The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  Sir Charles voiced the general feeling. “If you’ve got any solid evidence to support this theory, Miss Dammers. …” He implied that in that case the rope was as good as round Sir Eustace’s thick red neck.

  “Meaning that the evidence I’ve given already isn’t solid enough for the legal mind?” enquired Miss Dammers equably.

  “Psy—psychological reconstructions wouldn’t carry very much weight with a jury,” Sir Charles took refuge behind the jury in question.

  “I’ve connected Sir Eustace with the piece of Mason’s notepaper,” Miss Dammers pointed out.

  “I’m afraid on that alone Sir Eustace would get the benefit of the doubt.” Sir Charles was evidently deprecating the psychological obtuseness of that jury of his.

  “I’ve shown a tremendous motive, and I’ve connected him with a book of similar cases and a book of poisons.”

  “Yes. Oh, quite so. But what I mean is, have you any real evidence to connect Sir Eustace quite definitely with the letter, the chocolates, or the wrapper?”

  “He has an Onyx pen, and the inkpot in his library used to be filled with Harfield’s Ink,” Miss Dammers smiled. “I’ve no doubt it is still. He was supposed to have been at the Rainbow the whole evening before the murder, but I’ve ascertained that there is a gap of half-an-hour between nine o’clock and nine-thirty during which nobody saw him. He left the dining-room at nine, and a waiter brought him a whisky-and-soda in the lounge at half-past. In the interim nobody knows where he was. He wasn’t in the lounge. Where was he? The porter swears he did not see him go out, or come in again; but there is a back way which he could have used if he wanted to be unnoticed, as of course he did. I asked him myself, as if by way of a joke, and he said that he had gone up to the library after dinner to look up a reference in a book of big-game hunting. Could he mention the names of any other members in the library? He said there weren’t any; there never were; he’d never seen a member in the library all the time he belonged to the club. I thanked him and rang off.

  “In other words, he says he was in the library, because he knows there would be no other member there to prove he wasn’t. What he really did during that half-hour, of course, was to slip out the back-way, hurry down to the Strand to post the parcel (just as Mr. Sheringham saw Mr. Bendix hurrying down), slip in again, run up to the library to make sure nobody was there, and then go down to the lounge and order his whisky-and-soda to prove his presence there later. Isn’t that more feasible than your version of Mr. Bendix, Mr. Sheringham?”

  “I must admit that it’s no less so,” Roger had to agree.

  “Then you haven’t any solid evidence at all?” lamented Sir Charles. “Nothing that would really impress a jury?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Miss Dammers quietly. “I’ve been saving it up till the end because I wanted to prove my case (as I consider I have done) without it. But this is absolutely and finally conclusive. Will everybody examine these, please.”

  Miss Dammers produced from her bag a brown-paper-covered parcel. Unwrapping it, she brought to light a photograph and a quarto sheet of paper which looked like a typed letter.

  “The photograph,” she explained, “I obtained from Chief Inspector Moresby the other day, but without telling him the specific purpose for which I wanted it. It is of the forged letter, actual size. I should like everybody to compare it with this typed copy of the letter. Will you look at them first, Mr. Sheringham, and then pass them round? Notice particularly the slightly crooked s’s and the chipped capital H.”

  In dead silence Roger pored over the two. He examined them for a full two minutes, which seemed to the others more like two hours, and then passed them on to Sir Charles on his right.

  “There isn’t the slightest doubt that those two were done on the same machine,” he said soberly.

  Miss Dammers showed neither less nor more emotion than she had displayed throughout. Her voice carried exactly the same impersonal inflection. She might have been announcing her discovery of a match between two pieces of dress-material. From her level tone it could never have been guessed that a man’s neck depended on her words no less than on the rope that was to hang him.

  “You will find the machine in Sir Eustace’s rooms,” she said.

  Even Mr. Bradley was moved. “Then as I said, he deserves all that’s coming to him,” he drawled, with a quite impossible nonchalance, and even attempted a yawn. “Dear me, what a distressing bungler.”

