The Problem of the Green Capsule

by John Dickson Carr

  “Of course,” said Dr. Fell. “But we shall want you tonight.”

  She was gone, and the other three stood by the bullet-hole in the yellow pillar. Elliot hardly even noticed her. It was, he afterwards remembered, a vision of those windows facing the sunset light which made a window open in his own mind. Or it may have been the shock of a combination of circumstances, of what Marjorie Wills said and thought and did, which shook him out of a mental paralysis. His judgment was released, as a blind is released, with a snap. And, in the pouring clearness of that revelation, he cursed himself and all the works about him. A. plus B. plus C. plus D. raced into a pattern, clearly forming. He had not been a police-officer: he had been a blasted fool. Wherever it had been possible to take a wrong turning, he had taken it. Wherever it had been possible to read a wrong meaning, he had read it. If one clear piece of folly be allowed once to every man, then by the Lord Harry he had had his! But now——

  Dr. Fell had turned round. Elliot felt the doctor’s sharp small eyes on him.

  “Oho?” said the doctor suddenly. “Got it, have you?”

  “Yes, sir. I think I’ve got it.”

  And he made the gesture of one who strikes with his fist at nothing.

  In that case,” said Dr. Fell mildly, “we had better go back to the hotel and talk about it. Ready, Superintendent?”

  Elliot was again cursing himself, rearranging bits of evidence, sunk so deep that he only vaguely heard Dr. Fell whistling a tune when they went towards their car. It was a tune to which you could keep step. It was, in fact, the wedding march of Mendelssohn; but never before had it sounded evil or ominous.

  Chapter XVIII

  THE CASE AGAINST X

  At eight o’clock that night, when four men sat before the fire in Elliot’s room at “The Blue Lion,” Dr. Fell spoke.

  “We now know,” he said, holding up his fingers and checking off the points, “who the murderer is; how he worked; and why he worked. We know that the whole series of crimes were the work of this one man, acting without a confederate. We know the astonishing weight of the evidence against him. The guilt, we see, will prove itself.”

  Superintendent Bostwick uttered a decisive grunt.

  Major Crow nodded with great satisfaction.

  “Even granting everything, which I’m only too happy to grant,” he said, “the idea of this fellow living among us—!”

  “And disturbing the atmosphere,” supplied Dr. Fell. “Exactly. That’s what upsets the Superintendent so. The influences touches everything it comes into contact with, however harmless. You cannot pick up a tea-cup, go for a motor drive, or buy a film for a camera, without this influence somehow touching the action and somehow twisting it wrong. A quiet corner of the world, like this, is turned upside-down because of it. Guns are fired in front gardens, where people would have stared even to see a gun before. Stones are flung in the street. A bee buzzes in the Chief Constable’s bonnet, and another under the Superintendent’s cap. And all because of an influence or emanation which a certain person chooses to give out at last.”

  Dr. Fell took out his watch, looked at it, and laid it on the table beside him. He filled and lighted his pipe with massive deliberation, sniffed, and went on.

  “Therefore,” he said, “while you think over the evidence, I should like to lect—ahem!—should like to discuss the art of poisoning, and give you a few tips.

  “In particular, since it applies to this case, we might classify a certain group of murderers under one head. Oddly enough, I have never seen them set down into a class: though their characters are as a rule so startlingly alike that they might be cruder or subtler copies of each other. They are the eternal arch-hypocrites and the eternal warning to wives: I mean the male poisoners.

  “Women poisoners are (Lord knows) dangerous enough. But the men are a more uneasy menace to society, since to the slyness of poisoning they add a kind of devilish generalship, an application of business principles, a will to make good by the use of arsenic or strychnine. They are a small band, but they are evilly famous; and their faces are all alike. I grant you certain exceptions who will not fit into any category; Seddon, for instance.2 But I think that if we take a dozen well-known examples from real life, we shall find the same mask on the face and the same false stuff in the brain. Note how our murderer here at Sodbury Cross fits into the group.

