“From the very beginning of this case,” Miss Dammers proceeded,
imperturbable as ever, “I was of the opinion that the greatest clue
the criminal had left us was one of which he would have been totally
unconscious: the unmistakable indications of his own character. Taking
the facts as I found them, and not assuming others as Mr. Sheringham
did to justify his own reading of the murderer’s exceptional
mentality—” She looked challengingly towards Roger.
“Did I assume any facts that I couldn’t substantiate?” Roger felt
himself compelled to answer her look.
“Certainly you did. You assumed for instance that the typewriter on
which the letter was written is now at the bottom of the Thames. The
plain fact that it is not, once more bears out my own interpretation.
Taking the established facts as I found them, then, I was able without
difficulty to form the mental picture of the murderer that I have
already sketched out for you. But I was careful not to look for
somebody who would resemble my picture and then build up a case
against him. I simply hung the picture up in my mind, so to speak, in
order to compare with it any individual towards whom suspicion might
seem to point.
“Now, after I had cleared up Mr. Bendix’s reason for arriving at his
club that morning at such an unusual hour, there remained so far as I
could see only one obscure point, apparently of no importance, to
which nobody’s attention seemed to have been directed. I mean, the
engagement Sir Eustace had had that day for lunch, which must
subsequently have been cancelled. I don’t know how Mr. Bradley
discovered this, but I am quite ready to say how I did. It was from
that same useful valet who gave Mrs. Fielder-Flemming so much
interesting information.
“I must admit in this connection that I have advantages over the other
members of this Circle so far as investigations regarding Sir Eustace
were concerned, for not only did I know Sir Eustace himself so well
but I knew his valet too; and you may imagine that if Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming was able to extract so much from him with the aid of
money alone, I myself, backed not only by money but by the advantage
of a previous acquaintance, was in a position to obtain still more. In
any case, it was not long before the man casually mentioned that four
days before the crime Sir Eustace had told him to ring up Fellows’s
Hotel in Jermyn Street and reserve a private room for lunch-time on
the day on which the murder subsequently took place.
“That was the obscure point, which I thought it worth while to clear
up if I could. With whom was Sir Eustace going to lunch that day?
Obviously a woman, but which of his many women? The valet could give
me no information. So far as he knew, Sir Eustace actually had not got
any women at the moment, so intent was he upon the pursuit of Miss
Wildman (you must excuse me, Sir Charles), her hand and her fortune.
Was it Miss Wildman herself then? I was very soon able to establish
that it wasn’t.
“Does it strike you that there is a reminiscent ring about this
cancelled lunch-appointment on the day of the crime? It didn’t occur
to me for a long time, but of course there is. Mrs. Bendix had a
lunch-engagement for that day too, which was cancelled for some reason
unknown on the previous afternoon.”
“_Mrs. Bendix!_” breathed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. Here was a juicy
triangle.
Miss Dammers smiled faintly. “Yes, I won’t keep you on the
tenterhooks, Mabel. From what Sir Charles told us I knew that Mrs.
Bendix and Sir Eustace at any rate were not total strangers, and in
the end I managed to connect them. Mrs. Bendix was to have lunched
with Sir Eustace, in a private room, at the somewhat notorious
Fellows’s Hotel.”
“To discuss her husband’s shortcomings, of course?” suggested Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming, more charitably than her hopes.
“Possibly, among other things,” said Miss Dammers nonchalantly. “But
the chief reason, no doubt was because she was his mistress.” Miss
Dammers dropped this bombshell among the company with as little
emotion as if she had remarked that Mrs. Bendix was wearing a
jade-green taffeta frock for the occasion.
“Can you—can you substantiate that statement?” asked Sir Charles, the
first to recover himself.
Miss Dammers just raised her fine eyebrows. “But of course. I shall
make no statements that I can’t substantiate. Mrs. Bendix had been in
the habit of lunching at least twice a week with Sir Eustace, and
occasionally dining too, at Fellows’s Hotel, always in the same room.
They took considerable precautions and used to arrive not only at the
hotel but in the room itself quite independently of each other;
outside the room they were never seen together. But the waiter who
attended them (always the same waiter) has signed a declaration for me
that he recognised Mrs. Bendix, from the photographs published after
her death, as the woman who used to come there with Sir Eustace
Pennefather.”
