The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  “I certainly do,” Roger agreed feelingly. “Well, Moresby, I’ve got to go through the distressing business of buying a new hat before lunch. Do you feel like shadowing me to Bond Street? I might afterwards walk into a neighbouring hostelry, and it would be nice for you to be able to shadow me in there too.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Sheringham,” said Chief Inspector Moresby pointedly, “but I have some work to do.”

  Roger removed himself.

  He was feeling so depressed that he took a taxi to Bond Street instead of a ’bus, to cheer himself up. Roger, having been in London occasionally during the war-years and remembering the interesting habits cultivated by taxi-drivers during that period, had never taken one since when a ’bus would do as well. The public memory is notoriously short, but the public prejudices are equally notoriously long.

  Roger had reason for his depression. He was, as he had told Moresby, not only at a dead end, but the conviction was beginning to grow in him that he had actually been working completely on the wrong lines; and the possibility that all the labour he had put into the case had simply been time wasted was a sad one. His initial interest in the affair, though great, had been as he had just realised only an academic one, such as he would feel in any cleverly planned murder; and in spite of the contacts established with persons who were acquainted with various of the protagonists he still felt himself awkwardly outside the case. There was no personal connection somehow to enable him really to get to grips with it. He was beginning to suspect that it was the sort of case, necessitating endless inquiries such as a private individual has neither the skill, the patience nor the time to prosecute, which can really only be handled by the official police.

  It was hazard, two chance encounters that same day and almost within an hour, which put an entirely different complexion on the case to Roger’s eyes, and translated at last his interest in it from the academic into the personal.

  The first was in Bond Street.

  Emerging from his hat-shop, the new hat at just the right angle on his head, he saw bearing down on him Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer. Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer was small, exquisite, rich, comparatively young, and a widow, and she coveted Roger. Why, even Roger, who had his share of proper conceit, could not understand, but whenever he gave her the opportunity she would sit at his feet (metaphorically of course; he had no intention of giving her the opportunity to do so literally) and gaze up at him with her big brown eyes melting in earnest uplift. But she talked. She talked, in short, and talked, and talked. And Roger, who rather liked talking himself, could not bear it.

  He tried to dart across the road, but there was no opening in the traffic stream. He was cornered. With a gay smile that masked a vituperative mind he spoilt the angle of his beautiful new hat.

  Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer fastened on him gladly. “Oh, Mr. Sheringham! Just the very person I wanted to see. Mr. Sheringham, do tell me. In the strictest confidence of course. Are you taking up this dreadful business of poor Joan Bendix’s death? Oh, don’t—don’t tell me you’re not.” Roger tried to tell her that he had hoped to do so, but she gave him no chance. “Oh, aren’t you really? But it’s too dreadful. You ought, you know, you really ought to try and find out who sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace Pennefather. I do think it’s naughty of you not to.”

  Roger, the frozen grin of civilised intercourse on his face, again tried to edge a word in; without result.

  “I was horrified when I heard of it. Simply horrified.” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer registered horror. “You see, Joan and I were such very close friends. Quite intimate. In fact we were at school together.—Did you say anything, Mr. Sheringham?”

  Roger, who had allowed a faintly incredulous groan to escape him, hastily shook his head.

  “And the awful thing, the truly terrible thing is that Joan brought the whole thing on herself. Isn’t that appalling, Mr. Sheringham?”

  Roger no longer wanted to escape. “What did you say?” he managed to insert, again incredulously.

  “I suppose it’s what they call tragic irony.” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer chattered happily. “Certainly it was tragic enough and I’ve never heard of anything so terribly ironical. You know about that bet she made with her husband, of course, so that he had to get her a box of chocolates and if he hadn’t Sir Eustace would never have given him the poisoned ones but would have eaten them and died himself, and from all I hear about him good riddance? Well, Mr. Sheringham——” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer lowered her voice to a conspirator-like whisper and glanced about her in the approved manner. “I’ve never told any one else this, but I’m telling you because I know you’ll appreciate it. You are interested in irony aren’t you?”

