The Problem of the Green Capsule

by John Dickson Carr

  “I shouldn’t have thought so myself,” Elliot admitted. “But where does it leave us? This gives us only one more puzzle to add to the rest. Do you see any actual light in the business?”

  “Quite a good deal. It is now clear, isn’t it, how Chesney thought the chocolates were poisoned at Mrs. Terry’s?”

  “No, sir, I’m hanged if it is! How?”

  Dr. Fell shifted in his chair. An expression of Gargantuan distress went over his face; he made vague gestures and mysterious internal noises.

  “Look here.” He spoke in a tone of protest. “I most emphatically do not wish to sit here myself like a stuffed oracle, blandly tut-tutting and being so dashed superior at your expense. I have always detested that sort of snobbery; I will fight it to the last ditch. But I insist that these emotional disturbances have not been good for your intelligence.

  “Now let us consider the problems of the poisoned chocolates at Mrs. Terry’s. What are the terms of it? What are the facts that we must accept? First: that the chocolates were poisoned at some time during the day of June 17th. Second: that they were poisoned either by some visitor to the shop on that day, or by Miss Wills in a sleight-of-hand exchange through Frankie Dale. For it is established that there was nothing wrong with the chocolates on the night of the 16th, since Mrs. Terry took a handful or so for a children’s party. These are correct assumptions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not at all,” said Dr. Fell. “Rubbish!”

  “I deny,” he went on, fiery with earnestness, “that the chocolates were necessarily poisoned on June 17th. I also deny that they were necessarily poisoned by someone who visited the shop on that day.

  “Now, Major Crow (if I understand you) outlined a method by which a murderer could easily hocus an open chocolate-box on a counter. The murderer enters with a number of poisoned sweets concealed in his hand or in his pocket. He misdirects Mrs. Terry’s attention, and drops the doctored sweets into the box on the counter. True, true, true! Easy enough. It could have been done in that way. But isn’t it, when you reflect, an incredibly simple-minded approach for a murderer who has shown himself as nimble as this one? What does it do? It immediately shows that the poisoning was done on a definite given day, and limits the field of suspects to those who were in the shop on that day.

  “With your permission, I can suggest a much better way.

  “Prepare an exact duplicate of that open box of chocolates on the counter. Don’t (like a fool) poison the top layer of chocolates in your duplicate box. Instead poison six or ten of them fairly well down into the box. Go into Mrs. Terry’s and substitute one open box for another. Unless there is a fairly large demand for chocolate creams, nobody will get the poisoned ones on that day. On the contrary!—children, as a rule, don’t go in much for chocolate creams. They infinitely prefer liquorice or bull’s-eyes, where they get more quantity for their money. So it is likely that the poisoned creams will be in the shop one, two, three, four days, perhaps a week, before anyone reaches the poisoned layer. Therefore the real murderer will most certainly not be in the shop on the day the damage is done. And, at whatever date those creams were poisoned, I will lay you odds it was well before the fatal 17th of June.”

  This time Elliot cursed loudly. He walked to the window, stared out at the rain, and turned round.

  “Yes, but—well, for one thing, you can’t walk about the country hiding an open box of chocolates, can you? And juggling it with another open box?”

  “You can,” said Dr. Fell, “if you have a spring-grip bag. I’m sorry, my lad, but I’m afraid that spring-grip bag rather tears it. Those bags (correct me if I am wrong) are controlled by a button in the leather handle. Press the button; the bag snaps up whatever is underneath. Or it can, of course, be used conversely. Place something inside the bag; press the button to open the jaws of the spring, and it deposits what is inside the bag in whatever place you want it.”

  Here Dr. Fell made a mesmeric pass; sniffed; looked disconsolate; and finally spoke earnestly.

  “Yes, my lad. I’m afraid that’s just what happened, or there would be no point whatever to the spring-grip bag bobbing and tumbling through this case. The murderer, as you say, couldn’t juggle with open boxes unless he had something to hold them quite steady so that they wouldn’t spill in the juggling. Hence the Thief’s Friend.

