The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  “Oh, yes. There’s motive enough.”

  “Motive allowed,” said Mr. Bradley. “And the nitrobenzene? You said, I think, that Bendix has some knowledge of chemistry.”

  Roger laughed. “You remind me of a Wagner opera, Bradley. The nitrobenzene motif crops up regularly from you whenever a possible criminal is mentioned. However, I think I can satisfy even you in this instance. Nitrobenzene as you know, is used in perfumery. In the list of Bendix’s businesses is the Anglo-Eastern Perfumery Company. I made a special, and dreadful, journey out to Acton for the express purpose of finding out whether the Anglo-Eastern Company used nitrobenzene at all, and, if so, whether its poisonous qualities were thoroughly recognised. The answer to both questions was in the affirmative. So there can be no doubt that Bendix is thoroughly acquainted with the stuff.

  “He might easily enough have got his supply from the factory, but I’m inclined to doubt that. I think he’d be cleverer than that. He probably made the stuff himself, if the process is as easy as Bradley told us. Because I happen to know that he was on the modern side at Selchester (that I heard quite by chance too), which presupposes at any rate an elementary knowledge of chemistry. Do you pass that, Bradley?”

  “Pass, friend nitrobenzene,” conceded Mr. Bradley.

  Roger drummed thoughtfully on the table with his finger-tips. “It was a well-planned affair, wasn’t it?” he meditated. “And so extremely easy to reconstruct. Bendix must have thought he’d provided against every possible contingency. And so he very nearly had. It was just that little bit of unlucky grit that gets into the smooth machinery of so many clever crimes: he didn’t know that his wife had seen the play before. He’d decided on the mild alibi of his presence at the theatre, you see, just in case suspicion should ever impossibly arise, and no doubt he stressed his desire to see the play and take her with him. Not to spoil his pleasure, she would have unselfishly concealed from him the fact that she had seen the play before and didn’t much want to see it again. That unselfishness let him down. Because it’s inconceivable that she would have turned it to her own advantage to win the bet he pretends to have made with her.

  “He left the theatre of course during the first interval, and hurried as far as he dare go in the ten minutes at his disposal, to post the parcel. I sat through the dreadful thing myself last night just to see when the intervals came. The first one fits excellently. I’d hoped he might have taken a taxi one way, as time was short, but if he did no driver of such taxis as did make a similar journey that evening can identify him. Or possibly the right driver hasn’t come forward yet. I got Scotland Yard to look into that point for me. But it really fits much better with the cleverness he’s shown all through, that he should have gone by ’bus or under-ground. Taxis, he’d know, are traceable. But if so he’d run it very fine indeed, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he got back to his box a few minutes late. The police may be able to establish that.”

  “It seems to me,” observed Mr. Bradley, “that we made something of a mistake in turning the man down from membership here. We thought his criminology wasn’t up to standard, didn’t we? Well, well.”

  “But we could hardly be expected to know that he was a practical criminologist rather than a mere theoretical one,” Roger smiled. “It was a mistake, though. It would have been pleasant to include a practical criminologist among our members.”

  “I must confess that I thought at one time that we did,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, making her peace. “Sir Charles,” she added unnecessarily, “I apologise, without reserve.”

  Sir Charles inclined his head courteously. “Please don’t refer to it, madam. And in any event the experience for me was an interesting one.”

  “I may have been misled by the case I quoted,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, rather wistfully. “It was a strangely close parallel.”

  “It was the first parallel that occurred to me, too,” Roger agreed. “I studied the Molineux case quite closely, hoping to get a pointer from it. But now, if I were asked for a parallel, I should reply with the Caylyle Harris case. You remember, the young medical student who sent a pill containing morphine to the girl Helen Potts, to whom it turned out that he had been secretly married for a year. He was by way of being a profligate and a general young rotter too. A great novel, as you know, has been founded on the case, so why not a great crime too?”

  “Then why, Mr. Sheringham,” Miss Dammers wanted to know, “do you think that Mr. Bendix took the risk of not destroying the forged letter and the wrapper when he had the chance?”

