As they were talking a man entered the dining-room and walked past their table. Roger’s host became abruptly silent. The newcomer threw him an abrupt nod and passed on.
Roger’s host leant forward across the table and spoke in the hushed tones of one to whom a revelation has been vouchsafed. “Talk of the devil! That was Bendix himself. First time I’ve seen him in here since it happened. Poor devil! It knocked him all to pieces, you know. I’ve never seen a man so devoted to his wife. It was a byword. Did you see how ghastly he looked?” All this in a tactful whisper that must have been far more obvious to the subject of it had he happened to be looking their way than the loudest bellowing.
Roger nodded shortly. He had caught a glimpse of Bendix’s face and been shocked by it even before he learned his identity. It was haggard and pale and seamed with lines of bitterness, prematurely old. “Hang it all,” he now thought, much moved, “somebody really must make an effort. If the murderer isn’t found soon it will kill that chap too.”
Aloud he said, somewhat at random and certainly without tact: “He didn’t exactly fall on your neck. I thought you two were such bosom friends?”
His host looked uncomfortable. “Oh, well, you must make allowances just at present,” he hedged. “Besides, we weren’t bosom friends exactly. As a matter of fact he was a year or two senior to me. Or it might have been three even. We were in different houses too. And he was on the modern side of course (can you imagine the son of his father being anything else?), while I was a classical bird.”
“I see,” said Roger quite gravely, realising that his host’s actual contact with Bendix at school had been limited, at most, to that of the latter’s toe with the former’s hinder parts.
He left it at that.
For the rest of lunch he was a little inattentive. Something was nagging at his brain, and he could not identify it. Somewhere, somehow, during the last hour, he felt, a vital piece of information had been conveyed to him and he had never grasped its importance.
It was not until he was putting on his coat half-an-hour later, and for the moment had given up trying to worry his mind into giving up its booty, that the realisation suddenly came to him unbidden, in accordance with its usual and maddening way. He stopped dead, one arm in his coat-sleeve, the other in act to fumble.
“By Jove!” he said softly.
“Anything the matter, old man?” asked his host, now mellowed by much port.
“No, thanks; nothing,” said Roger hastily, coming to earth again.
Outside the club he hailed a taxi.
For probably the first time in her life Mrs. Verreker-le-Mesurer had given somebody a constructive idea.
For the rest of the day Roger was very busy indeed.
X
The President called on Mr. Bradley to hold forth.
Mr. Bradley stroked his moustache and mentally shot his cuffs.
He had begun his career (when still Percy Robinson) as a motor-salesman, and had discovered that there is more money in manufacturing. Now he manufactured detective stories, and found his former experience of the public’s gullibility not unhelpful. He was still his own salesman, but occasionally had difficulty in remembering that he was no longer mounted on a stand at Olympia. Everything and everybody in this world, including Morton Harrogate Bradley, he heartily despised, except only Percy Robinson. He sold, in tens of thousands.
“This is rather unfortunate for me,” he began, in the correct gentlemanly drawl, as if addressing an audience of morons. “I had rather been under the impression that I should be expected to produce as a murderer the most unlikely person, in the usual tradition; and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming has cut the ground away from under my feet. I don’t see how I can possibly find you a more unlikely murderer than Sir Charles here. All of us who have the misfortune to speak after Mrs. Fielder-Flemming will have to be content to pile up so many anticlimaxes.
“Not that I haven’t done my best. I studied the case according to my own lights, and it led me to a conclusion which certainly surprised myself quite a lot. But as I said, after the last speaker it will probably seem to everybody else a dismal anticlimax. Let me see now, where did I begin? Oh, yes; with the poison.
“Now the use of nitrobenzene as the poisoning agent interested me quite a lot. I find it extremely significant. Nitrobenzene is the last thing one would expect inside those chocolates. I’ve made something of a study of poisons, in connection with my work, and I’ve never heard of nitrobenzene being employed in a criminal case before. There are cases on record of its use in suicide, and in accidental poisoning, but not more than three or four all told.
“I’m surprised that this point doesn’t seem to have struck either of my predecessors. The really interesting thing is that so few people know nitrobenzene as a poison at all. Even the experts don’t. I was speaking to a man who got a Science scholarship at Cambridge and specialised in chemistry, and he had actually never heard of it as a poison. As a matter of fact I found I knew a good deal more about it than he did. A commercial chemist would certainly never think of it as among the ordinary poisons. It isn’t even listed as such, and the list is comprehensive enough. Well, all this seems most significant to me.
“Then there are other points about it. It’s used most extensively in commerce. In fact it’s the kind of thing that might be used in almost any manufacture. It’s a solvent, of quite a universal kind. We’ve been told that its chief use is in making aniline dyes. That may
