The Wychford Poisoning Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  ‘Do you know, Roger,’ said Alec with not altogether willing admiration, ‘I really believe you will!’

  ‘Of course I shall. So that’s settled. I’ll go up leisurely after lunch, pop round to my flat and collect passport and so on, and cross this evening. Perhaps I’d better go along now and throw my things into a bag before the bell goes. I like these sudden and soul-shattering decisions; they make one feel so important. You’ll take me to the station and see me off, Miss Purefoy?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Miss Purefoy very airily. ‘Father’ll run you down all right.’

  ‘Father?’ Roger repeated, wheeling round from the door. ‘Did I hear you say “father”? Why not you?’

  Miss Purefoy flushed brightly. ‘Well—’sa matter of fact I promised to do something else this afternoon. Of course, if you particularly want me, I could cut the other thing. But I should think father—’

  ‘Cease this babbling!’ said Roger sternly. ‘What are you doing this afternoon, woman?’

  ‘Playing golf, blast you!’ retorted Miss Purefoy uneasily.

  Roger turned back to the door. ‘Ah me!’ he observed sadly. ‘We have our day, don’t we? We have our day—and cease to be. ’Tis better to have been loved and got lost than—’

  ‘Damn you, Roger! Shut up!’ screamed Miss Purefoy hotly.

  CHAPTER XXV

  ULTIMA THULE

  SO Roger went to Paris.

  Alec had a letter from him a couple of days later, written on the morning after his arrival, and stating that he had already got into touch with the Paris branch of the firm, who were proving very willing and helpful, and that he was in process of making a lifelong friend of the manager. There was also a note enclosed for Sheila, containing a number of quotations bearing upon the word Charles, including a reference to a line in a well-known Jacobite song. Mrs Purefoy also had a letter to thank her for her hospitality and hinting that important developments would be accruing therefrom before very long.

  With earnest endeavour Alec proceeded to tackle the task which had been assigned to him. Every day he went up to London and pursued his inquiries among the business friends and acquaintances of Bentley. The name of the Courier, which he used freely, was a passport that carried him into all fastnesses and caused tongues to wag and brains to be racked to a quite satisfactory extent; for each and all of the artless businessmen cherished the hope of obtaining a little free publicity for themselves and their businesses by being able to contribute some item of information which should cause their names to be starred in the powerful Courier. Unfortunately, however, not a single one of them could produce the least evidence of Bentley not being all that a sane man might be expected to be.

  Nevertheless, to look on the bright side of things, the experience was certainly a very excellent one for Alexander Grierson. Never before in his life had he held converse with so many strangers as he did during those days, and in a very short space of time he had learned how to emerge, when the situation demanded it, so far from his habitual taciturnity as to become on occasions almost chatty. A remarkable tribute to his devotion to duty.

  Nor did Sheila in Wychford have any better luck. Stifling nobly her new-found passion for golf, she threw herself heart and soul into the chase. It is true that she did not have to work quite so hard as Alec, as there was fortunately no necessity for her to proceed on foot from place to place. A large red car conveyed her conveniently and expeditiously from one house to another, and waited patiently outside while she interviewed the occupants. Friends of the dead man, tradesmen, employees, workmen, anybody with whom she could discover that he had ever come into contact, she questioned patiently and tirelessly; but from none could she extract anything of any real importance. It became only too plain that both she and Alec were battering at the wall across a blind alley. They wrote a joint letter to tell Roger so.

  Roger’s reply took the form of a series of telegrams at short intervals. The first one ran as follows:

  ‘Don’t worry on the track of big things here.’

  The next, a few hours later:

  ‘Tremendous discoveries expected.’

  On the following morning:

  ‘Hopes confirmed revolutionary developments.’

  The same afternoon:

  ‘Oh children triumph of your Superintendent.’

  And lastly, the next evening:

  ‘Case ended Alec can go home shall be here some time highly confidential will write later collecting affidavits love to William and Saunderson.’

