The Wychford Poisoning Case Page 17

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it. Exercising my well-known low cunning and acting upon the admirable dossier compiled for me by Detective Purefoy, I went to see the man, alleging that I wanted to buy a car. From his office I lured him into a place of refreshment (remember the presence of the young, Alexander) and made him slightly drunk.’

  ‘Oh, I do wish you’d let me come up with you, Roger!’

  ‘Hush, little babbler!—Well, it really was rather pathetic,’ Roger went on with one of his swift changes of mood. ‘The poor chap had no objection at all to getting slightly drunk, none at all; I think he even welcomed it. There’s no doubt that he’s been worried to death about the whole business, and there’s equally no doubt that, according to his lights and out of business hours, he’s an honest man. Anyhow, I got him to own up to being the Allen of the case, and within two minutes he was asking me perfectly seriously whether I thought it would be any good for him to go to the police and confess to the murder in order to save Mrs Bentley.’

  ‘Sportsman!’ cried Sheila warmly.

  ‘Humph! Might be a bit of eye-wash, mightn’t it?’ queried her more sceptical cousin.

  ‘No, I’m quite sure it wasn’t eye-wash,’ Roger rejoined seriously. ‘Allen’s a rough diamond all right, but he’s a genuine one. And he was slightly drunk, don’t forget; that always tends to induce truthfulness. No, I’m quite sure he was being honest, both in that and something very important indeed of which he informed me at the same time, namely that he and Mrs Bentley had never been in love with each other and knew perfectly well that they weren’t in love with each other!’

  ‘Oho!’ said Alec with considerable interest. ‘Exit motive, then?’

  ‘Exactly. And I may as well tell you here that not only has my interview with this gentleman cleared Allen himself in my small opinion, but it confirms twenty times over our main theory of Mrs Bentley’s innocence. For instance, not only am I quite prepared to accept the fact that she wasn’t in love with Allen (there were confirmatory details, by the way, but I can’t go into those just at present, always remembering the presence amongst us of the young of the species), but—’

  ‘Don’t be such an idiot, Roger!’ the young of of the species interrupted with some indignation. ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘But he was very emphatic about her character as well; he mentioned, in fact, that she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why is it, I wonder, that flies should always be selected as the supreme test of a humane disposition? Why not fleas, or wood-lice, or caterpillars, or wasps? I suppose there must be something about a fly which brings out all one’s evil instincts. They ought to make a scientific thing of it. Lock your suspected person up in a small room furnished only with a single fly, and supply him with a swatter; if at the end of a fixed period, to be determined according to the individual’s estimated reactions to flies, the animal is found to be unscathed, innocence on the part of the suspected person may be confidently presumed. If on the other hand the fly is found to be suffering from a black eye or a cauliflower ear, then—’

  ‘What did Allen himself think about the case? Did he think Mrs Bentley was innocent?’

  ‘Very well; I’ll develop this thesis later. Allen? Oh, no; that doesn’t seem ever to have occurred to him. But he was extraordinarily puzzled about it; in fact, he confided to me that he couldn’t make head or tail of it. Now that, I think, is another interesting point. Why this invariable head or tail that has to be identified for everything? Not all things have a tail. You, for instance. In those cases I suppose one has to—’

  ‘Roger! For goodness’ sake stick to the point. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I’m a trifle elated, I’m afraid, Alec,’ Roger apologised. ‘This has been a very successful day, you see, and I’m—yes, I’m undoubtedly a, little elated.’

  ‘Well, take a lesson from Sheila. Even she’s being serious for once.’

  Sheila, curled up in her chair, her feet tucked away under her and her small chin resting on her hand, smiled faintly. Roger looked at her and smiled also.

  ‘I’ll try,’ he promised.

  ‘Well, get on and tell us the rest. You don’t seem to realise that we’re jolly keen to hear about it all.’

