammers, crisply. “Why not?” She dismissed Mr. Bradley as abruptly as she had answered his challenge. “And the letter itself, Sir Charles? The typewriting. You don’t attach any importance to that?”

  “As a detail, of course it would have to be considered; I was only sketching out the broad lines of the case.” Sir Charles was no longer bull-like. “I take it that the police would ferret out pieces of conclusive evidence of that nature.”

  “I think they might have some difficulty in connecting Pauline Pennefather with the machine that typed that letter,” observed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, not without tartness.

  The tide of feeling had obviously set in against Sir Charles.

  “But the motive,” he pleaded, now pathetically on the defensive. “You must admit that the motive is overwhelming.”

  “You don’t know Pauline, Sir Charles—Lady Pennefather?” Miss Dammers suggested.

  “I do not.”

  “Evidently,” commented Miss Dammers.

  “You don’t agree with Sir Charles’s theory, Miss Dammers?” ventured Mr. Chitterwick.

  “I do not,” said Miss Dammers with emphasis.

  “Might one enquire your reason?” ventured Mr. Chitterwick further.

  “Certainly you may. It’s a conclusive one, I’m afraid, Sir Charles. I was in Paris at the time of the murder, and just about the very hour when the parcel was being posted I was talking to Pauline Pennefather in the foyer of the Opera.”

  “What!” exclaimed the discomfited Sir Charles, the remnants of his beautiful theory crashing about his ears.

  “I should apologise for not having given you this information before, I suppose,” said Miss Dammers with the utmost calmness, “but I wanted to see what sort of a case you could put up against her. And I really do congratulate you. It was a remarkable piece of inductive reasoning. If I hadn’t happened to know that it was built up on a complete fallacy you would have quite convinced me.”

  “But—but why the secrecy, and—and the impersonation by the maid, if her visit was an innocent one?” stammered Sir Charles, his mind revolving wildly round private aeroplanes and the time they would take from the Place de l Opéra to Trafalgar Square.

  “Oh, I didn’t say it was an innocent one,” retorted Miss Dammers carelessly. “Sir Eustace isn’t the only one who is waiting for the divorce to marry again. And in the interim Pauline, quite rightly, doesn’t see why she should waste valuable time. After all, she isn’t so young as she was. And there’s always a strange creature called the King’s Proctor, isn’t there?”

  Shortly after that the Chairman adjourned the meeting of the Circle. He did so because he did not wish one of the members to die of apoplexy on his hands.

  CHAPTER VII

  MRS. FIELDER-FLEMMING was nervous. Actually nervous.

  She shuffled the pages of her notebook aimlessly, and seemed hardly able to sit through the few preliminaries which had to be settled before Roger asked her to give the solution which she had already affirmed, privately, to Alicia Dammers, to be indubitably the correct one of Mrs. Bendix’s murder. With such a weighty piece of knowledge in her mind one would have thought that for once in her life Mrs. Fielder-Flemming had a really heaven-sent opportunity to be impressive, but for once in her life she made no use of it. If she had not been Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, one might have gone so far as to say that she dithered.

  “Are you ready, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?” Roger asked, gazing at this surprising manifestation.

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming adjusted her very unbecoming hat, rubbed her nose (being innocent of powder, it did not suffer under this habitual treatment; just shone a little more brightly in pink embarrassment), and shot a covert glance round the table. Roger continued to gaze in astonishment. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was positively shrinking from the lime-light. For some occult reason she was approaching her task with real distaste, and a distaste at that quite out of comparison with the task’s significance.

  She cleared her throat, nervously. “I have a very difficult duty to perform,” she began in a low voice. “Last night I hardly slept. Anything more distasteful to a woman like myself it is impossible to imagine.” She paused, moistening her lips.

  “Oh, come, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” Roger felt himself impelled to encourage her. “It’s the same for all of us, you know. And I’ve heard you make a most excellent speech at one of your own first nights.”

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked at him, not at all encouraged. “I was not referring to that aspect of it, Mr. Sheringham,” she retorted, rather more tartly. “I was speaking of the burden which has been laid on me by the knowledge that has come into my possession, the terrible duty I have to perform in consequence of it.”

  “You mean you’ve solved the little problem?” enquired Mr. Bradley, without reverence.

