The Wychford Poisoning Case Read online

  ‘And very interesting too,’ Alec agreed. ‘You really are rather a marvel, Roger, the way you seem able to dig these things out.’

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing much in it,’ Roger said carelessly. ‘Just a small modicum of sense, a small modicum of obstinacy and a very large modicum of good luck. Anyhow, I don’t seem able to dig out the identity of the blighter who bought that arsenic—in other words, the real criminal. You see, we’ve got to examine such a dreadfully wide field now that our six particular pet suspects are eliminated. Good Lord, it might be anyone Bentley had ever known! I’m going to get Sheila to cut out for me every single person connected with the case whose picture appears in her papers and try that assistant with them tomorrow—everybody! Doctors, servants, women—’

  ‘But if he said it wasn’t a woman?’

  ‘How do we know it wasn’t a woman disguised as a man? Mrs Allen, for instance. Mrs Allen, I feel sure, would make an excellent boy, with the addition of a small moustache and a billy-cock hat on her shingled—’

  ‘Hallo, you frowsters!’ cried Sheila, bursting without warning into the room.

  Roger twisted round in his chair to look at her as she pulled off her hat and gloves and tossed them on to a chair. Her cheeks were pink with rushing through the cold air and her eyes sparkling.

  ‘Where have you been, you bad girl?’ he asked sternly.

  ‘Playing golf,’ said Miss Purefoy innocently.

  ‘Who with?’

  The pink in Miss Purefoy’s cheeks deepened slightly. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ she demanded aggressively.

  ‘Charlie Braithwaite, the gent’s name was,’ Alec supplied.

  ‘Why did you leave your poor little guest all alone and forlorn while you went off and enjoyed yourself with Charlie Braithwaite?’ Roger continued with much enjoyment.

  ‘I didn’t, you ass! He had mother to talk to. Besides, we asked him to come and he wouldn’t.’

  Roger eyed her with mock severity. ‘And why not? Because he doesn’t like playing gooseberry! And quite rightly too. Oh, Sheila, I wouldn’t have thought it of you. I thought you were a good little girl!’

  ‘Roger, you perfect idiot, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ returned Miss Purefoy with tremendous dignity, the effect of which was somewhat spoilt by the positively flaming effect of her cheeks.

  ‘Oh, Sheila!’ Roger grinned maliciously. ‘Oh, Sheila! And I thought you were not only a good little girl, but a truthful one too. I thought—’

  But Miss Purefoy had fled.

  The conversation at dinner that evening turned quite a lot upon the absent Mr Charles Braithwaite. In the end, a pudding-plate having been broken, a tumbler of lemonade upset over Sheila’s frock and the entire contents of the water-jug cascaded over Alec’s devoted head, Mrs Purefoy had to prohibit any further use of the fatal name that evening. It is amazing in how many ways one can say a name without ever saying it at all.

  Armed with his sheaf of photographs, Roger departed the next morning as usual. But this time he was not long absent. Within two hours he was back again and entering Sheila’s room, where its owner and Alec, in expectation of his early return, were ready waiting for him, the latter reading a novel over the fire, the former busy at her ironing-board.

  Roger closed the door behind him and looked at them moodily. Alec had never seen his mercurial friend so serious before. In the end it was Sheila who broke the silence.

  ‘You haven’t found him, Roger?’ she cried, putting her iron on its rest and gazing at him through the thin steam which was rising from the board.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Roger said sombrely, ‘I have. And it’s the very devil!’

  ‘You’ve found out who bought that arsenic?’ Alec demanded, slewed round in his chair. ‘Who?’

  Roger stared at him for a moment. ‘Bentley himself!’ he said gravely.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  VILLAINY UNMASKED

  FOR a full minute there was silence in the little room, while the other two tried to grasp the significance of this startling information. Then Alec said:

  ‘So Mrs Bentley did do it after all!’

  ‘Mrs Bentley? Of course she didn’t!’ Roger snapped, walking over to the fireplace and taking up a position with his back to the fire.

  ‘It was an accident!’ cried Sheila.

  ‘No, my child,’ Roger said more gently. ‘That it certainly wasn’t. It was as deliberate a thing as you can imagine.’

