When the excitement that greeted this revolutionary reading of the
case had died down, Roger went on to defend his theory in more detail.
“It _is_ something of a shock, of course, to find oneself
contemplating Bendix as the very cunning murderer of his own wife, but
really, once one has been able to rid one’s mind of all prejudice, I
don’t see how the conclusion can possibly be avoided. Every item of
evidence, however minute, goes to support it.”
“But the motive!” ejaculated Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
“Motive? Good heavens, he’d motive enough. In the first place he was
frankly—no, not frankly; secretly!—tired of her. Remember what we were
told of his character. He’d sown his wild oats. But apparently he
hadn’t finished sowing them, because his name has been mentioned in
connection with more than one woman even since his marriage, usually,
in the good old-fashioned way, actresses. So Bendix wasn’t such a
solemn stick by any means. He liked his fun. And his wife, I should
imagine, was just about the last person in the world to sympathise
with such feelings.
“Not that he hadn’t liked her well enough when he married her, quite
possibly, though it was her money he was after all the time. But she
must have bored him dreadfully very soon. And really,” said Roger
impartially, “I think one can hardly blame him there. Any woman,
however charming otherwise, is bound to bore a normal man if she does
nothing but prate continually about honour and duty and playing the
game; and that, I have on good authority, was Mrs. Bendix’s habit.
“Just look at the _ménage_ in this new light. The wife would never
overlook the smallest peccadillo. Every tiny lapse would be thrown up
at him for years. Everything she did would be right and everything he
did wrong. Her sanctimonious righteousness would be forever being
contrasted with his vileness. She might even work herself into the
state of those half-mad creatures who spend the whole of their married
lives reviling their husbands for having been attracted by other women
before they even met the girl it was their misfortune to marry. Don’t
think I’m trying to blacken Mrs. Bendix. I’m just showing you how
intolerable life with her might have been.
“But that’s only the incidental motive. The real trouble was that she
was too close with her money, and that too I know for a fact. That’s
where she sentenced herself to death. He wanted it, or some of it,
badly (it’s what he married her for), and she wouldn’t part.
“One of the first things I did was to consult a Directory of Directors
and make a list of the firms he’s interested in, with a view to
getting a confidential report on their financial condition. The report
reached me just before I left my rooms. It told me exactly what I
expected—that every single one of those firms is rocky, some only a
little but some within sight of a crash. They all need money to save
them. It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s run through all his own money, and
he had to get more. I found time to run down to Somerset House and
again it was as I expected: her will was entirely in his favour. The
really important point (which no one seems to have suspected) is that
he isn’t a good business-man at all; he’s a rotten one. And
half-a-million . . . Well!
“Oh, yes. There’s motive enough.”
“Motive allowed,” said Mr. Bradley. “And the nitrobenzene? You said, I
think, that Bendix has some knowledge of chemistry.”
Roger laughed. “You remind me of a Wagner opera, Bradley. The
nitrobenzene _motif_ crops up regularly from you whenever a possible
criminal is mentioned. However, I think I can satisfy even you in this
instance. Nitrobenzene as you know, is used in perfumery. In the list
of Bendix’s businesses is the Anglo-Eastern Perfumery Company. I made
a special, and dreadful, journey out to Acton for the express purpose
of finding out whether the Anglo-Eastern Company used nitrobenzene at
all, and, if so, whether its poisonous qualities were thoroughly
recognised. The answer to both questions was in the affirmative. So
there can be no doubt that Bendix is thoroughly acquainted with the
stuff.
“He might easily enough have got his supply from the factory, but I’m
inclined to doubt that. I think he’d be cleverer than that. He
probably made the stuff himself, if the process is as easy as Bradley
told us. Because I happen to know that he was on the modern side at
Selchester (that I heard quite by chance too), which presupposes at
any rate an elementary knowledge of chemistry. Do you pass that,
Bradley?”
“Pass, friend nitrobenzene,” conceded Mr. Bradley.
Roger drummed thoughtfully on the table with his finger-tips. “It was
a well-planned affair, wasn’t it?” he meditated. “And so extremely
easy to reconstruct. Bendix must have thought he’d provided against
every possible contingency. And so he very nearly had. It was just
that little bit of unlucky grit that gets into the smooth machinery of
so many clever crimes: he didn’t know that his wife had seen the play
before. He’d decided on the mild alibi of his presence at the theatre,
you see, just in case suspicion should ever impossibly arise, and no
doubt he stressed his desire to see the play and take her with him.
