The Problem of the Green Capsule (2 page)

Doctor Joe said uneasily: “The what?”

“The poisoner,” said the young man.
“By the design of sword and stripped willow tree (“lepidus”—”stripped of bark,” “polished,” hence “witty” or “agreeable”) set into the mosaic pavement at the entrance to the atrium, Mommsen has identified this villa as belonging to
——
”

“Yes, but what did he do?”

“—who, according to Varro, killed five members of his family by means of poisoned mushroom sauce,”
continued the young man. He looked round with an air of refreshed interest, as though he half expected to see the corpses still there.

“Here, this isn’t bad!” he added. “I suppose it was easy to get away with wholesale poisoning in those days.”

And then suddenly he knew that there was something wrong; the bristly hair seemed to rise on the back of his neck. He shut up the book and spoke quietly.

“Look here,” he blurted out. “Look here, have I said something I shouldn’t?”

“Of course not,” replied Marjorie with the greatest composure. “Besides, Uncle Marcus’s hobby is the study of crime. Isn’t it?”

“It is,” agreed Uncle Marcus. He turned to the young man. “Tell me, Mr.—I keep forgetting your name?”

“You know perfectly well what it is,” cried Marjorie.

But by the exaggerated respect the young man paid to Marcus, it was clear that Marcus was not only Marjorie’s uncle; he was her acting parent.

“Harding, sir. George Harding,” he answered.

“Ah, yes. Well, Mr. Harding, tell me; did you ever hear of a place called Sodbury Cross, near Bath?”

“No, sir. Why?”

“We come from there,” said Marcus.

He walked over briskly and sat down on the rim of the fountain settling himself as though he were preparing to harangue them. Taking off both his hat and his sunglasses, he balanced them on his knee. This removal of the mask showed that he had wiry greyish hair standing up in humps and angles which sixty years’ combing had been unable to subdue. His blue eyes were bright and intelligent and malicious. From time to time he would rub the shrivelled skin at the side of his jaw.

“Now, Mr. Harding,” he went on, “let’s face facts. I’m assuming that this affair between you and Marjorie isn’t just a kind of shipboard flirtation. I assume you are both serious, or think you are.”

Another change had passed over the group. It also affected the two men inside the balustrade of the peristyle. One of these (the watcher noticed) was a cheerful-looking middle-aged man with a felt hat pushed back on his bald head. His eyes were masked, but he had a round face coloured with good-living. He cleared his throat.

“I think,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just run down and——”

His companion, a tall young man of remarkable ugliness, turned round and began to study the interior of the house with elaborate forgetfulness.

Marcus looked at them.

“Rubbish,” he said crisply. “You may not be members of the family, either of you. But you know what we know; so stay where you are. And stop this infernal delicacy.”

The girl spoke quietly. “Do you think Uncle Marcus,” she said, “that this is the place to have this out?”

“I do, my dear.”

“Quite right,” agreed Doctor Joe with violence. He had assumed a stern, stuffed, momentous look. “For once in your life, Marcus—quite right.”

George Harding himself had assumed a stern, stuffed, heroic look.

“I can only assure you, sir—” he began in heroic tones.

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Marcus. “And oblige me by looking less embarrassed. It is nothing unusual; most people get married, and know what to do when they get married, as I trust you both do. Now, this question of marriage is entirely subject to my approval——”

“And mine,” said Doctor Joe sternly.

“
If
you please,” said Marcus, annoyed. “And my brother’s, of course. We’ve known you for a month or so, under conditions of traveling. As soon as you began going about with my niece, I cabled my solicitors to find out all about you. Well, you seem to be all right. Your record is good; and I’ve got no complaint. You have no family and no money——”

George Harding started to explain something, but Marcus cut him off.

“Yes, yes. I know all about your chemical process, which may make a fortune and all that. I wouldn’t put a penny into it, if both your lives depended on it. I take not the slightest interest in ‘new processes’, I detest new processes, particularly chemical ones; they exalt the brains of fools and they bore me green. But you will probably make a good thing of it. If you go soberly and steadily, you already have enough to live on, and you’ll have perhaps a bit more from Marjorie. Is all that understood?”

