The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  “But it’s an unfortunate marriage,” observed the cynical Miss Dammers, “in which the respect outstays its usefulness. A man wants a piece of humanity in his marriage-bed; not an object of deep respect. But I’m bound to say that if Mrs. Bendix did bore her husband before the end, he was gentleman enough not to show it. The marriage was generally considered an ideal one.”

  Miss Dammers paused for a moment to sip at the glass of water in front of her.

  “Lastly, Mr. Sheringham made the point that the letter and wrapper were not destroyed, because the murderer thought they would not only not harm him but definitely help him. With that too I agree. But I do not draw the same deduction from it that Mr. Sheringham did. I should have said that this entirely confirms my theory that the murder is the work of a second-rate mind, because a first-rate mind would never consent to the survival of any clue which could be easily destroyed, however helpful it might be expected to prove, because he would know how often such clues, deliberately left to mislead, have actually led to the criminal’s undoing. And I would draw the subsidiary deduction that the wrapper and letter were not expected to be just generally helpful, but that there was some definite piece of misleading information contained in them. I think I know what that piece of information was.

  “That is all the reference I have to make to Mr. Sheringham’s case.”

  Roger lifted his bowed head, and Miss Dammers sipped again at her water.

  “With regard to this matter of the respect Mr. Bendix had for his wife,” Mr. Chitterwick hazarded, “isn’t there something of an anomaly there, Miss Dammers? Because I understood you to say at the very beginning that the deduction you had drawn from that bet was that Mrs. Bendix was not quite so worthy of respect as we had all imagined. Didn’t that deduction stand the test, then?”

  “It did, Mr. Chitterwick, and there is no anomaly.”

  “Where a man doesn’t suspect, he will respect,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming swiftly, before her Alicia could think of it.

  “Ah, the horrid sepulchre under the nice white paint,” remarked Mr. Bradley, who didn’t approve of that sort of thing, even from distinguished dramatists. “Now we’re getting down to it. Is there a sepulchre, Miss Dammers?”

  “There is,” Miss Dammers agreed, without emotion. “And now, as you say, Mr. Bradley, we’re getting down to it.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Chitterwick positively bounced on his chair. “If the letter and wrapper could have been destroyed by the murderer … and Bendix wasn’t the murderer … and I suppose the porter needn’t be considered … Oh, I see!”

  “I wondered when somebody would,” said Miss Dammers.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “FROM the very beginning of this case,” Miss Dammers proceeded, imperturbable as ever, “I was of the opinion that the greatest clue the criminal had left us was one of which he would have been totally unconscious: the unmistakable indications of his own characters. Taking the facts as I found them, and not assuming others as Mr. Sheringham did to justify his own reading of the murderer’s exceptional mentality——” She looked challengely towards Roger.

  “Did I assume any facts that I couldn’t substantiate?” Roger felt himself compelled to answer her look.

  “Certainly you did. You assumed for instance that the typewriter on which the letter was written is now at the bottom of the Thames. The plain fact that it is not, once more bears out my own interpretation. Taking the established facts as I found them, then, I was able without difficulty to form the mental picture of the murderer that I have already sketched out for you. But I was careful not to look for somebody who would resemble my picture and then build up a case against him. I simply hung the picture up in my mind, so to speak, in order to compare with it any individual toward whom suspicion might seem to point.

  “Now, after I had cleared up Mr. Bendix’s reason for arriving at his club that morning at such an unusual hour, there remained so far as I could see only one obscure point, apparently of no importance, to which nobody’s attention seemed to have been directed. I mean, the engagement Sir Eustace had had that day for lunch, which must subsequently have been cancelled. I don’t know how Mr. Bradley discovered this, but I am quite ready to say how I did. It was from that same useful valet who gave Mrs. Fielder-Flemming so much interesting information.