  Sir Charles passed on the evidence. “Miss Dammers,” he said impressively, “you have rendered a very great service to society. I congratulate you.”

  “Thank you, Sir Charles,” replied Miss Dammers, matter-of-factly. “But it was Mr. Sheringham’s idea, you know.”

  “Mr. Sheringham,” intoned Sir Charles, “sowed better than he knew.”

  Roger, who had hoped to add another feather to his cap by solving the mystery himself, smiled in a somewhat sickly way.

  Mrs. Fielder-Flemming improved the occasion. “We have made history,” she said with fitting solemnity. “When the whole police-force of a nation had failed, a woman has uncovered the dark mystery. Alicia, this is a red-letter day, not only for you, not only for this Circle, but for Woman.”

  “Thank you, Mabel,” responded Miss Dammers. “How very nice of you to say so.”

  The evidence passed slowly round the table and returned to Miss Dammers. She handed it on to Roger.

  “Mr. Sheringham, I think you had better take charge of these. As President, I leave the matter in your hands. You know as much as I do. As you may imagine, to inform the police officially myself would be extremely distasteful. I should like my name kept out of any communication you make to them, entirely.”

  Roger was rubbing his chin. “I think that can be done. I could just hand these things over to him, with the information where the machine is, and let Scotland Yard work the case up themselves. These, and the motive, with the evidence of the porter at Fellows’s Hotel of which I shall have to tell Moresby, are the only things that will really interest the police, I think. Humph! I suppose I’d better see Moresby to-night. Will you come with me, Sir Charles? It would add weight.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” Sir Charles agreed with alacrity.

  Everybody looked, and felt, very serious.

  “I suppose,” Mr. Chitterwick dropped shyly into all this solemnity, “I suppose you couldn’t put it off for twenty-four hours, could you?”

  Roger looked his surprise. “But why?”

  “Well, you know …” Mr. Chitterwick wriggled with diffidence. “Well—I haven’t spoken yet, you know.”

  Five pairs of eyes fastened on him in astonishment. Mr. Chitterwick blushed warmly.

  “Of course. No, of course.” Roger was trying to be as tactful as he could. “And—well, that is to say, you want to speak, of course?”

  “I have a theory,” said Mr. Chitterwick modestly. “I—I don’t want to speak, no. But I have a theory.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Roger, and looked helplessly at Sir Charles.

  Sir Charles marched to the rescue. “I’m sure we shall all be most interested to hear Mr. Chitterwick’s theory,” he pronounced. “Most interested. But why not let us have it now, Mr. Chitterwick?”

  “It isn’t quite complete,” said Mr. Chitterwick, unhappy but persistent. “I should like another twenty-four hours to clear up one or two points.

  Sir Charles had an inspiration. “Of course, of course. We must meet to-morrow and listen to Mr. Chitterwick’s theory, of course. In the meantime Sheringham and I will just call in at Scotland Yard and——”

  “I’d much rather you didn’t,” said Mr. Chitterwick, now in the deeps of misery. “Really I would.”

  Again Roger looked helplessly at Sir Charles. This time Sir Charles looked helplessly back.

  “Well—I suppose another twenty-four hours wouldn’t make much difference,” said Roger with reluctance. “After all this time.”

  “Not very much difference,” ple
aded Mr. Chitterwick.

  “Well, not very much difference certainly,” agreed Sir Charles, frankly puzzled.

  “Then have I your word, Mr. President?” persisted Mr. Chitterwick, very mournfully.

  “If you put it like that,” said Roger, rather coldly.

  The meeting then broke up, somewhat bewildered.

  CHAPTER XVII

  IT was quite evident that, as he had said, Mr. Chitterwick did not want to speak. He looked appealingly round the circle of faces the next evening when Roger asked him to do so, but the faces remained decidedly unsympathetic. Mr. Chitterwick, expressed the faces plainly, was being a silly old woman.

  Mr. Chitterwick cleared his throat nervously two or three times and took the plunge.

