Chief Inspector Moresby, having stood up and blushingly received his
tribute of hand-claps, was invited to address the gathering from his
chair and thankfully retired into that shelter. Consulting the sheaf
of notes in his hand, he began to enlighten his very attentive
audience as to the strange circumstances connected with Mrs. Bendix’s
untimely death. Without reproducing his own words, and all the
numerous supplementary questions which punctuated his story, the gist
of what he had to tell was as follows:—
On Friday morning, the fifteenth of November, Graham Bendix strolled
into his club, the Rainbow, in Piccadilly, at about ten-thirty and
asked if there were any letters for him. The porter handed him a
letter and a couple of circulars, and he walked over to the fireplace
in the hall to read them.
While he was doing so another member entered the club. This was a
middle-aged baronet, Sir Eustace Pennefather, who had rooms just round
the corner, in Berkeley Street, but spent most of his time at the
Rainbow. The porter glanced up at the clock, as he did every morning
when Sir Eustace came in, and, as always, it was exactly half-past
ten. The time was thus definitely fixed by the porter beyond any
doubt.
There were three letters and a small parcel for Sir Eustace, and he,
too, took them over to the fireplace to open, nodding to Bendix as he
joined him there. The two men knew each other only very slightly and
had probably never exchanged more than half-a-dozen words in all.
There were no other members in the hall just then.
Having glanced through his letters, Sir Eustace opened the parcel and
snorted with disgust. Bendix looked at him enquiringly, and with a
grunt Sir Eustace thrust out the letter which had been enclosed in the
parcel, adding an uncomplimentary remark upon modern trade methods.
Concealing a smile (Sir Eustace’s habits and opinions were a matter of
some amusement to his fellow-members), Bendix read the letter. It was
from the firm of Mason & Sons, the big chocolate manufacturers, and
was to the effect that they had just put on the market a new brand of
liqueur-chocolates designed especially to appeal to the cultivated
palates of Men of Taste. Sir Eustace being, presumably, a Man of
Taste, would he be good enough to honour Mr. Mason and his sons by
accepting the enclosed one-pound box, and any criticisms or
appreciation that he might have to make concerning them would be
esteemed almost more than a favour.
“Do they think I’m a blasted chorus-girl,” fumed Sir Eustace, a
choleric man, “to write ’em testimonials about their blasted
chocolates? Blast ’em! I’ll complain to the blasted committee. That
sort of blasted thing can’t blasted well be allowed here.” For the
Rainbow Club, as every one knows, is a very proud and exclusive club
indeed, with an unbroken descent from the Rainbow Coffee-House,
founded in 1734. Not even a family founded by a king’s bastard can be
quite so exclusive to-day as a club founded on a coffee-house.
“Well, it’s an ill wind so far as I’m concerned,” Bendix soothed him.
“It’s reminded me of something. I’ve got to get some chocolates
myself, to pay an honourable debt. My wife and I had a box at the
Imperial last night, and I bet her a box of chocolates to a hundred
cigarettes that she wouldn’t spot the villain by the end of the second
act. She won. I must remember to get them. It’s not a bad show. _The
Creaking Skull_. Have you seen it?”
“Not blasted likely,” replied the other, unsoothed. “Got something
better to do than sit and watch a lot of blasted fools messing about
with phosphorescent paint and pooping off blasted pop-guns at each
other. Want a box of chocolates, did you say? Well, take this blasted
one.”
The money saved by this offer had no weight with Bendix. He was a very
wealthy man, and probably had enough on him in actual cash to buy a
hundred such boxes. But trouble is always worth saving. “Sure you
don’t want them?” he demurred politely.
In Sir Eustace’s reply only one word, several times repeated, was
clearly recognisable. But his meaning was plain. Bendix thanked him
and, most unfortunately for himself, accepted the gift.