  “I must admit in this connection that I have advantages over the other members of this Circle so far as investigations regarding Sir Eustace were concerned, for not only did I know Sir Eustace himself so well but I knew his valet too; and you may imagine that if Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was able to extract so much from him with the aid of money alone, I myself, backed not only by money but by the advantage of a previous acquaintance, was in a position to obtain still more. In any case, it was not long before the man casually mentioned that four days before the crime Sir Eustace had told him to ring up Fellows’s Hotel in Jermyn Street and reserve a private room for lunch-time on the day on which the murder subsequently took place.

  “That was the obscure point, which I thought it worth while to clear up if I could. With whom was Sir Eustace going to lunch that day? Obviously a woman, but which of his many women? The valet could give me no information. So far as he knew, Sir Eustace actually had not got any women at the moment, so intent was he upon the pursuit of Miss Wildman (you must excuse me, Sir Charles), her hand and her fortune. Was it Miss Wildman herself then? I was very soon able to establish that it wasn’t.

  “Does it strike you that there is a reminiscent ring about this cancelled lunch-appointment on the day of the crime? It didn’t occur to me for a long time, but of course there is. Mrs. Bendix had a lunch-engagement for that day too, which was cancelled for some reason unknown on the previous afternoon.”

  “Mrs. Bendix !” breathed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. Here was a juicy triangle.

  Miss Dammers smiled faintly. “Yes, I won’t keep you on the tenderhooks, Mabel. From what Sir Charles told us I knew that Mrs. Bendix and Sir Eustace at any rate were not total strangers, and in the end I managed to connect them. Mrs. Bendix was to have lunched with Sir Eustace, in a private room, at the somewhat notorious Fellow’s Hotel.”

  “To discuss her husband’s shortcomings, of course?” suggested Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, more charitably than her hopes.

  “Possibly, among other things,” said Miss Dammers nonchalantly. “But the chief reason, no doubt was because she was his mistress.” Miss Dammers dropped this bombshell among the company with as little emotion as if she had remarked that Mrs. Bendix was wearing a jade-green taffeta frock for the occasion.

  “Can you—can you substantiate that statement?” asked Sir Charles, the first to recover himself.

  Miss Dammers just raised her fine eyebrows. “But of course. I shall make no statements that I can’t substantiate. Mrs. Bendix had been in the habit of lunching at least twice a week with Sir Eustace, and occasionally dining too, at Fellow’s Hotel, always in the same room. They took considerable precautions and used to arrive not only at the hotel but in the room itself quite independently of each other; outside the room they were never seen together. But the waiter who attended them (always the same waiter) has signed a declaration for me that he recognised Mrs. Bendix, from the photographs published after her death, as the woman who used to come there with Sir Eustace Pennefather.”

  “He signed a declaration for you, eh?” mused Mr. Bradley. “You must find detecting an expensive hobby too, Miss Dammers.”

  “One can afford one expensive hobby, Mr. Bradley.”

  “But just because she lunched with him …” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was once more speaking with the voice of charity. “I mean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she was his mistress, does it? Not, of course, that I think any the less of her if she was,” she added hastily, remembering the official attitude.

  “Communicating with the room in which they had their meals is a bedroom,” replied Miss Dammers, in a desiccated tone of voice. “Invariably after they had gone, the waiter informed me
, he found the bedclothes disarranged and the bed showing signs of recent use. I imagine that would be accepted as clear enough evidence of adultery, Sir Charles?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” rumbled Sir Charles, in high embarrassment. Sir Charles was always exceedingly embarrassed when women used words like “adultery” and “sexual perversions” and even “mistress” to him, out of business hours. Sir Charles was regrettably old-fashioned.

  “Sir Eustace, of course,” added Miss Dammers in her detatched way, “had nothing to fear from the King’s Proctor.”

  She took another sip of water, while the others tried to accustom themselves to this new light on the case and the surprising avenues it illuminated.

  Miss Dammers proceeded to illuminate them still further, with powerful beams from her psychological searchlight. “They must have made a curious couple those two. Their widely differing scales of values, the contrast of their respective reactions to the business that brought them together, the possibility that not even in a common passion could their minds establish any point of real contact. I want you to examine the psychology of the situation as closely as you can, because the murder was derived directly from it.

