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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75476 ***
+
+
+The Poisoned Chocolates Case
+
+by Anthony Berkeley
+
+Published in 1929 by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd
+Reprinted in 2016 by The British Library
+
+
+
+          To
+     S. H. J. Cox
+  because for once he
+    did not guess it
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Roger Sheringham took a sip of the old brandy in front of him and
+leaned back in his chair at the head of the table.
+
+Through the haze of cigarette-smoke eager voices reached his ears from
+all directions, prattling joyfully upon this and that connected with
+murder, poisons and sudden death. For this was his own, his very own
+Crimes Circle, founded, organised, collected, and now run by himself
+alone; and when at the first meeting five months ago he had been
+unanimously elected its president, he had been as full of proud
+delight as on that never-to-be-forgotten day in the dim past when a
+cherub disguised as a publisher had accepted his first novel.
+
+He turned to Chief Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard who, as the
+guest of the evening, was sitting on his right, engaged, a little
+uneasily, with a positively enormous cigar.
+
+“Honestly, Moresby, without any disrespect to your own institution, I
+do believe that there’s more solid criminological genius in this room
+(intuitive genius, I mean; not capacity for taking pains) than
+anywhere in the world outside the _Sûreté_ in Paris.”
+
+“Do you, Mr. Sheringham?” said Chief Inspector Moresby tolerantly.
+Moresby was always kind to the strange opinions of others. “Well,
+well.” And he applied himself again to the lighted end of his cigar,
+which was so very far from the other that Moresby could never tell by
+mere suction at the latter whether the former were still alight or
+not.
+
+Roger had some grounds for his assertion beyond mere parental pride.
+Entry into the charmed Crimes Circle’s dinners was not to be gained by
+all and hungry. It was not enough for a would-be member to profess an
+adoration for murder and let it go at that; he or she had got to prove
+that they were capable of worthily wearing their criminological spurs.
+
+Not only must the interest be intense in all branches of the science,
+in the detection side, for instance, just as much as the side of
+criminal psychology, with the history of all cases of the least
+importance at the applicant’s finger-tips, but there must be
+constructive ability too; the candidate must have a brain and be able
+to use it. To this end, a paper had to be written, from a choice of
+subjects suggested by members, and submitted to the president, who
+passed on such as he considered worthy to the members in conclave, who
+thereupon voted for or against the suppliant’s election; and a single
+adverse vote meant rejection.
+
+It was the intention of the club to acquire eventually thirteen
+members, but so far only six had succeeded in passing their tests, and
+these were all present on the evening when this chronicle opens. There
+was a famous lawyer, a scarcely less famous woman dramatist, a
+brilliant novelist who ought to have been more famous than she was,
+the most intelligent (if not the most amiable) of living
+detective-story writers, Roger Sheringham himself, and Mr. Ambrose
+Chitterwick, who was not famous at all, a mild little man of no
+particular appearance who had been even more surprised at being
+admitted to this company of personages than they had been at finding
+him amongst them.
+
+With the exception of Mr. Chitterwick, then, it was an assembly of
+which any organiser might have been proud. Roger this evening was not
+only proud but excited too, because he was going to startle them; and
+it is always exciting to startle personages. He rose to do so.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed, after the welcome of glasses
+and cigarette-cases drummed on the table had died away. “Ladies and
+gentlemen, in virtue of the powers conferred by you the president of
+our Circle is permitted to alter at his discretion the arrangements
+made for any meeting. You all know what arrangements were made for
+this evening. Chief Inspector Moresby, whom we are so glad to welcome
+as the first representative of Scotland Yard to visit us”—more
+drumming on the table—“Chief Inspector Moresby was to be lulled by
+rich food and sound wine into being so indiscreet as to tell us about
+such of his experiences as could hardly be given to a body of
+pressmen.” More and longer drumming.
+
+Roger refreshed himself with a sip of brandy and continued. “Now I
+think I know Chief Inspector Moresby pretty well, ladies and
+gentlemen, and the occasions are not a few on which I too have tried,
+and tried very hard, to lure him similarly into the paths of
+indiscretion; but never once have I succeeded. I have therefore little
+hope that this Circle, lure it never so cooingly, will succeed in
+getting from the Chief Inspector any more interesting stories than he
+would mind being published in _The Daily Courier_ to-morrow. Chief
+Inspector Moresby, I am afraid, ladies and gentlemen, is unlurable.
+
+“I have therefore taken upon myself the responsibility of altering our
+entertainment for this evening; and the idea that has occurred to me
+in this connection will, I both hope and believe, appeal to you very
+considerably. I venture to think that it is both novel and
+enthralling.” Roger paused and beamed on the interested faces around
+him. Chief Inspector Moresby, a little puce below the ears, was still
+at grips with his cigar.
+
+“My idea,” Roger said, “is connected with Mr. Graham Bendix.” There
+was a little stir of interest. “Or rather,” he amended, more slowly,
+“with Mrs. Graham Bendix.” The stir subsided into a still more
+interested hush.
+
+Roger paused, as if choosing his words with more care. “Mr. Bendix
+himself is personally known to one or two of us here. Indeed, his name
+has actually been mentioned as that of a man who might possibly be
+interested, if approached, to become a member of this Circle. By Sir
+Charles Wildman, if I remember rightly.”
+
+The barrister inclined his rather massive head with dignity. “Yes, I
+suggested him once, I think.”
+
+“The suggestion was never followed up,” Roger continued. “I don’t
+quite remember why not; I think somebody else was rather sure that he
+would never be able to pass all our tests. But in any case the fact
+that his name was ever mentioned at all shows that Mr. Bendix is to
+some extent at least a criminologist, which means that our sympathy
+with him in the terrible tragedy that has befallen him is tinged with
+something of a personal interest, even in the case of those who, like
+myself, are not actually acquainted with him.”
+
+“Hear, hear,” said a tall, good-looking woman on the right of the
+table, in the clear tones of one very well accustomed to saying “hear,
+hear” weightily at appropriate moments during speeches, in case no one
+else did. This was Alicia Dammers, the novelist, who ran Women’s
+Institutes for a hobby, listened to other people’s speeches with
+genuine and altruistic enjoyment, and, in practice the most staunch of
+Conservatives, supported with enthusiasm the theories of the Socialist
+party.
+
+“My suggestion is,” Roger said simply, “that we turn that sympathy to
+practical uses.”
+
+There was no doubt that the eager attention of his audience was
+caught. Sir Charles Wildman lifted his bushy grey brows, from under
+which he was wont to frown with menacing disgust at the prosecution’s
+witnesses who had the bad taste to believe in the guilt of his own
+client, and swung his gold-rimmed eye-glasses on their broad black
+ribbon. On the other side of the table Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, a short,
+round, homely-looking woman who wrote surprisingly improper and most
+successful plays and looked exactly like a rather superior cook on her
+Sunday out, nudged the elbow of Miss Dammers and whispered something
+behind her hand. Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick blinked his mild blue eyes
+and assumed the appearance of an intelligent nanny-goat. The writer of
+detective-stories alone sat apparently unmoved and impassive; but in
+times of crisis he was wont to model his behaviour on that of his own
+favourite detective, who was invariably impassive at the most exciting
+moments.
+
+“I took the idea to Scotland Yard this morning,” Roger went on, “and
+though they never encourage that sort of idea there, they were really
+unable to discover any positive harm in it; with the result that I
+came away with a reluctant, but nevertheless official permission to
+try it out. And I may as well say at once that it was the same cue
+that prompted this permission as originally put the whole thing into
+my head”—Roger paused impressively and glanced round—“the fact that
+the police have practically given up all hope of tracing Mrs. Bendix’s
+murderer.”
+
+Ejaculations sounded on all sides, some of dismay, some of disgust,
+and some of astonishment. All eyes turned upon Moresby. That
+gentleman, apparently unconscious of the collective gaze fastened upon
+him, raised his cigar to his ear and listened to it intently, as if
+hoping to receive some intimate message from its depths.
+
+Roger came to his rescue. “That information is quite confidential, by
+the way, and I know none of you will let it escape beyond this room.
+But it is a fact. Active inquiries, having resulted in exactly
+nothing, are to be stopped. There is always hope of course that some
+fresh fact may turn up, but without it the authorities have come to
+the conclusion that they can get no farther. My proposal is,
+therefore, that this Club should take up the case where the
+authorities have left it.” And he looked expectantly round the circle
+of upturned faces.
+
+Every face asked a question at once.
+
+Roger forgot his periods in his enthusiasm and became colloquial.
+
+“Why, you see, we’re all keen, we’re not fools, and we’re not (with
+apologies to my friend Moresby) tied to any hard-and-fast method of
+investigation. Is it too much to hope that, with all six of us on our
+mettle and working quite independently of each other, one of us might
+achieve some result where the police have, to put it bluntly, failed?
+I don’t think it’s outside the possibilities. What do you say, Sir
+Charles?”
+
+The famous counsel uttered a deep laugh. “’Pon my word, Sheringham,
+it’s an interesting idea. But I must reserve judgment till you’ve
+outlined your proposal in a little more detail.”
+
+“I think it’s a wonderful idea, Mr. Sheringham,” cried Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, who was not troubled with a legal mind. “I’d like to
+begin this very evening.” Her plump cheeks positively quivered with
+excitement. “Wouldn’t you, Alicia?”
+
+“It has possibilities,” smiled that lady.
+
+“As a matter-of-fact,” said the writer of detective-stories, with an
+air of detachment, “I’d formed a theory of my own about this case
+already.” His name was Percy Robinson, but he wrote under the
+pseudonym of Morton Harrogate Bradley, which had so impressed the more
+simple citizens of the United States of America that they had bought
+three editions of his first book on the strength of that alone. For
+some obscure psychological reason Americans are always impressed by
+the use of surnames for Christian, and particularly when one of them
+happens to be the name of an English watering-place.
+
+Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick beamed in a mild way, but said nothing.
+
+“Well,” Roger took up his tale, “the details are open to discussion,
+of course, but I thought that, if we all decide to make the trial, it
+would be more amusing if we worked independently. Moresby here can
+give us the plain facts as they’re known to the police. He hasn’t been
+in charge of the case himself, but he’s had one or two jobs in
+connection with it and is pretty well up in the facts; moreover he has
+very kindly spent most of the afternoon examining the dossier at
+Scotland Yard so as to be sure of omitting nothing this evening.
+
+“When we’ve heard him some of us may be able to form a theory at once;
+possible lines of investigation may occur to others which they will
+wish to follow up before they commit themselves. In any case, I
+suggest that we allow ourselves a week in which to form our theories,
+verify our hypotheses, and set our individual interpretations on the
+facts that Scotland Yard has collected, during which time no member
+shall discuss the case with any other member. We may achieve nothing
+(most probably we shall not), but in any case it will be a most
+interesting criminological exercise; for some of us practical, for
+others academical, just as we prefer. And what I think should be most
+interesting will be to see if we all arrive at the same result or not.
+Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting is open for discussion, or whatever
+is the right way of putting it. In other words: what about it?” And
+Roger dropped back, not reluctantly, into his seat.
+
+Almost before his trousers had touched it the first question reached
+him.
+
+“Do you mean that we’re to go out and act as our own detectives, Mr.
+Sheringham, or just write a thesis on the facts that the Chief
+Inspector is going to give us?” asked Alicia Dammers.
+
+“Whichever each one of us preferred, I thought,” Roger answered.
+“That’s what I meant when I said that the exercise would be practical
+for some of us and academic for others.”
+
+“But you’ve got so much more experience than us on the practical side,
+Mr. Sheringham,” pouted Mrs. Fielder-Flemming (yes, pouted).
+
+“And the police have so much more than me,” Roger countered.
+
+“It will depend whether we use deductive or inductive methods, no
+doubt,” observed Mr. Morton Harrogate Bradley. “Those who prefer the
+former will work from the police-facts and won’t need to make any
+investigations of their own, except perhaps to verify a conclusion or
+two. But the inductive method demands a good deal of inquiry.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Roger.
+
+“Police-facts and the deductive method have solved plenty of serious
+mysteries in this country,” pronounced Sir Charles Wildman. “I shall
+rely on them for this one.”
+
+“There’s one particular feature of this case,” murmured Mr. Bradley to
+nobody, “that ought to lead one straight to the criminal. I’ve thought
+so all the time. I shall concentrate on that.”
+
+“I’m sure I haven’t the remotest idea how one sets about investigating
+a point, if it becomes desirable,” observed Mr. Chitterwick uneasily;
+but nobody heard him, so it did not matter.
+
+“The only thing that struck me about this case,” said Alicia Dammers,
+very distinctly, “regarded, I mean, as a pure case, was its complete
+absence of any psychological interest whatever.” And without actually
+saying so, Miss Dammers conveyed the impression that if that were so,
+she personally had no further use for it.
+
+“I don’t think you’ll say that when you’ve heard what Moresby’s got to
+tell us,” Roger said gently. “We’re going to hear a great deal more
+than has appeared in the newspapers, you know.”
+
+“Then let’s hear it,” suggested Sir Charles, bluntly.
+
+“We’re all agreed, then?” said Roger, looking round as happily as a
+child who has been given a new toy. “Everybody is willing to try it
+out?”
+
+Amid the ensuing chorus of enthusiasm, one voice alone was silent. Mr.
+Ambrose Chitterwick was still wondering, quite unhappily, how, if it
+ever became necessary to go a-detecting, one went. He had studied the
+reminiscences of a hundred ex-detectives, the real ones, with large
+black boots and bowler hats; but all he could remember at that moment,
+out of all those scores of fat books (published at eighteen and
+sixpence, and remaindered a few months later at eighteen-pence), was
+that a real, _real_ detective, if he means to attain results, never
+puts on a false moustache but simply shaves his eyebrows. As a
+mystery-solving formula, this seemed to Mr. Chitterwick inadequate.
+
+Fortunately in the buzz of chatter that preceded the very reluctant
+rising of Chief Inspector Moresby, Mr. Chitterwick’s poltroonery went
+unnoticed.
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+Chief Inspector Moresby, having stood up and blushingly received his
+tribute of hand-claps, was invited to address the gathering from his
+chair and thankfully retired into that shelter. Consulting the sheaf
+of notes in his hand, he began to enlighten his very attentive
+audience as to the strange circumstances connected with Mrs. Bendix’s
+untimely death. Without reproducing his own words, and all the
+numerous supplementary questions which punctuated his story, the gist
+of what he had to tell was as follows:—
+
+
+On Friday morning, the fifteenth of November, Graham Bendix strolled
+into his club, the Rainbow, in Piccadilly, at about ten-thirty and
+asked if there were any letters for him. The porter handed him a
+letter and a couple of circulars, and he walked over to the fireplace
+in the hall to read them.
+
+While he was doing so another member entered the club. This was a
+middle-aged baronet, Sir Eustace Pennefather, who had rooms just round
+the corner, in Berkeley Street, but spent most of his time at the
+Rainbow. The porter glanced up at the clock, as he did every morning
+when Sir Eustace came in, and, as always, it was exactly half-past
+ten. The time was thus definitely fixed by the porter beyond any
+doubt.
+
+There were three letters and a small parcel for Sir Eustace, and he,
+too, took them over to the fireplace to open, nodding to Bendix as he
+joined him there. The two men knew each other only very slightly and
+had probably never exchanged more than half-a-dozen words in all.
+There were no other members in the hall just then.
+
+Having glanced through his letters, Sir Eustace opened the parcel and
+snorted with disgust. Bendix looked at him enquiringly, and with a
+grunt Sir Eustace thrust out the letter which had been enclosed in the
+parcel, adding an uncomplimentary remark upon modern trade methods.
+Concealing a smile (Sir Eustace’s habits and opinions were a matter of
+some amusement to his fellow-members), Bendix read the letter. It was
+from the firm of Mason & Sons, the big chocolate manufacturers, and
+was to the effect that they had just put on the market a new brand of
+liqueur-chocolates designed especially to appeal to the cultivated
+palates of Men of Taste. Sir Eustace being, presumably, a Man of
+Taste, would he be good enough to honour Mr. Mason and his sons by
+accepting the enclosed one-pound box, and any criticisms or
+appreciation that he might have to make concerning them would be
+esteemed almost more than a favour.
+
+“Do they think I’m a blasted chorus-girl,” fumed Sir Eustace, a
+choleric man, “to write ’em testimonials about their blasted
+chocolates? Blast ’em! I’ll complain to the blasted committee. That
+sort of blasted thing can’t blasted well be allowed here.” For the
+Rainbow Club, as every one knows, is a very proud and exclusive club
+indeed, with an unbroken descent from the Rainbow Coffee-House,
+founded in 1734. Not even a family founded by a king’s bastard can be
+quite so exclusive to-day as a club founded on a coffee-house.
+
+“Well, it’s an ill wind so far as I’m concerned,” Bendix soothed him.
+“It’s reminded me of something. I’ve got to get some chocolates
+myself, to pay an honourable debt. My wife and I had a box at the
+Imperial last night, and I bet her a box of chocolates to a hundred
+cigarettes that she wouldn’t spot the villain by the end of the second
+act. She won. I must remember to get them. It’s not a bad show. _The
+Creaking Skull_. Have you seen it?”
+
+“Not blasted likely,” replied the other, unsoothed. “Got something
+better to do than sit and watch a lot of blasted fools messing about
+with phosphorescent paint and pooping off blasted pop-guns at each
+other. Want a box of chocolates, did you say? Well, take this blasted
+one.”
+
+The money saved by this offer had no weight with Bendix. He was a very
+wealthy man, and probably had enough on him in actual cash to buy a
+hundred such boxes. But trouble is always worth saving. “Sure you
+don’t want them?” he demurred politely.
+
+In Sir Eustace’s reply only one word, several times repeated, was
+clearly recognisable. But his meaning was plain. Bendix thanked him
+and, most unfortunately for himself, accepted the gift.
+
+By an extraordinarily lucky chance the wrapper of the box was not
+thrown into the fire, either by Sir Eustace in his indignation or by
+Bendix himself when the whole collection, box, covering letter,
+wrapper and string, was shovelled into his hands by the almost
+apoplectic baronet. This was the more fortunate as both men had
+already tossed the envelopes of their letters into the flames.
+
+Bendix however merely walked over to the porter’s desk and deposited
+everything there, asking the man to keep the box for him. The porter
+put the box aside, and threw the wrapper into the waste-paper basket.
+The covering letter had fallen unnoticed from Bendix’s hand as he
+walked across the floor. This the porter tidily picked up a few
+minutes later and put in the waste-paper basket too, whence, with the
+wrapper, it was retrieved later by the police.
+
+These two articles, it may be said at once, constituted two of the
+only three tangible clues to the murder, the third of course being the
+chocolates themselves.
+
+Of the three unconscious protagonists in the impending tragedy, Sir
+Eustace was by far the most remarkable. Still a year or two under
+fifty, he looked, with his flaming red face and thickset figure, a
+typical country squire of the old school, and both his manners and his
+language were in accordance with tradition. There were other
+resemblances too, but they were equally on the surface. The voices of
+the country squires of the old school were often slightly husky
+towards late middle age, but it was not with whisky. They hunted, and
+so did Sir Eustace, with avidity; but the country squires confined
+their hunting to foxes, and Sir Eustace was far more catholic in his
+predatory tastes. Sir Eustace in short, without doubt, was a
+thoroughly bad baronet. But his vices were all on the large scale,
+with the usual result that most other men, good or bad, liked him well
+enough (except perhaps a few husbands here and there, or a father or
+two), and women openly hung on his husky words.
+
+In comparison with him Bendix was rather an ordinary man, a tall,
+dark, not unhandsome fellow of eight-and-twenty, quiet and somewhat
+reserved, popular in a way but neither inviting nor apparently
+reciprocating anything beyond a somewhat grave friendliness.
+
+He had been left a rich man on the death five years ago of his father,
+who had made a fortune out of land-sites, which he had bought up in
+undeveloped areas with an uncanny foresight to sell later, at never
+less than ten times what he had given for them, when surrounded by
+houses and factories erected with other people’s money. “Just sit
+tight and let other people make you rich,” had been his motto, and a
+very sound one it proved. His son, though left with an income that
+precluded any necessity to work, had evidently inherited his father’s
+tendencies, for he had a finger in a good many business pies just (as
+he explained a little apologetically) out of sheer love of the most
+exciting game in the world.
+
+Money attracts money. Graham Bendix had inherited it, he made it, and
+inevitably he married it too. The orphaned daughter of a Liverpool
+ship-owner she was, with not far off half-a-million in her own right
+to bring to Bendix, who needed it not at all. But the money was
+incidental, for he needed her if not her fortune, and would have
+married her just as inevitably (said his friends) if she had had not a
+farthing.
+
+She was so exactly his type. A tall, rather serious-minded,
+highly-cultured girl, not so young that her character had not had time
+to form (she was twenty-five when Bendix married her, three years
+ago), she was the ideal wife for him. A bit of a Puritan, perhaps, in
+some ways, but Bendix himself was ready enough to be a Puritan by then
+if Joan Cullompton was.
+
+For in spite of the way he developed later Bendix had sown as a youth
+a few wild oats in the normal way. Stage-doors, that is to say, had
+not been entirely strange to him. His name had been mentioned in
+connection with that of more than one frail and fluffy lady. He had
+managed, in short, to amuse himself, discreetly but by no means
+clandestinely, in the usual manner of young men with too much money
+and too few years. But all that, again in the ordinary way, had
+stopped with his marriage.
+
+He was openly devoted to his wife and did not care who knew it, while
+she too, if a trifle less obviously, was equally said to wear her
+heart on her sleeve. To make no bones about it, the Bendixes had
+apparently succeeded in achieving that eighth wonder of the modern
+world, a happy marriage.
+
+And into the middle of it there dropped, like a clap of thunder, the
+box of chocolates.
+
+“After depositing the box of chocolates with the porter,” Moresby
+continued, shuffling his papers to find the right one, “Mr. Bendix
+followed Sir Eustace into the lounge, where he was reading the
+_Morning Post_.”
+
+Roger nodded approval. There was no other paper that Sir Eustace could
+possibly have been reading but the _Morning Post_.
+
+Bendix himself proceeded to study _The Daily Telegraph_. He was rather
+at a loose end that morning. There were no board meetings for him, and
+none of the businesses in which he was interested called him out into
+the rain of a typical November day. He spent the rest of the morning
+in an aimless way, read the daily papers, glanced through the
+weeklies, and played a hundred up at billiards with another member
+equally idle. At about half-past twelve he went back to lunch to his
+house in Eaton Square, taking the chocolates with him.
+
+Mrs. Bendix had given orders that she would not be in to lunch that
+day, but her appointment had been cancelled and she too was lunching
+at home. Bendix gave her the box of chocolates after the meal as they
+were sitting over their coffee in the drawing-room, explaining how
+they had come into his possession. Mrs. Bendix laughingly teased him
+about his meanness in not buying her a box, but approved the make and
+was interested to try the firm’s new variety. Joan Bendix was not so
+serious-minded as not to have a healthy feminine interest in good
+chocolates.
+
+Their appearance, however, did not seem to impress her very much.
+
+“Kümmel, Kirsch, Maraschino,” she said, delving with her fingers among
+the silver-wrappered sweets, each bearing the name of its filling in
+neat blue lettering. “Nothing else, apparently. I don’t see anything
+new here, Graham. They’ve just taken those three kinds out of their
+ordinary liqueur-chocolates.”
+
+“Oh?” said Bendix, who was not particularly interested in chocolates.
+“Well, I don’t suppose it matters much. All liqueur-chocolates taste
+the same to me.”
+
+“Yes, and they’ve even packed them in their usual liqueur-chocolate
+box,” complained his wife, examining the lid.
+
+“They’re only a sample,” Bendix pointed out. “They may not have got
+the right boxes ready yet.”
+
+“I don’t believe there’s the slightest difference,” Mrs. Bendix
+pronounced, unwrapping a Kümmel. She held the box out to her husband.
+“Have one?”
+
+He shook his head. “No, thank you, dear. You know I never eat the
+things.”
+
+“Well, you’ve got to have one of these, as a penance for not buying me
+a proper box. Catch!” She threw him one. As he caught it she made a
+wry face. “Oh! I was wrong. These are different. They’re twenty times
+as strong.”
+
+“Well, they can bear at least that,” Bendix smiled, thinking of the
+usual anæmic sweetmeat sold under the name of chocolate-liqueur.
+
+He put the one she had given him in his mouth and bit it up; a burning
+taste, not intolerable but far too pronounced to be pleasant, followed
+the release of the liquid. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I should think
+they are strong. I believe they’ve filled them with neat alcohol.”
+
+“Oh, they wouldn’t do that, surely,” said his wife, unwrapping
+another. “But they are very strong. It must be the new mixture.
+Really, they almost burn. I’m not sure whether I like them or not. And
+that Kirsch one tasted far too strongly of almonds. This may be
+better. You try a Maraschino too.”
+
+To humour her he swallowed another, and disliked it still more.
+“Funny,” he remarked, touching the roof of his mouth with the tip of
+his tongue. “My tongue feels quite numb.”
+
+“So did mine at first,” she agreed. “Now it’s tingling rather. Well, I
+don’t notice any difference between the Kirsch and the Maraschino. And
+they do burn! I can’t make up my mind whether I like them or not.”
+
+“I don’t,” Bendix said with decision. “I think there’s something wrong
+with them. I shouldn’t eat any more if I were you.”
+
+“Well, they’re only an experiment, I suppose,” said his wife.
+
+A few minutes later Bendix went out, to keep an appointment in the
+City. He left his wife still trying to make up her mind whether she
+liked the chocolates or not, and still eating them to decide. Her last
+words to him were that they were making her mouth burn again so much
+that she was afraid she would not be able to manage any more.
+
+“Mr. Bendix remembers that conversation very clearly,” said Moresby,
+looking round at the intent faces, “because it was the last time he
+saw his wife alive.”
+
+The conversation in the drawing-room had taken place approximately
+between a quarter-past and half-past two. Bendix kept his appointment
+in the City at three, where he stayed for about half-an-hour, and then
+took a taxi back to his club for tea.
+
+He had been feeling extremely ill during his business-talk, and in the
+taxi he very nearly collapsed; the driver had to summon the porter to
+help get him out and into the club. They both described him as pale to
+the point of ghastliness, with staring eyes and livid lips, and his
+skin damp and clammy. His mind seemed unaffected, however, and once
+they had got him up the steps he was able to walk, with the help of
+the porter’s arm, into the lounge.
+
+The porter, alarmed by his appearance, wanted to send for a doctor at
+once, but Bendix, who was the last man to make a fuss, absolutely
+refused to let him, saying that it could only be a bad attack of
+indigestion and that he would be all right in a few minutes; he must
+have eaten something that disagreed with him. The porter was doubtful,
+but left him.
+
+Bendix repeated this diagnosis of his own condition a few minutes
+later to Sir Eustace Pennefather, who was in the lounge at the time,
+not having left the club at all. But this time Bendix added: “And I
+believe it was those infernal chocolates you gave me, now I come to
+think of it. I thought there was something funny about them at the
+time. I’d better go and ring up my wife and find out if she’s been
+taken like this too.”
+
+Sir Eustace, a kind-hearted man, who was no less shocked than the
+porter at Bendix’s appearance, was perturbed by the suggestion that he
+might in any way be responsible for it, and offered to go and ring up
+Mrs. Bendix himself as the other was in no fit condition to move.
+Bendix was about to reply when a strange change came over him. His
+body, which had been leaning limply back in his chair, suddenly heaved
+rigidly upright; his jaws locked together, the livid lips drawn back
+in a hideous grin, and his hands clenched on the arms of the chair. At
+the same time Sir Eustace became aware of an unmistakable smell of
+bitter almonds.
+
+Thoroughly alarmed now, believing indeed that Bendix was dying under
+his eyes, he raised a shout for the porter and a doctor. There were
+two or three other men at the further end of the big room (in which a
+shout had probably never been heard before in the whole course of its
+history) and these hurried up at once. Sir Eustace sent one off to
+tell the porter to get hold of the nearest doctor without a second’s
+delay, and enlisted the others to try to make the convulsed body a
+little more comfortable. There was no doubt among them that Bendix had
+taken poison. They spoke to him, asking how he felt and what they
+could do for him, but he either would not or could not answer. As a
+matter of fact, he was completely unconscious.
+
+Before the doctor had arrived, a telephone message was received from
+an agitated butler asking if Mr. Bendix was there, and if so would he
+come home at once as Mrs. Bendix had been taken seriously ill.
+
+At the house in Eaton Square matters had been taking much the same
+course with Mrs. Bendix as with her husband, though a little more
+rapidly. She remained for half-an-hour or so in the drawing-room after
+the latter’s departure, during which time she must have eaten about
+three more of the chocolates. She then went up to her bedroom and rang
+for her maid, to whom she said that she felt very ill and was going to
+lie down for a time. Like her husband, she ascribed her condition to a
+violent attack of indigestion.
+
+The maid mixed her a draught from a bottle of indigestion-powder,
+which consisted mainly of bicarbonate of soda and bismuth, and brought
+her a hot-water bottle, leaving her lying on the bed. Her description
+of her mistress’s appearance tallied exactly with the porter’s and
+taxi-man’s description of Bendix, but unlike them she did not seem to
+have been alarmed by it. She admitted later to the opinion that Mrs.
+Bendix, though anything but a greedy woman, must have overeaten
+herself at lunch.
+
+At a quarter past three there was a violent ring from the bell in Mrs.
+Bendix’s room.
+
+The girl hurried upstairs and found her mistress apparently in a
+cataleptic fit, unconscious and rigid. Thoroughly frightened now, she
+wasted some precious minutes in ineffectual attempts to bring her
+round, and then hurried downstairs to telephone for the doctor. The
+practitioner who regularly attended the house was not at home, and it
+was some time before the butler, who had found the half-hysterical
+girl at the telephone and taken matters into his own hands, could get
+into communication with another. By the time the latter did get there,
+nearly half-an-hour after Mrs. Bendix’s bell had rung, she was past
+help. Coma had set in, and in spite of everything the doctor could do
+she died in less than ten minutes after his arrival.
+
+She was, in fact, already dead when the butler telephoned to the
+Rainbow Club.
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Having reached this stage in his narrative Moresby paused, for effect,
+breath and refreshment. So far, in spite of the eager interest with
+which the story had been followed, no fact had been brought out of
+which his listeners were unaware. It was the police investigations
+that they wanted to hear, for not only had no details of these been
+published but not so much as a hint had been given even as to the
+theory that was officially held.
+
+Perhaps Moresby had gathered something of this sentiment, for after a
+moment’s rest he resumed with a slight smile. “Well, ladies and
+gentlemen, I shan’t keep you much longer with these preliminaries, but
+it’s just as well to run through everything while we’re on it, if we
+want to get a view of the case as a whole.
+
+“As you know, then, Mr. Bendix himself did not die. Luckily for
+himself he had eaten only two of the chocolates, as against his wife’s
+seven, but still more luckily he had fallen into the hands of a clever
+doctor. By the time her doctor saw Mrs. Bendix it was too late for him
+to do anything; but the smaller amount of poison that Mr. Bendix had
+swallowed meant that its progress was not so rapid, and the doctor had
+time to save him.
+
+“Not that the doctor knew then what the poison was. He treated him
+chiefly for prussic acid poisoning, thinking from the symptoms and the
+smell that Mr. Bendix must have taken oil of bitter almonds, but he
+wasn’t sure and threw in one or two other things as well. Anyhow, it
+turned out in the end that he couldn’t have had a fatal dose, and he
+was conscious again by about eight o’clock that night. They’d put him
+into one of the club bedrooms, and by the next day he was
+convalescent.”
+
+At first, Moresby went on to explain, it was thought at Scotland Yard
+that Mrs. Bendix’s death and her husband’s narrow escape were due to a
+terrible accident. The police had of course taken the matter in hand
+as soon as the woman’s death was reported to them and the fact of
+poison established. In due course a District Detective Inspector
+arrived at the Rainbow Club, and as soon as the doctor would permit
+after Bendix’s recovery of consciousness held an interview with the
+still very sick man.
+
+The fact of his wife’s death was kept from him in his doubtful
+condition and he was questioned solely upon his own experience, for it
+was already clear that the two cases were bound up together and light
+on one would equally clarify the other. The Inspector told Bendix
+bluntly that he had been poisoned and pressed him as to how the stuff
+could have been taken: could he account for it in any way?