Again George started to explain something; this time it was Marjorie who interposed. Her face was slightly pink, but her eyes were candid and she showed great composure.

“Just say, ‘yes,’” she advised. “It’s all you will be allowed to say.”

The bald-headed man in the felt hat, who had been leaning on his elbows on the balustrade and watching them with a slight frown, now waved his hand as though to attract attention in a classroom.

“One moment, Marcus,” he interrupted. “You have asked both Wilbur and me to be present at this thing, though we’re not members of the family. So let me say a word. Is it necessary to cross-examine the boy as though he were——”

Marcus looked at him.

“I wish,” he said, “certain people would get out of their heads the curious notion that any form of questioning is always a ‘cross-examination.” Every novelist seems to be under this impression. Even you, professor, are addicted to it. It annoys me intensely. I am
examining
Mr. Harding. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” said George.

“Oh, go soak your head,” said the professor amiably.

Marcus settled back as far as was possible without tumbling into the fountain. His expression had grown even more bland.

“Since all this is understood,” he went on, in a slightly different voice, “you ought to know something about us. Has Marjorie told you anything about it? I thought not. If you think we are members of the strolling idle rich, who are accustomed to take a three months’ holiday at this time of year, get it out of your head. It is true that I am rich: but I am not idle and I very seldom stroll. Neither do the others: I see to that. I work; and, though I consider myself more of a scholar than a business man, I am none the worse a man of business for that. My brother Joseph is a general practitioner in Sodbury Cross;
he
works, in spite of his constitutional laziness; I see to that too. He is not a good doctor, but people like him.”

Doctor Joe’s face went fiery behind the dark glasses.

“Please be quiet,” said Marcus coolly. “Now, Wilburl—Wilbur Emmet there—is the manager of my business.”

He nodded towards the tall and spectacularly ugly young man who stood inside the balustrade of the peristyle. Wilbur Emmet kept a wooden countenance. Towards Marcus he showed a respect as great as George Harding’s, but it was a stiffer and more dignified respect, as though he were always ready to take notes.

“Since I employ him,” continued Marcus, “I can assure you he works too. Professor Ingram there, that fat fellow with the bald head, is just a friend of the family. He doesn’t work, but he would if I had any say in the matter. Now, Mr. Harding, I want you to understand this from the start, and I want you to understand me. I’m the head of this family; make no mistake about that. I’m not a tyrant. I’m not ungenerous and I’m not unreasonable: anybody will tell you that.” He stuck out his neck. “But I’m an interfering, strong-minded old busybody who wants to find out the truth of things. I want my own way and I generally get it. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” said George.

“Good,” commented Marcus, smiling. “Now, then. Everything else being so, you may wonder why we did take this three months’ holiday. I’ll tell you. It was because in the village of Sodbury Cross there is a criminal lunatic who enjoys poisoning people wholesale.”

Again there was a silence. Marcus put on his spectacles, and again the ring of dark glasses was complete.

“Has the cat got your tongue?” inquired Marcus. “I did not say the village contained a drinking-fountain or a market-cross. I said it contained a criminal lunatic who enjoys poisoning people wholesale. Purely to afford pleasure to this person, three children and an eighteen-year-old girl were poisoned with strychnine. One of the children died. It was a child of whom Marjorie had been particularly fond.”

George Harding opened his mouth to say something, and stopped again. He looked at the guide-book in his hand, and hastily thrust it into his pocket.

“I’m sorry—” he began.

“No; listen to me. Marjorie was ill for several weeks with nervous shock. Because of this, and certain other—atmospheres,” Marcus adjusted his glasses, “we decided to come for this trip.”

“Never been robust,” muttered Doctor Joe, staring at the ground.

Marcus silenced him.

“On Wednesday, Mr. Harding, we go home by the
Hakozaki Maru
from Naples. So you had better know a little about what happened in Sodbury Cross on last June 17th. There is a woman named Mrs. Terry who keeps a tobacconist’s and sweet-shop in the High Street. The children were poisoned by doses of strychnine in chocolate-creams sold by Mrs. Terry. She does not (you may gather) sell poisoned chocolates as a regular thing. The police believe that poisoned sweets were substituted for harmless ones—in a certain way.” He hesitated. “The point is that everyone who could have had access to the chocolates, everyone who could have done this at certain established times, is a person well known in Sodbury Cross. Do I make myself clear?”

