“Yes; a pretty business, eh?” he added savagely.
Dr. Fell did not comment.
“I think that chemist is a wrong ’un,” Elliot said slowly, “though there was nothing I could find. But on top of this, Superintendent Hadley handed me—
me
—the Sodbury Cross poisoning case: of which (thank you) I had already read up every detail in the back files of the newspapers.”
“You didn’t refuse the case?”
“No, sir. Could I have refused it anyway? At least, without telling the Superintendent what I knew?”
“H’m.”
“Yes. You’re thinking I ought to be kicked out of the Force; and you’re quite right.”
“Good God, no,” said Dr. Fell, opening his eyes wide. “That confounded conscience of yours will be the death of you yet. Stop talking such rubbish and get on with it.”
“Driving down here last night, I thought of every possible way out. Some of them so daft that they make me squirm when I think of it this morning. I thought of systematically ditching the evidence against her. I even thought of taking her and running off to the South Seas with her.”
He paused; but Dr. Fell only nodded sympathetically, as though he understood the sound reason of such courses; and it was with an enormous sense of relief flooding through him that Elliot continued.
“I hoped the Chief Constable—Major Crow, his name is—wouldn’t notice anything. But I must have acted queerly from the start, and I put my foot in it time after time. The worst was when the girl almost recognised me. She didn’t quite recognise me: that is, she didn’t connect me with the mirror in the chemist’s shop. But she knows she’s seen me before and she’s still trying to remember where.
“For the rest of it, I tried to go into the case without prejudice—compromise again, eh?—and treat it exactly as I would treat an ordinary case. Whether I succeeded or not I don’t know, but you notice I’m here to-day.”
Dr. Fell considered. “Tell me. Putting aside the chocolate-shop murder, did you find anything last night that led you to believe she might be guilty of killing Marcus Chesney?”
“No!
That’s just it: quite to the contrary. She’s got an alibi as big as a house.”
“Then what in the name of Beelzebub are we arguing about? Why aren’t you carolling like a lark?”
“I don’t know, sir, and that’s a fact. It’s only that the case is too queer and funny and fishy to be taken at one swoop. It’s a box of tricks right from the start.”
Dr. Fell leaned back, taking several puffs at his cigar, an expression of fierce concentration on his face. He shook his shoulders loose and took several more puffs at the cigar, as though for great weightiness of utterance. Even the ribbon on his eyeglasses was agitated.
“Let us,” he said, “examine your emotional problem. No; don’t shy away from it. This may be infatuation or it may be the real thing, but in either case I want to ask you a question about it. Suppose this girl is a murderess. One moment! I say: suppose this girl is a murderess. Now, these crimes are not crimes for which we can readily find an excuse. Even I find it necessary to concentrate tensely before being able to excuse them. They are not natural crimes; they are calculated abnormalities, and the person who perpetrated them is about as safe to have about the house as a king cobra. Very well. Supposing this girl to be guilty—do you want to know it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Still, you agree that it might be just as well to find out?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good,” said Dr. Fell, taking a few more puffs at his cigar. “Now let us look at it the other way. Suppose this girl is completely innocent. No; do not loose me a strangled breath of relief; be practical in your romanticism. Suppose this girl is completely innocent. What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“You say you have fallen for her?”
Then it dawned on Elliot.
“Oh, leave me out of it,” he said. “I don’t flatter myself that I would ever stand a chance with her. You should see the expression on her face when she looks at Harding. I saw it. I tell you, sir, the hardest thing I had to do last night was to be fair to Harding. I’ve got nothing against the fellow; he seems decent enough. I can only say that there’s something in my upbringing which, whenever I talk to Harding, sets my teeth on edge.”
He felt his ears tingling again.
“I had all sorts of visions about that, too, last night. I imagined myself dramatically arresting Harding for the murder—yes, handcuffs and all—and her looking at me, and all the claptrap that just naturally comes into a bloke’s head. But emotional knots don’t get cut as easily as that. Not for any human being they don’t. Harding is a red herring if I ever saw one. You ruddy well can’t commit a murder when you’re in one room with two people looking at you, and the real murderer is also in sight in another room. Harding may be a fortune-hunter (I think he is), but that’s just the line of human cussedness that things take in this world. Harding had never heard of Sodbury Cross until he met the Chesneys in Italy. So forget Harding and, in particular, forget me.”
