The Wychford Poisoning Case Page 11

  Sheila leaned back against the back of the chair and crossed her knees. That the little tweed skirt she was wearing only projected stiffly an inch or two beyond the upper one, thereby displaying the full length of two slim calves, she either did not know or else was not in the least concerned about; one is inclined to suspect the latter.

  ‘Go on, Roger,’ she said comfortably ‘I like talking about me. So I’ve got more sense in my little finger than five boys, have I?’

  ‘You have,’ Roger agreed, ‘at present. And in a year or two you’ll have completely lost every grain of it.’

  ‘Oh! How do you make that out.’

  ‘The process is known technically, I believe, as the development of sex-consciousness. But we won’t go into that.’

  ‘I know a hell of a lot about sex,’ observed Miss Purefoy with candour.

  ‘I’ve no doubt about that,’ Roger said mildly. ‘And when I want a little instruction in the subject, it’s probably you or somebody like you I should go to. Still, as I said, we won’t go into that for the moment. We were talking about sense. Yes, you’re going to lose every atom you’ve got. But don’t let that distress you. You’ll get it all back again. Possibly after you’ve turned thirty, certainly by the time you’re forty.’

  ‘Fat lot of use that’s going to be,’ commented Miss Purefoy.

  ‘Not much, certainly,’ Roger admitted; ‘considering that it’s precisely during the time you want it most that you won’t have it. Still, console yourself, my dear; every other member of your sex passes through the same process. Except perhaps the vast majority.’

  ‘Now, what are you driving at? Why not the vast majority?’

  ‘Because they haven’t got any sense at all. Never had, poor dears, and never will have. For further remarks on this subject, apply to Cousin Alexander.’

  ‘Now then,’ said Miss Purefoy, swinging an unhampered leg, ‘if you’ve finished being clever about women, shall I tell you something about men?’

  ‘No, please don’t. I know all about them. Let me tell you instead something about Miss Sheila Purefoy.’

  ‘Rather! Go ahead!’

  Roger twisted still further round in his chair. The photograph fell to the floor unheeded.

  ‘Well, Miss Sheila Purefoy is sitting on the arm of my chair in an attitude which, in any other member of her sex, I should be inclined to call deliberately provocative. In fact, if I were not a person of admirable self-restraint and ascetic disposition, I should probably have been tempted to put my arm round her waist.’

  ‘Well, carry on if you want to,’ said Miss Purefoy kindly.

  Roger closed his hand over the small brown one that was lying in Sheila’s lap. ‘I might even have been tempted to kiss her!’

  ‘Roger!’ exclaimed Miss Purefoy in high delight. ‘I do believe you’re trying to flirt with me!’

  Roger withdrew his hand from Sheila’s. ‘Of course I was!’ he said in pained tones. ‘But that’s not what you ought to have said. Run away and play with your dolls, Sheila. I’ll come back and flirt with you when you’re a big girl.’

  ‘Oh, no, Roger!’ implored Miss Purefoy pathetically. ‘Do flirt with me now. I’ll be good; I will really. I’ll make goo-goo eyes at you like anything. Please flirt with me, Roger!’

  ‘Go away, woman!’ returned Roger with dignity. He turned round in his chair again, picked up and opened his book, and began to read with considerable ostentation.

  ‘Roger!’ said a small voice behind his left shoulder.

  ‘Go away, woman!’ Roger repeated sternly.

  There was a moment’s stillness; then Sheila slowly uncrossed her legs and sat up. ‘All right, Roger,’ she said in a curiously sober voice. ‘I’ll go.’ She bent forward swiftly, kissed his cheek and ran to the door.

  Roger’s book fell off his knees and he did not pick it up. He stared at the door through which Sheila had vanished.

  ‘Oh, hell!’ he said softly.

  A few minutes later Alec came in. He had been keeping Dr Purefoy company in the car on his morning round and he was cold.

  ‘You frowsty blighter!’ he observed pleasantly, pulling a chair up to the fire. ‘Been reading in here all the morning?’

  ‘Alec,’ said Roger irrelevantly, ‘we were talking about women this morning, weren’t we?’

  ‘Oh Lord! You’re not going to start on that again, are you?’