+
+It was not long before the chocolates came into Bendix’s mind. He
+mentioned their burning taste, and he mentioned having already spoken
+to Sir Eustace about them as the possible cause of his illness.
+
+This the inspector already knew.
+
+He had spent the time before Bendix came round in interviewing such
+people as had come into contact with him since his return to the club
+that afternoon. He had heard the porter’s story and he had taken steps
+to trace the taxi-man; he had spoken with the members who had gathered
+round Bendix in the lounge, and Sir Eustace had reported to him the
+remark of Bendix about the chocolates.
+
+The inspector had not attached very much importance to this at the
+moment, but simply as a matter of routine had questioned Sir Eustace
+closely as to the whole episode and, again as a matter of routine, had
+afterwards rummaged through the waste-paper basket and extricated the
+wrapper and the covering-letter. Still as a matter of routine, and
+still not particularly impressed, he now proceeded to question Bendix
+on the same topic, and then at last began to realise its significance
+as he heard how the two had shared the chocolates after lunch and how,
+even before Bendix had left home, the wife had eaten more than the
+husband.
+
+The doctor now intervened, and the inspector had to leave the
+sick-room. His first action was to telephone to his colleague at the
+Bendix home and tell him to take possession without delay of the box
+of chocolates which was probably still in the drawing-room; at the
+same time he asked for a rough idea of the number of chocolates that
+were missing. The other told him, nine or ten. The inspector, who on
+Bendix’s information had only accounted for six or seven, rang off and
+telephoned what he had learnt to Scotland Yard.
+
+Interest was now centred on the chocolates. They were taken to
+Scotland Yard that evening, and sent off at once to be analysed.
+
+“Well, the doctor hadn’t been far wrong,” said Moresby. “The poison in
+those chocolates wasn’t oil of bitter almonds as a matter of fact, it
+was nitrobenzene; but I understand that isn’t so very different. If
+any of you ladies or gentlemen have a knowledge of chemicals, you’ll
+know more about the stuff than I do, but I believe it’s used
+occasionally in the cheaper sorts of confectionery (less than it used
+to be, though) to give an almond-flavour as a substitute for oil of
+bitter almonds, which I needn’t tell you is a powerful poison too. But
+the most usual way of employing nitrobenzene commercially is in the
+manufacture of aniline dyes.”
+
+When the analyst’s preliminary report came through Scotland Yard’s
+initial theory of accidental death was strengthened. Here definitely
+was a poison used in the manufacture of chocolates and other sweets. A
+terrible mistake must have been made. The firm had been employing the
+stuff as a cheap substitute for genuine liqueurs and too much of it
+had been used. The fact that the only liqueurs named on the silver
+wrappings were Maraschino, Kümmel and Kirsch, all of which carry a
+greater or lesser flavour of almonds, supported this conception.
+
+But before the firm was approached by the police for an explanation,
+other facts had come to light. It was found that only the top layer of
+chocolates contained any poison. Those in the lower layer were
+completely free from anything harmful. Moreover in the lower layer the
+fillings inside the chocolate cases corresponded with the description
+on the wrappings, whereas in the top layer, besides the poison, each
+sweet contained a blend of the three liqueurs mentioned and not, for
+instance, plain Maraschino and poison. It was further remarked that no
+Maraschino, Kirsch or Kümmel was to be found in the two lower layers.
+
+The interesting fact also emerged, in the analyst’s detailed report,
+that each chocolate in the top layer contained, in addition to its
+blend of the three liqueurs, exactly six minims of nitrobenzene, no
+more and no less. The cases were a fair size and there was plenty of
+room for quite a considerable quantity of the liqueur-blend besides
+this fixed quantity of poison. This was significant. Still more so was
+the further fact that in the bottom of each of the noxious chocolates
+there were distinct traces of a hole having been drilled in the case
+and subsequently plugged up with a piece of melted chocolate.
+
+It was now plain to the police that foul play was in question.
+
+A deliberate attempt had been made to murder Sir Eustace Pennefather.
+The would-be murderer had acquired a box of Mason’s chocolate
+liqueurs; separated those in which a flavour of almonds would not come
+amiss; drilled a small hole in each and drained it of its contents;
+injected, probably with a fountain-pen filler, the dose of poison;
+filled the cavity up from the mixture of former fillings; carefully
+stopped the hole, and re-wrapped it in its silver-paper covering. A
+meticulous business, meticulously carried out.
+
+The covering letter and wrapper which had arrived with the box of
+chocolates now became of paramount importance, and the inspector who
+had had the foresight to rescue these from destruction had occasion to
+pat himself on the back. Together with the box itself and the
+remaining chocolates, they formed the only material clues to this
+cold-blooded murder.
+
+Taking them with him, the Chief Inspector now in charge of the case
+called on the managing director of Mason & Sons, and without informing
+him of the circumstances as to how it had come into his possession,
+laid the letter before him and invited him to explain certain points
+in connection with it. How many of these (the managing director was
+asked) had been sent out, who knew of this one, and who could have had
+a chance of handling the box that was sent to Sir Eustace?
+
+If the police had hoped to surprise Mr. Mason, the result was nothing
+compared with the way in which Mr. Mason surprised the police.
+
+“Well, sir?” prompted the Chief Inspector, when it seemed as if Mr.
+Mason would go on examining the letter all day.
+
+Mr. Mason adjusted his glasses to the angle for examining Chief
+Inspectors instead of letters. He was a small, rather fierce, elderly
+man who had begun life in a back street in Huddersfield, and did not
+intend any one to forget it.
+
+“Where the devil did you get this?” he asked. The papers, it must be
+remembered, had not yet got hold of the sensational aspect of Mrs.
+Bendix’s death.
+
+“I came,” replied the Chief Inspector with dignity, “to ask you about
+your sending it out, sir, not tell you about my getting hold of it.”
+
+“Then you can go to the devil,” replied Mr. Mason with decision. “And
+take Scotland Yard with you,” he added, by way of a comprehensive
+afterthought.
+
+“I must warn you, sir,” said the Chief Inspector, somewhat taken aback
+but concealing the fact beneath his weightiest manner, “I must warn
+you that it may be a serious matter for you to refuse to answer my
+questions.”
+
+Mr. Mason, it appeared, was exasperated rather than intimidated by
+this covert threat. “Get out o’ ma office,” he replied in his native
+tongue. “Are ye druffen, man? Or do ye just think you’re funny? Ye
+know as well as I do that that letter was never sent out from ’ere.”
+
+It was then that the Chief Inspector became surprised. “Not—not sent
+out by your firm at all?” he yammered. It was a possibility that had
+not occurred to him. “It’s—forged, then?”
+
+“Isn’t that what I’m telling ye?” growled the old man, regarding him
+fiercely from under bushy brows. But the Chief Inspector’s evident
+astonishment had mollified him somewhat.
+
+“Sir,” said that official, “I must ask you to be good enough to answer
+my questions as fully as possible. It’s a case of murder I’m
+investigating, and—” he paused and thought cunningly “—and the
+murderer seems to have been making free use of your business to cloak
+his operations.”
+
+The cunning of the Chief Inspector prevailed. “The devil ’e ’as!”
+roared the old man. “Damn the blackguard. Ask any questions thou
+wants, lad; I’ll answer right enough.”
+
+Communication thus being established, the Chief Inspector proceeded to
+get to grips.
+
+During the next five minutes his heart sank lower and lower. In place
+of the simple case he had anticipated it became rapidly plain to him
+that the affair was going to be very difficult indeed. Hitherto he had
+thought (and his superiors had agreed with him) that the case was
+going to prove one of sudden temptation. Somebody in the Mason firm
+had a grudge against Sir Eustace. Into his (or more probably, as the
+Chief Inspector had considered, her) hands had fallen the box and
+letter addressed to him. The opportunity had been obvious, the means,
+in the shape of nitrobenzene in use in the factory, ready to hand; the
+result had followed. Such a culprit would be easy enough to trace.
+
+But now, it seemed, this pleasant theory must be abandoned, for in the
+first place no such letter as this had ever been sent out at all; the
+firm had produced no new brand of chocolates, if they had done so it
+was not their custom to dispense sample boxes among private
+individuals, the letter was a forgery. But the notepaper on the other
+hand (and this was the only remnant left to support the theory) was
+perfectly genuine, so far as the old man could tell. He could not say
+for certain, but was almost sure that this was a piece of old stock
+which had been finished up about six months ago. The heading might be
+forged, but he did not think so.
+
+“Six months ago?” queried the Inspector unhappily.
+
+“About that,” said the other, and plucked a piece of paper out of a
+stand in front of him. “This is what we use now.” The Inspector
+examined it. There was no doubt of the difference. The new paper was
+thinner and more glossy. But the heading looked exactly the same. The
+Inspector took a note of the firm who had printed both.
+
+Unfortunately no sample of the old paper was available. Mr. Mason had
+a search made on the spot, but not a sheet was left.
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Moresby now said, “it had been noticed that the
+piece of paper on which the letter was written was an old one. It is
+distinctly yellow round the edges. I’ll pass it round and you can see
+for yourselves. Please be careful of it.” The bit of paper, once
+handled by a murderer, passed slowly from each would-be detective to
+his neighbour.
+
+“Well, to cut a long story shorter,” Moresby went on, “we had it
+examined by the firm of printers, Webster’s, in Frith Street, and
+they’re prepared to swear that it’s their work. That means the paper
+was genuine, worse luck.”
+
+“You mean, of course,” put in Sir Charles Wildman impressively, “that
+had the heading been a copy, the task of discovering the printers who
+executed it should have been comparatively simple?”
+
+“That’s correct, Sir Charles. Except if it had been done by somebody
+who owned a small press of their own; but that would have been
+traceable too. All we’ve actually got is that the murderer is someone
+who had access to Mason’s notepaper up to six months ago; and that’s
+pretty wide.”
+
+“Do you think it was stolen with the actual intention of putting it to
+the purpose for which it was used?” asked Alicia Dammers.
+
+“It seems like it, madam. And something kept holding the murderer up.”
+
+As regards the wrapper, Mr. Mason had been unable to help at all. This
+consisted simply of a piece of ordinary, thin brown paper, such as
+could be bought anywhere, with Sir Eustace’s name and address
+hand-printed on it in neat capitals. Apparently there was nothing to
+be learnt from it at all. The post-mark showed that it had been
+despatched by the nine-thirty p. m. post from the post office in
+Southampton Street, Strand.
+
+“There is a collection at 8.30 and another at 9.30,” Moresby
+explained, “so it must have been posted between those two times. The
+packet was quite small enough to go into the opening for letters. The
+stamps make up the right value. The post office was shut by then, so
+it could not have been handed in over the counter. Perhaps you’d care
+to see it.” The piece of brown paper was handed gravely round.
+
+“Have you brought the box too, and the other chocolates?” asked Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming.
+
+“No, madam. It was one of Mason’s ordinary boxes, and the chocolates
+have all been used for analysis.”
+
+“Oh!” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was plainly disappointed. “I thought there
+might be finger-prints on it,” she explained.
+
+“We have already looked for those,” replied Moresby without a flicker.
+
+There was a pause while the wrapper passed from hand to hand.
+
+“Naturally, we’ve made inquiries as to any one seen posting a packet
+in Southampton Street between half-past eight and half-past nine,”
+Moresby continued, “but without result. We’ve also carefully
+interrogated Sir Eustace Pennefather to discover whether he could
+throw any light on the question why any one should wish to take his
+life, or who. Sir Eustace can’t give us the faintest idea. Of course
+we followed up the usual line of inquiry as to who would benefit by
+his death, but without any helpful results. Most of his possessions go
+to his wife, who has a divorce suit pending against him; and she’s out
+of the country. We’ve checked her movements and she’s out of the
+question. Besides,” added Moresby unprofessionally, “she’s a very nice
+lady.
+
+“And as to facts, all we know is that the murderer probably had some
+connection with Mason & Sons up to six months ago, and was almost
+certainly in Southampton Street at some time between eight-thirty and
+nine-thirty on that particular evening. I’m very much afraid we’re up
+against a brick wall.” Moresby did not add that so were the amateur
+criminologists in front of him too, but he very distinctly implied it.
+
+There was a silence.
+
+“Is that all?” asked Roger.
+
+“That’s all, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby agreed.
+
+There was another silence.
+
+“Surely the police have a theory?” Mr. Morton Harrogate Bradley threw
+out in a detached manner.
+
+Moresby hesitated perceptibly.
+
+“Come along, Moresby,” Roger encouraged him. “It’s quite a simple
+theory. I know it.”
+
+“Well,” said Moresby, thus stimulated, “we’re inclined to believe that
+the crime was the work of a lunatic, or semi-lunatic, possibly quite
+unknown personally to Sir Eustace. You see . . .” Moresby looked a
+trifle embarrassed. “You see,” he went on bravely, “Sir Eustace’s life
+was a bit, well, we might say hectic, if you’ll excuse the word. We
+think at the Yard that some religious or social maniac took it on
+himself to rid the world of him, so to speak. Some of his escapades
+had caused a bit of talk, as you may know.
+
+“Or it might just be a plain homicidal lunatic, who likes killing
+people at a distance.
+
+“There’s the Horwood case, you see. Some lunatic sent poisoned
+chocolates to the Commissioner of Police himself. That caused a lot of
+attention. We think this case may be an echo of it. A case that
+creates a good deal of notice is quite often followed by another on
+exactly the same lines, as I needn’t remind you.
+
+“Well, that’s our theory. And if it’s the right one, we’ve got about
+as much chance of laying our hands on the murderer as—as—” Chief
+Inspector Moresby cast about for something really scathing.
+
+“As we have,” suggested Roger.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+The Circle sat on for some time after Moresby had gone. There was a
+lot to discuss, and everybody had views to put forward, suggestions to
+make, and theories to advance.
+
+One thing emerged with singular unanimity: the police had been working
+on the wrong lines. Their theory must be mistaken. This was not a
+casual murder by a chance lunatic. Somebody very definite had gone
+methodically about the business of helping Sir Eustace out of the
+world, and that somebody had behind him an equally definite motive.
+Like almost all murders, in fact, it was a matter of _cherchez le
+motif_.
+
+On the exposition and discussion of theories Roger kept a firmly
+quelling hand. The whole object of the experiment, as he pointed out
+more than once, was that everybody should work independently, without
+bias from any other brain, form his or her own theory, and set about
+proving it in his or her own way.
+
+“But oughtn’t we to pool our facts, Sheringham?” boomed Sir Charles.
+“I should suggest that though we pursue our investigations
+independently, any new facts we discover should be placed at once at
+the disposal of all. The exercise should be a mental one, not a
+competition in routine-detection.”
+
+“There’s a lot to be said for that view, Sir Charles,” Roger agreed.
+“In fact, I’ve thought it over very carefully. But on the whole I
+think it will be better if we keep any new facts to ourselves after
+this evening. You see, we’re already in possession of all the facts
+that the police have discovered, and anything else we may come across
+isn’t likely to be so much a definite pointer to the murderer as some
+little thing, quite insignificant in itself, to support a particular
+theory.”
+
+Sir Charles grunted, obviously unconvinced.
+
+“I’m quite willing to have it put to the vote,” Roger said handsomely.
+
+A vote was taken. Sir Charles and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming voted for all
+facts being disclosed: Mr. Bradley, Alicia Dammers, Mr. Chitterwick
+(the last after considerable hesitation) and Roger voted against.
+
+“We retain our own facts,” Roger said, and made a mental note of who
+had voted for each. He was inclined to guess that the voting indicated
+pretty correctly who was going to be content with general theorising,
+and who was ready to enter so far into the spirit of the game as to go
+out and work for it. Or it might simply show who already had a theory
+and who had not.
+
+Sir Charles accepted the result with resignation.
+
+“We start equal as from now, then,” he announced.
+
+“As from the moment we leave this room,” amended Morton Harrogate
+Bradley, rearranging the set of his tie. “But I agree so far with Sir
+Charles’s proposition as to think that any one who can at this moment
+add anything to the Chief Inspector’s statement should do so.”
+
+“But can any one?” asked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
+
+“Sir Charles knows Mr. and Mrs. Bendix,” Alicia Dammers pointed out
+impartially. “And Sir Eustace. And I know Sir Eustace too, of course.”
+
+Roger smiled. This statement was a characteristic meiosis on the part
+of Miss Dammers. Everybody knew that Miss Dammers had been the only
+woman (so far as rumour recorded) who had ever turned the tables on
+Sir Eustace Pennefather. Sir Eustace had taken it into his head to add
+the scalp of an intellectual woman to those other rather
+unintellectual ones which already dangled at his belt. Alicia Dammers,
+with her good looks, her tall, slim figure, and her irreproachable
+sartorial taste, had satisfied his very fastidious requirements so far
+as feminine appearance was concerned. He had laid himself out to
+fascinate.
+
+The results had been watched by the large circle of Miss Dammers’s
+friends with considerable joy. Miss Dammers had apparently been only
+too ready to be fascinated. It seemed that she was living entirely on
+the point of succumbing to Sir Eustace’s blandishments. They had
+dined, visited, lunched and made excursions together without respite.
+Sir Eustace, stimulated by the daily prospect of surrender on the
+following one, had exercised his ardour with every art he knew.
+
+Miss Dammers had then retired serenely, and the next autumn published
+a book in which Sir Eustace Pennefather, dissected to the last
+ligament, was given to the world in all the naked unpleasingness of
+his psychological anatomy.
+
+Miss Dammers never talked about her “art,” because she was a really
+brilliant writer and not just pretending to be one, but she certainly
+held that everything had to be sacrificed (including the feelings of
+the Sir Eustace Pennefathers of this world) to whatever god she
+worshipped privately in place of it.
+
+“Mr. and Mrs. Bendix are quite incidental to the crime, of course,
+from the murderer’s point of view,” Mr. Bradley now pointed out to
+her, in the gentle tones of one instructing a child that the letter A
+is followed in the alphabet by the letter B. “So far as we know, their
+only connection with Sir Eustace is that he and Bendix both belonged
+to the Rainbow.”
+
+“I needn’t give you my opinion of Sir Eustace,” remarked Miss Dammers.
+“Those of you who have read _Flesh and the Devil_ know how I saw him,
+and I have no reason to suppose that he has changed since I was
+studying him. But I claim no infallibility. It would be interesting to
+hear whether Sir Charles’s opinion coincides with mine or not.”
+
+Sir Charles, who had not read _Flesh and the Devil_, looked a little
+embarrassed. “Well, I don’t see that I can add much to the impression
+the Chief Inspector gave of him. I don’t know the man well, and
+certainly have no wish to do so.”
+
+Everybody looked extremely innocent. It was common gossip that there
+had been the possibility of an engagement between Sir Eustace and Sir
+Charles’s only daughter, and that Sir Charles had not viewed the
+prospect with any perceptible joy. It was further known that the
+engagement had even been prematurely announced, and promptly denied
+the next day.
+
+Sir Charles tried to look as innocent as everybody else. “As the Chief
+Inspector hinted, he is something of a bad lot. Some people might go
+so far as to call him a blackguard. Women,” explained Sir Charles
+bluntly. “And he drinks too much,” he added. It was plain that Sir
+Charles Wildman did not approve of Sir Eustace Pennefather.
+
+“I can add one small point, of purely psychological value,” amplified
+Alicia Dammers. “But it shows the dullness of his reactions. Even in
+the short time since the tragedy rumour has joined the name of Sir
+Eustace to that of a fresh woman. I was somewhat surprised to hear
+that,” added Miss Dammers drily. “I should have been inclined to give
+him credit for being a little more upset by the terrible mistake, and
+its fortunate consequences to himself, even though Mrs. Bendix was a
+total stranger to him.”
+
+“Yes, by the way, I should have corrected that impression earlier,”
+observed Sir Charles. “Mrs. Bendix was not a total stranger to Sir
+Eustace, though he may probably have forgotten ever meeting her. But
+he did. I was talking to Mrs. Bendix one evening at a first night (I
+forget the play) and Sir Eustace came up to me. I introduced them,
+mentioning something about Bendix being a member of the Rainbow. I’d
+almost forgotten.”
+
+“Then I’m afraid I was completely wrong about him,” said Miss Dammers,
+chagrined. “I was far too kind.” To be too kind in the dissecting-room
+was evidently, in Miss Dammers’s opinion, a far greater crime than
+being too unkind.
+
+“As for Bendix,” said Sir Charles rather vaguely, “I don’t know that I
+can add anything to your knowledge of him. Quite a decent, steady
+fellow. Head not turned by his money in the least, rich as he is. His
+wife too, charming woman. A little serious perhaps. Sort of woman who
+likes sitting on committees. Not that that’s anything against her
+though.”
+
+“Rather the reverse, I should have said,” observed Miss Dammers, who
+liked sitting on committees herself.
+
+“Quite, quite,” said Sir Charles hastily, remembering Miss Dammers’s
+curious predilections. “And she wasn’t too serious to make a bet,
+evidently, although it was a trifling one.”
+
+“She had another bet, that she knew nothing about,” chanted in solemn
+tones Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, who was already pondering the dramatic
+possibilities of the situation. “Not a trifling one: a grim one. It
+was with Death, and she lost it.” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was
+regrettably inclined to carry her dramatic sense into her ordinary
+life. It did not go at all well with her culinary aspect.
+
+She eyed Alicia Dammers covertly, wondering whether she could get in
+with a play before that lady cut the ground away from under her with a
+book.
+
+Roger, as chairman, took steps to bring the discussion back to
+relevancies. “Yes, poor woman. But after all, we mustn’t let ourselves
+confuse the issue. It’s rather difficult to remember that the murdered
+person has no connection with the crime at all, so to speak, but there
+it is. Just by accident the wrong person died; it’s on Sir Eustace
+that we have to concentrate. Now, does anybody else here know Sir
+Eustace, or anything about him, or any other fact bearing on the
+crime?”
+
+Nobody responded.
+
+“Then we’re all on the same footing. And now, about our next meeting.
+I suggest that we have a clear week for formulating our theories and
+carrying out any investigations we think necessary, that we then meet
+on consecutive evenings, beginning with next Monday, and that we now
+draw lots as to the order in which we are to read our several papers
+or give our conclusions. Or does any one think we should have more
+than one speaker each evening?”
+
+After a little talk it was decided to meet again on Monday, that day
+week, and for purposes of fuller discussion allot one evening to each
+member. Lots were then drawn, with the result that members were to
+speak in the following order: (1) Sir Charles Wildman, (2) Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, (3) Mr. Morton Harrogate Bradley, (4) Roger
+Sheringham, (5) Alicia Dammers, and (6) Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick brightened considerably when his name was announced as
+last on the list. “By that time,” he confided to Morton Harrogate,
+“somebody is quite sure to have discovered the right solution, and I
+shall therefore not have to give my own conclusions. If indeed,” he
+added dubiously, “I ever reach any. Tell me, how _does_ a detective
+really set to work?”
+
+Mr. Bradley smiled kindly and promised to lend Mr. Chitterwick one of
+his own books. Mr. Chitterwick, who had read them all and possessed
+most of them, thanked him very gratefully.
+
+Before the meeting finally broke up, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming could not
+resist one more opportunity of being mildly dramatic. “How strange
+life is,” she sighed across the table to Sir Charles. “I actually saw
+Mrs. Bendix and her husband in their box at the Imperial the night
+before she died. (Oh, yes; I knew them by sight. They often came to my
+first nights.) I was in a stall almost directly under their box.
+Indeed life is certainly stranger than fiction. If I could have
+guessed for one minute at the dreadful fate hanging over her, I—”
+
+“You’d have had the sense to warn her to steer clear of chocolates, I
+hope,” observed Sir Charles, who did not hold very much with Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming.
+
+The meeting then broke up.
+
+Roger returned to his rooms in the Albany feeling exceedingly pleased
+with himself. He had a suspicion that the various attempts at a
+solution were going to be almost as interesting to him as the problem
+itself.
+
+Nevertheless he was on his mettle. He had not been very lucky in the
+draw and would have preferred the place of Mr. Chitterwick, which
+would have meant that he would have the advantage of already knowing
+the results achieved by his rivals before having to disclose his own.
+Not that he intended to rely on others’ brains in the least; like Mr.
+Morton Harrogate Bradley he already had a theory of his own; but it
+would have been pleasant to be able to weigh up and criticise the
+efforts of Sir Charles, Mr. Bradley and particularly Alicia Dammers
+(to these three he gave credit for possessing the best minds in the
+Circle) before irrevocably committing himself. And more than any other
+crime in which he had been interested, it seemed to him, he wanted to
+find the right solution of this one.
+
+To his surprise when he got back to his rooms he found Moresby waiting
+in his sitting-room.
+
+“Ah, Mr. Sheringham,” said that cautious official. “Thought you
+wouldn’t mind me waiting here for a word with you. Not in a great
+hurry to go to bed, are you?”
+
+“Not in the least,” said Roger, doing things with a decanter and
+syphon. “It’s early yet. Say when.”
+
+Moresby looked discreetly the other way.
+
+When they were settled in two huge leather armchairs before the fire
+Moresby explained himself. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Sheringham, the
+Chief’s deputed me to keep a sort of unofficial eye on you and your
+friends over this business. Not that we don’t trust you, or think you
+won’t be discreet, or anything like that, but it’s better for us to
+know just what’s going on with a massed-detective attack like this.”
+
+“So that if any of us finds out something really important, you can
+nip in first and make use of it,” Roger smiled. “Yes, I quite see the
+official point.”
+
+“So that we can take measures to prevent the bird from being scared,”
+Moresby corrected reproachfully. “That’s all, Mr. Sheringham.”
+
+“Is it?” said Roger, with unconcealed scepticism. “But you don’t think
+it very likely that your protecting hand will be required, eh,
+Moresby?”
+
+“Frankly, sir, I don’t. We’re not in the habit of giving up a case so
+long as we think there’s the least chance of finding the criminal; and
+Detective-Inspector Farrar, who’s been in charge of this one, is a
+capable man.”
+
+“And that’s his theory, that it’s the work of some criminal lunatic,
+quite untraceable?”
+
+“That’s the opinion he’s been led to form, Mr. Sheringham, sir. But
+there’s no harm in your Circle amusing themselves,” added Moresby
+magnanimously, “if they want to and they’ve got the time to waste.”
+
+“Well, well,” said Roger, refusing to be drawn.
+
+They smoked their pipes in silence for a few minutes.
+
+“Come along, Moresby,” Roger said gently.
+
+The chief inspector looked at him with an expression that indicated
+nothing but bland surprise. “Sir?”
+
+Roger shook his head. “It won’t wash, Moresby; it won’t wash. Come
+along, now; out with it.”
+
+“Out with what, Mr. Sheringham?” queried Moresby, the picture of
+innocent bewilderment.
+
+“Your real reason for coming round here,” Roger said nastily. “Wanted
+to pump me, for the benefit of that effete institution you represent,
+I suppose? Well, I warn you, there’s nothing doing this time. I know
+you better than I did eighteen months ago at Ludmouth, remember.”
+
+“Well, what can have put such an idea as that into your head, Mr.
+Sheringham, sir?” positively gasped that much misunderstood man, Chief
+Inspector Moresby, of Scotland Yard. “I came round because I thought
+you might like to ask me a few questions, to give you a leg up in
+finding the murderer before any of your friends could. That’s all.”
+
+Roger laughed. “Moresby, I like you. You’re a bright spot in a dull
+world. I expect you try to persuade the very criminals you arrest that
+it hurts you more than it does them. And I shouldn’t be at all
+surprised if you don’t somehow make them believe it. Very well, if
+that’s all you came round for I’ll ask you some questions, and thank
+you very much. Tell me this, then. Who do _you_ think was trying to
+murder Sir Eustace Pennefather?”
+
+Moresby sipped delicately at his whisky-and-soda. “You know what I
+think, Mr. Sheringham, sir.”
+
+“Indeed I don’t,” Roger retorted. “I only know what you’ve told me you
+think.”
+
+“I haven’t been in charge of the case at all, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby
+hedged.
+
+“Who do you really think was trying to murder Sir Eustace
+Pennefather?” Roger repeated patiently. “Is it your own opinion that
+the official police theory is right or wrong?”
+
+Driven into a corner, Moresby allowed himself the novelty of speaking
+his unofficial mind. He smiled covertly, as if at a secret thought.
+“Well, Mr. Sheringham, sir,” he said with deliberation, “our theory is
+a useful one, isn’t it? I mean, it gives us every excuse for not
+finding the murderer. We can hardly be expected to be in touch with
+every half-baked creature in the country who may have homicidal
+impulses.
+
+“Our theory will be put forward at the conclusion of the adjourned
+inquest, in about a fortnight’s time, with reason and evidence to
+support it, and any evidence to the contrary not mentioned, and you’ll
+see that the coroner will agree with it, and the jury will agree with
+it, and the papers will agree with it, and every one will say that
+really, the police can’t be blamed for not catching the murderer this
+time, and everybody will be happy.”
+
+“Except Mr. Bendix, who doesn’t get his wife’s murder avenged,” added
+Roger. “Moresby, you’re being positively sarcastic. And from all this
+I deduce that you personally will stand aside from this general and
+amicable agreement. Do you think the case has been badly handled by
+your people?”
+
+Roger’s last question followed so closely on the heels of his previous
+remarks that Moresby had answered it almost before he had time to
+reflect on the possible indiscretion of doing so. “No, Mr. Sheringham,
+I don’t think that. Farrar’s a capable man, and he’d leave no stone
+unturned—no stone, I mean, that he _could_ turn.” Moresby paused
+significantly.
+
+“Ah!” said Roger.
+
+Having committed himself to this lamb, Moresby seemed disposed to look
+about for a sheep. He re-settled himself in his chair and recklessly
+drank a gill from his tumbler. Roger, scarcely daring to breathe too
+audibly for fear of scaring the sheep, studiously examined the fire.
+
+“You see, this is a very difficult case, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby
+pronounced. “Farrar had an open mind, of course, when he took it up,
+and he kept an open mind even after he’d found out that Sir Eustace
+was even a bit more of a daisy than he’d imagined at first. That is to
+say, he never lost sight of the fact that it _might_ have been some
+outside lunatic who sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace, just out of
+a general socialistic or religious feeling that he’d be doing a favour
+to society or Heaven by putting him out of the world. A fanatic, you
+might say.”
+
+“Murder from conviction,” Roger murmured. “Yes?”
+
+“But naturally what Farrar was concentrating on was Sir Eustace’s
+private life. And that’s where we police-officers are handicapped.
+It’s not easy for us to make enquiries into the private life of a
+baronet. Nobody wants to be helpful; everybody seems anxious to put a
+spoke in our wheel. Every line that looked hopeful to Farrar led to a
+dead end. Sir Eustace himself told him to go to the devil, and made no
+bones about it.”
+
+“Naturally, from his point of view,” Roger said thoughtfully. “The
+last thing he’d want would be a sheaf of his peccadilloes laid out for
+a harvest festival in court.”
+
+“Yes, and Mrs. Bendix lying in her grave on account of them,” retorted
+Moresby with asperity. “No, he was responsible for her death, though
+indirectly enough I’ll admit, and it was up to him to be as helpful as
+he could to the police-officer investigating the case. But there
+Farrar was; couldn’t get any further. He unearthed a scandal or two,
+it’s true, but they led to nothing. So—well, he hasn’t admitted this,
+Mr. Sheringham, and you’ll realise I ought not to be telling you; it’s
+to go no further than this room, mind.”
+
+“Good heavens, no,” Roger said eagerly.
+
+“Well then, it’s my private opinion that Farrar was driven to the
+other conclusion in self-defence. And the chief had to agree with it
+in self-defence too. But if you want to get to the bottom of the
+business, Mr. Sheringham (and nobody would be more pleased if you did
+than Farrar himself) my advice to you is to concentrate on Sir
+Eustace’s private life. You’ve a better chance than any of us there;
+you’re on his level, you’ll know members of his club, you’ll know his
+friends personally, and the friends of his friends. And that,”
+concluded Moresby, “is the tip I really came round to give you.”
+
+“That’s very decent of you, Moresby,” Roger said with warmth. “Very
+decent indeed. Have another spot.”
+
+“Well, thank you, Mr. Sheringham, sir,” said Chief Inspector Moresby.
+“I don’t mind if I do.”
