The Wychford Poisoning Case

I

MARMALADE AND MURDER

‘KEDGEREE,’ said Roger Sheringham oracularly, pausing beside the silver dish on the sideboard and addressing his host and hostess with enthusiasm, ‘kedgeree has often seemed to me in a way to symbolise life. It can be so delightful or it can be so unutterably mournful. The crisp, dry grains of fish and rice in your successful kedgeree are days and weeks so easily surmountable, so exquisite in their passing; whereas the gloomy, sodden mass of an inferior cook—’

‘I warned you, darling,’ observed Alec Grierson to his young wife. ‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘But I like it, dear,’ protested Barbara Grierson (née Shannon). ‘I like hearing him talk about fat, drunken cooks; it may be most useful to me. Go on, Roger!’

‘I don’t think you can have been attending properly, Barbara,’ said Roger in a pained voice. ‘I was discoursing at the moment upon kedgeree, not cooks.’

‘Oh! I thought you said something about the gloomy mass of a sodden cook. Never mind. Go on, whatever it was. I ought to warn you that your coffee’s getting cold, though.’

‘And you might warn him at the same time that it’s past ten o’clock already,’ added her husband, applying a fresh match to his after-breakfast pipe. ‘Hadn’t you better start eating that kedgeree instead of lecturing on it, Roger? I was hoping to be at the stream before this, you know. I’ve been ready for the last half-hour.’

‘Vain are the hopes of men,’ observed Roger sadly, carrying a generously loaded plate to the table. ‘In the night they spring up and in the morning, lo! cometh the sun and they are withered and die.’

‘In the morning cometh Roger not, who continueth frowsting in bed,’ grumbled Alec. ‘That’d be more to the point.’

‘Cease, Alexander,’ Roger retorted gently. ‘The efforts of your admirable cook engage me.’

Alec picked up his newspaper and began to study its contents with indifferently concealed impatience.

‘Did you sleep well, Roger?’ Barbara wanted to know.

‘Did he sleep well?’ growled her husband, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Oh, no!’

‘Thank you, Barbara; very well indeed,’ Roger replied serenely. ‘Really, you know, that cook of yours is a culinary phenomenon. This kedgeree’s a dream. I’m going to have some more.’

‘Finish the dish. Now then, aren’t you sorry you wouldn’t come and stay with us before?’

‘Not in the least. In fact, I’m still congratulating myself that I resisted the awful temptation. One of the wisest things I ever did in all my life, compact with wisdom though it has been.’

‘Oh? Why?’

‘For any number of reasons. How long have you been married now? Just over a year? Exactly. It takes precisely twelve months for a married couple to get sufficiently used to each other without having to be maudlin in public, to the extreme embarrassment of middle-aged bachelors and unsympathetic onlookers such as myself.’

‘Roger!’ exclaimed his indignant hostess. ‘I’m sure Alec and I have never said a single—’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about words. I’m talking about expressive glances. My dear Barbara, the expressive glances I’ve had to sit and writhe between in my time! You wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Well, I should have thought you’d have enjoyed that sort of thing,’ Barbara laughed. ‘All’s copy that comes into your mill, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t write penny novelettes, Mrs Grierson,’ returned Roger with dignity.

‘Don’t you?’ Barbara replied innocently.

An explosive sound burst from Alec. ‘Good for you, darling. Had him there.’

‘You are pleased to insult me, the two of you,’ said Roger pathetically. ‘Helpless and in your power, speechless with kedgeree—’

‘No, not speechless!’ came from the depths of Alec’s paper. ‘Never that.’

‘Speechless with kedgeree, squirming with embarrassment in the presence of your new relationship to each other—’

‘Roger, how can you! When you yourself were Alec’s best man, too!’

‘You put me between you and insult me. The very first morning of my visit, too. What are the trains back to London?’

‘There’s a very good one in about half an hour. And now tell me all the other reasons why you wouldn’t come down here before.’

‘Well, for one thing I set a certain value on my comfort, Barbara, and other regrettable experiences, over which we will pass with silent shudders, have shown me very clearly that it takes a wife a full twelve months to learn to run her house with sufficient dexterity and knowledge to warrant her asking guests down to it.’

‘Roger! This place has always gone like clockwork ever since I took it over. Hasn’t it, Alec?’

‘Clockwork, darling,’ mumbled her husband absently.

‘But then, you’re a very exceptional woman, Barbara,’ said Roger mildly. ‘In the presence of your husband I can’t say less than that. He’s bigger than me.’

‘Roger, I don’t think I’m liking you very much this morning. Have you finished the kedgeree? Well, you’ll find some grilled kidneys in that other dish. More coffee?’