“He signed a declaration for you, eh?” mused Mr. Bradley. “You must
find detecting an expensive hobby too, Miss Dammers.”
“One can afford one expensive hobby, Mr. Bradley.”
“But just because she lunched with him . . .” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming
was once more speaking with the voice of charity. “I mean, it doesn’t
necessarily mean that she was his mistress, does it? Not, of course,
that I think any the less of her if she was,” she added hastily,
remembering the official attitude.
“Communicating with the room in which they had their meals is a
bedroom,” replied Miss Dammers, in a desiccated tone of voice.
“Invariably after they had gone, the waiter informed me, he found the
bedclothes disarranged and the bed showing signs of recent use. I
imagine that would be accepted as clear enough evidence of adultery,
Sir Charles?”
“Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” rumbled Sir Charles, in high
embarrassment. Sir Charles was always exceedingly embarrassed when
women used words like “adultery” and “sexual perversions” and even
“mistress” to him, out of business hours. Sir Charles was regrettably
old-fashioned.
“Sir Eustace, of course,” added Miss Dammers in her detached way, “had
nothing to fear from the King’s Proctor.”
She took another sip of water, while the others tried to accustom
themselves to this new light on the case and the surprising avenues it
illuminated.
Miss Dammers proceeded to illuminate them still further, with powerful
beams from her psychological searchlight. “They must have made a
curious couple those two. Their widely differing scales of values, the
contrast of their respective reactions to the business that brought
them together, the possibility that not even in a common passion could
their minds establish any point of real contact. I want you to examine
the psychology of the situation as closely as you can, because the
murder was derived directly from it.
“What can have induced Mrs. Bendix in the first place to become that
man’s mistress I don’t know. I won’t be so trite as to say I can’t
imagine, because I can imagine all sorts of ways in which it may have
happened. There is a curious mental stimulus to a good but stupid
woman in a bad man’s badness. If she has a touch of the reformer in
her, as most good women have, she soon becomes obsessed with the
futile desire to save him from himself. And in seven cases out of ten
her first step in doing so is to descend to his level.
“Not that she considers herself at first to be descending at all; a
good woman invariably suffers for quite a long time from the delusion
that whatever she does, her own particular brand of goodness cannot
become smirched. She may share a reprobate’s bed with him, because she
knows that only through her body at first can she hope to influence
him, until contact is established through the body with the soul and
he may be led into better ways than a habit of going to bed in the
daytime; but the initial sharing doesn’t reflect on her own purity in
the least. It is a hackneyed observation but I must insist on it once
more: good women have the most astonishing powers of self-deception.
“I do consider Mrs. Bendix as a good woman, before she met Sir
Eustace. Her trouble was that she thought herself so much better than
she was. Her constant references to honour and playing the game, which
Mr. Sheringham quoted, show that. She was infatuated with her own
goodness. And so, of course, was Sir Eustace. He had probably never
enjoyed the complaisance of a really good woman before. The seduction
of her (which was probably very difficult) would have amused him
enormously. He must have had to listen to hour after hour’s talk about
honour, and reform, and spirituality, but he would have borne it
patiently enough for the exquisite revenge on which he had set his
heart. The first two or three visits to Fellows’s Hotel must have
delighted him.
“But after that it became less and less amusing. Mrs. Bendix would
discover that perhaps her own goodness wasn’t standing quite so firm
under the strain as she had imagined. She would have begun to bore him
with her self-reproaches; bore him dreadfully. He continued to meet
her there first because a woman, to his type, is always a woman, and
afterwards because she gave him no choice. I can see exactly what must
inevitably have happened. Mrs. Bendix begins to get thoroughly morbid
about her own wickedness, and quite loses sight of her initial zeal
for reform.
“They use the bed now because there happens to be a bed there and it
would be a pity to waste it, but she has destroyed the pleasure of
both. Her one cry now is that she must put herself right with her own
conscience either by running away with Sir Eustace on the spot, or,
more probably, by telling her husband, arranging for divorce (for, of
course, he will never forgive her, _never_), and marrying Sir Eustace
as soon as both divorces are through. In any case, although she almost
loathes him by now nothing else can be contemplated but that the rest
of her life must be spent with Sir Eustace and his with her. How well
I know that type of mind.
“Naturally, to Sir Eustace, who is working hard to retrieve his
fortunes by a rich marriage, this scheme has small appeal. He begins
by cursing himself for having seduced the damned woman at all, and
goes on to curse still more the damned woman for having been seduced.