  ‘I’m lost,’ Alec confessed.

  ‘So am I,’ said Sheila.

  Roger surveyed them in turn, his spirits beginning to lift a little already. ‘You are?’ he said, with either real or pretended surprise. ‘Dear me, I should have thought it was obvious enough.’

  ‘Look here, Roger,’ Sheila observed, ‘let’s get this right. Have you solved the mystery?’

  ‘Lord, yes! I’ve solved it all right; just as the train was leaving Charing Cross, to be exact. That’s nothing. The devil of it is going to be to prove it—and that is going to be the very devil himself! A more diabolically ingenious little plot I’ve never struck.’

  ‘Oh, Roger!’ Sheila wailed. ‘Do tell us!’

  ‘Well, I will,’ Roger grinned, now completely restored once more; ‘having kept you in suspense for a few minutes for the good of your little souls. Now, consider. All this time we’ve been considering only two alternatives, haven’t we? Murder or accident—with the accent decidedly on the former.’

  The other two nodded.

  ‘There was a third possibility staring us in the face all the time, and we never caught a glimpse of it. Can’t either of you see what it is now?’

  Alec looked blank. Sheila shook her head.

  ‘Well, perhaps I could hardly expect it. You have to have a very nimble brain indeed for this sort of thing. To put it briefly, Bentley was neither murdered, nor was his death an accident; he committed suicide.’

  ‘Suicide!’ repeated the astonished audience.

  ‘Yes. The reasoning’s pretty obvious. There are only two deductions to be drawn from the fact of Bentley having bought the arsenic himself, you see; one is that Mrs Bentley is guilty after all, and the other that Bentley committed suicide. Having already arrived at the conclusion that the former is a psychological impossibility, the latter must hold good.’

  ‘That seems fair enough,’ Alec conceded.

  ‘Yes, but that isn’t all. It isn’t just a case of plain, straightforward suicide. We know that because of the arsenic in the medicines and the thermos flask.’

  ‘What is it then?’ Sheila demanded. ‘Do get on with it, Roger!’

  ‘Gently, gently, child; don’t hurry me. The clou of the matter, I was going on to tell you, is that Bentley was bent on having his revenge on his wife, and that we know from the way he altered his will to cut her out of it altogether. I’ll try and reconstruct the situation as I see it. To put the thing in a nutshell, Bentley had discovered his wife’s infidelity.’

  ‘Oh!’ breathed Sheila.

  ‘Now we know what sort of a man he was—morbid, fussy, self-pitying, highly strung, unbalanced; and naturally this came to him as a terrible shock. He brooded over it. Just as naturally he didn’t consider for a minute what excuses his wife might have had or what the moral aspect of his own married life had been. At first, no doubt, he was full of agonised self-pity, and felt that he had never before loved his wife so well as he did now that he had lost her—the usual state of affairs at this kind of juncture, I understand. But by degrees his love, in the dramatic way found both in melodrama and in real life, turned to hate, and to a remarkably substantial, vengeful hate at that. He began to wonder how he could have his revenge, possibly upon Allen, certainly on his wife. He wasn’t man enough to tackle the job out of hand, you see; he must go about it in a sneaking, underhand, cunning little way. Well, what does he do? Turns of course to that invariable refuge of ill-balanced minds, suicide. Life for him is over now; to go on living would only be to inflic
t unnecessary torture on himself; better end the whole thing and have done with it. That sort of thing; and all combined with a now absolutely maniacal hatred of his wife. It’s all so utterly understandable with a man of his rotten little temperament, isn’t it?’

  ‘Lord, yes,’ Alec agreed.

  ‘Go on, Roger!’ Sheila implored, gazing at him with round eyes. ‘This is too thrilling!’

  ‘Well, having these two ideas uppermost in his mind, obviously he sets about combining them. How can he work in with his suicide the revenge for which his petty little soul is aching? And then comes the great idea—arrange his death so that, again Allen if possible, but certainly his wife, will be accused of it—arrested for it—tried for it—hanged for it! That’s a pretty juicy revenge for any wronged husband, isn’t it? So he sets about his preparations. Buys his arsenic openly in his own name, leaving his own business card, and knowing that his identification will be perfectly easy; spills it about all over the place—in his medicines, in the thermos flask, in everything with which his wife could be connected. Oh, it really was magnificently planned.’