  “What can have induced Mrs. Bendix in the first place to become that man’s mistress I don’t know. I won’t be so trite as to say I can’t imagine, because I can imagine all sorts of ways in which it may have happened. There is a curious mental stimulus to a good but stupid woman in a bad man’s business. If she has a touch of the reformer in her, as most good women have, she soon becomes obsessed with the futile desire to save him from himself. And in seven cases out of ten her first step in doing so is to descend to his level.

  “Not that she considers herself at first to be descending at all; a good woman invariably suffers for quite a long time from the delusion that whatever she does, her own particular brand of goodness cannot become smirched. She may share a reprobate’s bed with him, because she knows that only through her body at first can she hope to influence him, until contact is established through the body with the soul and he may be led into better ways than a habit of going to bed in the daytime; but the initial sharing doesn’t reflect on her own purity in the least. It is a hackneyed observation but I must insist on it once more: good women have the most astonishing powers of self-deception.

  “I do consider Mrs. Bendix as a good woman, before she met Sir Eustace. Her trouble was that she thought herself so much better than she was. Her constant references to honour and playing the game, which Mr. Sheringham quoted, show that. She was infatuated with her own goodness. And so, of course, was Sir Eustace. He had probably never enjoyed the complaisance of a really good woman before. The seduction of her (which was probably very difficult) would have amused him enormously. He must have had to listen to hour after hour’s talk about honour, and reform, and spirituality, but he would have borne it patiently enough for the exquisite revenge on which he had set his heart. The first two or three visits to Fellows’s Hotel must have delighted him.

  “But after that it became less and less amusing. Mrs. Bendix would discover that perhaps her own goodness wasn’t standing quite so firm under the strain as she had imagined. She would have begun to bore him with her self-reproaches; bore him dreadfully. He continued to meet her there first because a woman, to his type, is always a woman, and afterwards because she gave him no choice. I can see exactly what must inevitably have happened. Mrs. Bendix begins to get thoroughly morbid about her own wickedness, and quite loses sight of her initial zeal for reform.

  “They use the bed now because there happens to be a bed there and it would be a pity to waste it, but she has destroyed the pleasure of both. Her one cry now is that she must put herself right with her own conscience either by running away with Sir Eustace on the spot, or, more probably, by telling her husband, arranging for divorce (for, of course, he will never forgive her, never), and marrying Sir Eustace as soon as both divorces are through. In any case, although she almost loathes him by now nothing else can be contemplated but that the rest of her life must be spent with Sir Eustance and his with her. How well I know that type of mind.

  “Naturally, to Sir Eustace, who is working hard to retrieve his fortunes by a rich marriage, this scheme has small appeal. He begins by cursing himself for having seduced the damned woman at all, and goes on to curse still more the damned woman for having been seduced. And the more pressing she becomes, the more he hates her. Then Mrs. Bendix must have brought matters to a head. She has heard about the Wildman girl affair. That must be stopped at once. She tells Sir Eustace that if he doesn’t break it off himself, she will take steps to break it off for him. Sir Eustace sees the whole thing coming out, his own appearance in a second divorce-court, and all hopes of Miss Wildman and her fortune gone for ever. Something has got to be done about it. But what can be done? Nothing short of murder will stop the damned woman’s tongue.

  “Well—it’s high time somebody murdered her anyhow.

  “Now I’m on rather less sure ground, but the assumptions seem to me sound enough and I can produce a reasonable amount of proof to support them. Sir Eustace decided to get rid of the woman once and for all. He thinks it over carefully, remembers to have read about a case, several cases, in some criminological book, each of which just failed through some small mistake. Combine them, eradicate the small mistake from each, and so long as his relations with Mrs. Bendix are not known (and he is quite certain they aren’t) there is no possibility of being found out. That may seem a long guess, but here’s my proof.