  Roger bowed his head. ‘Ticked off,’ he admitted. ‘And quite properly too. Well, let me see; there really isn’t very much more to tell you. We gassed a lot, but only a few more points of any importance emerged. Oh, I ought to have mentioned that after I’d made up my mind that the chap was genuine and genuinely worried to death, I took him into my confidence and told him straight out that I was working to prove Mrs Bentley’s innocence.’

  ‘The devil you did!’

  ‘Yes, I thought it would pay us. And it did; I put all sorts of deuced unpleasant questions to him, and he answered them all like a sportsman. These are the main things I got out of him; that he’s really in love with his wife, whom he acknowledges to be a cut above him, and whom he characterises with respectful regret as an “ice-box”; that he was just amusing himself with Mrs Bentley by way of a change, and that Mrs Bentley was similarly amusing herself with him, both being of a jolly and cheerful disposition and recognising a kindred spirit in the other and neither being in the least serious about the affair; that John Bentley, in spite of his rat-like properties, was a bit of a lad in some ways and his wife knew it; that he is quite certain the packet of arsenic was not on the bed-table when he spent that Monday evening with Bentley; that he doesn’t remember seeing any lemonade about, either in a glass or a jug, but can’t swear to there having been none; and that Mrs Bentley wouldn’t hurt a fly. All that is in favour either of him or her, you see. Against it one point emerged in Mrs Bentley’s disfavour.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, it’s not really very important, but it’s the sort of thing that the prosecution would be almost certain to twist into a significance far greater than it deserves. She’s a Catholic, and she doesn’t believe in divorce.’

  ‘Oh! Yes, I see what you mean.’

  ‘And that’s really all. So up with you, Sheila, to bed, my infant, while your uncles have one final cigarette in virtue of their greater years.’

  ‘In other words,’ retorted Sheila, uncurling reluctantly, ‘so that you can talk about the spicy bits with me out of the way. All right, I suppose I shall have to go then. Though it really is damned silly, you know. I’m not a kid.’

  ‘What would your mother say to this theory?’

  Sheila giggled. ‘Oh, she’d have kittens, of course. But all mothers do that if they think their idiot daughters can put two and two together and make four instead of three.’

  Roger rose and opened the door for her. ‘This peculiar property of mothers has quite escaped my notice,’ he remarked with interest. ‘The chief authority on mothers, their ways and habits, the American film industry, is singularly silent on the point. Goodnight, Miss Purefoy.’

  ‘Goodnight, you old idiot. ’Night, Alec!’

  Roger closed the door. ‘I wonder whether that young lady really does know as much about certain aspects of life as she is rather inclined to insist,’ he remarked as he resumed his seat.

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ Alec replied calmly. ‘There’s not much girls don’t know nowadays. Jolly good thing too. I’m all in favour of it. Bringing a girl up in blinkers never did anybody any good, least of all herself.’

  ‘Alexander, I quite agree with you. But it does go to their small heads a little, doesn’t it? Well, now about Mrs Bentley and Allen; the point I want to put to you is this—Allen’s statement about their not being in love with each other isn’t going to carry the slightest weight with either judge or jury, you know. To us it almost clinches the fact of her innocence; in court it’s going to have the exactly opposite effect. He’s already told the police, by the way, and they simply laughed in his face. They would.’

  ‘I don’t quite get this,’ Alec said. ‘Why isn’t it going to carry any weight with judge and jury? I should have said it was
extraordinarily significant.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a person of common-sense. But it’s no good looking for common-sense inside a law-court; the motto over the door is “Abandon any common-sense ye may once have had, all ye who enter here to serve in the jury-box, on the bench, and nearly always in the capacity of counsel.” I was talking about something like this the other day, wasn’t I? In connection with our dear old friend, the legal mind. Well, this is just another example of the same thing.’

  ‘Explain,’ said Alec, leaning back in his chair and puffing contentedly at his pipe.

