Poisoned Chocolates Case (9 page)

“Are you ready, Mrs. Fielder - Flemming?” Roger asked, gazing at this surprising manifestation.

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming adjusted her very unbecoming hat, rubbed her nose (being innocent of powder, it did not suffer under this habitual treatment; just shone a little more brightly in pink embarrassment), and shot a covert glance round the table. Roger continued to gaze in astonishment. Mrs. Fielder - Flemming was positively shrinking from the lime - light. For some occult reason she was approaching her task with real distaste, and a distaste at that quite out of comparison with the task's significance.

She cleared her throat nervously. “I have a very difficult duty to perform,” she began in a low voice. “Last night I hardly slept. Anything more distasteful to a woman like myself it is impossible to imagine.” She paused, moistening her lips.

“Oh, come, Mrs. Fielder - Flemming,” Roger felt himself impelled to encourage her. “It's the same for all of us, you know. And I've heard you make a most excellent speech at one of your own first nights.”

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming looked at him, not at all encouraged. “I was not referring to that aspect of it, Mr. Sheringham,” she retorted, rather more tartly. “I was speaking of the burden which has been laid on me by the knowledge that has come into my possession, the terrible duty I have to perform in consequence of it.”

“You mean you've solved the little problem?” enquired Mr. Bradley, without reverence.

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming regarded him sombrely. “With infinite regret,” she said, in low, womanly tones, “I have.” Mrs. Fielder - Flemming was recovering her poise.

She consulted her notes for a moment, and then began to speak in a firmer voice. "Criminology I have always regarded with something of a professional eye. Its main interest has always been for me its immense potentialities for drama. The inevitability of murder; the predestined victim, struggling unconsciously and vainly against fate; the predestined killer, moving first unconsciously too and then with full and relentless realisation, towards the accomplishment of his doom; the hidden causes, unknown perhaps to both victim and killer, which are all the time urging on the fulfilment of destiny.

"Apart from the action and the horror of the deed itself, I have always felt that there are more possibilities of real drama in the most ordinary or sordid of murders than in any other situation that can occur to man. Ibsenish in the inevitable working out of certain circumstances in juxtaposition that we call fate, no less than Edgar - Wallacish in the crises undergone by the emotions of the onlooker at their climax.

"It was perhaps natural then that I should regard not only this particular case from something of the standpoint of my calling (and certainly no more dramatic twist could well be invented), but the task of solving it too. Anyhow, natural or not, this is what I did; and the result has terribly justified me. I considered the case in the light of one of the oldest dramatic situations, and very soon everything became only too clear. I am referring to the situation which the gentlemen who pass among us in these days for dramatic critics, invariably call the Eternal Triangle.

“I had to begin of course with only one of the triangle's three members. Sir Eustace Pennefather. Of the two unknown one must be a woman, the other might be woman or man. So I fell back on another very old and very sound maxim, and proceeded to chercher la femme. And,” said Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, very solemnly, “I found her.”

So far, it must be admitted, her audience was not particularly impressed. Even the promising opening had not stirred them, for it was only to be expected that Mrs. Fielder - Flemming would feel it her duty to emphasise her feminine shrinkings from handing a criminal over to justice. Her somewhat laborious sentences too, obviously learned off by heart for the occasion, detracted if anything from the interest of what she had to convey.

But when she resumed, having waited in vain for a tributary gasp at her last momentous piece of information, the somewhat calculated tenseness of her style had given way to an unrehearsed earnestness which was very much more impressive.

“I wasn't expecting the triangle to be the hackneyed one,” she said, with a slight dig at the deflated remains of Sir Charles. "Lady Pennefather I hardly considered for a moment. The subtlety of the crime, I felt sure, must be a reflection of an unusual situation. And after all a triangle need not necessarily include a husband and wife among its members; any three people, if the circumstances arrange them so, can form one. It is the circumstances, not the three protagonists, that make the triangle.

"Sir Charles has told us that this crime reminded him of the Marie Lafarge case, and in some respects (he might have added) the Mary Ansell case too. It reminded me of a case as well, but it was neither of these. The Molineux case in New York, it seems to me, provides a much closer parallel than either.

