The Problem of the Green Capsule Read online

  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.

  Chapter II

  BITTER SWEET

  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 Che
sney 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.

  “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 o
n 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.”