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming regarded him sombrely. “With infinite regret,” she said, in low, womanly tones, “I have.” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was recovering her poise.

  She consulted her notes for a moment, and then began to speak in a firmer v
oice. “Criminology I have always regarded with something of a professional eye. Its main interest has always been for me its immense potentialities for drama. The inevitability of murder; the predestined victim, struggling unconsciously and vainly against fate; the predestined killer, moving first unconsciously too and then with full and relentless realisation, towards the accomplishment of his doom; the hidden causes, unknown perhaps to both victim and killer, which are all the time urging on the fulfilment of destiny.

  “Apart from the action and the horror of the deed itself, I have always felt that there are more possibilities of real drama in the most ordinary or sordid of murders than in any other situation that can occur to man. Ibsenish in the inevitable working out of certain circumstances in juxtaposition that we call fate, no less than Edgar-Wallacish in the καθαρσις undergone by the emotions of the onlooker at their climax.

  “It was perhaps natural then that I should regard not only this particular case from something of the standpoint of my calling (and certainly no more dramatic twist could well be invented), but the task of solving it too. Anyhow, natural or not, this is what I did; and the result has terribly justified me. I considered the case in the light of one of the oldest dramatic situations, and very soon everything became only too clear. I am referring to the situation which the gentlemen who pass among us in these days for dramatic critics, invariably call the Eternal Triangle.

  “I had to begin of course with only one of the triangle’s three members, Sir Eustace Pennefather. Of the two unknown one must be a woman, the other might be woman or man. So I fell back on another very old and very sound maxim, and proceeded to chercher la femme. And,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, very solemnly, “I found her.”

  So far, it must be admitted, her audience was not particularly impressed. Even the promising opening had not stirred them, for it was only to be expected that Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would feel it her duty to emphasise her feminine shrinkings from handing a criminal over to justice. Her somewhat laborious sentences too, obviously learned off by heart for the occasion, detracted if anything from the interest of what she had to convey.

  But when she resumed, having waited in vain for a tributary gasp at her last momentous piece of information, the somewhat calculated tenseness of her style had given way to an unrehearsed earnestness which was very much more impressive.

  “I wasn’t expecting the triangle to be the hackneyed one,” she said, with a slight dig at the deflated remains of Sir Charles. “Lady Pennefather I hardly considered for a moment. The subtlety of the crime, I felt sure, must be a reflection of an unusual situation. And after all a triangle need not necessarily include a husband and wife among its members; any three people, if the circumstances arrange them so, can form one. It is the circumstances, not the three protagonists, that make the triangle.

  “Sir Charles has told us that this crime reminded him of the Marie Lafarge case, and in some respects (he might have added) the Mary Ansell case too. It reminded me of a case as well, but it was neither of these. The Molineux case in New York, it seems to me, provides a much closer parallel than either.

  “You all remember the details, of course. Mr. Cornish, a director of the important Knickerbocker Athletic Club, received in his Christmas mail a small silver cup and a phial of bromo-seltzer, addressed to him at the club. He thought they had been sent by way of a joke, and kept the wrapper in order to identify the humorist. A few days later a woman who lived in the same boarding-house as Cornish complained of a headache and Cornish gave her some of the bromo-seltzer. In a very short time she was dead, and Cornish, who had taken just a sip because she complained of it being bitter, was violently ill but recovered later.

  “In the end a man named Molineux, another member of the same club, was arrested and put on trial. There was quite a lot of evidence against him, and it was known that he hated Cornish bitterly, so much so that he had already assaulted him once. Moreover another member of the club, a man named Barnet, had been killed earlier in the year through taking what purported to be a sample of a well-known headache powder which had also been sent to him at the club and, shortly before the Cornish episode, Molineux married a girl who had actually been engaged to Barnet at the time of his death; he had always wanted her, but she had preferred Barnet. Molineux, as you remember, was convicted at his first trial and acquitted at his second; he afterwards became insane.

  “Now this parallel seems to me complete. Our case is to all purposes a composite Cornish-cum-Barnet case. The resemblances are extraordinary. There is the poisoned article addressed to the man’s club; there is, in the. case of Cornish, the death of the wrong victim; there is the preservation of the wrapper; there is, in Barnet’s case, the triangle element (and a triangle, you will notice, without husband and wife). It’s quite startling. It is, in fact, more than startling; it’s significant. Things don’t happen like that quite by chance.”