  ‘But the fly-papers, Roger,’ Alec put in. ‘Was that pure coincidence?’

  ‘Possibly; and mustn’t he have hugged himself over it if it was? But I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he hadn’t somehow contrived it himself. It would be so easy to lead the conversation round one evening to cosmetics, and slip in the suggestion so casually that Mrs Bentley would never realise afterwards that it was he who had made it. She’d know all about arsenic as a cosmetic, you see; just the idea of getting it out of fly-papers would be all he’d have to put forward. In any case, whether the suggestion came from him or not, he took very sound advantage of it; the first dose of arsenic, of course, he administered to himself on the afternoon of the picnic. And after that—! Really, you know, I do take my hat off to Bentley: I think we must accord him the fictional title of Master-Criminal. If any criminal in fiction ever deserved it, Bentley does in real life.’

  ‘But you can’t call him a criminal, exactly,’ Sheila objected. ‘It isn’t a crime to commit suicide.’

  ‘It is,’ Roger retorted. ‘It’s a felony. But let that pass. You’re missing the whole point, little one. Can’t you see that Bentley is planning all this in order to murder his wife? M-u-r-d-e-r—murder her! By causing her to be wrongly accused and executed for his own death!’

  ‘Gawd!’ remarked Sheila with respect.

  ‘And good Lord, even that isn’t all!’ Roger continued excitedly. ‘How is he going to commit his suicide? Why, great Scott! by actually causing his wife to murder him! That’s the real sublimity of the plan. No arranging the stage first and then killing himself, but actually arranging to be killed! Why, it’s— For the first time in my life, words fail me.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ quoth Alec, though on account of which wonder he did not state.

  ‘Fancy planning one’s own murder!’ Roger went on a little more calmly after a moment’s pause. ‘The nerve of it! Just try and imagine the man’s state of mind. Of course he was mad; stark, staring, raving mad—and yet how diabolically sane! Handing over to his wife the packet of poison, not merely asking but imploring her to put it in his food, racked with agony and the most damnable physical discomfort, vomiting, retching his soul out, half-mad with pain—and then begging and praying for more! Really, it absolutely beggars description.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Alec again.

  Sheila sat down suddenly, her face a little white. ‘Don’t, Roger!’ she said a trifle unsteadily. ‘Not quite so—so graphically.’

  ‘Good Lord, I’m awfully sorry, my dear,’ Roger exclaimed contritely. ‘I was getting quite carried away by my own eloquence. The details are pretty beastly, I admit.’

  ‘I wasn’t meaning the details so much as the—the realness. I could almost see the horrible man going through it all.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else, then, quickly,’ Roger urged. ‘Don’t want you dashing up and down the house all night having nightmares. Alec, think of something nice and soothing! Bees, beeswax, bandits, Birmingham, bracers, boils, boots, botany—stop me when I reach something that appeals to you—boulders, bibliographers, blackmail, barrels, bath-bricks, basilisks, bashfulness, bagpipes—’

  ‘Roger, you idiot!’ Sheila laughed. ‘Have you got B’s on the brain?’

  ‘Oh, no; only in the bonnet. Feeling better?’

  ‘Much, thank you.’

  ‘Feeling up to carrying on with the discussion?’

  ‘Roger! I won’t be ragged!’

  ‘The lady is restored. Well, anyhow, there we are. That’s the solution of the Wychford Poisoning Case, as the papers call it. What do you think of it?’

  ‘Damned ingenious,’ Alec grunted.

  ‘That’s not the right thing to say, Alexander. I don’t want it to be ingenious; all I want is that it shall be satisfying, fit the facts, and leave no reasonable doubt in your minds as to its correctness. Does it do all those things?’

  ‘Oh, I should think it’s correct enough. Must be.’

  ‘Of course it’s correct!’ Sheila cried.

  ‘Well, that being so, we come to the real problem, which is—how in the world to prove it! There’s not a word of proof in what I’ve been saying, you see; it’s all pure assumption—psychological deduction if you like. How are we going to substantiate it sufficiently to take it into court and secure Mrs Bentley’s acquittal on it?’

