There might be some link here that could be established, in spite of all his precautions, between Haslar and the crime. I know that ‘he was careful to see that nothing he had used in connection with the affair remained.’ Robinson, of the Charing Cross trunk crime, was careful to see that no trace was left in his office of the murder of Mrs. Bonati, but after all his labour a bloodstained match and a hairpin were found in his wastepaper basket and helped to hang him.
Haslar’s workshop would certainly be searched. It might yield nothing. But even then it would still be possible that someone, himself unseen, had watched the murderer at his work of destroying the evidence and would come forward as soon as he realised that the incident which had puzzled him had a bearing on the crime.
Am I making things too easy for the detective by imagining all these possibilities? Even if none of my ‘fortunate chances’ materialised, once it had been established that Jamison was really Blunt, ordinary police routine work would establish the connection with Matthews and trace the latter. It would take longer, but it would be done in the end.
But if Jamison had led a life of crime, there might be others besides Matthews who had a possible motive for desiring his death. They would all be traced and eliminated one by one. And with every suspect who satisfied the detectives that he could have had nothing to do with the crime, the unmasking of the real murderer would be brought a step nearer.
I have mentioned certain contingencies, however, in order to show that Haslar, when he thought he was planning the perfect murder, was very far indeed from doing so. There were too many unknown factors in Jamison’s life for the crime to be safe.
And even now I have left out of account what was, perhaps, the most immediate danger of all—and one which Haslar must have realised, if he had thought intelligently about his problem at all.
He decided to kill Jamison, not because he was blackmailing him, but because he was a drunkard. ‘In a certain stage of intoxication men of Blunt’s type grew garrulous. Even if Blunt’s intentions remained good, his actions were no longer dependable.’
So the blackmailer was killed to prevent him blurting out his secret while under the influence of alcohol. But how could Haslar be sure that he hadn’t done so already? How many times had he been drunk before Haslar saw him in that condition? How many times was he drunk between that incident and the murder?
Possibly he had thrown out hints, even mentioned names. No one might have paid any attention to what he said at the time, dismissing it as the maudlin raving of an inebriate. But the moment he was murdered it would assume a new and sinister significance. It would be recalled and repeated.
Those disguises, too, which Haslar put on to make his purchases, might actually have fixed the transactions in the minds of the chemists at whose shops he called. Nothing is so conspicuous as a disguise, when assumed by a person who is not accustomed to masquerade. And his altered appearance extended to a few details only—height, build and age were not affected.
The evidence of the shopkeepers, therefore, while it would not, of itself, lead to Haslar, would do nothing to destroy the case against him. On the contrary, it would add another link to the chain.
But suppose that, in the end, when every clue had been followed up, that chain was still one link short. I might know Haslar’s history, I might be able to prove the blackmail and consequently the motive, but still be unable to show, to the satisfaction of a jury, that it was actually this man, and no other, who had prepared and posted the fatal parcel.
Even then I might still get him. I would go to him with the statements which he had made to me in the course of the investigation. I might be able to point to discrepancies between those he had made at different dates. I would undoubtedly be able to show that, in certain particulars, the story he had told me was at variance with facts which I had ascertained elsewhere. I would ask him for an explanation.
I think I would get the truth. I think that the long nervous strain which he had undergone would culminate, that his will would snap and that he would confess. The customary warning would make no difference—he would not realise that he was fastening the rope round his own neck. He would think it was there already.
But suppose he didn’t confess. I might still arrest him, knowing that the news of the arrest might bring in fresh information.
One of my first facts was that the murderer had some knowledge of chemistry. So far I have been unable to discover that Haslar has such knowledge. But after his arrest his friend comes forward, as a matter of public duty, and says: ‘A week or two before the murder I lent Haslar this book. As you will see, it contains a description of the method which was followed in making the bomb that killed Jamison.’
Another link in the chain.
Then, it may be, someone appears who has seen Haslar post the parcel. He remembers the incident and the date because it struck him afterwards, reading the newspaper reports, that it must have been just such a parcel which had caused Jamison’s death. But he did not think it was the parcel until he saw Haslar’s photograph in the newspaper.
And so the case is completed, goes before judge and jury. I think there is little doubt what the verdict will be.
THE END
Afterword
THE ARSENIC POISON MYSTERY
THE RE-PUBLICATION IN 2012 OF THE DETECTION Club novel Ask a Policeman contained as a bonus an article by Agatha Christie, who had been one of the inaugural members of the Club and its fourth President from 1957–1976. “Detective Writers in England” was a short but candid appraisal of some of her crime-writing contemporaries, commissioned by the Ministry of Information and published in a Russian magazine in 1945, but otherwise unseen and long forgotten. Its reappearance attracted a lot of interest, so when it came to preparing this reprint of Six Against the Yard, the publishers wanted to investigate what else there might be in the archive. Had Agatha Christie ever written anything on the theme of a perfect murder?
Indeed, she had—about a true-life perfect murder that in 1929 was a major scandal.
THE BACKGROUND TO THE CASE.