  “First of all, they are usually men of some imagination, education, and even culture. Their professions indicate as much. Palmer, Pritchard, Lamson, Buchanan, and Cream were doctors. Richeson was a clergyman, Wainewright an artist, Armstrong a solicitor, Hoch a chemist, Waite a dental surgeon, Vaquier an inventor, Carlyle Harris a medical student.

  “And immediately our interest springs up.

  “We do not care about the illiterate blockhead who bashes somebody in a pub. We are interested in the criminal who should know better. Of course, that most (if not all) of the above men were blockheads I should be the last to deny. But they were blockheads of a sort whose manners fascinated, whose imaginations really moved, whose acting ability was of the first order; and some of them startle us with the ingenuity of their devices to kill or avert suspicion.

  “Dr. George Harvey Lamson, Dr. Robert Buchanan, and Arthur Warren Waite committed murder, each one for financial gain, in 1881, in 1882, and in 1915. At this time the form of fiction we know as the detective-story was in its infancy. But consider the way in which each of them went about it.

  “Dr. Lamson killed his victim, a crippled nephew of eighteen, by means of raisins poisoned with aconitine and baked into a Dundee cake. He went so far as to cut the cake in the presence of the boy and the headmaster of the boy’s school; all three ate a piece of it at the tea-table, so that Lamson might protest his innocence when only the boy was affected. Somewhere, you know, I seem to have heard of that device in fiction.

  “Dr. Buchanan poisoned his wife with morphine. Now morphine is a drug which (he knew) would easily be spotted by any physician, due to the contraction of the victim’s eye-pupils. So Dr. Buchanan added to the morphine a little belladonna, which prevented contraction of the eyepupils, made the victim’s appearance normal, and obtained from the attending physician a certificate of natural death. It was a brilliant device; and it would have succeeded if Dr. Buchanan had not himself let the trick slip in incautious talk with a friend.

  “Arthur Warren Waite, the boyish happy criminal, attempted the murder of his wealthy mother- and father-in-law by means of pneumonia, diphtheria, and influenza germs. This proved too slow, and he at last fell back on less subtle poisons; but his first attempt was the death of the father-in-law by tubercular bacilli administered in a nasal spray.”

  Dr. Fell paused.

  He had plunged into his subject, steaming with earnestness. Had Superintendent Hadley been present, Hadley would have shouted for an arrest of the bus and an end of the lecture. But Elliot, Major Crow, and Superintendent Bostwick only nodded. They saw its application to the murderer of Sodbury Cross.

  “Now,” pursued Dr. Fell, “what is the first most outstanding characteristic of the poisoner? It is this. Among his friends he usually has the reputation of being a thoroughly good fellow. He is a jovial soul. An open-handed companion. A real sport. Sometimes he may display slight Puritanical scruples, about strict religious observance or even good form socially; but his boon-companions can easily forgive him for this because he is such a decent sort.

  “Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, that stickler for the social rules who poisoned people wholesale to get their insurance money, was the most hospitable of hosts a hundred years ago. William Palmer of Rugeley was himself a total abstainer, but nothing pleased him more than to stand the drinks genially to his friends. The Rev. Clarence V. T. Richeson of Boston charmed the devout wherever he went. Dr. Edward William Pritchard, he of the great bald skull and the great brown beard, was the idol of the Glasgow fraternal societies. You see how it applies to the man we want?”

  Major Crow nodded.
/>   “Yes,” said Elliot, grimly satisfied; and there was an image in the firelit room at “The Blue Lion.”

  “Whereas actually there is in their characters, as a reverse side to the same picture and perhaps an essential part of it, such a blind indifference to pain in others—such a cool doling-out of death in its most horrible forms—that our ordinary imaginations cannot grasp it. Perhaps the thing that strikes us most is not alone their indifference to death, but to the pain of death. Everybody has heard of Wainewright’s famous reply, ‘Why did you poison Miss Abercromby?’ ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick ankles.”

