Roger arrived at the Circle’s meeting-room the next evening even more
agog than usual. In his heart on hearts he could not believe that Miss
Dammers would ever be able to destroy his case against Bendix, or even
dangerously shake it, but in any event what she had to say could not
fail to be of absorbing interest, even without its animadversions of
his own solution. Roger had been looking forward to Miss Dammers’s
exposition more than to that of any one else.
Alicia Dammers was so very much a reflection of the age.
Had she been born fifty years ago, it is difficult to see how she
could have gone on existing. It was impossible that she could have
become the woman-novelist of that time, a strange creature (in the
popular imagination) with white cotton gloves, an intense manner, and
passionate, not to say hysterical yearnings towards a romance from
which her appearance unfortunately debarred her. Miss Dammers’s
gloves, like her clothes, were exquisite, and cotton could not have
touched her since she was ten (if she ever had been); tensity was for
her the depth of bad form; and if she knew how to yearn, she certainly
kept it to herself. Passion and purple, one gathered, Miss Dammers
found quite unnecessary to herself, if interesting phenomena in lesser
mortals.
From the caterpillar in cotton gloves the woman-novelist has
progressed through the stage of cook-like cocoondom at which Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming had stuck, to the detached and serious butterfly, not
infrequently beautiful as well as pensive, whose decorative pictures
the illustrated weeklies are nowadays delighted to publish.
Butterflies with calm foreheads, just faintly wrinkled in analytical
thought. Ironical, cynical butterflies; surgeon-butterflies thronging
the mental dissecting-rooms (and sometimes, if we must be candid,
inclined to loiter there a little too long); passionless butterflies,
flitting gracefully from one brightly-coloured complex to another. And
sometimes completely humourless, and then distressingly boring
butterflies, whose gathered pollen seems to have become a trifle
mud-coloured.
To meet Miss Dammers and look at her classical, oval face, with its
delicately small features and big grey eyes, to glance approvingly
over her tall, beautifully dressed figure, nobody whose imagination
was still popular would ever have set her down as a novelist at all.
And that in Miss Dammers’s opinion, coupled with the ability to write
good books, was exactly what a properly-minded modern authoress should
hope to achieve.
No one had ever been brave enough to ask Miss Dammers how she could
hope successfully to analyse in others emotions which she had never
experienced in herself. Probably because the plain fact confronted the
enquirer that she both could and did. Most successfully.
“We listened last night,” began Miss Dammers, at five minutes past
nine on the following evening, “to an exceedingly able exposition of a
no less interesting theory of this crime. Mr. Sheringham’s methods, if
I may say so, were a model to all of us. Beginning with the deductive,
he followed this as far as it would take him, which was actually to
the person of the criminal; he then relied on the inductive to prove
his case. In this way he was able to make the best possible use of
each method. That this ingenious mixture should have been based on a
fallacy and therefore never had any chance of leading Mr. Sheringham
to the right solution, is rather a piece of bad luck than his fault.”
Roger, who still could not believe that he had not reached the truth,
smiled dubiously.
“Mr. Sheringham’s reading of the crime,” continued Miss Dammers, in
her clear, level tones, “must have seemed to some of us novel in the
extreme. To me, however, it was perhaps more interesting than novel,
for it began from the same starting-point as the theory on which I
myself have been working; namely, that the crime had not failed in its
objective.”
Roger pricked up his ears.
“As Mr. Chitterwick pointed out, Mr. Sheringham’s whole case rested on
the bet between Mr. and Mrs. Bendix. From Mr. Bendix’s story of that
bet, he draws the psychological deduction that the bet never existed
at all. That is clever, but it is the wrong deduction. Mr. Sheringham
is too lenient in his interpretation of feminine psychology. I began,
I think I may say, with the bet too. But the deduction I drew from it,
knowing my sister-women perhaps a little more intimately than Mr.
Sheringham could, was that Mrs. Bendix was not quite so honourable as
she was painted by herself.”
“I thought of that, of course,” Roger expostulated. “But I discarded
it on purely logical grounds. There’s nothing in Mrs. Bendix’s life to
show that she wasn’t honest, and everything to show that she was. And
when there exists no evidence at all for the making of the bet beyond
Bendix’s bare word . . .”