The unsolved poisoning of three victims in South Croydon, Surrey, during 1928 and ’29, involved two interrelated families, the Sydneys and the Duffs. No motive was ascertained in the crimes, and no suspect has ever been identified. It was such a difficult case that even Agatha Christie was invited to comment on the crime, and in a rare piece of journalism she wrote an article for the Sunday Chronicle, which was published on 11th August 1929.
The first of the victims was Edmund Creighton Duff, the 59-year-old son-in-law of elderly Violet Sydney. Returning to his Croydon home on 26th April 1928 at the conclusion of a fishing holiday, Duff complained of nausea and leg cramps after eating supper. His condition worsened overnight, and he was pronounced dead the next day. A post-mortem yielded nothing sinister, and his death was certified as being due to “natural causes.” Ten months later, on 14th February 1929, Vera Sydney, Violet’s 40-year-old daughter, remarked on feeling “seedy” after lunch. The cook, her mother and the family cat all suffered after sharing in the meal, but whereas they recovered, Vera steadily declined and died on 16th February after hours of cramps and vomiting, which her physician blamed on “gastric influenza.”
Violet Sydney was the last to go, falling ill after lunch less than a month later on 5th March. Already under medical supervision for her bereavement, she blamed her symptoms on a particularly “gritty” tonic prescribed by her doctor, but died only hours afterwards. An analysis of the medicine showed nothing out of place, and the cause of Violet’s death remained a mystery. She was buried, but rising speculation drove the surviving relatives to demand an investigation.
Violet and Vera Sydney were exhumed on 22nd March, and an autopsy revealed traces of arsenic in both bodies. Despite his widow’s protest, Edmund Duff was then exhumed on 15th May, and arsenic was also found, with the discrepancy from the original post-mortem explained away by a suggestion that doctors may have analysed organs from the wron
g corpse in 1928. Inquests on Duff and Vera Sydney attributed their deaths to murder by persons unknown, although there was insufficient evidence in the case of Violet Sydney to determine whether she was murdered or had committed suicide.
It was suggested that the victims must have been despatched by a family member. But who? Violet’s son, Thomas, was desperate to return to the USA with his American wife and may have felt trapped by his overbearing mother, and the cook who prepared the soup that killed Vera may have been involved. But the chief suspect was Edmund Duff’s widow, Grace. Local gossip suggested that she was having an affair with Dr. H. Beecher Jackson, the Croydon Coroner who compiled the evidence for all three of the deceased, and may have had a hand in the death of her husband and in covering up the facts of the case. Having got away with that murder, people said she then poisoned Vera and the matriarchal Violet for financial gain. Grace Duff died in 1973, and forty years later the triple murder remains unsolved.
Was this the perfect crime? Despite its notoriety at the time, it clearly foxed the investigators. In fact, Superintendent G. W. Cornish did not mention it at all in his memoir of murder cases from nearly forty years’ service, Cornish of Scotland Yard, which was published by Macmillan in 1935 and led directly to his commission to write the commentaries in Six Against the Yard a year later. Successful policemen probably did not feel very inspired by cases they could not solve.
Agatha Christie, however, probably was inspired by the Croydon poisonings, as she sometimes based some of her books on real-life events. A whole family is made ill from arsenic poisoning, two of whom subsequently die, in 4.50 from Paddington (1957), and both Crooked House (1949) and A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) feature serial murders of family members from poison secreted in either medication or food and drink. Christie’s characters would often maintain that poison was always the preferred weapon of a female killer, and though Christie probably believed that to be true, she liked to lay red herrings, so “always” was never a reliable assertion!
Unpublished since 1929, and from a time when the case was still very fresh in the minds of the public, Agatha Christie’s insightful article examines the human side of the story, taking a typically compassionate view of events. Sadly, Superintendent Cornish, who died on 6th February 1959 at the age of 85, is unavailable for comment…
Agatha Christie
THE TRAGIC FAMILY OF CROYDON
AGATHA CHRISTIE PLEADS FOR THE TRAGIC FAMILY OF CROYDON
Living under the shadow of one of the greatest mysteries of recent times the tragic Sydney family of Croydon to-day merits the sympathy of every right-thinking man and woman in the land.
Thrice in a few months death as the result of arsenic poisoning has visited their little circle, and each time in a way that cruelly accentuated the blow. Now that the long ordeal of the inquiries is over the mystery remains: by whose hand were these fatal doses administered?
In this article Agatha Christie, the well-known writer of detective stories, pleads for a kindly attitude towards those who still must bear much of the burden of the tragedy that might at some future time find a parallel in the family of every one of us.
WHATEVER MAY BE THE TRUTH OF THE SYDNEY case, and whether that truth ever comes to light or not, I think that it must be admitted that it is one of the most fascinating and intriguing cases ever known from the point of view of the outsider.
It reads not so much like real life as like some well-constructed detective story, only the detective story has a solution and you are bound to reach it in the last chapter.
Then whether you snort with rage and say “how unfair,” or whether you say “that’s clever, I ought to have spotted that all along,” or whether—most disastrous from the point of view of the author—you say “just as I thought all the time” and yawn, yet, at any rate, you do know.