"You all remember the details, of course. Mr, Cornish, a director of the important Knickerbocker Athletic Club, received in his Christmas mail a small silver cup and a phial of bromo - seltzer, addressed to him at the club. He thought they had been sent by way of a joke, and kept the wrapper in order to identify the humorist. A few days later a woman who lived in the same boarding - house as Cornish complained of a headache and Cornish gave her some of the bromo - seltzer. In a very short time she was dead, and Cornish, who had taken just a sip because she complained of it being bitter, was violently ill but recovered later.

"In the end a man named Molineux, another member of the same club, was arrested and put on trial. There was quite a lot of evidence against him, and it was known that he hated Cornish bitterly, so much so that he had already assaulted him once. Moreover another member of the club, a man named Barnet, had been killed earlier in the year through taking what purported to be a sample of a well - known headache powder which had also been sent to him at the club and, shortly before the Cornish episode, Molineux married a girl who had actually been engaged to Barnet at the time of his death; he had always wanted her, but she had preferred Barnet. Molineux, as you remember, was convicted at his first trial and acquitted at his second; he afterwards became insane.

“Now this parallel seems to me complete. Our case is to all purposes a composite Cornish - cum - Barnet case. The resemblances are extraordinary. There is the poisoned article addressed to the man's club; there is, in the case of Cornish, the death of the wrong victim; there is the preservation of the wrapper; there is, in Barnet's case, the triangle element (and a triangle, you will notice, without husband and wife). It's quite startling. It is, in fact, more than startling; it's significant. Things don't happen like that quite by chance.”

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming paused and blew her nose, delicately but with emotion. She was getting nicely worked up now, and so, in consequence, was her audience. If there were no gasps there was at any rate the tribute of complete silence till she was ready to go on.

"I said that this similarity was more than startling, that it was significant. I will explain its particular significance later; at present it is enough to say that I found it very helpful also. The realisation of the extreme closeness of the parallel came as quite a shock to me, but once I had grasped it I felt strangely convinced that it was in this very similarity that the clue to the solution of Mrs. Bendix's murder was to be found. I felt this so strongly that I somehow actually knew it. These intuitions do come to me sometimes (explain them as you will) and I have never yet known them fail me. This one did not do so either.

“I began to examine this case in the light of the Molineux one. Would the latter help me to find the woman I was looking for in the former? What were the indications, so far as Barnet was concerned? Barnet received his fatal package because he was purposing to marry a girl whom the murderer was resolved he should not marry. With so many parallels between the two cases already, was there -” Mrs. Fielder - Flemming pushed back her unwieldy hat to a still more unbecoming angle and looked deliberately round the table with the air of an early Christian trying the power of the human eye on a doubtfully intimidated covey of lions - “was there another here!”

This time Mrs. Fielder - Flemming was rewarded with several real and audible gasps. That of Sir Charles was quite the most audible, an outraged, indignant gasp that came perilously near to a snort. Mr. Chitterwick gasped apprehensively, as if fearing something like a physical sequel to the sharp exchange of glances between Sir Charles and Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, those of the former positively menacing in their warning, those of the lady almost vocal with her defiance of it.

The Chairman gasped too, wondering what a Chairman should do if two members of his circle, and of opposite sexes at that, should proceed to blows under his very nose.

Mr. Bradley forgot himself so far as to gasp as well, in sheer, blissful ecstasy. Mrs. Fielder - Flemming looked as if she were to prove a better hand at bull - baiting than himself, but Mr. Bradley did not grudge her the honour so long as he was to be allowed to sit and hug himself in the audience. Not in his most daring toreador - like antics would Mr. Bradley have ever dared to postulate the very daughter of his victim as the cause of the murder itself. Could this magnificent woman really bring forward a case to support so puncturing an idea? And what if it should actually turn out to be true? After all, such a thing was conceivable enough. Murders have been committed for the sake of lovely ladies often enough before; so why not for the lovely daughter of a pompous old silk? Oh God, oh Montreal.

Finally Mrs. Fielder - Flemming gasped too, at herself.