  “Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I quite realise what you must be thinking, and I must plead for leniency. I can only say in excuse of what you must consider my perversity, that convincing though Miss Dammers’s clever exposition was and definite as her proofs appeared, we have listened to so many apparently convincing solutions of this mystery and been confronted with so many seemingly definite proofs, that I could not help feeling that perhaps even Miss Dammers’s theory might not prove on reflection to be quite so strong as one would at first think.” Mr. Chitterwick, having surmounted this tall obstacle, blinked rapidly but was unable to recall the next sentence he had prepared so carefully.

  He jumped it, and went on a little. “As the one to whom has fallen the task, both a privilege and a responsibility, of speaking last, you may not consider it out of place if I take the liberty of summing up the various conclusions that have been reached here, so different in both their methods and results. Not to waste time however in going over old ground, I have prepared a little chart which may show more clearly the various contrasting theories, parallels, and suggested criminals. Perhaps members would care to pass it round.”

  With much hesitation Mr. Chitterwick produced the chart on which he had spent so much careful thought, and offered it to Mr. Bradley on his right. Mr. Bradley received it graciously, and even condescended to lay it on the table between himself and Miss Dammers and examine it. Mr. Chitterwick looked artlessly gratified.

  “You will see,” said Mr. Chitterwick, with a shade more confidence, “that practically speaking no two members have agreed on any one single matter of importance. The divergence of opinion and method is really remarkable. And in spite of such variations each member has felt confident that his or her solution was the right one. This chart, more than any words of mine could, emphasises not only the extreme openness, as Mr. Bradley would say, of the case before us, but illustrates another of Mr. Bradley’s observations too, that is how surprisingly easy it is to prove anything one may desire, by a process either of conscious or of unwitting selection.

  “Miss Dammers, I think,” suggested Mr. Chitterwick, “may perhaps find that chart especially interesting. I am not myself a student of psychology, but even to me it was striking to notice how the solution of each member reflected, if I may say so, that particular member’s own trend of thought and character. Sir Charles, for instance, whose training has naturally led him to realise the importance of the material, will not mind if I point out that the angle from which he viewed the problem was the very material one of cui bono, while the equally material evidence of the notepaper formed for him its salient feature. At the other end of the scale, Miss Dammers herself regards the case almost entirely from a psychological view-point and takes as its salient feature the character, as unconsciously revealed, of the criminal.

  “Between these two, other members have paid attention to psychological and material evidence in varying proportions. Then again the methods of building up the case against a suspected person have been widely different. Some of us have relied almost entirely on inductive methods, some almost wholly on deductive; while some, like Mr. Sheringham, have blended the two. In short, the task our President set us has proved a most instructive lesson in comparative detection.”

  Mr. Chitterwick cleared his throat, smiled nervously, and continued. “There is another chart which I might have made, and which I think would have been no less illuminating than this one. It is a chart of the singularly different deductions drawn by different members from the undisputed facts in the case. Mr. Bradley might have found particular interest in this possible chart, as a writer of detective-stories.

  “For I have often noticed,” apologised Mr. Chitterwick to the writers of detective-stories en masse, “that in books of that kind it is frequently assumed that any given fact can admit of only one single deduction, and that invariably the right one. Nobody else is capable of drawing any deductions at all but the author’s favourite detective, and the ones he draws (in the books where the detective is capable of drawing deductions at all which, alas, are only too few) are invariably right. Miss Dammers mentioned something of the kind one evening herself, with her illustration of the two bottles of ink.

  “As an example of what really happens therefore, I should like to cite the sheet of Mason’s notepaper in this case. From that single piece of paper the following deductions have at one time or another been drawn:

  That the criminal was an employee or ex-employee of Mason & Sons.

  That the criminal was a customer of Mason & Sons.

  That the criminal was a printer, or had access to a printing-press.

  That the criminal was a lawyer, acting on behalf of Mason & Sons.

  That the criminal was a relative of an ex-employee of Mason & Sons.

  That the criminal was a would-be customer of Webster’s, the printers.

