The Wychford Poisoning Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  ‘This is too deep for me,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Well, I’ll try and give you a simple example of what I mean. Suppose there was some question about these quack electric belts that you see advertised everywhere and whose proprietors ought one and all to be shoved away in prison as common charlatans and thieves. (Would you believe it, but I know of a real case in which some wretched woman was taken in by the glibness of the advertisements and actually persuaded into parting with twenty pounds for one of the rotten things. Twenty pounds—for a thing not worth half a crown!) Well, supposing it was a question of the validity of one of these abominations, and a doctor was in the witness-box. This is the way the legal mind would go to work. He’d be asked, you see, whether this belt did or did not, as it claims to do, generate electricity when worn on the body; and he’d have to say “Yes!” Couldn’t help himself. It does, you see—just as drawing the tip of your finger across the tablecloth does; and just about the same amount. Any friction whatever generates electricity. ‘Aha!’ says the legal mind. ‘It does, does it? Then that’s all right. The thing is not a fraud. It says it generates electricity, and it does generate electricity. Fine anybody who says it’s a fraud a couple of hundred pounds, and whatever you do, make a precedent of it!’ Not a bit of use for the doctor to try to explain (if he ever gets the chance, which he certainly wouldn’t) that the belt doesn’t generate enough electricity to make a fly’s wings quiver. The legal mind doesn’t care a hang about that. It does generate electricity, and there’s an end of it.’

  ‘He’s getting all worked up,’ observed Alec to his fellow-listener.

  ‘Shut up, Alec! It’s jolly interesting. Go on, Roger.’

  ‘Well, take another example. Supposing a man had had nothing to eat for a whole day but a slice of bread. You’d say he had had something to eat, wouldn’t you?’

  Sheila nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, now suppose it wasn’t a slice, but one single crumb, Would you still say he’d had something to eat?’

  ‘I—I don’t know. In a way, I suppose, but—!’

  ‘Well, finally suppose that it wasn’t even a crumb, but just a speck of bread, almost invisible to the naked eye. Would you still say that man had had something to eat that day, or not?’

  ‘No, I’m hanged if I would!’

  ‘Exactly; you wouldn’t. And nor would anyone else—who happened not to be afflicted with a legal mind! Nevertheless, on a strictly accurate statement of fact, that man had something to eat during that day; and that’s what the legal mind would tell you. Now then, what chance has Mrs Bentley got of being acquitted on a question of “probability”?’

  ‘Dam’ little,’ Sheila agreed.

  ‘And over and above all, don’t forget what I told you about her own solicitor. If he thinks her guilty, as I’m quite convinced he does, that means that he’s got precious little hope of an acquittal. And if anybody ought to be in a position to know how much her defence is going to be worth, certainly he should.’

  ‘And you say you’re going to be able to get at that, you think?’ Alec asked. ‘What her defence is going to be and her own explanations of all this business?’

  ‘Mrs Saunderson certainly knows what Mrs Bentley said about it all,’ Roger said, ‘and I imagine the defence is bound to be based on that. Whether I shall be able to worm it out of her remains to be seen. But in common fairness I ought to tell you,’ he added modestly, ‘that time and patience, when allied with Roger Sheringham, ought to work wonders.’

  ‘Roger,’ Sheila put in, ‘do tell me! Honestly, not ragging—did you kiss her?’

  ‘Miss Purefoy, you have a singularly prurient mind,’ Roger said coldly. ‘No, honestly, not ragging—I did not kiss her!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Miss Purefoy in frank disappointment. ‘You dud!’

  ‘Look here!’ Alec exclaimed suddenly. ‘Dash it all, Roger, we’ve been overlooking something tremendously important. Don’t you see? If Mrs Bentley didn’t do it, and always assuming she didn’t, then the person who did must have been one of those six!’

  ‘I’ve been wondering when one of my two bright subordinates was going to draw that rather shrieking deduction,’ Roger remarked tolerantly.

  ‘Oo!’ cried Sheila. ‘Who do you think did, Roger? I believe the nurse did.’

  ‘The nurse, my infant? Why the deuce do you think that?’

