The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  To meet Miss Dammers and look at her classical, oval face, with its delicately small features and big grey eyes, to glance approvingly over her tall, beautifully dressed figure, nobody whose imagination was still popular would ever have set her down as a novelist at all. And that in Miss Dammers’s opinion, coupled with the ability to write good books, was exactly what a properly-minded modern authoress should hope to achieve.

  No one had ever been brave enough to ask Miss Dammers how she could hope successfully to analyse in others emotions which she had never experienced in herself. Probably because the plain fact confronted the enquirer that she both could and did. Most successfully.

  “We listened last night,” began Miss Dammers, at five minutes past nine on the following evening, “to an exceedingly able exposition of a no less interesting theory of this crime. Mr. Sheringham’s methods, if I may say so, were a model to all of us. Beginning with the deductive, he followed this as far as it would take him, which was actually to the person of the criminal; he then relied on the inductive to prove his case. In this way he was able to make the best possible use of each method. That this ingenious mixture should have been based on a fallacy and therefore never had any chance of leading Mr. Sheringham to the right solution, is rather a piece of bad luck than his fault.”

  Roger, who still could not believe that he had not reached the truth, smiled dubiously.

  “Mr. Sheringham’s reading of the crime,” continued Miss Dammers, in her clear, level tones, “must have seemed to some of us novel in the extreme. To me, however, it was perhaps more interesting than novel, for it began from the same starting-point as the theory on which I myself have been working; namely, that the crime had not failed in its objective.”

  Roger pricked up his ears.

  “As Mr. Chitterwick pointed out, Mr. Sheringham’s whole case rested on the bet between Mr. and Mrs. Bendix. From Mr. Bendix’s story of that bet, he draws the psychological deduction that the bet never existed at all. That is clever, but it is the wrong deduction. Mr. Sheringham is too lenient in his interpretation of feminine psychology. I began, I think I may say, with the bet too. But the deduction I drew from it, knowing my sister-women perhaps a little more intimately than Mr. Sheringham could, was that Mrs. Bendix was not quite so honourable as she was painted by herself.”

  “I thought of that, of course,” Roger expostulated. “But I discarded it on purely logical grounds. There’s nothing in Mrs. Bendix’s life to show that she wasn’t honest, and everything to show that she was. And when there exists no evidence at all for the making of the bet beyond Bendix’s bare word …”

  “Oh, but there does,” Miss Dammers took him up. “I’ve been spending most of to-day in establishing that point. I knew I should never really be able to shake you till I could definitely prove that there was a bet. Let me put you out of your agony at once, Mr. Sheringham. I’ve overwhelming evidence that the bet was made.”

  “You have?” said Roger, disconcerted.

  “Certainly. It was a point you really should have verified yourself, you know,” chided Miss Dammers gently, “considering its importance to your case. Well, I have two witnesses. Mrs. Bendix mentioned the bet to her maid when she went up to her bedroom to lie down, actually saying (like yourself, Mr. Sheringham) that the violent indigestion from which she thought herself to be suffering was a judgment on her for having made it. The second witness is a friend of my own, who knows the Bendixes. She saw Mrs. Bendix sitting alone in her box during the second interval, and went in to speak to her. In the course of the conversation Mrs. Bendix remarked that she and her husband had a bet on the identity of the villian, mentioning the character in the play whom she herself fancied. But (and this completely confirms my own deduction) Mrs. Bendix did not tell my friend that she had seen the play before.”

  “Oh!” said Roger, now quite crestfallen.

  Miss Dammers dealt with him as tenderly as possible. “There were only those two deductions to be made from that bet, and by bad luck you chose the wrong one.”

  “But how did you know,” said Roger, coming to the surface for the third time, “that Mrs. Bendix had seen the play before? I only found that out myself a couple of days ago, and by the merest accident.”