  “That, of course, was swank; but it really does express the attitude of the poisoner towards human life. Wainewright had to have money so (obviously) someone had to die. William Palmer needed money to bet on horses, and so it became clear that his wife, his brother, and his friends must be given strychnine. It was a self-evident proposition. And it is also true in the case of those who blandly or even plaintively ‘have to have’ something. The Rev. Clarence Richeson, of the magnetic eyes, would have denied with tears that he was marrying Miss Edmunds for her money or her position. But he poisoned a former mistress with potassium cyanide so that she should not interfere. The sentimental Dr. Edward Pritchard gained little by killing his wife with slow doses of tartar emetic over a period of four months; and he gained only a few thousands by killing his wife’s mother. But he wished to be free. He ‘had to have’ it.

  “Which brings us to the poisoner’s next characteristic; his inordinate vanity.

  “All murderers have it. But the poisoner possesses it to a bloated degree. He is vain of his intelligence, vain of his looks, vain of his manners, vain of his power to deceive. He is touched with the brush of the actor, even the exhibitionist; and as a rule he is a very good actor indeed. Pritchard opening the coffin so that he might kiss for the last time the lips of his dead wife: Carlyle Harris debating science and theology with the chaplain on his way to the electric chair: Palmer’s shocked indignation in the presence of the investigators: those foot-light scenes are endless, and their root is vanity.

  “This vanity need not appear on the surface. Your poisoner may be a mild, blue-eyed, professorial little man, like Herbert Armstrong, the Hay solicitor, who disposed of his wife and then attempted to dispose of a business rival by means of arsenic spread on a scone at tea. Which makes it all the worse when the conceit at last comes bubbling up, under examination or in a dock. And nowhere does the male poisoner’s vanity more clearly express itself than in his power—or what he thinks is his power—over women.

  “Nearly all of them have, or think they have, this power over women. Armstrong had it, concealed though it was. Wainewright, Palmer, and Pritchard made use of it to commit their murders. Harris, Buchanan, and Richeson got into their difficulties because they had it. Even squint-eyed Neill Cream thought he had it. It goes with a huge preen and swagger behind everything they did. Hoch, the Bluebeard murderer, disposed of a dozen wives, with arsenic neatly hidden in a fountain-pen. Few spectacles seem more ludicrous than that of Jean Pierre Vaquier, the Byfleet poisoner, smirking over his oiled whiskers in the dock. Vaquier had doctored the publican’s bromo-salts with strychnine, trusting in his power over women to get both his victim’s wife and his victim’s public-house. He was dragged away from his appeal screaming. ‘Je demande la justice,’ and it is quite possible he thought he had not got it.

  “For, whittling the thing down, we can see that all these fine fellows committed murder for financial gain.

  “Cream I grant you as an exception; for Cream was mad, and those frenzied demands for blackmail cannot be taken too seriously. But at the root of the others’ crimes is a wish for money, a wish for a softer position in the world. Even when a wife or a mistress is eliminated, she is eliminated so that the poisoner may get a richer one. She stands in the way of his talents. But for her he might be comfortable. But for her he might be eminent. In his own mind he is already eminent; the world owes him its good things. Therefore the unwanted wife or mistress becomes only a symbol, who might be an aunt or a next-door neighbour or Barnacle Bill the Sailor. It is the rotted fabric of the brain we have to consider; and that, I think we can agree, is the murderer of Sodbury Cross.”

  Major Crow, who had been brooding and staring into the fire, made a fierce gesture.

  “I know it’s true,” he said. He looked at Elliot. “You’ve proved that.”

  “Yes, sir. I think I have.”

  “But everything he does is enough to make you want to hang the blighter,” snapped Major Crow. “Even the reason why he failed to get away with this, if I understand you properly. The whole show failed because——”

  “It failed because he tried to alter the whole history of crime,” replied Dr. Fell. “That never works, believe me.”

  “Stop a bit, sir!” said Bostwick. “I don’t follow you there.”

  “If you are ever tempted to commit a murder by poison,” said Dr. Fell with complete seriousness, “remember this. Of all forms of murder, poisoning is the most difficult to get away with.”

  Major Crow stared at him.

