The Wychford Poisoning Case

by Anthony Berkeley

  ‘This is a puzzle all right,’ quoth Alec.

  ‘Oh, yes; I’m not saying you never get a puzzle in real life. Take Steinie Morrison or Oscar Slater, for instance; or Seddon and Mrs Thompson, as I was quoting to you the other day in a different connection. All of those were puzzling enough, though personally I’ve quite made up my mind, after studying the trials of the last two, what the truth was in each case.’ He paused.

  ‘What was the truth, then?’ Alec asked dutifully.

  ‘That Seddon was guilty and Mrs Thompson innocent—innocent of the actual count on which she was tried, I mean. I’m quite sure that she and Bywaters had not arranged that encounter in advance, I’m quite sure that she didn’t know murder was being done until it had been done, and I’m almost sure that Bywaters did not go out that evening with the intention of murdering; he lost first his temper and then his head, drew his knife and saw red. However, we can’t go into that now; I could talk to you on that case till midnight. No, what I mean is—don’t let’s treat this case of ours just as a story-book crime puzzle; what we’ve got to do is to remember the human element, first, last, and all the time. It’s the human element that makes the crime possible, and it’s the human element which ought to lead us to the truth.’

  ‘There’s certainly no lack of the human element here,’ Alec observed.

  ‘There is not!’ Roger agreed, with something like enthusiasm. ‘Gay, jolly young wife and worrying, nagging, fussing middle-aged husband, getting on each other’s nerves no doubt and driving each other half-crazy; wife consoling herself with the bluff, hearty husband of her acidulated best friend, husband ditto with one of his own servants, a calculating, crafty wench, as I see her, knowing very well not only which side her bread is buttered but how to butter it as well—and then finding that the butter, after all, was only margarine. And then that dangerish, tigerish (catty is altogether too feeble a word), purring little hypocrite of another best friend, always about the place, always with her finger, as you said, well in the middle of each and every pie, turning to bitter, implacable enmity at the very first breath of suspicion and now holding in those little hands of hers the clue to every riddle and probably the solution of the whole puzzle. To say nothing of those two Bentleys, one hard as iron and utterly relentless, and the other pliable as india rubber but just as stubborn, and both standing to benefit incalculably by the death of a brother for whom neither of them much cared. Oh, there’s plenty of human interest here all right!’

  ‘Well, the public are eating it all right.’

  ‘Exactly. Because the circumstances are unusual as well, besides the characters of the people involved. The Bentleys are well-to do, for instance; and you very, very seldom get a murder among the well-to-do except in fiction. On the spur of the moment Constance Kent, the Ardlamont case and the various doctor-criminals are the only ones I can think of; the upper strata of society would appear to be either more civilised or more cunning. And lastly we’ve got here the pretty young wife and the husband far too old for her—the stock situation of every second penny-novelette ever published.’

  ‘But the sympathy isn’t with her. It’s all against her.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s very interesting. I don’t think it’s entirely because people think she’s guilty, you know, this tremendous feeling against Mrs Bentley; not entirely. It’s partly because she’s a foreigner, no doubt, but I think the root of it in the vast majority of cases is that curious streak of brutishness buried in the depths of practically everybody’s soul—the brutishness that nobody dares give expression to individually, but which comes out so strongly in the mass; the lust for cruelty, if you like, that prompts the incredible inhumanity of mobs and leads to lynchings and clubbing helpless people to death and ghastly outrages on women in a revolution. As far as Mrs Bentley’s concerned, the whole nation has formed itself into a mob. Mrs Bentley has been suggested to them as an object for execration, and without bothering to consider anything further the mob is clamouring that she be judicially lynched for them. The fact that she’s a woman, and a young and pretty woman at that, actually puts an edge on their delight in their own blood-lust. Lord, I’m expressing this extraordinarily badly, but you may see—Hallo, there’s the bell! I must hurry up. I’ve got to go out again after dinner.’

  ‘Out?’ Alec repeated in surprise.