  “I adore it,” Roger said mechanically. “Yes?”

  “Well—Joan wasn’t playing fair !”

  “How do you mean?” Roger asked, bewildered. Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer was artlessly pleased with her sensation. “Why, she ought not to have made that bet at all. It was a judgment on her. A terrible judgment of course, but the appalling thing is that she did bring it on herself, in a way. I’m so terribly distressed about it. Really, Mr. Sheringham, I can hardly bear to turn the light out when I go to bed. I see Joan’s face simply looking at me in the dark. It’s awful.” And for a fleeting instant Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer’s face did for once really mirror the emotion she professed: it looked quite haggard.

  “Why oughtn’t Mrs. Bendix to have made the bet?” Roger asked patiently.

  “Oh! Why, because she’d seen the play before. We went together, the very first week it was on. She knew who the villain was all the time.”

  “By Jove!” Roger was as impressed as Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer could have wished. “The Avenging Chance again, eh? We’re none of us immune from it.”

  “Poetic justice, you mean?” twittered Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, to whom these remarks had been a trifle obscure. “Yes it was, in a way, wasn’t it? Though really, the punishment was out of all proportion to the crime. Good gracious, if every woman who cheats over a bet is to be killed for it, where would any of us be?” demanded Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer with unconscious frankness.

  “Umph!” said Roger tactfully.

  Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer glanced rapidly up and down the pavement, and moistened her lips. Roger had an odd impression that she was talking not as usual just for the sake of talking, but in some recondite way to escape from not talking. It was as if she was more distressed over her friend’s death than she cared to show and found some relief in babbling. It interested Roger also to notice that fond though she had probably been of the dead woman, she now found herself driven as if against her will to hint at blame even while praising her. It was as though she was able thus to extract some subtle consolation for the actual death.

  “But Joan Bendix of all people! That’s what I can’t get over, Mr. Sheringham. I should never have thought Joan would do a thing like that. Joan was such a nice girl. A little close with money perhaps, considering how well-off she was, but that isn’t anything. Of course I know it was only fun, and pulling her husband’s leg, but I always used to think Joan was such a serious girl, if you know what I mean.”

  “Quite,” said Roger, who could understand plain English as well as most people.

  “I mean, ordinary people don’t talk about honour, and truth, and playing the game, and all those things one takes for granted. But Joan did. She was always saying that this wasn’t honourable, or that wouldn’t be playing the game. Well, she paid herself for not playing the game, poor girl, didn’t she? Still, I suppose it all goes to prove the truth of the old saying.”

  “What old saying?” asked Roger, almost hypnotised by this flow.

  “Why, that still waters run deep. Joan must have been deep after all, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer sighed. It was evidently a grave social error to be deep. “Not that I want to say anything against her now she’s dead, poor darling, but—well, what I mean is, I do think psychology is so very interesting, don’t you,
Mr. Sheringham?”

  “Quite fascinating,” Roger agreed gravely. “Well, I’m afraid I must be——”

  “And what does that man, Sir Eustace Pennefather, think about it all?” demanded Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, with an expression of positive vindictiveness. “After all, he’s as responsible for Joan’s death as anybody.”

  “Oh, really.” Roger had not conceived any particular love for Sir Eustace, but he felt constrained to defend him against this charge. “Really, I don’t think you can say that, Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer.”

  “I can, and I do,” affirmed that lady. “Have you ever met him, Mr. Sheringham? I hear he’s a horrible creature. Always running after some woman or other, and when he’s tired of her just drops her—biff!—like that. Is it true?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Roger said coldly. “I don’t know him at all.”

  “Well, it’s common talk who he’s taken up with now,” retorted Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer, perhaps a trifle more pink than the delicate aids to nature on her cheeks would have warranted. “Half-a-dozen people have told me. That Bryce woman, of all people. You know, the wife of the oil man, or petrol, or whatever he made his money in.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” Roger said, quite untruthfully.

