The Poisoned Chocolates Case

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.