“Oh, but there does,” Miss Dammers took him up. “I’ve been spending
most of to-day in establishing that point. I knew I should never
really be able to shake you till I could definitely prove that there
was a bet. Let me put you out of your agony at once, Mr. Sheringham.
I’ve overwhelming evidence that the bet was made.”
“You have?” said Roger, disconcerted.
“Certainly. It was a point you really should have verified yourself,
you know,” chided Miss Dammers gently, “considering its importance to
your case. Well, I have two witnesses. Mrs. Bendix mentioned the bet
to her maid when she went up to her bedroom to lie down, actually
saying (like yourself, Mr. Sheringham) that the violent indigestion
from which she thought herself to be suffering was a judgment on her
for having made it. The second witness is a friend of my own, who
knows the Bendixes. She saw Mrs. Bendix sitting alone in her box
during the second interval, and went in to speak to her. In the course
of the conversation Mrs. Bendix remarked that she and her husband had
a bet on the identity of the villain, mentioning the character in the
play whom she herself fancied. But (and this completely confirms my
own deduction) Mrs. Bendix did _not_ tell my friend that she had seen
the play before.”
“Oh!” said Roger, now quite crestfallen.
Miss Dammers dealt with him as tenderly as possible. “There were only
those two deductions to be made from that bet, and by bad luck you
chose the wrong one.”
“But how did you know,” said Roger, coming to the surface for the
third time, “that Mrs. Bendix had seen the play before? I only found
that out myself a couple of days ago, and by the merest accident.”
“Oh, I’ve known that from the beginning,” said Miss Dammers
carelessly. “I suppose Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer told you? I don’t know
her personally, but I know people who do. I didn’t interrupt you last
night when you were talking about the amazing chance of this piece of
knowledge reaching you. If I had, I should have pointed out that the
agency by which anything known to Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer (as I see
her) might become known to her friends too, isn’t chance at all, but
certainty.”
“I see,” said Roger, and sank for the third, and final, time. But as
he did so he remembered one piece of information which Mrs.
Verreker-le-Mesurer had succeeded, not wholly as it seemed but very
nearly so, in withholding from her friends; and catching Mr. Bradley’s
ribald eye knew that his thought was shared. So even Miss Dammers was
not quite infallible in her psychology.
“We then,” resumed that lady, somewhat didactically, “have Mr. Bendix
displaced from his temporary rôle of villain and back again in his old
part of second victim.” She paused for a moment.
“But without Sir Eustace returning to the cast in his original star
part of intended victim of the piece,” amplified Mr. Bradley.
Miss Dammers rightly ignored him. “Now here, I think, Mr. Sheringham
will find my case as interesting as I found his last night, for though
we differ so vitally in some essentials we agree remarkably in others.
And one of the points on which we agree is that the intended victim
certainly was killed.”
“What, Alicia?” exclaimed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “You think too that
the plot was directed against Mrs. Bendix from the beginning?”
“I have no doubt of it. But to prove my contention I must demolish yet
another of Mr. Sheringham’s conclusions.
“You made the point, Mr. Sheringham, that half-past ten in the morning
was a most unusual time for Mr. Bendix to arrive at his club and
therefore highly significant. That is perfectly true. Unfortunately
you attached the wrong significance to it. His arrival at that hour
doesn’t necessarily argue a guilty intention, as you assumed. It
escaped you (as in fairness I must say it seems to have escaped every
one else) that if Mrs. Bendix was the intended victim and Mr. Bendix
himself not her murderer, his presence at the club at that convenient
time might have been secured by the real murderer. In any case I think
Mr. Sheringham might have given Mr. Bendix the benefit of the doubt in
so far as to ask him if he had any explanation of his own to offer. As
I did.”
“You asked Bendix himself how it had happened that he arrived at the
club at half-past ten that morning?” Mr. Chitterwick said in awed
tones. This was certainly the way real detecting should be done.
Unfortunately his own diffidence seemed to have prevented Mr.
Chitterwick from doing any real detecting at all.