+
+Roger was meditating as he mixed the drinks. “I believe you’re right,
+Moresby,” he said slowly. “In fact, I’ve been thinking along those
+lines ever since I read the first full account. The truth lies in Sir
+Eustace’s private life, I feel sure. And if I were superstitious,
+which I’m not, do you know what I should believe? That the murderer’s
+aim misfired and Sir Eustace escaped death for an express purpose of
+Providence: so that he, the destined victim, should be the ironical
+instrument of bringing his own intended murderer to justice.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Sheringham, would you really?” said the sarcastic Chief
+Inspector, who was not superstitious either.
+
+Roger seemed rather taken with the idea. “_Chance, the Avenger._ Make
+a good film title, wouldn’t it? But there’s a terrible lot of truth in
+it.
+
+“How often don’t you people at the Yard stumble on some vital piece of
+evidence out of pure chance? How often isn’t it that you’re led to the
+right solution by what seems a series of mere coincidences? I’m not
+belittling your detective-work; but just think how often a piece of
+brilliant detective-work which has led you most of the way but not the
+last vital few inches, meets with some remarkable stroke of sheer luck
+(thoroughly well-deserved luck, no doubt, but _luck_), which just
+makes the case complete for you. I can think of scores of instances.
+The Milsom and Fowler murder, for example. Don’t you see what I mean?
+Is it chance every time, or is it Providence avenging the victim?”
+
+“Well, Mr. Sheringham,” said Chief Inspector Moresby, “to tell you the
+truth, I don’t mind what it is, so long as it lets me put my hands on
+the right man.”
+
+“Moresby,” laughed Roger, “you’re hopeless.”
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Sir Charles Wildman, as he had said, cared more for honest facts than
+for psychological fiddle-faddle.
+
+Facts were very dear to Sir Charles. More, they were meat and drink to
+him. His income of roughly thirty thousand pounds a year was derived
+entirely from the masterful way in which he was able to handle facts.
+There was no one at the bar who could so convincingly distort an
+honest but awkward fact into carrying an entirely different
+interpretation from that which any ordinary person (counsel for the
+prosecution, for instance) would have put upon it. He could take that
+fact, look it boldly in the face, twist it round, read a message from
+the back of its neck, turn it inside out and detect auguries in its
+entrails, dance triumphantly on its corpse, pulverise it completely,
+re-mould it if necessary into an utterly different shape, and finally,
+if the fact still had the temerity to retain any vestige of its
+primary aspect, bellow at it in the most terrifying manner. If that
+failed he was quite prepared to weep at it in open court.
+
+No wonder that Sir Charles Wildman, K.C., was paid that amount of
+money every year to transform facts of menacing appearance to his
+clients into so many sucking-doves, each cooing those very clients’
+tender innocence. If the reader is interested in statistics it might
+be added that the number of murderers whom Sir Charles in the course
+of his career had saved from the gallows, if placed one on top of the
+other, would have reached to a very great height indeed.
+
+Sir Charles Wildman had rarely appeared for the prosecution. It is not
+considered etiquette for prosecuting counsel to bellow, and there is
+scant need for their tears. His bellowing and his public tears were
+Sir Charles Wildman’s long suit. He was one of the old school, one of
+its very last representatives; and he found that the old school paid
+him handsomely.
+
+When therefore he looked impressively round the Crimes Circle on its
+next meeting, one week after Roger had put forward his proposal, and
+adjusted the gold-rimmed pince-nez on his somewhat massive nose, the
+other members could feel no doubt as to the quality of the
+entertainment in store for them. After all, they were going to enjoy
+for nothing what amounted to a thousand-guinea brief for the
+prosecution.
+
+Sir Charles glanced at the note-pad in his hand and cleared his
+throat. No barrister could clear his throat quite so ominously as Sir
+Charles.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, in weighty tones, “it is not
+unnatural that I should have been more interested in this murder than
+perhaps any one else, for personal reasons which will no doubt have
+occurred to you already. Sir Eustace Pennefather’s name, as you must
+know, has been mentioned in connection with that of my daughter; and
+though the report of their engagement was not merely premature, but
+utterly without foundation, it is inevitable that I should feel some
+personal connection, however slight, with this attempt to assassinate
+a man who has been mentioned as a possible son-in-law to myself.
+
+“I do not wish to stress this personal aspect of the case, which
+otherwise I have tried to view as impersonally as any other with which
+I have been connected; but I put it forward more as an excuse than
+anything. For it has enabled me to approach the problem set us by our
+President with a more intimate knowledge of the persons concerned than
+the rest of you could have, and with, too, I fear, information at my
+disposal which goes a long way towards indicating the truth of this
+mystery.
+
+“I know that I should have placed this information at the disposal of
+my fellow-members last week, and I apologise to them wholeheartedly
+for not having done so; but the truth is that I did not realise then
+that this knowledge of mine was in any way germane to the solution, or
+even remotely helpful, and it is only since I began to ponder over the
+case with a view to clearing up the tragic tangle, that the vital
+import of this information has impressed itself upon me.” Sir Charles
+paused and allowed his resounding periods to echo round the room.
+
+“Now, with its help,” he pronounced, looking severely from face to
+face, “I am of opinion that I have read this riddle.”
+
+A twitter of excitement, no less genuine because obviously awaited,
+ran round the faithful Circle.
+
+Sir Charles whisked off his pince-nez and swung them, in a
+characteristic gesture, on their broad ribbon. “Yes, I think, in fact
+I am sure, that I am about to elucidate this dark business to you. And
+for this reason I regret that the lot has fallen upon me to speak
+first. It would have been more interesting perhaps had we been
+permitted to examine some other theories first, and demonstrate their
+falsity, before we probed to the truth. That is, assuming that there
+are other theories to examine.
+
+“It would not surprise me, however, to learn that you had all leapt to
+the conclusion to which I have been driven. Not in the least. I claim
+no extraordinary powers in allowing the facts to speak to me for
+themselves; I pride myself on no superhuman insight in having been
+able to see further into this dark business than our official solvers
+of mysteries and readers of strange riddles, the trained detective
+force. Very much the reverse. I am only an ordinary human being,
+endowed with no more powers than any of my fellow-creatures. It would
+not astonish me for an instant to be apprised that I am only following
+in the footsteps of others of you in fixing the guilt on the
+individual who did, as I submit I am about to prove to you beyond any
+possibility of doubt, commit this foul crime.”
+
+Having thus provided for the improbable contingency of some other
+member of the Circle having been so clever as himself, Sir Charles cut
+some of the cackle and got down to business.
+
+“I set about this matter with one question in my mind and one only—the
+question to which the right answer has proved a sure guide to the
+criminal in almost every murder that has ever been committed, the
+question which hardly any criminal can avoid leaving behind him,
+damning though he knows the answer must be: the question—_cui bono?_”
+Sir Charles allowed a pregnant moment of silence. “Who,” he translated
+obligingly, “was the gainer? Who,” he paraphrased, for the benefit of
+any possible half-wits in his audience, “would, to put it bluntly,
+_score_ by the death of Sir Eustace Pennefather?” He darted looks of
+enquiry from under his tufted eyebrows, but his hearers dutifully
+played the game; nobody undertook to enlighten him prematurely.
+
+Sir Charles was far too practised a rhetorician to enlighten them
+prematurely himself. Leaving the question as an immense query-mark in
+their minds, he veered off on another track.
+
+“Now there were, as I saw it, only three definite clues in this
+crime,” he continued, in almost conversational tones. “I refer of
+course to the forged letter, the wrapper, and the chocolates
+themselves. Of these the wrapper could only be helpful so far as its
+post-mark. The hand-printed address I dismissed as useless. It could
+have been done by any one, at any time. It led, I felt, nowhere. And I
+could not see that the chocolates or the box that contained them were
+of the least use as evidence. I may be wrong, but I could not see it.
+They were specimens of a well-known brand, on sale at hundreds of
+shops; it would be fruitless to attempt to trace their purchaser.
+Moreover any possibilities in that direction would quite certainly
+have been explored already by the police. I was left, in short, with
+only two pieces of material evidence, the forged letter and the
+post-mark on the wrapper, on which the whole structure of proof must
+be erected.”
+
+Sir Charles paused again, to let the magnitude of this task sink into
+the minds of the others; apparently he had overlooked the fact that
+his problem must have been common to all. Roger, who with difficulty
+had remained silent so long, interposed a gentle question.
+
+“Had you already made up your mind as to the criminal, Sir Charles?”
+
+“I had already answered to my own satisfaction the question I had
+posed to myself, to which I made reference a few minutes ago,” replied
+Sir Charles, with dignity but without explicitness.
+
+“I see. You had made up your mind,” Roger pinned him down. “It would
+be interesting to know, so that we can follow better your way of
+approaching the proof. You used inductive methods then?”
+
+“Possibly, possibly,” said Sir Charles testily. Sir Charles strongly
+disliked being pinned down.
+
+He glowered for a moment in silence, to recover from this indignity.
+
+“The task, I saw at once,” he resumed, in a sterner voice, “was not
+going to be an easy one. The period at my disposal was extremely
+limited, far-reaching enquiries were obviously necessary, my own time
+was far too closely engaged to permit me to make, in person, any
+investigations I might find advisable. I thought the matter over and
+decided that the only possible way in which I could arrive at a
+conclusion was to consider the facts of the case for a sufficient
+length of time till I was enabled to formulate a theory which would
+stand every test I could apply to it out of such knowledge as was
+already at my disposal, and then make a careful list of further points
+which were outside my own knowledge but which must be facts if my
+theory were correct; these points could then be investigated by
+persons acting on my behalf and, if they were substantiated, my theory
+would be conclusively proved.” Sir Charles drew a breath.
+
+“In other words,” Roger murmured with a smile to Alicia Dammers,
+turning a hundred words into six, “‘I decided to employ inductive
+methods.’” But he spoke so softly that nobody but Miss Dammers heard
+him.
+
+She smiled back appreciatively. The art of the written word is not
+that of the spoken one.
+
+“I formed my theory,” announced Sir Charles, with surprising
+simplicity. Perhaps he was still a little short of breath.
+
+“I formed my theory. Of necessity much of it was guesswork. Let me
+give an example. The possession by the criminal of a sheet of Mason &
+Sons’ notepaper had puzzled me more than anything. It was not an
+article which the individual I had in mind might be expected to
+possess, still less to be able to acquire. I could not conceive any
+method by which, the plot already decided upon and the sheet of paper
+required for its accomplishment, such a thing could be deliberately
+acquired by the individual in question without suspicion being raised
+afterwards.
+
+“I therefore formed the conclusion that it was the actual ability to
+obtain a piece of Mason’s notepaper in a totally unsuspicious way,
+which was the reason of the notepaper of that particular firm being
+employed at all.” Sir Charles looked triumphantly round as if awaiting
+something.
+
+Roger supplied it; no less readily for all that the point must have
+occurred to every one as being almost too obvious to need any comment.
+“That’s a very interesting point indeed, Sir Charles. Most ingenious.”
+
+Sir Charles nodded his agreement. “Sheer guesswork, I admit. Nothing
+but guesswork. But guesswork that was justified in the result.” Sir
+Charles was becoming so lost in admiration of his own perspicacity
+that he had forgotten all his love of long, winding sentences and
+smooth-rolling subordinate clauses. His massive head positively jerked
+on his shoulders.
+
+“I considered how such a thing might come into one’s possession, and
+whether the possession could be verified afterwards. It occurred to me
+at last that many firms insert a piece of notepaper with a receipted
+bill, with the words ‘With Compliments’ or some such phrase typed on
+it. That gave me three questions. Was this practice employed at
+Mason’s? Had the individual in question an account at Mason’s, or more
+particularly, to explain the yellowed edge of the paper, had there
+been such an account in the past? Were there any indications on the
+paper of such a phrase having been carefully erased?
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” boomed Sir Charles, puce with excitement, “you
+will see that the odds against those three questions being answered in
+the affirmative were enormous. Overwhelming. Before I posed them I
+knew that, should it prove to be the case, no mere chance could be
+held responsible.” Sir Charles dropped his voice. “I knew,” he said
+slowly, “that if those three questions of mine were answered in the
+affirmative, the individual I had in mind must be as guilty as if I
+had actually watched the poison being injected into those chocolates.”
+
+He paused and looked impressively round him, riveting all eyes on his
+face.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen, those three questions _were_ answered in the
+affirmative.”
+
+Oratory is a powerful art. Roger knew perfectly well that Sir Charles,
+out of sheer force of habit, was employing on them all the usual and
+hackneyed forensic tricks. It was with difficulty, Roger felt, that he
+refrained from adding “of the jury” to his “Ladies and gentlemen.” But
+really this was only what might have been expected. Sir Charles had a
+good story to tell, and a story in which he obviously sincerely
+believed, and he was simply telling it in the way which, after all
+these years of practice, came most naturally to him. That was not what
+was annoying Roger.
+
+What did annoy him was that he himself had been plodding on the scent
+of quite a different hare and, convinced as he had been that his must
+be the right one, had at first been only mildly amused as Sir Charles
+flirted round the skirts of his own quarry. Now he had allowed himself
+to be influenced by mere rhetoric, cheap though he knew it to be, into
+wondering.
+
+But was it only rhetoric that had made him begin to doubt? Sir Charles
+seemed to have some substantial facts to weave into the airy web of
+his oratory. And pompous old fellow though he might be, he was
+certainly no fool. Roger began to feel distinctly uneasy. For his own
+hare, he had to admit, was a very elusive one.
+
+As Sir Charles proceeded to develop his thesis, Roger’s uneasiness
+began to turn into downright unhappiness.
+
+“There can be no doubt about it. I ascertained through an agent that
+Mason’s, an old-fashioned firm, invariably paid such private customers
+as had an account with them (nine-tenths of their business of course
+is wholesale) the courtesy of including a statement of thanks, just
+two or three words typed in the middle of a sheet of notepaper. I
+ascertained that this individual had had an account with the firm,
+which was apparently closed five months ago; that is to say, a cheque
+was sent then in settlement and no goods have been ordered since.
+
+“Moreover I found time to pay a special visit myself to Scotland Yard
+in order to examine that letter again. By looking at the back I could
+make out quite distinct though indecipherable traces of former
+typewritten words in the middle of the page. These latter cut halfway
+down one of the lines of the letter and so prove that they could not
+have been an erasure from that; they correspond in length to the
+statement I expected; and they show signs of the most careful
+attempts, by rubbing, rolling and re-roughening the smoothed paper, to
+eradicate not only the typewriter-ink but even the actual indentations
+caused by the metal letter-arms.
+
+“This I held to be conclusive proof that my theory was correct, and at
+once I set about clearing up such other doubtful points as had
+occurred to me. Time was short, and I had recourse to no less than
+four firms of trustworthy inquiry-agents among whom I divided the task
+of providing the data I was seeking. This not only saved me
+considerable time, but had the advantage of not putting the sum-total
+of the information obtained into any hands but my own. Indeed I did my
+best so to split up my queries as to prevent any of the firms from
+even guessing what object I had in mind; and in this I am of the
+opinion that I have been successful.
+
+“My next care was the post-mark. It was necessary for my case that I
+should prove that my suspect had actually been in the neighbourhood of
+the Strand at the time in question. You will say,” suggested Sir
+Charles, searching the interested faces round him, and apparently
+picking upon Mr. Morton Harrogate Bradley as the raiser of this futile
+objection. “You will say,” said Sir Charles sternly to Mr. Bradley,
+“that this was not necessary. The parcel might have been posted quite
+innocently by an unwitting accomplice to whom it had been entrusted,
+so that the actual criminal had an unshakable alibi for that period;
+the more so as the individual to whom I refer was actually not in this
+country, so that it would be all the easier to request a friend who
+might be travelling to England to undertake the task of posting the
+parcel in this country and so saving the cost of the foreign postage,
+which on parcels is not inconsiderable.
+
+“I do not agree,” said Sir Charles to Mr. Bradley, still more
+severely. “I have considered that point, and I do not think the
+individual I have in mind would undertake such a very grave risk. For
+the friend would almost certainly remember the incident when she read
+of the affair in the papers, as would be almost inevitable.
+
+“No,” concluded Sir Charles, finally crushing Mr. Bradley once and for
+all, “I am convinced that the individual I am thinking of would
+realise that nobody else must handle that parcel till it had passed
+into the keeping of the post-office.”
+
+“Of course,” said Mr. Bradley academically, “Lady Pennefather may have
+had not an innocent accomplice but a guilty one. You’ve considered
+that, of course?” Mr. Bradley managed to convey that the matter was of
+no real interest, but as Sir Charles had been addressing these remarks
+directly to him it was only courteous to comment on them.
+
+Sir Charles purpled visibly. He had been priding himself on the
+skilful way in which he had been withholding his suspect’s name, to
+bring it out with a lovely plump right at the end after proving his
+case, just like a real detective story. And now this wretched
+scribbler of the things had spoilt it all.
+
+“Sir,” he intoned, in proper Johnsonian manner, “I must call your
+attention to the fact that I have mentioned no names at all. To do
+such a thing is most imprudent. Do I need to remind you that there is
+such a thing as a law of libel?”
+
+Morton Harrogate smiled his maddeningly superior smile (he really was
+a most insufferable young man). “Really, Sir Charles!” he mocked,
+stroking his little sleek object he wore on his upper lip. “I’m not
+going to write a story about Lady Pennefather trying to murder her
+husband, if that’s what you’re warning me against. Or could it
+possibly be that you were referring to the law of slander?”
+
+Sir Charles, who had meant slander, enveloped Mr. Bradley in a crimson
+glare.
+
+Roger sped to the rescue. The combatants reminded him of a bull and a
+gadfly, and that is a contest which it is often good fun to watch. But
+the Crimes Circle had been founded to investigate the crimes of
+others, not to provide opportunities for new ones. Roger did not
+particularly like either the bull or the gadfly, but both amused him
+in their different ways; he certainly disliked neither. Mr. Bradley on
+the other hand disliked both Roger and Sir Charles. He disliked Roger
+the more of the two because Roger was a gentleman and pretended not to
+be, whereas he himself was not a gentleman and pretended he was. And
+that surely is cause enough to dislike any one.
+
+“I’m glad you raised that point, Sir Charles,” Roger now said
+smoothly. “It’s one we must consider. Personally I don’t see how we’re
+to progress at all unless we come to some arrangement concerning the
+law of slander, do you?”
+
+Sir Charles consented to be mollified. “It is a difficult point,” he
+agreed, the lawyer in him immediately swamping the outraged human
+being. A born lawyer will turn aside from any other minor pursuit,
+even briefs, for a really knotty legal point, just as a born woman
+will put on her best set of underclothes and powder her nose before
+inserting the latter in the gas-oven.
+
+“I think,” Roger said carefully, anxious not to wound legal
+susceptibilities (it was a bold proposition for a layman to make),
+“that we should disregard that particular law. I mean,” he added
+hastily, observing the look of pain on Sir Charles’s brow at being
+asked to condone this violation of a _lex intangenda_, “I mean, we
+should come to some such arrangement as that anything said in this
+room should be without prejudice, or among friends, or—or not in the
+spirit of the adverb,” he plunged desperately, “or whatever the legal
+wriggle is.” On the whole it was not a tactful speech.
+
+But it is doubtful whether Sir Charles heard it. A dreamy look had
+come into his eyes, as of a Lord of Appeal crooning over a piece of
+red tape. “Slander, as we all know,” he murmured, “consists in the
+malicious speaking of such words as render the party who speaks them
+in the hearing of others liable to an action at the suit of the party
+to whom they apply. In this case, the imputation being of a crime or
+misdemeanour which is punishable corporeally, pecuniary damage would
+not have to be proved, and, the imputation being defamatory, its
+falsity would be presumed and the burden of proving its truth would be
+laid upon the defendant. We should therefore have the interesting
+situation of the defendant in a slander action becoming, in essence,
+the plaintiff in a civil suit for murder. And really,” said Sir
+Charles in much perplexity, “I don’t know what would happen then.”
+
+“Er—what about privilege?” suggested Roger feebly.
+
+“Of course,” Sir Charles disregarded him, “there would have to be
+stated in the declaration the actual words used, not merely their
+meaning and general inference, and failure to prove them as stated
+would result in the plaintiff being nonsuited; so that unless notes
+were taken here and signed by a witness who had heard the defamation,
+I do not quite see how an action could lie.”
+
+“Privilege?” murmured Roger despairingly.
+
+“Moreover I should be of the opinion,” said Sir Charles, brightening,
+“that this might be regarded as one of those proper occasions upon
+which statements, in themselves defamatory, and even false, may be
+made if from a perfectly proper motive and with an entire belief in
+their truth. In that case the presumption would be reversed and the
+burden would be on the plaintiff to prove, and that to the
+satisfaction of a jury, that the defendant was actuated by express
+malice. In that case I rather fancy that the court would be guided
+almost wholly by considerations of public expediency, which would
+probably mean that—”
+
+“Privilege!” said Roger loudly.
+
+Sir Charles turned on him the dull eye of a red-ink fiend. But this
+time the word had penetrated. “I was coming to that,” he reproved.
+“Now in our case I hardly think that a plea of public privilege would
+be accepted. As to private privilege, the limits are of course
+exceedingly difficult to define. It would be doubtful if we could
+plead successfully that all statements made here are matters of purely
+private communication, because it is a question whether this Circle
+does constitute, in actual fact, a private or a public gathering. One
+could,” said Sir Charles with much interest, “argue either way. Or
+even, for the matter of that, that it is a private body meeting in
+public, or, _vice versa_, a public gathering held in private. The
+point is a very debatable one.” Sir Charles swung his glasses for a
+moment to emphasise the extreme debatability of the point.
+
+“But I do feel inclined to venture the opinion,” he plunged at last,
+“that on the whole we might be justified in taking up our stand upon
+the submission that the occasion _is_ privileged in so far as it is
+concerned entirely with communications which are made with no _animus
+injuriandi_ but solely in performance of a duty not necessarily legal
+but moral or social, and any statements so uttered are covered by a
+plea of _veritas convicii_ being made within proper limits by persons
+in the _bona fide_ prosecution of their own and the public interest. I
+am bound to say however,” Sir Charles immediately proceeded to hedge
+as if horrified at having committed himself at last, “that this is not
+a matter of complete certainty, and a wiser policy might be to avoid
+the direct mention of any name, while holding ourselves free to
+indicate in some unmistakable manner, such as by signs, or possibly by
+some form of impersonation or acting, the individual to whom we
+severally refer.”
+
+“Still,” pursued the President, faint but persistent, “on the whole
+you do think that the occasion may be regarded as privileged, and we
+may go ahead and mention any name we like?”
+
+Sir Charles’s glasses described a complete and symbolical circle. “I
+think,” said Sir Charles very weightily indeed (after all it was an
+opinion which would have cost the Circle such a surprisingly round sum
+had it been delivered in chambers that Sir Charles need not be grudged
+a little weight in the delivering of it). “I think,” said Sir Charles,
+“that we might take that risk.”
+
+“Right-ho!” said the President with relief.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+“I dare say,” resumed Sir Charles, “that many of you will have already
+reached the same conclusion as myself, with regard to the identity of
+the murderer. The case seems to me to afford so striking a parallel
+with one of the classical murders, that the similarity can hardly have
+passed unnoticed. I refer of course, to the Marie Lafarge case.”
+
+“Oh!” said Roger, surprised. So far as he was concerned the similarity
+had passed unnoticed. He wriggled uncomfortably. Now one came to
+consider it, of course the parallel was obvious.
+
+“There too we have a wife, accused of sending a poisoned article to
+her husband. Whether the article was a cake or a box of chocolates is
+beside the point. It will not do perhaps to—”
+
+“But nobody in their sane senses still believes that Marie Lafarge was
+guilty,” Alicia Dammers interrupted, with unusual warmth. “It’s been
+practically proved that the cake was sent by the foreman, or whatever
+he was. Wasn’t his name Dennis? His motive was much bigger than hers,
+too.”
+
+Sir Charles regarded her severely. “I think I said, _accused_ of
+sending. I was referring to a matter of fact, not of opinion.”
+
+“Sorry,” nodded Miss Dammers, unabashed.
+
+“In any case, I just mention the coincidence for what it is worth. Let
+us now go back to resume our argument at the point we left it. In that
+connection, the question was raised just now,” said Sir Charles,
+determinedly impersonal, “as to whether Lady Pennefather may have had
+not an innocent accomplice but a guilty one. That doubt had already
+occurred to me. I have satisfied myself that it is not the case. She
+planned and carried through this affair alone.” He paused, inviting
+the obvious question.
+
+Roger tactfully supplied it.
+
+“How could she, Sir Charles? We know that she was in the South of
+France the whole time. The police investigated that very point. She
+has a complete alibi.”
+
+Sir Charles positively beamed at him. “She _had_ a complete alibi. I
+have destroyed it.
+
+“This is what actually happened. Three days before the parcel was
+posted Lady Pennefather left Mentone and went, ostensibly, for a week
+to Avignon. At the end of the week she returned to Mentone. Her
+signature is in the hotel-register at Avignon, she has the receipted
+bill, everything is quite in order. The only curious thing is that
+apparently she did not take her maid, a very superior young woman of
+smart appearance and good manners, to Avignon with her, for the
+hotel-receipt is for one person only. And yet the maid did not stay at
+Mentone. Did the maid then vanish into thin air?” demanded Sir Charles
+indignantly.
+
+“Oh!” nodded Mr. Chitterwick, who had been listening intently. “I see.
+How ingenious.”
+
+“Highly ingenious,” agreed Sir Charles, complacently taking the credit
+for the erring lady’s ingenuity. “The maid took the mistress’s place;
+the mistress paid a secret visit to England. And I have verified that
+beyond any doubt. An agent, acting on telegraphic instructions from
+me, showed the hotel-proprietor at Avignon a photograph of Lady
+Pennefather and asked whether such a person had ever stayed in the
+hotel; the man averred that he had never seen her in his life. My
+agent showed him a snapshot which he had obtained of the maid; the
+proprietor recognised her instantly as Lady Pennefather. Another
+‘guess’ of mine had proved only too accurate.” Sir Charles leaned back
+in his chair and swung his glasses in silent tribute to his own
+astuteness.
+
+“Then Lady Pennefather did have an accomplice?” murmured Mr. Bradley,
+with the air of one discussing _The Three Bears_ with a child of four.
+
+“An innocent accomplice,” retorted Sir Charles. “My agent questioned
+the maid tactfully, and learned that her mistress has told her that
+she had to go over to England on urgent business but, having already
+spent six months of the current year in that country, would have to
+pay British income-tax if she so much as set foot in England again
+that year. A considerable sum was in question, and Lady Pennefather
+suggested this plan as a means of getting round the difficulty, with a
+handsome bribe to the girl. Not unnaturally the offer was accepted.
+Most ingenious; most ingenious.” He paused again and beamed round,
+inviting tributes.
+
+“How very clever of you, Sir Charles,” murmured Alicia Dammers,
+stepping into the breach.
+
+“I have no actual proof of her stay in this country,” regretted Sir
+Charles, “so that from the legal point of view the case against her is
+incomplete in that respect, but that will be a matter for the police
+to discover. In all other respects, I submit, my case is complete. I
+regret, I regret exceedingly, having to say so, but I have no
+alternative: Lady Pennefather is Mrs. Bendix’s murderess.”
+
+There was a thoughtful silence when Sir Charles had finished speaking.
+Questions were in the air, but nobody seemed to care to be the first
+to put one. Roger gazed into vacancy, as if looking longingly after
+the spoor of his own hare. There was no doubt that, as matters stood
+at present, Sir Charles seemed to have proved his case.
+
+Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick plucked up courage to break the silence. “We
+must congratulate you, Sir Charles. Your solution is as brilliant as
+it is surprising. Only one question occurs to me, and that is the one
+of motive. Why should Lady Pennefather desire her husband’s death when
+she is actually in process of divorcing him? Had she any reason to
+suspect that a decree would not be granted?”
+
+“None at all,” replied Sir Charles blandly. “It was just because she
+was so certain that a decree would be granted that she desired his
+death.”
+
+“I—I don’t quite understand,” stammered Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+Sir Charles allowed the general bewilderment to continue for a few
+more moments before he condescended to dispel it. He had the orator’s
+feeling for atmosphere.
+
+“I referred at the beginning of my remarks to a piece of knowledge
+which had come into my possession and which had helped me materially
+towards my solution. I am now prepared to disclose, in strict
+confidence, what that piece of knowledge was.
+
+“You already know that there was talk of an engagement between Sir
+Eustace and my daughter. I do not think I shall be violating the
+secrets of the confessional if I tell you that not many weeks ago, Sir
+Eustace came to me and formally asked me to sanction an engagement
+between them as soon as his wife’s decree _nisi_ had been pronounced.
+
+“I need not tell you all that transpired at that interview. What is
+relevant is that Sir Eustace informed me categorically that his wife
+had been extremely unwilling to divorce him, and he had only succeeded
+in the end by making a will entirely in her favour, including his
+estate in Worcestershire. She had a small private income of her own,
+and he was going to make her such allowance in addition as he was
+able; but with the interest on the mortgage on his estate swallowing
+up nearly all the rent he was getting for it, and his other expenses,
+this could not be a large one. His life, however, was heavily insured
+in accordance with Lady Pennefather’s marriage settlements, and the
+mortgage on the estate was in the nature of an endowment policy, and
+lapsed with his death. He had therefore, as he candidly admitted, very
+little to offer my daughter.
+
+“Like myself,” said Sir Charles impressively, “you cannot fail to
+grasp the significance of this. According to the will then in
+existence, Lady Pennefather from being not even comfortably off would
+become a comparatively rich woman on her husband’s death. But rumours
+are reaching her ears of a possible marriage between that husband and
+another woman as soon as the divorce is complete. What is more
+probable than that when such an engagement is actually concluded, a
+new will will be made?
+
+“Her character is already shown in a strong enough light by her
+willingness to accept the bribe of the will as an inducement to
+divorce. She is obviously a grasping woman, greedy for money. Murder
+is only another step for such a woman to take. And murder is her only
+hope. I do not think,” concluded Sir Charles, “that I need to labour
+the point any further.” His glasses swung deliberately.
+
+“It’s uncommonly convincing,” Roger said, with a little sigh. “Are you
+going to hand this information over to the police, Sir Charles?”
+
+“I conceive that failure to do so would be a gross dereliction of my
+duty as a citizen,” Sir Charles replied, with a pomposity that in no
+way concealed how pleased he was with himself.
+
+“Humph!” observed Mr. Bradley, who evidently was not going to be so
+pleased with Sir Charles as Sir Charles was. “What about the
+chocolates? Is it part of your case that she prepared them over here,
+or brought them with her?”
+
+Sir Charles waved an airy hand. “Is that material?”
+
+“I should say that it would be very material to connect her at any
+rate with the poison.”
+
+“Nitrobenzene? One might as well try to connect her with the purchase
+of the chocolates. She would have no difficulty in getting hold of
+that. I regard her choice of poison, in fact, as on a par with the
+ingenuity she has displayed in all the other particulars.”
+
+“I see.” Mr. Bradley stroked his little moustache and eyed Sir Charles
+combatively. “Come to think of it, you know, Sir Charles, you haven’t
+really proved a case against Lady Pennefather at all. All you’ve
+proved is motive and opportunity.”
+
+An unexpected ally ranged herself beside Mr. Bradley. “Exactly!” cried
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “That’s just what I was about to point out
+myself. If you hand over the information you’ve collected to the
+police, Sir Charles, I don’t think they’ll thank you for it. As Mr.
+Bradley says, you haven’t proved that Lady Pennefather’s guilty, or
+anything like it. I’m quite sure you’re altogether mistaken.”
+
+Sir Charles was so taken aback that for a moment he could only stare.
+“_Mistaken?_” he managed to ejaculate. It was clear that such a
+possibility had never entered Sir Charles’s orbit.
+
+“Well, perhaps I’d better say—wrong,” amended Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,
+quite drily.
+
+“But my dear madam—” For once words did not come to Sir Charles. “But
+why?” he fell back upon, feebly.
+
+“Because I’m sure of it,” retorted Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, most
+unsatisfactorily.
