The Poisoned Chocolates Case

“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.