“In addition to your conscience,” observed Dr. Fell critically, “you must also get rid of your confounded humility. It is an excellent spiritual virtue; but it is a virtue that no woman can endure. However, we’ll pass that. Well?”
“Well, what?”
“How do you feel now?” asked Dr. Fell.
And Elliot suddenly realised that he felt better; so much better that he wanted a cup of coffee and something to smoke. It was as though his wits focused and clarified. He did not understand it; yet even the room appeared in different colours.
“Harrumph,” said Dr. Fell, scratching the side of his nose. “So what shall we do? You forget, you know, that I have been given only the barest outline of the case; and in your natural enthusiasm you have fired most of the arrows clear over my head. But what will you do? Will you make a fool of yourself by going back and explaining to Hadley? Or shall we have a go at the facts and see what happens? I am at your service.”
“Yes!” roared Elliot. “Yes, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
“Good. In that case, sit down there,” said Dr. Fell grimly, “and kindly tell me just what in blazes did happen.”
It took half an hour, for Elliot, clothed in hardheadness again yet somehow not ashamed of himself, kept his mind busy with the smallest facts. He concluded with the little bottle of prussic acid in the medicine-chest of the bathroom.
“—and that’s about all. Though we didn’t get away from the house until three o’clock. Everybody denied having anything to do with the prussic acid; swore they knew of no such thing in the bathroom; and said it wasn’t there when they dressed for dinner that night. I also looked in on this fellow Wilbur Emmet, but naturally he was in no shape to be any good to us.”
He had a vivid recollection of that bedroom, as tidy yet as unattractive as Emmet himself. He remembered the lanky form twisted in the bed-clothes, the harsh electric light, the elaborate array of hair-creams and neckties on the dressing-table. On the work-table there was a pile of letters and receipted bills. Beside it stood the little straw suitcase in which Emmet carried an assortment of syringes, tiny shears, and curious articles which to Elliot’s eye resembled surgical tools. Even the wall-paper was of a yellowish-red pattern which suggested peaches.
“Emmet was talking a lot, but you couldn’t make out one intelligible word he said: except that he would sometimes say, ‘Marjorie!’ and they would have to quiet him. That’s all, sir. I’ve now told you every single thing I know, and I wonder if you can make any sense of it. I wonder if you can explain what’s so infernally wrong about it.”
Dr. Fell nodded slowly and emphatically.
“I think I can,” he said.
“But before I do,” continued Dr. Fell, pointing aggressively with the cigar, “I should like to clear up one point on which I either cannot have heard you correctly, or else somebody has committed a bad howler. It deals with the end of Chesney’s performance. Chesney (imagine) has just opened those double-doors to announce that the show is over. Got the scene?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Professor Ingram then says to him, ‘By the way, who was your hideous-looking colleague?” To which Chesney replied, ‘Oh, that was only Wilbur; he helped me plan the whole thing.’ That is correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You have other testimony on the point besides Miss Wills’s?” insisted the doctor. “The others confirmed it?”
“Yes, sir,” returned Elliot, puzzled. “I went over all that with them just before I left the house.”
Dr. Fell’s colour had changed slightly. He sat with his mouth open, the cigar poised in the air, while he stared at his companion with widening eyes. He said, with a kind of thunderous whisper like wind along an Underground tunnel: “Oh, Bacchus! Oh, Lord! Oh, my sacred hat! This won’t do.”
“But what’s wrong?”
“Get out that list of Chesney’s ten questions,” urged Dr. Fell excitedly. “Cast your eye over it. Study it. Be appalled by it. Don’t you see anything wrong?”
Elliot stared from Dr. Fell’s face to the list, made uneasy by the other’s intense eagerness. “No, sir, I can’t say I do. Maybe my brain isn’t working properly——”
“It isn’t,” the doctor assured him seriously. “Look at it, man! Concentrate! Don’t you see that Chesney has asked a totally unnecessary and even absurd question?”
“Which one?”
“Question number four. ‘
What was the height of the person who entered by the French window?
’ Hang it all! That was one of a short list of questions he was carefully preparing to ask them; shrewd questions, catch questions, questions to take them by surprise. Yet, before he even begins to ask those questions, he calmly announces to them
just who the person was.
