The Poisoned Chocolates Case

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.”