“That you’ll have to find out for yourself. People in general aren’t in a mood to argue niceties, as we have to. That’s the trouble. First it was the completely meaningless nature of the thing, the pure crookedmindedness of it, which stunned everybody. And then—well, it isn’t helped by the fact (though fortunately most of the
crowd at ‘The Blue Lion’ don’t know this) that the circumstances are almost exactly the same as in a famous poisoning case at Brighton over sixty years ago. You’ve heard the case of Christiana Edmunds in 1871? She worked the poisoned-chocolates dodge, getting a child to take them back to the shop and exchange them, in exactly the same way. Carried a duplicate bag in—I think—her muff; and palmed it off on the child like a conjuror.”
Elliot considered. “Christiana Edmunds, if I remember,” he said, “was mad. She died in Broadmoor.”
“Yes,” agreed the major
bluntly; “and some people think this girl will too.”
After a pause he went on with an air of reasonableness.
“But look at the case against her! Or, rather, the lack of a case. Won’t wash: simply won’t wash. First, no poison can be traced to her; it can’t be proved that she bought, borrowed, found, or stole a millionth of a grain. The local answer to that is simple. She’s a great favourite of Dr. Chesney; and Joe Chesney, they say, is the sort of careless person who would leave strychnine lying loose about the place like tobacco. It’s true that he has strychnine in
his surgery, but he’s accounted to us for all of it.
“Second, Mrs. Terry herself swears that only six
chocolates were returned in the bag Frankie Dale brought back.
“Third, if Marjorie Wills did that, she went about it in an incredibly asinine way. She didn’t even take the precautions of mad Christiana Edmunds. After all, Brighton is a big place; and a woman who chose a child who didn’t know her to make the exchange would run a reasonable chance of not being identified afterwards. But this girl!—smack in the middle of a small place like this, speaking to a boy who knew her, and in the presence of witnesses? Hang it, she went out of her way to call attention to herself! If she wanted to poison the chocolates, she would have done it completely unsuspected in the other way I’ve told you about.
“No, Inspector. There’s not a point in the case against her that a good counsel wouldn’t shoot to pieces in twenty minutes; and we can’t afford to make an arrest just to satisfy Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. Besides, I hope it’s not true. She’s a pretty little thing, and nothing has ever been known against her except that the Chesneys in general are queer.”
“Did this popular excitement against her start before the Chesneys went away on their trip?”
“Well, it was simmering a bit. It only came fully to the surface when they did go. And, now that they’re back, it’s worse. The Superintendent here has been in a stew for fear some hotheads will go up and try to smash up Marcus’s greenhouses. I don’t anticipate that, though. The local lad talks a lot, but he’s almost heavily patient. He expects authority to act for him, and won’t cut up rough unless it doesn’t. Gad,
I’m
willing to do anything possible!” said the Major, with sudden plaintiveness. “I’ve got children of my own and I don’t like this business any better than the rest of them. Besides, Marcus Chesney’s attitude hasn’t helped any. He came back from the Continent roaring for blood, and saying he was going to solve our problem for us after we had failed. In fact, I understand he was in here only the day before yesterday with some nonsense, asking questions——”
Elliot pricked up his ears.
“Was he?” Elliot demanded. “About what, sir?”
The Chief Constable glanced inquiringly at Superintendent Bostwick. Speech struggled up massively in the latter.
“Gentleman wanted to know,” said Superintendent Bostwick, with sarcasm, “the exact size of the chocolate-boxes on Mrs. Terry’s counter. I asked him why he wanted to know. He flew off into a temper, and said it was none of my business. I said he better ask Mrs. Terry, then. He said”—the Superintendent chuckled with spectral enjoyment—“he said he had another question to ask me; but, since I was such a bleeding fool, he wouldn’t ask it and I could take the consequences. He said he always knew I lacked the power of observation, but now he knew I hadn’t any brains.”
“It seems rather an
idée fixe
of his,” explained the Major, “that most people are incapable of describing accurately what they see or hear——”
“I know,” said Elliot.
“You know?”
Elliot did not have time to answer this, for at that moment the telephone rang. Major Crow glanced rather impatiently at the clock, whose noisy ticking filled the room, and whose hands pointed to twenty minutes past twelve. Bostwick lumbered over and picked up the phone, while both Elliot and the Chief Constable were sunk in an obscure but uncomfortable dream. The Major was tired and depressed; Elliot, at the very least was depressed. It was Bostwick’s voice which roused them—perhaps the very slight shrillness with which he repeated, “Sir?” Major Crow swung round suddenly, knocking his chair with a bump against the desk.