By an extraordinarily lucky chance the wrapper of the box was not
thrown into the fire, either by Sir Eustace in his indignation or by
Bendix himself when the whole collection, box, covering letter,
wrapper and string, was shovelled into his hands by the almost
apoplectic baronet. This was the more fortunate as both men had
already tossed the envelopes of their letters into the flames.
Bendix however merely walked over to the porter’s desk and deposited
everything there, asking the man to keep the box for him. The porter
put the box aside, and threw the wrapper into the waste-paper basket.
The covering letter had fallen unnoticed from Bendix’s hand as he
walked across the floor. This the porter tidily picked up a few
minutes later and put in the waste-paper basket too, whence, with the
wrapper, it was retrieved later by the police.
These two articles, it may be said at once, constituted two of the
only three tangible clues to the murder, the third of course being the
chocolates themselves.
Of the three unconscious protagonists in the impending tragedy, Sir
Eustace was by far the most remarkable. Still a year or two under
fifty, he looked, with his flaming red face and thickset figure, a
typical country squire of the old school, and both his manners and his
language were in accordance with tradition. There were other
resemblances too, but they were equally on the surface. The voices of
the country squires of the old school were often slightly husky
towards late middle age, but it was not with whisky. They hunted, and
so did Sir Eustace, with avidity; but the country squires confined
their hunting to foxes, and Sir Eustace was far more catholic in his
predatory tastes. Sir Eustace in short, without doubt, was a
thoroughly bad baronet. But his vices were all on the large scale,
with the usual result that most other men, good or bad, liked him well
enough (except perhaps a few husbands here and there, or a father or
two), and women openly hung on his husky words.
In comparison with him Bendix was rather an ordinary man, a tall,
dark, not unhandsome fellow of eight-and-twenty, quiet and somewhat
reserved, popular in a way but neither inviting nor apparently
reciprocating anything beyond a somewhat grave friendliness.
He had been left a rich man on the death five years ago of his father,
who had made a fortune out of land-sites, which he had bought up in
undeveloped areas with an uncanny foresight to sell later, at never
less than ten times what he had given for them, when surrounded by
houses and factories erected with other people’s money. “Just sit
tight and let other people make you rich,” had been his motto, and a
very sound one it proved. His son, though left with an income that
precluded any necessity to work, had evidently inherited his father’s
tendencies, for he had a finger in a good many business pies just (as
he explained a little apologetically) out of sheer love of the most
exciting game in the world.
Money attracts money. Graham Bendix had inherited it, he made it, and
inevitably he married it too. The orphaned daughter of a Liverpool
ship-owner she was, with not far off half-a-million in her own right
to bring to Bendix, who needed it not at all. But the money was
incidental, for he needed her if not her fortune, and would have
married her just as inevitably (said his friends) if she had had not a
farthing.
She was so exactly his type. A tall, rather serious-minded,
highly-cultured girl, not so young that her character had not had time
to form (she was twenty-five when Bendix married her, three years
ago), she was the ideal wife for him. A bit of a Puritan, perhaps, in
some ways, but Bendix himself was ready enough to be a Puritan by then
if Joan Cullompton was.
For in spite of the way he developed later Bendix had sown as a youth
a few wild oats in the normal way. Stage-doors, that is to say, had
not been entirely strange to him. His name had been mentioned in
connection with that of more than one frail and fluffy lady. He had
managed, in short, to amuse himself, discreetly but by no means
clandestinely, in the usual manner of young men with too much money
and too few years. But all that, again in the ordinary way, had
stopped with his marriage.
He was openly devoted to his wife and did not care who knew it, while
she too, if a trifle less obviously, was equally said to wear her
heart on her sleeve. To make no bones about it, the Bendixes had
apparently succeeded in achieving that eighth wonder of the modern
world, a happy marriage.
And into the middle of it there dropped, like a clap of thunder, the
box of chocolates.
“After depositing the box of chocolates with the porter,” Moresby
continued, shuffling his papers to find the right one, “Mr. Bendix
followed Sir Eustace into the lounge, where he was reading the
_Morning Post_.”