You follow that? As you quote Miss Wills as saying, they all knew Wilbur Emmet’s height. They lived with him; they saw him every day. So, when they heard beforehand who the visitor was, they couldn’t possibly go wrong on question four. Why, therefore, does Chesney spill the beans all over the floor by presenting them with the answer before he even asks the question?”
Elliot swore uneasily. Then he began to reflect.
“Steady, though. What about a catch in that, sir?” he suggested. “Suppose Emmet had instructions—Professor Ingram suggested this—to hunch down inside the raincoat, so that his height appeared three inches less than it actually was? So Mr. Chesney set a trap for them like that. When he carefully told them it was Emmet, he expected them to fall into the trap and give what they knew to be his height: six feet. Whereas actually the height of the man hunched down inside the raincoat was to be only five feet nine.”
“It is possible,” Dr. Fell scowled. “I will agree, with my hand on my heart, that there may have been more traps in that little show than even you seem to realize. But as for having Emmet crouch down—you know, Inspector, I can’t quite believe it. You describe the raincoat as long and tight-fitting. The only way a person could take away three inches from his height would be to bend his knees and shuffle across the stage with short steps. Now, I will almost defy anyone to do that without his knees jutting out like pistons under the coat, carrying himself oddly and making obvious to the audience just what he is doing. Everyone seems, on the contrary, to convey a kind of tense straightness and rigidity about the fellow’s bearing. Anything is possible, I admit; but——”
“You mean the man was five feet nine after all?”
“Oh,” said Dr. Fell with some dryness, “there is the startling and unusual possibility that he really was six feet. Two witnesses say so, you know. At every point where Professor Ingram disagrees with them, you automatically believe the professor. Probably you are right to do so; but we mustn’t—h’mf—we mustn’t fall into the error of treating Professor Ingram as an oracle or an augur or a mouthpiece of Holy Writ.”
Again Elliot reflected.
“Or,” he suggested, “Mr. Chesney may have been nervous or rattled, and blurted out Emmet’s name without intending to.”
“Hardly,” said Dr. Fell, “when he immediately called Emmet in and made a row when Emmet didn’t appear. H’mf, no. It’s difficult to believe that, Inspector. The conjuror doesn’t spill his cards all over the floor so easily, or get rattled and call the audience’s attention to the particular trap-door through which he dropped his assistant. Chesney never struck me as that sort of chap.”
“I shouldn’t have thought so myself,” Elliot admitted. “But where does it leave us? This gives us only one more puzzle to add to the rest. Do you see any actual light in the business?”
“Quite a good deal. It is now clear, isn’t it, how Chesney thought the chocolates were poisoned at Mrs. Terry’s?”
“No, sir, I’m hanged if it is! How?”
Dr. Fell shifted in his chair. An expression of Gargantuan distress went over his face; he made vague gestures and mysterious internal noises.
“Look here.” He spoke in a tone of protest. “I most emphatically do not wish to sit here myself like a stuffed oracle, blandly tut-tutting and being so dashed superior at your expense. I have always detested that sort of snobbery; I will fight it to the last ditch. But I insist that these emotional disturbances have not been good for your intelligence.
“Now let us consider the problems of the poisoned chocolates at Mrs. Terry’s. What are the terms of it? What are the facts that we must accept? First: that the chocolates were poisoned at some time during the day of June 17th. Second: that they were poisoned either by some visitor to the shop on that day, or by Miss Wills in a sleight-of-hand exchange through Frankie Dale. For it is established that there was nothing wrong with the chocolates on the night of the 16th, since Mrs. Terry took a handful or so for a children’s party. These are correct assumptions?”
“Yes.”
“Not at all,” said Dr. Fell. “Rubbish!”
“I deny,” he went on, fiery with earnestness, “that the chocolates were necessarily poisoned on June 17th. I also deny that they were necessarily poisoned by someone who visited the shop on that day.
“Now, Major Crow (if I understand you) outlined a method by which a murderer could easily hocus an open chocolate-box on a counter. The murderer enters with a number of poisoned sweets concealed in his hand or in his pocket. He misdirects Mrs. Terry’s attention, and drops the doctored sweets into the box on the counter. True, true, true! Easy enough. It could have been done in that way. But isn’t it, when you reflect, an incredibly simple-minded approach for a murderer who has shown himself as nimble as this one? What does it do? It immediately shows that the poisoning was done on a definite given day, and limits the field of suspects to those who were in the shop on that day.