“Certainly,” agreed Miss Dammers briskly. “I rang him up, and put the
point to him. From what I gathered, not even the police had thought to
put it before. And though he answered it in a way I quite expected, it
was clear that he saw no significance in his own answer. Mr. Bendix
told me that he had gone there to receive a telephone message. But why
not have had the message telephoned to his home? you will ask.
Exactly. So did I. The reason was that it was not the sort of message
one cares about receiving at home. I must admit that I pressed Mr.
Bendix about this message, and as he had no idea of the importance of
my questions he must have considered my taste more than questionable.
However, I couldn’t help that.
“In the end I got him to admit that on the previous afternoon he had
been rung up at his office by a Miss Vera Delorme, who plays a small
part in _Heels Up!_ at the Regency Theatre. He had only met her once
or twice, but was not averse from doing so again. She asked him if he
were doing anything important the next morning, to which he replied
that he was not. Could he take her out to a quiet little lunch
somewhere? He would be delighted. But she was not quite sure yet
whether she was free. She would ring him up the next morning between
ten-thirty and eleven o’clock at the Rainbow Club.”
Five pairs of brows were knitted.
“I don’t see any significance in that either,” finally plunged Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming.
“No?” said Miss Dammers. “But if Miss Delorme straightly denies having
ever rung Mr. Bendix up at all?”
Five pairs of brows unravelled themselves.
“_Oh!_” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
“Of course that was the first thing I verified,” said Miss Dammers
coolly.
Mr. Chitterwick sighed. Yes, undoubtedly this was real detecting.
“Then your murderer had an accomplice, Miss Dammers?” Sir Charles
suggested.
“He had two,” retorted Miss Dammers. “Both unwitting.”
“Ah, yes. You mean Bendix. And the woman who telephoned?”
“Well—!” Miss Dammers looked in her unexcited way round the circle of
faces. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Apparently it was not at all obvious.
“At any rate it must be obvious why Miss Delorme was chosen as the
telephonist: because Mr. Bendix hardly knew her, and would certainly
not be able to recognise her voice on the telephone. And as for the
real speaker . . . Well, really!” Miss Dammers looked her opinion of
such obtuseness.
“Mrs. Bendix!” squeaked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming catching sight of a
triangle.
“Of course. Mrs. Bendix, carefully primed by _somebody_ about her
husband’s minor misdemeanours.”
“The somebody being the murderer of course,” nodded Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming. “A friend of Mrs. Bendix’s then. At least,” amended
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming in some confusion, remembering that real friends
seldom murder each other, “she thought of him as a friend. Dear me,
this is getting very interesting, Alicia.”
Miss Dammers gave a small, ironical smile. “Yes, it’s a very intimate
little affair after all, this murder. Tightly closed, in fact, Mr.
Bradley.
“But I’m getting on rather too fast. I had better complete the
destruction of Mr. Sheringham’s case before I build up my own.” Roger
groaned faintly and looked up at the hard, white ceiling. It reminded
him of Miss Dammers, and he looked down again.
“Really, Mr. Sheringham, your faith in human nature is altogether too
great, you know,” Miss Dammers mocked him without mercy. “Whatever
anybody chooses to tell you, you believe. A confirmatory witness never
seems necessary to you. I’m sure that if some one had come to your
rooms and told you he’d seen the Shah of Persia injecting the
nitrobenzene into those chocolates you would have believed him
unhesitatingly.”
“Are you hinting that somebody hasn’t told me the truth?” groaned the
unhappy Roger.
“I’ll do more than hint it; I’ll prove it. When you told us last night
that the man in the typewriter shop had positively identified Mr.
Bendix as the purchaser of a second-hand No. 4 Hamilton I was
astounded. I took a note of the shop’s address. This morning, first
thing, I went there. I taxed the man roundly with having told you a
lie. He admitted it, grinning.
“So far as he could make out, all you wanted was a good Hamilton No.
4, and he had a good Hamilton No. 4 to sell. He saw nothing wrong in
leading you to suppose that his was the shop where your friend had
bought his own good Hamilton No. 4, because he had quite as good a one
as any other shop could have. And if it eased your mind that he should
recognise your friend from his photograph—well,” said Miss Dammers
drily, “he was quite prepared to ease it as many times as you had
photographs to produce.”