‘Grilled kidneys?’ said Roger, rising with alacrity. ‘Oh, I am going to enjoy my stay here, Barbara. I suspected it at dinner last night. Now I know.’

‘Are you going to be all the morning over brekker, Roger?’ demanded Alec in desperation.

‘Most of it, Alexander, I hope,’ Roger replied happily.

For nearly two minutes the silence was unbroken.

‘Anything in the paper this morning, dear?’ Barbara asked casually.

‘Only this Bentley case,’ replied her husband without looking up.

‘The woman who poisoned her husband with arsenic? Anything fresh?’

‘Yes, the magistrates have committed her for trial.’

‘Anything said about her defence, Alec?’ asked Roger.

Alex consulted the paper. ‘No; defence reserved.’

‘Defence!’ said Barbara with a slight sniff. ‘What a hope! If ever a person was obviously guilty—!’

‘There,’ said Roger, ‘speaks the voice of all England—with two exceptions.’

‘Exceptions? I shouldn’t have thought there was a single exception. Who?’

‘Well, Mrs Bentley, for one.’

‘Oh—Mrs Bentley. She knows what she did all right.’

‘Oh, no doubt. But she couldn’t have thought she was being obviously guilty, could she? I mean, she’s a curious sort of person if she did.’

‘But she is rather a curious sort of person in any case, isn’t she? Ordinary people don’t feed their husbands on arsenic. And who’s the other exception?’

‘Me,’ said Roger modestly.

‘You? Roger! Do you mean to say you think she’s not guilty?’

‘Not exactly. It was just the word obviously that I was taking exception to. After all, she hasn’t been tried yet, you know. We haven’t heard yet what she’s got to say about it all.’

‘What can she say? I suppose she’ll fake up some sort of story, but really, Roger! All I can say is that if they don’t hang her, no husband’s life will ever be safe again.’

‘Then let’s hope they do,’ remarked Alec humorously. ‘Speaking entirely from the personal point of view, of course.’

‘Prejudice, thy name is woman,’ Roger murmured. ‘Second name, apparently, bloodthirstiness. It’s wonderful. We’re all being women over this affair. Marmalade, please, Alexander.’

‘I know you’re a perverse old devil, Roger,’ Alec was constrained to protest as he passed the dish across, ‘but you can’t mean to say that you really think she’s innocent?’

‘I don’t think anything of the sort, Alexander. What I am trying to do (which apparently no one else is) is to preserve an open mind. I repeat—she hasn’t been tried yet!’

‘But the coroner’s jury brought it in murder against her.’

‘Even coroner’s juries have been known to be fallible,’ Roger pointed out mildly. ‘And they didn’t bring it in quite as bluntly as that. Their exact words, as far as I remember, were that Bentley died from the administration of arsenic, and the majority were of the opinion that the arsenic had been administered with the intention of taking away life.’

‘That comes to the same thing.’

‘Possibly. But it isn’t conclusive.’

‘You seem to know a lot about this case, Roger,’ Barbara remarked.

‘I do,’ Roger agreed. ‘I’ve tried to read every word that’s been written about it. I find it an uncommonly interesting one. After you with that paper, Alec.’

Alec threw the paper across. ‘Well, there was a lot of new evidence brought before the magistrates yesterday. You’d better read it. If you can keep an open mind after that, call the rest of us oysters.’

‘I do that already,’ Roger replied, propping the paper up in front of him. ‘Thank you, Oyster Alexander.’

II

STATING THE CASE

‘ALEC,’ said Roger, as he settled his back comfortably against a shady willow and pulled his pipe out of his pocket. ‘Alec, I would reason with you.’

It was a glorious morning at the beginning of September. The two men had managed after all to put in a couple of hours’ fishing in the little trout-stream which ran through the bottom of the Grierson’s estate, in spite of Roger’s lingering over his kedgeree and kidneys. Twenty minutes ago they had broken off for the lunch of sandwiches and weak whisky-and-water which they had brought with them, and these having now been despatched Roger was feeling disposed to talk.

For once in a while Alec was not unwilling to encourage him. ‘About the Bentley case?’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. What’ve you got up your sleeve?’

‘Oh, nothing up my sleeve,’ Roger said, cramming tobacco into the enormous bowl of his short-stemmed pipe. ‘Nothing as definite as that. But I must say I am most infernally interested in the case, and there’s one thing about it that strikes me very forcibly. Look here, would it bore you if I ran through the whole thing and reviewed all the evidence? I’ve got it all at my fingers’ tips, and it would help to clarify it in our minds, I think. Just facts. I mean, without all the prejudice.’

‘Not a bit,’ Alec agreed readily. ‘We’ve got half an hour to smoke our pipes in anyhow, before we want to get going again.’

