The Poisoned Chocolates Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  “The consequence was that I began work entirely from the angle of Sir Eustace’s women. I spent a good many not too savoury days collecting data, until I was convinced that I had a complete list of all his affairs during the past five years. It was not too difficult. Sir Eustace, as I said last night, is not a reticent man. Apparently I had not got the full list, for mine hadn’t included the lady whose name was not mentioned last night, and if there was one omission it’s possible there may be more. At any rate, it seems that Sir Eustace, to do him justice, did have his moments of discretion.

  “But now all that is really beside the point. What matters is that at first I was certain that the crime was the work not only of a woman, but of a woman who had comparatively recently been Sir Eustace’s mistress.

  “I have now changed all my opinions, in toto.”

  “Oh, really!” moaned Mr. Bradley. “Don’t tell me I was wrong all along the line.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Roger, trying to keep the triumph out of his voice. It is a difficult thing, when one has really and truly solved a problem which has baffled so many excellent brains, to appear entirely indifferent about it.

  “I regret to have to say,” he went on, hoping he appeared humbler than he felt, “I regret to have to say that I can’t claim all credit for this change of view for my own perspicacity. To be quite honest, it was sheer luck. A chance meeting with a silly woman in Bond Street put me in possession of a piece of information, trivial in itself (my informant never for one moment saw its possible significance), but which immediately altered the whole case for me. I saw in a flash that I’d been working from the beginning on mistaken premises. That I’d been making, in fact, the particular fundamental mistake which the murderer had intended the police and everybody else to make.

  “It’s a curious business, this element of luck in the solution of crime-puzzles,” Roger ruminated. “As it happens I was discussing it with Moresby, in connection with this very case. I pointed out to him the number of impossible problems which Scotland Yard solves eventually through sheer luck—a vital piece of evidence turning up of its own accord so to speak, or a piece of information brought in by an angry woman because her husband happened to have given her grounds for jealousy just before the crime. That sort of thing is happening all the time. The Avenging Chance, I suggested as a title, if Moresby ever wanted to make a film out of such a story.

  “Well, The Avenging Chance has worked again. By means of that lucky encounter in Bond Street, in one moment of enlightenment it showed me who really had sent those chocolates to Sir Eustace Pennefather.”

  “Well, well, well!” Mr. Bradley kindly expressed the feelings of the Circle.

  “And who was it, then?” queried Miss Dammers, who had an unfortunate lack of dramatic feeling. For that matter Miss Dammers was inclined to plume herself on the fact that she had no sense of construction, and that none of her books ever had a plot. Novelists who use words like ‘values’ and ‘reflexes’ and ‘Œdipus-complex’ simply won’t have anything to do with plots. “Who appeared to you in this interesting revelation, Mr. Sheringham?”

  “Oh, let me work my story up a little first,” Roger pleaded.

  Miss Dammers sighed. Stories, as Roger as a fellow-craftsman ought to have known, simply weren’t done nowadays. But then Roger was a best-seller, and anything is possible with a creature like that.

  Unconscious of these reflections, Roger was leaning back in his chair in an easy attitude, meditating gently. When he began to speak again it was in a more conversational tone than he had used before.

  “You know, this really was a very remarkable case. You and Bradley, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, didn’t do the criminal justice when you described it as a hotch-potch of other cases. Any ideas of real merit in previous cases may have been borrowed, perhaps; but as Fielding says, in Tom Jones, to borrow from the classics, even without acknowledgment, is quite legitimate for the purposes of an original work. And this is an original work. It has one feature which not only absolves it from all charge to the contrary, but which puts its head and shoulders above all its prototypes.

  “It’s bound to become one of the classical cases itself. And but for the merest accident, which the criminal for all his ingenuity couldn’t possibly have foreseen, I think it would have become one of the classical mysteries. On the whole I’m inclined to consider it the most perfectly-planned murder I’ve ever heard of (because of course one doesn’t hear of the even more perfectly-planned ones that are never known to be murders at all). It’s so exactly right—ingenious, utterly simple, and as near as possible infallible.”