  “It began about a week ago, they say,” rattled on this red-hot gossiper. “To console himself for not getting Dora Wildman, I suppose. Well, thank goodness Sir Charles had the sense to put his foot down there. He did, didn’t he? I heard so the other day. Horrible man! You’d have thought that such a dreadful thing as being practically responsible for poor Joan’s death would have sobered him up a little, wouldn’t you? But not a bit of it. As a matter of fact I believe he——”

  “Have you seen any shows lately?” Roger asked in a loud voice.

  Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer stared at him, for a moment nonplussed. “Shows? Yes, I’ve seen almost everything, I think. Why, Mr. Sheringham?”

  “I just wondered. The new revue at the Pavilion’s quite good, isn’t it? Well, I’m afraid I must——”

  “Oh, don’t!” Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer shuddered delicately. “I was there the night before Joan’s death.” (Can no subject take us away from that for a moment? thought Roger.) “Lady Cavelstoke had a box and asked me to join her party.”

  “Yes?” Roger was wondering if it would be considered rude if he simply handed the lady off, as at rugger, and dived for the nearest opening in the traffic. “Quite a good show,” he said at random, edging restlessly towards the curb. “I liked that sketch, The Sempiternal Triangle, particularly.”

  “The Sempiternal Triangle?” repeated Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer vaguely.

  “Yes, quite near the beginning.”

  “Oh! Then I may not have seen it. I got there a few minutes late, I’m afraid. But then,” said Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer with pathos, “I always do seem to be late for everything.” Roger noted mentally that the few minutes was by way of a euphemism, as were most of Mrs. Verreker-le- Mesurer’s statements regarding herself. The Sempiternal Triangle had certainly not been in the first half-hour of the performance.

  “Ah!” Roger looked fixedly at an oncoming ’bus. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer. There’s a man on that ’bus who wants to speak to me. Scotland Yard!” he hissed, in an impressive whisper.

  “Oh! Then—then does that mean you are looking into poor Joan’s death, Mr. Sheringham? Do tell me! I won’t breathe it to a soul.”

  Roger looked round him with a mysterious air and frowned in the approved manner. “Yes!” he nodded, his finger to his lips. “But not a word, Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer.”

  “Of course not, I promise.” But Roger was disappointed to notice that the lady did not seem quite so impressed as he had hoped. From her expression he was almost ready to believe that she suspected how unavailing his efforts had been, and was a little sorry that he had taken on more than he could manage.

  But the ’bus had now reached them, and with a hasty “Good-bye” Roger swung himself onto the step as it lumbered past. With awful stealth, feeling those big brown eyes fixed in awe on his back, he climbed the steps and took his seat, after an exaggerated scrutiny of the other passengers, beside a perfectly inoffensive little man in a bowler-hat. The little man, who happened to be a clerk in the employment of a monumental mason at Tooting, looking at him resentfully. There were plenty of quite empty seats all round them.

  The ’bus swung into Piccadilly, and Roger got off at the Rainbow club. He was lunching once again with a member. Roger had spent most of the last ten days asking such members of the Rainbow club as he knew, however remotely, out to lunch in order to be asked to the club in return. So far nothing helpful had arisen out of all this wasted labour, and he anticipated nothing more to-day.

  Not that the member was at all reluctant to talk about the tragedy. He had been at school with Bendix, it appeared, and was as ready to adopt responsibility for him on the strength of this tie as Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer had been for Mrs. Bendix. He plumed himself more than a little therefore on having a more intimate connection with the business than his fellow-members. Indeed one gathered that the connection was even a trifle closer than that of Sir Eustace himself. Roger’s host was that kind of man.

  As they were talking a man entered the dining-room and walked past their table. Roger’s host became abruptly silent. The newcomer threw him an abrupt nod and passed on.