‘I think you might have put it a little better than that,’ Roger said with reproach. ‘However! Now let me see, what’s the beginning of the story? The Bentley ménage, I suppose. No, further back than that. Wait a minute, I’ve got some notes here.’

He plunged his hand into the breast-pocket of the very disreputable, very comfortable sports’ coat he was wearing and drew out a small notebook, which he proceeded to study for a minute or two.

‘Yes. We’d better go over the man’s whole life, I think. Well, John Bentley was the eldest of three brothers, and at the time of his death he was forty-one years old. At the age of eighteen he entered his father’s business of general import and export merchants, specialising in machine-tools, and spent six years in the London office. When he was twenty-four his father sent him over to France to take charge of a small branch which was being opened in Paris, and he remained there for twelve years, including the period of the war, in which he was not called upon to serve. During that time he had married, at the age of thirty-four, a Mademoiselle Jacqueline Monjalon, the daughter of a Parisian business acquaintance, since dead; his bride was only eighteen years old. Is that all clear?’

‘Most lucid,’ said Alec, puffing at his pipe.

‘Two years after his marriage, Bentley was recalled to London by his father to assume gradual control of the whole business, which was then in a very flourishing condition, and this he proceeded to do. There was another brother in the business, the second one; but this gentleman had not been able to elude his duties to his country and had been conscripted in 1916, subsequently serving for eighteen months in France till badly wounded in the final push. From a certain wildness which I seem to trace in some of his statements to the press and elsewhere, I should diagnose a dose of shell-shock as well.’

‘Diagnosis granted,’ Alex agreed: ‘I noticed that. Hysterical kind of ass, I thought. Go on.’

‘Well, when our couple returned from France, they bought a large and comfortable house in the town of Wychford, which lies about fifteen miles south-east of London and possesses an excellent train-service for the tired businessman. Thence, of course, friend John would travel up to town every day except Saturdays, a day on which nobody above the rank of assistant-manager dare show his face in the streets of London or everybody would think his firm is going bankrupt: remember that if you ever go into business, Alec.’

‘Thanks, I will.’

‘Well, eighteen months after the Bentley’s arrival in England, the father, instead of retiring from work in the ordinary way, makes a better job of it and dies, leaving the business to the two sons who are in it, in the proportion of two-thirds to John and one-third to William, the second son. To the third son, Alfred, he left most of the residue of his estate, which amounted in value to much the same as William’s share of the business. John, then, who seems to have been the old man’s favourite, came off very decidedly the best of the three. John therefore picked up the reins of the business and for the next three years all went well. Not quite so well as it had done, because John wasn’t the man his father had been; still, well enough. So much, I think, for the family history. Got all that?’

Alec nodded. ‘Yes, I knew most of that before, I think.’

‘So now we come from the general to the particular. In other words, to the Bentley ménage. Now, have you formed any estimate of the characters of these two, Monsieur and Madame? Could you give me a short character-sketch of Bentley himself, for instance?’

‘No, I’m blessed if I could. I was concentrating on the facts, not the characters.’

Roger shook his head reprovingly. ‘A great mistake, Alexander; a great mistake. What do you think it is that makes any great murder case so absorbingly interesting? Not the sordid facts in themselves. No, it’s the psychology of the people concerned; the character of the criminal, the character of the victim, their reactions to violence, what they felt and thought and suffered over it all. The circumstances of the case, the methods of the murderer, the reasons for the murder, the steps he takes to elude detection—all these arise directly out of character; in themselves they’re only secondary. Facts, you might say, depend on psychology. What was it that made the Thompson-Bywaters case so extraordinarily interesting? Not the mere facts. It was the characters of the three protagonists. Take away the psychology of that case and you get just a sordid triangle of the most trite and uninteresting description. Add it, and you get what the film-producers call a drama packed with human interest. Just the same with the Seddon case, Crippen, or, to become criminologically classical, William Palmer. A grave error, my Alexander; a very grave error indeed.’

‘Sorry; I seem to have said the wrong thing. All right. What about the psychology of the Bentleys, then?’

‘Well, John Bentley seems to emerge to me as a fussy, rather irritating little man, very pleased with himself and continually worrying about his health; probably a bit of a hypochondriac. Reading between the lines, I don’t think brother William got on at all well with him—no doubt because he was much the same sort of fellow himself. It doesn’t need any reading between the lines to see that his wife didn’t. She appears as a happy, gay little creature, not overburdened with brains but certainly not deficient in them, always wanting to go out somewhere and enjoy herself, theatres, dance-clubs, car-rides, parties, any old thing. Well, just imagine the two of them together—and remember that she’s sixteen years younger than her husband. She wants to go to a dance, he won’t take her because it would interfere with his regular eight-hours’ sleep; she wants to go to a race-meeting, he thinks standing about in the open air would give him a cold; she wants to go to the theatre, he thinks the man in the next seat might be carrying influenza germs. Of course the inevitable happens. She gets somebody else to take her.’

