“Sorry to be so late, sir,” Elliot told the former. “But I picked up a flat tyre on the other side of Calne, and——”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the Chief Constable. “We’re night-hawks ourselves. Where are you putting up?”
“The Superintendent suggested ‘The Blue Lion.’”
“Couldn’t do better. Would you like to go over and knock ’em up and turn in now, or hear something about the case first?”
“I’d like to hear something about it, sir, if it’s not too late for you.”
For a time it was silent in the office, except for the ticking of a noisy clock; and the gaslight flared nervously. Major Crow held out a box of cigarettes. He was a shortish, mild-mannered, mild-voiced man, with a close-shaven grey moustache; one of that type of ex-Army man whose success always surprises you until you come in contact with its absolute efficiency. The Chief Constable lit a cigarette and hesitated, his eye on the floor.
“I’m the one,” he said, “who ought to apologize to you, Inspector. We ought to have called in the Yard long ago, if we were going to call you in at all. But there’s been rather a stir in the past few days, since Chesney and his crowd got home again. People will think enormous strides are being made”—his smile was without offence—“just because Scotland Yard is on the job. Now, a lot of them want us to arrest a girl named Miss Wills, Marjorie Wills. And there isn’t enough evidence.”
Elliot, though tempted, did not comment.
“You’ll understand the difficulty,” pursued Major Crow, “if you just get a mental picture of Mrs. Terry’s shop—You’ve seen hundreds like it. It’s a very small place, narrow but deep. On the left-hand side there’s a counter for tobacco and cigarettes; on the right-hand side there’s a counter for sweets. An aisle barely wide enough to turn round in runs between them to the back of the shop, where there’s a small circulating library. You know?”
Elliot nodded.
“There are only three tobacco-and-sweet shops in Sodbury Cross; and Mrs. Terry’s is (or was) by far the best patronized. Everybody went there. She’s a cheerful soul, and absolutely efficient. Husband died and left her with five children: you know?”
Again Elliot nodded.
“But you also know how the sale of sweets is managed in those places. Some of the stuff is under a flattish glass show-case. But a lot of it is simply spread out anyhow, in
glass jars or in open boxes on the
counter. Now, on top of this show-case there were five open boxes, slightly tilted up to show the contents. Three boxes contained chocolate creams, one box contained solid chocolates, and one box caramels.
“Now, suppose you wanted to introduce poisoned chocolates among them. Nothing easier! You buy some chocolate elsewhere—they’re a common type you can find everywhere. You take a hypodermic needle, fill it with strychnine in an alcohol solution, and inject a grain or two into (say) half a dozen chocolates. A tiny puncture like that won’t show.
“You then walk into Mrs. Terry’s shop (or any other shop) with the chocolates hidden in the palm of your hand. You ask for cigarettes and Mrs. Terry goes behind the cigarette counter. Say you ask for fifty or a hundred Players; so that she not only has to turn around, but has to reach or climb up to a higher shelf for the box of a hundred. While her back is turned you simply reach behind you and drop the prepared chocolates into the open box. A hundred people go through that shop in a day; and who’s to know or prove it was you?”
He had risen, a slight flush on his face.
“Is that how it was done, sir?” inquired Elliot.
“Wait! You can see the devilish ease with which a person who merely wants the pleasure of killing, and doesn’t care who he kills, can get away with it. You see our difficulty.
“First, I’d better tell you about Marcus Chesney, his family and cronies. Chesney lives in a big house about a quarter of a mile from here; you may have seen it. Fine spick-and-span place, everything up to date and of the best. It’s called Bellegarde; named after a peach.”
“A what, sir?”
“A peach,” replied the Chief Constable. “Ever heard of Chesney’s famous greenhouses? No? He’s got half an acre of ’em. His father and his grandfather before him grew what were supposed to be the finest luxury peaches in the world. Marcus has carried on. They’re those big peaches you buy at West End hotels at fantastic prices. He grows them out of season; he says sun or climate has nothing to do with peach-growing; he says the trick is his secret, which is worth tens of thousands. He grows the Bellegarde, the Early Silver, and (his own specialty) the Royal Ripener. And it’s certainly profitable: I hear his yearly income runs into six figures.”
Here Major Crow hesitated, looking keenly at his guest.