Alone without a gasp sat Alicia Dammers, her face alight with nothing but an intellectual interest in the development of her fellow - member's argument, determinedly impersonal. One was to gather that to Miss Dammers it was immaterial whether her own mother had been mixed up in the murder, so long as her part in it had provided opportunities for the sharpening of wits and the stimulation of intelligence. Without ever acknowledging her recognition that a personal element was being introduced into the Circle's investigations, she yet managed to radiate the idea that Sir Charles ought, if anything, to be detachedly delighted at the possibility of such enterprise on the part of his daughter.

Sir Charles however was far from delighted. From the red swelling of the veins on his forehead it was obvious that something was going to burst out of him in a very few seconds. Mrs. Fielder - Flemming leapt, like an agitated but determined hen, for the gap.

“We have agreed to waive the law of slander here,” she almost squawked. “Personalities don't exist for us. If the name crops up of any one personally known to us, we utter it as unflinchingly, in whatever connection, as if it were a complete stranger's. That is the definite arrangement we came to last night, Mr. President, isn't it? We are to do what we conceive to be our duty to society quite irrespective of any personal considerations?”

For a moment Roger indulged his tremors. He did not want his beautiful Circle to explode in a cloud of dust, never again to be re - united. And though he could not but admire the flurried but undaunted courage of Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, he had to be content to envy it so far as Sir Charles was concerned, for he certainly did not possess anything like it himself. On the other hand there was no doubt that the lady had right on her side, and what can any President do but administer justice?

“Perfectly correct, Mrs. Fielder - Flemming,” he had to admit, hoping his voice sounded as firm as he would have wished.

For a moment a blue glare, emanating from Sir Charles, enveloped him luridly. Then, as Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, evidently heartened by this official support, took up her bomb again, the rays of the glare were switched again on to her. Roger, nervously watching the two of them, could not help reflecting that blue rays are things which should never be directed on to bombs.

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming juggled neatly with her bomb. Often though it seemed about to slip through her fingers, it never quite reached the ground or detonated. "Very well, then. I will go on. My triangle now had the second of its members. On the analogy of the Barnet murder, where was the third to be found? Obviously, with Molineux as the prototype, in some person who was anxious to prevent the first member from marrying the second.

“So far, you will see, I am not out of harmony with the conclusions Sir Charles gave us last night, though my method of arriving at them was perhaps somewhat different. He gave us a triangle also, without expressly defining it as such (perhaps even without recognising it as such). And the first two members of his triangle are precisely the same as the first two of mine.”

Here Mrs. Fielder - Flemming made a notable effort to return something of Sir Charles's glare, in defiant challenge to contradiction. As she had simply stated a plain fact, however, which Sir Charles was quite unable to refute without explaining that he had not meant what he had meant the evening before, the challenge passed unanswered. Also the glare visibly diminished. But for all that (patently remarked Sir Charles's expression) a triangle by any other name does not smell so unsavoury.

“It is when we come to the third member,” pursued Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, with renewed poise, “that we are at variance. Sir Charles suggested to us Lady Pennefather. I have not the pleasure of Lady Pennefather's acquaintance, but Miss Dammers who knows her well, tells me that in almost every particular the estimate given us by Sir Charles of her character was wrong. She is neither mean, grasping, greedy, nor in any imaginable way capable of the awful deed with which Sir Charles, perhaps a little rashly, was ready to credit her. Lady Pennefather, I understand, is a particularly sweet and kindly woman; somewhat broad - minded no doubt, but none the worse for that; indeed as some of us would think, a good deal the better.”

Mrs. Fielder - Flemming encouraged the belief that she was not merely tolerant of a little harmless immorality, but actually ready to act as godmother to any particular instance of it. Indeed she went sometimes quite a long detour out of her way in order to propagate this belief among her friends. But unfortunately her friends would persist in remembering that she had refused to have anything more to do with one of her own nieces since the latter, on learning that her middle - aged husband kept, for purposes of convenience, a different mistress in each of the four quarters of England, and just to be on the safe side one in Scotland too, had run away with a young man of her own with whom she happened to be very devotedly in love.