Not to spoil his pleasure, she would have unselfishly concealed from
him the fact that she had seen the play before and didn’t much want to
see it again. That unselfishness let him down. Because it’s
inconceivable that she would have turned it to her own advantage to
win the bet he pretends to have made with her.
“He left the theatre of course during the first interval, and hurried
as far as he dare go in the ten minutes at his disposal, to post the
parcel. I sat through the dreadful thing myself last night just to see
when the intervals came. The first one fits excellently. I’d hoped he
might have taken a taxi one way, as time was short, but if he did no
driver of such taxis as did make a similar journey that evening can
identify him. Or possibly the right driver hasn’t come forward yet. I
got Scotland Yard to look into that point for me. But it really fits
much better with the cleverness he’s shown all through, that he should
have gone by ’bus or underground. Taxis, he’d know, are traceable. But
if so he’d run it very fine indeed, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he
got back to his box a few minutes late. The police may be able to
establish that.”
“It seems to me,” observed Mr. Bradley, “that we made something of a
mistake in turning the man down from membership here. We thought his
criminology wasn’t up to standard, didn’t we? Well, well.”
“But we could hardly be expected to know that he was a practical
criminologist rather than a mere theoretical one,” Roger smiled. “It
was a mistake, though. It would have been pleasant to include a
practical criminologist among our members.”
“I must confess that I thought at one time that we did,” said Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming, making her peace. “Sir Charles,” she added
unnecessarily, “I apologise, without reserve.”
Sir Charles inclined his head courteously. “Please don’t refer to it,
madam. And in any event the experience for me was an interesting one.”
“I may have been misled by the case I quoted,” said Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming, rather wistfully. “It was a strangely close
parallel.”
“It was the first parallel that occurred to me, too,” Roger agreed. “I
studied the Molineux case quite closely, hoping to get a pointer from
it. But now, if I were asked for a parallel, I should reply with the
Carlyle Harris case. You remember, the young medical student who sent
a pill containing morphine to the girl Helen Potts, to whom it turned
out that he had been secretly married for a year. He was by way of
being a profligate and a general young rotter too. A great novel, as
you know, has been founded on the case, so why not a great crime too?”
“Then why, Mr. Sheringham,” Miss Dammers wanted to know, “do you think
that Mr. Bendix took the risk of not destroying the forged letter and
the wrapper when he had the chance?”
“He very carefully didn’t do so,” Roger replied promptly, “because the
forged letter and the wrapper had been calculated not only to divert
suspicion from himself but actually to point away from him to somebody
else—an employee of Mason’s, for instance, or an anonymous lunatic.
Which is exactly what they did.”
“But wouldn’t it be a great risk, to send poisoned chocolates like
that to Sir Eustace?” suggested Mr. Chitterwick diffidently. “I mean,
Sir Eustace might have been ill the next morning, or not offered to
hand them over at all. Suppose he had given them to somebody else
instead of Bendix.”
Roger proceeded to give Mr. Chitterwick cause for his diffidence. He
was feeling something of a personal pride in Bendix by this time, and
it distressed him to hear a great man thus maligned.
“Oh, really! You must give my man credit for being what he is. He’s
not a bungler, you know. It wouldn’t have had any serious results if
Sir Eustace had been ill that morning, or eaten the chocolates
himself, or if they’d been stolen in transit and consumed by the
postman’s favourite daughter, or any other unlikely contingency. Come,
Mr. Chitterwick! You don’t imagine he’d send the poisoned ones through
the post, do you? Of course not. He’d send harmless ones, and exchange
them for the others on the way home. Dash it all, he wouldn’t go out
of his way to present opportunities to chance.”
“Oh! I see,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, properly subdued.
“We’re dealing with a very great criminal,” went on Roger, rather less
severely. “That can be seen at every point. Take the arrival at the
club, just for example—that most unusual early arrival (why this early
arrival at all, by the way, if he isn’t guilty?). Well, he doesn’t
wait outside and follow his unconscious accomplice in, you see. Not a
bit of it. Sir Eustace is chosen because he’s known to get there so
punctually at half-past ten every morning; takes a pride in it; boasts
of it; goes out of his way to keep up the good old custom. So Bendix
arrives at ten thirty-five, and there things are. It had puzzled me at
the beginning of the case, by the way, to see why the chocolates had
been sent to Sir Eustace at his club at all, instead of to his rooms.
