“Dr. Buchanan poisoned his wife with morphine. Now morphine is a drug which (he knew) would easily be spotted by any physician, due to the contraction of the victim’s eye-pupils. So Dr. Buchanan added to the morphine a little belladonna, which prevented contraction of the eyepupils, made the victim’s appearance normal, and obtained from the attending physician a certificate of natural death. It was a brilliant device; and it would have succeeded if Dr. Buchanan had not himself let the trick slip in incautious talk with a friend.
“Arthur Warren Waite, the boyish happy criminal, attempted the murder of his wealthy mother- and father-in-law by means of pneumonia, diphtheria, and influenza germs. This proved too slow, and he at last fell back on less subtle poisons; but his first attempt was the death of the father-in-law by tubercular bacilli administered in a nasal spray.”
Dr. Fell paused.
He had plunged into his subject, steaming with earnestness. Had Superintendent Hadley been present, Hadley would have shouted for an arrest of the bus and an end of the lecture. But Elliot, Major Crow, and Superintendent Bostwick only nodded. They saw its application to the murderer of Sodbury Cross.
“Now,” pursued Dr. Fell, “what is the first most outstanding characteristic of the poisoner? It is this. Among his friends he usually has the reputation of being a thoroughly good fellow. He is a jovial soul. An open-handed companion. A real sport. Sometimes he may display slight Puritanical scruples, about strict religious observance or even good form socially; but his boon-companions can easily forgive him for this because he is such a decent sort.
“Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, that stickler for the social rules who poisoned people wholesale to get their insurance money, was the most hospitable of hosts a hundred years ago. William Palmer of Rugeley was himself a total abstainer, but nothing pleased him more than to stand the drinks genially to his friends. The Rev. Clarence V. T. Richeson of Boston charmed the devout wherever he went. Dr. Edward William Pritchard, he of the great bald skull and the great brown beard, was the idol of the Glasgow fraternal societies. You see how it applies to the man we want?”
Major Crow nodded.
“Yes,” said Elliot, grimly satisfied; and there was an image in the firelit room at “The Blue Lion.”
“Whereas actually there is in their characters, as a reverse side to the same picture and perhaps an essential part of it, such a blind indifference to pain in others—such a cool doling-out of death in its most horrible forms—that our ordinary imaginations cannot grasp it. Perhaps the thing that strikes us most is not alone their indifference to death, but to the pain of death. Everybody has heard of Wainewright’s famous reply, ‘Why did you poison Miss Abercromby?’ ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick ankles.”
“That, of course, was swank; but it really does express the attitude of the poisoner towards human life. Wainewright had to have money so (obviously) someone had to die. William Palmer needed money to bet on horses, and so it became clear that his wife, his brother, and his friends must be given strychnine. It was a self-evident proposition. And it is also true in the case of those who blandly or even plaintively ‘have to have’ something. The Rev. Clarence Richeson, of the magnetic eyes, would have denied with tears that he was marrying Miss Edmunds for her money or her position. But he poisoned a former mistress with potassium cyanide so that she should not interfere. The sentimental Dr. Edward Pritchard gained little by killing his wife with slow doses of tartar emetic over a period of four months; and he gained only a few thousands by killing his wife’s mother. But he wished to be free. He ‘had to have’ it.
“Which brings us to the poisoner’s next characteristic; his inordinate vanity.
“All murderers have it. But the poisoner possesses it to a bloated degree. He is vain of his intelligence, vain of his looks, vain of his manners, vain of his power to deceive. He is touched with the brush of the actor, even the exhibitionist; and as a rule he is a very good actor indeed. Pritchard opening the coffin so that he might kiss for the last time the lips of his dead wife: Carlyle Harris debating science and theology with the chaplain on his way to the electric chair: Palmer’s shocked indignation in the presence of the investigators: those foot-light scenes are endless, and their root is vanity.
“This vanity need not appear on the surface. Your poisoner may be a mild, blue-eyed, professorial little man, like Herbert Armstrong, the Hay solicitor, who disposed of his wife and then attempted to dispose of a business rival by means of arsenic spread on a scone at tea. Which makes it all the worse when the conceit at last comes bubbling up, under examination or in a dock. And nowhere does the male poisoner’s vanity more clearly express itself than in his power—or what he thinks is his power—over women.