  Roger’s host leant forward across the table and spoke in the hushed tones of one to whom a revelation has been vouchsafed. “Talk of the devil! That was Bendix himself. First time I’ve seen him in here since it happened. Poor devil! It knocked him all to pieces, you know. I’ve never seen a man so devoted to his wife. It was a byword. Did you see how ghastly he looked?” All this in a tactful whisper that must have been far more obvious to the subject of it had he happened to be looking their way than the loudest bellowing.

  Roger nodded shortly. He had caught a glimpse of Bendix’s face and been shocked by it even before he learned his identity. It was haggard and pale and seamed with lines of bitterness, prematurely old. “Hang it all,” he now thought, much moved, “somebody really must make an effort. If the murderer isn’t found soon it will kill that chap too.”

  Aloud he said, somewhat at random and certainly without tact: “He didn’t exactly fall on your neck. I thought you two were such bosom friends?”

  His host looked uncomfortable. “Oh, well, you must make allowances just at present,” he judged. “Besides, we weren’t bosom friends exactly. As a matter of fact he was a year or two senior to me. Or it might have been three even. We were in different houses too. And he was on the modern side of course (can you imagine the son of his father being anything else?), while I was a classical bird.”

  “I see,” said Roger quite gravely, realising that his host’s actual contact with Bendix at school had been limited, at most, to that of the latter’s toe with the former’s hinder parts.

  He left it at that.

  For the rest of lunch he was a little inattentive. Something was nagging at his brain, and he could not identify it. Somewhere, somehow, during the last hour, he felt, a vital piece of information had been conveyed to him and he had never grasped its importance.

  It was not until he was putting on his coat half-an-hour later, and for the moment had given up trying to worry his mind into giving up its booty, that the realisation suddenly came to him unbidden, in accordance with its usual and maddening way. He stopped dead, one arm in his coat-sleeve, the other in act to fumble.

  “By Jove!” he said softly.

  “Anything the matter, old man?” asked his host, now mellowed by much port.

  “No, thanks; nothing,” said Roger hastily, coming to earth again.

  Outside the club he hailed a taxi.

  For probably the first time in her life Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer had given somebody a constructive idea.

  For the rest of the day Roger was very busy indee
d.

  CHAPTER X

  THE president called on Mr. Bradley to hold forth.

  Mr. Bradley stroked his moustache and mentally shot his cuffs.

  He had begun his career (when still Percy Robinson) as a motor-salesman, and had discovered that there is more money in manufacturing. Now he manufactured detective stories, and found his former experience of the public’s gullibility not unhelpful. He was still his own salesman, but occasionally had difficulty in remembering that he was no longer mounted on a stand at Olympia. Everything and everybody in this world, including Morton Harrogate Bradley, he heartily despised, except only Percy Robinson. He sold, in tens of thousands.

  “This is rather unfortunate for me,” he began, in the correct gentlemanly drawl, as if addressing an audience of morons. “I had rather been under the impression that I should be expected to produce as a murderer the most unlikely person, in the usual tradition; and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming has cut the ground away from under my feet. I don’t see how I can possibly find you a more unlikely murderer than Sir Charles here. All of us who have the misfortune to speak after Mrs. Fielder-Flemming will have to be content to pile up so many anticlimaxes.

  “Not that I haven’t done my best. I studied the case according to my own lights, and it led me to a conclusion which certainly surprised myself quite a lot. But as I said, after the last speaker it will probably seem to everybody else a dismal anti-climax. Let me see now, where did I begin? Oh, yes; with the poison.

  “Now the use of nitrobenzene as the poisoning agent interested me quite a lot. I find it extremely significant. Nitrobenzene is the last thing one would expect inside those chocolates. I’ve made something of a study of poisons, in connection with my work, and I’ve never heard of nitrobenzene being employed in a criminal case before. There are cases on record of its use in suicide, and in accidental poisoning, but not more than three or four all told.