  “Humph! Not so very infallible, as it turned out, Sheringham, eh?” grunted Sir Charles.

  Roger smiled at him.

  “The motive’s so obvious, when you know where to look for it; but you didn’t know. The method’s so significant, once you’ve grasped its real essentials; but you didn’t grasp them. The traces are so thinly covered, when you’ve realised just what is covering them; but you didn’t realise. Everything was anticipated. The soap was left lying about in chunks, and we all hurried to stuff our eyes with it. No wonder we couldn’t see clearly. It really was beautifully planned. The police, the public, the press—everybody completely taken in. It seems almost a pity to have to give the murderer away.”

  “Really, Mr. Sheringham,” remarked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “You’re getting quite lyrical.”

  “A perfect murder makes me feel lyrical. If I was this particular criminal I should have been writing odes to myself for the last fortnight.”

  “And as it is,” suggested Miss Dammers, “you feel like writing odes to yourself for having solved the thing.”

  “I do rather,” Roger agreed.

  “Well, I’ll begin with the evidence. As to that, I won’t say that I’ve got such a collection of details as Bradley was able to amass to prove his first theory, but I think you’ll all agree that I’ve got quite enough. Perhap I can’t do better than run through his list of twelve conditions which the murderer must fulfil, though as you’ll see I don’t by any means agree with all of them.

  “I grant and can prove the first two, that the murderer must have at least an elementary knowledge of chemistry and criminology, but I disagree with both parts of the third; I don’t think a good education is really essential, and I should certainly not rule out any one with a public-school or university education, for reasons which I’ll explain later. Nor do I agree with the fourth, that he or she must have had possession of or access to Mason’s note-paper. It was an ingenious idea of Bradley’s that the possession of the notepaper suggested the method of the crime, but I think it mistaken; a previous case suggested the method, chocolates were decided on (for a very good reason indeed, as I’ll show later) as the vehicle, and Mason’s as being the most important firm of chocolate manufacturers. It then became necessary to procure a piece of their notepaper, and I’m in a position to show how this was done.

  “The fifth condition I would qualify. I don’t agree that the criminal must have possession of or access to a Hamilton No. 4 typewriter, but I do agree that such possession must have existed. In other words, I would put that condition in the past tense. Remember that we have to deal with a very astute criminal, and a very carefully planned crime. I thought it most unlikely that such an incriminating piece of evidence as the actual typewriter would be allowed to lie about for anyone to discover. Much more probably that a machine had been bought specially for the occasion. It was clear from the letter that it wasn’t a new machine which had been used. With the courage of my deduction, therefore, I spent a whole afternoon making inquiries at second-hand typewriter-shops till I ran down the place where it had been bought, and proved the buying. The shopman was able to identify my murderer from a photograph I had with me.”

  “And where’s the machine now?” asked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming eagerly.

  “I expect at the bottom of the Thames. That’s my point. This criminal of mine leaves nothing to chance
at all.

  “With the sixth condition, about being near the post-office during the critical hour, of course I agree. My murderer has a mild alibi, but it doesn’t hold water. As to the next two, the fountain-pen and the ink, I haven’t been able to check them at all, and while I agree that their possession would be rather pleasing confirmation I don’t attach great importance to them; Onyx pens are so universal, and so is Harfield’s ink, that there isn’t much argument there either way. Besides, it would be just like my criminal not to own either of them but to have borrowed the pen unobtrusively. Lastly, I agree about the creative mind, and the neatness with the fingers, and of course with the prisoner’s peculiar mentality, but not with the necessity for methodical habits.”

  “Oh, come,” said Mr. Bradley, pained. “That was rather a sound deduction, I thought. And it stands to reason, too.”

  “Not to my reason,” Roger retorted.

