The Poisoned Chocolates Case Page 2

  There were three letters and a small parcel for Sir Eustace, and he, too, took them over to the fireplace to open, nodding to Bendix as he joined him there. The two men knew each other only very slightly and had probably never exchanged more than half-a-dozen words in all. There were no other members in the hall just then.

  Having glanced through his letters, Sir Eustace opened the parcel and snorted with disgust. Bendix looked at him enquiringly, and with a grunt Sir Eustace thrust out the letter which had been enclosed in the parcel, adding an uncomplimentary remark upon modern trade methods. Concealing a smile (Sir Eustace’s habits and opinions were a matter of some amusement to his fellow-members), Bendix read the letter. It was from the firm of Mason & Sons, the big chocolate manufacturers, and was to the effect that they had just put on the market a new brand of liqueur-chocolates designed especially to appeal to the cultivated palates of Men of Taste. Sir Eustace being, presumably, a Man of Taste, would he be good enough to honour Mr. Mason and his sons by accepting the enclosed one-pound box, and any criticisms or appreciation that he might have to make concerning them would be esteemed almost more than a favour.

  “Do they think I’m a blasted chorus-girl,” fumed Sir Eustace, a choleric man, “to write ’em testimonials about their blasted chocolates? Blast ’em! I’ll complain to the blasted committee. That sort of blasted thing can’t blasted well be allowed here.” For the Rainbow Club, as every one knows, is a very proud and exclusive club indeed, with an unbroken descent from the Rainbow Coffee-House, founded in 1734. Not even a family founded by a king’s bastard can be quite so exclusive to-day as a club founded on a coffee-house.

  “Well, it’s an ill wind so far as I’m concerned,” Bendix soothed him. “It’s reminded me of something. I’ve got to get some chocolates myself, to pay an honourable debt. My wife and I had a box at the Imperial last night, and I bet her a box of chocolates to a hundred cigarettes that she wouldn’t spot the villain by the end of the second act. She won. I must remember to get them. It’s not a bad show. The Creaking Skull. Have you seen it?”

  “Not blasted likely,” replied the other, unsoothed. “Got something better to do than sit and watch a lot of blasted fools messing about with phosphorescent paint and pooping off blasted pop-guns at each other. Want a box of chocolates, did you say? Well, take this blasted one.”

  The money saved by this offer had no weight with Bendix. He was a very wealthy man, and probably had enough on him in actual cash to buy a hundred such boxes. But trouble is always worth saving. “Sure you don’t want them?” he demurred politely.

  In Sir Eustace’s reply only one word, several times repeated, was clearly recognisable. But his meaning was plain. Bendix thanked him and, most unfortunately for himself, accepted the gift.

  By an extraordinarily lucky chance the wrapper of the box was not thrown into the fire, either by Sir Eustace in his indignation or by Bendix himself when the whole collection, box, covering letter, wrapper and string, was shovelled into his hands by the almost apoplectic baronet. This was the more fortunate as both men had already tossed the envelopes of their letters into the flames.

  Bendix however merely walked over to the porter’s desk and deposited everything there, asking the man to keep the box for him. The porter put the box aside, and threw the wrapper into the waste-paper basket. The covering letter had fallen unnoticed from Bendix’s hand as he walked across the floor. This the porter tidily picked up a few minutes later and put in the waste-paper basket too, whence, with the wrapper, it was retrieved later by the police.

  These two articles, it may be said at once, constituted two of the only three tangible clues to the murder, the third of course being the chocolates themselves.

  Of the three unconscious protagonists in the impending tragedy, Sir Eustace was by far the most remarkable. Still a year or two under fifty, he looked, with his flaming red face and thickset figure, a typical country squire of the old school, and both his manners and his language were in accordance with tradition. There were other resemblances too, but they were equally on the surface. The voices of the country squires of the old school were often slightly husky towards late middle age, but it was not with whisky. They hunted, and so did Sir Eustace, with avidity; but the country squires confined their hunting to foxes, and Sir Eustace was far more catholic in his predatory tastes. Sir Eustace in short, without doubt, was a thoroughly bad baronet. But his vices were all on the large scale, with the usual result that most other men, good or bad, liked him well enough (except perhaps a few husbands here and there, or a father or two), and women openly hung on his husky words.