  “He walked into Mrs. Terry’s shop with a box of hocussed creams in the bottom of his bag. While he misdirected Mrs. Terry’s attention, he released this box on the counter. He then put the bag down over the real box; snapped it up into the bag out of sight; pushed the poisoned box into place: all in the space of time it took him to receive fifty Players or Gold Flake across the tobacco-counter opposite. And Marcus Chesney tumbled to the trick. To illustrate how the boxes were changed, he imported a similar spring-grip bag from London. Chesney then had the same trick performed last night—and nobody spotted it.”

  Elliot drew a deep breath in the silence that followed.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely.

  “Eh?”

  “I said thank you,” repeated Elliot, grinning. “You’re pulling my wits back to normal, sir; or giving them a kick in the pants, if you know what I mean.”

  “Thanke’e, Inspector,” said Dr. Fell, with vague gratification.

  “But do you realise, all the same, that this explanation leaves US STILL worse off than before? I believe it. I think it’s the one that best fits all the circumstances. But it upsets the only facts we had before. We don’t even have an idea as to when the chocolates might have been poisoned, except that it probably wasn’t the only day the police have been concentrating on for nearly four months.”

  “I am sorry to upset the apple-cart,” said Dr. Fell, rubbing his head vigorously but apologetically. “But—hang it all! If you have a crooked mind like mine, such a course seems as inevitable as a cat in the salmon-tin. And I don’t agree with you that it leaves us worse off than before. On the contrary, it ought to lead us straight to the truth.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me, Inspector. Were you brought up in a village or at least in a small community?”

  “No, sir. Not exactly. Glasgow.”

  “Ah. But I was,” said Dr. Fell, with rich satisfaction. “Now let us postulate our situation. The murderer, carrying what appears to be a small harmless satchel, walks into the shop. We assume that the murderer is someone known to Mrs. Terry; we must assume that. Have you never had any experience with the ripe, healthy, and instinctive curiosity of shopkeepers in a small community, particularly of the bustling sort Mrs. Terry is? Suppose you walked in carrying a satchel. It would be, ‘Going away, Mr. Elliot?’ ‘Off to Weston, Mr. Elliot?’—or she would think that even if she didn’t say it, because the sight of you with a satchel would be an unusual sight. It is not a customary appendage of yours. The memory would stick in her mind. If anyone with a small valise went into her shop during the week preceding the chocolate-murder, she will probably have some recollection of it.”

  Elliot nodded. But he had a feeling that there was another step to be taken, another groping to be made, for Dr. Fell was watching him with massive concentration.

  “Or else—?” the doctor prompted.

  “I see,” muttered Elliot, staring at the rain-washed window. “Or else the murderer was someone who usually carries a bag of that type, and the sight was so ordinary Mrs. Terry never thought twice about it.”

  “It is a tenable hypothesis,” said the other, sniffing.

  “You mean Dr. Joseph Chesney?”

  “Perhaps. Is there anybody else who usually goes about with a bag or case or something of the sort?”

  “Only Wilbur Emmet, they tell me. He’s got a little straw semi-suitcase affair; I saw it in his room, as I told you.”

  Dr. Fell shook his head.

  “Only Wilbur Emmet,” he observed. “‘Only’ Wilbur Emmet, the man says. Archons of Athens! If a leather bag can be turned into a spring-grip bag through the ingenuity
of a magic supply-house, is there any reason why the same shouldn’t apply to a straw suitcase? Surely it is obvious that, when Major Crow and Superintendent Bostwick recover from their present idées fixes, they will certainly fasten on Emmet? Professor Ingram, I suspect from what you tell me, has already done so; and will greet us with the theory as soon as we poke our noses into Bellegarde. We must be inordinately careful of traps. Therefore, on the basis of the evidence as it stands now, I assure you that the only person who can possibly be guilty is Wilbur Emmet. Would you care to hear my reasons?”

  Chapter XII

  ONCE MORE ON THE WALL

  Dr. Fell, Elliot had sometimes thought, would be a bad person with whom to hold a conversation on a morning (say) when you are suffering from too many whiskies the night before. His mind moved so fast that it was round the corner and in at the window before your mental eyesight could follow it. You were conscious of a whir of wings, a capping of tall words; and then, before you quite knew what had happened, a whole edifice had been reared by steps which seemed completely logical at the time but were difficult to remember afterwards.

