The President called on Mr. Bradley to hold forth.
Mr. Bradley stroked his moustache and mentally shot his cuffs.
He had begun his career (when still Percy Robinson) as a
motor-salesman, and had discovered that there is more money in
manufacturing. Now he manufactured detective stories, and found his
former experience of the public’s gullibility not unhelpful. He was
still his own salesman, but occasionally had difficulty in remembering
that he was no longer mounted on a stand at Olympia. Everything and
everybody in this world, including Morton Harrogate Bradley, he
heartily despised, except only Percy Robinson. He sold, in tens of
thousands.
“This is rather unfortunate for me,” he began, in the correct
gentlemanly drawl, as if addressing an audience of morons. “I had
rather been under the impression that I should be expected to produce
as a murderer the most unlikely person, in the usual tradition; and
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming has cut the ground away from under my feet. I
don’t see how I can possibly find you a more unlikely murderer than
Sir Charles here. All of us who have the misfortune to speak after
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming will have to be content to pile up so many
anti-climaxes.
“Not that I haven’t done my best. I studied the case according to my
own lights, and it led me to a conclusion which certainly surprised
myself quite a lot. But as I said, after the last speaker it will
probably seem to everybody else a dismal anti-climax. Let me see now,
where did I begin? Oh, yes; with the poison.
“Now the use of nitrobenzene as the poisoning agent interested me
quite a lot. I find it extremely significant. Nitrobenzene is the last
thing one would expect inside those chocolates. I’ve made something of
a study of poisons, in connection with my work, and I’ve never heard
of nitrobenzene being employed in a criminal case before. There are
cases on record of its use in suicide, and in accidental poisoning,
but not more than three or four all told.
“I’m surprised that this point doesn’t seem to have struck either of
my predecessors. The really interesting thing is that so few people
know nitrobenzene as a poison at all. Even the experts don’t. I was
speaking to a man who got a Science scholarship at Cambridge and
specialised in chemistry, and he had actually never heard of it as a
poison. As a matter of fact I found I knew a good deal more about it
than he did. A commercial chemist would certainly never think of it as
among the ordinary poisons. It isn’t even listed as such, and the list
is comprehensive enough. Well, all this seems most significant to me.
“Then there are other points about it. It’s used most extensively in
commerce. In fact it’s the kind of thing that might be used in almost
any manufacture. It’s a solvent, of quite a universal kind. We’ve been
told that its chief use is in making aniline dyes. That may be the
most important one, but it certainly isn’t the most extensive. It’s
used a lot in confectionery, as we were also told, and in perfumery as
well. But really I can’t attempt to give you a list of its uses. They
range from chocolates to motor-car tyres. The important thing is that
it’s perfectly easy to get hold of.
“For that matter it’s perfectly easy to make too. Any schoolboy knows
how to treat benzol with nitric acid to get nitrobenzene. I’ve done it
myself a hundred times. The veriest smattering of chemical knowledge
is all that’s wanted, and nothing in the way of expensive apparatus.
Or, so far as that goes, it could be done equally by somebody without
any chemical knowledge at all; that is, the actual process of making
it. Oh, and it could be made quite secretly by the way. Nobody need
even guess. But I think just a little chemical knowledge at any rate
would be wanted, ever to set one about making it at all. At least, for
this particular purpose.
“Well, so far as the case as a whole was concerned, this use of
nitrobenzene seemed to me not only the sole original feature but by
far the most important piece of evidence. Not in the way that prussic
acid is valuable evidence for the reason that prussic acid is so hard
to obtain, because once its use was determined anybody could get hold
of or make nitrobenzene, and that of course is a tremendous point in
favour of it from the would-be murderer’s point of view. No, what I
mean is that the sort of person who would ever think of employing the
stuff at all ought to be definable within surprisingly narrow limits.”
Mr. Bradley stopped a moment to light a cigarette, and if he was
secretly pleased that his fellow-members showed the extent to which he
had engaged their interest by not uttering a word until he was ready
to go on, he did not divulge the fact. Surveying them for a moment as
if inspecting a class composed entirely of half-wits, he took up his
argument again.
“First of all, then, we can credit this user of nitrobenzene with a
minimum at any rate of chemical knowledge. Or perhaps I ought to
qualify that. Either chemical knowledge, or specialised knowledge. A
chemist’s assistant, for instance, who was interested enough in his
job to read it up after shop-hours would fit the bill for the first
case, and a woman employed in a factory where nitrobenzene was used
and where the employees had been warned against its poisonous
properties would do for an example of the second. There are two kinds
of person, it seems to me, who might think of using the stuff as a
poison at all, and the first kind is subdivided into the two classes
I’ve mentioned.