“As for Chesney himself,” he went on, “he’s not exactly popular in the district. He’s shrewd, and tough as nails. People either dislike him intensely, or give him a half-tolerant respect. You know the sort of thing in pubs: ‘Ah, he’s a one, old Chesney is!’ and a shake of the head, and a half-chuckle, and down goes the tankard on the counter. Then there’s popularly supposed to be something queer about the family, though nobody can tell what it is.
“Marjorie Wills is his niece; daughter of his sister, deceased. She seems to be quite a nice girl, for all anybody knows. But she’s got a temper. For all her sweetly innocent looks, I hear she sometimes uses language that would startle a sergeant-major.
“Then there’s Joe Chesney, the doctor. He redeems the family; everybody likes him. He goes about like a roaring bull, and I wouldn’t trust his professional skill too far, but lots of people swear by him. He doesn’t live with Marcus—Marcus won’t have Bellegarde messed up with a surgery. He lives a little way along the road. Then there’s a retired professor named Ingram, very quiet and pleasant—a great crony of Marcus’s. He has a cottage in the same road, and he’s well thought of hereabouts. Finally, the manager or foreman of Chesney’s ‘nurseries’ is a chap named Emmet, about whom nobody knows or cares much.
“Well! June 17th was a Thursday, market day, and there were quite a number of people in town. I think we can take as established that there were no poisoned chocolates in Mrs. Terry’s stock until that day. Reason: she has five children, as I told you, and one of them had a birthday on the 16th. Mrs. Terry gave him a small birthday party in the evening. For the party, she took (among other sweets) a handful out of each of the boxes on top of the counter. Nobody suffered any ill-effects from eating any of it.
“For the Thursday, we’ve got a list of all the people—all of them—who were in the shop on that day. That’s not as difficult as it sounds, because most of them took library books, and Mrs. Terry keeps a record. There were no strangers in the shop that day: this we can take as established. Marcus Chesney himself was there, by the way. So was Dr. Joe Chesney. But neither Professor Ingram nor young Emmet went in.”
Elliot had taken out his notebook and was studying the curious designs he had made there.
“What about Miss Wills?” he inquired—and again became conscious of the warm night, the singing gaslight, and the Chief Constable’s worried eyes.
“I’m coming to that,” Major Crow went on. “Miss Wills wasn’t actually in the shop at all. This is what happened. At round about four o’clock in the afternoon, just after school was out, she drove in to Sodbury Cross in her uncle’s car. She went to Packers’, the butcher’s, to make a small complaint about something. When she was coming out of the butcher’s, she met little Frankie Dale, eight years old. She always has been very fond of Frankie, according to most people. She said to him—overheard by a witness—‘Oh, Frankie, run down to Mrs. Terry’s and get me three-pennyworth of chocolate creams, will you?” and she handed the child a sixpence.
“Mrs. Terry’s is about fifty yards away from the butcher’s. Frankie did as he was told. As I’ve mentioned, there were three boxes of chocolate creams on top of the glass case. Frankie, like most kids, didn’t specify. He simply pointed firmly to the middle box, and said, “I want three-pennyworth of those.’”
“Just a moment, sir,” interposed Elliot. “Had anybody else bought chocolate creams up to that time?”
“No. There had been a fairly brisk trade in liquorice, chocolate-bars, and bull’s eyes, but no chocolate creams had been sold that day.”
“Go on, please.”
“Mrs. Terry weighed it out for him. Those chocolates are sixpence a quarter-pound; he got two ounces, which came to six chocolates. Then Frankie ran back to Miss Wills, with the chocolates in a little paper bag. Now, it had been raining that day; and Miss Wills was wearing a raincoat with deep pockets. She put the bag into her pocket. Then, as though changing her mind, she pulled it out again. At least, she pulled out
a
paper bag. You know?”
“Yes.”
“She opened the bag, looked inside, and said, ‘Frankie, you’ve got me the small ones with the white filling. I wanted the larger ones with the pink filling. Run back and ask Mrs. Terry to change them, will you?’ Mrs. Terry, of course, obligingly changed them. She poured the chocolates into the middle box, and refilled the bag with others from the righthand box. Frankie gave them to Miss Wills, who said he could keep the change from the sixpence.