And the more pressing she becomes, the more he hates her. Then Mrs.
Bendix must have brought matters to a head. She has heard about the
Wildman girl affair. That must be stopped at once. She tells Sir
Eustace that if he doesn’t break it off himself, she will take steps
to break it off for him. Sir Eustace sees the whole thing coming out,
his own appearance in a second divorce-court, and all hopes of Miss
Wildman and her fortune gone for ever. Something has got to be done
about it. But what can be done? Nothing short of murder will stop the
damned woman’s tongue.
“Well—it’s high time somebody murdered her anyhow.
“Now I’m on rather less sure ground, but the assumptions seem to me
sound enough and I can produce a reasonable amount of proof to support
them. Sir Eustace decides to get rid of the woman once and for all. He
thinks it over carefully, remembers to have read about a case, several
cases, in some criminological book, each of which just failed through
some small mistake. Combine them, eradicate the small mistake from
each, and so long as his relations with Mrs. Bendix are not known (and
he is quite certain they aren’t) there is no possibility of being
found out. That may seem a long guess, but here’s my proof.
“When I was studying him, I gave Sir Eustace every chance of plying
his blandishments on me. One of his methods is to profess a deep
interest in everything that interests the woman. Naturally therefore
he discovered a profound, if hitherto latent, interest in criminology.
He borrowed several of my books, and certainly read them. Among the
ones he borrowed is a book of American poisoning cases. In it is an
account of every single case that has been mentioned as a parallel by
members of this Circle (except of course Marie Lafarge and Christina
Edmunds).
“About six weeks ago, when I got in one evening my maid told me that
Sir Eustace, who hadn’t been near my flat for months, had called; he
waited for a time in the sitting-room and then went. Shortly after the
murder, having also been struck by the similarity between this and one
or two of those American cases, I went to the bookshelf in my
sitting-room to look them up. The book was not there. Nor, Mr.
Bradley, was my copy of Taylor. But I saw them both in Sir Eustace’s
rooms the day I had that long conversation with his valet.”
Miss Dammers paused for comment.
Mr. Bradley supplied it. “Then the man deserves what’s coming to him,”
he drawled.
“I told you this murder wasn’t the work of a highly intelligent mind,”
said Miss Dammers.
“Well, now, to complete my reconstruction. Sir Eustace decides to rid
himself of his encumbrance, and arranges what he thinks a perfectly
safe way of doing so. The nitrobenzene, which appears to worry Mr.
Bradley so much, seems to me a very simple matter. Sir Eustace has
decided upon chocolates as the vehicle, and chocolate liqueurs at
that. (Mason’s chocolate liqueurs, I should say, are a favourite
purchase of Sir Eustace’s. It is significant that he had bought
several one-pound boxes recently.) He is searching, then, for some
poison with a flavour which will mingle well enough with that of the
liqueurs. He is bound to come across oil of bitter almonds very soon
in that connection, actually used as it is in confectionery, and from
that to nitrobenzene, which is more common, easier to get hold of, and
practically untraceable, is an obvious step.
“He arranges to meet Mrs. Bendix for lunch, intending to make a
present to her then of the chocolates which are to come to him that
morning by post, a perfectly natural thing to do. He will already have
the porter’s evidence of the innocent way in which he acquired them.
At the last minute he sees the obvious flaw in this plan. If he gives
Mrs. Bendix the chocolates in person, and especially at lunch at
Fellows’s Hotel, his intimacy with her must be disclosed. He hastily
racks his brains and finds a very much better plan. Getting hold of
Mrs. Bendix, he tells her some story of her husband and Vera Delorme.
“In characteristic fashion Mrs. Bendix loses sight of the beam in her
own eye on learning of this mote in her husband’s and at once falls in
with Sir Eustace’s suggestion that she shall ring Mr. Bendix up,
disguising her voice and pretending to be Vera Delorme, and just find
out for herself whether or not he will jump at the chance of an
intimate little lunch for the following day.
“‘And tell him you’ll ring him up at the Rainbow to-morrow morning
between ten-thirty and eleven,’ Sir Eustace adds carelessly. ‘If he
goes to the Rainbow, you’ll be able to know for certain that he’s
dancing attendance on her at any hour of the day.’ And so she does.