+
+Roger had been watching this exchange with a gradual change of
+feeling. From being hypnotised by Sir Charles’s persuasiveness and
+self-confidence into something like reluctant agreement, he was
+swinging round now in reaction to the other extreme. Dash it all, this
+fellow Bradley had kept a clearer head after all. And he was perfectly
+right. There were gaps in Sir Charles’s case that Sir Charles himself,
+as counsel for Lady Pennefather’s defence, could have driven a
+coach-and-six through.
+
+“Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “the fact that before she went
+abroad Lady Pennefather may have had an account at Mason’s isn’t
+surprising in the least. Nor is the fact that Mason’s send out a
+complimentary chit with their receipts. As Sir Charles himself said,
+very many old-fashioned firms of good repute do. And the fact that the
+sheet of paper on which the letter was written had been used
+previously for some such purpose is not only not surprising, when one
+comes to consider; it’s even obvious. Whoever the murderer, the same
+problem of getting hold of the piece of notepaper would arise. Yes,
+really, that Sir Charles’s three initial questions should have
+happened to find affirmative answers, does seem little more than a
+coincidence.”
+
+Sir Charles turned on this new antagonist like a wounded bull. “But
+the odds were enormous against it!” he roared. “If it was a
+coincidence, it was the most incredible one in the whole course of my
+experience.”
+
+“Ah, Sir Charles, but you’re prejudiced,” Mr. Bradley told him gently.
+“And you exaggerate dreadfully, you know. You seem to be putting the
+odds at somewhere round about a million to one. I should put them at
+six to one. Permutations and combinations, you know.”
+
+“Damn your permutations, sir!” riposted Sir Charles with vigour. “And
+your combinations too.”
+
+Mr. Bradley turned to Roger. “Mr. Chairman, is it within the rules of
+this club for one member to insult another member’s underwear?
+Besides, Sir Charles,” he added to that fuming knight, “I don’t wear
+the things. Never have done, since I was an infant.”
+
+For the dignity of the chair Roger could not join in the delighted
+titters that were escaping round the table; in the interests of the
+Circle’s preservation he had to pour oil on these very seething
+waters.
+
+“Bradley, you’re losing sight of the point, aren’t you? I don’t want
+to destroy your theory necessarily, Sir Charles, or detract in any way
+from the really brilliant manner in which you’ve defended it; but if
+it’s to stand its ground it must be able to resist any arguments we
+can bring against it. That’s all. And I honestly do think that you’re
+inclined to attach a little too much importance to the answers to
+those three questions. What do you say, Miss Dammers?”
+
+“I agree,” Miss Dammers said crisply. “The way Sir Charles emphasised
+their importance reminded me at the time of a favourite trick of
+detective-story writers. He said, if I remember rightly, that if those
+questions were answered in the affirmative he knew that his suspect
+was guilty just as much as if he’d seen her with his own eyes putting
+the poison into the chocolates, because the odds against a
+coincidental affirmative to all three of them were incalculable. In
+other words he simply made a strong assertion, unsupported by evidence
+or argument.”
+
+“And that is what detective-story writers do, Miss Dammers?” queried
+Mr. Bradley, with a tolerant smile.
+
+“Invariably, Mr. Bradley. I’ve often noticed it in your own books. You
+state a thing so emphatically that the reader does not think of
+questioning the assertion. ‘Here,’ says the detective, ‘is a bottle of
+red liquid and here is a bottle of blue. If these two liquids turn out
+to be ink, then we know that they were purchased to fill up the empty
+inkpots in the library as surely as if we had read the dead man’s very
+thoughts.’ Whereas the red ink might have been bought by one of the
+maids to dye a jumper, and the blue by the secretary for his
+fountain-pen; or a hundred other such explanations. But any
+possibilities of that kind are silently ignored. Isn’t that so?”
+
+“Perfectly,” agreed Bradley, unperturbed. “Don’t waste time on
+unessentials. Just tell the reader very loudly what he’s to think, and
+he’ll think it all right. You’ve got the technique perfectly. Why
+don’t you try your hand at it? It’s quite a paying game, you know.”
+
+“I may one day. And anyhow I will say for you, Mr. Bradley, that your
+detectives do detect. They don’t just stand about and wait for
+somebody else to tell them who committed the murder, as the so-called
+detectives do in most of the so-called detective-stories I read.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Mr. Bradley. “Then you actually read
+detective-stories, Miss Dammers?”
+
+“Certainly,” said Miss Dammers, crisply. “Why not?” She dismissed Mr.
+Bradley as abruptly as she had answered his challenge. “And the letter
+itself, Sir Charles? The typewriting. You don’t attach any importance
+to that?”
+
+“As a detail, of course it would have to be considered; I was only
+sketching out the broad lines of the case.” Sir Charles was no longer
+bull-like. “I take it that the police would ferret out pieces of
+conclusive evidence of that nature.”
+
+“I think they might have some difficulty in connecting Pauline
+Pennefather with the machine that typed that letter,” observed Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, not without tartness.
+
+The tide of feeling had obviously set in against Sir Charles.
+
+“But the motive,” he pleaded, now pathetically on the defensive. “You
+must admit that the motive is overwhelming.”
+
+“You don’t know Pauline, Sir Charles—Lady Pennefather?” Miss Dammers
+suggested.
+
+“I do not.”
+
+“Evidently,” commented Miss Dammers.
+
+“You don’t agree with Sir Charles’s theory, Miss Dammers?” ventured
+Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+“I do not,” said Miss Dammers with emphasis.
+
+“Might one enquire your reason?” ventured Mr. Chitterwick further.
+
+“Certainly you may. It’s a conclusive one, I’m afraid, Sir Charles. I
+was in Paris at the time of the murder, and just about the very hour
+when the parcel was being posted I was talking to Pauline Pennefather
+in the foyer of the Opera.”
+
+“What!” exclaimed the discomfited Sir Charles, the remnants of his
+beautiful theory crashing about his ears.
+
+“I should apologise for not having given you this information before,
+I suppose,” said Miss Dammers with the utmost calmness, “but I wanted
+to see what sort of a case you could put up against her. And I really
+do congratulate you. It was a remarkable piece of inductive reasoning.
+If I hadn’t happened to know that it was built up on a complete
+fallacy you would have quite convinced me.”
+
+“But—but why the secrecy, and—and the impersonation by the maid, if
+her visit was an innocent one?” stammered Sir Charles, his mind
+revolving wildly round private aeroplanes and the time they would take
+from the _Place de l’Opéra_ to Trafalgar Square.
+
+“Oh, I didn’t say it was an innocent one,” retorted Miss Dammers
+carelessly. “Sir Eustace isn’t the only one who is waiting for the
+divorce to marry again. And in the interim Pauline, quite rightly,
+doesn’t see why she should waste valuable time. After all, she isn’t
+so young as she was. And there’s always a strange creature called the
+King’s Proctor, isn’t there?”
+
+Shortly after that the Chairman adjourned the meeting of the Circle.
+He did so because he did not wish one of the members to die of
+apoplexy on his hands.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was nervous. Actually nervous.
+
+She shuffled the pages of her notebook aimlessly, and seemed hardly
+able to sit through the few preliminaries which had to be settled
+before Roger asked her to give the solution which she had already
+affirmed, privately, to Alicia Dammers, to be indubitably the correct
+one of Mrs. Bendix’s murder. With such a weighty piece of knowledge in
+her mind one would have thought that for once in her life Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming had a really heaven-sent opportunity to be
+impressive, but for once in her life she made no use of it. If she had
+not been Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, one might have gone so far as to say
+that she dithered.
+
+“Are you ready, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?” Roger asked, gazing at this
+surprising manifestation.
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming adjusted her very unbecoming hat, rubbed her
+nose (being innocent of powder, it did not suffer under this habitual
+treatment; just shone a little more brightly in pink embarrassment),
+and shot a covert glance round the table. Roger continued to gaze in
+astonishment. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was positively shrinking from the
+lime-light. For some occult reason she was approaching her task with
+real distaste, and a distaste at that quite out of comparison with the
+task’s significance.
+
+She cleared her throat, nervously. “I have a very difficult duty to
+perform,” she began in a low voice. “Last night I hardly slept.
+Anything more distasteful to a woman like myself it is impossible to
+imagine.” She paused, moistening her lips.
+
+“Oh, come, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” Roger felt himself impelled to
+encourage her. “It’s the same for all of us, you know. And I’ve heard
+you make a most excellent speech at one of your own first nights.”
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked at him, not at all encouraged. “I was not
+referring to that aspect of it, Mr. Sheringham,” she retorted, rather
+more tartly. “I was speaking of the burden which has been laid on me
+by the knowledge that has come into my possession, the terrible duty I
+have to perform in consequence of it.”
+
+“You mean you’ve solved the little problem?” enquired Mr. Bradley,
+without reverence.
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming regarded him sombrely. “With infinite regret,”
+she said, in low, womanly tones, “I have.” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was
+recovering her poise.
+
+She consulted her notes for a moment, and then began to speak in a
+firmer voice. “Criminology I have always regarded with something of a
+professional eye. Its main interest has always been for me its immense
+potentialities for drama. The inevitability of murder; the predestined
+victim, struggling unconsciously and vainly against fate; the
+predestined killer, moving first unconsciously too and then with full
+and relentless realisation, towards the accomplishment of his doom;
+the hidden causes, unknown perhaps to both victim and killer, which
+are all the time urging on the fulfilment of destiny.
+
+“Apart from the action and the horror of the deed itself, I have
+always felt that there are more possibilities of real drama in the
+most ordinary or sordid of murders than in any other situation that
+can occur to man. Ibsenish in the inevitable working out of certain
+circumstances in juxtaposition that we call fate, no less than
+Edgar-Wallacish in the _καθαρσις_ undergone by the emotions of the
+onlooker at their climax.
+
+“It was perhaps natural then that I should regard not only this
+particular case from something of the standpoint of my calling (and
+certainly no more dramatic twist could well be invented), but the task
+of solving it too. Anyhow, natural or not, this is what I did; and the
+result has terribly justified me. I considered the case in the light
+of one of the oldest dramatic situations, and very soon everything
+became only too clear. I am referring to the situation which the
+gentlemen who pass among us in these days for dramatic critics,
+invariably call the Eternal Triangle.
+
+“I had to begin of course with only one of the triangle’s three
+members, Sir Eustace Pennefather. Of the two unknown one must be a
+woman, the other might be woman or man. So I fell back on another very
+old and very sound maxim, and proceeded to _chercher la femme_. And,”
+said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, very solemnly, “I found her.”
+
+So far, it must be admitted, her audience was not particularly
+impressed. Even the promising opening had not stirred them, for it was
+only to be expected that Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would feel it her duty
+to emphasise her feminine shrinkings from handing a criminal over to
+justice. Her somewhat laborious sentences too, obviously learned off
+by heart for the occasion, detracted if anything from the interest of
+what she had to convey.
+
+But when she resumed, having waited in vain for a tributary gasp at
+her last momentous piece of information, the somewhat calculated
+tenseness of her style had given way to an unrehearsed earnestness
+which was very much more impressive.
+
+“I wasn’t expecting the triangle to be the hackneyed one,” she said,
+with a slight dig at the deflated remains of Sir Charles. “Lady
+Pennefather I hardly considered for a moment. The subtlety of the
+crime, I felt sure, must be a reflection of an unusual situation. And
+after all a triangle need not necessarily include a husband and wife
+among its members; any three people, if the circumstances arrange them
+so, can form one. It is the circumstances, not the three protagonists,
+that make the triangle.
+
+“Sir Charles has told us that this crime reminded him of the Marie
+Lafarge case, and in some respects (he might have added) the Mary
+Ansell case too. It reminded me of a case as well, but it was neither
+of these. The Molineux case in New York, it seems to me, provides a
+much closer parallel than either.
+
+“You all remember the details of course. Mr. Cornish, a director of
+the important Knickerbocker Athletic Club, received in his Christmas
+mail a small silver cup and a phial of bromo-seltzer, addressed to him
+at the club. He thought they had been sent by way of a joke, and kept
+the wrapper in order to identify the humorist. A few days later a
+woman who lived in the same boarding-house as Cornish complained of a
+headache and Cornish gave her some of the bromo-seltzer. In a very
+short time she was dead, and Cornish, who had taken just a sip because
+she complained of it being bitter, was violently ill but recovered
+later.
+
+“In the end a man named Molineux, another member of the same club, was
+arrested and put on trial. There was quite a lot of evidence against
+him, and it was known that he hated Cornish bitterly, so much so that
+he had already assaulted him once. Moreover another member of the
+club, a man named Barnet, had been killed earlier in the year through
+taking what purported to be a sample of a well-known headache powder
+which had also been sent to him at the club and, shortly before the
+Cornish episode, Molineux married a girl who had actually been engaged
+to Barnet at the time of his death; he had always wanted her, but she
+had preferred Barnet. Molineux, as you remember, was convicted at his
+first trial and acquitted at his second; he afterwards became insane.
+
+“Now this parallel seems to me complete. Our case is to all purposes a
+composite Cornish-cum-Barnet case. The resemblances are extraordinary.
+There is the poisoned article addressed to the man’s club; there is,
+in the case of Cornish, the death of the wrong victim; there is the
+preservation of the wrapper; there is, in Barnet’s case, the triangle
+element (and a triangle, you will notice, without husband and wife).
+It’s quite startling. It is, in fact, more than startling; it’s
+significant. Things don’t happen like that quite by chance.”
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming paused and blew her nose, delicately but with
+emotion. She was getting nicely worked up now, and so, in consequence,
+was her audience. If there were no gasps there was at any rate the
+tribute of complete silence till she was ready to go on.
+
+“I said that this similarity was more than startling, that it was
+significant. I will explain its particular significance later; at
+present it is enough to say that I found it very helpful also. The
+realisation of the extreme closeness of the parallel came as quite a
+shock to me, but once I had grasped it I felt strangely convinced that
+it was in this very similarity that the clue to the solution of Mrs.
+Bendix’s murder was to be found. I felt this so strongly that I
+somehow actually _knew_ it. These intuitions do come to me sometimes
+(explain them as you will) and I have never yet known them fail me.
+This one did not do so either.
+
+“I began to examine this case in the light of the Molineux one. Would
+the latter help me to find the woman I was looking for in the former?
+What were the indications, so far as Barnet was concerned? Barnet
+received his fatal package because he was purposing to marry a girl
+whom the murderer was resolved he should not marry. With so many
+parallels between the two cases already, was there—” Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming pushed back her unwieldy hat to a still more
+unbecoming angle and looked deliberately round the table with the air
+of an early Christian trying the power of the human eye on a
+doubtfully intimidated covey of lions—“_was there another here?_”
+
+This time Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was rewarded with several real and
+audible gasps. That of Sir Charles was quite the most audible, an
+outraged, indignant gasp that came perilously near to a snort. Mr.
+Chitterwick gasped apprehensively, as if fearing something like a
+physical sequel to the sharp exchange of glances between Sir Charles
+and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, those of the former positively menacing in
+their warning, those of the lady almost vocal with her defiance of it.
+
+The Chairman gasped too, wondering what a Chairman should do if two
+members of his circle, and of opposite sexes at that, should proceed
+to blows under his very nose.
+
+Mr. Bradley forgot himself so far as to gasp as well, in sheer,
+blissful ecstasy. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked as if she were to prove
+a better hand at bull-baiting than himself, but Mr. Bradley did not
+grudge her the honour so long as he was to be allowed to sit and hug
+himself in the audience. Not in his most daring toreador-like antics
+would Mr. Bradley have ever dared to postulate the very daughter of
+his victim as the cause of the murder itself. Could this magnificent
+woman really bring forward a case to support so puncturing an idea?
+And what if it should actually turn out to be true? After all, such a
+thing was conceivable enough. Murders have been committed for the sake
+of lovely ladies often enough before; so why not for the lovely
+daughter of a pompous old silk? Oh God, oh Montreal.
+
+Finally Mrs. Fielder-Flemming gasped too, at herself.
+
+Alone without a gasp sat Alicia Dammers, her face alight with nothing
+but an intellectual interest in the development of her fellow-member’s
+argument, determinedly impersonal. One was to gather that to Miss
+Dammers it was immaterial whether her own mother had been mixed up in
+the murder, so long as her part in it had provided opportunities for
+the sharpening of wits and the stimulation of intelligence. Without
+ever acknowledging her recognition that a personal element was being
+introduced into the Circle’s investigations, she yet managed to
+radiate the idea that Sir Charles ought, if anything, to be detachedly
+delighted at the possibility of such enterprise on the part of his
+daughter.
+
+Sir Charles however was far from delighted. From the red swelling of
+the veins on his forehead it was obvious that something was going to
+burst out of him in a very few seconds. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming leapt,
+like an agitated but determined hen, for the gap.
+
+“We have agreed to waive the law of slander here,” she almost
+squawked. “Personalities don’t exist for us. If the name crops up of
+any one personally known to us, we utter it as unflinchingly, in
+whatever connection, as if it were a complete stranger’s. That is the
+definite arrangement we came to last night, Mr. President, isn’t it?
+We are to do what we conceive to be our duty to society quite
+irrespective of any personal considerations?”
+
+For a moment Roger indulged his tremors. He did not want his beautiful
+Circle to explode in a cloud of dust, never again to be re-united. And
+though he could not but admire the flurried but undaunted courage of
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he had to be content to envy it so far as Sir
+Charles was concerned, for he certainly did not possess anything like
+it himself. On the other hand there was no doubt that the lady had
+right on her side, and what can any President do but administer
+justice?
+
+“Perfectly correct, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” he had to admit, hoping
+his voice sounded as firm as he would have wished.
+
+For a moment a blue glare, emanating from Sir Charles, enveloped him
+luridly. Then, as Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, evidently heartened by this
+official support, took up her bomb again, the rays of the glare were
+switched again on to her. Roger, nervously watching the two of them,
+could not help reflecting that blue rays are things which should never
+be directed on to bombs.
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming juggled featly with her bomb. Often though it
+seemed about to slip through her fingers, it never quite reached the
+ground or detonated. “Very well, then. I will go on. My triangle now
+had the second of its members. On the analogy of the Barnet murder,
+where was the third to be found? Obviously, with Molineux as the
+prototype, in some person who was anxious to prevent the first member
+from marrying the second.
+
+“So far, you will see, I am not out of harmony with the conclusions
+Sir Charles gave us last night, though my method of arriving at them
+was perhaps somewhat different. He gave us a triangle also, without
+expressly defining it as such (perhaps even without recognising it as
+such). And the first two members of his triangle are precisely the
+same as the first two of mine.”
+
+Here Mrs. Fielder-Flemming made a notable effort to return something
+of Sir Charles’s glare, in defiant challenge to contradiction. As she
+had simply stated a plain fact however, which Sir Charles was quite
+unable to refute without explaining that he had not meant what he had
+meant the evening before, the challenge passed unanswered. Also the
+glare visibly diminished. But for all that (patently remarked Sir
+Charles’s expression) a triangle by any other name does _not_ smell so
+unsavoury.
+
+“It is when we come to the third member,” pursued Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, with renewed poise, “that we are at variance. Sir
+Charles suggested to us Lady Pennefather. I have not the pleasure of
+Lady Pennefather’s acquaintance, but Miss Dammers who knows her well,
+tells me that in almost every particular the estimate given us by Sir
+Charles of her character was wrong. She is neither mean, grasping,
+greedy, nor in any imaginable way capable of the awful deed with which
+Sir Charles, perhaps a little rashly, was ready to credit her. Lady
+Pennefather, I understand, is a particularly sweet and kindly woman;
+somewhat broad-minded no doubt, but none the worse for that; indeed as
+some of us would think, a good deal the better.”
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming encouraged the belief that she was not merely
+tolerant of a little harmless immorality, but actually ready to act as
+godmother to any particular instance of it. Indeed she went sometimes
+quite a long détour out of her way in order to propagate this belief
+among her friends. But unfortunately her friends would persist in
+remembering that she had refused to have anything more to do with one
+of her own nieces since the latter, on learning that her middle-aged
+husband kept, for purposes of convenience, a different mistress in
+each of the four quarters of England, and just to be on the safe side
+one in Scotland too, had run away with a young man of her own with
+whom she happened to be very devotedly in love.
+
+“Just as I differ from Sir Charles over the identity of the third
+person in the triangle,” went on Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, happily
+ignorant of her friends’ memories, “so I differ from him in the means
+by which that identity is to be established. We are at complete
+variance in our ideas regarding the very heart of the problem, the
+motive. Sir Charles would have us think that this was a murder
+committed (or attempted, rather) for gain; I am convinced that the
+incentive was, at any rate, a less ignoble one than that. Murder, we
+are taught, can never be really justifiable; but there are occasions
+when it comes dangerously near it. This, in my opinion, was one of
+them.
+
+“It is in the character of Sir Eustace himself that I see the clue to
+the identity of the third person. Let us consider it for a moment. We
+are not restricted by any considerations of slander, and we can say at
+once that, from certain points of view, Sir Eustace is a quite
+undesirable member of the community. From the point of view of a young
+man, for the sake of example, who is in love with a girl, Sir Eustace
+must be one of the very last persons with whom the young man would
+wish that girl to come into contact. He is not merely immoral, he is
+without excuse for his immorality, a far more serious thing. He is a
+rake, a spendthrift, without honour or scruples where women are
+concerned, and a man moreover who has already made a mess of marriage
+with a very charming woman and one by no means too narrow to overlook
+even a more than liberal allowance of the usual male peccadilloes and
+lapses. As a prospective husband for any young girl Sir Eustace
+Pennefather is a tragedy.
+
+“And as a prospective husband for a young girl whom a man loves with
+all his heart,” intoned Mrs. Fielder-Flemming very solemnly, “it is
+easy to conceive that, in that particular man’s regard, Sir Eustace
+Pennefather becomes nothing short of an impossibility.
+
+“And a man who _is_ a man,” added Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, quite mauve
+with intensity, “does not admit impossibilities.”
+
+She paused, pregnantly.
+
+“Curtain, Act I,” confided Mr. Bradley behind his hand to Mr. Ambrose
+Chitterwick.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick smiled nervously.
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Sir Charles took the usual advantage of the first interval to rise
+from his seat. Like so many of us in these days by the time of the
+first interval (when it is not a play of Mrs. Fielder-Flemming’s that
+is in question) he felt almost physically unable to contain himself
+longer.
+
+“Mr. President,” he boomed, “let us get this clear. Is Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming making the preposterous accusation that some friend
+of my daughter’s is responsible for this crime, or is she not?”
+
+The President looked somewhat helplessly up at the bulk towering
+wrathfully above him and wished he were anything but the President. “I
+really don’t know, Sir Charles,” he professed, which was not only
+feeble but untrue.
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming however was by now quite able to speak up for
+herself. “I have not yet specifically accused any one of the crime,
+Sir Charles,” she said, with a cold dignity that was only marred by
+the fact that her hat, which had apparently been sharing its
+mistress’s emotions, was now perched rakishly over her left ear. “So
+far I have been simply developing a thesis.”
+
+To Mr. Bradley Sir Charles would have replied, with Johnsonian scorn
+of evasion: “Sir, damn your thesis.” Hampered now by the puerilities
+of civilised convention regarding polite intercourse between the
+sexes, he could only summon up once more the blue glare.
+
+With the unfairness of her sex Mrs. Fielder-Flemming promptly took
+advantage of his handicap. “And,” she added pointedly, “I have not yet
+finished doing so.”
+
+Sir Charles sat down, the perfect allegory. But he grunted very
+naughtily to himself as he did so.
+
+Mr. Bradley restrained an impulse to clap Mr. Chitterwick on the back
+and then chuck him under the chin.
+
+Her serenity so natural as to be patently artificial, Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming proceeded to call the interval closed and ring up the
+curtain on her second act.
+
+“Having given you my processes towards arriving at the identity of the
+third member of the triangle I postulated, in other words towards that
+of the murderer, I will go on to the actual evidence and show how that
+supports my conclusions. Did I say ‘supports’? I meant, confirms them
+beyond all doubt.”
+
+“But what are your conclusions, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?” Bradley asked,
+with an air of bland interest. “You haven’t defined them yet. You only
+hinted that the murderer was a rival of Sir Eustace’s for the hand of
+Miss Wildman.”
+
+“Exactly,” agreed Alicia Dammers. “Even if you don’t want to tell us
+the man’s name yet, Mabel, can’t you narrow it down a little more for
+us?” Miss Dammers disliked vagueness. It savoured to her of the
+slipshod, which above all things in this world she detested. Moreover
+she really was extremely interested to know upon whom Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming’s choice had alighted. Mabel, she knew, might look
+like one sort of fool, talk like another sort, and behave like a
+third; and yet really she was not a fool at all.
+
+But Mabel was determined to be coy. “Not yet, I’m afraid. For certain
+reasons I want to prove my case first. You’ll understand later, I
+think.”
+
+“Very well,” sighed Miss Dammers. “But do let’s keep away from the
+detective-story atmosphere. All we want to do is to solve this
+difficult case, not mystify each other.”
+
+“I have my reasons, Alicia,” frowned Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, and rather
+obviously proceeded to collect her thoughts. “Where was I? Oh yes, the
+evidence. Now this is very interesting. I have succeeded in obtaining
+two pieces of quite vital evidence which I have never heard brought
+forward before.
+
+“The first is that Sir Eustace was not in love with—” Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming hesitated; then, as the plunge had already been taken
+for her, followed the intrepid Mr. Bradley into the deeps of complete
+candour “—with Miss Wildman at all. He intended to marry her simply
+for her money—or rather, for what he hoped to get of her father’s
+money. I hope, Sir Charles,” added Mrs. Fielder-Flemming frostily,
+“that you will not consider me slanderous if I allude to the fact that
+you are an exceedingly rich man. It has a most important bearing on my
+case.”
+
+Sir Charles inclined his massive, handsome head. “It is hardly a
+matter of slander, madam. Simply one of taste, which is outside my
+professional orbit. I fear it would be a waste of time for me to
+attempt to advise you on it.”
+
+“That is very interesting, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” Roger hastily
+interposed on this exchange of pleasantries. “How did you discover
+it?”
+
+“From Sir Eustace’s man, Mr. Sheringham,” replied Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming not without pride. “I interrogated him. Sir Eustace
+had made no secret of it. He seems to confide most freely in his man.
+He expected, apparently, to be able to pay off his debts, buy a
+racehorse or two, provide for the present Lady Pennefather, and
+generally make a fresh and no doubt discreditable start. He had
+actually promised Barker (that is his man’s name) a present of a
+hundred pounds on the day he ‘led the little filly to the altar,’ as
+he phrased it. I am sorry to hurt your feelings, Sir Charles, but I
+have to deal with facts, and feelings must go down before them. A
+present of ten pounds bought me all the information I wanted. Quite
+remarkable information, as it turned out.” She looked round
+triumphantly.
+
+“You don’t think, perhaps,” ventured Mr. Chitterwick with an
+apologetic smile, “that information from such a tainted source might
+not be entirely reliable? The source seems so very tainted. Why, I
+don’t think my own man would sell me for a ten-pound note.”
+
+“Like master like man,” returned Mrs. Fielder-Flemming shortly. “His
+information was perfectly reliable. I was able to check nearly
+everything he told me, so that I think I am entitled to accept the
+small residue as correct too.
+
+“I should like to quote another of Sir Eustace’s confidences. It is
+not pretty, but it is very, very illuminating. He had made an attempt
+to seduce Miss Wildman in a private room at the Pug-Dog Restaurant
+(that, for instance, I checked later), apparently with the object of
+ensuring the certainty of the marriage he desired. (I am sorry again,
+Sir Charles, but these facts must be brought out.) I had better say at
+once that the attempt was unsuccessful. That night Sir Eustace
+remarked (and to his valet of all people, remember); ‘You can take a
+filly to the altar, but you can’t make her drunk.’ That, I think, will
+show you better than any words of mine just what manner of man Sir
+Eustace Pennefather is. And it will also show you how overwhelmingly
+strong was the incentive of the man who really loved her to put her
+for ever out of the reach of such a brute.
+
+“And that brings me to the second piece of my evidence. This is really
+the foundation stone of the whole structure, the basis on which the
+necessity for murder (as the murderer saw it) rested, and the basis at
+the same time of my own reconstruction of the crime. Miss Wildman was
+hopelessly, unreasonably, irrevocably infatuated with Sir Eustace
+Pennefather.”
+
+As an artist in dramatic effect, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was silent for
+a moment to allow the significance of this information to sink into
+the minds of her audience. But Sir Charles was far too personally
+preoccupied to be interested in significances.
+
+“And may one ask how you found _that_ out, madam?” he demanded,
+swelling with sarcasm. “From my daughter’s maid?”
+
+“From your daughter’s maid,” responded Mrs. Fielder-Flemming sweetly.
+“Detecting, I discover, is an expensive hobby, but one mustn’t regret
+money spent in a good cause.”
+
+Roger sighed. It was plain that, once this ill-fortuned child of his
+invention had died a painful death, the Circle (if it had not been
+completely squared by then) would be found to be without either Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming or Sir Charles Wildman; and he knew which of the two
+it would be. It was a pity. Sir Charles, besides being such an asset
+from the professional point of view, was the only leavening apart from
+Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick of the literary element; and Roger, who had
+attended a few literary parties in his earlier days, was quite sure he
+would not be able to face a gathering that consisted of nothing but
+people who made their livings by their typewriters.
+
+Besides, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming really was being a little hard on the
+old man. After all, it was his daughter who was in question.
+
+“I have now,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, “established an overwhelming
+motive for the man who is in my mind to eliminate Sir Eustace. In fact
+it must have seemed to him the only possible way out of an intolerable
+situation. Let me now go on to connect him with the few facts allowed
+us by the anonymous murderer.
+
+“When the Chief Inspector the other evening permitted us to examine
+the forged letter from Mason & Sons I examined it closely, because I
+know something about typewriters. That letter was typed on a Hamilton
+machine. The man I have in mind has a Hamilton typewriter at his place
+of business. You may say that might be only a coincidence, the
+Hamilton being so generally used. So it might; but if you get enough
+coincidences lumped together, they cease to become coincidences at all
+and become certainties.
+
+“In the same way we have the further coincidence of Mason’s notepaper.
+This man has a definite connection with Mason’s. Three years ago, as
+you may remember, Mason’s were involved in a big lawsuit. I forget the
+details, but I think they brought an action against one of their
+rivals. You may remember, Sir Charles?”
+
+Sir Charles nodded reluctantly, as if unwilling to help his antagonist
+even with this unimportant information. “I ought to,” he said shortly.
+“It was against the Fearnley Chocolate Company for infringement of
+copyright in an advertisement figure. I led for Mason’s.”
+
+“Thank you. Yes, I thought it was something like that. Very well,
+then. This man was connected with that very case. He was helping
+Mason’s, on the legal side. He must have been in and out of their
+office. His opportunities for possessing himself of a piece of their
+notepaper would have been legion. The chances by which he might have
+found himself three years later in possession of a piece would be
+innumerable. The paper had yellowed edges; it must have been quite
+three years old. It had an erasure. That erasure, I suggest, is the
+remains of a brief note on the case jotted down one day in Mason’s
+office. The thing is obvious. Everything fits.
+
+“Then there is the matter of the post-mark. I agree with Sir Charles
+that we may take it for granted that the murderer, cunning though he
+is, and anxious though he might be to establish an alibi, would not
+entrust the posting of the fatal parcel to any one else. Apart from a
+confederate, which I am sure we may rule out of the question, it would
+be far too dangerous; the name of Sir Eustace Pennefather could hardly
+escape being seen, and the connection later established. The murderer,
+secure in his conviction that suspicion will never fall on himself of
+all people (just like all murderers that have ever been), gambles a
+possible alibi against a certain risk and posts the thing himself. It
+is therefore advisable, just to clinch the case against him, to
+connect the man with the neighbourhood of the Strand between the hours
+of eight-thirty and nine-thirty on that particular evening.
+
+“Surprisingly enough I found this task, which I had expected to be the
+most difficult, the easiest of all. The man of whom I am thinking
+actually attended a public dinner that night at the Hotel Cecil, a
+re-union dinner to be exact of his old school. The Hotel Cecil, I need
+not remind you, is almost opposite Southampton Street. The Southampton
+Street post-office is the nearest one to the Hotel. What could be
+easier for him than to slip out of his seat for the five minutes which
+is all that would be required, and be back again almost before his
+neighbours had noticed his action?”
+
+“What indeed?” murmured the rapt Mr. Bradley.