“I see,” said Roger, and his thoughts dwelt on the eight pounds he had
handed over to that sympathetic, mind-easing shopman in return for a
Hamilton No. 4 he didn’t want.
“As for the girl in Webster’s,” continued Miss Dammers implacably,
“she was just as ready to admit that perhaps she might have made a
mistake in recognising that friend of the gentleman who called in
yesterday about some notepaper. But really, the gentleman had seemed
so anxious she should that it would have seemed quite a pity to
disappoint him, like. And if it came to that, she couldn’t see the
harm in it not even now she couldn’t.” Miss Dammers’s imitation of
Webster’s young woman was most amusing. Roger did not laugh heartily.
“I’m sorry if I seem to be rubbing it in, Mr. Sheringham,” said Miss
Dammers.
“Not at all,” said Roger.
“But it’s essential to my own case, you see.”
“Yes, I quite see that,” said Roger.
“Then that evidence is disposed of. I don’t think you really had any
other, did you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Roger.
“You will see,” Miss Dammers resumed, over Roger’s corpse, “that I am
following the fashion of withholding the criminal’s name. Now that it
has come to my turn to speak, I am realising the advantages of this;
but really, I can’t help fearing that you will all have guessed it by
the time I come to my denouement. To me, at any rate, the murderer’s
identity seems quite absurdly obvious. Before I disclose it
officially, however, I should like to deal with a few of the other
points, not actual evidence, raised by Mr. Sheringham in his argument.
“Mr. Sheringham built up a very ingenious case. It was so very
ingenious that he had to insist more than once on the perfect planning
that had gone to its construction, and the true greatness of the
criminal mind that had evolved it. I don’t agree,” said Miss Dammers
crisply. “My case is much simpler. It was planned with cunning but not
with perfection. It relied almost entirely upon luck: that is to say,
upon one vital piece of evidence remaining undiscovered. And finally
the mind that evolved it is not great in any way. But it _is_ a mind
which, dealing with matters outside its usual orbit would certainly be
imitative.
“That brings me to a point of Mr. Bradley’s. I agree with him to the
extent that I think a certain acquaintance with criminological history
is postulated, but not when he argues that it is the work of a
creative mind. In my opinion the chief feature of the crime is its
servile imitation of certain of its predecessors. I deduced from it,
in fact, the type of mind which is possessed of no originality of its
own, is intensely conservative because without the wit to recognise
the progress of change, is obstinate, dogmatic, and practical, and
lacks entirely any sense of spiritual values. As one who am inclined
to suffer myself from something of an aversion from matter, I sensed
my exact antithesis behind the whole atmosphere of this case.”
Everybody looked suitably impressed. As for Mr. Chitterwick, he could
only gasp before these detailed deductions from a mere atmosphere.
“With another point of Mr. Sheringham’s I have already inferred that I
agree: that chocolates were used as the vehicle of the poison because
they were meant to reach a woman. And here I might add that I am sure
no harm was intended to Mr. Bendix himself. We know that Mr. Bendix
did not care for chocolates, and it is a reasonable assumption that
the murderer knew it too; he never expected that Mr. Bendix would eat
any himself.
“It is curious how often Mr. Sheringham hits the mark with small
shafts, while missing it with the chief one. He was quite right about
the notepaper being extracted from that sample-book at Webster’s. I’m
bound to admit that the possession of the piece of notepaper had
worried me considerably. I was at a complete loss there. Then Mr.
Sheringham very handily presented us with his explanation, and I have
been able to-day to destroy his application of it to his own theory
and incorporate it in my own. The attendant who pretended out of
innocent politeness to recognise the photograph Mr. Sheringham showed
her, was able to recognise in earnest the one I produced. And not only
recognise it,” said Miss Dammers with the first sign of complacence
she had yet shown, “but identify the original of it actually by name.”
“Ah!” nodded Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, much excited.
“Mr. Sheringham made a few other small points, which I thought it
advisable to-day to blunt,” Miss Dammers went on, with a return to her
impersonal manner. “Because most of the small firms in which Mr.