The presence of Bendix is therefore assured for the next morning at
half-past ten. Who in the world is to say that he was not there by
purest chance when Sir Eustace was exclaiming over that parcel?
“As for the bet, which clinched the handing over of the chocolates, I
cannot believe that this was just a stroke of luck for Sir Eustace.
That seems too good to be true. Somehow, I’m sure, though I won’t
attempt to show how (that would be mere guesswork), Sir Eustace
arranged for that bet in advance. And if he did, the fact in no way
destroys my initial deduction from it, that Mrs. Bendix was not so
honest as she pretended; for whether it was arranged or whether it
wasn’t, the plain fact is left that it is dishonest to make a bet to
which you know the answer.
“Lastly, if I am to follow the fashion and cite a parallel case, I
decide unhesitatingly for John Tawell, who administered prussic acid
in a bottle of beer to his mistress, Sarah Hart, when he was tired of
her.”
The Circle looked at her admiringly. At last, it seemed, they really
had got to the bottom of the business.
Sir Charles voiced the general feeling. “If you’ve got any solid
evidence to support this theory, Miss Dammers . . .” He implied that
in that case the rope was as good as round Sir Eustace’s thick red
neck.
“Meaning that the evidence I’ve given already isn’t solid enough for
the legal mind?” enquired Miss Dammers equably.
“Psy—psychological reconstructions wouldn’t carry _very_ much weight
with a jury,” Sir Charles took refuge behind the jury in question.
“I’ve connected Sir Eustace with the piece of Mason’s notepaper,” Miss
Dammers pointed out.
“I’m afraid on that alone Sir Eustace would get the benefit of the
doubt.” Sir Charles was evidently deprecating the psychological
obtuseness of that jury of his.
“I’ve shown a tremendous motive, and I’ve connected him with a book of
similar cases and a book of poisons.”
“Yes. Oh, quite so. But what I mean is, have you any real evidence to
connect Sir Eustace quite definitely with the letter, the chocolates,
or the wrapper?”
“He has an Onyx pen, and the inkpot in his library used to be filled
with Harfield’s Ink,” Miss Dammers smiled. “I’ve no doubt it is still.
He was supposed to have been at the Rainbow the whole evening before
the murder, but I’ve ascertained that there is a gap of half-an-hour
between nine o’clock and nine-thirty during which nobody saw him. He
left the dining-room at nine, and a waiter brought him a
whisky-and-soda in the lounge at half-past. In the interim nobody
knows where he was. He wasn’t in the lounge. Where was he? The porter
swears he did not see him go out, or come in again; but there is a
back way which he could have used if he wanted to be unnoticed, as of
course he did. I asked him myself, as if by way of a joke, and he said
that he had gone up to the library after dinner to look up a reference
in a book of big-game hunting. Could he mention the names of any other
members in the library? He said there weren’t any; there never were;
he’d never seen a member in the library all the time he belonged to
the club. I thanked him and rang off.
“In other words, he says he was in the library, because he knows there
would be no other member there to prove he wasn’t. What he really did
during that half-hour, of course, was to slip out the back-way, hurry
down to the Strand to post the parcel (just as Mr. Sheringham saw Mr.
Bendix hurrying down), slip in again, run up to the library to make
sure nobody was there, and then go down to the lounge and order his
whisky-and-soda to prove his presence there later. Isn’t that more
feasible than your vision of Mr. Bendix, Mr. Sheringham?”
“I must admit that it’s no less so,” Roger had to agree.
“Then you haven’t any solid evidence at all?” lamented Sir Charles.
“Nothing that would really impress a jury?”
“Yes, I have,” said Miss Dammers quietly. “I’ve been saving it up till
the end because I wanted to prove my case (as I consider I have done)
without it. But this is absolutely and finally conclusive. Will
everybody examine these, please.”
Miss Dammers produced from her bag a brown-paper-covered parcel.
Unwrapping it, she brought to light a photograph and a quarto sheet of
paper which looked like a typed letter.
“The photograph,” she explained, “I obtained from Chief Inspector
Moresby the other day, but without telling him the specific purpose
for which I wanted it. It is of the forged letter, actual size. I
should like everybody to compare it with this typed copy of the
letter. Will you look at them first, Mr. Sheringham, and then pass
them round? Notice particularly the slightly crooked s’s and the
chipped capital H.”