+
+“I have two final points to make. You remember that in pointing out
+the resemblance of this case to the Molineux affair, I remarked that
+this similarity was more than surprising, it was significant. I will
+explain what I meant by that. What I meant was that the parallel was
+far too close for it to be just a coincidence. This case is a
+deliberate _copy_ of that one. And if it is, there is only one
+inference. This murder is the work of a man steeped in criminal
+history—of a criminologist. And the man I have in mind _is_ a
+criminologist.
+
+“My last point concerns the denial in the newspaper of the rumoured
+engagement between Sir Eustace Pennefather and Miss Wildman. I learnt
+from his valet that Sir Eustace did not send that denial himself. Nor
+did Miss Wildman. Sir Eustace was furiously angry about it. It was
+sent, on his own initiative without consulting either of them, by the
+man whom I am accusing of having committed this crime.”
+
+Mr. Bradley stopped hugging himself for a moment. “And the
+nitrobenzene? Were you able to connect him with that too?”
+
+“That is one of the very few points on which I agree with Sir Charles.
+I don’t think it in the least necessary, or possible, to connect him
+with such a common commodity, which can be bought anywhere without the
+slightest difficulty or remark.”
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was holding herself in with a visible effort.
+Her words, so calm and judicial to read, had hitherto been spoken too
+with a strenuous attempt towards calm and judicial delivery. But with
+each sentence the attempt was obviously becoming more difficult. Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming was clearly getting so excited that a few more such
+sentences seemed likely to choke her, though to the others such
+intensity of feeling seemed a little unnecessary. She was approaching
+her climax, of course, but even that seemed hardly an excuse for such
+a very purple face and a hat that had now managed somehow to ride to
+the very back of her head where it trembled agitatedly in sympathy
+with its mistress.
+
+“That is all,” she concluded jerkily. “I submit that I have proved my
+case. This man is the murderer.”
+
+There was complete silence.
+
+“Well?” said Alicia Dammers impatiently. “Who is he, then?”
+
+Sir Charles, who had been regarding the orator with a frown that grew
+more and more lowering every minute, thumped quite menacingly on the
+table in front of him. “Precisely,” he growled. “Let us get out in the
+open. Against whom are these ridiculous insinuations of yours
+directed, madam?” One gathered that Sir Charles did not find himself
+in agreement with the lady’s conclusions, even before knowing what
+they were.
+
+“Accusations, Sir Charles,” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming squeaked correction.
+“You—you pretend you don’t know?”
+
+“Really, madam,” retorted Sir Charles, with massive dignity, “I’m
+afraid I have no idea.”
+
+And then Mrs. Fielder-Flemming became regrettably dramatic. Rising
+slowly to her feet like a tragedy queen (except that tragedy queens do
+not wear their hats tremblingly on the very backs of their heads, and
+if their faces are apt to go brilliant purple with emotion disguise
+the tint with appropriate grease paints), heedless of the chair
+overturning behind her with a dull, doom-like thud, her quivering
+finger pointing across the table, she confronted Sir Charles with
+every inch of her five-foot nothing.
+
+“Thou!” shrilled Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “Thou art the man!” Her
+outstretched finger shook like a ribbon on an electric fan. “The brand
+of Cain is on your forehead! Murderer!”
+
+In the silence of ecstatic horror that followed Mr. Bradley clung
+deliriously to the arm of Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+Sir Charles succeeded in finding his voice, temporarily mislaid. “The
+woman’s mad,” he gasped.
+
+Finding that she had not been shot on the spot, or even blasted by
+blue lightning from Sir Charles’s eyes, either of which possibilities
+it seemed that she had been dreading, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming proceeded
+rather less hysterically to amplify her charge.
+
+“No, I am not mad, Sir Charles; I am very, very sane. You loved your
+daughter, and with the twofold love that a man who has lost his wife
+feels for the only feminine thing left to him. You considered that any
+lengths were justified to prevent her from falling into the hands of
+Sir Eustace Pennefather—from having her youth, her innocence, her
+trust exploited by such a scoundrel.
+
+“Out of your own mouth I convict you. Already you’ve told us that it
+was not necessary to mention everything that took place at your
+interview with Sir Eustace. No; for then you would have had to give
+away the fact that you informed him you would rather kill him with
+your own hands than see your daughter married to him. And when matters
+reached such a pass, what with the poor girl’s infatuation and
+obstinacy and Sir Eustace’s determination to take advantage of them,
+that no means short of that very thing was left to you to prevent the
+catastrophe, you did not shrink from employing them. Sir Charles
+Wildman, may God be your judge, for I cannot.” Breathing heavily, Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming retrieved her inverted chair and sat down on it.
+
+“Well, Sir Charles,” remarked Mr. Bradley, whose swelling bosom was
+threatening to burst his waistcoat. “Well, I wouldn’t have thought it
+of you. Murder, indeed. Very naughty; very, very naughty.”
+
+For once Sir Charles took no notice of his faithful gadfly. It is
+doubtful whether he even heard him. Now that it had penetrated into
+his consciousness that Mrs. Fielder-Flemming really intended her
+accusation in all seriousness and was not the victim of a temporary
+attack of insanity, his bosom was swelling just as tumultuously as Mr.
+Bradley’s. His face, adopting the purple tinge that Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming’s was relinquishing, took on the aspect of the frog
+in the fable who failed to realise his own bursting-point. Roger,
+whose emotions on hearing Mrs. Fielder-Flemming’s outburst had been so
+mixed as to be almost scrambled, began to feel quite alarmed for him.
+
+But Sir Charles found the safety-valve of speech just in time. “Mr.
+President,” he exploded through it, “if I am not right in assuming
+this to be a jest on this lady’s part, even though a jest in the worst
+possible taste, am I to be expected to take this preposterous nonsense
+seriously?”
+
+Roger glanced at Mrs. Fielder-Flemming’s face, now set in flinty
+masses, and gulped. However, preposterous though Sir Charles might
+term it, his antagonist had certainly made out a case, and not a
+flimsy, unsupported case either. “I think,” he said, as carefully as
+he could, “that if it had been any one but yourself in question, Sir
+Charles, you would agree that a charge of this kind, when there is
+real evidence to support it, does at least require to be taken
+seriously so far as to need refuting.”
+
+Sir Charles snorted and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming nodded her head several
+times with vehemence.
+
+“If refuting is possible,” observed Mr. Bradley. “But I must admit
+that, personally, I am impressed. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming seems to me to
+have made out her case. Would you like me to go and telephone for the
+police, Mr. President?” He spoke with an air of earnest endeavour to
+do his duty as a citizen, however distasteful it might be.
+
+Sir Charles glared, but once more seemed bereft of words.
+
+“Not yet, I think,” Roger said gently. “We haven’t heard yet what Sir
+Charles has to answer.”
+
+“Well, I suppose we may as well _hear_ him,” conceded Mr. Bradley.
+
+Five pairs of eyes glued themselves on Sir Charles, five pairs of ears
+were strained.
+
+But Sir Charles, struggling mightily with himself, was silent.
+
+“As I expected,” murmured Mr. Bradley. “There is no defence. Even Sir
+Charles, who has snatched so many murderers from the rope, can find
+nothing to say in such a glaring case. It’s very sad.”
+
+From the look he flashed at his tormentor it was to be deduced that
+Sir Charles might have found plenty to say had the two of them been
+alone together. As it was, he could only rumble.
+
+“Mr. President,” said Alicia Dammers, with her usual brisk efficiency,
+“I have a proposal to make. Sir Charles appears to be admitting his
+guilt by default, and Mr. Bradley, as a good citizen, wishes to hand
+him over to the police.”
+
+“Hear, hear!” observed the good citizen.
+
+“Personally I should be sorry to do that. I think there is a good deal
+to be said for Sir Charles. Murder, we are taught, is invariably
+anti-social. But is it? I am of the opinion that Sir Charles’s
+intention, that of ridding the world (and incidentally his own
+daughter) of Sir Eustace Pennefather, was quite in the world’s best
+interests. That his intention miscarried and an innocent victim was
+killed is quite beside the point. Even Mrs. Fielder-Flemming seemed to
+be doubtful whether Sir Charles ought to be condemned, as a jury would
+certainly condemn him, though she added in conclusion that she did not
+feel competent to judge him.
+
+“I differ from her. Being a person of, I hope, reasonable
+intelligence, I feel perfectly competent to judge him. And I consider
+further that all five of us are competent to judge him. I therefore
+suggest that we do in fact judge him ourselves. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming
+could act as prosecutor; somebody (I propose Mr. Bradley) could defend
+him; and all five of us constitute a jury, the finding to be by
+majority in favour or against. We would bind ourselves to abide by the
+result, and if it is against him we send for the police; if it is in
+his favour we agree never to breathe a word of his guilt outside this
+room. May this be put to the meeting?”
+
+Roger smiled at her reprovingly. He knew quite well that Miss Dammers
+no more believed in Sir Charles’s guilt than he, Roger, did himself,
+and he knew that she was only pulling that eminent counsel’s leg; a
+little cruelly, but no doubt she thought it was good for him. Miss
+Dammers professed herself a strong believer in seeing the other side,
+and held that it would be a very good thing for the cat occasionally
+to find itself chased by the mouse; certainly therefore it was most
+salutary for a man who had prosecuted other men for their lives to
+find himself for once in the dock on just such a terrifying charge.
+Mr. Bradley, on the other hand, though he, too, obviously did not
+believe that Sir Charles was the murderer, mocked not out of
+conviction but because only so could he get a little of his own back
+against Sir Charles for having made more of a success of his life than
+Mr. Bradley was likely to do.
+
+Nor, Roger thought, had Mr. Chitterwick any serious doubts as to the
+possibility of Sir Charles being guilty, though he was still looking
+so alarmed at Mrs. Fielder-Flemming’s temerity in suggesting such a
+thing that it was not altogether possible to say what he did think.
+Indeed Roger was quite sure that nobody entertained the least
+suspicion of Sir Charles’s innocence except Mrs. Fielder-Flemming—and
+perhaps, from the look of him, Sir Charles himself. As that outraged
+gentleman had pointed out, such an idea, looked at in sober
+reflection, was plainly the most preposterous nonsense. Sir Charles
+could not be guilty because—well, because he was Sir Charles, and
+because such things don’t happen, and because he obviously couldn’t
+be.
+
+On the other hand Mrs. Fielder-Flemming had very neatly proved that he
+was. And Sir Charles had not even attempted yet to prove that he
+wasn’t.
+
+Not for the first time Roger wished, very sincerely, that anybody were
+sitting in the presidential chair but himself.
+
+“I think,” he now repeated, “that before we take any steps at all we
+ought to hear what Sir Charles has to say. I am sure,” added the
+President kindly, remembering the right phrase, “that he will have a
+complete answer to all charges.” He looked expectantly towards the
+criminal.
+
+Sir Charles appeared to jerk himself out of the haze of his wrath. “I
+am really expected to defend myself against this—this hysteria?” he
+barked. “Very well. I admit I am a criminologist, which Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming appears to think so damning. I admit that I attended
+a dinner at the Hotel Cecil on that night, which it seems is enough to
+put the rope round my neck. I admit, since it appears that my private
+affairs are to be dragged into public, regardless of taste or decency,
+that I would rather have strangled Sir Eustace with my own hands than
+see him married to my daughter.”
+
+He paused, and passed his hand rather wearily over his high forehead.
+He was no longer formidable, but only a rather bewildered old man.
+Roger felt intensely sorry for him. But Mrs. Fielder-Flemming had
+stated her case too well for it to be possible to spare him.
+
+“I admit all this, but none of it is evidence that would have very
+much weight in a court of law. If you want me to prove that I did not
+actually send those chocolates, what am I to say? I could bring my two
+neighbours at the dinner, who would swear that I never left my seat
+till—well, it must have been after ten o’clock. I can prove by means
+of other witnesses that my daughter finally consented, on my
+representations, to give up the idea of marriage with Sir Eustace and
+has gone voluntarily to stay with relations of ours in Devonshire for
+a considerable time. But there again I have to admit that this has
+happened since the date of posting the chocolates.
+
+“In short, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming has managed, with considerable skill,
+to put together a _prima facie_ case against me, though it was based
+on a mistaken assumption (I would point out to her that counsel is
+never constantly in and out of his client’s premises, but meets him
+usually only in the presence of his solicitor, either at the former’s
+place of business or in his own chambers), and I am quite ready, if
+this meeting thinks it advisable, for the matter to be investigated
+officially. More, I welcome such investigation in view of the slur
+that has been cast upon my name. Mr. President, I ask you, as
+representing the members as a whole, to take such action as you think
+fit.”
+
+Roger steered a wary course. “Speaking for myself, Sir Charles, I am
+quite sure that Mrs. Fielder-Flemming’s reasoning, exceedingly clever
+though it was, has been based as you say upon an error, and really, as
+a matter of mere probability, I cannot see a father sending poisoned
+chocolates to the would-be fiancé of his own daughter. A moment’s
+thought would show him the practical inevitability of the chocolates
+reaching eventually the daughter herself. I have my own opinion about
+this crime, but even apart from that I feel quite certain in my own
+mind that the case against Sir Charles has not really been proved.”
+
+“Mr. President,” cut in Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, not without heat, “you
+may say what you like, but in the interests of—”
+
+“I agree, Mr. President,” Miss Dammers interrupted incisively. “It is
+unthinkable that Sir Charles could have sent those chocolates.”
+
+“Humph!” said Mr. Bradley, unwilling to have his sport spoiled quite
+so soon.
+
+“Hear, hear!” Mr. Chitterwick, with surprising decision.
+
+“On the other hand,” Roger pursued, “I quite see that Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming is entitled to the official investigation which Sir
+Charles asks for, no less than is Sir Charles himself on behalf of his
+good name. And I agree with Sir Charles that she has certainly made
+out a _prima facie_ case for investigation. But what I should like to
+stress is that so far only two members out of six have spoken, and it
+is not outside possibility that such startling developments may have
+been traced out by the time we have all had our turn, that the one we
+are discussing now may (I do not say that it will, but it _may_) have
+faded into insignificance.”
+
+“Oho!” murmured Mr. Bradley. “What has our worthy President got up his
+sleeve?”
+
+“I therefore propose, as a formal motion,” Roger concluded,
+disregarding the somewhat sour looks cast on him by Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, “that we shelve the question regarding Sir Charles
+entirely, for discussion or report either inside or outside this room,
+for one week from to-day, when any member who wishes may bring it up
+again for decision, failing which it passes into oblivion for good and
+all. Shall we vote on that? Those in favour?”
+
+The motion was carried unanimously. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would have
+liked to vote against it, but she had never yet belonged to any
+committee where all motions were not carried unanimously and habit was
+too strong for her.
+
+The meeting then adjourned, rather oppressed.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Roger sat on the table in Moresby’s room at Scotland Yard and swung
+his legs moodily. Moresby was being no help at all.
+
+“I’ve told you, Mr. Sheringham,” said the Chief Inspector, with a
+patient air. “It’s not a bit of good you trying to pump me. I’ve told
+you all we know here. I’d help you if I could, as you know”—Roger
+snorted incredulously—“but we’re simply at a dead end.”
+
+“So am I,” Roger grunted. “And I don’t like it.”
+
+“You’ll soon get used to it, Mr. Sheringham,” consoled Moresby, “if
+you take on this sort of job often.”
+
+“I simply can’t get any further,” Roger lamented. “In fact I don’t
+think I want to. I’m practically sure I’ve been working on the wrong
+tack altogether. If the clue really does lie in Sir Eustace’s private
+life, he’s shielding it like the very devil. But I don’t think it
+does.”
+
+“Humph!” said Moresby, who did.
+
+“I’ve cross-examined his friends, till they’re tired of the sight of
+me. I’ve cadged introductions to the friends of his friends, and the
+friends of his friends of his friends, and cross-examined them too.
+I’ve haunted his club. And what have I discovered? That Sir Eustace
+was not only a daisy, as you’d told me already, but a perfectly
+indiscreet daisy at that; the quite unpleasant type, fortunately very
+much rarer than women suppose, that talks of his feminine successes,
+with names—though I think that in Sir Eustace’s case this was simply
+through lack of imagination and not any natural caddishness. But you
+see what I mean. I’ve collected the names of scores of women, and they
+all lead—nowhere! If there is a woman at the bottom of it, I should
+have been sure to have heard of her by this time. And I haven’t.”
+
+“And what about that American case, which we thought such an
+extraordinary parallel, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+“That was cited last night by one of our members,” said Roger
+gloomily. “And a very pretty little deduction she drew from it.”
+
+“Ah, yes,” nodded the chief inspector. “That would be Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, I suppose. She thinks Sir Charles Wildman is the
+guilty party, doesn’t she?”
+
+Roger stared at him. “How the devil did you know that? Oh! The
+unscrupulous old hag. She passed you the wink, did she?”
+
+“Certainly not, sir,” retorted Moresby with a virtuous air, as if half
+the difficult cases Scotland Yard solves are not edged in the first
+place along the right path by means of “information received.” “She
+hasn’t said a word to us, though I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been
+her duty to do so. But there isn’t much that your members are doing
+which we don’t know about, and thinking too for that matter.”
+
+“We’re being shadowed,” said Roger, pleased. “Yes, you told me at the
+beginning that we were to have an eye kept on us. Well, well. So in
+that case, are you going to arrest Sir Charles?”
+
+“Not yet, I think, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby returned gravely.
+
+“What do you think of the theory, then? She made out a very striking
+case for it.”
+
+“I should be very surprised,” said Moresby with care, “to be convinced
+that Sir Charles Wildman had taken to murdering people himself instead
+of preventing us from hanging other murderers.”
+
+“Less paying, certainly,” Roger agreed. “Yes, of course there can’t be
+anything in it really, but it’s a nice idea.”
+
+“And what theory are you going to put forward, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+“Moresby, I haven’t the faintest idea. And I’ve got to speak to-morrow
+night, too. I suppose I can fake up something to pass muster, but it’s
+a disappointment.” Roger reflected for a moment. “I think the real
+trouble is that my interest in this case is simply academic. In all
+the others it has been personal, and that not only gives one such a
+much bigger incentive to get to the bottom of a case but somehow
+actually helps one to do so. Bigger gleanings in the way of
+information, I suppose. And more intimate sidelights on the people
+concerned.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Sheringham,” remarked Moresby, a little maliciously,
+“perhaps you’ll admit now that we people here, whose interest is never
+personal (if you mean by that looking at a case from the inside
+instead of from the outside), have a bit of an excuse when we do come
+to grief over a case. Which, by the way,” Moresby added with
+professional pride, “is precious seldom.”
+
+“I certainly do,” Roger agreed feelingly. “Well, Moresby, I’ve got to
+go through the distressing business of buying a new hat before lunch.
+Do you feel like shadowing me to Bond Street? I might afterwards walk
+into a neighbouring hostelry, and it would be nice for you to be able
+to shadow me in there too.”
+
+“Sorry, Mr. Sheringham,” said Chief Inspector Moresby pointedly, “but
+_I_ have some work to do.”
+
+Roger removed himself.
+
+He was feeling so depressed that he took a taxi to Bond Street instead
+of a ’bus, to cheer himself up. Roger, having been in London
+occasionally during the war-years and remembering the interesting
+habits cultivated by taxi-drivers during that period, had never taken
+one since when a ’bus would do as well. The public memory is
+notoriously short, but the public’s prejudices are equally notoriously
+long.
+
+Roger had reason for his depression. He was, as he had told Moresby,
+not only at a dead end, but the conviction was beginning to grow in
+him that he had actually been working completely on the wrong lines;
+and the possibility that all the labour he had put into the case had
+simply been time wasted was a sad one. His initial interest in the
+affair, though great, had been as he had just realised only an
+academic one, such as he would feel in any cleverly planned murder;
+and in spite of the contacts established with persons who were
+acquainted with various of the protagonists he still felt himself
+awkwardly outside the case. There was no personal connection somehow
+to enable him really to get to grips with it. He was beginning to
+suspect that it was the sort of case, necessitating endless inquiries
+such as a private individual has neither the skill, the patience nor
+the time to prosecute, which can really only be handled by the
+official police.
+
+It was hazard, two chance encounters that same day and almost within
+an hour, which put an entirely different complexion on the case to
+Roger’s eyes, and translated at last his interest in it from the
+academic into the personal.
+
+The first was in Bond Street.
+
+Emerging from his hat-shop, the new hat at just the right angle on his
+head, he saw bearing down on him Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer. Mrs.
+Verreker-le-Mesurer was small, exquisite, rich, comparatively young,
+and a widow, and she coveted Roger. Why, even Roger, who had his share
+of proper conceit, could not understand, but whenever he gave her the
+opportunity she would sit at his feet (metaphorically of course; he
+had no intention of giving her the opportunity to do so literally) and
+gaze up at him with her big brown eyes melting in earnest uplift. But
+she talked. She talked, in short, and talked, and talked. And Roger,
+who rather liked talking himself, could not bear it.
+
+He tried to dart across the road, but there was no opening in the
+traffic stream. He was cornered. With a gay smile that masked a
+vituperative mind he spoilt the angle of his beautiful new hat.
+
+Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer fastened on him gladly. “Oh, Mr. Sheringham!
+Just the very person I wanted to see. Mr. Sheringham, _do_ tell me. In
+the strictest confidence of course. _Are_ you taking up this dreadful
+business of _poor_ Joan Bendix’s death? Oh, don’t—_don’t_ tell me
+you’re not.” Roger tried to tell her that he had hoped to do so, but
+she gave him no chance. “Oh, aren’t you really? But it’s too dreadful.
+You ought, you know, you really _ought_ to try and find out who sent
+those chocolates to Sir Eustace Pennefather. I do think it’s naughty
+of you not to.”
+
+Roger, the frozen grin of civilised intercourse on his face, again
+tried to edge a word in; without result.
+
+“I was horrified when I heard of it. Simply horrified.” Mrs.
+Verreker-le-Mesurer registered horror. “You see, Joan and I were such
+_very_ close friends. Quite intimate. In fact we were at school
+together.—Did you say anything, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+Roger, who had allowed a faintly incredulous groan to escape him,
+hastily shook his head.
+
+“And the awful thing, the truly _terrible_ thing is that Joan brought
+the whole thing on herself. Isn’t that appalling, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+Roger no longer wanted to escape. “What did you say?” he managed to
+insert, again incredulously.
+
+“I suppose it’s what they call tragic irony,” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer
+chattered happily. “Certainly it was tragic enough and I’ve never
+heard of anything so terribly ironical. You know about that bet she
+made with her husband, of course, so that he had to get her a box of
+chocolates and if he hadn’t Sir Eustace would never have given him the
+poisoned ones but would have eaten them and died himself, and from all
+I hear about him good riddance? Well, Mr. Sheringham—” Mrs.
+Verreker-le-Mesurer lowered her voice to a conspirator-like whisper
+and glanced about her in the approved manner. “I’ve never told any one
+else this, but I’m telling you because I know you’ll appreciate it.
+You _are_ interested in irony, aren’t you?”
+
+“I adore it,” Roger said mechanically. “Yes?”
+
+“Well—_Joan wasn’t playing fair!_”
+
+“How do you mean?” Roger asked, bewildered. Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer
+was artlessly pleased with her sensation. “Why, she ought not to have
+made that bet at all. It was a judgment on her. A terrible judgment of
+course, but the appalling thing is that she did bring it on herself,
+in a way. I’m so terribly distressed about it. Really, Mr. Sheringham,
+I can hardly bear to turn the light out when I go to bed. I see Joan’s
+face simply looking at me in the dark. It’s awful.” And for a fleeting
+instant Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer’s face did for once really mirror the
+emotion she professed: it looked quite haggard.
+
+“Why oughtn’t Mrs. Bendix to have made the bet?” Roger asked
+patiently.
+
+“Oh! Why, because she’d seen the play before. We went together, the
+very first week it was on. She _knew_ who the villain was all the
+time.”
+
+“By Jove!” Roger was as impressed as Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer could
+have wished. “The Avenging Chance again, eh? We’re none of us immune
+from it.”
+
+“Poetic justice, you mean?” twittered Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, to
+whom these remarks had been a trifle obscure. “Yes it was, in a way,
+wasn’t it? Though really, the punishment was out of all proportion to
+the crime. Good gracious, if every woman who cheats over a bet is to
+be killed for it, where would any of us be?” demanded Mrs.
+Verreker-le-Mesurer with unconscious frankness.
+
+“Umph!” said Roger tactfully.
+
+Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer glanced rapidly up and down the pavement, and
+moistened her lips. Roger had an odd impression that she was talking
+not as usual just for the sake of talking, but in some recondite way
+to escape from not talking. It was as if she was more distressed over
+her friend’s death than she cared to show and found some relief in
+babbling. It interested Roger also to notice that fond though she had
+probably been of the dead woman, she now found herself driven as if
+against her will to hint at blame even while praising her. It was as
+though she was able thus to extract some subtle consolation for the
+actual death.
+
+“But Joan Bendix of all people! That’s what I can’t get over, Mr.
+Sheringham. I should never have thought Joan _would_ do a thing like
+that. Joan was such a nice girl. A little close with money perhaps,
+considering how well-off she was, but that isn’t anything. Of course I
+know it was only fun, and pulling her husband’s leg, but I always used
+to think Joan was such a _serious_ girl, if you know what I mean.”
+
+“Quite,” said Roger, who could understand plain English as well as
+most people.
+
+“I mean, ordinary people don’t talk about honour, and truth, and
+playing the game, and all those things one takes for granted. But Joan
+did. She was always saying that this wasn’t honourable, or that
+wouldn’t be playing the game. Well, she paid herself for not playing
+the game, poor girl, didn’t she? Still, I suppose it all goes to prove
+the truth of the old saying.”
+
+“What old saying?” asked Roger, almost hypnotised by this flow.
+
+“Why, that still waters run deep. Joan must have been deep after all,
+I’m afraid.” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer sighed. It was evidently a grave
+social error to be deep. “Not that I want to say anything against her
+now she’s dead, poor darling, but—well, what I mean is, I do think
+psychology is so very interesting, don’t you, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+“Quite fascinating,” Roger agreed gravely. “Well, I’m afraid I must
+be—”
+
+“And what does that man, Sir Eustace Pennefather, think about it all?”
+demanded Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, with an expression of positive
+vindictiveness. “After all, he’s as responsible for Joan’s death as
+anybody.”
+
+“Oh, really.” Roger had not conceived any particular love for Sir
+Eustace, but he felt constrained to defend him against this charge.
+“Really, I don’t think you can say that, Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer.”
+
+“I can, and I do,” affirmed that lady. “Have you ever met him, Mr.
+Sheringham? I hear he’s a horrible creature. Always running after some
+woman or other, and when he’s tired of her just drops her—biff!—like
+that. Is it true?”
+
+“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Roger said coldly. “I don’t know him at
+all.”
+
+“Well, it’s common talk who he’s taken up with now,” retorted Mrs.
+Verreker-le-Mesurer, perhaps a trifle more pink than the delicate aids
+to nature on her cheeks would have warranted. “Half-a-dozen people
+have told me. That Bryce woman, of all people. You know, the wife of
+the oil man, or petrol, or whatever he made his money in.”
+
+“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 a 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 on to 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, looked 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 to-day.
+
+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 hedged. “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.
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+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.
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+“I have always thought,” resumed Mr. Bradley, restored, “I have always
+thought that murders may be divided into two classes, closed or open.
+By a closed murder I mean one committed in a certain closed circle of
+persons, such as a house-party, in which it is known that the murderer
+is limited to membership of that actual group. This is by far the
+commoner form in fiction. An open murder I call one in which the
+criminal is not limited to any particular group but might be almost
+any one in the whole world. This, of course, is almost invariably what
+happens in real life.
+
+“The case with which we’re dealing has this peculiarity, that one
+can’t place it quite definitely in either category. The police say
+that it’s an open murder; both our previous speakers here seem to
+regard it as a closed one.
+
+“It’s a question of the motive. If one agrees with the police that it
+is the work of some fanatic or criminal lunatic, then it certainly is
+an open murder; anybody without an alibi in London that night might
+have posted the parcel. If one’s of the opinion that the motive was a
+personal one, connected with Sir Eustace himself, then the murderer is
+confined to the closed circle of people who have had relations of one
+sort or another with Sir Eustace.
+
+“And talking of posting that parcel, I must just make a diversion to
+tell you something really interesting. For all I know to the contrary,
+I might have seen the murderer with my own eyes, in the very act of
+posting it! As it happened, I was passing through Southampton Street
+that evening at just about a quarter to nine. Little did I guess, as
+Mr. Edgar Wallace would say, that the first act of this tragic drama
+was possibly being unfolded at that very minute under my unsuspecting
+nose. Not even a premonition of disaster caused me to falter in my
+stride. Providence was evidently being somewhat close with
+premonitions that night. But if only my sluggish instincts had warned
+me, how much trouble I might have saved us all. Alas,” said Mr.
+Bradley sadly, “such is life.
+
+“However, that’s neither here nor there. We were discussing closed and
+open murders.
+
+“I was determined to form no definite opinions either way, so to be on
+the safe side I treated this as an open murder. I then had the
+position that every one in the whole wide world was under suspicion.
+To narrow down the field a little, I set to work to build up the one
+individual who really did it, out of the very meagre indications he or
+she had given us.
+
+“I had the conclusions drawn already from the choice of nitrobenzene,
+which I’ve explained to you. But as a corollary to the good education,
+I added the very significant postscript: but not public-school or
+university. Don’t you agree, Sir Charles? It simply wouldn’t be done.”
+
+“Public-school men have been known to commit murders before now,”
+pointed out Sir Charles, somewhat at sea.
+
+“Oh, granted. But not in such an underhand way as this. The
+public-school code does stand for something, surely, even in murder.
+So, I am sure, any public-school man would tell me. This isn’t a
+gentlemanly murder at all. A public-school man, if he could ever bring
+himself to anything so unconventional as murder, would use an axe or a
+revolver or something which would bring him and his victim face to
+face. He would never murder a man behind his back, so to speak. I’m
+quite sure of that.
+
+“Then another obvious conclusion is that he’s exceptionally neat with
+his fingers. To unwrap those chocolates, drain them, re-fill them,
+plug up the holes with melted chocolate, and wrap them up in their
+silver paper again to look as if they’ve never been tampered with—I
+can tell you, that’s no easy job. And all in gloves too, remember.
+
+“I thought at first that the beautiful way it was done pointed
+strongly to a woman. However, I carried out an experiment and got a
+dozen or so of my friends to try their hands at it, men and women, and
+out of the whole lot I was the only one (I say it without any
+particular pride) who made a really good job of it. So it wasn’t
+necessarily a woman. But manual dexterity’s a good point to establish.
+
+“Then there was the matter of the exact six-minim dose in each
+chocolate. That’s very illuminating, I think. It argues a methodical
+turn of mind amounting to a real passion for symmetry. There are such
+people. They can’t bear that the pictures on a wall don’t balance each
+other exactly. I know, because I’m rather that way myself. Symmetry is
+synonymous with order, to my mind. I can quite see how the murderer
+came to fill the chocolates in that way. I should probably have done
+so myself. Unconsciously.
+
+“Then I think we can credit him or her with a creative mind. A crime
+like this isn’t done on the spur of the moment. It’s deliberately
+created, bit by bit, scene by scene, built up exactly as a play is
+built up. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?”
+
+“It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but it may be true.”
+
+“Oh, yes; a lot of thought must have gone to the carrying of it
+through. I don’t think we need worry about the plagiarism from other
+crimes. The greatest creative minds aren’t above adapting the ideas of
+other people to their own uses. I do myself. So do you, I expect,
+Sheringham; so do you, no doubt, Miss Dammers; so do you at times, I
+should imagine, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. Be honest now, all of you.”
+
+A subdued murmur of honesty acknowledged occasional lapses in this
+direction.
+
+“Of course. Look how Sullivan used to adapt old church music, and turn
+a Gregorian chant into _A Pair of Sparkling Eyes_, or something
+equally unchantlike. It’s permissible. Well, there’s all that to help
+with the portrait of our unknown and, lastly, there must be present in
+his or her mental make-up the particular cold, relentless inhumanity
+of the poisoner. That’s all, I think. But it’s something, isn’t it?
+One ought to be able to go a fair way towards recognising our criminal
+if one ever ran across a person with these varied characteristics.