Bendix figures on the board of directors are not in a flourishing
state, Mr. Sheringham deduced not only that Mr. Bendix was a bad
business-man, with which I am inclined to agree, but that he was
desperately in need of money. Once again Mr. Sheringham failed to
verify his deduction, and once again he must pay the penalty in
finding himself utterly wrong.
“The most elementary channels of enquiry would have brought Mr.
Sheringham the information that only a very small proportion of Mr.
Bendix’s money is invested in these concerns, which are really a
wealthy man’s toys. By far the greater part is still where his father
left it when he died, in government stock and safe industrial concerns
so large that even Mr. Bendix could never aspire to a seat on the
board. And from what I know of him, Mr. Bendix is quite a big enough
man to recognise that he is not the business-genius his father was,
and has no intention of spending on his toys more than he can
comfortably afford. The real motive Mr. Sheringham gave him for his
wife’s death therefore completely disappears.”
Roger bowed his head. For ever afterwards, he felt, would genuine
criminologists point the finger of contempt at him as the man who
failed to verify his own deductions. Oh, shameful future!
“As for the subsidiary motive, I attach less importance to that but on
the whole I am inclined to agree with Mr. Sheringham. I think Mrs.
Bendix must have become a dreadful bore to her husband, who after all
was a normal man, with a normal man’s reactions and scale of values. I
should be inclined to think that she morally drove him into the arms
of his actresses, in search of a little light companionship. I’m not
saying he wasn’t deeply in love with her when he married her; no doubt
he was. And he’d have had a naturally deep respect for her then.
“But it’s an unfortunate marriage,” observed the cynical Miss Dammers,
“in which the respect outstays its usefulness. A man wants a piece of
humanity in his marriage-bed; not an object of deep respect. But I’m
bound to say that if Mrs. Bendix did bore her husband before the end,
he was gentleman enough not to show it. The marriage was generally
considered an ideal one.”
Miss Dammers paused for a moment to sip at the glass of water in front
of her.
“Lastly, Mr. Sheringham made the point that the letter and wrapper
were not destroyed, because the murderer thought they would not only
not harm him but definitely help him. With that too I agree. But I do
not draw the same deduction from it that Mr. Sheringham did. I should
have said that this entirely confirms my theory that the murder is the
work of a second-rate mind, because a first-rate mind would never
consent to the survival of any clue which could be easily destroyed,
however helpful it might be expected to prove, because he would know
how often such clues, deliberately left to mislead, have actually led
to the criminal’s undoing. And I would draw the subsidiary deduction
that the wrapper and letter were not expected to be just generally
helpful, but that there was some definite piece of misleading
information contained in them. I think I know what that piece of
information was.
“That is all the reference I have to make to Mr. Sheringham’s case.”
Roger lifted his bowed head, and Miss Dammers sipped again at her
water.
“With regard to this matter of the respect Mr. Bendix had for his
wife,” Mr. Chitterwick hazarded, “isn’t there something of an anomaly
there, Miss Dammers? Because I understood you to say at the very
beginning that the deduction you had drawn from that bet was that Mrs.
Bendix was not quite so worthy of respect as we had all imagined.
Didn’t that deduction stand the test, then?”
“It did, Mr. Chitterwick, and there is no anomaly.”
“Where a man doesn’t suspect, he will respect,” said Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming swiftly, before her Alicia could think of it.
“Ah, the horrid sepulchre under the nice white paint,” remarked Mr.
Bradley, who didn’t approve of that sort of thing, even from
distinguished dramatists. “Now we’re getting down to it. Is there a
sepulchre, Miss Dammers?”
“There is,” Miss Dammers agreed, without emotion. “And now, as you
say, Mr. Bradley, we’re getting down to it.”
“Oh!” Mr. Chitterwick positively bounced on his chair. “If the letter
and wrapper _could_ have been destroyed by the murderer . . . and
Bendix wasn’t the murderer . . . and I suppose the porter needn’t be
considered . . . Oh, _I_ see!”
“I wondered when somebody would,” said Miss Dammers.