“So did mine at first,” she agreed. “Now it’s tingling rather. Well, I don’t notice any difference between the Kirsch and the Maraschino. And they do burn! I can’t make up my mind whether I like them or not.”
“I don’t,” Bendix said with decision. “I think there’s something wrong with them. I shouldn’t eat any more if I were you.”
“Well, they’re only an experiment, I suppose,” said his wife.
A few minutes later Bendix went out, to keep an appointment in the City. He left his wife still trying to make up her mind whether she liked the chocolates or not, and still eating them to decide. Her last words to him were that they were making her mouth burn again so much that she was afraid she would not be able to manage any more.
“Mr. Bendix remembers that conversation very clearly,” said Moresby, looking round at the intent faces, “because it was the last time he saw his wife alive.”
The conversation in the drawing-room had taken place approximately between a quarter-past and half-past two. Bendix kept his appointment in the City at three, where he stayed for about half-an-hour, and then took a taxi back to his club for tea.
He had been feeling extremely ill during his business-talk, and in the taxi he very nearly collapsed; the driver had to summon the porter to help get him out and into the club. They both described him as pale to the point of ghastliness, with staring eyes and livid lips, and his skin damp and clammy. His mind seemed unaffected, however, and once they had got him up the steps he was able to walk, with the help of the porter’s arm, into the lounge.
The porter, alarmed by his appearance, wanted to send for a doctor at once, but Bendix, who was the last man to make a fuss, absolutely refused to let him, saying that it could only be a bad attack of indigestion and that he would be all right in a few minutes; he must have eaten something that disagreed with him. The porter was doubtful, but left him.
Bendix repeated this diagnosis of his own condition a few minutes later to Sir Eustace Pennefather, who was in the lounge at the time, not having left the club at all. But this time Bendix added: “And I believe it was those infernal chocolates you gave me, now I come to think of it. I thought there was something funny about them at the time. I’d better go and ring up my wife and find out if she’s been taken like this too.”
Sir Eustace, a kindhearted man, who was no less shocked than the porter at Bendix’s appearance, was perturbed by the suggestion that he might in any way be responsible for it, and offered to go and ring up Mrs. Bendix himself as the other was in no fit condition to move. Bendix was about to reply when a strange change came over him. His body, which had been leaning limply back in his chair, suddenly heaved rigidly upright; his jaws locked together, the livid lips drawn back in a hideous grin, and his hands clenched on the arms of the chair. At the same time Sir Eustace became aware of an unmistakable smell of bitter almonds.
Thoroughly alarmed now, believing indeed that Bendix was dying under his eyes, he raised a shout for the porter and a doctor. There were two or three other men at the further end of the big room (in which a shout had probably never been heard before in the whole course of its history) and these hurried up at once. Sir Eustace sent one off to tell the porter to get hold of the nearest doctor without a second’s delay, and enlisted the others to try to make the convulsed body a little more comfortable. There was no doubt among them that Bendix had taken poison. They spoke to him, asking how he felt and what they could do for him, but he either would not or could not answer. As a matter of fact, he was completely unconscious.
Before the doctor had arrived, a telephone message was received from an agitated butler asking if Mr. Bendix was there, and if so would he come home at once as Mrs. Bendix had been taken seriously ill.
At the house in Eaton Square matters had been taking much the same course with Mrs. Bendix as with her husband, though a little more rapidly. She remained for half-an-hour or so in the drawing-room after the latter’s departure, during which time she must have eaten about three more of the chocolates. She then went up to her bedroom and rang for her maid, to whom she said that she felt very ill and was going to lie down for a time. Like her husband, she ascribed her condition to a violent attack of indigestion.
The maid mixed her a draught from a bottle of indigestion-powder, which consisted mainly of bicarbonate of soda and bismuth, and brought her a hot-water bottle, leaving her lying on the bed. Her description of her mistress’s appearance tallied exactly with the porter’s and taximan’s description of Bendix, but unlike them she did not seem to have been alarmed by it. She admitted later to the opinion that Mrs. Bendix, though anything but a greedy woman, must have overeaten herself at lunch.
At a quarter past three there was a violent ring from the bell in Mrs. Bendix’s room.
The girl hurried upstairs and found her mistress apparently in a cataleptic fit, unconscious and rigid. Thoroughly frightened now, she wasted some precious minutes in ineffectual attempts to bring her round, and then hurried downstairs to telephone for the doctor. The practitioner who regularly attended the house was not at home, and it was some time before the butler, who had found the half-hysterical girl at the telephone and taken matters