Here the dark glasses looked very hard at Marcus’s listener.

“I think so, sir.”

“Speaking for myself,” continued Marcus, “I am anxious to get back home——”

“Good Lord, yes!” exploded Doctor Joe, with powerful relief. “Decent cigarettes. Decent tea. Decent——”

From the shadows of the peristyle, the stern-faced and exceptionally ugly-faced young man spoke for the first time. He had a deep voice, which gave his somewhat mysterious words the effect of a Sibylline prophecy. His hands were dug into the pockets of a blue blazer.

“Sir,” said Wilbur Emmet, “we should not have been away in July and August. I do not trust the early silver to McCracken.”

“Please understand me, Mr. Harding,” said Marcus sharply. “We are not a band of pariahs. We do as we please. We take a holiday when we please, and come home when we please: at least, I do. I am particularly anxious to get back home, because I think I can solve the problem that has been tormenting them. I knew a part of the answer months ago. But there are certain—” Again, hesitating, he lifted his hand in the air, shook it, and brought it down on his knee. “If you come to Sodbury Cross, you will find certain innuendoes. Certain atmospheres. Certain whispers. Are you prepared for them?”

“Yes,” said George.

To the man who was watching them from the doorway of the atrium, there always remained a picture of that group in the garden, framed in ancient pillars and strangely symbolic of what was to happen. But his thoughts were not metaphysical now. He did not go farther into the house of Aulus Lepidus the poisoner. Instead he turned round and went out into the Street of Tombs, where he walked a little way up towards the Herculaneum Gate. A tiny blur of white smoke coiled and crawled round the cone of Vesuvius. Detective-Inspector Andrew MacAndrew Elliot, Criminal Investigation Department, sat down on the high footway, lighted a cigarette, and stared thoughtfully at the brown lizard that darted out into the road.

On the night that murder was done at Bellegarde, Marcus Chesney’s country house, Inspector Elliot left London in his car—of which he was inordinately proud—and arrived in Sodbury Cross at half-past eleven. It was a fine though very dark night after a day of brilliant sunshine, and warm for the third of October.

There had been, he thought gloomily, a kind of fatality about it. When Superintendent Hadley told him to take over, he did not say what was in his mind. Haunting him was not only a Pompeian scene, but a certain ugly business at a chemist’s shop.

“As usual,” Hadley had complained bitterly, “we’ve been called in when the trail is as cold as last year’s flatiron. Nearly four months ago! You did very well on a cold trail in that Crooked Hinge business, so you may be able to do something. But don’t be too optimistic. Do you know anything about it?”

“I—read something about it at the time, sir.”

“Well, it’s being stirred up again. Devil of a row, it appears, since the Chesney family got back from a trip abroad. Anonymous letters, scrawls on the wall, that sort of thing. It’s a dirty business, my lad: poisoning kids.”

Elliot hesitated. There was a dull anger in him. “Do they think it was one of the Chesney family, sir?”

“I don’t know. Major Crow—that’s the Chief Constable—has his own ideas. Crow is inclined to be more excitable than you’d think to look at him. When he gets an idea, he freezes to it. All the same, he’ll give you the facts. He’s a good man, and you ought to work well under him. Oh, and if you need any help, Fell is close at hand. He’s at Bath, taking the cure. You might ring him up and see that he does some work for a change.”

Andrew MacAndrew Elliot, young, serious-minded, and very Scottish of soul, was considerably heartened at the knowledge of the vast doctor’s presence. He might even, he thought, tell Dr. Fell what was in his mind, for Dr. Fell was that sort of person.

At half-past eleven, then, he arrived in Sodbury Cross and pulled up at the police-station. Sodbury Cross in status hovers between a town and a village. But it is a market-town, and close to the London Road, so that it carries a volume of traffic. At this time of night it was sealed up in sleep. The lights of Elliot’s car picked up blank rows of windows; the only other light was in an illuminated clock over the Diamond Jubilee drinking fountain.

Major Crow and Superintendent Bostwick were waiting for him in the Superintendent’s office at the police-station.