“Nearly all of them have, or think they have, this power over women. Armstrong had it, concealed though it was. Wainewright, Palmer, and Pritchard made use of it to commit their murders. Harris, Buchanan, and Richeson got into their difficulties because they had it. Even squint-eyed Neill Cream thought he had it. It goes with a huge preen and swagger behind everything they did. Hoch, the Bluebeard murderer, disposed of a dozen wives, with arsenic neatly hidden in a fountain-pen. Few spectacles seem more ludicrous than that of Jean Pierre Vaquier, the Byfleet poisoner, smirking over his oiled whiskers in the dock. Vaquier had doctored the publican’s bromo-salts with strychnine, trusting in his power over women to get both his victim’s wife and his victim’s public-house. He was dragged away from his appeal screaming. ‘Je demande la justice,’ and it is quite possible he thought he had not got it.
“For, whittling the thing down, we can see that all these fine fellows committed murder for financial gain.
“Cream I grant you as an exception; for Cream was mad, and those frenzied demands for blackmail cannot be taken too seriously. But at the root of the others’ crimes is a wish for money, a wish for a softer position in the world. Even when a wife or a mistress is eliminated, she is eliminated so that the poisoner may get a richer one. She stands in the way of his talents. But for her he might be comfortable. But for her he might be eminent. In his own mind he is already eminent; the world owes him its good things. Therefore the unwanted wife or mistress becomes only a symbol, who might be an aunt or a next-door neighbour or Barnacle Bill the Sailor. It is the rotted fabric of the brain we have to consider; and that, I think we can agree, is the murderer of Sodbury Cross.”
Major Crow, who had been brooding and staring into the fire, made a fierce gesture.
“I know it’s true,” he said. He looked at Elliot.
“You’ve
proved that.”
“Yes, sir. I think I have.”
“But everything he does is enough to make you want to hang the blighter,” snapped Major Crow. “Even the reason why he failed to get away with this, if I understand you properly. The whole show failed because——”
“It failed because he tried to alter the whole history of crime,” replied Dr. Fell. “That never works, believe me.”
“Stop a bit, sir!” said Bostwick. “I don’t follow you there.”
“If you are ever tempted to commit a murder by poison,” said Dr. Fell with complete seriousness, “remember this. Of all forms of murder, poisoning is the most difficult to get away with.”
Major Crow stared at him.
“Hold on,” he protested. “You mean the easiest, don’t you? I’m not what you’d call an imaginative man, as you’ll agree. But I’ve sometimes wondered—well, look here, I’ll admit it! There are people dying every day around us; supposed to be natural deaths; doctor’s certificate and everything; but who’s to know how many of them may be murders? We don’t know.”
“Ah!” said Dr. Fell, drawing a huge breath.
“What do you mean, ‘ah’?”
“I mean that I have heard the remark before,” replied Dr. Fell. “You may be quite right. We don’t know. All I wish to emphasize is that we don’t know. And therefore your argument is so extraordinary that it makes my brain reel. A hundred persons, let us say, die in Wigan in the course of a year. You darkly suspect that a number of them may have been poisoned. And, because of this, you turn round to me and quote it as a reason why poisoning is so very easy. What you say may be very true; for all I know, the graveyards may be filled with murdered corpses clamouring for vengeance from here to John o’ Groats; but, hang it all! Let us have some evidence before we assume a thing to be true.”
“Well, what’s your position, then?”
“Arguing,” said Dr. Fell more mildly, “arguing on the only cases we can possibly use as a test—the cases where poison has been discovered in a body—it is clear that poisoning is the most difficult crime to get away with because so very few people ever do get away with it.
“I mean that the poisoner, by the very nature of his character, is doomed from the start. He cannot, he never does, let well enough alone. When he does happen to get away with it the first time, he keeps right on poisoning until he is inevitably caught. See the list above. He is betrayed by his own character. You or I might shoot or stab or bludgeon or strangle. But we should not become so passionately fond of a bright revolver or a shiny new dagger or a life-preserver or a silk handkerchief that we insisted on playing with it all the time. The poisoner does just that.