“The rest of the business,” said Major Crow, drawing a deep breath and turning a grim eye on his listener, “is told soon enough. Frankie didn’t spend his threepence then; he went home to tea. But after tea he came back again. Whether or not he had already got his mind set on chocolate creams, from buying some before, I don’t know. But he spent two-pence on them—the small ones with the white filling—and a penny on liquorice. About a quarter past six, a maidservant named Lois Curtain (she works for Mr. and Mrs. Anderson) came in with the two Anderson children, and bought half a pound of mixed creams out of all three boxes.
“All those who tasted a chocolate from the middle box complained of their violently bitter taste. Frankie, poor little devil, wasn’t going to be put off by this, because he’d spent his twopence. He wolfed down the lot. The pains came on about an hour later, and he died in terrible pain at eleven o’clock that night. The Anderson kids, and Lois Curtain, were more fortunate. Little Dorothy Anderson took a bite out of a chocolate; she cried out about it, and said it was too bitter—‘nasty’ was the word she used—to eat. Lois Curtain, curious, also took a bite out of it. Tommy Anderson set up such a clamour that
he
had to have a bite as well. Lois then bit into another chocolate, and that was bitter too. She decided that the chocolates were bad, and put ’em away in her handbag until she could go back and complain to Mrs. Terry. None of the three died, but it was touch and go with Lois that night. Strychnine poisoning, of course.”
Major Crow stopped. He had been speaking quietly, but Elliot did not like the look in his eyes. Extinguishing his cigarette, he sat down again.
He added:
“I’ve been twelve years in this part of the country, but I’ve never seen such an uproar as the one that followed that little bit of business. The first report, of course, was that Mrs. Terry had been selling poisoned chocolates, and all the blame fell on her. I think some people had a vague idea you could get tainted chocolates in the same way you can get tainted meat. Mrs. Terry was hysterical: you know? Screaming and crying, with her apron over her face. They smashed her windows; and Frankie Dale’s father went half out of his mind.
“But in a day or two they grew saner, and started to ask questions. Joe Chesney frankly said in the bar of ‘The Blue Lion’ that it was deliberate poisoning. He had attended Frankie. Frankie had eaten three chocolates, and swallowed six and a quarter grains of strychnine. One sixteenth of a grain, you know, has proved a fatal dose. The other three victims had divided over two grains among them. The remaining chocolates from the middle box were analyzed. Two more of them contained (each chocolate) over two grains of strychnine formate in an alcohol solution, and so did two more in the bag bought by Lois Curtain, in addition to the two she and the children had shared. In other words, ten chocolates altogether had been poisoned; and there was much more than a fatal dose in every one of them. Somebody had been out to kill, and kill with as great agony to the victim as possible.
“Now—pretty plainly—there were three possible solutions.
“One. Mrs. Terry had deliberately poisoned the chocolates. Which nobody believed, after the first uproar.
“Two. Someone who went into the shop during the day had added a handful of poisoned stuff to the middle box while Mrs. Terry’s back was turned. Just as I indicated to you a while ago.
“Three. Marjorie Wills did it. When Frankie brought her the bag of harmless creams, she had in the pocket of her raincoat a duplicate bag of prepared poisoned ones. She put the harmless bag into her pocket, drew out the poisoned one, and asked Frankie to take it back and change it. So the poisoned stuff was emptied into the middle box. You follow that?”
Elliot frowned.
“Yes, sir. I see that. But—”
“Exactly!” interrupted the Major, with a hypnotic eye on his guest. “I know what you’re going to say. That was the snag. She bought
six
chocolates. But there were, altogether,
ten
poisoned ones in the middle box. If she returned a duplicate bag of six, what about the extra four? And if the duplicate bag had contained ten chocolates instead of six, wouldn’t Mrs. Terry have noticed it in emptying it into the box?”
Superintendent Bostwick of the local police had hitherto not said a word. A great lump of a man, he had been sitting with his arms folded and his eye on the calendar. Now he cleared his throat.
“Some people,” he said, “thinks she wouldn’t have. Not if she was rushed.”
Clearing his throat again, he added:
“Scotland Yard or no Scotland Yard, we’ll get that damned murdering devil if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
The heat of the outburst quivered in the warm room. Major Crow looked at Elliot.
“Bostwick,” he said, “is trained to be fair-minded. But if that’s what he thinks, what do you imagine the others think?”
“I see,” said Elliot, and inwardly he shivered a little. “Is it generally believed that Miss Wills——?”