“It’s Doctor Joe,” said the Superintendent heavily. “You’d better talk to him, sir.”
There was a glitter of sweat on his forehead, though the expression of his eyes told little. He held out the telephone.
Major Crow took it, and listened quietly for perhaps a minute. In the silence Elliot could hear the telephone jabbering, though he could make out no coherent word. Then the Chief Constable hung up the receiver with some care.
“That was Joe Chesney,” he repeated, rather superfluously. “Marcus is dead. The doctor believes he was poisoned with cyanide.”
Again the ticking of the clock filled the room, and Major Crow cleared his throat.
“It would also appear,” he went on, “that Marcus proved his pet theory with his last breath. If I understand what the doctor said, every single one of them saw him poisoned under their eyes; and yet not one single person can tell what happened.”
Bellegarde was a house about which it could be said that there was no nonsense. Though very large, it was not an ancestral mansion, nor did it pretend to be one. It was solidly built of yellow Dutch bricks, with gable facings in blue, now somewhat begrimed; its gables were set at the end of a long, low frontage with a steep-pitched roof.
But, at the moment, Inspector Elliot made out details with difficulty. The sky was thick and overcast. Not a light showed at the front of the house. But from the side, the side out of sight round to their left as they entered the drive, poured such a blaze that they had seen it from the main road. Elliot stopped his car in the drive, and Major Crow and Bostwick climbed out of the rear seat.
“Just a moment, sir,” Elliot said respectfully. “Before we go in, there’s something we had better straighten out. What is my status here? I was sent here over that sweet-shop case, but this—”
In the dark he felt that Major Crow was regarding him with a grim smile.
“You do like to have things in order, don’t you?” the Chief Constable inquired. “Well, well, that’s all to the good,” he added hastily. “It’s your case, my lad. You handle it: under Bostwick’s supervision, of course. When I’ve heard what has happened, I’m going home to bed. Now carry on.”
Instead of knocking at the front door, Elliot made straight for the side of the house and looked round the corner. Bellegarde, he saw, was not deep. This side consisted of three rooms set in a line. Each room had two French windows opening out on a narrowish strip of lawn with a line of chestnut trees running parallel to the line of windows. The first room—towards the front of the house—was dark. It was from the French windows of the other two that the light streamed, particularly the third room. It gave the smooth grass a theatrical green; it illuminated every yellow leaf on the chestnut trees, throwing theatrical shadows under them.
Elliot glanced into the first of the two lighted rooms. It was empty, both French windows, backed with heavy velvet curtains, stood open. It was what used to be called a Music Room, of the elaborate variety, with a piano and a radio-gramophone; the chairs now looked disarranged. Folding doors (closed) communicated with the farthest room of the three. The silence itself was thick enough to suggest unpleasant possibilities.
“Hello!” Elliot called out.
Nobody answered. He moved on to look in at the windows of the other lighted room, with which the folding doors communicated. And he stopped short.
In the narrow green aisle between the house and the chestnut trees, just outside the windows of the far room, lay as odd an assortment of articles as Elliot had ever seen. The first thing he noticed was a top-hat, a tall and shiny top-hat of the old-fashioned sort, its nap badly rubbed. Beside it had been flung down a long old-fashioned raincoat with deep pockets, also much worn. Near this lay a brown wool muffler—and a pair of dark sun-glasses. Finally, there stood amid this heap of castoff clothing a black leather bag, rather larger than a doctor’s bag but not so large as a suitcase. On the black bag had been painted the words,
R. H. Nemo, M. D.
“It looks,” observed Major Crow coolly, “as though somebody has been undressing.”
Elliot did not reply. For he had just looked into the room; and it was not a pleasant sight.
Both windows of this room were also ajar. It had been fitted up as an office or study. In the centre stood a broad table with blotter and pen-tray, and a desk-chair behind it on Elliot’s left. A person sitting in this chair would be facing the double-doors to the other room. A bronze lamp on this table held an electric bulb of such intense, blinding brilliancy that Elliot knew it for a Photoflood bulb, the sort with which indoor photographs are taken; the shade of the lamp was tilted so that its full glare would fall on the face and body of anyone sitting in that desk-chair. And there was someone sitting in the desk-chair now.