  Then followed a maddening silence for a whole fortnight. Alec went home, and from both Dorsetshire and Wychford Paris was bombarded with letters and telegrams demanding news, at first politely, then peremptorily and at last with considerable pithiness. To all of them Roger replied not a word. As a matter of actual fact he never got a single one of them, having changed his hotel in Paris and in his excitement quite forgotten to notify the first one of his new address; but this did not transpire till considerably later.

  At last, three weeks or more after Roger’s departure for Paris and only ten days before the date of the assizes at which Mrs Bentley was to be tried, Alec received a long typewritten document from his late colleague accompanied by a letter. It arrived by the first post, and Alec spent the whole of his breakfast time in reading it, with intervals for ejaculations to Barbara, passing the marmalade, and automatic absorption of food.

  It was at Alec’s breakfast-table that the whole business had had its beginning, and it is at Alec’s breakfast-table that we finally take leave of it with Roger’s letter. The letter ran as follows:

  ‘DEAR ALEC and SHEILA (I’m sending copies of this to both of you, my infants, to save typing it out all over again), I know you’ll both have been cursing me like blazes for leaving you in outer darkness all this time, but it simply couldn’t be helped. I’ve been engaged in most delicate and confidential negotiations with solicitors, lawyers and all manner of similar persons, and also with people of no less importance than the Solicitor-General and the Home Secretary themselves (imagine your Roger entering the latter’s room on all fours and kissing the homely secretarial boots; it was a great sight!) and I’ve been put under the most awful vows of secrecy until everything was finally out of the wood. That moment has now arrived, and I can at last give you an account of things.

  ‘I am enclosing a copy of the report which I was finally able to draw up in Paris, copies of which I sent at the time to (a) Mrs Bentley’s solicitor, (b) the Director of Public Prosecutions, and (c) in accordance with my promise, Burgoyne of the Daily Courier. You will see everything set out in orderly form there, and most of it is known to both of you already; this letter is just to point out for our own private edification where we were right, where we were wrong and what I finally discovered in Paris.

  ‘In the first place, then, we were perfectly right all the time in our main assumption of Mrs Bentley’s innocence. Where we were chiefly wrong, at the beginning, was in our thoughtless agreement with the rest of the world that murder had, in fact, been committed. We altered our opinion about this at the end, of course, but even then we were no less wrong in setting it down to suicide and an attempt on Bentley’s part to put a noose round his wife’s neck. I must say I’m rather sorry about this, as I proved it so very convincingly and the whole idea (to say nothing of my subsequent elucidation of it) was so delightfully ingenious. However, we must be truthful: the whole beautiful structure your superintendent erected had no more basis upon fact than had the original theory of the police about which we were all so refreshingly ironical.

  ‘To come straightaway to the heart of the matter, there was one possible explanation of Bentley’s death which, hardly surprisingly, simply never occurred to us at all. We considered that he might have been murdered, we touched on the idea of accident, we founded a pretty case upon the theory of suicide; what we never dreamed of for one moment was that he might have died from natural causes. And that is the explanation of the whole mystery. Mr John
Bentley, my children, did die from natural causes.

  ‘I’m putting the cart before the horse, you’ll understand, because I’m telling you first of all my conclusion before the discoveries which enabled me to form it. These are the discoveries, or rather, the discovery, for they all boil down to this one fact—Bentley was an arsenic-eater! There! That, you see, is the explanation of everything. It explains the more than ordinary fatal dose found in his body (the three grains that would kill any ordinary person were just by way of a snack for Bentley), the presence of arsenic in the medicines and so on, his purchase of it, everything; and it is supported, one might add, by that habit of imbibing arsenical pick-me-ups with such regularity, as I discovered. I’m sorry to have to provide such a tame ending—disappoint you of a dastardly criminal, a full-dress trial and a subsequent execution; but so it is. Real life is one anti-climax after another, you know.