  “He very carefully didn’t do so,” Roger replied promptly, “because the forged letter and the wrapper had been calculated not only to divert suspicion from himself but actually to point away from him to somebody else—an employee of Mason’s, for instance, or an anonymous lunatic. Which is exactly what they did.”

  “But wouldn’t it be a great risk, to send poisoned chocolates like that to Sir Eustace?” suggested Mr. Chitterwick diffidently. “I mean, Sir Eustace might have been ill the next morning, or not offered to hand them over at all. Suppose he had given them to somebody else instead of Bendix.”

  Roger proceeded to give Mr. Chitterwick cause for his diffidence. He was feeling something of a personal pride in Bendix by this time, and it distressed him to hear a great man thus maligned.

  “Oh, really! You must give my man credit for being what he is. He’s not a bungler, you know. It wouldn’t have had any serious results if Sir Eustace had been ill that morning, or eaten the chocolates himself, or if they’d been stolen in transit and consumed by the postman’s favourite daughter, or any other unlikely contingency. Come, Mr. Chitterwick! You don’t imagine he’d send the poisoned ones through the post, do you? Of course not. He’d send harmless ones, and exchange them for the others on the way home. Dash it all, he wouldn’t go out of his way to present opportunities to chance.”

  “Oh! I see,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, properly subdued.

  “We’re dealing with a very great criminal,” went on Roger, rather less severely. “That can be seen at every point. Take the arrival at the club, just for example—that most unusual early arrival (why this early arrival at all, by the way, if he isn’t guilty?). Well, he doesn’t wait outside and follow his unconscious accomplice in, you see. Not a bit of it. Sir Eustace is chosen because he’s known to get there so punctually at half-past ten every morning; takes a pride in it; boasts of it; goes out of his way to keep up the good old custom. So Bendix arrives at ten thirty-five, and there things are. It had puzzled me at the beginning of the case, by the way, to see why the chocolates had been sent to Sir Eustace at his club at all, instead of to his rooms. Now it’s obvious.”

  “Well, I wasn’t so far out with my list of conditions,” Mr. Bradley consoled himself. “But why don’t you agree with my rather subtle point about the murderer not being a public-school or University man, Sheringham? Just because Bendix happens to have been at Selchester and Oxford?”

  “No, because I’d make the still more subtle point that where the code of a public-school and University might influence a murderer in the way he murdered another man, it wouldn’t have much effect when a woman is to be the victim. I agree that if Bendix had been wanting to dispose of Sir Eustace, he would probably have put him out of the world in a nice, straightforward, manly way. But one doesn’t use nice, straightforward, manly ways in one’s dealings with women, if it comes to hitting them on the head with a bludgeon or anything in that nature. Poison, I fancy, would be quite in order. And there’s very little suffering with a large dose of nitrobenzene. Unconsciousness soon intervenes.”

  “Yes,” admitted Mr. Bradley, “that is rather too subtle a point for one of my unpsychological attributes.”

  “I think I dealt with most of your other conditions. As regards the methodical habits, which you deduced from the meticulous doses of poison in each chocolate, my point of course is that the doses were exactly equal in order that Bendix could take any two of the chocolates
and be sure of having got the right amount of nitrobenzene into his system to produce the symptoms he wanted, and not enough to run any serious risk. That dosing of himself with the poison really was a master-stroke. And it’s so natural that a man shouldn’t have taken so many chocolates as a woman. He exaggerated his symptoms considerably, no doubt, but the effect on everybody was tremendous.

  “We must remember, you see, that we’ve only got his word for the conversation in the drawing-room, over the eating of the chocolates, just as we’ve only got his word for it that there ever was a bet at all. Most of that conversation certainly took place, however. Bendix is far too great an artist not to make all possible use of the truth in his lying. But of course he wouldn’t have left her that afternoon till he’d seen her take, or somehow made her take at least six of the chocolates, which he’d know made up more than a lethal dose. That was another advantage in having the stuff in those exact six-minim quantities.”

  “In fact,” Mr. Bradley summed up, “our Uncle Bendix is a great man.”

  “He really is,” said Roger, quite solemnly.