  “When I was studying him, I gave Sir Eustace every chance of plying his blandishments on me. One of his methods is to profess a deep interest in everything that interests the woman. Naturally therefore he discovered a profound, if hitherto latent, interest in criminology. He borrowed several of my books, and certainly read them. Among the ones he borrowed is a book of American poisoning cases. In it is an account of every single case that has been mentioned as a parallel by members of this Circle (except of course Marie Lafarge and Christina Edmunds).

  “About six weeks ago, when I got in one evening my maid told me that Sir Eustace, who hadn’t been near my flat for months, had called; he waited for a time in the sitting-room and then went. Shortly after the murder, having also been struck by the similarity between this and one or two of those American cases, I went to the bookstall in my sitting-room to look them up. The book was not there. Nor, Mr. Bradley, was my copy of Taylor. But I saw them both in Sir Eustace’s rooms the day I had that long conversation with his valet.”

  Miss Dammers paused for comment.

  Mr. Bradley supplied it. “Then the man deserves what’s coming to him,” he drawled.

  “I told you this murder wasn’t the work of a highly intelligent mind,” said Miss Dammers.

  “Well, now, to complete my reconstruction. Sir Eustace decides to rid himself of his encumbrance, and arranged what he thinks a perfectly safe way of doing so. The nitrobenzene, which appears to worry Mr. Bradley so much, seems to me a very simple matter. Sir Eustace has decided upon chocolates as the vehicle, and chocolate liqueurs at that. (Mason’s chocolate liqueurs, I should say, are a favourite purchase of Sir Eustace’s. It is significant that he had bought several one-pound boxes recently.) He is searching, then, for some poison with a flavour which will mingle well enough with that of the liqueurs. He is bound to come across oil of bitter almonds very soon in that connection, actually used as it is in confectionery, and from that to nitrobenzene, which is more common, easier to get hold of, and practically untraceable, is an obvious step.

  “He arranges to meet Mrs. Bendix for lunch, intending to make a present to her then of the chocolates which are to come to him that morning by post, a perfectly natural thing to do. He will already have the porter’s evidence of the innocent way in which he acquired them. At the last minute he sees the obvious flaw in this plan. If he gives Mrs. Bendix the chocolates in person, and especially at lunch at Fellows’s Hotel, his intimacy with
her must be disclosed. He hastily racks his brains and finds a very much better plan. Getting hold of Mrs. Bendix, he tells her some story of her husband and Vera Delorme.

  “In characteristic fashion Mrs. Bendix loses sight of the beam in her own eye on learning of this mote in her husband’s and at once falls in with Sir Eustace’s suggestion that she shall ring Mr. Bendix up, disguising her voice and pretending to be Vera Delorme, and just find out for herself whether or not he will jump at the chance of an intimate little lunch for the following day.

  “‘And tell him you’ll ring him up at the Rainbow to-morrow morning between ten-thirty and eleven,’ Sir Eustace adds carelessly. ‘If he goes to the Rainbow, you’ll be able to know for certain that he’s dancing attendance on her at any hour of the day.’ And so she does. The presence of Bendix is therefore assured for the next morning at half-past ten. Who in the world is to say that he was not there by purest chance when Sir Eustace was exclaiming over that parcel?

  “As for the bet, which clinched the handing over of the chocolates, I cannot believe that this was just a stroke of luck for Sir Eustace. That seems too good to be true. Somehow, I’m sure, though I won’t attempt to show her (that would be mere guesswork), Sir Eustace arranged for that bet in advance. And if he did, the fact in no way destroys my initial deduction from it, that Mrs. Bendix was not so honest as she pretended; for whether it was arranged or whether it wasn’t, the plain fact is left that it is dishonest to make a bet to which you know the answer.

  “Lastly, if I am to follow the fashion and cite a parallel case, I decide unhesitatingly for John Tawell, who administered prussic acid in a bottle of beer to his mistress, Sarah Hart, when he was tired of her.”

  The Circle looked at her admiringly. At last, it seemed, they really had got to the bottom of the business.