  ‘Won’t it do that as it is?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Indeed it won’t! Just imagine prosecuting counsel dealing with it. The first thing he’d do would be to call it a farrago of baseless assumptions and impossible inferences (Bentley being a wronged husband is white all through in court, remember; it’s impossible that he can have done anything even smudgy). The next thing counsel would do would be to point out this simple fact—if Bentley bought that arsenic himself, then it practically clinches the fact of his wife’s guilt; all she had to do was to steal a couple of nips when he wasn’t looking; that there could be any possible truth in her own explanation that Bentley actually asked her to administer that powder to him, knowing it to be arsenic, is simply too ludicrous for words. You see. The plain truth that Bentley was causing his wife to murder him would be simply laughed out of court. And without a shred of evidence to support it, really for once I can’t altogether blame the legal mind.’

  ‘But how on earth can we prove it?’ Alec asked helplessly.

  ‘That’s just what I’m blessed if I can see. But if we don’t find a way, you can depend on it that Mrs Bentley will be hanged!’

  ‘Oh, Roger!’ cried Sheila. ‘This is awful!’

  ‘It is indeed,’ Roger agreed. ‘I went over and over it in my mind coming down in the train, but I can’t see even the faintest glimmer of a loophole. It looks as if Bentley’s been too clever for us.’

  ‘What about putting it before her solicitor?’ Alec suggested. ‘Hasn’t it reached the stage when special knowledge is wanted?’

  ‘Well, if we can’t think of anything ourselves, of course we shall have to do that. But I’m not keen, if it’s humanly possible to avoid it. How would he take it, you see? Not very seriously; I can’t help feeling. Dash it all, one can’t blame him! We’ve been led up to it gradually, so it doesn’t strike us in quite the same way; but put it before some fresh person, and it must seem too utterly fantastic and impossible. No, I can’t think that we must hand it over to Mrs Bentley’s solicitor except as a last despairing resource. And as yet we’re not so pressed for time as all that.’

  Alec smoked in silence, Sheila picked up her cold iron and absently scrutinised its bottom, Roger stared at the ceiling and went on toasting the back of his legs.

  ‘Oh, somebody do say something!’ Sheila implored, when the silence had lasted a good three minutes. Three minutes can be a remarkably long time when minds are a little taut and nerves a little strung.

  ‘All right, I will,’ Roger smiled. ‘As far
as I can see, there’s only one possible hope and that is to unearth evidence of insanity on Bentley’s part. If we can’t prove fact, we must try and prove state of mind.’

  ‘That’s a scheme,’ Alec approved warmly, and Sheila nodded her agreement.

  ‘I don’t know how far it will take us, but it’s worth trying because it seems to me it’s the only thing we can try. Now, I said just now that we’re not pressed for time. Well, from one point of view we’re not; from another, we most decidedly are. Anyhow, in order to save some of it I propose that we split forces and utilise our full strength; there are hundreds and thousands of inquiries waiting to be made, so let’s split up and make them separately instead of together. You, Sheila, look after Wychford, and you, Alec, London. That is to say, get into touch with as many people as you can who knew Bentley, knew of Bentley, knew people who knew Bentley, and knew the second cousins of people who had once lent Bentley a match—that sort of thing; and from all of them find out, as tactfully or as blatantly as you like, whether Bentley had ever shown signs of being what you might call “queer.” Your Superintendent has spoken; he knows you will not fail in your duty to the dear old flag.’

  ‘And what about the Superintendent himself?’ Sheila wanted to know.

  ‘He,’ said Roger proudly, ‘is going to Paris. This very afternoon!’

  ‘Paris?’

  ‘Yes. Bentley spent twelve years there. Who knows what one might not pick up there? And an Englishman isn’t so guarded in Paris as he is in London.’

  ‘Hark at the man!’ Sheila cried admiringly. ‘Talk about hustle. You ought to have been an American, Roger. But what I want to know is, how are you going to discover Bentley’s old haunts and friends and all that?’

  ‘Oh, but too simple, my infant. I shall go straight to the firm’s Paris office, talk at them in an official way and obtain in exactly half-an-hour every bit of the information I require.’