‘Ah!’ observed Alec wisely. ‘Allen!’

‘Exactly! Allen. Well, that’s where the facts of the case proper seem to begin; with that weekend Mrs Bentley spent with Allen at the Bischroma Hotel.’

‘Now we’re getting to it.’

Roger paused to re-light his pipe, which had gone out under the flood of this eloquence.

‘Now,’ he agreed, ‘we’re getting to it. That was on the 27th of June; Mrs Bentley going home to Wychford again on the 29th and telling her husband that she’d been staying with a girl friend of hers from Paris. Bentley doesn’t seem to have suspected anything: which is what one might expect with that complacent, self-centred little type. But he has got his doubts about Allen. Allen’s name crops up in the conversation that same night, we learn from brother William, who was staying in the house for the whole summer, and Bentley forbids his wife to have anything more to do with the chap. Madame laughs at him and asks if he’s jealous.’

‘The nerve of her!’

‘Oh, quite natural, in the circumstances. He says he’s not jealous in the least, thank you, but he’s just given her his instructions and will she be kind enough to see that they are carried out (can’t you just see him at it!) Madame, ceasing to laugh, tells him not to be an ass. Bentley retorts suitably. Anyhow, the upshot is that they have a blazing row, all in front of brother William, and Madame flies upstairs, chattering with fury, to pack her bag for France that very minute.’

‘Pity she didn’t!’

‘I agree. Brother William steps in, however, and persuades her to stay that night at any rate, and in the morning he gets in a Mrs Saunderson from down the same road, with whom Mrs Bentley has been getting very pally during the last couple of years, and she manages to pacify the lady to such an extent that there is a grand reconciliation scene that same evening, with John and Jacqueline in the centre surrounded by the triumphant beams of Brother William and Mrs Saunderson. That was on June the 29th. On July the 1st Mrs Bentley buys two dozen arsenical fly-papers from a chemist in Wychford.’

‘Well, you must admit that’s suspicious, at any rate.’

‘Oh, I do. Suspicious isn’t the word. The parlourmaid, Mary Blower, and the housemaid, Nellie Green, both see these fly-papers soaking in three saucers during the next two days in Mrs Bentley’s bedroom. There had never been fly-papers of that kind in the house before, and they were not a little intrigued about them; Mary Blower especially, as we shall see later. That same day Bentley, fussing as usual over his health, goes to see his doctor in Wychford, Dr James, and gets himself thoroughly over-hauled. Dr James tells him that he’s a little run down (the stock comment for people of that kind), but that there’s nothing constitutionally wrong with him; he gives the man a bottle of medicine to keep him quiet, a mild tonic, mostly iron. Four days later, on a Sunday, Bentley complains at breakfast that he’s not feeling up to the mark. William tells us with a properly shocked air that Mrs Bentley received this information callously and told him straight out that there was nothing the matter with him; but really, the poor lady must have heard the same thing at so many breakfasts before that one can understand her not being exactly prostrated by it. In any case, he’s not feeling so bad that he can’t go out for a picnic that same afternoon with her and William, and Mr and Mrs Allen.’

‘Having climbed down over the Allen business, apparently,’ Alec commented.

‘Yes. But of course he had to. With the possible exception of Mrs Saunderson, the Allens were their closest friends in Wychford. Unless he wanted to precipitate an open scandal, he couldn’t maintain his stand about Allen. To do so would be tantamount to informing Mrs Allen that, in Bentley’s opinion, her husband was in danger of becoming unfaithful to her. One’s sympathies are certainly with Bentley there; the position was a very nasty one for him. And I can’t imagine him liking the man much. They must have been complete opposites, mustn’t they? Bentley, fussy, peevish, and on the small side; Allen, big, breezy, hearty, strong, and packed with self-confidence—or so I read him. Yes, I can quite understand Bentley’s uneasiness about friend Allen just about that time.’

‘And Mrs Allen didn’t know her husband was taking Mrs Bentley out all this time?’

‘So I should imagine. She probably guessed he was taking somebody out, but not that it was Mrs Bentley. I can’t quite get Mrs Allen. She seemed perfectly calm, even icy, in the police-court; and probably her deliberate manner did Mrs Bentley actually more harm than Mrs Saunderson’s hysteria. She is the wronged wife, you see, and she’s certainly investing an ignominious