The Problem of the Green Capsule Read online

“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——?”

  “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 no
t 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.”

  Chapter III

  BITTER ALMONDS

  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 c
ontrast. 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.