  In comparison with him Bendix was rather an ordinary man, a tall, dark, not unhandsome fellow of eight-and-twenty, quiet and somewhat reserved, popular in a way but neither inviting nor apparently reciprocating anything beyond a somewhat grave friendliness.

  He had been left a rich man on the death five years ago of his father, who had made a fortune out of land-sites, which he had bought up in undeveloped areas with an uncanny foresight to sell later, at never less than ten times what he had given for them, when surrounded by houses and factories erected with other people’s money. “Just sit tight and let other people make you rich,” had been his motto, and a very sound one it proved. His son, though left with an income that precluded any necessity to work, had evidently inherited his father’s tendencies, for he had a finger in a good many business pies just (as he explained a little apologetically) out of sheer love of the most exciting game in the world.

  Money attracts money. Graham Bendix had inherited it, he made it, and inevitably he married it too. The orphaned daughter of a Liverpool shipowner she was, with not far off half-a-million in her own right to bring to Bendix, who needed it not at all. But the money was incidental, for he needed her if not her fortune, and would have married her just as inevitably (said his friends) if she had had not a farthing.

  She was so exactly his type. A tall, rather serious-minded, highly-cultured girl, not so young that her character had not had time to form (she was twenty-five when Bendix married her, three years ago), she was the ideal wife for him. A bit of a Puritan, perhaps, in some ways, but Bendix himself was ready enough to be a Puritan by then if Joan Cullompton was.

  For in spite of the way he developed later Bendix had sown as a youth a few wild oats in the normal way. Stage-doors, that is to say, had not been entirely strange to him. His name had been mentioned in connection with that of more than one frail and fluffy lady. He had managed, in short, to amuse himself, discreetly but by no means clandestinely, in the usual manner of young men with too much money and too few years. But all that, again in the ordinary way, had stopped with his marriage.

  He was openly devoted to his wife and did not care who knew it, while she too, if a trifle less obviously, was equally said to wear her heart on her sleeve. To make no bones about it, the Bendixes had apparently succeeded in achieving that eighth wonder of the modern world, a happy marriage.

  And into the middle of it there dropped, like a clap of thunder, the box of chocolates.

  “After depositing the box of chocolates with the porter,” Moresby continued, shuffling his papers to find the right one, “Mr. Bendix followed Sir Eustace into the lounge, where he was reading the Morning Post.”

  Roger nodded approval. There was no other paper that Sir Eustace could possibly have been reading but the Morning Post.

  Bendix himself proceeded to study The Daily Telegraph. He was rather at a loose end that morning. There were no board meetings for him, and none of the businesses in which he was interested called him out into the rain of a typical November day. He spent the rest of the morning in an aimless way, read the daily papers, glanced through the weeklies, and played a hundred up at billiards with another member equally idle. At about half-past twelve he went back to lunch to his house in Eaton Square, taking the chocolates with him.

  Mrs. Bendix had given orders that she would not be in to lunch that day, but her appointment had been
cancelled and she too was lunching at home. Bendix gave her the box of chocolates after the meal as they were sitting over their coffee in the drawing-room, explaining how they had come into his possession. Mrs. Bendix laughingly teased him about his meanness in not buying her a box, but approved the make and was interested to try the firm’s new variety. Joan Bendix was not so serious-minded as not to have a healthy feminine interest in good chocolates.

  Their appearance, however, did not seem to impress her very much.

  “Kümmel, Kirsch, Maraschino,” she said, delving with her fingers among the silver-wrapped sweets, each bearing the name of its filling in neat blue lettering. “Nothing else, apparently. I don’t see anything new here, Graham. They’ve just taken those three kinds out of their ordinary liqueur-chocolates.”

  “Oh?” said Bendix, who was not particularly interested in chocolates. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters much. All liqueur-chocolates taste the same to me.”