Now it’s obvious.”
“Well, I wasn’t so far out with my list of conditions,” Mr. Bradley
consoled himself. “But why don’t you agree with my rather subtle point
about the murderer not being a public-school or University man,
Sheringham? Just because Bendix happens to have been at Selchester and
Oxford?”
“No, because I’d make the still more subtle point that where the code
of a public-school and University might influence a murderer in the
way he murdered another man, it wouldn’t have much effect when a woman
is to be the victim. I agree that if Bendix had been wanting to
dispose of Sir Eustace, he would probably have put him out of the
world in a nice, straightforward, manly way. But one doesn’t use nice,
straightforward, manly ways in one’s dealings with women, if it comes
to hitting them on the head with a bludgeon or anything in that
nature. Poison, I fancy, would be quite in order. And there’s very
little suffering with a large dose of nitrobenzene. Unconsciousness
soon intervenes.”
“Yes,” admitted Mr. Bradley, “that is rather too subtle a point for
one of my unpsychological attributes.”
“I think I dealt with most of your other conditions. As regards the
methodical habits, which you deduced from the meticulous doses of
poison in each chocolate, my point of course is that the doses were
exactly equal in order that Bendix could take any two of the
chocolates and be sure of having got the right amount of nitrobenzene
into his system to produce the symptoms he wanted, and not enough to
run any serious risk. That dosing of himself with the poison really
was a master-stroke. And it’s so natural that a man shouldn’t have
taken so many chocolates as a woman. He exaggerated his symptoms
considerably, no doubt, but the effect on everybody was tremendous.
“We must remember, you see, that we’ve only got his word for the
conversation in the drawing-room, over the eating of the chocolates,
just as we’ve only got his word for it that there ever was a bet at
all. Most of that conversation certainly took place, however. Bendix
is far too great an artist not to make all possible use of the truth
in his lying. But of course he wouldn’t have left her that afternoon
till he’d seen her take, or somehow made her take, at least six of the
chocolates, which he’d know made up more than a lethal dose. That was
another advantage in having the stuff in those exact six-minim
quantities.”
“In fact,” Mr. Bradley summed up, “our Uncle Bendix is a great man.”
“He really is,” said Roger, quite solemnly.
“You’ve no doubt at all that he is the criminal?” queried Miss
Dammers.
“None at all,” said Roger, astonished.
“Um,” said Miss Dammers.
“Why, have you?”
“Um,” said Miss Dammers.
The conversation then lapsed.
“Well,” said Mr. Bradley, “let’s all tell Sheringham how wrong he is,
shall we?”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked tense. “I’m afraid,” she said in a hushed
voice, “that he is only too right.”
But Mr. Bradley refused to be impressed. “Oh, I think I can find a
hole or two to pick at. You seem to attach a good deal of importance
to the motive, Sheringham. Don’t you exaggerate? One doesn’t poison a
wife one’s tired of; one leaves her. And really, I find some
difficulty in believing (_a_) that Bendix should have been so set on
getting hold of more money to pour down the drainpipe of his
businesses as to commit murder for it, and (_b_) that Mrs. Bendix
should have been so close as to refuse to come to her husband’s help
if he really was badly pressed.”
“Then I think you fail to estimate the characters of both of them,”
Roger told him. “They were both obstinate as the devil. It was Mrs.
Bendix, not her husband, who realised that his businesses _were_ a
drainpipe. I could give you a list a yard long of murders that have
been committed with far less motive than Bendix had.”
“Motive allowed again, then. Now you remember that Mrs. Bendix had had
a lunch appointment for the day of her death, which was cancelled.
Didn’t Bendix know of that? Because if he did, would he have chosen a
day for the delivery of the chocolates when he knew his wife wouldn’t
be at home for lunch to receive them?”
“Just the point I had thought of putting to Mr. Sheringham myself,”
remarked Miss Dammers.
Roger looked puzzled. “It seems to me a most unimportant point. If it
comes to that, why should he necessarily want to give the chocolates
to his wife at lunch-time?”
“For two reasons,” responded Mr. Bradley glibly.
“Firstly because he would naturally want to put them to their right
purpose as soon as he possibly could, and secondly because his wife
being the only person who can contradict his story of the bet, he
would obviously want her silenced as soon as practicable.”