  ‘Well, let me put it like this. In the first place, this affair with Allen is terribly prejudicial to Mrs Bentley’s case, you understand. To the legal mind, as I pointed out before, everything is either one extreme or the other, black or white; no shade of grey can be recognised. A faithful wife, of course, is white all through; an unfaithful wife correspondingly black. Love legalised by marriage is blamelessly white; and illicit love black as pitch. Extenuating circumstances which might produce a grey effect can’t be admitted for a moment. In other words, an irregular love affair can never kindle a single spark of sympathy in a court of law. Prosecuting counsel talks piously about the sacredness of the marriage-tie, and the judge refers to “this guilty passion,” while the jury look down their noses in the good old hypocritical way—as if there was a single person, from judge through counsel and jury to the constable at the door, who hadn’t had his own private lapses from the blameless purity they’re all making such a fuss about! Though that, of course, makes them all the more intolerant of other people’s. Anyhow, you see, hopeless, irrational prejudice at once, and the firm conviction in everybody’s British mind that from adultery to murder is only the shortest possible step.’

  ‘Yes, but if she doesn’t love him—!’

  ‘I’m coming to that. Well, that’s the state of things when an unfaithful wife has the misfortune to be standing in the dock. We know she’s black all through, because infidelity admits of no compromise. But supposing, to top all this iniquity, she actually hasn’t got the excuse of loving her partner in sin! Could anything be more abominable than that? Why, it’s monstrous! It’s inhuman! The woman simply can’t have any moral sense at all! She must be a complete monster! What would murder be to a person like that? Why, obviously the most ordinary, the most natural, the most inevitable thing in the world! Gentlemen, my learned friend has submitted to you that the fact of this abandoned creature not having even the excuse of love for her conduct (if love it would have been called in any case) destroys the motive which we impute to her for taking her husband’s life. Gentlemen, my learned friend has a reputation second to none for brilliance and plausibility, but surely in this suggestion he has overstepped himself. Destroy the motive! Gentlemen, when we are considering such incredible—nay, I will go further!—such revolting conduct, need we trouble to look for a mere motive? If you will allow me to paraphrase an old saying, I would simply make this reply to my friend’s suggestion—actions speak louder than motives!’

  ‘’Struth!’ said Alec.

  ‘Well, you see what I mean. That’s the construction counsel would put upon it. And I’d bet a hundred to one that the silly old judge would back him up. Judges are silly old men, you know; nearly always. Sense on the bench is as rare as it is delightful: recognition, I mean, of human beings as they are, and not as they ought to be. And this is just precisely the sort of case that seems to make a judge hurry to shed any elements of native sense he may be blessed with.’

  ‘You seem to feel rather strongly about all this, Roger.’

  ‘Well, I do. I’ve read so many trials, you see, and so many summings-up, and the amount of really wilful stupidity in so many of them leaves me simply gasping. Some judges seem to go absolutely out of their way in order to deliberately blind themselves to human nature, whereas a close knowledge of psychology ought to be the very first requirement in any applicant for a judicial position. Dear me, I am getting worked up; I’ve murderously split, maimed and maliciously damaged one perfectly good infinitive. By the way, of course there are plenty of sound humanly minded judges; I’m not condemning the whole judicial tribe. But unfortunately they’re very decidedly in the minority.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Yes, that certainly is a point. But good Lord, do you really mean to say that these lawyers would twist the thing round like that?’

  ‘My dear Alec, it wouldn’t be twisting to their minds. That’s the first way they’d look at it. The law lives on axioms, you see. All adultery is founded on guilty passion; all faithful wives are blameless; all unfaithful wives want their husbands dead; every individual is either thoroughly good or thoroughly bad—that sort of thing. To suggest that any of these axioms may be based on false premises is simply to be laughed at. It’d be worse than useless to put forward the idea, for instance, that a good and faithful wife may be a far more harmful member of the community than a bad and unfaithful one, or that adultery is not synonymous with a desire to transform an inconvenient husband into a convenient corpse. In private life a barrister or a judge might go so far as to admit that there might be something in this revolutionary idea; but in court, facing a British jury and with the legal mind in full working order, he simply wouldn’t understand you.’

  ‘I shall have to confront you with a lawyer one day, and let you fight it out,’ said Alec with a slight grin.