  ‘Because she’s the most unlikely person, of course. Don’t you know that it’s always the most unlikely person who committed the crime? Superintendent Sheringham, I’m surprised at you. What sort of a detective do you think you are?’

  ‘Talking about that, by the way, what sort of detectives are you between you? I’ve told you all my discoveries. I don’t seem to have heard anything from you at all.’

  ‘Oh, we didn’t find out much. We tried three times to get hold of Dr James, but he was out each time.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter about him now; I found all that out myself. Did you manage to collect any evidence about character? Not that that’s wildly important, in view of what we know about that crucial half-hour. Still, did you?’

  ‘Well, I saw a lot of her friends and people who knew her, and faked up a different excuse each time to bring the conversation round to her, but what’s the use? They’re all perfectly convinced she’s guilty, and I don’t think a single one of them had a good word to say for her.’

  ‘God save us from our friends indeed! Yes, that was the same with my lady. Not the least earthly use trying to get any information as to character out of her. In fact, by her description, Mrs Bentley was a monster. And I told her it was le mot juste, Heaven forgive me! So not to put too fine a point on it, you didn’t find out anything at all?’

  ‘Well,’ said Alec, ‘we did—’

  ‘Oh, let me tell him, Alec, there’s an angel! Yes, Roger, we did find out one thing that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere before, though whether it’s the least importance or not I don’t know. Probably not, as we discovered it and not you. It’s this. Did you know that the servant who told them about the fly-papers, Mary Blower, was under notice to go?’

  ‘The devil she was!’ Roger exclaimed. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Sheila!’ Mrs Purefoy’s voice reached them faintly. ‘Sheila! Time you were getting ready for dinner, dear!’

  CHAPTER XI

  ENTIRELY FEMININE

  AFTER breakfast the next morning Alec and Roger strolled out to smoke their pipes in the delightful old garden at the back of the house, with its two mulberry trees, its medlar tree, its green fig tree, its peach border, quaintly shaped flower-beds and thick, springy lawn to whose making a couple of centuries of assiduous rolling and mowing had gone.

  ‘Well, what’s the programme today?’ Alec asked.

  ‘As far as you’re concerned, nothing. We can’t get on a step now ’til I’ve tackled this Saunderson woman successfully, And the dismissal of that servant; I shall have to include that in my pumping operations too.’

  ‘How are you going about it? Getting her to talk, I mean?’

  Roger looked at his friend a little quizzically. ‘I’m going to make love to her, Alexander,’ he said frankly.

  ‘Humph!’ Alec grunted with patent disapproval.

  ‘Rather a curious reversal of the ordinary procedure in this kind of circumstances, isn’t it?’ Roger mused. ‘The best detectives, I understand, the pukka article, make love to the servant in order to find out things about the mistress. I with my usual contempt for convention make love to a mistress to find out about a servant. And of the two, I must say that I think my method is vastly to be preferred.’

  They paced up and down the lawn for a few moments in silence.

  ‘Look here,’ Alec said suddenly. ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Roger sighed. ‘I’ve been expecting some such remark as that, my excellent Alexander. I haven’t forgotten the enormous trouble you gave me at Layton Court over this very same thing, or somet
hing very like it. Though I did hope that marriage might have at least modified your views. All right, go on; get it off your chest.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all very well for you to laugh,’ Alec growled. ‘You make fun of everything. But I’m hanged if it’s playing the game, making a cat’s-paw of a woman like this just to get information out of her.’

  ‘It isn’t you who’d be hanged, Alec,’ Roger retorted crudely. ‘It’d be Mrs Bentley. Is that what you’re driving at—that it would be better to let Mrs Bentley be hanged than trifle with the other lady’s innocent affections?’

  ‘Don’t be such an ass! You know very well it isn’t. But what I do say is that there’s no need to go about getting your information in that particular way. Why don’t you go to her and tell her the whole story just as you told Sheila?’

  ‘Because, my well-meaning but completely dunderheaded friend, the only result of that would be to shut the lady up tighter than seven clams. I tell you there’s one way and one way only to get what I want out of her, and that is to make love to her.’