  “Oh, I’ve known that from the beginning,” said Miss Dammers carelessly. “I suppose Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer told you? I don’t know her personally, but I know people who do. I didn’t interrupt you last night when you were talking about the amazing chance of this piece of knowledge reaching you. If I had, I should have pointed out that the agency by which anything known to Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer (as I see her) might become known to her friends too, isn’t chance at all, but certainty.”

  “I see,” said Roger, and sank for the third, and final, time. But as he did so he remembered one piece of information which Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer had succeeded, not wholly as it seemed but very nearly so, in withholding from her friends; and catching Mr. Bradley’s ribald eye knew that his thought was shared. So even Miss Dammers was not quite infallible in her psychology.

  “We then,” resumed that lady, somewhat didactically, “have Mr. Bendix displaced from his temporary role of villain and back again in his old part of second victim. She paused for a moment.

  “But without Sir Eustace returning to the cast in his original start part of intended victim of the piece,” amplified Mr. Bradley.

  Miss Dammers rightly ignored him. “Now here, I think, Mr. Sheringham will find my case as interesting as I found his last night, for though we differ so vitally in some essentials we agree remarkably in others. And one of the points on which we agree is that the intended victim certainly was killed.”

  “What, Alicia?” exclaimed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “You think too that the plot was directed against Mrs. Bendix from the beginning?”

  “I have no doubt of it. But to prove my contention I must demolish yet another of Mr. Sheringham’s conclusions.

  “You made the point, Mr. Sheringham, that half-past ten in the morning was a most unusual time for Mr. Bendix to arrive at his club and therefore highly significant. That is perfectly true. Unfortunately you attached the wrong significance to it. His arrival at that hour doesn’t necessarily argue a guilty intention, as you assumed. It escaped you (as in fairness I must say it seems to have escaped every one else) that if Mrs. Bendix was the intended victim and Mr. Bendix himself not her murderer, his presence at the club at that convenient time might have been secured by the real murderer. In any case I think Mr. Sheringham might have given Mr. Bendix the benefit of the doubt in so far as to ask him if he had any explanation of his own to offer. As I did.”

  “You asked Bendix himself how it had happened that he arrived at the club at half-past ten that morning?” Mr. Chitterwick said in awed tones. This was certainly the way real detecting should be done. Unfortunately his own diffidence seemed to have prevented Mr. Chitterwick from doing any real detecting at all.

  “Certainly,” agreed Miss Dammers briskly. “I rang him up, and put the point to him. From what I gathered, not even the police had thought to put it before. And though he answered it in a way I quite expected, it was clear that he saw no significance in his own answer. Mr. Bendix told me that he had gone there to receive a telephone message. But why not have had the message telephoned to his home? you will ask. Exactly. So did I. The reason was that it was not the sort of message one cares about receiving at home. I must admit that I pressed Mr. Bendix about this message, and as he had no idea of the importance of my questions he must have considered my taste more than questionable. However, I couldn’t help that.

  “In the end I got him to admit that on the previous afternoon he had been rung up at his office by a Miss Vera Delorme, who plays a small part in Heels Up ! at the Regency Theatre. He had only met her once or twice, but was not averse from doing so again. She asked him if he were doing anything important the next morning, to which he replied that he was not. Could he take her out to a quiet little lunch somewhere? He
would be delighted. But she was not quite sure yet whether she was free. She would ring him up the next morning between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock at the Rainbow Club.”

  Five pairs of brows were knitted.

  “I don’t see any significance in that either,” finally plunged Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.

  “No?” said Miss Dammers. “But if Miss Delorme straightly denies having ever rung Mr. Bendix up at all?”

  Five pairs of brows unravelled themselves.

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.

  “Of course that was the first thing I verified,” said Miss Dammers coolly.

  Mr. Chitterwich sighed. Yes, undoubtedly this was real detecting.

  “Then your murderer had an accomplice, Miss Dammers?” Sir Charles suggested.

  “He had two,” retorted Miss Dammers. “Both unwitting.”

  “Ah, yes. You mean Bendix. And the woman who telephoned?”