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming paused and blew her nose, delicately but with emotion. She was getting nicely worked up now, and so, in consequence, was her audience. If there were no gasps there was at any rate the tribute of complete silence till she was ready to go on.

  “I said that this similarity was more than startling, that it was significant. I will explain its particular significance later; at present it is enough to say that I found it very helpful also. The realisation of the extreme closeness of the parallel came as quite a shock to me, but once I had grasped it I felt strangely convinced that it was in this very similarity that the clue to the solution of Mrs. Bendix’s murder was to be found. I felt this so strongly that I somehow actually knew it. These intuitions do come to me sometimes (explain them as you will) and I have never yet known them fail me. This one did not do so either.

  “I began to examine this case in the light of the Molineux one. Would the latter help me to find the woman I was looking for in the former? What were the indications, so far as Barnet was concerned? Barnet received his fatal package because he was purposing to marry a girl whom the murderer was resolved he should not marry. With so many parallels between the two cases already, was there——” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming pushed back her unwieldy hat to a still more unbecoming angle and looked deliberately round the table with the air of an early Christian trying the power of the human eye on a doubtfully intimidated covey of lions— “was there another here!”

  This time Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was rewarded with several real and audible gasps. That of Sir Charles was quite the most audible, an outraged, indignant gasp that came perilously near to a snort. Mr. Chitterwick gasped apprehensively, as if fearing something like a physical sequel to the sharp exchange of glances between Sir Charles and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, those of the former positively menacing in their warning, those of the lady almost vocal with her defiance of it.

  The Chairman gasped too, wondering what a Chairman should do if two members of his circle, and of opposite sexes at that, should proceed to blows under his very nose.

  Mr. Bradley forgot himself so far as to gasp as well, in sheer, blissful ecstasy. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked as if she were to prove a better hand at bull-baiting than himself, but Mr. Bradley did not grudge her the honour so long as he was to be allowed to sit and hug himself in the audience. Not in his most daring toreador-like antics would Mr. Bradley have ever dared to postulate the very daughter of his victim as the cause of the murder itself. Could this magnificent woman really bring forward a case to support so puncturing an idea? And what if it should actually turn out to be true? After all, such a thing was conceivable enough. Murders have been committed for the sake of lovely ladies often enough before; so why not for the lovely daughter of a pompous old silk? Oh God, oh Montreal.

  Finally Mrs. Fielder-Flemming gasped too, at herself.

  Alone without a gasp sat Alicia Dammers, her face alight with nothing but an intellectual interest in the development of her fellow-member’s argument, determinedly impersonal. One was to gather that to Miss Dammers it was immaterial whether her own mother ha
d been mixed up in the murder, so long as her part in it had provided opportunities for the sharpening of wits and the stimulation of intelligence. Without ever acknowledging her recognition that a personal element was being introduced into the Circle’s investigations, she yet managed to radiate the idea that Sir Charles ought, if anything, to be detachedly delighted at the possibility of such enterprise on the part of his daughter.

  Sir Charles however was far from delighted. From the red swelling of the veins on his forehead it was obvious that something was going to burst out of him in a very few seconds. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming leapt, like an agitated but determined hen, for the gap.

  “We have agreed to waive the law of slander here,” she almost squawked. “Personalities don’t exist for us. If the name crops up of any one personally known to us, we utter it as unflinchingly, in whatever connection, as if it were a complete stranger’s. That is the definite arrangement we came to last night, Mr. President, isn’t it? We are to do what we conceive to be our duty to society quite irrespective of any personal considerations?”

  For a moment Roger indulged his tremors. He did not want his beautiful Circle to explode in a cloud of dust, never again to be re-united. And though he could not but admire the flurried but undaunted courage of Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he had to be content to envy it so far as Sir Charles was concerned, for he certainly did not possess anything like it himself. On the other hand there was no doubt that the lady had right on her side, and what can any President do but administer justice?

  “Perfectly correct, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” he had to admit, hoping his voice sounded as firm as he would have wished.

  For a moment a blue glare, emanating from Sir Charles, enveloped him luridly. Then, as Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, evidently heartened by this official support, took up her bomb again, the rays of the glare were switched again on to her. Roger, nervously watching the two of them, could not help reflecting that blue rays are things which should never be directed on to bombs.