  “Yes, and they’ve even packed them in their usual liqueur-chocolate box,” complained his wife, examining the lid.

  “They’re only a sample,” Bendix pointed out. “They may not have got the right boxes ready yet.”

  “I don’t believe there’s the slightest difference,” Mrs. Bendix pronounced, unwrapping a Kümmel. She held the box out to her husband. “Have one?”

  He shook his head. “No, thank you, dear. You know I never eat the things.”

  “Well, you’ve got to have one of these, as a penance for not buying me a proper box. Catch!” She threw him one. As he caught it she made a wry face. “Oh! I was wrong. These are different. They’re twenty times as strong.”

  “Well, they can bear at least that,” Bendix smiled, thinking of the usual anæmic sweetmeat sold under the name of chocolate-liqueur.

  He put the one she had given him in his mouth and bit it up; a burning taste, not intolerable but far too pronounced to be pleasant, followed the release of the liquid. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I should think they are strong. I believe they’ve filled them with neat alcohol.”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t do that, surely,” said his wife, unwrapping another. “But they are very strong. It must be the new mixture. Really, they almost burn. I’m not sure whether I like them or not. And that Kirsch one tasted far too strongly of almonds. This may be better. You try a Maraschino too.”

  To humour her he swallowed another, and disliked it still more. “Funny,” he remarked, touching the roof of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. “My tongue feels quite numb.”

  “So did mine at first,” she agreed. “Now it’s tingling rather. Well, I don’t notice any difference between the Kirsch and the Maraschino. And they do burn! I can’t make up my mind whether I like them or not.”

  “I don’t,” Bendix said with decision. “I think there’s something wrong with them. I shouldn’t eat any more if I were you.”

  “Well, they’re only an experiment, I suppose,” said his wife.

  A few minutes later Bendix went out, to keep an appointment in the city. He left his wife still trying to make up her mind whether she liked the chocolates or not, and still eating them to decide. Her last words to him were that they were making her mouth burn again so much that she was afraid she would not be able to manage any more.

  “Mr. Bendix remembers that conversation very clearly,” said Moresby, looking round at the intent faces, “because it was the last time he saw his wife alive.”

  The conversation in the drawing-room had taken place approximately between a quarter-past and half-past two. Bendix kept his appointment in the City at three, where he stayed for about half-an-hour, and then took a taxi back to his club for tea.

  He had been feeling extremely ill during his business-talk, and in the taxi he very nearly collapsed; the driver had to summon the porter to help get him out and into the club. They both describe him as pale to the point of ghastliness, with staring eyes and livid lips, and his skin damp and clammy. His mind seemed unaffected, however, and once they had got him up the steps he was able to walk, with the help of the porter’s arm, into the lounge.

  The porter, alarmed by his appearance, wanted to send for a doctor at once, but Bendix, who was the last man to make a fuss, absolutely refused to let him, saying that it could only be a bad attack of indigestion and that he would be all right in a few minutes; he must have eaten something that disagreed with him. The porter was doubtful, but left him.

  Bendix repeated this diagnosis of his own condition a few minutes later to Sir Eustace Pennefather, who was in the lounge at the time, not having left the club at all. But this time Bendix added: “And I believe it was those infernal chocolates you gave me, now I come to think of it. I thought there was something funny about them at the time. I’d better go and ring up my wife and find out if she’s been taken like this too.”

  Sir Eustace, a kind-hearted man, who was no less shocked than the porter at Bendix’s appearance, was perturbed by the suggestion that he might in any way be responsible for it, and offered to go and ring up Mrs. Bendix himself as the other was in no fit condition to move. Bendix was about to reply when a strange change came over him. His body, which had been leaning limply back in his chair, suddenly heaved rigidly upright; his jaws locked together, the livid lips drawn back in a hideous grin, and his hands clenched on the arms of the chair. At the same time Sir Eustace became aware of an unmistakable smell of bitter almonds.

