“Not the intended victim?” queried Roger, very uneasily. “How do you make that out?”
“Why, I’ve discovered,” said Mr. Bradley, dissembling his pride, “that Sir Eustace had had an engagement for lunch on the day of the murder. He seems to have been very secretive about it, and it was certainly with a woman; and not only with a woman, but with a woman in whom Sir Eustace was more than a little interested. I think probably not Miss Wildman, but somebody of whom he was anxious that Miss Wildman shouldn’t know. But in my opinion the woman who sent the chocolates knew. The appointment was cancelled, but the other woman might not have known that.
“My suggestion (it’s only a suggestion, and I can’t substantiate it in any way at all except that it makes chocolates still more reasonable) is that those chocolates were intended not for Sir Eustace at all but for the sender’s rival.”
“Ah!” breathed Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
“This is quite a new idea,” complained Sir Charles.
Roger had been hastily conning over the names of Sir Eustace’s various ladies. He had been unable to fit one before into the crime, and he was unable now; yet he did not think that any had escaped him. “If the woman you’re thinking of, Bradley, the sender,” he said tentatively, “really was a mistress of Sir Eustace, I don’t think you need worry about being too punctilious. Her name is almost certainly on the lips of the whole Rainbow Club in that connection, if not of every club in London. Sir Eustace is not a reticent man.”
“I can assure Mr. Bradley,” said Miss Dammers with irony, “that Sir Eustace’s standard of honour falls a good deal short of his own.”
“In this case,” Mr. Bradley told them, unmoved, “I think not.”
“How is that?”
“Because I’m quite sure that apart from my unconscious informant, and Sir Eustace, and myself, there is nobody who knows of the connection at all. Except the lady, of course,” added Mr. Bradley punctiliously. “Naturally it would not have escaped her.”
“Then how did you find out?” demanded Miss Dammers.
“That,” Mr. Bradley informed her equably, “I regret that I’m not at liberty to say.”
Roger stroked his chin. Could there be another one of whom he had never heard? In that case, how would this new theory of his continue to stand up?
“Your so close parallel falls to the ground, then?” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was stating.
“Not altogether. But if it does, I’ve got another just as good. Christina Edmunds. Almost the same case, with the insanity left out. Jealousy-mania. Poisoned chocolates. What could be better?”
“Humph! The mainstay of your last case, I gathered,” observed Sir Charles, “or at any rate the starting-point, was the choice of nitrobenzene. I suppose that, and the deductions you drew from it, are equally important to this one. Are we to take it that this lady is an amateur chemist, with a copy of Taylor on her shelves?”
Mr. Bradley smiled gently. “That, as you rightly point out, was the mainstay of my last case, Sir Charles. It isn’t of this one. I’m afraid my remarks on the choice of poison were rather special pleading. I was leading up to a certain person, you see, and therefore only drew the deductions which suited that particular person. However, there was a good deal of possible truth in them for all that, though I wouldn’t rate their probability quite as high as I pretended to do then. I’m quite prepared to believe that nitrobenzene was used simply because it’s so easy to get hold of. But it’s perfectly true that the stuff’s hardly known as a poison at all.”
“Then you make no use of it in your present case?”
“Oh, yes, I do. I still think the point that the criminal not so much used it as knew of it to use, is a perfectly sound one. The reason for that knowledge should be capable of being established. I stuck out before for a copy of some such book as Taylor as the reason, and I still do. As it happens this good lady has got a copy of Taylor.”
“She is a criminologist, then?” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming pounced.
Mr. Bradley leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. “That, I should think, is very much open to question. Frankly, I’m puzzled over the matter of criminology. Myself, I don’t see that lady as an ‘-ist’ of any description. Her function in life is perfectly obvious, the one she fulfilled for Sir Eustace, and I shouldn’t have thought her capable of any other. Except to powder her nose rather charmingly, and look extremely decorative; but all that’s part and parcel of her real raison d’être. No, I don’t think she could possibly be a criminologist, any more than a canary-bird could. But she certainly has a smattering of criminology, because in her flat there’s a whole bookshelf filled with works on the subject.”
“She’s a personal friend of yours, then?” queried Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, very casually.
“Oh, no. I’ve only met her once. That was when I called at her flat with a bran-new copy of a recently published book of popular murders under my arm, and represented myself as a traveller for the publisher soliciting orders for the book; might I have the pleasure of putting her name down? The book had only been out four days, but she proudly showed me a copy of it on her shelves already. Was she interested in criminology, then? Oh, yes, she simply adored it; murder was too fascinating, wasn’t it? Conclusive, I think.”
“She sounds a bit of a fool,” commented Sir Charles.
“She looks like a bit of a fool,” agreed Mr. Bradley. “She talks like a bit of a fool. Meeting her at a tea-fight, I should have said she is a bit of a fool. And yet she carried through a really cleverly planned murder, so I