  ‘Yes, curse it,’ Roger groaned. ‘Back to that wretched woman. She wanted me to stay to dinner there, but I got out of that. I must say I have hopes for this evening, high hopes; but it’s devilish hard work—and devilish ticklish work too. The least false step puts one back hours. Look here, take Sheila aside if you get the chance and see if you can wangle me a latch-key, Alec. I expect I’ll be pretty late. And try and wait up a bit for me if you can.’

  Alec was successful in obtaining the latch-key, and Roger made the best apologies he could to his host and hostess for his unseemly absence. To his relief Sheila was almost normal at dinner; she greeted him cheerfully and without embarrassment, and only the almost vicious note which characterised her unmerciful twitting of him with regard to his alleged infatuation for the Saunderson gave any inkling at all that anything might be out of the ordinary with her. For once Roger was almost glad to escape from the moors to the peaceful seclusion of the boudoir.

  His prophecy had been a sound one. It was past one o’clock before he staggered into the drawing-room where Alec, by the remains of a moribund fire, was waiting for him alone.

  Roger struck an attitude by the door. ‘Alexander!’ he proclaimed softly. ‘I have succeeded! I have loosened the serpent’s tongue, and lo! all the wisdom of the serpent is now mine. Roger Sheringham, serpent charmer. But oh! how I’ve had to labour for it! For God’s sake give me a drink!’

  CHAPTER XIII

  WHAT MRS BENTLEY SAID

  ROGER threw himself with exaggerated exhaustion on to the couch and Alec mixed a whisky and soda at a side table on which stood a decanter, syphon and glasses.

  ‘That’s good work, Roger,’ he said with as great a display of enthusiasm as his cautious Scotch nature would permit. ‘Have you got the explanations for everything?’

  ‘Every single blessed thing.’

  ‘How are they? Convincing?’

  ‘To the man who’s already made up his mind, no. To the man whose mind is still open, just as reasonable as the theories of the prosecution.’

  ‘Good work! Here you are. I’ve made it a stiff one.’

  ‘I need a stiff one,’ said Roger simply, and applied himself to it.

  ‘Hallo, Roger!’ remarked a voice from the door. ‘Any news?’

  Sheila closed the door behind her with elaborate caution. She was wearing a black silk kimono patterned with silver storks, and little pink quilted bedroom slippers on her bare feet. As she moved one caught a glimpse of frivolous blue silk pyjamas. It was a costume in which many people might have betrayed signs of self-consciousness; Sheila evidently took it for the most ordinary thing in the world.

  ‘You naughty little girl!’ said Roger with severity. ‘Go back to bed at once!’

  ‘Try not to be an ass, Roger,’ Miss Purefoy entreated. ‘I’ve been lying awake for you for the last hour and a half. I was beginning to think you were going to stay the night there.’ She dropped into a chair near the fire and crossed her knees, perfunctorily arranging the folds of the kimono over perhaps four inches of pyjama. ‘Well, what’s happened?’

  ‘He’s found out what Mrs Bentley says about things,’ Alec informed her.

  ‘Have you, Roger? I say, good for you! Let’s hear all about it.’

  Roger set his glass on the floor and cleared his throat importantly. ‘Thus and thus and thus, my children. First, the fly-papers. Mrs Bentley says she got them to use as a cosmetic.’

  ‘A cosmetic?’ Sheila repeated in surprise.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you know that arsenic is used as a cosmetic?’

  ‘No, that I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it is. There’s an idea
that it’s good for the complexion (I don’t know whether there’s any truth in it or not), and it certainly functions as a depilatory. All this was thrashed out in the Madeleine Smith case, you won’t remember; her explanation of buying arsenic was that she wanted it for use as a cosmetic. I think that’s quite a feasible explanation as far as Mrs Bentley’s concerned. She’s a French woman, you must remember, and it’s highly probable that she’d heard of this use of arsenic when she was a girl in Paris; probably actually used it. And in this country, of course, she wouldn’t be able to buy arsenic without signing the poisons’ book, except in the form of fly-papers or weed-killer. To clinch the matter, she was going to that ball with Allen two days later, wasn’t she? Yes, the explanation sounds reasonable enough.’

  ‘Pass fly-papers,’ Sheila agreed. ‘What about the Bovril? That’s what I don’t see how she could get over.’