The Sydney case HAS a solution. It is known to one person—the murderer—for I think every reasoning person must conclude that one hand and one hand only has been at work. But that person has not been discovered.
A FAMILY LIVING IN HARMONY.
This is essentially a family drama. We read the papers and we strive to visualise each separate participant in the case. We make up our minds just what we think they are like. Mrs. Grace Duff, Mr. Thomas Sydney, his wife, the Duff and Sydney children, the two servants, Mrs. Kathleen Noakes, and Amy Baker.
They seem to have been a harmonious family according to the evidence of the servants—and in matters of this kind servants usually know.
Let “Mr. A” swear as he may that he and “Mrs. A” never had an unkind word for each other, let “Mr. B” declare that she and “Mr. B” were qualifying for the Dunmow Flitch—and then hear Mary Ann on the subject. She knows.
A BAFFLING PROBLEM THAT FASCINATES.
It is, of course, highly probable that far more facts are known to the police than to the public. They may have something to go on—one hopes in the interests of the Sydneys that they have. The public has only the bare outlines of the case.
It is a fascinating problem because it is such a completely baffling one. Whichever way you start off to solve it you find yourself in a blind alley.
You can picture a motive for Mr. Duff’s death; you can picture a motive for Vera Sydney’s death; you can picture a motive for Mrs. Sydney’s death—but you cannot combine the three. There seems no conceivable way in which the death of these three persons would benefit any other one person, and the similarity of the means shows that it must be one person who is concerned.
QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED.
Mrs. Noakes prepared Vera’s soup, Amy Baker brought Mr. Duff his beer. Mrs. Duff had the opportunity of doctoring what he ate and drank. Mr. Sydney was at the house shortly before his mother took her medicine! Nothing fits in with anything else. The surviving members of the Sydney family may possibly be benefited by the deaths of Mrs. Sydney and Miss Vera Sydney. Nobody is benefited pecuniarily by the death of Mr. Duff.
The only thing that stands out on reviewing the case dispassionately is this: That somewhere in the first murder must lie the clue. Solve the mystery of Mr. Duff’s death and the solution of the other two must follow.
Is it not conceivable that the other two crimes bear a direct relation to the first? Did Miss Sydney and then her mother become aware of or at least suspect the truth? Is it not possible that they were removed for this reason? Or did the murderer, whoever he or she may be, acquire that strange lust for killing which is chronicled in the annals of crime?
OPENING UP A NEW SPECULATION.
There is the case of the French murderess who strangled children, first her own nephews and nieces and then strangers, taking a post as a nurse in order to indulge her horrible speciality.
There is a case of recent date where an English murderer is popularly credited with having committed many more crimes than the one for which he was hanged. There is Smith and the “brides in the bath.”
And that opens up a new and rather curious speculation: if an inquest had not been held on Mrs. Sydney, who would have been the next to go?
Three members of the family were poisoned. Would it have stopped there? One comes back and back again to the beginning—to the death of Mr. Edmund Creighton Duff—a death by which every member of the Sydney family was rendered poorer either directly or indirectly; a fantastic death—completely unaccountable!
His death left his widow badly off. They were on the best of terms, and there has never been even a suggestion that she wished to marry anyone else. If calumny could have touched her it would have done so. The world is not charitable in what it says without women. Mrs. Duff emerges triumphant from her ordeal.
WHO WAS MRS. DUFF’S ENEMY?
And yet for some unknown reason Mr. Duff is cruelly and cold-bloodedly murdered. Why? Who was his secret enemy?
There must have been enmity, and perhaps therein lies the whole solution.
A mind brooding on dislike, never showing it openly, must over time fester and turn diseas
ed.
The secret poisoner waits to repeat his deed.
He is drunk with success. “I did it—and nobody knows or will ever know.” And so if anyone annoys him or stands in his way he calmly removes them.
Who was Edmund Creighton Duff’s enemy? Did he ever suspect the fact himself?
SYMPATHY FOR THE INNOCENT.
I think now that the tragic inquest is concluded that one feeling will be shared by nearly everybody—the most earnest sympathy and pity for the innocent members of the family, especially the children. It is a case where the innocent suffer most horribly for sins they have never committed.
One hopes devoutly that the case will be cleared up and an arrest made for their sakes.
What life has been for them all these three months and what it necessarily must still be is not pleasant to contemplate. They live in a haze of publicity; acquaintances and friends look at them curiously; there are continually autograph hunters, curious idle crowds. Any decent happy private life is made impossible for them.
Add this to any private grief or doubts they may be undergoing and it becomes one of our modern forms of torture which, on the whole, has the Inquisition “beat.”
Yet it is unavoidable. The public interest is natural. One would be inhuman did one not feel interested.
COWARDLY ANONYMOUS LETTER-WRITERS.
I should imagine that the worst thing the Sydney family have to face is a steady influx of obscene and disgusting anonymous letters.
Who are the people who write them? It is a mystery. But there they are. These letters are probably couched in the foulest terms, penned without any regard for probability and written with the sheer malicious desire to hurt and wound. I should like some day to see a popular newspaper campaign against anonymous letter writers.
Six Against the Yard Page 23