  “Steady on, sir!” Elliot urged. “I’ve heard you do this sort of thing before, and——”

  “No, hear me out,” said the doctor with fierce earnestness. “You must remember that I started life as a schoolmaster. Every minute of the day the lads were attempting to tell me some weird story or other, smoothly, plausibly, and with a dexterity I have not since heard matched at the Old Bailey. Therefore I start with an unfair advantage over the police. I have had much more experience with habitual liars. And it occurs to me that you accepted Emmet’s innocence much too tamely.

  “It was foisted on you, of course, by Miss Wills, before you had time to think. Kindly don’t rise in wrath; the foisting was probably unconscious. But what was the state of affairs there? You say, ‘Everybody in that house had an alibi,’—which isn’t true. Explain, if you will, how Emmet had an alibi.”

  “H’m,” said Elliot.

  “Nobody, in fact, saw Emmet at all. You found him lying unconscious under a tree, with a poker handy. Someone immediately said, ‘He has clearly been lying here like this for a long time.’ But what medical evidence did you have (or could you have) as to how long he had been lying there? It was not like a post-mortem report as to the time of death. It could just as well have occurred ten seconds before as two or three minutes before. A prosecuting counsel might call it the double-bluff.”

  Elliot reflected. “Well, sir, I won’t say I hadn’t thought of it. By that theory, the man in the top-hat was really Emmet after all. He played his own part, except that he gave Mr. Chesney a poisoned capsule. Then he arranged to get himself a crack over the head—self-mutilation to prove incapacity isn’t a new thing—and showed he couldn’t have been Dr. Nemo.”

  “Exactly. And further?”

  “It would have been easier for him than anybody else,” Elliot acknowledged. “No hocus-pocus. No putting on or off the props. All he had to do was play his own part in his own good time. All he had to do was substitute a prussic-acid capsule for the harmless one. He knew all the details. He was the only person who knew all the details. He—” The more Elliot thought of it, the more he was impelled and pushed into belief. “The trouble is, sir, that as yet I don’t know anything about Emmet. I’ve never talked to him. Who is Emmet? What is he? There’s been no breath of suspicion against Emmet so far, by anybody. How would it profit him to kill Mr. Chesney?”

  “How would it profit him,” asked Dr. Fell, “to spread strychnine among a group of children?”

  “We’re getting back to pure lunacy, then?”

  “I don’t know. But it might pay you to consider motive a bit more. As for Emmet—” Dr. Fell scowled, and stubbed out his cigar. “I remember meeting him at the same party where I met Chesney. Tall, dark-haired, red-nosed chap, with a voice and manner rather like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. He stalked about, intoning; and spilled an ice over his knee. The leit-motif was ‘poor old Wilbur.’ As for his appearance—what about the mechanics? The top-hat, raincoat, and so on? Were they of a size to be worn only by Emmet, or what?”

  Elliot took out his notebook.

  “The top-hat was size 7; it was an old relic belonging to Marcus Chesney himself. The raincoat, which belongs to Emmet, was an ordinary Men’s Large Size; they don’t make raincoats in a list of carefully graded sizes like suits. The rubber gloves, a sixpenny pair from Woolworth’s, I found expertly rolled up in the right-hand pocket of the raincoat——”

  “So?” said Dr. Fell.

  “And here are the various measurements; Bostwick got them for me. Emmet is 6 feet tall; weight 11 st. 8; wears size 7 hat. Dr. Joseph Chesney is 5 ft. 11 1/2 inches tall; weight 13 st.; size 7 hat. George Harding is 5 ft. 9 inches tall; weight 11 st.; size 6 7/8 hat. Professor Ingram is 5 ft. 8 inches tall; weight 12 st. 2; wears size 7 1/4 hat. Marjorie Wills is 5 ft. 2 inches tall; weight 7 st. 8—but you don’t want to hear that She’s out of it,” said Elliot, with quiet and firm satisfaction. “Any of the others could have worn the stuff without looking queer in it: the only point being that every one of ’em except Emmet has an unbreakable alibi. We can’t say too much at the moment; but just at present it looks as though it’s got to be Emmet. Why, I wonder?”