Roger nodded approval. There was no other paper that Sir Eustace could
possibly have been reading but the _Morning Post_.
Bendix himself proceeded to study _The Daily Telegraph_. He was rather
at a loose end that morning. There were no board meetings for him, and
none of the businesses in which he was interested called him out into
the rain of a typical November day. He spent the rest of the morning
in an aimless way, read the daily papers, glanced through the
weeklies, and played a hundred up at billiards with another member
equally idle. At about half-past twelve he went back to lunch to his
house in Eaton Square, taking the chocolates with him.
Mrs. Bendix had given orders that she would not be in to lunch that
day, but her appointment had been cancelled and she too was lunching
at home. Bendix gave her the box of chocolates after the meal as they
were sitting over their coffee in the drawing-room, explaining how
they had come into his possession. Mrs. Bendix laughingly teased him
about his meanness in not buying her a box, but approved the make and
was interested to try the firm’s new variety. Joan Bendix was not so
serious-minded as not to have a healthy feminine interest in good
chocolates.
Their appearance, however, did not seem to impress her very much.
“Kümmel, Kirsch, Maraschino,” she said, delving with her fingers among
the silver-wrappered sweets, each bearing the name of its filling in
neat blue lettering. “Nothing else, apparently. I don’t see anything
new here, Graham. They’ve just taken those three kinds out of their
ordinary liqueur-chocolates.”
“Oh?” said Bendix, who was not particularly interested in chocolates.
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters much. All liqueur-chocolates taste
the same to me.”
“Yes, and they’ve even packed them in their usual liqueur-chocolate
box,” complained his wife, examining the lid.
“They’re only a sample,” Bendix pointed out. “They may not have got
the right boxes ready yet.”
“I don’t believe there’s the slightest difference,” Mrs. Bendix
pronounced, unwrapping a Kümmel. She held the box out to her husband.
“Have one?”
He shook his head. “No, thank you, dear. You know I never eat the
things.”
“Well, you’ve got to have one of these, as a penance for not buying me
a proper box. Catch!” She threw him one. As he caught it she made a
wry face. “Oh! I was wrong. These are different. They’re twenty times
as strong.”
“Well, they can bear at least that,” Bendix smiled, thinking of the
usual anæmic sweetmeat sold under the name of chocolate-liqueur.
He put the one she had given him in his mouth and bit it up; a burning
taste, not intolerable but far too pronounced to be pleasant, followed
the release of the liquid. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I should think
they are strong. I believe they’ve filled them with neat alcohol.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t do that, surely,” said his wife, unwrapping
another. “But they are very strong. It must be the new mixture.
Really, they almost burn. I’m not sure whether I like them or not. And
that Kirsch one tasted far too strongly of almonds. This may be
better. You try a Maraschino too.”
To humour her he swallowed another, and disliked it still more.
“Funny,” he remarked, touching the roof of his mouth with the tip of
his tongue. “My tongue feels quite numb.”
“So did mine at first,” she agreed. “Now it’s tingling rather. Well, I
don’t notice any difference between the Kirsch and the Maraschino. And
they do burn! I can’t make up my mind whether I like them or not.”
“I don’t,” Bendix said with decision. “I think there’s something wrong
with them. I shouldn’t eat any more if I were you.”
“Well, they’re only an experiment, I suppose,” said his wife.
A few minutes later Bendix went out, to keep an appointment in the
City. He left his wife still trying to make up her mind whether she
liked the chocolates or not, and still eating them to decide. Her last
words to him were that they were making her mouth burn again so much
that she was afraid she would not be able to manage any more.
“Mr. Bendix remembers that conversation very clearly,” said Moresby,
looking round at the intent faces, “because it was the last time he
saw his wife alive.”
The conversation in the drawing-room had taken place approximately
between a quarter-past and half-past two. Bendix kept his appointment
in the City at three, where he stayed for about half-an-hour, and then
took a taxi back to his club for tea.
