The Poisoned Chocolates Case

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.”