“You’re quibbling,” Roger smiled, “and I refuse to be drawn. For that
matter, I don’t see why Bendix should have known of his wife’s
lunch-appointment at all. They were constantly lunching out, both of
them, and I don’t suppose they took any particular care to inform each
other beforehand.”
“Humph!” said Mr. Bradley, and stroked his chin.
Mr. Chitterwick ventured to raise his recently crushed head. “You
really base your whole case on the bet, Mr. Sheringham, don’t you?”
“And the psychological deduction I drew from the story of it. Yes, I
do. Entirely.”
“So that if the bet could be proved after all to have been made, you
would have no case left?”
“Why,” exclaimed Roger, in some alarm, “have you any independent
evidence that the bet was made?”
“Oh, no. Oh, dear me, no. Nothing of the sort. I was merely thinking
that if any one did want to disprove your case, as Bradley suggested,
it is the bet on which he would have to concentrate.”
“You mean, quibbling about the motive, and the lunch-appointment, and
such minor matters, is altogether beside the point?” suggested Mr.
Bradley amiably. “Oh, I quite agree. But I was only trying to test his
case, you know, not disprove it. And for why? Because I think it’s the
right one. The Mystery of the Poisoned Chocolates, so far as I’m
concerned, is at an end.”
“Thank you, Bradley,” said Mr. Sheringham.
“So three cheers for our sleuth-like President,” continued Mr. Bradley
with great heartiness, “coupled with the name of Graham Reynard Bendix
for the fine run he’s given us. Hip, hip—”
“And you say you’ve definitely proved the purchase of the typewriter,
and the contact of Mr. Bendix with the sample-book at Webster’s, Mr.
Sheringham?” remarked Alicia Dammers, who had apparently been pursuing
a train of thought of her own.
“I do, Miss Dammers,” said Roger, not without complacence.
“Would you give me the name of the typewriter-shop?”
“Of course,” Roger tore a page from his notebook and copied out the
name and address.
“Thank you. And can you give me a description of the girl at Webster’s
who identified the photograph of Mr. Bendix?”
Roger looked at her a little uneasily; she gazed back with her usual
calm serenity. Roger’s uneasiness grew. He gave her as good a
description of Webster’s young woman as he could recall. Miss Dammers
thanked him imperturbably.
“Well, what are we going to do about it all?” persisted Mr. Bradley,
who seemed to have adopted the rôle of showman for his President.
“Shall we send a delegation to Scotland Yard consisting of Sheringham
and myself, to break the news to them that their troubles are over?”
“You are assuming that everybody agrees with Mr. Sheringham?”
“Of course.”
“Isn’t it customary to put this sort of question to a vote?” suggested
Miss Dammers coolly.
“‘Carried unanimously,’” quoted Mr. Bradley. “Yes, do let’s have the
correct procedure. Well, then, Sheringham moves that this meeting do
accept his solution of the Poisoned Chocolates Mystery as the right
one, and send a delegation of himself and Mr. Bradley to Scotland Yard
to talk pretty severely to the police. I second the motion. Those in
favour. . . ? Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming endeavoured to conceal her disapproval of Mr.
Bradley in her approval of Mr. Bradley’s suggestion. “I certainly
think that Mr. Sheringham has proved his case,” she said stiffly.
“Sir Charles?”
“I agree,” said Sir Charles, in stern tones, equally disproving Mr.
Bradley’s frivolity.
“Chitterwick?”
“I agree too.” Was it Roger’s fancy, or did Mr. Chitterwick hesitate
just a moment before he spoke, as if troubled by some mental
reservation which he did not care to put into words? Roger decided
that it was his fancy.
“And Miss Dammers?” concluded Mr. Bradley.
Miss Dammers looked calmly round the table. “I don’t agree at all. I
think Mr. Sheringham’s exposition was exceedingly ingenious, and
altogether worthy of his reputation; at the same time I think it quite
wrong. To-morrow I hope to be able to prove to you who really
committed this crime.”
The Circle gaped at her respectfully.
Roger, wondering whether his ears had not really been playing tricks
with him, found that his tongue too utterly refused to work. An
inarticulate sound oozed from him.
Mr. Bradley was the first to recover himself. “Carried,
non-unanimously. Mr. President, I think this is a precedent. Does
anybody know what happens when a resolution is not carried
unanimously?”
In the temporary disability of the President, Miss Dammers took it
upon herself to decide. “The meeting stands adjourned, I think,” she
said.
And adjourned the meeting found itself.