  “There have been plenty of other deductions of course from that sheet of paper, such as that the chance possession of it suggested the whole method of the crime, but I am only calling attention to the ones which were to point directly to the criminal’s identity. There are no less than six of them, you see, and all mutually contradictory.”

  “I’ll write a book for you, Mr. Chitterwick,” promised Mr. Bradley, “in which the detective shall draw six contradictory deductions from each fact. He’ll probably end up by arresting seventy-two different people for the murder and committing suicide because he finds afterwards that he must have done it himself. I’ll dedicate the book to you.”

  “Yes, do,” beamed Mr. Chitterwick. “For really, it wouldn’t be far from what we’ve had in this case. For example, I only called attention to the notepaper. Besides that there were the poison, the typewriter, the postmark, the exactness of the dose—oh, many more facts. And from each one of them not much less than half-a-dozen different deductions have been drawn.

  “In fact,” Mr. Chitterwick summed up, “it was as much as anything the different deductions drawn by different members that proved their different cases.”

  “On second thoughts,” decided Mr. Bradley, “my detectives in future will be the kind that don’t draw any deductions at all. Besides, that will be so much easier for me.”

  “So with these few remarks on the solutions we have already heard,” continued Mr. Chitterwick, “which I hope members will pardon me, I will hurry on to my explanation of why I asked Mr. Sheringham so urgently last evening not to go to Scotland Yard at once.”

  Five faces expressed silent agreement that it was about time Mr. Chitterwick was heard on that point.

  Mr. Chitterwick appeared to be conscious of the thoughts behind the faces, for his manner became a little flurried.

  “I must first deal very briefly with the case against Sir Eustace Pennefather, as Miss Dammers gave it us last night. Without belittling her presentation of it in any way at all, I must just point out that her two chief reasons for fixing the guilt upon him seemed to me to be firstly that he was the type of person whom she had already decided the criminal must be, and secondly that he had been conducting an intrigue with Mrs. Bendix and certainly would have seemed to have some cause for wishing her out of the way—if (but only if) Miss Dammers’s own view of the progress of that intrigue was the corre
ct one.

  “But the typewriter, Mr. Chitterwick!” cried Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, loyal to her sex.

  Mr. Chitterwick started. “Oh, yes; the typewriter. I’m coming to that. But before I reach it, I should like to mention two other points which Miss Dammers would have us believe are important material evidence against Sir Eustace, as opposed to the psychological. That he should be in the habit of buying Mason’s liqueur chocolates for his—his female friends hardly seems to me even significant. If every one who is in the habit of buying Mason’s liqueur chocolates is to be suspect, then London must be full of suspects. And surely even so unoriginal a murderer as Sir Eustace would seem to be, would have taken the elementary precaution of choosing some vehicle for the poison which is not generally associated with his name, instead of one that is. And if I may venture the opinion, Sir Eustace is not quite such a dunderhead as Miss Dammers would seem, to think.

  “The second point is that the girl in Webster’s should have recognised, and even identified, Sir Eustace from his photograph. That also doesn’t appear to me, if Miss Dammers doesn’t mind my saying so, nearly as significant as she would have us believe. I have ascertained,” said Mr. Chitterwick, not without pride (here too was a piece of real detecting) “that Sir Eustace Pennefather buys his notepaper at Webster’s, and has done so for years. He was in there about a month ago to order a fresh supply. It would be surprising, considering that he has a title, if the girl who served him had not remembered him; it cannot be considered significant,” said Mr. Chitterwick quite firmly, “that she does.

  “Apart from the typewriter, then, and perhaps the copies of the criminological books, Miss Dammers’s case has no real evidence to support it at all, for the matter of the broken alibi, I am afraid, must be held to be neither here nor there. I don’t wish to be unfair,” said Mr. Chitterwick carefully, “but I think I am justified in saying that Miss Dammers’s case against Sir Eustace rests entirely and solely upon the evidence of the typewriter.” He gazed round anxiously for possible objections.