The Poisoned Chocolates Case

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?”