“But it’s the second kind that I think we are much more probably
dealing with in this crime. This is a more intelligent sort of person
altogether.
“In this category the chemist’s assistant becomes an amateur dabbler
in chemistry, the girl in the factory a woman-doctor, let us say, with
an interest in toxicology, or, to get away from the specialist, a
highly intelligent lady with a strong interest in criminology
particularly on its toxicological side—just, in fact, like Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming here.” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming gasped indignantly and
Sir Charles, though momentarily startled at the unexpected quarter
from which was dealt this tit for the tats he had lately suffered at
the gasping lady’s hands, emitted the next instant a sound which from
anybody else could only have been described as a guffaw. “All of them,
you understand,” continued Mr. Bradley with complete serenity, “the
kind of people who might be expected not only to keep a Taylor’s
Medical Jurisprudence on their shelves but to consult it frequently.
“I agree with you, you see, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, that the method of
this crime does show traces of criminological knowledge. You cited one
case which was certainly a remarkable parallel, Sir Charles cited
another, and I am going to cite yet a third. It is a regular jumble of
old cases, and I am quite sure, as you are, that this is something
more than a mere coincidence. I’d arrived at this conclusion myself,
of criminological knowledge, before you mentioned it at all, and I was
helped to it as well by the strong feeling that whoever sent those
chocolates to Sir Eustace possesses a Taylor. That is a pure guess, I
admit, but in my copy of Taylor the article on nitrobenzene occurs on
the very next page after cyanide of potassium; and there seems to me
food for thought there.” The speaker paused a moment.
Mr. Chitterwick nodded. “I think I see. You mean, anybody deliberately
searching the pages for a poison that would fulfil certain
requirements. . . ?”
“Exactly,” Mr. Bradley concurred.
“You lay great stress on this matter of the poison,” Sir Charles
remarked, almost genial. “Do you tell us that you think you’ve
identified the murderer by deductions drawn from this one point
alone?”
“No, Sir Charles, I don’t think I can go quite so far as that. I lay
so much stress on it because, as I said, it’s the only really original
feature of the crime. By itself it won’t solve the problem, but
considered in conjunction with other features I do think it should go
a long way towards doing so—or at any rate provide such a check on a
person suspected for other reasons as to turn suspicion into
certainty.
“Let’s look at it for instance in the light of the crime as a whole. I
think the first thing one realises is that this crime is the work not
only of an intelligent person but of a well-educated one too. Well,
you see, that rules out at once the first division of people who might
be expected to think of using nitrobenzene as the poisoning agent.
Gone are our chemist’s assistant and our factory-girl. We can
concentrate on our intelligent, well-educated person, with an interest
in criminology, some knowledge of toxicology, and, if I’m not very
much mistaken (and I very seldom am), a copy of Taylor or some similar
book on his or her shelves.
“That, my dear Watsons, is what the criminal’s singular choice of
nitrobenzene has to tell me.” And Mr. Bradley stroked the growth on
his upper lip with an offensive complacency that was not wholly
assumed. Mr. Bradley took some pains to impress on the world how
pleased he was with himself, but the pose was not without its
foundation in fact.
“Most ingenious, certainly,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, duly impressed.
“So now let’s get on with it,” observed Miss Dammers, not at all
impressed. “What’s your theory? That is, if you’ve really got one.”
“Oh, I’ve got one all right.” Mr. Bradley smiled in a superior manner.
This was the first time he had succeeded in provoking Miss Dammers to
snap at him, and he was rather pleased. “But let’s take things in
their proper order. I want to show you how inevitably I was led to my
conclusion, and I can only do that by tracing out my own footsteps, so
to speak. Having made my deductions from the poison itself, then, I
set about examining the other clues to see if they would lead me to a
result that I could check by the other. First of all I concentrated on
the notepaper of the forged letter, the only really valuable clue
apart from the poison.
“Now this piece of notepaper puzzled me. For some reason, which I
couldn’t identify, the name of Mason’s seemed to strike a reminiscent
note to me. I felt sure that I’d heard of Mason’s in some other
connection than just through their excellent chocolates. At last I
remembered.
