The Poisoned Chocolates Case

“From the very beginning of this case,” Miss Dammers proceeded, imperturbable as ever, “I was of the opinion that the greatest clue the criminal had left us was one of which he would have been totally unconscious: the unmistakable indications of his own character. Taking the facts as I found them, and not assuming others as Mr. Sheringham did to justify his own reading of the murderer’s exceptional mentality—” She looked challengingly towards Roger.

“Did I assume any facts that I couldn’t substantiate?” Roger felt himself compelled to answer her look.

“Certainly you did. You assumed for instance that the typewriter on which the letter was written is now at the bottom of the Thames. The plain fact that it is not, once more bears out my own interpretation. Taking the established facts as I found them, then, I was able without difficulty to form the mental picture of the murderer that I have already sketched out for you. But I was careful not to look for somebody who would resemble my picture and then build up a case against him. I simply hung the picture up in my mind, so to speak, in order to compare with it any individual towards whom suspicion might seem to point.

“Now, after I had cleared up Mr. Bendix’s reason for arriving at his club that morning at such an unusual hour, there remained so far as I could see only one obscure point, apparently of no importance, to which nobody’s attention seemed to have been directed. I mean, the engagement Sir Eustace had had that day for lunch, which must subsequently have been cancelled. I don’t know how Mr. Bradley discovered this, but I am quite ready to say how I did. It was from that same useful valet who gave Mrs. Fielder-Flemming so much interesting information.

“I must admit in this connection that I have advantages over the other members of this Circle so far as investigations regarding Sir Eustace were concerned, for not only did I know Sir Eustace himself so well but I knew his valet too; and you may imagine that if Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was able to extract so much from him with the aid of money alone, I myself, backed not only by money but by the advantage of a previous acquaintance, was in a position to obtain still more. In any case, it was not long before the man casually mentioned that four days before the crime Sir Eustace had told him to ring up Fellows’s Hotel in Jermyn Street and reserve a private room for lunch-time on the day on which the murder subsequently took place.

“That was the obscure point, which I thought it worth while to clear up if I could. With whom was Sir Eustace going to lunch that day? Obviously a woman, but which of his many women? The valet could give me no information. So far as he knew, Sir Eustace actually had not got any women at the moment, so intent was he upon the pursuit of Miss Wildman (you must excuse me, Sir Charles), her hand and her fortune. Was it Miss Wildman herself then? I was very soon able to establish that it wasn’t.

“Does it strike you that there is a reminiscent ring about this cancelled lunch-appointment on the day of the crime? It didn’t occur to me for a long time, but of course there is. Mrs. Bendix had a lunch-engagement for that day too, which was cancelled for some reason unknown on the previous afternoon.”

“Mrs. Bendix!” breathed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. Here was a juicy triangle.

Miss Dammers smiled faintly. “Yes, I won’t keep you on the tenterhooks, Mabel. From what Sir Charles told us I knew that Mrs. Bendix and Sir Eustace at any rate were not total strangers, and in the end I managed to connect them. Mrs. Bendix was to have lunched with Sir Eustace, in a private room, at the somewhat notorious Fellows’s Hotel.”

“To discuss her husband’s shortcomings, of course?” suggested Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, more charitably than her hopes.

“Possibly, among other things,” said Miss Dammers nonchalantly. “But the chief reason, no doubt was because she was his mistress.” Miss Dammers dropped this bombshell among the company with as little emotion as if she had remarked that Mrs. Bendix was wearing a jade-green taffeta frock for the occasion.

“Can you—can you substantiate that statement?” asked Sir Charles, the first to recover himself.

Miss Dammers just raised her fine eyebrows. “But of course. I shall make no statements that I can’t substantiate. Mrs. Bendix had been in the habit of lunching at least twice a week with Sir Eustace, and occasionally dining too, at Fellows’s Hotel, always in the same room. They took considerable precautions and used to arrive not only at the hotel but in the room itself quite independently of each other; outside the room they were never seen together. But the waiter who attended them (always the same waiter) has signed a declaration for me that he recognised Mrs. Bendix, from the photographs published after her death, as the woman who used to come there with Sir Eustace Pennefather.”