+
+“Oh, and there’s one other point I mustn’t forget. The parallel crime.
+I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned this. To my mind it’s a closer
+parallel than any we’ve had yet. It isn’t a well-known case, but
+you’ve all probably heard of it. The murder of Dr. Wilson, at
+Philadelphia, just twenty years ago.
+
+“I’ll run through it briefly. This man Wilson received one morning
+what purported to be a sample bottle of ale, sent to him by a
+well-known brewery. There was a letter with it, written apparently on
+their official notepaper, and the address-label had the firm’s name
+printed on it. Wilson drank the beer at lunch, and died immediately.
+The stuff was saturated with cyanide of potassium.
+
+“It was soon established that the beer hadn’t come from the brewery at
+all, which had sent out no samples. It had been delivered through the
+local express company, but all they could say was that it had been
+sent to them for delivery by a man. The printed label and the
+letter-paper had been forged, printed specially for the occasion.
+
+“The mystery was never solved. The printing-press used to print the
+letter-heading and label couldn’t be traced, though the police visited
+every printing-works in the whole of America. The very motive for the
+murder was never even satisfactorily ascertained. A typical open
+murder. The bottle arrived out of the blue, and the murderer remained
+in it.
+
+“You see the close resemblance to this case, particularly in the
+supposed sample. As Mrs. Fielder-Flemming has pointed out, it’s almost
+too good to be a coincidence. Our murderer _must_ have had that case
+in mind, with its (for the murderer) most successful outcome. As a
+matter of fact there was a possible motive. Wilson was a notorious
+abortionist, and somebody may have wanted to stop his activities.
+Conscience, I suppose. There are people who have such a thing. That’s
+another parallel with this affair, you see. Sir Eustace is a notorious
+evil-liver. And that goes to support the police view, of an anonymous
+fanatic. There’s a good deal to be said for that view, I think.
+
+“But I must get on with my own exposition.
+
+“Well, having reached this stage I tabulated my conclusions and drew
+up a list of conditions which this criminal of ours must fulfil. Now I
+should like to point out that these conditions of mine were so many
+and so varied that if anybody could be found to fit them the chances,
+Sir Charles, would not be a mere million to one but several million to
+one that he or she must be the guilty person. This isn’t just
+haphazard statement, it’s cold mathematical fact.
+
+“I have twelve conditions, and the mathematical odds against their all
+being fulfilled in one person are actually (if my arithmetic stands
+the test) four hundred and seventy-nine million, one thousand and six
+hundred to one. And that, mark you, is if all the chances were even
+ones. But they’re not. That he should have some knowledge of
+criminology is at least a ten to one chance. That he should be able to
+get hold of Mason’s notepaper must be more than a hundred to one
+against.
+
+“Well, taking it all in all,” opined Mr. Bradley, “I should think the
+real odds must be somewhere about four billion, seven hundred and
+ninety thousand million, five hundred and sixteen thousand, four
+hundred and fifty-eight to one. In other words, it’s a snip. Does
+every one agree?”
+
+Every one was far too stunned to disagree.
+
+“Right; then we’re all of one mind,” said Mr. Bradley cheerfully. “So
+I’ll read you my list.”
+
+He shuffled the pages of a little pocket-book and began to read:—
+
+        Conditions to be Filled by the Criminal.
+
+  1. Must have at least an elementary amount of chemical knowledge.
+  2. Must have at least an elementary knowledge of criminology.
+  3. Must have had a reasonably good education, but not public school
+     or University.
+  4. Must have possession of, or access to, Mason’s notepaper.
+  5. Must have possession of, or access to, a Hamilton No. 4
+     typewriter.
+  6. Must have been in the neighbourhood of Southampton Street,
+     Strand, during the critical hour, 8.30–9.30, on the evening
+     before the murder.
+  7. Must be in possession of, or had access to, an Onyx fountain-pen,
+     fitted with a medium-broad nib.
+  8. Must be in possession of, or had access to, Harfield’s
+     Fountain-Pen Ink.
+  9. Must have something of a creative mind, but not above adapting
+     the creations of others.
+ 10. Must be more than ordinarily neat with the fingers.
+ 11. Must be a person of methodical habits, probably with a strong
+     feeling for symmetry.
+ 12. Must have the cold inhumanity of the poisoner.
+
+“By the way,” said Mr. Bradley, stowing away his pocket-book again,
+“you see that I’ve agreed with you too, Sir Charles, that the murderer
+would never have entrusted the posting of the parcel to another
+person. Oh, and one other point. For purposes of reference. If anybody
+wants to see an Onyx pen, and fitted with a medium-broad nib as well,
+take a look at mine. And curiously enough it’s filled with Harfield’s
+Fountain-Pen Ink too.” The pen circulated slowly round the table while
+Mr. Bradley, leaning back in his chair, surveyed its progress with a
+fatherly smile.
+
+“And that,” said Mr. Bradley, when the pen had been restored to him,
+“is that.”
+
+Roger thought he saw the explanation of the glint that had appeared
+from time to time in Mr. Bradley’s eye. “You mean, the problem’s still
+to solve. The four billion chances were too much for you. You couldn’t
+find any one to fit your own conditions?”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Bradley, apparently most reluctant all of a sudden,
+“if you must know, I have found some one who does.”
+
+“You have? Good man! Who?”
+
+“Hang it all, you know,” said the coy Mr. Bradley, “I hardly like to
+tell you. It’s really too ridiculous.”
+
+A chorus of expostulation, cajolement, and encouragement was
+immediately directed at him. Never had Mr. Bradley found himself so
+popular.
+
+“You’ll laugh at me if I do tell you.”
+
+It appeared that everybody would rather suffer the tortures of the
+Inquisition than laugh at Mr. Bradley. Never can five people less
+disposed to mirth at Mr. Bradley’s expense have been gathered
+together.
+
+Mr. Bradley seemed to take heart. “Well, it’s very awkward. Upon my
+soul I don’t know what to do about it. If I can show you that the
+person I have in mind not only fulfils each of my conditions exactly,
+but also had a certain interest (remote I admit, but capable of proof)
+in sending those chocolates to Sir Eustace, have I your assurance, Mr.
+President, that the meeting will give me its serious advice as to what
+my duty is in the matter?”
+
+“Good gracious, yes,” at once agreed Roger, much excited. Roger had
+thought that he might be on the verge of solving the problem himself,
+but he was quite sure that he and Bradley had not hit upon the same
+solution. And if the fellow really had got some one . . . “Good Lord,
+yes!” said Roger.
+
+Mr. Bradley looked round the table in a worried way. “Well, can’t you
+see who I mean? Dear me, I thought I’d told you in almost every other
+sentence.”
+
+Nobody had seen whom he meant.
+
+“The only possible person, so far as I can see, who could ever be
+expected to fulfil all those twelve conditions?” said this harassed
+version of Mr. Bradley, dishevelling his carefully flattened hair.
+“Why, dash it, not my sister at all, but—but—but _me_, of course!”
+
+There was a stupefied silence.
+
+“D-did you say, _you_?” finally ventured Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+Mr. Bradley turned gloomy eyes on him. “Obviously, I’m afraid. I have
+more than an elementary knowledge of chemistry. I can make
+nitrobenzene and often have. I’m a criminologist. I’ve had a
+reasonably good education, but not public-school or University. I had
+access to Mason’s notepaper. I possess a Hamilton No. 4 typewriter. I
+was in Southampton Street itself during the critical hour. I possess
+an Onyx pen, fitted with a medium-broad nib and filled with Harfield’s
+ink. I have something of a creative mind, but I’m not above adapting
+the ideas of other people. I’m far more than ordinarily neat with my
+fingers. I’m a person of methodical habits, with a strong feeling for
+symmetry. And apparently I have the cold inhumanity of the poisoner.
+
+“Yes,” sighed Mr. Bradley, “there’s simply no getting away from it.
+_I_ sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace.
+
+“I must have done. I’ve proved it conclusively. And the extraordinary
+thing is that I don’t remember a single jot about it. I suppose I did
+it when I was thinking about something else. I’ve noticed I’m getting
+a little absent-minded at times.”
+
+Roger was struggling with an inordinate wish to laugh. However he
+managed to ask gravely enough: “And what do you imagine was your
+motive, Bradley?”
+
+Mr. Bradley brightened a little. “Yes, that was a difficulty. For
+quite a time I couldn’t establish my motive at all. I couldn’t even
+connect myself with Sir Eustace Pennefather. I’d heard of him of
+course, as anybody who’s ever been to the Rainbow must. And I’d
+gathered he was somewhat savoury. But I’d no grudge against the man.
+He could be as savoury as he liked so far as I cared. I don’t think
+I’d ever even seen him. Yes, the motive was a real stumbling-block,
+because of course there must be one. What should I have tried to kill
+him for otherwise?”
+
+“And you’ve found it?”
+
+“I think I’ve managed to ferret out what must be the real cause,” said
+Mr. Bradley, not without pride. “After puzzling for a long time I
+remembered that I had heard myself once say to a friend, in a
+discussion on detective-work, that the ambition of my life was to
+commit a murder, because I was perfectly certain that I could do so
+without ever being found out. And the excitement, I pointed out, must
+be stupendous; no gambling game ever invented can come anywhere near
+it. A murderer is really making a magnificent bet with the police, I
+demonstrated, with the lives of himself and his victim as the stakes;
+if he gets away with it, he wins both; if he’s caught, he loses both.
+For a man like myself, who has the misfortune to be extremely bored by
+the usual type of popular recreation, murder should be the hobby _par
+excellence_.”
+
+“Ah!” Roger nodded portentously.
+
+“This conversation, when I recalled it,” pursued Mr. Bradley very
+seriously, “seemed to me significant in the extreme. I at once went to
+see my friend and asked him if he remembered it and was prepared to
+swear that it took place at all. He was. In fact he was able to add
+further details, more damning still. I was so impressed that I took a
+statement from him.
+
+“Amplifying my notion (according to his statement), I had gone on to
+consider how it could best be carried out. The obvious thing, I had
+decided, was to select some figure of whom the world would be well
+rid, not necessarily a politician (I was at some pains to avoid the
+obvious, apparently), and simply murder him at a distance. To play the
+game, one should leave a clue or two, more or less obscure. Apparently
+I left rather more than I intended.
+
+“My friend concluded by saying that I went away from him that evening
+expressing the firmest intention of carrying out my first murder at
+the earliest opportunity. Not only would the practice make such an
+admirable hobby, I told him, but the experience would be invaluable to
+a writer of detective-stories such as myself.
+
+“That, I think,” said Mr. Bradley with dignity, “establishes my motive
+only too certainly.”
+
+“Murder for experiment,” remarked Roger. “A new category. Most
+interesting.”
+
+“Murder for jaded pleasure-seekers,” Mr. Bradley corrected him. “There
+is a precedent, you know. Loeb and Leopold. Well, there you have it.
+Have I proved my case, Mr. President?”
+
+“Completely, so far as I can see. I can’t detect a flaw in your
+argument.”
+
+“I’ve been at some pains to make it a good deal more water-tight than
+I ever bother to do in my books. You could argue a very nasty case
+against me in court on those lines, couldn’t you, Sir Charles?”
+
+“Well, I should want to go into it a little more closely, but at first
+sight, Bradley, I admit that so far as circumstantial evidence is
+worth (and in my opinion, as you know, it is worth everything), I
+can’t see room for very much doubt that you sent those chocolates to
+Sir Eustace.”
+
+“And if I said here and now that in sober truth I _did_ send them?”
+persisted Mr. Bradley.
+
+“I couldn’t disbelieve you.”
+
+“And yet I didn’t. But given time, I’m quite prepared to prove to you
+just as convincingly that the person who really sent them was the
+Archbishop of Canterbury, or Sybil Thorndike, or Mrs. Robinson-Smythe
+of The Laurels, Acacia Road, Upper Tooting, or the President of the
+United States, or anybody else in this world you like to name.
+
+“So much for proof. I built that whole case up against myself out of
+the one coincidence of my sister having a few sheets of Mason’s
+notepaper. I told you nothing but the truth. But I didn’t tell you the
+whole truth. Artistic proof is, like artistic anything else, simply a
+matter of selection. If you know what to put in and what to leave out
+you can prove anything you like, quite conclusively. I do it in every
+book I write, and no reviewer has ever hauled me over the coals for
+slipshod argument yet. But then,” said Mr. Bradley modestly, “I don’t
+suppose any reviewer has ever read one of my books.”
+
+“Well, it was a very ingenious piece of work,” Miss Dammers summed up.
+“And most instructive.”
+
+“Thank you,” murmured Mr. Bradley, with gratitude.
+
+“And what it all amounts to,” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming delivered a
+somewhat tart verdict, “is that you haven’t the faintest idea who is
+the real criminal.”
+
+“Oh, I know _that_, of course,” said Mr. Bradley languidly. “But I
+can’t prove it. So it’s not much good telling you.”
+
+Everybody sat up.
+
+“You’ve found some one else, in spite of the odds, to fit those
+conditions of yours?” demanded Sir Charles.
+
+“I suppose she must,” admitted Mr. Bradley, “as she did it. But
+unfortunately I haven’t been able to check them all.”
+
+“She!” Mr. Chitterwick caught him up.
+
+“Oh, yes, it was a woman. That was the most obvious thing about the
+whole case—and incidentally one of the things I was careful to leave
+out just now. Really, I wonder that’s never been mentioned before.
+Surely if there’s anything evident about this affair at all it is that
+it’s a woman’s crime. It would never occur to a man to send poisoned
+chocolates to another man. He’d send a poisoned sample razor-blade, or
+whisky, or beer like the unfortunate Dr. Wilson’s friend. Quite
+obviously it’s a woman’s crime.”
+
+“I wonder,” Roger said softly.
+
+Mr. Bradley threw him a sharp glance. “You don’t agree, Sheringham?”
+
+“I only wondered,” said Roger. “But it’s a very defendable point.”
+
+“Impregnable, I should have said,” drawled Mr. Bradley.
+
+“Well,” said Miss Dammers, impatient of these minor matters, “aren’t
+you going to tell us who did it, Mr. Bradley?”
+
+Mr. Bradley looked at her quizzically. “But I said that it wasn’t any
+good, as I can’t prove it. Besides, there’s a small matter of the
+lady’s honour involved.”
+
+“Are you resuscitating the law of slander, to get you out of a
+difficulty?”
+
+“Oh, dear me, no. I wouldn’t in the least mind giving her away as a
+murderess. It’s a much more important thing than that. She happens to
+have been Sir Eustace’s mistress at one time, you see, and there’s a
+code governing that sort of thing.”
+
+“Ah!” said Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+Mr. Bradley turned to him politely. “You were going to say something?”
+
+“No, no. I was just wondering whether you’d been thinking on the same
+lines as I have. That’s all.”
+
+“You mean the discarded mistress theory?”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Chitterwick uncomfortably, “yes.”
+
+“Of course. You’d hit on that line of research, too?” Mr. Bradley’s
+tone was that of a benevolent headmaster patting a promising pupil on
+the head. “It’s the right one, obviously. Viewing the crime as a
+whole, and in the light of Sir Eustace’s character, a discarded
+mistress, radiating jealousy, stands out like a beacon in the middle
+of it. That’s one of the things I conveniently omitted too from my
+list of conditions—No. 13, the criminal must be a woman. And touching
+on artistic proof again, both Sir Charles and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming
+practised it, didn’t they? Both of them omitted to establish any
+connection of nitrobenzene with their respective criminals, though
+such a connection is vital to both their cases.”
+
+“Then you really think jealousy is the motive?” Mr. Chitterwick
+suggested.
+
+“I’m absolutely convinced of it,” Mr. Bradley assured him. “But I’ll
+tell you something else of which I’m not by any means convinced, and
+that is that the intended victim really was Sir Eustace Pennefather.”
+
+“Not the intended victim?” queried Roger, very uneasily. “How do you
+make that out?”
+
+“Why, I’ve discovered,” said Mr. Bradley, dissembling his pride, “that
+Sir Eustace had had an engagement for lunch on the day of the murder.
+He seems to have been very secretive about it, and it was certainly
+with a woman; and not only with a woman, but with a woman in whom Sir
+Eustace was more than a little interested. I think probably not Miss
+Wildman, but somebody of whom he was anxious that Miss Wildman
+shouldn’t know. But in my opinion the woman who sent the chocolates
+knew. The appointment was cancelled, but the other woman might not
+have known that.
+
+“My suggestion (it’s only a suggestion, and I can’t substantiate it in
+any way at all except that it makes chocolates still more reasonable)
+is that those chocolates were intended not for Sir Eustace at all but
+for the sender’s rival.”
+
+“Ah!” breathed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
+
+“This is quite a new idea,” complained Sir Charles.
+
+Roger had been hastily conning over the names of Sir Eustace’s various
+ladies. He had been unable to fit one before into the crime, and he
+was unable now; yet he did not think that any had escaped him. “If the
+woman you’re thinking of, Bradley, the sender,” he said tentatively,
+“really was a mistress of Sir Eustace, I don’t think you need worry
+about being too punctilious. Her name is almost certainly on the lips
+of the whole Rainbow Club in that connection, if not of every club in
+London. Sir Eustace is not a reticent man.”
+
+“I can assure Mr. Bradley,” said Miss Dammers with irony, “that Sir
+Eustace’s standard of honour falls a good deal short of his own.”
+
+“In this case,” Mr. Bradley told them, unmoved, “I think not.”
+
+“How is that?”
+
+“Because I’m quite sure that apart from my unconscious informant, and
+Sir Eustace, and myself, there is nobody who knows of the connection
+at all. Except the lady, of course,” added Mr. Bradley punctiliously.
+“Naturally it would not have escaped her.”
+
+“Then how did you find out?” demanded Miss Dammers.
+
+“That,” Mr. Bradley informed her equably, “I regret that I’m not at
+liberty to say.”
+
+Roger stroked his chin. Could there be another one of whom he had
+never heard? In that case, how would this new theory of his continue
+to stand up?
+
+“Your so close parallel falls to the ground, then?” Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming was stating.
+
+“Not altogether. But if it does, I’ve got another just as good.
+Christina Edmunds. Almost the same case, with the insanity left out.
+Jealousy-mania. Poisoned chocolates. What could be better?”
+
+“Humph! The mainstay of your last case, I gathered,” observed Sir
+Charles, “or at any rate the starting-point, was the choice of
+nitrobenzene. I suppose that, and the deductions you drew from it, are
+equally important to this one. Are we to take it that this lady is an
+amateur chemist, with a copy of Taylor on her shelves?”
+
+Mr. Bradley smiled gently. “That, as you rightly point out, was the
+mainstay of my _last_ case, Sir Charles. It isn’t of this one. I’m
+afraid my remarks on the choice of poison were rather special
+pleading. I was leading up to a certain person, you see, and therefore
+only drew the deductions which suited that particular person. However,
+there was a good deal of possible truth in them for all that, though I
+wouldn’t rate their probability quite as high as I pretended to do
+then. I’m quite prepared to believe that nitrobenzene was used simply
+because it’s so easy to get hold of. But it’s perfectly true that the
+stuff’s hardly known as a poison at all.”
+
+“Then you make no use of it in your present case?”
+
+“Oh, yes, I do. I still think the point that the criminal not so much
+used it as knew of it to use, is a perfectly sound one. The reason for
+that knowledge should be capable of being established. I stuck out
+before for a copy of some such book as Taylor as the reason, and I
+still do. As it happens this good lady _has_ got a copy of Taylor.”
+
+“She _is_ a criminologist, then?” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming pounced.
+
+Mr. Bradley leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. “That,
+I should think, is very much open to question. Frankly, I’m puzzled
+over the matter of criminology. Myself, I don’t see that lady as an
+‘-ist’ of any description. Her function in life is perfectly obvious,
+the one she fulfilled for Sir Eustace, and I shouldn’t have thought
+her capable of any other. Except to powder her nose rather charmingly,
+and look extremely decorative; but all that’s part and parcel of her
+real _raison d’être_. No, I don’t think she could possibly be a
+criminologist, any more than a canary-bird could. But she certainly
+has a smattering of criminology, because in her flat there’s a whole
+bookshelf filled with works on the subject.”
+
+“She’s a personal friend of yours, then?” queried Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming, very casually.
+
+“Oh, no. I’ve only met her once. That was when I called at her flat
+with a bran-new copy of a recently published book of popular murders
+under my arm, and represented myself as a traveller for the publisher
+soliciting orders for the book; might I have the pleasure of putting
+her name down? The book had only been out four days, but she proudly
+showed me a copy of it on her shelves already. Was she interested in
+criminology, then? Oh, yes, she simply adored it; murder was _too_
+fascinating, wasn’t it? Conclusive, I think.”
+
+“She sounds a bit of a fool,” commented Sir Charles.
+
+“She looks like a bit of a fool,” agreed Mr. Bradley. “She talks like
+a bit of a fool. Meeting her at a tea-fight, I should have said she
+_is_ a bit of a fool. And yet she carried through a really cleverly
+planned murder, so I don’t see how she can be a bit of a fool.”
+
+“It doesn’t occur to you,” remarked Miss Dammers, “that perhaps she
+never did anything of the sort?”
+
+“Well, no,” Mr. Bradley had to confess. “I’m afraid it doesn’t. I
+mean, a comparatively recent discarded mistress of Sir Eustace’s
+(well, not more than three years ago, and hope dies hard), who thinks
+no small champagne of herself and considers murder too fascinating for
+words. Well, really!
+
+“By the way, if you want any confirmatory evidence that she had been
+one of Sir Eustace’s lady-loves, I might add that I saw a photograph
+of him in her flat. It was in a frame that had a very wide border. The
+border showed the word ‘Your’ and conveniently cut off the rest. Not
+‘Yours,’ notice, but ‘Your.’ I think it’s a reasonable assumption that
+something quite affectionate lies under that discreet border.”
+
+“I have it from his own lips that Sir Eustace changes his mistresses
+as often as his hats,” Miss Dammers said briskly. “Isn’t it possible
+that more than one may have suffered from a jealousy-complex?”
+
+“But not, I think, have possessed a copy of Taylor as well,” Mr.
+Bradley insisted.
+
+“The criminological-knowledge factor seems to have taken the place in
+this case of the nitrobenzene factor in the last,” meditated Mr.
+Chitterwick. “Am I right in thinking that?”
+
+“Quite,” Mr. Bradley assured him kindly. “That, in my opinion, is the
+really important clue. It’s so emphasised, you see. We get it from two
+entirely different angles, the choice of poison and the reminiscent
+features of the case. In fact we’re coming up against it all the
+time.”
+
+“Well, well,” muttered Mr. Chitterwick, reproving himself as one might
+who had been coming up against a thing all the time and never even
+noticed it.
+
+There was a short silence, which Mr. Chitterwick imputed (quite
+wrongly) to a general condemnation of his own obtuseness.
+
+“Your list of conditions,” Miss Dammers resumed the charge. “You said
+you hadn’t been able to check all of them. Which does this woman
+definitely fulfil, and which haven’t you been able to check?”
+
+Mr. Bradley assumed an air of alertness. “No. 1, I don’t know whether
+she has any chemical knowledge. No. 2, I do know that she has at least
+an elementary knowledge of criminology. No. 3, she is almost certain
+to have had a reasonably good education (though whether she ever
+learnt anything is quite a different matter), and I think we may
+assume that she was never at a public-school. No. 4, I haven’t been
+able to connect her with Mason’s notepaper, except in so far as she
+has an account at Mason’s; and if that is good enough for Sir Charles,
+it’s good enough for me. No. 5, I haven’t been able to connect her
+with a Hamilton typewriter, but that ought to be quite easy; one of
+her friends is sure to have one.
+
+“No. 6, she could have been in the neighbourhood of Southampton
+Street. She tried to establish an alibi, but bungled it badly; it’s
+full of holes. She’s supposed to have been in a theatre, but she
+didn’t even get there till well past nine. No. 7, I saw an Onyx
+fountain-pen on her bureau. No. 8, I saw a bottle of Harfield’s
+Fountain-Pen Ink in one of the pigeon-holes of the bureau.
+
+“No. 9, I shouldn’t have said she had a creative mind; I shouldn’t
+have said that she had a mind at all; but apparently we must give her
+the benefit of any doubt there is. No. 10, judging from her face, I
+should say she was very neat with her fingers. No. 11, if she is a
+person of methodical habits she must feel it an incriminating point,
+for she certainly disguises it very well. No. 12, this I think might
+be amended, to ‘must have the poisoner’s complete lack of
+imagination.’ That’s the lot.”
+
+“I see,” said Miss Dammers. “There are gaps.”
+
+“There are,” Mr. Bradley agreed blandly. “To tell the truth, I know
+this woman must have done it because really, you know, she must. But I
+can’t believe it.”
+
+“Ah!” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, putting a neat sentence into one
+word.
+
+“By the way, Sheringham,” remarked Mr. Bradley, “you know the bad
+lady.”
+
+“I do, do I?” said Roger, apparently coming out of a trance. “I
+thought I might. Look here, if I write a name down on a piece of
+paper, do you mind telling me if I’m right or wrong?”
+
+“Not in the least,” replied the equable Mr. Bradley. “As a matter of
+fact I was going to suggest something like that myself. I think as
+President you ought to know who I mean, in case there is anything in
+it.”
+
+Roger folded his piece of paper in two and tossed it down the table.
+“That’s the person, I suppose.”
+
+“You’re quite right,” said Mr. Bradley.
+
+“And you base most of your case on her reasons for interesting herself
+in criminology?”
+
+“You might put it like that,” conceded Mr. Bradley.
+
+In spite of himself Roger blushed faintly. He had the best of reasons
+for knowing why Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer professed such an interest in
+criminology. Not to put too fine a point on it, the reasons had been
+almost forced on him.
+
+“Then you’re absolutely wrong, Bradley,” he said without hesitation.
+“Absolutely.”
+
+“You know definitely?”
+
+Roger suppressed an involuntary shudder. “Quite definitely.”
+
+“You know, I never believed she did it,” said the philosophical Mr.
+Bradley.
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+Roger was very busy.
+
+Flitting in taxis hither and thither, utterly regardless of what the
+clocks had to tell him, he was trying to get his case completed before
+the evening. His activities might have seemed to that artless
+criminologist, Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, not only baffling but
+pointless.
+
+On the previous afternoon, for instance, he had taken his first taxi
+to the Holborn Public Library and there consulted a work of reference
+of the most uninspiring description. After that he had driven to the
+offices of Messrs. Weall and Wilson, the well-known firm which exists
+to protect the trade interests of individuals and supply subscribers
+with highly confidential information regarding the stability of any
+business in which it is intended to invest money.
+
+Roger, glibly representing himself as a potential investor of large
+sums, had entered his name as a subscriber, filled up a number of the
+special enquiry forms which are headed Strictly Confidential, and not
+consented to go away until Messrs. Weall and Wilson had promised, in
+consideration of certain extra moneys, to have the required
+information in his hands within twenty-seven hours.
+
+He had then bought a newspaper and gone to Scotland Yard. There he
+sought out Moresby.
+
+“Moresby,” he said without preamble, “I want you to do something
+important for me. Can you find me a taximan who took up a fare in
+Piccadilly Circus or its neighbourhood at about ten minutes past nine
+on the night before the Bendix murder, and deposited same at or near
+the Strand end of Southampton Street? And/or another taxi who took up
+a fare in the Strand near Southampton Street at about a quarter-past
+nine, and deposited same in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly Circus?
+The second is the more likely of the two; I’m not quite sure about the
+first. Or one taxi might have been used for the double journey, but I
+doubt that very much. Do you think you can do this for me?”
+
+“We may not get any results, after all this time,” said Moresby
+doubtfully. “It’s really important, is it?”
+
+“Quite important.”
+
+“Well, I’ll try of course, seeing it’s you, Mr. Sheringham, and I know
+I can take your word for it that it is important. But I wouldn’t for
+any one else.”
+
+“That’s fine,” said Roger with much heartiness. “Make it pretty
+urgent, will you? And you might give me a ring at the Albany at about
+tea-time to-morrow, if you think you’ve got hold of my man.”
+
+“What’s the idea, then, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+“I’m trying to break down a rather interesting alibi,” said Roger.
+
+He went back to his rooms to dine.
+
+After the meal his head was buzzing far too busily for him to be able
+to do anything else but take it for a walk. Restlessly he wandered out
+of the Albany and turned down Piccadilly. He ambled round the Circus,
+thinking hard, and paused for a moment out of habit to inspect with
+unseeing eyes the photographs of the new revue hanging outside the
+Pavilion. The next thing he realised was that he must have turned down
+the Haymarket and swung round in a wide circle into Jermyn Street, for
+he was standing outside the Imperial Theatre in that fascinating
+thoroughfare, idly watching the last of the audience crowding in.
+
+Glancing at the advertisements of _The Creaking Skull_, he saw that
+the terrible thing began at half-past eight. Glancing at his watch, he
+saw that the time was twenty-nine minutes past that hour.
+
+There was an evening to be got through somehow.
+
+He went inside.
+
+The night passed somehow, too.
+
+Early the next morning (or early, that is, for Roger; say half-past
+ten), in a bleak spot somewhere beyond the bounds of civilisation, in
+short in Acton, Roger found himself parleying with a young woman in
+the offices of the Anglo-Eastern Perfumery Company. The young woman
+was entrenched behind a partition just inside the main entrance, her
+only means of communication with the outer world being through a small
+window fitted with frosted glass. This window she would open (if
+summoned long and loudly enough) to address a few curt replies to
+importunate callers, and this window she would close with a bang by
+way of a hint that the interview, in her opinion, should now be
+closed.
+
+“Good morning,” said Roger blandly, when his third rap had summoned
+this maiden from the depths of her fastness. “I’ve called to—”
+
+“Travellers, Tuesdays and Friday mornings, ten to eleven,” said the
+maiden surprisingly, and closed the window with one of her best bangs.
+That’ll teach him to try and do business with a respectable English
+firm on a Thursday morning, good gracious me, said the bang.
+
+Roger stared blankly at the closed window. Then it dawned on him that
+a mistake had been made. He rapped again. And again.
+
+At the fourth rap the window flew open as if something had exploded
+behind it. “I’ve told you already,” snapped the maiden, righteously
+indignant, “that we only see—”
+
+“I’m not a traveller,” said Roger hastily. “At least,” he added with
+meticulousness, thinking of the dreary deserts he had explored before
+finding this inhospitable oasis, “at least, not a commercial one.”
+
+“You don’t want to sell anything?” asked the maiden suspiciously.
+Impregnated with all that is best in the go-ahead spirit of English
+business methods, she naturally looked with the deepest distrust on
+anybody who might possibly wish to do such an unbusinesslike thing as
+_sell_ her firm something.
+
+“Nothing,” Roger assured her with the utmost earnestness, impressed in
+his turn with the revolting vulgarity of such a proceeding.
+
+On these conditions it appeared that the maiden, though by no means
+ready to take him to her bosom, was prepared to tolerate him for a few
+seconds. “Well, what _do_ you want then?” she asked, with an air of
+weariness patiently, even nobly borne. From her tone it was to be
+gathered that very few people penetrated as far as that door unless
+with the discreditable intention of trying to do business with her
+firm. Just fancy—business!
+
+“I’m a solicitor,” Roger told her now, without truth, “and I’m
+enquiring into the matter of a certain Mr. Joseph Lea Hardwick, who
+was employed here. I regret to say that—”
+
+“Sorry, never heard of the gentleman,” said the maiden shortly, and
+intimated in her usual way that the interview had lasted quite long
+enough.
+
+Once more Roger got busy with his stick. After the seventh application
+he was rewarded with another view of indignant young English girlhood.
+
+“I’ve told you already—”
+
+But Roger had had about enough of this. “And now, young woman, let me
+tell _you_ something. If you refuse to answer my questions, let me
+warn you that you may find yourself in very serious trouble. Haven’t
+you ever heard of contempt of court?” There are times when some slight
+juggling with the truth is permissible. There are times, too, when
+even a shrewd blow with a bludgeon may be excused. This time was one
+of both.
+
+The maiden, though far from cowed, was at last impressed. “Well, what
+do you want to know then?” she asked, resignedly.
+
+“This man, Joseph Lea Hardwick—”
+
+“I’ve told you, I’ve never heard of him.”