“I’m afraid I must touch here on the personal, and I apologise in
advance, Sir Charles, for the lapse of taste. My sister, before she
married, was a shorthand-typist.” Mr. Bradley’s extreme languor all of
a sudden indicated that he felt this connection needed some defence
and was determined not to give it. The next instant he gave it. “That
is to say, her education put her on rather a different level from the
usual shorthand-typist, and she was, in point of fact, a trained
secretary.
“She had joined an establishment run by a lady who supplied
secretaries to business firms to take the places temporarily of girls
in responsible positions who were ill, or away on holiday, or anything
like that. Including my sister there were only two or three girls at
the place, and the posts they went to only lasted as a rule for two or
three weeks. Each girl would therefore have a good many such posts in
the course of a year. However, I did remember distinctly that one of
the firms to which my sister went while she was there was Mason’s, as
temporary secretary to one of the directors.
“This seemed to me possibly useful. It wouldn’t be likely that she
could throw a sidelight on the murder, but at any rate she might be
able to give me introductions to one or two members of Mason’s staff
if necessary. So I went down to see her about it.
“She remembered quite well. It was between three and four years ago,
and she liked being there so much that she had thought quite seriously
of putting in for a permanent secretaryship with the firm, should one
be available. Naturally she hadn’t got to know any of the staff really
well, but quite enough to give me the introductions if I wanted them.
“‘By the way,’ I happened to say to her casually, ‘I saw the letter
that was sent to Sir Eustace with the chocolates, and not only Mason’s
name but the actual paper itself struck me as familiar. I suppose you
wrote to me on it while you were there?’
“‘I don’t know that I ever did that,’ she said, ‘but of course the
paper was familiar to you. You’ve played paper-games here often
enough, haven’t you? You know we always use it. It’s such a convenient
size.’ Paper-games, I should explain, have always been a favourite
thing in our family.
“It’s funny how a connection will stick in the mind, but not the
actual circumstances of it. Of course I remembered then at once. There
was quite a pile of the paper, in one of the drawers of my sister’s
writing-table. I’d often torn it into strips for our paper-games
myself.
“‘But how did you get hold of it?’ I asked her.
“It seemed to me that she answered rather evasively, just saying that
she’d got it from the office when she was working there. I pressed
her, and at last she told me that one evening she was just on the
point of leaving the office when she remembered that some friends were
coming in after dinner at home. We should almost certainly play a
paper-game of some kind, and we had run out of suitable paper. She
hurried up the stairs again back to the office, dumped her
attaché-case on the table and opened it, hastily snatched up some
paper from the pile beside her typewriter, and threw it into the case.
In her hurry she didn’t realise how much she’d taken, and that supply,
which was supposed to tide us over one evening, had actually lasted
for nearly four years. She must have taken something like half a ream.
“Well, I went away from my sister’s house rather startled. Before I
left I examined the remaining sheets, and so far as I could see they
were exactly like the one on which the letter was typed. Even the
edges were a little discoloured too. I was more than startled: I was
alarmed. Because I ought to tell you that it had already occurred to
me that of all the ways of going about the search for the person who
had sent that letter to Sir Eustace, the one that seemed most hopeful
was to look for its writer among the actual employees, or
ex-employees, of the firm itself.
“As a matter of fact this discovery of mine had a more disconcerting
side still. On thinking over the case the idea had struck me that in
the two matters of the notepaper and the method itself of the crime it
was quite possible that the police, and every one else, had been
putting the cart before the horse. It had been taken for granted
apparently that the murderer had first of all decided on the method,
and then set about getting hold of the notepaper to carry it out.
“But isn’t it far more feasible that the notepaper should have been
already there, in the criminal’s ownership, and that it was the chance
possession of it which actually suggested the method of the crime? In
that case, of course, the likelihood of the notepaper being traced to
the murderer would be very small indeed, whereas in the other case
there is always that possibility. Had that occurred to you for
instance, Mr. President?”
“I must admit that it hadn’t,” Roger confessed. “And yet, like
Holmes’s tricks, the possibility’s evident enough now it’s brought
forward. I must say, it strikes me as being a very sound point,
Bradley.”
“Psychologically, of course,” agreed Miss Dammers, “it’s perfect.”
“Thank you,” murmured Mr. Bradley. “Then you’ll be able to understand
just how disconcerting that discovery of mine was. Because if there
was anything in that point at all, anybody who had in his or her
possession some old notepaper of Mason’s, with slightly discoloured
edges, immediately became suspect.”