Marcus Chesney sat sideways, his shoulders hunched together and his hands gripping the arm of the chair as though he were trying to push himself to his feet. But it was only the illusion of being alive. His feet trailed out, and his weight rested against the back of the chair. His face was cyanosed, the forehead-veins standing out dark blue and swollen. Against this the grey-white of his hair appeared in startling contrast. The congested eyelids were shut, and there was still a slight froth on the lips.
All this the Photoflood lamp, tilted and focused on him, brought out with a merciless clarity of white light. In the wall behind Marcus Chesney’s back there was a mantelpiece of polished wood; and on this mantelpiece stood a white-faced clock whose busy little pendulum switched back and forth with loud ticking. Its hands pointed to twenty-five minutes past twelve.
“Yes, he’s gone,” said Major Crow, in what he tried to make a brisk tone, “But—look here——”
His voice trailed off in protest. The ticking of the clock was inordinately loud. Even from the window they could smell the bitter-almonds odour.
“Yes, sir?” said Elliot, memorising details.
“He looks as though he pegged out hard. Pain, I mean.”
“He did.”
“Joe Chesney said it was cyanide. And then there’s that odour: I can’t say I’ve ever smelled it before, but everybody knows about it. But isn’t cyanide the stuff that strikes like lightning and kills instantaneously; no pain at all?”
“No, sir. There’s no poison that does that. It’s very rapid, but only rapid in the sense that it takes minutes instead of——”
Here, this wouldn’t do; he had to get on with it. But, as Elliot stood in the window, his imagination took the ugly exhibits in that room and fitted them together in a picture of remarkable vividness. Here was the dead man sitting behind a table that faced the double-doors across the room, with a strong light set to shine on him. It was like a stage—with illuminations. If those folding doors were open, and people were sitting beyond them to look in here, this room would be like a stage. The folding doors would be curtains, Marcus Chesney would be the actor. And outside the window lay those curious stage-properties, a top-hat, a raincoat, a brown muffler, a pair of sun-glasses, and a black bag painted with the name of a phantom doctor. Well, that could wait.
Elliot noted the time by his watch, which agreed to the second with the clock on the mantelpiece, and entered it in his notebook. Then he went into the room.
The bitter-almonds odour was very strong round Marcus’s mouth. He had been dead only a very short time; his hands were still clenched in a final spasm round the arm of the chair. He wore a dinner-jacket whose shirtfront bulged up out of the waistcoat, and behind the handkerchief in his breast-pocket there stuck out the edge of a folded piece of paper.
If he had taken poison, Elliot could find no container or receptacle from which he had taken it. The table, with its neat desk-blotter and pen-tray, was brushed clean. There were only two other objects on the table. One was a lead-pencil, flattish rather than round or hexagonal, and dark blue in colour; it lay not in the pen-tray, but on the blotter. The other object on the desk was a two-pound box of cheap chocolates. It was unopened; the glazed cardboard was ornamented with a flowered design like blue wall-paper, and bore the words
Henry’s Peppermint Creams
in gilt letters on the lid.
“Hullo!” bellowed a voice from the other room.
The carpets were thick, and they heard no footsteps. Also, it was so dark beyond the core of light that they could see little even when someone fumbled at the folding doors and pulled them open. But Dr. Joseph Chesney hurried into the room, and stopped short.
“Oh,” said Doctor Joe. He was breathing hard. “It’s you, Major. And Bostwick. Thank God.”
The major greeted him curtly.
“We were wondering where you’d got to,” he said. “This is Inspector Elliot, who has come down from Scotland Yard to give us a hand. Suppose you tell him what happened here.”
Doctor Joe looked at Elliot with searching curiosity. The air was disturbed at his passing, as by a wind; he brought an atmosphere of brandy to mingle with the bitter-almonds. His short ginger beard and moustache were puffed out by the pursing of his lips and the breaths he drew. Seen here at home, rather than in Italy, he seemed less aggressive and perhaps even less burly in spite of his heavy tweed suit. He had scrubby ginger hair and scrubby red eyebrows over fiercely genial eyes, with moving wrinkles under them as though the whole lower part of his face were on a hinge. But the fat face was not genial now.