  “Hold on,” he protested. “You mean the easiest, don’t you? I’m not what you’d call an imaginative man, as you’ll agree. But I’ve sometimes wondered—well, look here, I’ll admit it! There are people dying every day around us; supposed to be natural deaths; doctor’s certificate and everything; but who’s to know how many of them may be murders? We don’t know.”

  “Ah!” said Dr. Fell, drawing a huge breath.

  “What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

  “I mean that I have heard the remark before,” replied Dr. Fell. “You may be quite right. We don’t know. All I wish to emphasize is that we don’t know. And therefore your argument is so extraordinary that it makes my brain reel. A hundred persons, let us say, die in Wigan in the course of a year. You darkly suspect that a number of them may have been poisoned. And, because of this, you turn round to me and quote it as a reason why poisoning is so very easy. What you say may be very true; for all I know, the graveyards may be filled with murdered corpses clamouring for vengeance from here to John o’ Groats; but, hang it all! Let us have some evidence before we assume a thing to be true.”

  “Well, what’s your position, then?”

  “Arguing,” said Dr. Fell more mildly, “arguing on the only cases we can possibly use as a test—the cases where poison has been discovered in a body—it is clear that poisoning is the most difficult crime to get away with because so very few people ever do get away with it.

  “I mean that the poisoner, by the very nature of his character, is doomed from the start. He cannot, he never does, let well enough alone. When he does happen to get away with it the first time, he keeps right on poisoning until he is inevitably caught. See the list above. He is betrayed by his own character. You or I might shoot or stab or bludgeon or strangle. But we should not become so passionately fond of a bright revolver or a shiny new dagger or a life-preserver or a silk handkerchief that we insisted on playing with it all the time. The poisoner does just that.

  “Even his first risks are bad enough. The ordinary murderer runs a single risk. The poisoner runs a triple risk. Unlike a shooting or a stabbing, his work is not over even when he has done it. He must make sure the victim does not live long enough to denounce him, a bad risk; he must show he had neither opportunity to administer the poison nor reason for administering it, a very deadly risk; and he must obtain the poison without detection, perhaps the worst risk of all.

  “Over and over again it is the same dismal story. X dies under circumstances which arouse suspicion. It is known that Y had good reason to wish X out of the way, and every opportunity to tamper with X’s food or drink. The body is exhumed. Poison is found. From there it is as a rule only a question of tracing a purchase of poison to Y; and we have, in inevitable procession like a series of pictures in a moral album, the arrest, the trial, the sentence, and th
e eight-o’clock walk.

  “Now, our friend here at Sodbury Cross knew this. He did not have to be a deep student of crime to know it he only had to read his daily newspaper. But, knowing it, he set out to construct a design for murder which should cover all these three risks with a kind of triple alibi. He tried to do a thing which no criminal has ever succeeded in doing. And he failed because it is possible for an intelligent person (such as you are) to see through such detail of the triple plot. Now let me show you something else.”

  Fumbling in his inside pocket, Dr. Fell produced a note-case stuffed with odd papers: the sweepings that he always gathered about him, pushed into his pockets, and refused to part with. Among these he succeeded in finding a letter.

  “I told you,” he pursued, “that Marcus Chesney wrote to me only a few days ago. I have jealously guarded this letter because I did not want you to be misled. There is too much real evidence. And this would have misled you badly. But read it now, in the light of what we have determined to be the truth, and see what interpretation you put on it.”

  He spread the letter out on the table beside his watch. It was headed, “Bellegarde, October 1st,” and dealt with much the same theories they had already heard. But Dr. Fell’s finger indicated a passage towards the end:

  All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what they see in the proper colours. They do not know what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience. Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then they will be unable to interpret what they see.

  I expect to give my little entertainment before a group of friends soon. If this goes well, may I ask whether you would be kind enough to come and see it, at some later date? I understand you are now at Bath, and I can send a car for you whenever you like. I promise to hoodwink you in every possible way. But, since you are new to the terrain, since you are only very slightly acquainted with any of the persons, I will be fair and give you a straight tip: keep a close eye on my niece Marjorie.