  ‘Don’t. He’d wipe the floor with me in argument, of course; that’s his job. But just consider once more—what hope would Mrs Bentley have of being believed at all if she were to get up in court and tell them she wasn’t in love with Allen? That she didn’t commit adultery with him out of infatuation or dear old “guilty passion,” she just did it because her husband bored her rather stiff and she wanted a little mild amusement? Good Lord, what a hope! They simply wouldn’t believe her for a second. If they did, of course they’d consider her even more depraved and abandoned than before; but they wouldn’t. And yet if one only went into it, that’s the cause of nine-tenths of the adultery that is committed.’

  ‘You seem to know a devil of a lot about this subject, Roger. Been studying it too?’

  ‘Adultery? Of course. That’s my business. You can’t write novels in these days without a very intimate knowledge of that particular phenomenon, its cause, cures and general ramifications, my dear Alexander. Don’t think I’m defending adultery, by the way, because I’m doing nothing of the sort; we all know it’s very naughty indeed, and, even more important, economically quite unsound. But because one condemns it in principle, that doesn’t say that one must side with the law in refusing to recognise how very easily, and for what apparently trivial causes, we poor feckless humans can be driven into it; and of these trivial causes the most powerful, the most frequent and the most easily comprehensible (always outside a court) is a lack of sympathetic understanding in the second member of the triangle and the presence of it in the third. Anyhow, you see how it is in this instance. A judge and jury simply wouldn’t be able to understand the very first thing about the psychological condition of either Mrs Bentley or Allen himself which resulted, without the least talk of love or infatuation or anything like that, in their being unfaithful to their respective spouses out of a combination of sheer fun, good spirits, devilry, mutual understanding and boredom. And for Mrs Bentley to put it forward, or for Allen to try and explain it, is simply to throw her to the lions. You and I and any other sensible person may realise that it knocks the bottom out of the whole case against her (unless any other motive could be brought forward, of course; I mean the case as it stands); inside a court it would be taken as tantamount to complete proof of her guilt. I have spoken.’

  ‘You have,’ Alec agreed admiringly. ‘‘Mr Sheringham then delivered a short lecture on adultery.” No, but seriously, Roger, that really is extraordinarily interesting about Mrs Bentley. I should never have dreamed of looking on it that way, but I see you’re probably quite right. Well, all this naturally makes me
a good deal keener on proving her innocence. What’s the programme for tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Roger said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve got two more people to see, haven’t I? Brothers William and Alfred. The former, as I told you, strikes me as a bit of a hysterical ass and I don’t think I shall waste much time on him. But Brother Alfred—!’

  ‘Yes?’ Alec asked, knocking out the ashes of his pipe.

  ‘Well, Brother Alfred does interest me. Quite considerably!’

  CHAPTER XIX

  INTRODUCING BENTLEY BROTHERS

  ROGER spent the following morning at Wychford. He took the opportunity after breakfast of taking Mrs Purefoy aside and giving her some clearer idea of the reason for his and Alec’s visit to town, not mentioning his belief in Mrs Bentley’s innocence but simply saying that he was acting for the Daily Courier in a special capacity to see if he could bring any new facts to light; he felt he owed his hostess this by way of some excuse for his repeated absences and for treating her house as an hotel. Mrs Purefoy smilingly told him not to bother about anything like that, but simply to come and go just as he liked; they were delighted to have him, and Alec was a good companion for Sheila in the absence of that young lady’s brother and sister.

  Later on, Dr Purefoy being confined once more to the local hospital by an operation, as happened very nearly every afternoon, Sheila demanded and obtained the car and took them both for a little run into the country. Earnest attempts on her part to extract information regarding the turn taken by the conversation after her departure the night before were met with stern rebuffs.

  ‘I say,’ Sheila said suddenly, at last abandoning her endeavours in despair. ‘I say, Roger, what about that other maid at the Bentleys’? There were two of them who saw the fly-papers, you know. She’s left now, I found out yesterday, but she ought to be easy to trace. I can’t remember what her name was, but—’