  ‘Now how the deuce do you make that out?’

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll try and explain, though I quite despair of ever making you see it. The only thing on Mrs Saunderson’s horizon is Mrs Saunderson; the only way of getting Mrs Saunderson to talk about anything is by keeping continually in the foreground of the conversation that thing’s particular relation to Mrs Saunderson; the only way of getting into Mrs Saunderson’s head the idea that one is not more interested in any other thing than her and thereby loosening her tongue upon matters is to make love to Mrs Saunderson. Good Lord, you talk as if the woman didn’t want love made to her! Holy smoke, that’s the only thing in the world she does want. Not to make love to Mrs Saunderson is, in Mrs Saunderson’s opinion, an open insult to Mrs Saunderson; it would mean that one didn’t find her attractive. Can you understand that?’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me,’ Alec said obstinately, ‘that any woman in this world is going to want love made to her by any chance man who happens to come along.’

  Roger groaned. ‘Alec, you’re hopeless! Hasn’t even marriage taught you that women do not live on the top of pedestals, leading good, pure, blameless little lives in a white cloud of superhumanity? Women, dear Alec, were sent upon this earth for just one purpose, the bearing of children; that’s their job in life, and a damned big job too, and for that end solely and entirely have they been designed. I don’t want to have to give you a lecture about women, but I do think you ought to know as much about them as an ordinary child of ten does. Nearly all women, then, Alexander, are idiots—mentally a trifle deficient, if you like; charming idiots, delightful idiots, adorable idiots, if you like, but always idiots, and mostly damnable idiots at that. Frequently devilish idiots as well; most women are potential devils, you know. They live entirely by their emotions, both in thought and deed, they are fundamentally incapable of reason and their one idea in life is to appear attractive to men. That’s about all there is to women.

  ‘Here and there, of course, one does meet with exceptions—thank Heaven! And invariably these exceptions make themselves felt, either in their own immediate circle or in business, if they happen to have no artistic abilities; or else as novelists (mostly), painters (occasionally) or musicians (very rarely)—strange about the last, by the way, music being decidedly the most emotional form of self-expression. And stranger still that music should so often go with mathematics; it does, you know. Strange thing altogether, music; the scale, for instance … But I’m wandering; I’ll lecture to you about music another time. Meanwhile, about women, just one thing more. There’s a terrible lot of poppycock talked about the impossibility of understanding women, the eternal mystery of woman and all that junk (would you believe it—I once saw an article in one of the dear old Sunday papers which began like this, “Whenever two or three men are gathered together, the conversation always turns before long upon the eternal mystery of woman.” Would you believe it? I’ve never forgotten that. Written by a woman, of course). Where was I? Oh, yes.

  ‘Well, that idea was put about by woman herself, of course; they like to make their dear little silly empty-headed selves out as mysterious and deep and sphinx-like and all the rest of it; makes ’em important, you see, and Heaven knows they need all the importance they can fake up. Whereas the real truth of the matter is that any man with more than half a brain, combined with a modicum of sympathy and emotion and an understanding mind, can understand any woman backwards, from the heels of her fatuous little shoes to the crown of her artificially waved head; there’s nothing to understand. But the woman was never yet born of woman who has really understood one single man. And that will be all about women.’

  ‘My Lord!’ sighed Alec, but not without a touch of admiration. ‘How you can yap! And do you mean to tell me that you really believe all that stuff?’

  Roger laughed. ‘Candidly, Alexander, no! It’s the kind of cheap and easy cynical drivel that a fourth-rate writer stuffs his books with in the hope that the undiscerning may mistake him for a third-rate one. But you go too far in the direction of the penny novelette, you know, so I thought it might be a little tonic. Nobody knows better than I that a man without his woman is only half an entity and that a woman (the right woman for him, needless to say) can not only make her man twice the fellow he was before, but she can turn his life, however drab, into something really rather staggeringly wonderful—too wonderful sometimes for a determined bachelor like me to contemplate with equanimity. And now I’m talking like a penny novelette myself.’