+
+As the gentleman in question had enjoyed an existence of only two or
+three minutes, and that solely in Roger’s brain, his creator was not
+unprepared for this. “It is possible that he was known to you under a
+different name,” he said darkly.
+
+The maiden’s interest was engaged. More, she looked positively
+alarmed. She spoke shrilly. “If it’s divorce, let me tell you you
+can’t hang anything on _me_. I never even knew he was married.
+Besides, it isn’t as if there was a cause. I mean to say—well, at
+least—anyhow, it’s a pack of lies. I never—”
+
+“It isn’t divorce,” Roger hastened to stem the tide, himself scarcely
+less alarmed at these quite unmaidenly revelations. “It’s—it’s nothing
+to do with your private life at all. It’s about a man who was employed
+here.”
+
+“Oh!” The late maiden’s relief turned rapidly into indignation. “Well,
+why couldn’t you say so?”
+
+“Employed here,” pursued Roger firmly, “in the nitrobenzene
+department. You have a nitrobenzene department, haven’t you?”
+
+“Not that I’m aware of, I’m sure.”
+
+Roger made the noise that is usually spelt “Tchah! You know perfectly
+well what I mean. The department which handles the nitrobenzene used
+here. You are hardly prepared to deny that nitrobenzene _is_ used
+here, I hope? And extensively?”
+
+“Well, and what if it is?”
+
+“It has been reported to my firm that this man met his death through
+insufficient warning having been issued to the employees here about
+the dangerous nature of this substance. I should like—”
+
+“What? One of our men died? I don’t believe it. I should have been the
+first to know if—”
+
+“It’s been hushed up,” Roger inserted quickly. “I should like you to
+show me a copy of the warning that is hung up in the factory about
+nitrobenzene.”
+
+“Well, I’m sorry then, but I’m afraid I can’t oblige you.”
+
+“Do you mean to tell me,” said Roger, much shocked, “that no warning
+is issued at all to your employees about this most dangerous
+substance? They’re not even told that it is a deadly poison?”
+
+“I didn’t say that, did I? Of course they’re warned that it’s
+poisonous. Everybody is. And they’re most careful about the way it’s
+handled, I’m sure. It just happens that there isn’t a warning hung up.
+And if you want to know any more about it, you’d better see one of the
+directors. I’ll—”
+
+“Thank you,” said Roger, speaking the truth at last, “I’ve learned all
+I wanted. Good morning.” He retreated jubilantly.
+
+He retreated to Webster’s, the printers, in a taxi.
+
+Webster’s of course are to printing what Monte Carlo is to the
+Riviera. Webster’s, practically speaking, _are_ printing. So where
+more naturally should Roger go if he wanted some new notepaper printed
+in a very special and particular way, as apparently he did?
+
+To the young woman behind the counter who took him in charge he
+specified at great length and in the most meticulous detail exactly
+what he did want. The young woman handed him her book of specimen
+pieces and asked him to see if he could find a style there which would
+suit him. While he looked through it she turned to another customer.
+Not to palter with the truth, that young woman had been getting a
+little weary of Roger and his wants.
+
+Apparently Roger could not find a style to suit him, for he closed the
+book and edged a little along the counter till he was within the
+territory of the next young woman. To her in turn he embarked on the
+epic of his needs, and in turn too she presented him with her book of
+specimens and asked him to choose one. As the book was only another
+copy of the same edition, it is not surprising that Roger found
+himself no further forward.
+
+Once more he edged along the counter, and once more he recited his
+saga to the third, and last, young woman. Knowing the game, she handed
+him her book of specimens. But this time Roger had his reward. This
+book was one of the same edition, but it was not an exact copy.
+
+“Of course I’m sure you’ll have what I want,” he remarked garrulously
+as he flicked over the pages, “because I was recommended here by a
+friend who is really most particular. _Most_ particular.”
+
+“Is that so?” said the young woman, doing her best to appear extremely
+interested. She was a very young woman indeed, young enough to study
+the technique of salesmanship in her spare time; and one of the first
+rules in salesmanship, she had learned, was to receive a customer’s
+remark that it is a fine day with the same eager and respectful
+admiration of the penetrating powers of his observation as she would
+accord to a fortune-teller who informed her that she would receive a
+letter from a dark stranger across the water containing an offer of
+money, on her note of hand alone. “Well,” she said, trying hard, “some
+people are particular, and that’s a fact.”
+
+“Dear me!” Roger seemed much struck. “Do you know, I believe I’ve got
+my friend’s photograph on me this very minute. Isn’t that an
+extraordinary coincidence?”
+
+“Well, I never,” said the dutiful young woman.
+
+Roger produced the coincidental photograph and handed it across the
+counter. “There! Recognise it?”
+
+The young woman took the photograph and studied it closely. “So that’s
+your friend! Well, isn’t that extraordinary? Yes, of course I
+recognise it. It’s a small world, isn’t it?”
+
+“About a fortnight ago, I think my friend was in here last,” Roger
+persisted. “Is that right?”
+
+The young woman pondered. “Yes, it would be about a fortnight ago, I
+suppose. Yes, just about. Now this is a line we’re selling a good deal
+of just at present.”
+
+Roger bought an inordinate quantity of notepaper he didn’t want in the
+least, out of sheer lightness of heart. And because she really was a
+very nice young woman, and it was a shame to take advantage of her.
+
+Then he went back to his rooms for lunch.
+
+Most of the afternoon he spent in trying apparently to buy a
+second-hand typewriter.
+
+Roger was very particular that his typewriter should be a Hamilton No.
+4. When the salesmen tried to induce him to consider other makes he
+refused to look at them, saying that he had had the Hamilton No. 4 so
+strongly recommended to him by a friend, who had bought a second-hand
+one just about three weeks ago. Perhaps it was at this very shop? No?
+They hadn’t sold a Hamilton No. 4 for the last two months? How very
+odd.
+
+But at one shop they had; and that was odder still. The obliging
+salesman looked up the exact date, and found that it was just a month
+ago. Roger described his friend, and the salesman at once agreed that
+Roger’s friend and his own customer were one and the same.
+
+“Good gracious, and now I come to think of it,” Roger cried, “I
+actually believe I’ve got my friend’s photograph on me at this very
+minute. Let me see!” He rummaged in his pockets, and to his great
+astonishment produced the photograph in question.
+
+The salesman most obligingly proceeded to identify his customer
+without hesitation. He then went on, just as obligingly, to sell Roger
+the second-hand Hamilton No. 4 which that enthusiastic detective felt
+he had not the face to refuse to buy. Detecting, Roger was
+discovering, is for the person without official authority to back him,
+a singularly expensive business. But like Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he
+did not grudge money spent in a good cause.
+
+He went back to his rooms to tea. There was nothing more to be done
+except await the call from Moresby.
+
+It came sooner than he expected.
+
+“Is that you, Mr. Sheringham? There are fourteen taxi-drivers here,
+littering up my office,” said Moresby offensively. “They all took
+fares from Piccadilly Circus to the Strand, or _vice versa_, at your
+time. What do you want me to do with ’em?”
+
+“Kindly keep them till I come, Chief Inspector,” returned Roger with
+dignity, and grabbed his hat. He had not expected more than three at
+the most, but he was not going to let Moresby know that.
+
+The interview with the fourteen was brief enough however. To each
+grinning man in turn (Roger deduced a little heavy humour on the part
+of Moresby before he arrived) Roger showed the photograph, taking some
+pains to hold it so that Moresby could not see it, and asked if he
+could recognise his fare. Not a single one could.
+
+Moresby dismissed the men with a broad grin. “That’s a pity, Mr.
+Sheringham. Puts a bit of a spoke in the case you’re trying to work
+up, no doubt?”
+
+Roger smiled at him in a superior manner. “On the contrary, my dear
+Moresby, it just about clinches it.”
+
+“It what did you say?” asked Moresby, startled out of his grammar.
+“What are you up to, Mr. Sheringham, eh?”
+
+“I thought you knew all that. Aren’t we being sleuthed?”
+
+“Well!” Moresby actually looked a shade out of countenance. “To tell
+you the truth, Mr. Sheringham, all your people seemed to be going so
+far off the lines that I called my men off; it didn’t seem worth while
+keeping ’em on.”
+
+“Dear, dear,” said Roger gently. “Fancy that. Well, it’s a small
+world, isn’t it?”
+
+“So what have you been doing, Mr. Sheringham? You’ve no objection to
+telling me that, I suppose?”
+
+“None in the least, Moresby. Your work for you. Does it interest you
+to know that I’ve found out who sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace?”
+
+Moresby eyed him for a moment. “It certainly does, Mr. Sheringham. If
+you really have.”
+
+“Oh, I have, yes,” said Roger very nonchalantly; even Mr. Bradley
+himself could not have spoken more so. “I’ll give you a report on it
+as soon as I’ve got my evidence in order.—It was an interesting case,”
+he added. And suppressed a yawn.
+
+“Was it now, Mr. Sheringham?” said Moresby, in a choked voice.
+
+“Oh, yes; in its way. But absurdly simple once one had grasped the
+really essential factor. Quite ridiculously so. I’ll let you have that
+report some time. So long, then.” And he strolled out.
+
+One cannot conceal the fact that Roger had his annoying moments.
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+Roger called on himself.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen, as the one responsible for this experiment, I
+think I can congratulate myself. The three members who have spoken so
+far have shown an ingenuity of observation and argument which I think
+could have been called forth by no other agency. Each was convinced
+before beginning to speak that he or she had solved the problem and
+could produce positive proof in support of such solution, and each, I
+think, is still entitled to say that his or her reading of the puzzle
+has not yet been definitely disproved.
+
+“Even Sir Charles’s choice of Lady Pennefather is perfectly arguable,
+in spite of the positive alibi that Miss Dammers is able to give to
+Lady Pennefather herself; Sir Charles is quite entitled to say that
+Lady Pennefather has an accomplice, and to adduce in support of that
+the rather dubious circumstances attending her stay in Paris.
+
+“And in this connection I should like to take the opportunity of
+retracting what I said to Bradley last night. I said that I knew
+definitely that the woman he had in mind could not have committed the
+murder. That was a mis-statement. I didn’t know definitely at all. I
+found the idea, from what I personally know of her, to be quite
+incredible.
+
+“Moreover,” said Roger bravely, “I have some reason to suspect the
+origin of her interest in criminology, and I’m pretty sure it’s quite
+a different one from that postulated by Bradley. What I should have
+said was, that her guilt of this crime was a psychological
+impossibility. But so far as facts go, one can’t prove psychological
+impossibilities. Bradley is still perfectly entitled to believe her
+the criminal. And in any case she must certainly remain on the list of
+suspects.”
+
+“I agree with you, Sheringham, you know, about the psychological
+impossibility,” remarked Mr. Bradley. “I said as much. The trouble is
+that I consider I proved the case against her.”
+
+“But you proved the case against yourself too,” pointed out Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming sweetly.
+
+“Oh, yes; but that doesn’t worry me with its inconsistency. That
+involves no psychological impossibility, you see.”
+
+“No,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “Perhaps not.”
+
+“Psychological impossibility!” contributed Sir Charles robustly. “Oh,
+you novelists. You’re all so tied up with Freud nowadays that you’ve
+lost sight of human nature altogether. When I was a young man nobody
+talked about psychological impossibilities. And why? Because we knew
+very well that there’s no such thing.”
+
+“In other words, the most improbable person may, in certain
+circumstances, do the most unlikely things,” amplified Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming. “Well, I may be old-fashioned, but I’m inclined to
+agree with that.”
+
+“Constance Kent,” led Sir Charles.
+
+“Lizzie Borden,” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming covered.
+
+“The entire Adelaide Bartlett case,” Sir Charles brought out the ace
+of trumps.
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming gathered the cards up into a neat pack. “In my
+opinion, people who talk of psychological impossibilities are treating
+their subjects as characters in one of their own novels—they’re
+infusing a certain percentage of their own mental make-up into them
+and consequently never see clearly that what they think may be the
+impossible for themselves may quite well be the possible (however
+improbable) in somebody else.”
+
+“Then there is something to be said after all for the detective story
+merchant’s axiom of the most unlikely person,” murmured Mr. Bradley.
+“Good!”
+
+“Shall we hear what Mr. Sheringham’s got to say about the case now?”
+suggested Miss Dammers.
+
+Roger took the hint.
+
+“I was going on to say how interestingly the experiment had turned
+out, too, in that the three people who have already spoken happen each
+to have hit on a different person for the criminal. I, by the way, am
+going to suggest another, so even if Miss Dammers and Mr. Chitterwick
+each agree with one of us, that gives us four entirely different
+possibilities. I don’t mind confessing that I’d hoped something like
+that would happen, though I hardly looked for such an excellent
+result.
+
+“Still, as Bradley has pointed out in his remarks about closed and
+open murders, the possibilities in this case really are almost
+infinite. That, of course, makes it so much more interesting from our
+point of view. For instance, I began my own investigations from the
+point of view of Sir Eustace’s private life. It was there, I felt
+convinced, that the clue to the murder was to be found. Just as
+Bradley did. And like him, I thought that this clue would be in the
+form of a discarded mistress; jealousy or revenge, I was sure, would
+turn out to be the mainspring of the crime. Lastly, like him I was
+convinced from the very first glance at the business that the crime
+was the work of a woman.
+
+“The consequence was that I began work entirely from the angle of Sir
+Eustace’s women. I spent a good many not too savoury days collecting
+data, until I was convinced that I had a complete list of all his
+affairs during the past five years. It was not too difficult. Sir
+Eustace, as I said last night, is not a reticent man. Apparently I had
+not got the full list, for mine hadn’t included the lady whose name
+was not mentioned last night, and if there was one omission it’s
+possible there may be more. At any rate, it seems that Sir Eustace, to
+do him justice, did have his moments of discretion.
+
+“But now all that is really beside the point. What matters is that at
+first I was certain that the crime was the work not only of a woman,
+but of a woman who had comparatively recently been Sir Eustace’s
+mistress.
+
+“I have now changed all my opinions, _in toto_.”
+
+“Oh, really!” moaned Mr. Bradley. “Don’t tell me I was wrong all along
+the line.”
+
+“I’m afraid so,” said Roger, trying to keep the triumph out of his
+voice. It is a difficult thing, when one has really and truly solved a
+problem which has baffled so many excellent brains, to appear entirely
+indifferent about it.
+
+“I regret to have to say,” he went on, hoping he appeared humbler than
+he felt, “I regret to have to say that I can’t claim all credit for
+this change of view for my own perspicacity. To be quite honest, it
+was sheer luck. A chance meeting with a silly woman in Bond Street put
+me in possession of a piece of information, trivial in itself (my
+informant never for one moment saw its possible significance), but
+which immediately altered the whole case for me. I saw in a flash that
+I’d been working from the beginning on mistaken premises. That I’d
+been making, in fact, the particular fundamental mistake which the
+murderer had intended the police and everybody else to make.
+
+“It’s a curious business, this element of luck in the solution of
+crime-puzzles,” Roger ruminated. “As it happens I was discussing it
+with Moresby, in connection with this very case. I pointed out to him
+the number of impossible problems which Scotland Yard solves
+eventually through sheer luck—a vital piece of evidence turning up of
+its own accord so to speak, or a piece of information brought in by an
+angry woman because her husband happened to have given her grounds for
+jealousy just before the crime. That sort of thing is happening all
+the time. _The Avenging Chance_, I suggested as a title, if Moresby
+ever wanted to make a film out of such a story.
+
+“Well, The Avenging Chance has worked again. By means of that lucky
+encounter in Bond Street, in one moment of enlightenment it showed me
+who really had sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace Pennefather.”
+
+“Well, well, well!” Mr. Bradley kindly expressed the feelings of the
+Circle.
+
+“And who was it, then?” queried Miss Dammers, who had an unfortunate
+lack of dramatic feeling. For that matter Miss Dammers was inclined to
+plume herself on the fact that she had no sense of construction, and
+that none of her books ever had a plot. Novelists who use words like
+‘values’ and ‘reflexes’ and ‘Œdipus-complex’ simply won’t have
+anything to do with plots. “Who appeared to you in this interesting
+revelation, Mr. Sheringham?”
+
+“Oh, let me work my story up a little first,” Roger pleaded.
+
+Miss Dammers sighed. Stories, as Roger as a fellow-craftsman ought to
+have known, simply weren’t done nowadays. But then Roger was a
+best-seller, and anything is possible with a creature like that.
+
+Unconscious of these reflections, Roger was leaning back in his chair
+in an easy attitude, meditating gently. When he began to speak again
+it was in a more conversational tone than he had used before.
+
+“You know, this really was a very remarkable case. You and Bradley,
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, didn’t do the criminal justice when you
+described it as a hotch-potch of other cases. Any ideas of real merit
+in previous cases may have been borrowed, perhaps; but as Fielding
+says, in _Tom Jones_, to borrow from the classics, even without
+acknowledgment, is quite legitimate for the purposes of an original
+work. And this _is_ an original work. It has one feature which not
+only absolves it from all charge to the contrary, but which puts it
+head and shoulders above all its prototypes.
+
+“It’s bound to become one of the classical cases itself. And but for
+the merest accident, which the criminal for all his ingenuity couldn’t
+possibly have foreseen, I think it would have become one of the
+classical mysteries. On the whole I’m inclined to consider it the most
+perfectly-planned murder I’ve ever heard of (because of course one
+doesn’t hear of the even more perfectly-planned ones that are never
+known to be murders at all). It’s so exactly right—ingenious, utterly
+simple, and as near as possible infallible.”
+
+“Humph! Not so very infallible, as it turned out, Sheringham, eh?”
+grunted Sir Charles.
+
+Roger smiled at him.
+
+“The motive’s so obvious, when you know where to look for it; but you
+didn’t know. The method’s so significant, once you’ve grasped its real
+essentials; but you didn’t grasp them. The traces are so thinly
+covered, when you’ve realised just what is covering them; but you
+didn’t realise. Everything was anticipated. The soap was left lying
+about in chunks, and we all hurried to stuff our eyes with it. No
+wonder we couldn’t see clearly. It really was beautifully planned. The
+police, the public, the press—everybody completely taken in. It seems
+almost a pity to have to give the murderer away.”
+
+“Really, Mr. Sheringham,” remarked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “You’re
+getting quite lyrical.”
+
+“A perfect murder makes me feel lyrical. If I was this particular
+criminal I should have been writing odes to myself for the last
+fortnight.”
+
+“And as it is,” suggested Miss Dammers, “you feel like writing odes to
+yourself for having solved the thing.”
+
+“I do rather,” Roger agreed.
+
+“Well, I’ll begin with the evidence. As to that, I won’t say that I’ve
+got such a collection of detail as Bradley was able to amass to prove
+his first theory, but I think you’ll all agree that I’ve got quite
+enough. Perhaps I can’t do better than run through his list of twelve
+conditions which the murderer must fulfil, though as you’ll see I
+don’t by any means agree with all of them.
+
+“I grant and can prove the first two, that the murderer must have at
+least an elementary knowledge of chemistry and criminology, but I
+disagree with both parts of the third; I don’t think a good education
+is really essential, and I should certainly not rule out any one with
+a public-school or university education, for reasons which I’ll
+explain later. Nor do I agree with the fourth, that he or she must
+have had possession of or access to Mason’s notepaper. It was an
+ingenious idea of Bradley’s that the possession of the notepaper
+suggested the method of the crime, but I think it mistaken; a previous
+case suggested the method, chocolates were decided on (for a very good
+reason indeed, as I’ll show later) as the vehicle, and Mason’s as
+being the most important firm of chocolate manufacturers. It then
+became necessary to procure a piece of their notepaper, and I’m in a
+position to show how this was done.
+
+“The fifth condition I would qualify. I don’t agree that the criminal
+must have possession of or access to a Hamilton No. 4 typewriter, but
+I do agree that such possession must have existed. In other words, I
+would put that condition in the past tense. Remember that we have to
+deal with a very astute criminal, and a very carefully planned crime.
+I thought it most unlikely that such an incriminating piece of
+evidence as the actual typewriter would be allowed to lie about for
+anyone to discover. Much more probable that a machine had been bought
+specially for the occasion. It was clear from the letter that it
+wasn’t a new machine which had been used. With the courage of my
+deduction, therefore, I spent a whole afternoon making inquiries at
+second-hand typewriter-shops till I ran down the place where it had
+been bought, and proved the buying. The shopman was able to identify
+my murderer from a photograph I had with me.”
+
+“And where’s the machine now?” asked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming eagerly.
+
+“I expect, at the bottom of the Thames. That’s my point. This criminal
+of mine leaves nothing to chance at all.
+
+“With the sixth condition, about being near the post-office during the
+critical hour, of course I agree. My murderer has a mild alibi, but it
+doesn’t hold water. As to the next two, the fountain-pen and the ink,
+I haven’t been able to check them at all, and while I agree that their
+possession would be rather pleasing confirmation I don’t attach great
+importance to them; Onyx pens are so universal, and so is Harfield’s
+ink, that there isn’t much argument there either way. Besides, it
+would be just like my criminal not to own either of them but to have
+borrowed the pen unobtrusively. Lastly, I agree about the creative
+mind, and the neatness with the fingers, and of course with the
+poisoner’s peculiar mentality, but not with the necessity for
+methodical habits.”
+
+“Oh, come,” said Mr. Bradley, pained. “That was rather a sound
+deduction, I thought. And it stands to reason, too.”
+
+“Not to my reason,” Roger retorted.
+
+Mr. Bradley shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“It’s the notepaper I’m interested in,” said Sir Charles. “In my
+opinion that’s the point on which the case against any one must hang.
+How do you prove possession of the notepaper, Sheringham?”
+
+“The notepaper,” said Roger, “was extracted about three weeks ago from
+one of Webster’s books of sample notepaper-headings. The erasure would
+be some private mark of Webster’s, the price, for instance: ‘This
+style, 5s. 9d.’ There are three books at Webster’s, containing exactly
+the same samples. Two of them include a piece of Mason’s paper; from
+the third it’s missing. I can prove contact of my suspect with the
+book about three weeks ago.”
+
+“You can, can you?” Sir Charles was impressed. “That sounds pretty
+conclusive. What put you on the idea of the sample books?”
+
+“The yellowed edges of the letter,” Roger said, not a little pleased
+with himself. “I didn’t see how a bit of paper that had been kept in a
+pile could get its edges quite so discoloured as all that, so
+concluded that it must have been an isolated piece. Then it struck me
+that walking about London, one does see isolated pieces of notepaper
+stuck on a board in the windows of printing-firms. But this piece
+showed no drawing-pin holes or any other signs of having been fixed to
+a board. Besides, it would be difficult to remove it from a board.
+What was the next best thing? Obviously, a sample-book, such as one
+usually finds inside the same shops. So to the printers of Mason’s
+notepaper I went, and there, so to speak, my piece wasn’t.”
+
+“Yes,” muttered Sir Charles, “certainly that sounds pretty
+conclusive.” He sighed. One gathered that he was gazing wistfully in
+his mind’s eye at the diminishing figure of Lady Pennefather, and the
+beautiful case he had built up around her. Then he brightened. This
+time one had gathered that he had switched his vision to the figure,
+equally diminishing, of Sir Charles Wildman, and the beautiful case
+that had been built up around him too.
+
+“So now,” said Roger, feeling he could really put it off no longer,
+“we come to the fundamental mistake to which I referred just now, the
+trap the murderer laid for us and into which we all so neatly fell.”
+
+Everybody sat up.
+
+Roger surveyed them benignly.
+
+“You got very near seeing it, Bradley, last night, with your casual
+suggestion that Sir Eustace himself might not have been the intended
+victim after all. That’s right enough. But I go further than that.”
+
+“I fell in the trap, though, did I?” said Mr. Bradley, pained. “Well,
+what is this trap? What’s the fundamental mistake we all side-slipped
+into?”
+
+“Why,” Roger brought out in triumph, “that the plan had
+miscarried—that the wrong person had been killed!”
+
+He got his reward.
+
+“What!” said every one at once. “Good heavens, you don’t mean. . . ?”
+
+“Exactly,” Roger crowed. “That was just the beauty of it. The plan had
+_not_ miscarried. It had been brilliantly successful. The wrong person
+had _not_ been killed. Very much the right person was.”
+
+“What’s all this?” positively gaped Sir Charles. “How on earth do you
+make that out?”
+
+“Mrs. Bendix was the objective all the time,” Roger went on more
+soberly. “That’s why the plot was so ingenious. Every single thing was
+anticipated. It was foreseen that, if Bendix could be brought
+naturally into Sir Eustace’s presence when the parcel was being
+opened, the latter would hand the chocolates over to him. It was
+foreseen that the police would look for the criminal among Sir
+Eustace’s associates, and not the dead woman’s. It was probably even
+foreseen, Bradley, that the crime would be considered the work of a
+woman, whereas really, of course, chocolates were employed because it
+was a woman who was the objective.”
+
+“Well, well well!” said Mr. Bradley.
+
+“Then it’s your theory,” pursued Sir Charles, “that the murderer was
+an associate of the dead woman’s, and had nothing to do with Sir
+Eustace at all?” He spoke as if not altogether averse from such a
+theory.
+
+“It is,” Roger confirmed. “But first let me tell you what finally
+opened my eyes to the trap. The vital piece of information I got in
+Bond Street was this: _that Mrs. Bendix had seen that play_, _The
+Creaking Skull_, _before_. There’s no doubt about it; she actually
+went with my informant herself. You see the extraordinary
+significance, of course. That means that she already knew the answer
+to that bet she made with her husband about the identity of the
+villain.”
+
+A little intake of breath testified to a general appreciation of this
+information.
+
+“Oh! What a marvellous piece of divine irony.” Miss Dammers was
+exercising her usual faculty of viewing things from the impersonal
+aspect. “Then she actually brought her own retribution on herself. The
+bet she won virtually killed her.”
+
+“Yes,” said Roger. “The irony hadn’t failed to strike even my
+informant. The punishment, as she pointed out, was so much greater
+than the crime. But I don’t think,”—Roger spoke very gently, in a
+mighty effort to curb his elation—“I don’t think that even now you
+quite see my point.”
+
+Everybody looked inquiringly.
+
+“You’ve all heard Mrs. Bendix quite minutely described. You must all
+have formed a tolerably close mental picture of her. She was a
+straightforward, honest girl, making if anything (also according to my
+informant) almost too much of a fetich of straight dealing and playing
+the game. Does the making of a bet to which she already knew the
+answer, fit into that picture or does it not?”
+
+“Ah!” nodded Mr. Bradley. “Oh, very pretty.”
+
+“Just so. It is (with apologies to Sir Charles) a psychological
+impossibility. It really is, you know, Sir Charles; one simply can’t
+see her doing such a thing, in fun or out of it; and I gather that fun
+wasn’t her strong suit, by any means.
+
+“_Ergo_,” concluded Roger briskly, “she didn’t. _Ergo_, that bet was
+never made. _Ergo_, there never was such a bet. _Ergo_, Bendix was
+lying. _Ergo_, Bendix wanted to get hold of those chocolates for some
+reason other than he stated. And the chocolates being what they were,
+there was only one other reason.
+
+“That’s my case.”
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+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.
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+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.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+It was quite evident that, as he had said, Mr. Chitterwick did not
+want to speak. He looked appealingly round the circle of faces the
+next evening when Roger asked him to do so, but the faces remained
+decidedly unsympathetic. Mr. Chitterwick, expressed the faces plainly,
+was being a silly old woman.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick cleared his throat nervously two or three times and
+took the plunge.
+
+“Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I quite realise what you must be
+thinking, and I must plead for leniency. I can only say in excuse of
+what you must consider my perversity, that convincing though Miss
+Dammers’s clever exposition was and definite as her proofs appeared,
+we have listened to so many apparently convincing solutions of this
+mystery and been confronted with so many seemingly definite proofs,
+that I could not help feeling that perhaps even Miss Dammers’s theory
+might not prove on reflection to be not quite so strong as one would
+at first think.” Mr. Chitterwick, having surmounted this tall
+obstacle, blinked rapidly but was unable to recall the next sentence
+he had prepared so carefully.
+
+He jumped it, and went on a little. “As the one to whom has fallen the
+task, both a privilege and a responsibility, of speaking last, you may
+not consider it out of place if I take the liberty of summing up the
+various conclusions that have been reached here, so different in both
+their methods and results. Not to waste time however in going over old
+ground, I have prepared a little chart which may show more clearly the
+various contrasting theories, parallels, and suggested criminals.
+Perhaps members would care to pass it round.”
+
+With much hesitation Mr. Chitterwick produced the chart on which he
+had spent so much careful thought, and offered it to Mr. Bradley on
+his right. Mr. Bradley received it graciously, and even condescended
+to lay it on the table between himself and Miss Dammers and examine
+it. Mr. Chitterwick looked artlessly gratified.
+
+    Mr. Chitterwick’s Chart
+
+                              ANGLE OF           SALIENT
+ SOLVER         MOTIVE        VIEW               FEATURE
+ ---------------------------------------------------------------- . . .
+ Sir Charles    Gain          _Cui bono_         Notepaper
+  Wildman
+ Mrs. Fielder-  Elimination   _Cherchez la       Hidden triangle
+  Flemming                     femme_
+ Bradley (1)    Experiment    Detective-         Nitrobenzene
+                               novelist’s
+ Bradley (2)    Jealousy      Character of       Criminological
+                               Sir Eustace        knowledge of murderer
+ Sheringham     Gain          Character of       Bet
+                               Mr. Bendix
+ Miss Dammers   Elimination   Psychology of      Criminal’s
+                               all participants   character
+ Police         Conviction,   General            Material clues
+                 or lust of
+                 killing
+
+     Mr. Chitterwick’s Chart (continued)
+
+                     METHOD OF       PARALLEL
+ SOLVER              PROOF           CASE             CRIMINAL
+ ------------ . . . ---------------------------------------------------
+ Sir Charles         Inductive       Marie Lafarge    Lady Pennefather
+  Wildman
+ Mrs. Fielder-       Intuitive and   Molineux         Sir Charles
+  Flemming            Inductive                        Wildman
+ Bradley (1)         Scientific      Dr. Wilson       Bradley
+                      deduction
+ Bradley (2)         Deductive       Christina        Woman unnamed
+                                      Edmunds
+ Sheringham          Deductive and   Carlyle Harris   Bendix
+                      Inductive
+ Miss Dammers        Psychological   Tawell           Sir Eustace
+                      deduction                        Pennefather
+ Police              Routine         Horwood          Unknown fanatic
+                                                       or lunatic
+
+“You will see,” said Mr. Chitterwick, with a shade more confidence,
+“that practically speaking no two members have agreed on any one
+single matter of importance. The divergence of opinion and method is
+really remarkable. And in spite of such variations each member has
+felt confident that his or her solution was the right one. This chart,
+more than any words of mine could, emphasises not only the extreme
+openness, as Mr. Bradley would say, of the case before us, but
+illustrates another of Mr. Bradley’s observations too, that is how
+surprisingly easy it is to prove anything one may desire, by a process
+either of conscious or of unwitting selection.
+
+“Miss Dammers, I think,” suggested Mr. Chitterwick, “may perhaps find
+that chart especially interesting. I am not myself a student of
+psychology, but even to me it was striking to notice how the solution
+of each member reflected, if I may say so, that particular member’s
+own trend of thought and character. Sir Charles, for instance, whose
+training has naturally led him to realise the importance of the
+material, will not mind if I point out that the angle from which he
+viewed the problem was the very material one of _cui bono_, while the
+equally material evidence of the notepaper formed for him its salient
+feature. At the other end of the scale, Miss Dammers herself regards
+the case almost entirely from a psychological view-point and takes as
+its salient feature the character, as unconsciously revealed, of the
+criminal.
+
+“Between these two, other members have paid attention to psychological
+and material evidence in varying proportions. Then again the methods
+of building up the case against a suspected person have been widely
+different. Some of us have relied almost entirely on inductive
+methods, some almost wholly on deductive; while some, like Mr.
+Sheringham, have blended the two. In short, the task our President set
+us has proved a most instructive lesson in comparative detection.”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick cleared his throat, smiled nervously, and continued.
+“There is another chart which I might have made, and which I think
+would have been no less illuminating than this one. It is a chart of
+the singularly different deductions drawn by different members from
+the undisputed facts in the case. Mr. Bradley might have found
+particular interest in this possible chart, as a writer of
+detective-stories.