  ‘Well, now, what she says about the Bovril is really most uncommonly interesting. Her explanation of that is that her husband, a day or two after he took to his bed for the last time, produced a packet of white powder and told her a most extraordinary rigmarole about it. According to him, this powder was the only thing in the world that could do him any good, but it was something which the doctor would try and prevent him taking because it was a drug which no doctor properly understood (Bentley was always very sarcastic about doctors and drugs, I ought to tell you; he considered them far too timid in the use they make of them. So that all fits in). Well, he handed the packet over to her and asked her to put a tiny pinch or two into his food from time to time, but she wasn’t to breathe a word about it to a soul, because if she did the doctor would be sure to hear of it and be down on him like a ton of bricks. Mrs Bentley didn’t attach any particular importance to this. She knew her husband was always dosing himself, and she thought that the white powder was something like bicarbonate of soda or some other equally harmless ingredient. Besides, Bentley had particularly told her that it was absolutely innocuous.’

  ‘And did she?’ asked Alec.

  ‘Yes, she put one or two pinches in his food just to humour him. Then there came that fuss about the letter, the nurse arrived, and she found herself debarred from administering anything to her husband direct. According to her story, Bentley also saw that he was going to have trouble in getting his doses of this white powder, so when the nurse was out of the room he asked his wife to put a pinch or two in the bottle of Bovril which, was standing on a table by his bed. At first Mrs Bentley refused, but he got so excited and worked up about it that just to keep him quiet she agreed to do so. The nurse came back, Mrs Bentley smuggled the bottle of Bovril out of the room and did as she’d promised. And that’s how arsenic came to be found in that bottle of Bovril.’

  ‘Sounds dam’ fishy,’ Sheila commented.

  ‘So the police thought,’ Roger said mildly.

  ‘Then is that packet of white powder the same as the packet of arsenic which was found in the drawer in Mrs Bentley’s room?’ asked Alec.

  ‘Presumably, yes.’

  ‘Humph!’

  ‘What about the other things, Roger?’ said Sheila, ‘Weren’t there some other things found with arsenic in?’

  ‘Yes; there was the medicine-bottle of arsenic and lemon-juice, and the handkerchief belonging to Mrs Bentley which was also impregnated with arsenic. These, she says, were the results of the fly-papers. The arsenic and lemon-juice was the cosmetic preparation, which she dabbed on her face to improve her complexion, and the handkerchief was what she dabbed it on with. She locked them away in her drawer with, later on, the packet of white powder, just for safety. Oh, and by the way, this statement of hers was corroborated to a certain extent by the analyst’s evidence before the magistrates. The arsenic and lemon-juice certainly was the result of the fly-papers’ decoction, because the analyst found paper fibres in it. Also, there were traces of lemon juice on this handkerchief, so that seems to be corroborated. As for the rest, the arsenic in Bentley’s medicine-bottles and in the thermos, and all the rest of it, she says she doesn’t know anything about at all, and the only thing she can think is that he put it there himself.’

  ‘But, good Lord!’ exclaimed Alec. ‘A man wouldn’t want to go and feed himself on arsenic.’

  ‘That conclusion struck me too, Alexander,’ Roger agreed. ‘But if, as we decided to do, we are going to take Mrs Bentley’s story as true, what’s the obvious result that we get?’

  ‘That he didn’t know it was arsenic!’ cried Sheila excitedly.

  Roger beamed on her benignly. ‘I am proud of my intelligent staff. Well done, Detective Purefoy. Precisely! He didn’t know it was arsenic. And what in turn does that give us?’ He paused inquiringly, but neither of them answered him. ‘Why, that somebody had given him this arsenic and stuffed him up with some damned silly yarn about it, with the very neat consequence that he was induced to poison himself! Now then, what about that?’

  ‘I say!’ breathed Sheila. ‘I wonder!’

  ‘Putting aside Mrs Bentley,’ Alec said slowly, ‘that does seem the only other explanation.’

  ‘But who would it be?’ Sheila cried. ‘It’d have to be somebody who knew him pretty well.’

  Roger refreshed himself from his tumbler and lit a cigarette.