  Mr. Bradley shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s the notepaper I’m interested in,” said Sir Charles. “In my opinion that’s the point on which the case against any one must hang. How do you prove possession of the notepaper, Sheringham?”

  “The notepaper,” said Roger, “was extracted about three weeks ago from one of Webster’s books of sample notepaper-headings. The erasure would be some private mark of Webster’s, the price, for instance: ‘This style, 5s. 9d.’ There are three books at Webster’s, containing exactly the same samples. Two of them include a piece of Mason’s paper; from the third it’s missing. I can prove contact of my suspect with the book about three weeks ago.”

  “You can, can you?” Sir Charles was impressed. “That sounds pretty conclusive. What put you on the idea of the sample books?”

  “The yellowed edges of the letter,” Roger said, not a little pleased with himself. “I didn’t see how a bit of paper that had been kept in a pile could get its edges quite so discoloured as all that, so concluded that it must have been an isolated piece. Then it struck me that walking about London, one does see isolated pieces of notepaper stuck on a board in the windows of printing-firms. But this piece showed no drawing-pin holes or any other signs of having been fixed to a board. Besides, it would be difficult to remove it from a board. What was the next best thing? Obviously, a sample-book, such as one usually finds inside the same shops. So to the printers of Mason’s notepaper I went, and there, so to speak, my piece wasn’t.”

  “Yes,” muttered Sir Charles, “certainly that sounds pretty conclusive.” He sighed. One gathered that he was gazing wistfully in his mind’s eye at the diminishing figure of Lady Pennefather, and the beautiful case he had built up around her. Then he brightened. This time one had gathered that he had switched his vision to the figure, equally diminishing, of Sir Charles Wildman, and the beautiful case that had been built up around him too.

  “So now,” said Roger, feeling he could really put it off no longer, “we come to the fundamental mistake to which I referred just now, the trap the murderer laid for us and into which we all so neatly fell.”

  Everybody sat up.

  Roger surveyed them benignly.

  “You got very near seeing it, Bradley, last night, with your casual suggestion that Sir Eustace himself might not have been the intended victim after all. That’s right enough. But I go further than that.”

  “I fell in the trap, though, did I?” said Mr. Bradley, pained. “Well, what is this trap? What’s the fundamental mistake we all side-slipped into?”

  “Why,” Roger brought out in triumph, “that the plan had miscarried—that the wrong person had been killed!”

  He got his reward.

  “What!” said every one at once. “Good heavens, you don’t mean …?”

  “Exactly,” Roger crowed. “That was just the beauty of it. The plan had not miscarried. It had been brilliantly successful. The wrong person had not been killed. Very much the right person was.”

  “What’s all this?” positively gaped Sir Charles. “How on earth do you make that out?”

  “Mrs. Bendix was the objective all the time,” Roger went on more soberly. “That’s why the plot was so ingenious. Every single thing was anticipated. It was foreseen that, if Bendix could be brought naturally into Sir Eustace’s presence when the parcel was being opened, the latter would hand the chocolates over to him. It was foreseen that the police would look for the criminal among Sir Eustace’s associates, and not the dead woman’s. It was probably even foreseen, Bradley, that the crime would be considered the work of a woman, whereas really, of course, chocolates were employed because it was a woman who was the objective.”

  “Well, well well!” said Mr. Bradley.

  “Then it’s your theory,” pursued Sir Charles, “that the murderer was an associate of the dead woman’s, and had nothing to do with Sir Eustace at all?” He spoke as if not altogether averse from such a theory.

  “It is,” Roger confirmed. “But first let me tell you what finally opened my eyes to the trap. The vital piece of information I got in Bond Street was this: that Mrs. Bendix Had seen that Play, The Creaking Skull, before. There’s no doubt about it; she actually went with my informant herself. You see the extraordinary significance, of course. That means that she already knew the answer to that bet she made with her husband about the identity of the villain.”

  A little intake of breath testified to a general appreciation of this information.

