Poisoned Chocolates Case (13 page)

“I've never heard of her,” Roger said, quite untruthfully.

“It began about a week ago, they say,” rattled on this red - hot gossiper. “To console himself for not getting Dora Wildman, I suppose. Well, thank goodness Sir Charles had the sense to put his foot down there. He did, didn't he? I heard so the other day. Horrible man! You'd have thought that such a dreadful thing as being practically responsible for poor Joan's death would have sobered him up a little, wouldn't you? But not a bit of it. As a matter of fact I believe he - - ”

“Have you seen any shows lately?” Roger asked in a loud voice.

Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer stared at him, for a moment nonplussed. “Shows? Yes, I've seen almost everything, I think. Why, Mr. Sheringham? ”

“I just wondered. The new revue at the Pavilion's quite good, isn't it? Well, I'm afraid I must - - ”

“Oh, don't!” Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer shuddered delicately. “I was there the night before Joan's death.” (Can no subject take us away from that for a moment? thought Roger.) “Lady Cavelstoke had a box and asked me to join her party.”

“Yes?” Roger was wondering if it would be considered rude if he simply handed the lady off, as at rugger, and dived for the nearest opening in the traffic. “Quite a good show,” he said at random, edging restlessly towards the curb. I liked that sketch, The Sempiternal Triangle, particularly."

“The Sempiternal Triangle?” repeated Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer vaguely.

'Yes, quite near the beginning."

Oh! Then I may not have seen it. I got there few minutes late, I'm afraid. But then,“ said Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer with pathos, ”I always do seem to be late for everything." Roger noted mentally that the few minutes was by way of a euphemism, as were most of Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer's statements regarding herself. The Sempiternal Triangle had certainly not been in the first half - hour of the performance.

“Ah!” Roger looked fixedly at an oncoming 'bus. “I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me, Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer. There's a man on that 'bus who wants to speak to me. Scotland Yard!” he hissed, in an impressive whisper.

“Oh! Then - then does that mean you are looking into poor Joan's death, Mr. Sheringham? Do tell me! I won't breathe it to a soul.”

Roger looked round him with a mysterious air and frowned in the approved manner. “Yes!” he nodded, his finger to his lips. “But not a word, Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer.”

“Of course not, I promise.” But Roger was disappointed to notice that the lady did not seem quite so impressed as he had hoped. From her expression he was almost ready to believe that she suspected how unavailing his efforts had been, and was a little sorry that he had taken on more than he could manage.

But the 'bus had now reached them, and with a hasty “Good - bye” Roger swung himself onto the step as it lumbered past. With awful stealth, feeling those big brown eyes fixed in awe on his back, he climbed the steps and took his seat, after an exaggerated scrutiny of the other passengers, beside a perfectly inoffensive little man in a bowler - hat. The little man, who happened to be a clerk in the employment of a monumental mason at Tooting, looking at him resentfully. There were plenty of quite empty seats all round them.

The 'bus swung into Piccadilly, and Roger got off at the Rainbow club. He was lunching once again with a member. Roger had spent most of the last ten days asking such members of the Rainbow club as he knew, however remotely, out to lunch in order to be asked to the club in return. So far nothing helpful had arisen out of all this wasted labour, and he anticipated nothing more today.

Not that the member was at all reluctant to talk about the tragedy. He had been at school with Bendix, it appeared, and was as ready to adopt responsibility for him on the strength of this tie as Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer had been for Mrs. Bendix. He plumed himself more than a little therefore on having a more intimate connection with the business than his fellow - members. Indeed one gathered that the connection was even a trifle closer than that of Sir Eustace himself. Roger's host was that kind of man.

As they were talking a man entered the dining - room and walked past their table. Roger's host became abruptly silent. The newcomer threw him an abrupt nod and passed on.

Roger's host leant forward across the table and spoke in the hushed tones of one to whom a revelation has been vouchsafed. “Talk of the devil! That was Bendix himself. First time I've seen him in here since it happened. Poor devil! It knocked him all to pieces, you know. I've never seen a man so devoted to his wife. It was a byword. Did you see how ghastly he looked?” All this in a tactful whisper that must have been far more obvious to the subject of it had he happened to be looking their way than the loudest bellowing.

Roger nodded shortly. He had caught a glimpse of Bendix's face and been shocked by it even before he learned his identity. It was haggard and pale and seamed with lines of bitterness, prematurely old. “Hang it all,” he now thought, much moved, “somebody really must make an effort. If the murderer isn't found soon it will kill that chap too.”

Aloud he said, somewhat at random and certainly without tact: “He didn't exactly fall on your neck. I thought you two were such bosom friends?”

His host looked uncomfortable. “Oh, well, you must make allowances just at present,” he judged. “Besides, we weren't bosom friends exactly. As a matter of fact he was a year or two senior to me. Or it might have been three even. We were in different houses too. And he was on the modern side of course (can you imagine the son of his father being anything else?), while I was a classical bird.”

“I see,” said Roger quite gravely, realising that his host's actual contact with Bendix at school had been limited, at most, to that of the latter's toe with the former's hinder parts.

He left it at that. For the rest of lunch he was a little inattentive. Something was nagging at his brain, and he could not identify it. Somewhere, somehow, during the last hour, he felt, a vital piece of information had been conveyed to him and he had never grasped its importance.

It was not until he was putting on his coat half - an - hour later, and for the moment had given up trying to worry his mind into giving up its booty, that the realisation suddenly came to him unbidden, in accordance with its usual and maddening way. He stopped dead, one arm in his coat - sleeve, the other in act to fumble.

“By Jove !” he said softly.

“Anything the matter, old man?” asked his host, now mellowed by much port.

“No, thanks; nothing,” said Roger hastily, coming to earth again.

Outside the club he hailed a taxi.

For probably the first time in her life Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer had given somebody a constructive idea.

For the rest of the day Roger was very busy indeed.

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 anticlimaxes.

"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 his 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 . . .?”