“He signed a declaration for you, eh?” mused Mr. Bradley. “You must find detecting an expensive hobby too, Miss Dammers.”

“One can afford one expensive hobby, Mr. Bradley.”

“But just because she lunched with him . . .” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was once more speaking with the voice of charity. “I mean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she was his mistress, does it? Not, of course, that I think any the less of her if she was,” she added hastily, remembering the official attitude.

“Communicating with the room in which they had their meals is a bedroom,” replied Miss Dammers, in a desiccated tone of voice. “Invariably after they had gone, the waiter informed me, he found the bedclothes disarranged and the bed showing signs of recent use. I imagine that would be accepted as clear enough evidence of adultery, Sir Charles?”

“Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” rumbled Sir Charles, in high embarrassment. Sir Charles was always exceedingly embarrassed when women used words like “adultery” and “sexual perversions” and even “mistress” to him, out of business hours. Sir Charles was regrettably old-fashioned.

“Sir Eustace, of course,” added Miss Dammers in her detached way, “had nothing to fear from the King’s Proctor.”

She took another sip of water, while the others tried to accustom themselves to this new light on the case and the surprising avenues it illuminated.

Miss Dammers proceeded to illuminate them still further, with powerful beams from her psychological searchlight. “They must have made a curious couple those two. Their widely differing scales of values, the contrast of their respective reactions to the business that brought them together, the possibility that not even in a common passion could their minds establish any point of real contact. I want you to examine the psychology of the situation as closely as you can, because the murder was derived directly from it.

“What can have induced Mrs. Bendix in the first place to become that man’s mistress I don’t know. I won’t be so trite as to say I can’t imagine, because I can imagine all sorts of ways in which it may have happened. There is a curious mental stimulus to a good but stupid woman in a bad man’s badness. If she has a touch of the reformer in her, as most good women have, she soon becomes obsessed with the futile desire to save him from himself. And in seven cases out of ten her first step in doing so is to descend to his level.

“Not that she considers herself at first to be descending at all; a good woman invariably suffers for quite a long time from the delusion that whatever she does, her own particular brand of goodness cannot become smirched. She may share a reprobate’s bed with him, because she knows that only through her body at first can she hope to influence him, until contact is established through the body with the soul and he may be led into better ways than a habit of going to bed in the daytime; but the initial sharing doesn’t reflect on her own purity in the least. It is a hackneyed observation but I must insist on it once more: good women have the most astonishing powers of self-deception.

“I do consider Mrs. Bendix as a good woman, before she met Sir Eustace. Her trouble was that she thought herself so much better than she was. Her constant references to honour and playing the game, which Mr. Sheringham quoted, show that. She was infatuated with her own goodness. And so, of course, was Sir Eustace. He had probably never enjoyed the complaisance of a really good woman before. The seduction of her (which was probably very difficult) would have amused him enormously. He must have had to listen to hour after hour’s talk about honour, and reform, and spirituality, but he would have borne it patiently enough for the exquisite revenge on which he had set his heart. The first two or three visits to Fellows’s Hotel must have delighted him.

“But after that it became less and less amusing. Mrs. Bendix would discover that perhaps her own goodness wasn’t standing quite so firm under the strain as she had imagined. She would have begun to bore him with her self-reproaches; bore him dreadfully. He continued to meet her there first because a woman, to his type, is always a woman, and afterwards because she gave him no choice. I can see exactly what must inevitably have happened. Mrs. Bendix begins to get thoroughly morbid about her own wickedness, and quite loses sight of her initial zeal for reform.

“They use the bed now because there happens to be a bed there and it would be a pity to waste it, but she has destroyed the pleasure of both. Her one cry now is that she must put herself right with her own conscience either by running away with Sir Eustace on the spot, or, more probably, by telling her husband, arranging for divorce (for, of course, he will never forgive her, never), and marrying Sir Eustace as soon as both divorces are through. In any case, although she almost loathes him by now nothing else can be contemplated but that the rest of her life must be spent with Sir Eustace and his with her. How well I know that type of mind.