  ‘One thing occurs to me,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘and that is that our net for suspects is considerably enlarged now, isn’t it? I mean, we aren’t limited any longer to those six people who were with Bentley during that half-hour. We imagine we know now how he got the arsenic into him; what we don’t know is who gave it him in the first place. Well, that might have been anybody.’

  ‘Still, you were taking a good deal of trouble just before dinner to show that a good many of those six had a motive for wanting Bentley out of the way,’ Alec remarked. ‘That still holds good, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes; most decidedly. All I mean is that we’re not limited to those. Supposing there was a business rival, for instance, whom Bentley was on the point of ruining. Our net’s wide enough to take him in.’

  ‘We mustn’t go trying after too far-fetched ideas, though,’ Alec observed with native caution. ‘I can’t quite see Bentley accepting white powders from the hand of a man who had every reason to be up against him.’

  ‘Can’t you, Alec?’ Roger retorted. ‘Well, I can. That’s just that very point which makes our field so unpleasantly wide. With a hypochondriac and self-doser like Bentley one can see anything. You’ve no idea what blithering idiots people of that type can be where their own fads are concerned. Bentley might have been a sharp man of business and no fool in the ordinary things of life, but introduce the subject of drugs or propound some new theory of self-treatment, and he’ll swallow absolutely anything, both metaphorically and literally!’

  ‘By the way,’ Alec remarked, ‘all this rather does away with the idea that you had first of all, doesn’t it? That the real murderer was working against Mrs Bentley just as much as Bentley himself, and deliberately laid all this train of evidence to lead to her.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That was only a preliminary theory. It may still hold good, but more probably that conclusive train of evidence was sheer accident. How could the real murderer have insured that she would be making a cosmetic out of arsenical fly-papers so conveniently, for instance? Unless it was somebody in the house who just nipped in and took advantage of this very damning fact, I don’t see how that could have happened.’

  ‘And what about the arsenic in the medicine-bottles? I suppose that must have been carefully put there by the person interested.’

  ‘Yes; and that does look rather like the deliberate manufacturing of evidence against Mrs Bentley, doesn’t it? At least, I don’t see for the moment what other reason there could be for it.’

  ‘I say!’ interposed Sheila excitedly. ‘How do we know after all that the arsenic that killed him did come out of that white packet? We all jumped to the conclusion that it did, because it seemed so obvious. But we don’t know, do we?’ />
  ‘Alexander,’ said Roger in awe-struck tones, ‘do you know that we’re in the presence of a genius? Sheer, screaming genius!’

  ‘It was a bit of a brain-wave,’ admitted Miss Purefoy modestly.

  ‘It was indeed,’ Roger agreed. ‘Seriously, Sheila, that’s a point, and I don’t mind admitting that it hadn’t occurred to me before. Yes, we must bear that in mind. Mind you, I don’t think it’s very probable, and if the drug had been hyoscin or aconite, or anything unusual like that, the chances would be a couple of million to one against there being anything in it. Still, you’re quite right; we’ve got to bear every contingency in mind, and there’s no doubt that if any second person had conceived the idea of using poison, arsenic is the one they would probably pick on; so the coincidence doesn’t become as great as it might have been. What you mean, in other words, is that it might have been one of those six after all, even if he was given the packet by somebody totally different?’

  ‘I suppose I did,’ Sheila said a little vaguely.

  ‘Yes,’ Roger mused, ‘and none of those people would have found any difficulty in getting him to take it, I should imagine. He knew all of them well enough to lap any new drug out of their hands. And here’s another suggestion, to cap Sheila’s brilliant effort—was the white powder administered to Bentley by his wife arsenic at all? We don’t know. Supposing it was something perfectly innocuous, and that packet of arsenic was substituted for the other to be found in the search after Bentley’s death! The person who substituted it having, of course, already poisoned Bentley in some other way. It’s perfectly feasible. My hat, there are some weird possibilities in this case, to say nothing of complications!’

  ‘And the biggest possibility of all,’ said Alec, ‘is—!’

  ‘That Mrs Bentley did the whole thing herself,’ Roger took him up. ‘Yes, I know. But I do hope she didn’t, because we’re getting along so nicely.’