“He left the theatre of course during the first interval, and hurried as far as he dare go in the ten minutes at his disposal, to post the parcel. I sat through the dreadful thing myself last night just to see when the intervals came. The first one fits excellently. I’d hoped he might have taken a taxi one way, as time was short, but if he did no driver of such taxis as did make a similar journey that evening can identify him. Or possibly the right driver hasn’t come forward yet. I got Scotland Yard to look into that point for me. But it really fits much better with the cleverness he’s shown all through, that he should have gone by bus or underground. Taxis, he’d know, are traceable. But if so he’d run it very fine indeed, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he got back to his box a few minutes late. The police may be able to establish that.”
“It seems to me,” observed Mr. Bradley, “that we made something of a mistake in turning the man down from membership here. We thought his criminology wasn’t up to standard, didn’t we? Well, well.”
“But we could hardly be expected to know that he was a practical criminologist rather than a mere theoretical one,” Roger smiled. “It was a mistake, though. It would have been pleasant to include a practical criminologist among our members.”
“I must confess that I thought at one time that we did,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, making her peace. “Sir Charles,” she added unnecessarily, “I apologise, without reserve.”
Sir Charles inclined his head courteously. “Please don’t refer to it, madam. And in any event the experience for me was an interesting one.”
“I may have been misled by the case I quoted,” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, rather wistfully. “It was a strangely close parallel.”
“It was the first parallel that occurred to me, too,” Roger agreed. “I studied the Molineux case quite closely, hoping to get a pointer from it. But now, if I were asked for a parallel, I should reply with the Carlyle Harris case. You remember, the young medical student who sent a pill containing morphine to the girl Helen Potts, to whom it turned out that he had been secretly married for a year. He was by way of being a profligate and a general young rotter too. A great novel, as you know, has been founded on the case, so why not a great crime too?”
“Then why, Mr. Sheringham,” Miss Dammers wanted to know, “do you think that Mr. Bendix took the risk of not destroying the forged letter and the wrapper when he had the chance?”
“He very carefully didn’t do so,” Roger replied promptly, “because the forged letter and the wrapper had been calculated not only to divert suspicion from himself but actually to point away from him to somebody else—an employee of Mason’s, for instance, or an anonymous lunatic. Which is exactly what they did.”
“But wouldn’t it be a great risk, to send poisoned chocolates like that to Sir Eustace?” suggested Mr. Chitterwick diffidently. “I mean, Sir Eustace might have been ill the next morning, or not offered to hand them over at all. Suppose he had given them to somebody else instead of Bendix.”
Roger proceeded to give Mr. Chitterwick cause for his diffidence. He was feeling something of a personal pride in Bendix by this time, and it distressed him to hear a great man thus maligned.
“Oh, really! You must give my man credit for being what he is. He’s not a bungler, you know. It wouldn’t have had any serious results if Sir Eustace had been ill that morning, or eaten the chocolates himself, or if they’d been stolen in transit and consumed by the postman’s favourite daughter, or any other unlikely contingency. Come, Mr. Chitterwick! You don’t imagine he’d send the poisoned ones through the post, do you? Of course not. He’d send harmless ones, and exchange them for the others on the way home. Dash it all, he wouldn’t go out of his way to present opportunities to chance.”
“Oh! I see,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, properly subdued.
“We’re dealing with a very great criminal,” went on Roger, rather less severely. “That can be seen at every point. Take the arrival at the club, just for example—that most unusual early arrival (why this early arrival at all, by the way, if he isn’t guilty?). Well, he doesn’t wait outside and follow his unconscious accomplice in, you see. Not a bit of it. Sir Eustace is chosen because he’s known to get there so punctually at half-past ten every morning; takes a pride in it; boasts of it; goes out of his way to keep up the good old custom. So Bendix arrives at ten thirty-five, and there things are. It had puzzled me at the beginning of the case, by the way, to see why the chocolates had been sent to Sir Eustace at his club at all, instead of to his rooms. Now it’s obvious.”
“Well, I wasn’t so far out with my list of conditions,” Mr. Bradley consoled himself. “But why don’t you agree with my rather subtle point about the murderer not being a public-school or University man, Sheringham? Just because Bendix happens to have been at Selchester and Oxford?”
“No, because I’d make the still more subtle point that where the code of a public-school and University might influence a murderer in the way he murdered another man, it wouldn’t have much effect when a woman is to be the victim. I agree that if Bendix had been wanting to