  ‘I think I mentioned, in passing, that they were idiots, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did!’ agreed Alec with feeling.

  ‘Well, so they are. Most consummate idiots, poor little devils; and the tragedy of it is, that they can’t help it. But they’re not such consummate idiots, such unutterable, thoughtless, careless, ineffable, altogether damned idiots as men are!’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Alec exclaimed, genuinely startled. ‘Meaning me?’

  ‘No, you ass!’ Roger snapped. ‘Meaning me!’

  ‘Well, I’ll be hanged!’ gasped the astonished Alec. It was the first word of self-disparagement he had ever heard pass his distinguished friend’s lips.

  At lunch Mrs Purefoy was seriously perturbed about Sheila; that young lady’s violent and hectic ragging of Alec not only passed all bounds of decorum, but almost those of decency as well. Roger, on the contrary, provided a pleasant contrast with his usual manner in the unwonted restraint and taciturnity of his behaviour.

  After lunch he followed Alec upstairs and into his bedroom.

  ‘Alec, come for a walk somewhere,’ he said shortly.

  Alec scrutinised his friend with exaggerated concern. ‘I’m going to ask Jim to have a look at you, Roger,’ he said. ‘You must be ill. At lunch you sat there looking like a dead cow’—Roger’s animal impersonations appeared to be singularly versatile—‘and hardly opened your mouth, and now you want to go for a walk! Let me feel your pulse.’

  ‘Don’t try to be funnier than nature made you, Alec,’ observed Roger wearily.

  ‘Well, do cheer up!’ Alec exhorted. ‘Think of tea-time. That ought to buck you up.’

  Roger rounded on him in sudden exasperation. ‘Good Lord, you don’t think I’m looking forward to it, do you? The thought of the wretched woman makes me feel ill. I tell you, Alec, I’ve a dam’ good mind to go back with you to Dorsetshire and chuck the whole thing! In fact, if I weren’t almost sure we’re on the right tack, I certainly would.’

  Alec stared at him with open mouth. ‘Well I’ll be jiggered!’ he said blankly.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE HUMAN ELEMENT

  THE end of the walk saw Roger restored to a somewhat more reasonable frame of mind. Severely as he was accustomed to castigate any claim on the part of others to an artistic temperament (holding as he did that this was even more of a palpable pose than to prate of writing for mere writing’s sake), he was certainly to some extent himself the possessor of this inconvenient accessory. His infrequent reactions from his usual mood of frivolous complacency were, when they did occur, violent and murky.

  His disposition was naturally buoyant, however, and it was not long on this occasion before the vehemence with which he had blamed himself for the palpable state of Sheila’s feelings began to abate. His thoughtless pretence of a mock-flirtation had done nothing more after all than bring matters to a brief and fleeting climax; and though he was still distressed at the idea that the child might for the moment have imagined any hint of seriousness underlying his nonsense, his sense of proportion soon returned. Just as the flapper of the days before the war had vented her calf-love and her instinctive sense of hero-worship upon her favourite matinée idol, so must Sheila in nature have somebody to idolise in secret and spin dreams around in her small white bed at night. Roger was a trifle embarrassed that her choice should have fallen upon himself, for he liked Sheila and enjoyed the frank and easy camaraderie into which they had fallen so quickly. He made up his mind to treat her exactly as he had done for the last twenty-four hours and show not the faintest suspicion that everything might not b
e as it appeared on the surface.

  Nevertheless, as Alec left him outside Mrs Saunderson’s gates it was with distinct reluctance that he made his way up to the front door and rang the bell. The difference between Mrs Saunderson and Sheila Purefoy was the difference between black lingerie in a scented boudoir and small brogue shoes on an open moor; and Roger never had cared much about black lingerie.

  It was nearly half-past seven before he got back to the house in the High Street. He looked into the empty drawing-room, then ran up the stairs to Alec’s room, where he found that gentleman brushing his hair with a good deal of earnest attention in front of his dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Hallo, Alec; I’ve found out one thing,’ he began abruptly. ‘Don’t ask me how I did it, or I shall burst into tears; a detective’s life must be a singularly hard one. But I’ve brought something back with me for my trouble.’

  ‘You have? Good! What is it?’