  Thoroughly alarmed now, believing indeed that Bendix was dying under his eyes, he raised a shout for the porter and a doctor. There were two or three other men at the further end of the big room (in which a shout had probably never been heard before in the whole course of its history) and these hurried up at once. Sir Eustace sent one off to tell the porter to get hold of the nearest doctor without a second’s delay, and enlisted the others to try to make the convulsed body a little more comfortable. There was no doubt among them that Bendix had taken poison. They spoke to him, asking how he felt and what they could do for him, but he either would or could not answer. As a matter of fact, he was completely unconscious.

  Before the doctor had arrived, a telephone message was received from an agitated butler asking if Mr. Bendix was there, and if so would he come home at once as Mrs. Bendix had been taken seriously ill.

  At the house in Eaton Square matters had been taking much the same course with Mrs. Bendix as with her husband, though a little more rapidly. She remained for half-an-hour or so in the drawing-room after the latter’s departure, during which time she must have eaten about three more of the chocolates. She then went up to her bedroom and rang for her maid, to whom she said that she felt very ill and was going to lie down for a time. Like her husband, she ascribed her condition to a violent attack of indigestion.

  The maid mixed her a draught from a bottle of indigestion-powder, which consisted mainly of bicarbonate of soda and bismuth, and brought her a hot-water bottle, leaving her lying on the bed. Her description of her mistress’s appearance tallied exactly with the porter’s and taxi-man’s description of Bendix, but unlike them she did not seem to have been alarmed by it. She admitted later to the opinion that Mrs. Bendix, though anything but a greedy woman, must have overeaten herself at lunch.

  At a quarter past three there was a violent ring from the bell in Mrs. Bendix’s room.

  The girl hurried upstairs and found her mistress apparently in a cataleptic fit, unconscious and rigid. Thoroughly frightened now, she wasted some precious minutes in ineffectual attempts to bring her round, and then hurried downstairs to telephone for the doctor. The practitioner who regularly attended the house was not at home, and it was some time before the butler, who had found the half-hysterical girl at the telephone and taken matters into his own hands, could get into communication with another. By the time the latter did get there, nearly half-an-hour after Mrs. Bendix’s bell had rung, she was past help. Coma had set in, and in spite of everything the doctor could do she died in less than ten minutes after his arrival.

>   She was, in fact, already dead when the butler telephoned to the Rainbow Club.

  CHAPTER III

  HAVING reached this stage in his narrative Moresby paused, for effect, breath and refreshment. So far, in spite of the eager interest with which the story had been followed, no fact had been brought out of which his listeners were unaware. It was the police investigations that they wanted to hear, for not only had no details of these been published but not so much as a hint had been given even as to the theory that was officially held.

  Perhaps Moresby had gathered something of this sentiment, for after a moment’s rest he resumed with a slight smile. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I shan’t keep you much longer with these preliminaries, but it’s just as well to run through everything while we’re on it, if we want to get a view of the case as a whole.

  “As you know, then, Mr. Bendix himself did not die. Luckily for himself he had eaten only two of the chocolates, as against his wife’s seven, but still more luckily he had fallen into the hands of a clever doctor. By the time her doctor saw Mrs. Bendix it was too late for him to do anything; but the smaller amount of poison that Mr. Bendix had swallowed meant that its progress was not so rapid, and the doctor had time to save him.

  “Not that the doctor knew then what the poison was. He treated him chiefly for prussic acid poisoning, thinking from the symptoms and the smell that Mr. Bendix must have taken oil of bitter almonds, but he wasn’t sure and threw in one or two other things as well. Anyhow, it turned out in the end that he couldn’t have had a fatal dose, and he was conscious again by about eight o’clock that night. They’d put him into one of the club bedrooms, and by the next day he was convalescent.”

  At first, Moresby-went on to explain, it was thought at Scotland Yard that Mrs. Bendix’s death and her husband’s narrow escape were due to a terrible accident. The police had, of course, taken the matter in hand as soon as the woman’s death was reported to them and the fact of poison established. In due course a District Detective Inspector arrived at the Rainbow Club, and as soon as the doctor would permit after Bendix’s recovery of consciousness held an interview with the still very sick man.