“Hr-r-r-r-mph!” Sir Charles cleared his throat forcibly by way of
comment. The implication was obvious. Gentlemen don’t suspect their
own sisters.
“Dear, dear,” clucked Mr. Chitterwick, more humanly.
Mr. Bradley went on to pile up the agony. “And there was another
thing, which I could not overlook. My sister before she went in for
her training as a secretary, had played with the idea of becoming a
hospital nurse. She went through a short course in nursing as a young
girl, and was always thoroughly interested in it. She would read not
only books on nursing itself, but medical books too. Several times,”
said Mr. Bradley solemnly, “I’ve seen her studying my own copy of
Taylor, apparently quite absorbed in it.”
He paused again, but this time nobody commented. The general feeling
was that this was getting really too much of a good thing.
“Well, I went home and thought it over. Of course it seemed absurd to
put my own sister on the list of suspects, and at the very head of it
too. One doesn’t connect one’s own circle with the idea of murder. The
two things don’t mix at all. Yet I couldn’t fail to realise that if it
had been anybody else in question but my sister I should be feeling
quite jubilant over the prospect of solving the case. But as things
were, what was I to do?
“In the end,” said Mr. Bradley smugly, “I did what I thought my duty
and faced the situation. I went back to my sister’s house the next day
and asked her squarely whether she had ever had any kind of relations
with Sir Eustace Pennefather, and if so what. She looked at me blankly
and said that up till the time of the murder she had never heard of
the man. I believed her. I asked her if she could remember what she
had been doing on the evening before the murder. She looked at me
still more blankly and said that she had been in Manchester with her
husband at that time, they had stayed at the Peacock Hotel, and in the
evening had been to a cinema where they had seen a film called, so far
as she could recall, _Fires of Fate_. Again I believed her.
“As a matter of routine precaution however I checked her statements
later and found them perfectly correct; for the time of the posting of
the parcel she had an unshakable alibi. I felt more relieved than I
can say.” Mr. Bradley spoke in a low voice, with pathos and restraint,
but Roger caught his eye as he looked up and there was a mocking glint
in it which made the President feel vaguely uneasy. The trouble with
Mr. Bradley was that one never quite knew with him.
“Having drawn a blank with my first ticket, then, I tabulated the
conclusions I’d formed to date and set about considering the other
points in the case.
“It then struck me that the Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard had
been somewhat reticent about the evidence that night he addressed us.
So I rang him up and asked him a few questions that had occurred to
me. From him I learnt that the typewriter was a Hamilton No. 4, that
is, the ordinary Hamilton model; that the hand-printed address on the
cover was written with a fountain-pen, almost certainly an Onyx fitted
with a medium-broad nib; that the ink was Harfield’s Fountain-Pen Ink;
and that there was nothing to be learned from the wrapping-paper
(ordinary brown) or the string. That there were no finger-prints
anywhere we had been told.
“Well, I suppose I ought not to admit it, considering how I earn my
living, but upon my soul I haven’t the faintest idea how a
professional detective goes about a job of work,” said Mr. Bradley
with candour. “It’s easy enough in a book, of course, because there
are a certain number of things which the author wants found out and
these he lets his detective discover, and no others. In real life, no
doubt, it doesn’t pan out quite like that.
“Anyhow, what I did was to copy my own detectives’ methods and set
about the business in as systematic a way as I could. That is to say,
I made a careful list of all the available evidence, both as to fact
and to character (and it was surprising how much there was when one
came to tabulate it), and drew as many deductions as I could from each
piece, at the same time trying to keep a perfectly open mind as to the
identity of the person who was to hatch out from my nest of completed
conclusions.
“In other words,” said Mr. Bradley, not without severity, “I did _not_
decide that Lady A or Sir Somebody B had such a good motive for the
crime that she or he must undoubtedly have done it, and then twist my
evidence to fit this convenient theory.”
“Hear, hear!” Roger felt constrained to approve.
“Hear, hear!” echoed in turn both Alicia Dammers and Mr. Ambrose
Chitterwick.
Sir Charles and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming glanced at each other and then
hastily away again, for all the world like two children in a
Sunday-school who have been caught doing quite the wrong thing
together.
“Dear me,” murmured Mr. Bradley, “this is all very exhausting. May I
have five minutes’ rest, Mr. President, and half a cigarette?”
The President kindly gave Mr. Bradley an interval in which to restore
himself.