  Roger dropped into an armchair beside the dressing-table. ‘Bentley had been carrying on an intrigue with Mary Blower!’

  Alec whistled. ‘Had he, by Jove! That looks nasty.’

  ‘For us, you mean? But Mrs Bentley didn’t know about it—or as far as the Saunderson’s information is, she didn’t.’

  ‘She didn’t, eh? Well, what do you make of that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Roger confessed, lighting a cigarette. ‘These are the facts, as far as I can make them out. Bentley (who, though a rat, appears to have been somewhat of an amorous rat; this wasn’t his first affair by any means, according to the omniscient Saunderson)—Bentley had been playing about with the girl and then chucked her; Mrs Bentley had her suspicions, if nothing more, and gave her the sack; she demanded protection from Bentley, who told her quite plainly to go to the devil; in the correct way her love turned to loathing, but she didn’t go to the devil; instead, she took some pains to send Mrs Bentley there. And that’s the story. Mary Blower wept it all out on Mrs Saunderson’s shoulder after Mrs Bentley’s arrest. Nobody else knows a thing about it.’

  ‘Humph! This seems to complicate matters.’

  ‘It does; it throws discredit on all Mary Blower’s evidence, you see. She hates both the Bentleys like poison, so we can’t believe a word she tells us about them. And there’s another thing. Mrs Bentley knew that her husband had been unfaithful to her before she herself embarked on this Allen affair. She told Mrs Saunderson so. Isn’t it amazing—these women seem to have no decent reticence at all! They yap to their friends about the most intimate details of their married lives—things a man would sooner be burnt alive than tell to his very best lifelong pal. It does make me rather sick. Still, it has its uses for budding detectives, I must say.’

  ‘Now don’t go off the deep end about women again,’ Alec admonished. ‘Stick to the point. What does all this suggest to you? That Mary Blower poisoned Bentley herself?’

  ‘Not necessarily. But it does give her a motive for doing so, doesn’t it? Lord, this is getting difficult. Out of those six people on whom we’re keeping a suspicious eye, no less than four have the most excellent motives for wishing friend Bentley under the turf—to say nothing of Mrs Bentley herself.’

  ‘Four?’ said Alec in some surprise.

  ‘Why, surely. One, Mary Blower, for reasons mentioned; two, Brother William, to obtain full control of the business, out of which he considered himself to have been cheated by his father’s will, you remember—and also remembering that he didn’t know anything about Bentley’s own new will; Brother Alfred, in consequence of that new will; and Mrs Allen.’

  ‘Mrs Allen? How does she come into it?’

  ‘Well, surely that’s obvious. She’s hating nothing more in the world than Mrs Bentley. What more satisfying revenge could she have than by causing her rival to be hanged as a murderess? It would be superb.’

  ‘But dash it all, she couldn’t go to the length of poisoning Bentley to ensure it?’ Alec protested.

  ‘Wouldn’t she?’ said Roger thoughtfully. ‘I’m not too sure about that. A woman can be a pretty dreadful devil in circumstances like those, you know. And how do we know that she hadn’t got something against Bentley himself as well? Oh, yes, I think we can set her down as having a motive all right, and a strong one too. She goes down on our list of double suspects.’

  ‘Double suspects?’

  ‘Yes, opportunity and motive. There are six suspects under opportunity, and four of those crop up again under motive.’

  Roger leaned back in his chair and expelled a cloud of smoke from his lungs. ‘What’s it going to turn out, Alec? Murder for gain, murder for revenge, murder for elimination, murder for jealousy, murder from lust of killing, or murder from conviction—according to a classification of motives in a most interesting book I read recently?fn1 It seems to me that murder from conviction is the only one we can definitely rule out: nobody is likely to have come to a reasoned conviction that, for the sake of humanity, Mr John Bentley had better be wiped out of existence, and then have proceeded so efficiently to act upon it. That leaves us with five possible motives to put a possible criminal to.’

  ‘I should think you might rule out murder from lust of killing too,’ Alec suggested.

  ‘Indeed and that’s just what we can’t do!’ Roger retorted with energy. ‘That’s a possibility that can never be ruled out; and the more difficult a case is, the more must just that possibility be borne in mind. Supposing the nurse had homicidal tendencies!’

  ‘Oh, come, I say! Be reasonable.’