  ‘Then if nobody knows that better than you,’ remarked Alec curiously, ‘why are you still a determined bachelor?’

  ‘Because the right woman in my case, Alexander,’ Roger replied lightly enough, ‘happens unfortunately to be married to someone else.’

  Alec coughed gruffly. With the Englishman’s almost morbid aversion from sentiment in the presence of his own sex, he was unable to frame a suitable reply; but under his silence he was deeply touched. It was the first time that Roger had ever even hinted at any such tragedy in his life, and that it was by way of being a tragedy Alec instinctively knew. In its light a good many things became plain to him which had been before obscure.

  ‘Still,’ Roger was continuing thoughtfully, ‘there is a modicum of truth at the bottom of that diatribe I treated you to just now. The average woman is not over-burdened with brains, and she does consider herself a bit of a mystery, which of course she isn’t. Anyhow there’s quite enough truth in it to show you why I’ve got to make love to the excellent Saunderson; as no doubt you now quite understand?’

  ‘No, I’m damned if I do.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t,’ Roger replied, quite cheerfully.

  ‘Still, apparently you think you’ve got to, so it’s no use me saying anything one way or the other.’

  ‘Ah, now that’s more like it,’ Roger approved.

  They left it, and women, at that.

  Before lunch Sheila sought out Roger where he was reading by the fire in the drawing-room.

  ‘I say, you asked me to get you a photograph of Mrs Bentley yesterday, Roger, and I forgot clean about it. I’ve just been down the town and bought one. Here you are.’

  ‘Thanks, Sheila,’ Roger said, unwrapping the paper. ‘Are they on sale in the shops, then?’

  ‘Lord, yes! Everywhere. I only wonder they haven’t got A Present from Wychford printed across the bottom.’

  ‘Local industries, vamping respectable novelists and murdering husbands. Ah, well! So this is the lady, is she? Let’s study her for a minute.’

  With the frank camaraderie of the sexless young animal she still was, Sheila perched herself on the arm of Roger’s chair and leaned on his shoulder, the brim of her little felt hat brushing his cheek as she peered down at the photograph on his knees. They gazed at it in silence. The face was an attractive one, round and full-cheeked in the characteristic Latin fashion, with big, laughing eyes, a mouth full-lipped but not
sensual, tilted nose, delicately drawn brows, a high forehead and very dark, almost certainly black hair; she looked, perhaps twenty-two or three when the photograph was taken, and she was smiling merrily.

  ‘Southern stock, I should say, from the look of her,’ Roger murmured. ‘Up towards Paris you get the Frankish type; this is pure Latin.’

  ‘She might be Italian almost, mightn’t she?’

  ‘Not almost, but quite; it’s the same race. Well, Sheila, what do you think? Can you imagine that woman poisoning her husband, or can’t you?’

  ‘No!’ Sheila said without hesitation. ‘Not for a minute. She’s got too jolly a smile.’

  ‘Don’t be deceived by her smile; try and visualise her face in repose, or in anger for that matter. She’d have a wicked temper, I’ll promise you that. And she’s as passionate as they make ’em. Imagine her wildly, overpoweringly in love with this Allen man and tied to that little middle-aged rat of a husband of hers—longing with all her passionate heart to break free from him! Can’t you imagine her killing him?’

  ‘Oh, yes; easily. But that isn’t what you said. I can imagine her killing him in a blind temper. But she’d stick a knife into him or shoot him—not poison him!’

  Roger twisted round in his chair and looked up into her face. ‘Miss Purefoy,’ he said, and the usual mocking tone was a little faint in his voice, ‘do you know you’re a young woman of really rather remarkable acuteness?’

  ‘I’m not a perfect fool,’ returned Miss Purefoy equably, ‘if that’s what you mean. I never thought I was.’

  ‘How old are you? Eighteen, is it?’

  ‘Nineteen. Getting on for twenty.’

  ‘Nineteen. It’s amazing! And you’ve got as much sense in your little finger as five editions of the average boy of nineteen can muster between them—to say nothing of that irritating property of your own sex known as feminine intuition.’