  “You’ve no doubt at all that he is the criminal?” queried Miss Dammers.

  “None at all,” said Roger, astonished.

  “Um,” said Miss Dammers.

  “Why, have you?”

  “Um,” said Miss Dammers.

  The conversation then lapsed.

  “Well,” said Mr. Bradley, “let’s all tell Sheringham how wrong he is, shall we?”

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked tense. “I’m afraid,” she said in a hushed voice, “that he is only too right.”

  But Mr. Bradley refused to be impressed. “Oh, I think I can find a hole or two to pick at. You seem to attach a good deal of importance to the motive, Sheringham. Don’t you exaggerate? One doesn’t poison a wife one’s tired of; one leaves her. And really, I find some difficulty in believing (a) that Bendix should have been so set on getting hold of more money to pour down the drainpipe of his businesses as to commit murder for it, and (b) that Mrs. Bendix should have been so close as to refuse to come to her husband’s help if he really was badly pressed.”

  “Then I think you fail to estimate the characters of both of them,” Roger told him. “They were both obstinate as the devil. It was Mrs. Bendix, not her husband, who realised that his businesses were a drainpipe. I could give you a list a yard long of murders that have been committed with far less motive than Bendix had.”

  “Motive allowed again, then. Now you remember that Mrs. Bendix had had a lunch appointment for the day of her death, which was cancelled. Didn’t Bendix know of that? Because if he did, would he have chosen a day for the delivery of the chocolates when he knew his wife wouldn’t be at home for lunch to receive them?”

  “Just the point I had thought of putting to Mr. Sheringham myself,” remarked Miss Dammers.

  Roger looked puzzled. “It seems to me a most unimportant point. If it comes to that, why should he necessarily want to give the chocolates to his wife at lunch-time?”

  “For two reasons,” responded Mr. Bradley glibly. “Firstly because he would naturally want to put them to their right purpose as soon as he possibly could, and secondly because his wife being the only person who can contradict this story of the bet, he would obviously want her silenced as soon as practicable.”

  “You’re quibbling,” Roger smiled, “and I refuse to be drawn. For that matter, I don’t see why Bendix should have known of his wife’s lunch-appointment at all. They were constantly lunching out, both of them, and I don’t suppose they took any particular care to inform each other beforehand.”

  “Humph!” said Mr. Bradley and stroked his chin.

  Mr. Chitterwick ventured to raise his recently crushed head. “You really base your whole case on the bet, Mr. Sheringham, don’t you?”

  “And the psychological deduction I drew from the story of it. Yes, I do. Entirely.”

  “So that if the bet could be proved after all to have been made, you would have no case left?”

  “Why,” exclaimed Roger, in some alarm, “have you any independent evidence that the bet was made?”

  “Oh, no. Oh, dear me, no. Nothing of the sort. I was merely thinking that if any one did want to disprove your case, as Bradley suggested, it is the bet on which he would have to concentrate.”

  “You mean, quibbling about the motive, and the lunch-appointment, and such minor matters, is altogether beside the point?” suggested Mr. Bradley amiably. “Oh, I quite agree. But I was only trying to test his case, you know, not disprove it. And for why? Because I think it’s the right one. The Mystery of the Poisoned Chocolates, so far as I’m concerned, is at an end.”

  “Thank you, Bradley,” said Mr. Sheringham.

  “So three cheers for our sleuth-like President,” continued Mr. Bradley with great heartiness, “coupled with the name of Graham Reynard Bendix for the fine run he’s given us. Hip, hip——”

  “And you say you’ve definitely proved the purchase of the typewriter, and the contact of Mr. Bendix with the sample-book at Webster’s, Mr. Sheringham?” remarked Alicia Dammers, who had apparently been pursuing a train of thought of her own.

  “I do, Miss Dammers,” said Roger, not without complacence.

  “Would you give me the name of the typewriter-shop?”

  “Of course,” Roger tore a page from his notebook and copied out the name and address.

  “Thank you. And can you give me a description of the girl at Webster’s who identified the photograph of Mr. Bendix?”