  ‘Curse you, Alexander,’ Roger exclaimed, touched on the raw, ‘that’s precisely what I am being. You think a nurse could never suffer from homicidal tendencies or murder a patient? Then let me confound you with the case of one Catherine Wilson, who murdered no less than seven of her patients and attempted to murder several more and who was considered by the judge who tried her, as he stated privately afterwards, to be the greatest criminal that ever lived—his own words; with which, by the way, I don’t altogether agree.’

  ‘Humph!’ said Alec.

  ‘That was in 1862, and created no small stir at the time. I’m willing to grant you, if you wish to argue the point, that this wasn’t entirely murder for lust of killing, because she always induced her victims to leave money to her in their wills or made sure in other ways of becoming a gainer by their deaths; though in my opinion she was certainly a homicidal maniac as well. Still, we must classify her under murder for gain. However, consider further the case of a lady named Van de Layden, also a nurse, who between 1869 and 1885 poisoned no less than twenty-seven people and did her best to poison seventy-five others. Consider also one Marie Jeanneret who had similar impulses and became a professional nurse in order to gratify them, which she did with considerable success. Am I still being unreasonable in suggesting that it is possible for a professional nurse to be a homicidal maniac?’

  ‘No,’ said Alec.

  ‘I accept your apology,’ Roger said with considerable dignity. ‘Where were we when you disturbed the thread of my argument with your puking objections? Oh, yes. Well, murder for gain, Brother William or Brother Alfred; murder for revenge, though with complications, Mrs Allen or Mary Blower; murder for jealousy—well, I can’t quite see anybody to fit that except Allen, and as far as we know he had no opportunity; murder for elimination, Mrs Bentley; murder for lust of killing, anybody. That’s how the case stands at present.’

  ‘Then you’ve still got Mrs Bentley under suspicion?’

  ‘Oh, of course; it’s no good losing sight of her.’

  ‘Look here,’ Alec said slowly, ‘there’s another point about her that’s occurred to me and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention it. The motive for murdering her husband, everybody says, is her affair with Allen, isn’t it? So that she could be free. Well, it seems to me that a woman like that—a jolly sort of woman, as she looks in her photograph—wouldn’t go to that extent to get her freedom; she’d just run away from him and have done with it.’

  ‘B
ut this is pure psychology, Alec!’ cried Roger with warm admiration. ‘And is Alexander also among the psychologists? Yes; but the answer to that (and you can be very sure that the prosecution will rub it well in) is that if she did that she’d lose his money, and she wanted not only her freedom but her husband’s wealth as well.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Alec, somewhat dashed. ‘Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Still, for all that I think you’re perfectly right. If my estimate of the lady is right, she wouldn’t care a tinker’s cuss about the money; she’d just pack up and leave him. She was on the verge of it twice, wasn’t she? How most unfortunate for her that Brother William and Mrs Saunderson were able to restrain her, poor woman!’

  ‘Mrs Saunderson seems to have had a finger in every one of those pies,’ observed Alec, without malice.

  ‘Her type is ubiquitous,’ Roger agreed absently.

  For a minute or two there was silence. Alec washed his hands, dried them, inspected his hair afresh and decided the parting would not do after all; he set about manufacturing another. Roger went on smoking with a thoughtful air.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get ready for dinner?’ asked Alec.

  ‘In a minute. Alec, I came across rather an illuminating sentence in a book I was reading the other day. It was this, or something like it; “Ordinary detective yarns bore me, because all they set out to do is to show who committed the crime; what I care about is why it was committed.” See? In other words, the real interest in a murder case in actual life, the interest that keeps pages of newspaper columns filled and causes perfectly respectable citizens to let their eggs and bacon grow cold while they read and re-read them, is not the crime puzzle of the carefully manufactured detective story, but the human element which led the, quite possibly, very ordinary crime to be committed at all. There very seldom is a crime puzzle in real life, you know; yet the classical dramas of the Central Criminal Court are more absorbingly interesting than any detective story ever written. Why? Because of their psychological values. Crippen, for instance. Not a shadow of doubt as to who murdered Belle Elmore, or whether Crippen was guilty or not. But tell me the detective story that can compete with the story of that case for sheer, breathless interest.’