He had been feeling extremely ill during his business-talk, and in the
taxi he very nearly collapsed; the driver had to summon the porter to
help get him out and into the club. They both described him as pale to
the point of ghastliness, with staring eyes and livid lips, and his
skin damp and clammy. His mind seemed unaffected, however, and once
they had got him up the steps he was able to walk, with the help of
the porter’s arm, into the lounge.
The porter, alarmed by his appearance, wanted to send for a doctor at
once, but Bendix, who was the last man to make a fuss, absolutely
refused to let him, saying that it could only be a bad attack of
indigestion and that he would be all right in a few minutes; he must
have eaten something that disagreed with him. The porter was doubtful,
but left him.
Bendix repeated this diagnosis of his own condition a few minutes
later to Sir Eustace Pennefather, who was in the lounge at the time,
not having left the club at all. But this time Bendix added: “And I
believe it was those infernal chocolates you gave me, now I come to
think of it. I thought there was something funny about them at the
time. I’d better go and ring up my wife and find out if she’s been
taken like this too.”
Sir Eustace, a kind-hearted man, who was no less shocked than the
porter at Bendix’s appearance, was perturbed by the suggestion that he
might in any way be responsible for it, and offered to go and ring up
Mrs. Bendix himself as the other was in no fit condition to move.
Bendix was about to reply when a strange change came over him. His
body, which had been leaning limply back in his chair, suddenly heaved
rigidly upright; his jaws locked together, the livid lips drawn back
in a hideous grin, and his hands clenched on the arms of the chair. At
the same time Sir Eustace became aware of an unmistakable smell of
bitter almonds.
Thoroughly alarmed now, believing indeed that Bendix was dying under
his eyes, he raised a shout for the porter and a doctor. There were
two or three other men at the further end of the big room (in which a
shout had probably never been heard before in the whole course of its
history) and these hurried up at once. Sir Eustace sent one off to
tell the porter to get hold of the nearest doctor without a second’s
delay, and enlisted the others to try to make the convulsed body a
little more comfortable. There was no doubt among them that Bendix had
taken poison. They spoke to him, asking how he felt and what they
could do for him, but he either would not or could not answer. As a
matter of fact, he was completely unconscious.
Before the doctor had arrived, a telephone message was received from
an agitated butler asking if Mr. Bendix was there, and if so would he
come home at once as Mrs. Bendix had been taken seriously ill.
At the house in Eaton Square matters had been taking much the same
course with Mrs. Bendix as with her husband, though a little more
rapidly. She remained for half-an-hour or so in the drawing-room after
the latter’s departure, during which time she must have eaten about
three more of the chocolates. She then went up to her bedroom and rang
for her maid, to whom she said that she felt very ill and was going to
lie down for a time. Like her husband, she ascribed her condition to a
violent attack of indigestion.
The maid mixed her a draught from a bottle of indigestion-powder,
which consisted mainly of bicarbonate of soda and bismuth, and brought
her a hot-water bottle, leaving her lying on the bed. Her description
of her mistress’s appearance tallied exactly with the porter’s and
taxi-man’s description of Bendix, but unlike them she did not seem to
have been alarmed by it. She admitted later to the opinion that Mrs.
Bendix, though anything but a greedy woman, must have overeaten
herself at lunch.
At a quarter past three there was a violent ring from the bell in Mrs.
Bendix’s room.
The girl hurried upstairs and found her mistress apparently in a
cataleptic fit, unconscious and rigid. Thoroughly frightened now, she
wasted some precious minutes in ineffectual attempts to bring her
round, and then hurried downstairs to telephone for the doctor. The
practitioner who regularly attended the house was not at home, and it
was some time before the butler, who had found the half-hysterical
girl at the telephone and taken matters into his own hands, could get
into communication with another. By the time the latter did get there,
nearly half-an-hour after Mrs. Bendix’s bell had rung, she was past
help. Coma had set in, and in spite of everything the doctor could do
she died in less than ten minutes after his arrival.
She was, in fact, already dead when the butler telephoned to the
Rainbow Club.