  Roger looked at her a little uneasily; she gazed back with her usual calm serenity. Roger’s uneasiness grew. He gave her as good a description of Webster’s young woman as he could recall. Miss Dammers thanked him imperturbably.

  “Well, what are we going to do about it all?” persisted Mr. Bradley, who seemed to have adopted the rôle of showman for his President. “Shall we send a delegation to Scotland Yard consisting of Sheringham and myself, to break the news to them that their troubles are over?”

  “You are assuming that everybody agrees with Mr. Sheringham?”

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t it customary to put this sort of question to a vote?” suggested Miss Dammers coolly.

  “‘Carried unanimously,’” quoted Mr. Bradley. “Yes, do let’s have the correct procedure. Well, then, Sheringham moves that this meeting do accept his solution of the Poisoned Chocolates Mystery as the right one, and send a delegation of himself and Mr. Bradley to Scotland Yard to talk pretty severely to the police. I second the motion. Those in favour …? Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?”

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming endeavoured to conceal her disapproval of Mr. Bradley in her approval of Mr. Bradley’s suggestion. “I certainly think that Mr. Sheringham has proved his case,” she said stiffly.

  “Sir Charles?”

  “I agree,” said Sir Charles, in stern tones, equally disproving Mr. Bradley’s frivolity.

  “Chitterwick?”

  “I agree too.” Was it Roger’s fancy, or did Mr. Chitterwick hesitate just a moment before he spoke, as if troubled by some mental reservation which he did not care to put into words? Roger decided that it was his fancy.

  “And Miss Dammers?” concluded Mr. Bradley.

  Miss Dammers looked calmly round the table. “I don’t agree at all. I think Mr. Sheringham’s exposition was exceedingly ingenious, and altogether worthy of his reputation; at the same time I think it quite wrong. To-morrow I hope to be able to prove to you who really committed this crime.”

  The Circle gaped at her respectfully.

  Roger, wondering whether his ears had not really been playing tricks with him, found that his tongue too utterly refused to work. An articulate sound oozed from him.

  Mr. Bradley was the first to recover himself. “Carried, non-unanimously. Mr. President, I think this is a precedent. Does anybody know what happens when a resolution is not carried unanimously?”

  In the temporary disability of the President,
Miss Dammers took it upon herself to decide. “The meeting stands adjourned, I think,” she said.

  And adjourned the meeting found itself.

  CHAPTER XV

  ROGER arrived at the Circle’s meeting-room the next evening even more agog than usual. In his heart of hearts he could not believe that Miss Dammers would ever be able to destroy his case against Bendix, or even dangerously shake it, but in any event what she had to say could not fail to be of absorbing interest, even without its animadversions of his own solution. Roger had been looking forward to Miss Dammer’s exposition more than to that of any one else.

  Alicia Dammers was so very much a reflection of the age.

  Had she been born fifty years ago, it is difficult to see how she could have gone on existing. It was impossible that she could have become the woman-novelist of that time, a strange creature (in the popular imagination) with white cotton gloves, an intense manner, and passionate, not to say hysterical yearnings towards a romance from which her appearance unfortunately debarred her. Miss Dammers’s gloves, like her clothes, were exquisite, and cotton could not have touched her since she was ten (if she ever had been); tensity was for her the depth of bad form; and if she knew how to yearn, she certainly kept it to herself. Passion and purple, one gathered, Miss Dammers found quite unnecessary to herself, if interesting phenomena in lesser mortals.

  From the caterpillar in cotton gloves the woman-novelist has progressed through the stage of cook-like coccoondom at which Mrs. Fielder-Flemming had stuck, to the detached and serious butterfly, not infrequently beautiful as well as pensive, whose decorative pictures the illustrated weeklies are nowadays delighted to publish. Butterflies with calm foreheads, just faintly wrinkled in analytical thought. Ironical, cynical butterflies; surgeon-butterflies thronging the mental dissecting-rooms (and sometimes, if we must be candid, inclined to loiter there a little too long); passionless butterflies, flitting gracefully from one brightly-coloured complex to another. And sometimes completely humourless, and then distressingly boring butterflies, whose gathered pollen seems to have become a trifle mud-coloured.