+
+“For I have often noticed,” apologised Mr. Chitterwick to the writers
+of detective-stories _en masse_, “that in books of that kind it is
+frequently assumed that any given fact can admit of only one single
+deduction, and that invariably the right one. Nobody else is capable
+of drawing any deductions at all but the author’s favourite detective,
+and the ones he draws (in the books where the detective is capable of
+drawing deductions at all which, alas, are only too few) are
+invariably right. Miss Dammers mentioned something of the kind one
+evening herself, with her illustration of the two bottles of ink.
+
+“As an example of what really happens therefore, I should like to cite
+the sheet of Mason’s notepaper in this case. From that single piece of
+paper the following deductions have at one time or another been drawn:
+
+ 1. That the criminal was an employee or ex-employee of Mason & Sons.
+ 2. That the criminal was a customer of Mason & Sons.
+ 3. That the criminal was a printer, or had access to a
+    printing-press.
+ 4. That the criminal was a lawyer, acting on behalf of Mason & Sons.
+ 5. That the criminal was a relative of an ex-employee of
+    Mason & Sons.
+ 6. That the criminal was a would-be customer of Webster’s, the
+    printers.
+
+“There have been plenty of other deductions of course from that sheet
+of paper, such as that the chance possession of it suggested the whole
+method of the crime, but I am only calling attention to the ones which
+were to point directly to the criminal’s identity. There are no less
+than six of them, you see, and all mutually contradictory.”
+
+“I’ll write a book for you, Mr. Chitterwick,” promised Mr. Bradley,
+“in which the detective shall draw six contradictory deductions from
+each fact. He’ll probably end up by arresting seventy-two different
+people for the murder and committing suicide because he finds
+afterwards that he must have done it himself. I’ll dedicate the book
+to you.”
+
+“Yes, do,” beamed Mr. Chitterwick. “For really, it wouldn’t be far
+from what we’ve had in this case. For example, I only called attention
+to the notepaper. Besides that there were the poison, the typewriter,
+the post-mark, the exactness of the dose—oh, many more facts. And from
+each one of them not much less than half-a-dozen different deductions
+have been drawn.
+
+“In fact,” Mr. Chitterwick summed up, “it was as much as anything the
+different deductions drawn by different members that proved their
+different cases.”
+
+“On second thoughts,” decided Mr. Bradley, “my detectives in future
+will be the kind that don’t draw any deductions at all. Besides, that
+will be so much easier for me.”
+
+“So with these few remarks on the solutions we have already heard,”
+continued Mr. Chitterwick, “which I hope members will pardon me, I
+will hurry on to my explanation of why I asked Mr. Sheringham so
+urgently last evening not to go to Scotland Yard at once.”
+
+Five faces expressed silent agreement that it was about time Mr.
+Chitterwick was heard on that point.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick appeared to be conscious of the thoughts behind the
+faces, for his manner became a little flurried.
+
+“I must first deal very briefly with the case against Sir Eustace
+Pennefather, as Miss Dammers gave it us last night. Without belittling
+her presentation of it in any way at all, I must just point out that
+her two chief reasons for fixing the guilt upon him seemed to me to be
+firstly that he was the type of person whom she had already decided
+the criminal must be, and secondly that he had been conducting an
+intrigue with Mrs. Bendix and certainly would have seemed to have some
+cause for wishing her out of the way—_if_ (but only if) Miss Dammers’s
+own view of the progress of that intrigue was the correct one.”
+
+“But the typewriter, Mr. Chitterwick!” cried Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,
+loyal to her sex.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick started. “Oh, yes; the typewriter. I’m coming to that.
+But before I reach it, I should like to mention two other points which
+Miss Dammers would have us believe are important material evidence
+against Sir Eustace, as opposed to the psychological. That he should
+be in the habit of buying Mason’s liqueur chocolates for his—his
+female friends hardly seems to me even significant. If every one who
+is in the habit of buying Mason’s liqueur chocolates is to be suspect,
+then London must be full of suspects. And surely even so unoriginal a
+murderer as Sir Eustace would seem to be, would have taken the
+elementary precaution of choosing some vehicle for the poison which is
+not generally associated with his name, instead of one that is. And if
+I may venture the opinion, Sir Eustace is not quite such a dunderhead
+as Miss Dammers would seem to think.
+
+“The second point is that the girl in Webster’s should have
+recognised, and even identified, Sir Eustace from his photograph. That
+also doesn’t appear to me, if Miss Dammers doesn’t mind my saying so,
+nearly as significant as she would have us believe. I have
+ascertained,” said Mr. Chitterwick, not without pride (here too was a
+piece of real detecting) “that Sir Eustace Pennefather buys his
+notepaper at Webster’s, and has done so for years. He was in there
+about a month ago to order a fresh supply. It would be surprising,
+considering that he has a title, if the girl who served him had not
+remembered him; it cannot be considered significant,” said Mr.
+Chitterwick quite firmly, “that she does.
+
+“Apart from the typewriter, then, and perhaps the copies of the
+criminological books, Miss Dammers’s case has no real evidence to
+support it at all, for the matter of the broken alibi, I am afraid,
+must be held to be neither here nor there. I don’t wish to be unfair,”
+said Mr. Chitterwick carefully, “but I think I am justified in saying
+that Miss Dammers’s case against Sir Eustace rests entirely and solely
+upon the evidence of the typewriter.” He gazed round anxiously for
+possible objections.
+
+One came, promptly. “But you can’t possibly get round that,” exclaimed
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming impatiently.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick looked a trifle distressed. “Is ‘get round’ quite the
+right expression? I’m not trying wilfully or maliciously to pick holes
+in Miss Dammers’s case just for amusement. You must really believe
+that. Please think that I am actuated only by a desire to bring this
+crime home to its real perpetrator. And with that end alone in view, I
+can certainly suggest an explanation of the typewriter evidence which
+excludes the guilt of Sir Eustace.”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick looked so unhappy at what he conceived to be Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming’s insinuation that he was merely wasting the Circle’s
+time, that Roger spoke to him kindly.
+
+“You can?” he said gently, as one encourages one’s daughter on drawing
+a cow, which if not much like a cow is certainly unlike any other
+animal on earth. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Chitterwick. How do you
+explain it then?”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick, responding to treatment, shone with pride. “Dear me!
+You can’t see it really? Nobody sees it?”
+
+It seemed that nobody saw it.
+
+“And yet the possibility of such a thing has been before me right from
+the beginning of the case,” crowed the now triumphant Mr. Chitterwick.
+“Well, well!” He arranged his glasses on his nose and beamed round the
+circle, his round red face positively aglow.
+
+“Well, what is the explanation, Mr. Chitterwick?” queried Miss
+Dammers, when it seemed that Mr. Chitterwick was going to continue
+beaming in silence for ever.
+
+“Oh! Oh, yes; of course. Why, to put it one way, Miss Dammers, that
+you were wrong and Mr. Sheringham was right, in your respective
+estimates of the criminal’s ability. That there was, in fact, an
+extremely able and ingenious mind behind this murder (Miss Dammers’s
+attempts to prove the contrary were, I’m afraid another case of
+special pleading). And that one of the ways in which this ingenuity
+was shown, was to arrange the evidence in such a way that if any one
+were to be suspected it would be Sir Eustace. That the evidence of the
+typewriter, in a word, and of the criminological books was, as I
+believe the technical word is, ‘_rigged_.’” Mr. Chitterwick resumed
+his beam.
+
+Everybody sat up with what might have been a concerted jerk. In a
+flash the tide of feeling towards Mr. Chitterwick had turned. The man
+_had_ got something to say after all. There actually was an idea
+behind that untimely request of the previous evening.
+
+Mr. Bradley rose to the occasion, and he quite forgot to speak quite
+so patronisingly as usual. “I say—dam’ good, Chitterwick! But can you
+substantiate that?”
+
+“Oh, yes. I think so,” said Mr. Chitterwick, basking in the rays of
+appreciation that were being shone on him.
+
+“You’ll be telling us next you know who did it,” Roger smiled.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick smiled back. “Oh, I know _that_.”
+
+“_What!_” exclaimed five voices in chorus.
+
+“I know that, of course,” said Mr. Chitterwick modestly. “You’ve
+practically told me that yourselves. Coming last of all, you see, my
+task was comparatively simple. All I had to do was to sort out the
+true from the false in everybody else’s statements, and—well, there
+_was_ the truth.”
+
+The rest of the Circle looked their surprise at having told Mr.
+Chitterwick the truth without knowing it themselves.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick’s face took on a meditative aspect. “Perhaps I may
+confess now that when our President first propounded his idea to us, I
+was filled with dismay. I had had no practical experience of
+detecting, I was quite at a loss as to how to set about it, and I had
+no theory of the case at all. I could not even see a starting-point.
+The week flew by, so far as I was concerned, and left me exactly where
+I had been at its beginning. On the evening Sir Charles spoke he
+convinced me completely. The next evening, for a short time, Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming convinced me too.
+
+“Mr. Bradley did not altogether convince me that he had committed the
+murder himself, but if he had named any one else then I should have
+been convinced; as it was, he convinced me that his—his discarded
+mistress theory,” said Mr. Chitterwick bravely, “must be the correct
+one. That indeed was the only idea I had had at all, that the crime
+might be the work of one of Sir Eustace’s—h’m!—discarded mistresses.
+
+“But the next evening Mr. Sheringham convinced me just as definitely
+that Mr. Bendix was the murderer. It was only last night, during Miss
+Dammers’s exposition, that I at last began to realise the truth.”
+
+“Then I was the only one who didn’t convince you, Mr. Chitterwick?”
+Miss Dammers smiled.
+
+“I’m afraid,” apologised Mr. Chitterwick, “that is so.”
+
+He mused for a moment.
+
+“It is really remarkable, quite remarkable, how near in some way or
+other everybody got to the truth of this affair. Not a single person
+failed to bring out at least one important fact, or make at least one
+important deduction correctly. Fortunately, when I realised that the
+solutions were going to differ so widely, I made copious notes of the
+preceding ones and kept them up to date each evening as soon as I got
+home. I thus had a complete record of the productions of all these
+brains, so much superior to my own.”
+
+“No, no,” murmured Mr. Bradley.
+
+“Last night I sat up very late, poring over these notes, separating
+the true from the false. It might perhaps interest members to hear my
+conclusions in this respect?” Mr. Chitterwick put forward the
+suggestion with the utmost diffidence.
+
+Everybody assured Mr. Chitterwick that they would be only too
+gratified to hear where they had stumbled inadvertently on the truth.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+Mr. Chitterwick consulted a page of his notes. For a moment he looked
+a little distressed. “Sir Charles,” he began. “Er—Sir Charles . . .”
+It was plain that Mr. Chitterwick was finding difficulty in
+discovering any point at all on which Sir Charles had been right, and
+he was a kindly man. He brightened. “Oh, yes, of course. Sir Charles
+was the first to point out the important fact that there had been an
+erasure on the piece of notepaper used for the forged letter. That
+was—er—very helpful.
+
+“Then he was right too when he put forward the suggestion that Sir
+Eustace’s impending divorce was really the mainspring of the whole
+tragedy. Though I am afraid,” Mr. Chitterwick felt compelled to add,
+“that the inference he drew was not the correct one. He was quite
+right too in feeling that the criminal, in such a clever plot, would
+take steps to arrange an alibi, and that there was, in fact, an alibi
+in the case that would have to be circumvented. But then again it was
+not Lady Pennefather’s.
+
+“Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” continued Mr. Chitterwick, “was quite right
+to insist that the murder was the work of somebody with a knowledge of
+criminology. That was a very clever inference, and I am glad,” beamed
+Mr. Chitterwick, “to be able to assure her that it was perfectly
+correct. She contributed another important piece of information too,
+just as vital to the real story underlying this tragedy as to her own
+case, namely that Sir Eustace was not in love with Miss Wildman at all
+but was hoping to marry her simply for her money. Had that not been
+the case,” said Mr. Chitterwick, shaking his head, “I fear, I very
+much fear, that it would have been Miss Wildman who met her death
+instead of Mrs. Bendix.”
+
+“Good God!” muttered Sir Charles; and it is perhaps as great a tribute
+as Mr. Chitterwick was ever to receive that the K.C. accepted this
+startling news without question.
+
+“That clinches it,” muttered Mr. Bradley to Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
+“Discarded mistress.”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick turned to him. “As for you, Bradley, it’s astonishing
+how near you came to the truth. Amazing!” Mr. Chitterwick registered
+amazement. “Even in your first case, against yourself, so many of your
+conclusions were perfectly right. The final result of your deductions
+from the nitrobenzene, for instance; the fact that the criminal must
+be neat-fingered and of a methodical and creative mind; even, what
+appeared to me at the time just a trifle far-fetched, that a copy of
+Taylor would be found on the criminal’s shelves.
+
+“Then beyond the fact that No. 4 must be qualified to ‘must have had
+an opportunity of secretly obtaining a sheet of Mason’s notepaper,’
+all twelve of your conditions were quite right, with the exception of
+6, which does not admit of an alibi, and 7 and 8, about the Onyx pen
+and Harfield’s ink. Mr. Sheringham was right in that matter with his
+rather more subtle point of the criminal’s probable unobtrusive
+borrowing of the pen and ink. Which is exactly what happened, of
+course, with regard to the typewriter.
+
+“As for your second case—well!” Mr. Chitterwick seemed to be without
+words to express his admiration of Mr. Bradley’s second case. “You
+reached to the truth in almost every particular. You saw that it was a
+woman’s crime, you deduced the outraged feminine feelings underlying
+the whole affair, you staked your whole case on the criminal’s
+knowledge of criminology. It was really most penetrating.”
+
+“In fact,” said Mr. Bradley, carefully concealing his gratification,
+“I did everything possible except find the murderess.”
+
+“Well, that is so, of course,” deprecated Mr. Chitterwick, somehow
+conveying the impression that after all finding the murderess was a
+very minor matter compared with Mr. Bradley’s powers of penetration.
+
+“And then we come to Mr. Sheringham.”
+
+“Don’t!” implored Roger. “Leave him out.”
+
+“Oh, but your reconstruction was very clever,” Mr. Chitterwick assured
+him with great earnestness. “You put a new aspect on the whole affair,
+you know, by your suggestion that it was the right victim who was
+killed after all.”
+
+“Well, it seems that I erred in good company,” Roger said tritely,
+with a glance at Miss Dammers.
+
+“But you didn’t err,” corrected Mr. Chitterwick.
+
+“Oh?” Roger showed his surprise. “Then it was all aimed against Mrs.
+Bendix?”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick looked confused. “Haven’t I told you about that? I’m
+afraid I’m doing this in a very muddle-headed way. Yes, it is
+partially true to say that the plot was aimed against Mrs. Bendix. But
+the real position, I think, is that it was aimed against Mrs. Bendix
+and Sir Eustace jointly. You came very near the truth, Mr. Sheringham,
+except that you substituted a jealous husband for a jealous rival.
+Very near indeed. And of course you were entirely right in your point
+that the method was not suggested by the chance possession of the
+notepaper or anything like that, but by previous cases.”
+
+“I’m glad I was entirely right over something,” murmured Roger.
+
+“And Miss Dammers,” bowed Mr. Chitterwick, “was most helpful. _Most_
+helpful.”
+
+“Although not convincing,” supplemented that lady drily.
+
+“Although I’m afraid I did not find her altogether convincing,” agreed
+Mr. Chitterwick, with an apologetic air. “But it was really the theory
+she gave us that at last showed me the truth. For she also put yet
+another aspect on the crime, with her information regarding
+the—h’m!—the affair between Mrs. Bendix and Sir Eustace. And that
+really,” said Mr. Chitterwick, with another little bow to the
+informant, “was the foundation-stone of the whole business.”
+
+“I didn’t see how it could fail to be,” said Miss Dammers. “But I
+still maintain that my deductions from it are the correct ones.”
+
+“Perhaps if I may just put my own forward?” hesitated Mr. Chitterwick,
+apparently somewhat dashed.
+
+Miss Dammers accorded a somewhat tart permission.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick collected himself. “Oh, yes; I should have said that
+Miss Dammers was quite right in one important particular, her
+assumption that it was not so much the affair between Mrs. Bendix and
+Sir Eustace that was at the bottom of the crime, as Mrs. Bendix’s
+character. That really brought about her own death. Miss Dammers, I
+should imagine, was perfectly right in her tracing out of the
+intrigue, and her imaginative insight into Mrs. Bendix’s reactions—I
+think that is the word?” Mr. Chitterwick inquired diffidently of
+authority. “Mrs. Bendix’s reactions to it, but not, I consider, in her
+deductions regarding Sir Eustace’s growing boredom.
+
+“Sir Eustace, I am led to believe, was less inclined to be bored than
+to share the lady’s distress. For the real point, which happened to
+escape Miss Dammers, is that Sir Eustace was quite infatuated with
+Mrs. Bendix. Far more so than she with him.
+
+“That,” pronounced Mr. Chitterwick, “is one of the determining factors
+in this tragedy.”
+
+Everybody pinned the factor down. The Circle’s attitude towards Mr.
+Chitterwick by this time was one of intelligent expectation. Probably
+no one really thought that he had found the right solution, and Miss
+Dammers’s stock had not been appreciably lowered. But certainly it
+seemed that the man had at any rate got something to offer.
+
+“Miss Dammers,” proceeded the object of their attention, “was right in
+another point she made too, namely that the inspiration of this
+murder, or perhaps I should say the method of it, certainly came from
+that book of poisoning cases she mentioned, of which her own copy (she
+tells us) is at present in Sir Eustace’s rooms—planted there,” added
+Mr. Chitterwick, much shocked, “by the murderess.
+
+“And another useful fact she established. That Mr. Bendix had been
+lured (really,” apologised Mr. Chitterwick, “I can use no other word)
+to the Rainbow Club that morning. But it was not Mrs. Bendix who
+telephoned to him on the previous afternoon. Nor was he sent there for
+the particular purpose of receiving the chocolates from Sir Eustace.
+The fact that the lunch appointment had been cancelled was altogether
+outside the criminal’s knowledge. Mr. Bendix was sent there to be a
+witness to Sir Eustace receiving the parcel; that was all.
+
+“The intention was, of course, that Mr. Bendix should have Sir Eustace
+so connected in his mind with the chocolates that if suspicion should
+ever arise against any definite person, that of Mr. Bendix would be
+directed before long to Sir Eustace himself. For the fact of his
+wife’s intrigue would be bound to come to his knowledge, as indeed I
+understand privately that it has, causing him naturally the most
+intense distress.”
+
+“So that’s why he’s been looking haggard,” exclaimed Roger.
+
+“Without doubt,” Mr. Chitterwick agreed gravely. “It was a wicked
+plot. Sir Eustace, you see, was expected to be dead by then and
+incapable of denying his guilt, and such evidence as there was had
+been carefully arranged to point to murder and suicide on his part.
+That the police never suspected him (that is, so far as we know),
+simply shows that investigations do not always take the turn that the
+criminal expects. And in this case,” observed Mr. Chitterwick with
+some severity, “I think the criminal was altogether too subtle.”
+
+“If that was her very involved reason for ensuring the presence of Mr.
+Bendix at the Rainbow Club,” agreed Miss Dammers with some irony, “her
+subtlety certainly overreached itself.” It was evident that not only
+on the point of psychology did Miss Dammers not find herself ready to
+accept Mr. Chitterwick’s conclusions.
+
+“That, indeed, is exactly what happened,” Mr. Chitterwick pointed out
+mildly. “Oh, and while we are on the subject of the chocolates, I
+ought to add that the reason why they were sent to Sir Eustace’s club
+was not only so that Mr. Bendix might be a witness of their arrival,
+but also, I should imagine, so that Sir Eustace would be sure to take
+them with him to his lunch-appointment. The murderess of course would
+be sufficiently conversant with his ways to know that he would almost
+certainly spend the morning at his club and go straight on to lunch
+from there; the odds were enormous that he would take the box of Mrs.
+Bendix’s favourite chocolates with him.
+
+“I think we may regard it as an instance of the criminal’s habitual
+overlooking of some vital point that is to lead eventually to
+detection, that this murderess completely lost sight of the
+possibility that the appointment for lunch might be cancelled. She is
+a particularly ingenious criminal,” said Mr. Chitterwick with gentle
+admiration, “and yet even she is not immune from this failing.”
+
+“Who is she, Mr. Chitterwick?” ingenuously asked Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick answered her with a positively roguish smile.
+“Everybody else has withheld the name of the suspect till the right
+moment. Surely I may be allowed to do so too.
+
+“Well, I think I have cleared up most of the doubtful points now.
+Mason’s notepaper was used, I should say, because chocolates had been
+decided on as the vehicle and Mason’s were the only chocolate
+manufacturing firm who were customers of Webster’s. As it happened,
+this fitted very well, because it was always Mason’s chocolates that
+Sir Eustace bought for his—er—his friends.”
+
+Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked puzzled. “Because Mason’s were the only
+firm who were customers of Webster’s? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
+
+“Oh, I _am_ explaining all this badly,” cried Mr. Chitterwick in much
+distress, assuming all blame for this obtuseness. “It had to be some
+firm on Webster’s books, you see, because Sir Eustace has his
+notepaper printed at Webster’s, and he was to be identified as having
+been in there recently if the purloined piece was ever connected with
+the sample book. Exactly, in fact, as Miss Dammers did.”
+
+Roger whistled. “Oh, I see. You mean, we’ve all been putting the cart
+before the horse over this piece of notepaper?”
+
+“I’m afraid so,” regretted Mr. Chitterwick with earnestness. “Really,
+I’m very much afraid so.”
+
+Insensibly opinion was beginning to turn in Mr. Chitterwick’s favour.
+To say the least, he was being just as convincing as Miss Dammers had
+been, and that without subtle psychological reconstructions and
+references to “values.” Only Miss Dammers herself remained outwardly
+sceptical; but that, after all, was only to be expected.
+
+“Humph!” said Miss Dammers, sceptically.
+
+“What about the motive, Mr. Chitterwick?” nodded Sir Charles with
+solemnity. “Jealousy, did you say? I don’t think you’ve quite cleared
+up that yet, have you?”
+
+“Oh, yes, of course.” Mr. Chitterwick actually blushed. “Dear me, I
+meant to make that clear right at the beginning. I _am_ doing this
+badly. No, not jealousy, I’m inclined to fancy. Revenge. Or revenge at
+any rate so far as Sir Eustace was concerned, and jealousy as regards
+Mrs. Bendix. From what I can understand, you see, this lady is—dear
+me,” said Mr. Chitterwick, in distress and embarrassment, “this is
+very delicate ground. But I must trespass on it. Well—though she had
+concealed it successfully from her friends, this lady had been very
+much in love with Sir Eustace, and become—er—had become,” concluded
+Mr. Chitterwick bravely, “his mistress. That was a long time ago.
+
+“Sir Eustace was very much in love with her too, and though he used to
+amuse himself with other women it was understood by both that this was
+quite permissible so long as there was nothing serious. The lady, I
+should say, is very modern and broad-minded. It was understood, I
+believe, that he was to marry her as soon as he could induce his wife
+(who was quite ignorant of this affair) to divorce him. But when this
+was at last arranged, Sir Eustace found that owing to his extreme
+financial stringency, it was imperative that he should marry money
+instead.
+
+“The lady was naturally very disappointed, but knowing that Sir
+Eustace did not care at all for—er—was not really in love with Miss
+Wildman and the marriage would only be, so far as he was concerned,
+one of convenience, she reconciled herself to the future and, quite
+seeing Sir Eustace’s necessity, did not resent the introduction of
+Miss Wildman—whom indeed,” Mr. Chitterwick felt himself compelled to
+add, “she considered as quite negligible. It never occurred to her to
+doubt, you see, that the old arrangement would hold good, and she
+would still have Sir Eustace’s real love with which to content
+herself.
+
+“But then something quite unforeseen happened. Sir Eustace not only
+fell out of love with her. He fell unmistakably in love with Mrs.
+Bendix. Moreover, he succeeded in making her his mistress. That was
+quite recently, since he began to pay his addresses to Miss Wildman.
+And I think Miss Dammers has given us a true picture of the results in
+Mrs. Bendix’s case if not in that of Sir Eustace.
+
+“Well, you can see the position then, so far as this other lady was
+concerned. Sir Eustace was getting his divorce, marriage with the
+negligible Miss Wildman was now out of the question, but marriage with
+Mrs. Bendix, tortured in her conscience and seeing in divorce from her
+husband and marriage with Sir Eustace the only means of solving
+it—marriage with Mrs. Bendix, the real beloved, and even more eligible
+than Miss Wildman so far as the financial side was concerned, was to
+all appearances inevitable. I deprecate the use of hackneyed
+quotations as much as anybody, but really I feel that if I permit
+myself to add that hell has no fury like—”
+
+“Can you prove all this, Mr. Chitterwick?” interposed Miss Dammers
+coolly on the hackneyed quotation.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick started. “I—I think so,” he said, though a little
+dubiously.
+
+“I’m inclined to doubt it,” observed Miss Dammers briefly.
+
+Somewhat uncomfortable, under Miss Dammers’s sceptical eye, Mr.
+Chitterwick explained. “Well Sir Eustace, whose acquaintance I have
+been at some pains to cultivate recently . . .” Mr. Chitterwick
+shivered a little, as if the acquaintance had not been his ideal one.
+“Well, from a few indications that Sir Eustace has unconsciously given
+me . . . That is to say, I was questioning him at lunch to-day as
+adroitly as I could, my conviction as to the murderer’s identity
+having been formed at last, and he did unwittingly let fall a few
+trifles which . . .”
+
+“I doubt it,” repeated Miss Dammers bluntly.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick looked quite nonplussed.
+
+Roger hurried to the rescue. “Well, shelving the matter of proof for
+the moment, Mr. Chitterwick, and assuming that your reconstruction of
+the events is just an imaginative one. You’d reached the point where
+marriage between Sir Eustace and Mrs. Bendix had become inevitable.”
+
+“Yes; oh, yes,” said Mr. Chitterwick, with a grateful look towards his
+saviour. “And then of course, this lady formed her terrible decision
+and made her very clever plan. I think I’ve explained all that. Her
+old right of access to Sir Eustace’s rooms enabled her to type the
+letter on his typewriter one day when she knew he was out. She is
+quite a good mimic, and it was easy for her when ringing up Mr. Bendix
+to imitate the sort of voice Miss Delorme might be expected to have.”
+
+“Mr. Chitterwick, do any of us know this woman?” demanded Mrs.
+Fielder-Flemming abruptly.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick looked more embarrassed than ever. “Er—yes,” he
+hesitated. “That is, you must remember it was she who smuggled Miss
+Dammers’s two books into Sir Eustace’s rooms too, you know.”
+
+“I shall have to be more careful about my friends in future, I see,”
+observed Miss Dammers, gently sarcastic.
+
+“An ex-mistress of Sir Eustace’s eh?” Roger murmured, conning over in
+his mind such names as he could remember from that lengthy list.
+
+“Well, yes,” Mr. Chitterwick agreed. “But nobody had any idea of it.
+That is— Dear me, this is very difficult.” Mr. Chitterwick wiped his
+forehead with his handkerchief, and looked extremely unhappy.
+
+“She’d managed to conceal it?” Roger pressed him.
+
+“Er—yes. She’d certainly managed to conceal the true state of matters
+between them, very cleverly indeed. I don’t think anybody suspected it
+at all.”
+
+“They apparently didn’t know each other?” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming
+persisted. “They were never seen about together?”
+
+“Oh, at one time they were,” said Mr. Chitterwick, looking in quite a
+hunted way from face to face. “Quite frequently. Then, I understand,
+they thought it better to pretend to have quarrelled and—and met only
+in secret.”
+
+“Isn’t it time you told us this woman’s name, Chitterwick?” boomed Sir
+Charles down the table, looking judicial.
+
+Mr. Chitterwick scrambled desperately out of this fire of questions.
+“It’s very strange, you know, how murderers never will let well alone,
+isn’t it?” he said breathlessly. “It happens so often. I’m quite sure
+I should never have stumbled on the truth in this case if the
+murderess had only left things as they were, in accordance with her
+own admirable plot. But this trying to fix the guilt on another
+person . . . Really, from the intelligence displayed in this
+case, she ought to have been above that. Of course her plot _had_
+miscarried. Been only half-successful, I should say. But why not
+accept the partial failure? Why tempt Providence? Trouble was
+inevitable—inevitable—”
+
+Mr. Chitterwick seemed by this time utterly distressed. He was
+shuffling his notes with extreme nervousness, and wriggling in his
+chair. The glances he kept darting from face to face were almost
+pleading. But what he was pleading for remained obscure.
+
+“Dear me,” said Mr. Chitterwick, as if at his wits’ end. “This is very
+difficult. I’d better clear up the remaining point. It’s about the
+alibi.
+
+“In my opinion the alibi was an afterthought, owing to a piece of
+luck. Southampton Street is near both the Cecil and the Savoy, isn’t
+it? I happen to know that this lady has a friend, another woman, of a
+somewhat unconventional nature. She is continually away on exploring
+expeditions and so on, usually quite alone. She never stays in London
+more than a night or two, and I should imagine she is the sort of
+woman who rarely reads the newspapers. And if she did, I think she
+would certainly not divulge any suspicion they might convey to her,
+especially concerning a friend of her own.
+
+“I have ascertained that immediately preceding the crime this woman,
+whose name by the way is Jane Harding, stayed for two nights at the
+Savoy Hotel, and left London, on the morning the chocolates were
+delivered, for Africa. From there she was going on to South America.
+Where she may be now I have not the least idea. Nor, I should say, has
+any one else. But she came to London from Paris, where she had been
+staying for a week.
+
+“The—er—criminal would know about this forthcoming trip to London, and
+so hurried to Paris. (I am afraid,” apologised Mr. Chitterwick
+uneasily, “there is a good deal of guess-work here.) It would be
+simple to ask this other lady to post the parcel in London, as the
+parcel postage is so heavy from France, and just as simple to ensure
+it being delivered on the morning of the lunch-appointment with Mrs.
+Bendix, by saying it was a birthday present, or some other pretext,
+and—and—must be posted to arrive on that particular day.” Mr.
+Chitterwick wiped his forehead again and glanced pathetically at
+Roger. Roger could only stare back in bewilderment.
+
+“Dear me,” muttered Mr. Chitterwick distractedly, “this is _very_
+difficult.—Well, I have satisfied myself that—”
+
+Alicia Dammers had risen to her feet and was unhurriedly picking up
+her belongings. “I’m afraid,” she said, “I have an appointment. Will
+you excuse me, Mr. President?”
+
+“Of course,” said Roger, in some surprise.
+
+At the door Miss Dammers turned back. “I’m so sorry not to be able to
+stay to hear the rest of your case, Mr. Chitterwick. But really, you
+know, as I said, I very much doubt whether you’ll be able to prove
+it.”
+
+She went out of the room.
+
+“She’s perfectly right,” whispered Mr. Chitterwick, gazing after her
+in a petrified way. “I’m quite sure I can’t. But there isn’t the
+faintest doubt. I’m afraid, not the faintest.”
+
+Stupefaction reigned.
+
+“You—you _can’t_ mean. . . ?” twittered Mrs. Fielder-Flemming in a
+strangely shrill voice.
+
+Mr. Bradley was the first to get a grip on himself. “So we did have a
+practising criminologist amongst us after all,” he drawled, in a
+manner that was never Oxford. “How quite interesting.”
+
+Again silence held the Circle.
+
+“So now,” asked the President helplessly, “what the devil do we do?”
+
+Nobody enlightened him.
+
+
+  The End
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note
+
+This transcription follows the text of The British Library edition,
+published in 2016. However, the following errors have been corrected
+from the text:
+
+ * A mismatched quotation mark was repaired (Chapter VI).
+ * “unwieldly” was changed to “unwieldy” (Chapter VII).
+ * “appears to thinks” was changed to “appears to think”
+   (Chapter VIII).
+ * “Aways” was changed to “Always” (Chapter IX).
+ * “Masons’” was changed to “Mason’s” (Chapter XIII).
+ * “assumptions seems” was changed to “assumptions seem”
+   (Chapter XVI).
+
+All other seeming errors and unusual phrasings have been left
+unchanged.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75476 ***