  “Well—!” Miss Dammers looked in her unexcited way round the circle of faces. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Apparently it was not at all obvious.

  “At any rate it must be obvious why Miss Delorme was chosen as the telephonist: because Mr. Bendix hardly knew her, and would certainly not be able to recognise her voice on the telephone. And as for the real speaker … Well, really!” Miss Dammers looked her opinion of such abtuseness.

  “Mrs. Bendix!” squeaked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming catching sight of a triangle.

  “Of course. Mrs. Bendix, carefully primed by somebody about her husband’s minor misdemeanours.”

  “The somebody being the murderer of course,” nodded Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “A friend of Mrs. Bendix’s then. At least,” amended Mrs. Fielder-Flemming in some confusion, remembering that real friends seldom murder each other, “she thought of him as a friend. Dear me, this is getting very interesting, Alicia.”

  Miss Dammers gave a small, ironical smile. “Yes, it’s a very intimate little affair after all, this murder. Tightly closed, in fact, Mr. Bradley.

  “But I’m getting on rather too fast. I had better complete the destruction of Mr. Sheringham’s case before I build up my own.” Roger groaned faintly and looked up at the hard, white ceiling. It reminded him of Miss Dammers, and he looked down again.

  “Really, Mr. Sheringham, your faith in human nature is altogether too great, you know,” Miss Dammers mocked him without mercy. “Whatever anybody chooses to tell you, you believe. A confirmatory witness never seems necessary to you. I’m sure that if some one had come to your rooms and told you he’d seen the Shah of Persia injecting the nitrobenzene into those chocolates you would have believed him unhesitatingly.”

  “Are you hinting that somebody hasn’t told me the truth?” groaned the unhappy Roger.

  “I’ll do more than hint it; I’ll prove it. When you told us last night that the man in the typewriter shop had positively identified Mr. Bendix as the purchaser of a second-hand No. 4 Hamilton I was astounded. I took a note of the shop’s address. This morning, first thing, I went there. I taxed the man roundly with having told you a lie. He admitted it, grinning.

  “So far as he could make out, all you wanted was a good Hamilton No. 4, and he had a good Hamilton No. 4 to sell. He saw nothing wrong in leading you to suppose that his was the shop where your friend had bought his own good Hamilton No. 4, because he had quite as good a one as any other shop could have. And if it eased your mind that he should recognise your friend from his photograph—well,” said Miss Dammers drily, “he was quite prepared to ease it as many times as you had photographs to produce.”

  “I see,” said Roger, and his thoughts dwelt on the eight pounds he had handed over to that sympathetic, mind-easing shopman in return for a Hamilton No. 4 he didn’t want.

  “As for the girl in Webster’s,” continued Miss Dammers implacably, “she was just as ready to admit that perhaps she might have made a mistake in recognising that friend of the gentleman who called in yesterday about some notepaper. But really, the gentleman had seemed so anxious she should that it would have seemed quite a pity to disappoint him, like. And if it came to that, she couldn’t see the harm in it not even now she couldn’t.” Miss Dammers’s imitation of Webster’s young woman was most amusing. Roger did not laugh heartily.

  “I’m sorry if I seem to be rubbing it in, Mr. Sheringham,” said Miss Dammers.

  “Not at all,” said Roger.

  “But it’s essential to my own case, you see.”

  “Yes, I quite see that,” said Roger.

  “Then that evidence is disposed of. I don’t think you really had any other, did you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Roger.

  “You will see,” Miss Dammers resumed, over Roger’s corpse, “that I am following the fashion of withholding the criminal’s name. Now that it has come to my turn to speak, I am realising the advantages of this; but really, I can’t help fearing that you will all have guessed it by the time I come to my denouement. To me, at any rate, the murderer’s identity seems quite absurdly obvious. Before I disclose it officially, however, I should like to deal with a few of the other points, not actual evidence, raised by Mr. Sheringham in his argument.