  ‘By the way, in case you don’t know what an arsenic-eater is, I’ll explain that he is a gentleman who makes a practice of taking arsenic in surprisingly large quantities (twice an ordinarily fatal dose, for instance, and followed up perhaps by another equally large one the next day) because he thinks that it bucks him up and puts new life into him, as in certain cases undoubtedly it does. The big doses are worked up to very gradually, of course, habit inducing greater and greater immunity. The classic example of arsenic-eaters are the peasants of Styria, who, as far as I can make out, practically live on it, with the most beneficial results; a sturdier body of men, they tell me, you won’t find anywhere. Never having myself been to Styria and not even yet possessing the faintest idea where Styria may be, this must be taken as hearsay evidence.

  ‘There’s no need to go through the various steps by which I established this singular hobby of Bentley’s; you’ll find it all set forth in the enclosed document. What it all amounts to is that quite early in my investigations over there I noticed that the word “arsenic” was beginning to crop up with increasing frequency, and I simply followed it to its logical conclusion; nearly all the rest of the time I spent in getting the affidavits that are incorporated in the report, sixteen of them altogether, from the various people I was able to unearth who had either seen Bentley taking arsenic in large doses or to whom he had actually spoken with reference to the habit he had formed.

  ‘In Paris, it appears, Bentley (very luckily for his wife) seems hardly to have troubled to conceal his fad, was more proud of it, in fact, than anything else; that is, before his marriage. After it, he was a good deal more reticent, and evidently neither his wife nor his brothers ever had the slightest idea of it. Back in England, he appears never to have said a single word on the subject. Personally, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he wasn’t trying during the last few years to break himself of the habit; and probably he found it very much more difficult to get hold of the stuff than in Paris. Then, when he felt so bad before his last illness, he had one more shot at it, rather in desperation I should judge, considering that he bought it quite openly on his own business card.

  ‘Anyhow, that’s the long and the short of it. Bentley died from natural gastroenteritis set up either by the chill he had caught at the picnic or by impure food, and possibly (one might say, probably) aggravated by the arsenic with which he at once proceeded to treat himself. And in this connection you must remember that, what with the arsenic itself and all the other numberless things he had been dosing himself with, his stomach must have been in a very bad state and you could say that he already had a predisposition to gastroenteritis.

  ‘Of course this clears Mrs Bentley completely. She was speaking the truth when she gave her own explanations of what had happened, you see, as we very intelligently decided to assume. Of course if one wanted to do so, one could found on this case a long tirade against the value of circumstantial evidence, but that would be foolish. Circumstantial evidence can have its dangerous side, of course; and it can lead to a wrongful conviction—as it certainly would have done in this case. We shall hear shrieks in the press about it without doubt, and the columns of the newspapers will be filled for some weeks with hysterical letters from ridiculous people demanding the exclusion of circumstantial evidence from all murder trials, or at the very least the quashing by the court of appeal of all verdicts for the prosecutions obtained on circumstantial evidence alone.

  ‘They might just as well demand the abolition of all trials for murder. For every murder case that can produce direct evidence, at least five hundred have to rely entirely upon circumstantial; and against every mistaken verdict obtained by the latter, at least a thousand correct ones can be set. Whenever I see this old controversy about circumstantial evidence cropping up, I always think of the remarks of Sir Robert Collier, the Solicitor-General, at the trial of Frank Muller—the first railway murder, as you probably don’t know. The murderer took his victim’s hat away with him by mistake and left his own behind. Sir Robert said: “If you discover with certainty the person who wore that hat on that night you will have the murderer, and the case is proved almost as strongly against him as if he was seen to do it.” That this is not in itself a full answer to the arguments against the danger of relying entirely upon circumstantial evidence, I know perfectly well, but I won’t pursue that subject here. All hobby-horses to be kept strictly under control.