  “Oh! What a marvellous piece of divine irony.” Miss Dammers was exercising her usual faculty of viewing things from the impersonal aspect. “Then she actually brought her own retribution on herself. The bet she won virtually killed her.”

  “Yes,” said Roger. “The irony hadn’t failed to strike even my informant. The punishment, as she pointed out, was so much greater than the crime. But I don’t think,”—Roger spoke very gently, in a mighty effort to curb his elation—” I don’t think that even now you quite see my point.”

  Everybody looked inquiringly.

  “You’ve all heard Mrs. Bendix quite minutely described. You must all have formed a tolerably close mental picture of her. She was a straightforward, honest girl, making if anything (also according to my informant) almost too much of a fetish of straight dealing and playing the game. Does the making of a bet to which she already knew the answer, fit into that picture or does it not?”

  “Ah!” nodded Mr. Bradley. “Oh, very pretty.”

  “Just so. It is (with apologies to Sir Charles) a psychological impossibility. It really is, you know, Sir Charles; one simply can’t see her doing such a thing, in fun or out of it; and I gather that fun wasn’t her strong suit, by any means.

  “Ergo,” concluded Roger briskly, “she didn’t. Ergo, that bet was never made. Ergo, there never was such a bet. Ergo, Bendix was lying. Ergo, Bendix wanted to get hold of those chocolates for some reason other than he stated. And the chocolates being what they were, there was only one other reason.

  “That’s my case.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  WHEN the excitement that greeted this revolutionary reading of the case had died down, Roger went on to defend his theory in more detail.

  “It is something of a shock, of course, to find oneself contemplating Bendix as the very cunning murderer of his own wife, but really, once one has been able to rid one’s mind of all prejudice, I don’t see how the conclusion can possibly be avoided. Every item of evidence, however minute, goes to support it.”

  “But the motive!” ejaculated Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.

  “Motive? Good heavens, he’d motive enough. In the first place he was frankly—no, not frankly; secretly!—tired of her. Remember what we were told of his character. He’d sown his wild oats. But apparently he hadn’t finished sowing them, because his name has been mentioned in connection with more than one woman even since his marriage, usually, in the good old-fashioned way, actresses. So Bendix wasn’t-such a solemn stick by any means. He liked his fun. And his wife, I should imagine, was just about the last person in the world to sym
pathise with such feelings.

  “Not that he hadn’t liked her well enough when he married her, quite possibly, though it was her money he was after all the time. But she must have bored him dreadfully very soon. And really,” said Roger impartially, “I think one can hardly blame him there. Any woman, however charming otherwise, is bound to bore a normal man if she does nothing but prate continually about honour and duty and playing the game; and that, I have on good authority, was Mrs. Bendix’s habit.

  “Just looked at the ménage in this new light. The wife would never overlook the smallest peccadillo. Every tiny lapse would be thrown up at him for years. Everything she did would be right and everything he did wrong. Her sanctimonious righteousness would be forever being contrasted with his vileness. She might even work herself into the state of those half-mad creatures who spend the whole of their married lives reviling their husbands for having been attracted by other women before they even met the girl it was their misfortune to marry. Don’t think I’m trying to blacken Mrs. Bendix. I’m just showing you how intolerable life with her might have been.

  “But that’s only the incidental motive. The real trouble was that she was too close with her money, and that too I know for a fact. That’s where she sentenced herself to death. He wanted it, or some of it, badly (it’s what he married her for), and she wouldn’t part.

  “One of the first things I did was to consult a Directory of Directors and make a list of the firms he’s interested in, with a view to getting a confidential report on their financial condition. The report reached me just before I left my rooms. It told me exactly what I expected—that every single one of those firms is rocky, some only a little but some within sight of a crash. They all need money to save them. It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s run through all his own money, and he had to get more. I found time to run down to Somerset House and again it was as I expected: her will was entirely in his favour. The really important point (which no one seems to have suspected) is that he isn’t a good business-man at all; he’s a rotten one. And half-a-million … Well!