“Even his first risks are bad enough. The ordinary murderer runs a single risk. The poisoner runs a triple risk. Unlike a shooting or a stabbing, his work is not over even when he has done it. He must make sure the victim does not live long enough to denounce him, a bad risk; he must show he had neither opportunity to administer the poison nor reason for administering it, a very deadly risk; and he must obtain the poison without detection, perhaps the worst risk of all.
“Over and over again it is the same dismal story. X dies under circumstances which arouse suspicion. It is known that Y had good reason to wish X out of the way, and every opportunity to tamper with X’s food or drink. The body is exhumed. Poison is found. From there it is as a rule only a question of tracing a purchase of poison to Y; and we have, in inevitable procession like a series of pictures in a moral album, the arrest, the trial, the sentence, and the eight-o’clock walk.
“Now, our friend here at Sodbury Cross knew this. He did not have to be a deep student of crime to know it
he only had to read his daily newspaper. But, knowing it, he set out to construct a design for murder which should cover all these three risks with a kind of triple alibi. He tried to do a thing which no criminal has ever succeeded in doing. And he failed because it is possible for an intelligent person (such as you are) to see through such detail of the triple plot. Now let me show you something else.”
Fumbling in his inside pocket, Dr. Fell produced a note-case stuffed with odd papers: the sweepings that he always gathered about him, pushed into his pockets, and refused to part with. Among these he succeeded in finding a letter.
“I told you,” he pursued, “that Marcus Chesney wrote to me only a few days ago. I have jealously guarded this letter because I did not want you to be misled. There is too much real evidence. And this would have misled you badly. But read it now, in the light of what we have determined to be the truth, and see what interpretation you put on it.”
He spread the letter out on the table beside his watch. It was headed, “Bellegarde, October 1st,” and dealt with much the same theories they had already heard. But Dr. Fell’s finger indicated a passage towards the end:
All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what they see in the proper colours. They do not know what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience. Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then they will be unable to interpret what they see.
I expect to give my little entertainment before a group of friends soon. If this goes well, may I ask whether you would be kind enough to come and see it, at some later date? I understand you are now at Bath, and I can send a car for you whenever you like. I promise to hoodwink you in every possible way. But, since you are new to the terrain, since you are only very slightly acquainted with any of the persons, I will be fair and give you a straight tip: keep a close eye on my niece Marjorie.
Major Crow whistled.
“Exactly,” grunted Dr. Fell, folding up the letter. “And that, together with what we are going to see and hear to-night, should complete our case.”
There was a discreet knock at the door. Dr. Fell, drawing a deep breath, looked at his watch. He glanced round the circle, and all of them nodded that they were ready. Dr. Fell put away his watch as the door opened; a familiar figure, looking rather unfamiliar in ordinary clothes instead of the usual white jacket, poked its head into the room.
“Come in, Mr. Stevenson,” said Dr. Fell.
2
And it will be noted that there is missing from this list the name of Crippen. The omission is deliberate. To many of us there will always remain a strong suspicion that Crippen never meant to kill Belle Elmore, and that the overdose of hyoscine was accidental. This was the view of no less an authority than Sir Edward Marshall Hall (see Mr. Edward Marjoribank’s admirable
Life
,
p.
277
et seq
.). Crippen refused to plead accidental death because it would have involved Ethel de Neve.
When Elliot’s car drew up at Bellegarde, it was crowded even though Bostwick and Major Crow were following in another one. Dr. Fell occupied most of the back seat, the rest of which was filled with the large case Stevenson had been instructed to bring along. Stevenson himself, seeming fascinated but uneasy, sat beside Elliot.
Well, it was nearly over. Elliot yanked on the handbrake, and looked up at the lighted facade of the house. But he waited until all the others joined him before he rang the bell. It was a chilly evening, with a slight mist.
Marjorie herself opened the door. When she saw their official countenances she looked round quickly.