In dead silence Roger pored over the two. He examined them for a full
two minutes, which seemed to the others more like two hours, and then
passed them on to Sir Charles on his right.
“There isn’t the slightest doubt that those two were done on the same
machine,” he said soberly.
Miss Dammers showed neither less nor more emotion than she had
displayed throughout. Her voice carried exactly the same impersonal
inflection. She might have been announcing her discovery of a match
between two pieces of dress-material. From her level tone it could
never have been guessed that a man’s neck depended on her words no
less than on the rope that was to hang him.
“You will find the machine in Sir Eustace’s rooms,” she said.
Even Mr. Bradley was moved. “Then as I said, he deserves all that’s
coming to him,” he drawled, with a quite impossible nonchalance, and
even attempted a yawn. “Dear me, what a distressing bungler.”
Sir Charles passed on the evidence. “Miss Dammers,” he said
impressively, “you have rendered a very great service to society. I
congratulate you.”
“Thank you, Sir Charles,” replied Miss Dammers, matter-of-factly. “But
it was Mr. Sheringham’s idea, you know.”
“Mr. Sheringham,” intoned Sir Charles, “sowed better than he knew.”
Roger, who had hoped to add another feather to his cap by solving the
mystery himself, smiled in a somewhat sickly way.
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming improved the occasion. “We have made history,”
she said with fitting solemnity. “When the whole police-force of a
nation had failed, a woman has uncovered the dark mystery. Alicia,
this is a red-letter day, not only for you, not only for this Circle,
but for Woman.”
“Thank you, Mabel,” responded Miss Dammers. “How very nice of you to
say so.”
The evidence passed slowly round the table and returned to Miss
Dammers. She handed it on to Roger.
“Mr. Sheringham, I think you had better take charge of these. As
President, I leave the matter in your hands. You know as much as I do.
As you may imagine, to inform the police officially myself would be
extremely distasteful. I should like my name kept out of any
communication you make to them, entirely.”
Roger was rubbing his chin. “I think that can be done. I could just
hand these things over to him, with the information where the machine
is, and let Scotland Yard work the case up themselves. These, and the
motive, with the evidence of the porter at Fellows’s Hotel of which I
shall have to tell Moresby, are the only things that will really
interest the police, I think. Humph! I suppose I’d better see Moresby
to-night. Will you come with me, Sir Charles? It would add weight.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Sir Charles agreed with alacrity.
Everybody looked, and felt, very serious.
“I suppose,” Mr. Chitterwick dropped shyly into all this solemnity, “I
suppose you couldn’t put it off for twenty-four hours, could you?”
Roger looked his surprise. “But why?”
“Well, you know . . .” Mr. Chitterwick wriggled with diffidence.
“Well—I haven’t spoken yet, you know.”
Five pairs of eyes fastened on him in astonishment. Mr. Chitterwick
blushed warmly.
“Of course. No, of course.” Roger was trying to be as tactful as he
could. “And—well, that is to say, you want to speak, of course?”
“I have a theory,” said Mr. Chitterwick modestly. “I—I don’t _want_ to
speak, no. But I have a theory.”
“Yes, yes,” said Roger, and looked helplessly at Sir Charles.
Sir Charles marched to the rescue. “I’m sure we shall all be most
interested to hear Mr. Chitterwick’s theory,” he pronounced. “Most
interested. But why not let us have it now, Mr. Chitterwick?”
“It isn’t quite complete,” said Mr. Chitterwick, unhappy but
persistent. “I should like another twenty-four hours to clear up one
or two points.”
Sir Charles had an inspiration. “Of course, of course. We must meet
to-morrow and listen to Mr. Chitterwick’s theory, of course. In the
meantime Sheringham and I will just call in at Scotland Yard and—”
“I’d much rather you didn’t,” said Mr. Chitterwick, now in the deeps
of misery. “Really I would.”
Again Roger looked helplessly at Sir Charles. This time Sir Charles
looked helplessly back.
“Well—I suppose another twenty-four hours wouldn’t make _much_
difference,” said Roger with reluctance. “After all this time.”
“Not _very_ much difference,” pleaded Mr. Chitterwick.
“Well, not very much difference certainly,” agreed Sir Charles,
frankly puzzled.
“Then have I your word, Mr. President?” persisted Mr. Chitterwick,
very mournfully.
“If you put it like that,” said Roger, rather coldly.
The meeting then broke up, somewhat bewildered.