  ‘Well, about Mrs Bentley; all this evidence I’ve collected has been put by Mr Matthews (Mrs Bentley’s solicitor) and myself before the Director of Public Prosecutions, and he saw at once that it alters everything. In fact, with the defence bringing it forward at the trial Mrs Bentley’s innocence would be definitely established and a conviction quite impossible. So after a good deal of chin-wagging, and consultation with the Home Secretary and all that sort of thing, it has now been decided that the Crown will not continue the case; in other words, when Mrs Bentley is brought up for trial a nolle prosequi will be entered on behalf of the prosecution.

  ‘And that, I think, is really all there is to tell you. It was an interesting little exercise in psychology, and the amazing thing is how right we were and how wrong. I think the conclusions we formed about each one of those seven people was perfectly right from the psychological point of view, only in the cases of Allen, Brother William and Mrs Bentley herself were our deductions therefrom equally correct. Brother Alfred we maligned most dreadfully, and Mrs Allen still worse. Still more amazing was the situation—seven people with a perfectly good motive for killing Bentley, and yet he died a natural death! To my mind, this is hardly playing the game on Bentley’s part. The fact of the matter was that we paid too much attention to the psychological possibilities, and not enough to hard fact; we allowed ourselves to be led away by fascinating but really quite untenable hypothesis about perfectly respectable citizens.

  ‘For the rest, one or two things still remain a trifle vague, but as they have nothing whatever to do with the case we won’t let them worry us. Brother William, for instance. He really was thoroughly alarmed that day in his office when I suggested that other unpleasant things might come to light concerning a male member of the Bentley family. It’s my belief that the truth is that he has a few private peccadillos of his own on his conscience, and was terrified lest the Saunderson should get to hear of them. I suppose that engagement will be announced soon now—unless Brother William manages to retreat before it’s too late. I am also inclined to believe that Mrs Bentley’s affair with Allen was not the first of its kind, and both Brother William and Brother Alfred knew that this was so; but that is pure guess-work.

  ‘All the others, of course, even Mary Blower, emerge with stainless characters—or fairly stainless; but in only one case will I recant absolutely the first estimate I formed, and that is Mrs Allen’s. I’ve seen a good bit of Allen lately (they’ve had him on the carpet to be questioned and so on), and once or twice he’s taken me back to Wychford to dine. Mrs Allen is a real sportsman—and a jolly shrewd judge of human nature into the bargain; she may be an “ice-box” in certain matters, but if so there’
s a lot to be said for ice-boxes. She takes Allen exactly as he is, has quite forgiven him what he did and is altogether a most admirable person and wife; I like her immensely. She’s one of the few women I’ve ever met who are able to take a man as the Lord made him, and not try to re-model the pattern herself. A very rare gift, my dear Sheila!

  ‘Well, au revoir, mes enfants (you see the effect of my recent visit). Sheila, I shall be coming to Wychford shortly to pay my respects to your excellent parents and thank them for what they did, and I shall expect you to cancel any engagements with a red motor-car that you may have for that day; please show them this report so that they can see that their sufferings were not in vain. Alec, kindly give my humble devotion to Barbara and ask her if I may come to Dorsetshire in the near future and finish my visit before I have to buckle down to my next confounded book; and as her answer will certainly be “yes,” please thank her for me at the same time.

  ‘Your late Superintendant, and still Superior,

  ‘ROGER SHERINGHAM.’

  THE END

  Footnote

  fn1 Murder and Its Motives, by F. Tennyson Jesse.

  THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB

  LIST OF TITLES

  THE MAYFAIR MYSTERY • FRANK RICHARDSON

  THE PERFECT CRIME • ISRAEL ZANGWILL

  CALLED BACK • HUGH CONWAY

  THE MYSTERY OF THE SKELETON KEY • BERNARD CAPES

  THE GRELL MYSTERY • FRANK FROËST

  DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE • R. L. STEVENSON

  THE RASP • PHILIP MACDONALD

  THE HOUSE OPPOSITE • J. JEFFERSON FARJEON

  THE PONSON CASE • FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

  THE TERROR • EDGAR WALLACE

  THE MYSTERY AT STOWE • VERNON LODER

  THE BLACKMAILERS • ÉMILE GABORIAU