  Dr. Fell looked at him curiously. He was to remember that look long afterwards.

  “Our psychologist friends,” the doctor declared, “will doubtless say that he is the downtrodden one who suffers from the Lust for Power. It is a common complaint among poisoners, I admit Jegado, Zwanziger, Van de Leyden, Cream: the list is endless. I have also heard that Emmet suffers from (let us give it the capitals) a Hopeless Passion for Miss Wills. Oh, any arrangement of the dark cells is possible, I grant you. But it is possible, too”—here he stared very hard at his companion—“that Emmet figures in still another role: as scapegoat.”

  “Scapegoat?”

  “Yes. For (d’ye see?) there is still another interpretation of the spring-grip bag and the murderer in the chocolate-shop.” Dr. Fell considered. “It has seemed curious to me, Inspector, that so many references have been made to the case of Christiana Edmunds in 1871. It always seemed to me that there was a moral in that story.”

  Doubt struck Elliot again as quick and sharp as a dart in a board.

  “You mean, sir, that——”

  “Eh?” said Dr. Fell, waking up and looking genuinely startled out of his heavy musings. “No, no, no! Good God, no! Perhaps I don’t make myself clear.” He made flurried gestures; he seemed anxious to change the subject. “Well, let’s apply your own theory and get down to business. What are we going to do? What’s our next move?”

  “We are going to see that ciné-film,” Elliot told him. “That is, if you’d care to come along. The chemist in Sodbury Cross, Major Crow tells me, is an enthusiast on amateur film-work, and does his own developing. Major Crow knocked him up at a quarter past three this morning and made him promise to have the film ready by lunch-time to-day. The chemist has a private projector above his shop; Major Crow says he’s to be trusted. We’re meeting there at one o’clock to run the film through. Lord!” said Elliot violently, and shook his fist, “This might solve our problems. The real story of what happened, down in black and white that can’t lie! Everything we want to know! I tell you, it seems almost too good to be true. Suppose something went wrong with the film? Suppose it didn’t come out? Suppose——”

  He did not know that within the next hour he was to get one of the greatest shocks of his life. While Dr. Fell dressed, while they drove the short distance to Sodbury Cross under a clearing sky, while they pulled up in the grey High Street outside the chemist’s shop of Mr. Hobart Stevenson, Elliot anticipated the shock from every direction except the right one. Dr. Fell, a great bandit figure in box-pleated cape and shovel hat, uttered thunderous reassurances from the rear seat. Elliot’s chief fear was that the chemist had bungled the developing; by the time they arrived he had almost convin
ced himself that this was the case.

  The shop of Mr. Hobart Stevenson, in the middle of the rather grim-lipped High Street, had a distinctly photographic flavour. Its shop-windows displayed pyramids of small yellow boxes of films; a camera looked out from among the cough-mixtures, and behind it was a poster displaying enlargements of impossibly ecstatic photographs. From here you could look along the High Street to the boarded windows that marked Mrs. Terry’s shop: to a garage and filling-station, a long array of shops displaying nothing but eatables, several pubs, and the Jubilee drinking fountain in the middle of the road. It seemed deserted, despite the main traffic that hummed through in a series of lonely swishes; and despite figures that were stricken motionless as they peered out of shop-windows. From here to “The Blue Lion” Elliot was conscious of being watched.

  The bell over the shop door gave a sharp ping as they went in. Hobart Stevenson’s shop was gloomy, full of that dim chemical smell which brought back sharply to Elliot the memory of another place. But it was a tidy little box, a kind of bottle walled in by bottles, from the brisk diploma framed on the wall to the weights of a weighing-chair beside the counter. Hobart Stevenson—a plump, lip-pursing young man in a neat white jacket—wormed out from behind the counter to meet them.

  “Inspector Elliot?” he said. He was obviously so weighed down by the importance of the occasion that his eye strayed to the door, and considered locking it against customers. Every strand of his flat hair seemed to quiver with it; Elliot studied him, and decided that he could be trusted.

  “This is Dr. Gideon Fell,” said Elliot. “Sorry we had to get you out of bed last night.”

  “Not at all, not at all, I didn’t mind,” said Stevenson, who clearly didn’t.

  “Well? Have you got that film?”