  “Mr. Sheringham built up a very ingenious case. It was so very ingenious that he had to insist more than once on the perfect planning that had gone to its construction, and the true greatness of the criminal mind that had evolved it. I don’t agree,” said Miss Dammers crisply. “My case is much simpler. It was planned with cunning but not with perfection. It relied almost entirely upon luck: that is to say, upon one vital piece of evidence remaining undiscovered. And finally the mind that evolved it is not great in any way. But it is a mind which, dealing with matters outside its usual orbit, would certainly be imitative.

  “That brings me to a point of Mr. Bradley’s. I agree with him to the extent that I think a certain acquaintance with criminological history is postulated, but not when he argues that it is the work of a creative mind. In my opinion the chief feature of the crime is its servile imitation of certain of its predecessors. I deduced from it, in fact, the type of mind which is possessed of no originality of its own, is intensely conservative because without the wit to recognise the progress of change, is obstinate, dogmatic, and practical, and lacks entirely any sense of spiritual values. As one who am inclined to suffer myself from something of an aversion from matter, I sensed my exact antithesis behind the whole atmosphere of this case.”

  Everybody looked suitably impressed. As for Mr. Chitterwick, he could only grasp before these detailed deductions from a mere atmosphere.

  “With another point of Mr. Sheringham’s I have already inferred that I agree: that chocolates were used as the vehicle of the poison because they were meant to reach a woman. And here I might add that I am sure no harm was intended to Mr. Bendix himself. We know that Mr. Bendix did not care for chocolates, and it is a reasonable assumption that the murderer knew it too; he never expected that Mr. Bendix would eat any himself.

  “It is curious how often Mr. Sheringham hits the mark with small shafts, while missing it with the chief one. He was quite right about the notepaper being extracted from that sample-book at Webster’s. I’m bound to admit that the possession of the piece of notepaper had worried me considerably. I was at a complete loss there. Then Mr. Sheringham very handily presented us with his explanation, and I have been able to-day to destroy his application of it to his own theory and incorporate it in my own. The attendant who pretended out of innocent politeness to recognise the photograph Mr. Sheringham showed her, was able to recognise in earnest the one I produced. And not only recognise it,” said Miss Dammers with the first sign of complacence she had yet shown, “but identify the original of it actually by name.”

  “Ah!” nodded Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, much excited.

  “Mr. Sheringham made a few other small points, which I thought it advisable to-day to blunt,” Miss Dammers went on, with a return to her impersonal manner. “Because most of the small firms in
which Mr. Bendix figures on the board of directors are not in a flourishing state, Mr. Sheringham deduced not only that Mr. Bendix was a bad business-man, with which I am inclined to agree, but that he was desperately in need of money. Once again Mr. Sheringham failed to verify his deduction, and once again he must pay the penalty in finding himself utterly wrong.

  “The most elementary channels of enquiry would have brought Mr. Sheringham the information that only a very small proportion of Mr. Bendix’s money is invested in these concerns, which are really a wealthy man’s toys. By far the greater part is still where his father left it when he died, in government stock and safe industrial concerns so large that even Mr. Bendix could never aspire to a seat on the board. And from what I know of him, Mr. Bendix is quite a big enough man to recognise that he is not the business-genius his father was, and has no intention of spending on his toys more than he can comfortably afford. The real motive Mr. Sheringham gave him for his wife’s death therefore completely disappears.”

  Roger bowed his head. For ever afterwards, he felt, would genuine criminologists point the finger of contempt at him as the man who failed to verify his own deductions. Oh, shameful future!

  “As for the subsidiary motive, I attach less importance to that but on the whole I am inclined to agree with Mr. Sheringham. I think Mrs. Bendix must have become a dreadful bore to her husband, who after all was a normal man, with a normal man’s reactions and scale of values. I should be inclined to think that she morally drove him into the arms of his actresses, in search of a little light companionship. I’m not saying he wasn’t deeply in love with her when he married her; no doubt he was. And he’d have had a naturally deep respect for her then.