‘ISN’T the man?’ repeated Alec and Sheila in unison.
Roger dropped into a chair by the fire. ‘No. Isn’t that annoying? Of course it’s just the sort of low trick one would expect Brother William to play.’
‘Is the chap quite sure?’ asked Alec in perturbation.
‘Absolutely. He says he never forgets a face, and he’s perfectly certain he’s never had dealings with Brother William’s.’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Sheila. ‘But suppose he disguised himself?’
‘Yes, I thought of that.’
‘You did?’ said Sheila disappointedly. ‘What a nuisance you are, Roger! You think of everything.’
‘Not everything,’ Roger replied modestly. ‘Business cairds, for instance. No, but we did go into the question of disguise. I covered up bits of the face, chin and so on, in case he’d been wearing a false beard, forehead, all the rest of it. But it wasn’t any use; the little chap’s quite positive it wasn’t Brother William.’
‘This is a bit of a body-blow,’ Alec murmured. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Well, I shall try him with photos of Brother Alfred, of course, and Allen, and anybody else I can think of. This does complicate the case rather infernally, though. You see, a business card isn’t necessarily the wonderful clue we first thought it. Anybody could get hold of the Bentleys’ business card, and it’s my belief that it’s rather a cunning blind. If the police had taken the trouble to get as far as we have, you see, the obvious inference for them, not knowing as much as we do, is that Bentley bought the stuff himself for some purpose connected with his business, took it home and had it stolen from him by his wife. That all goes to throw suspicion still farther away from the real culprit.’
‘And on to Mrs Bentley?’
‘Yes, as it happens. But I’m not saying that that was the culprit’s intention. I’m rather inclined to think that it’s just the way things have turned out. And there’s a little job for you again, Sheila. Can you get hold of photographs of those two for me? I want to spend tomorrow in town if I can?’
Sheila wrinkled her forehead. ‘That’s a bit of a problem. I don’t know where—Oh, yes, I do! Good enough! I’ve got some old copies of the Daily Pictorial; kept them, in fact, because of the pictures. They’ve got photos of pretty well everybody in the whole case there. I’ll look them out for you now.’
She went over to a drawer, pulled out half-a-dozen newspapers and began to turn the pages rapidly.
‘Here we are! “Mr Alfred Bentley, brother of the deceased man.” “Mr R. W. Allen, whose name has been mentioned in connection with the case.” Look! That the sort of thing you want?’ She spread them across Roger’s knee and leaned on the back of his chair as he looked at them.
‘Excellent,’ Roger approved. ‘Not a very good one of Allen, but quite good enough. Yes, that’s fine.’
‘I’ll cut them out for you,’ Sheila volunteered, and busied herself with doing so.
Roger pulled out his pipe and began to fill it slowly.
‘There’s another thing about the purchase of this arsenic that’s struck me since I saw you last, Alec,’ he said slowly. ‘It was bought on the seventh of July. Well, if you consult that admirable little table of dates which I drew up, you’ll see that this was actually the Tuesday after the picnic. After Bentley’s first illness, in fact. Therefore, whatever it may have been due to, the first attack was not caused by the arsenic in the packet.’
‘Yes,’ Alec nodded. ‘I see that, of course.’
‘What did cause it, then? The police say it must have been caused by arsenic, because of arsenic being found subsequently in his hair and skin and so on; and I must say that does sound damned reasonable. But if it wasn’t arsenic from the packet, what was it?’
‘There’s only one other lot of arsenic we know anything about,’ Alec pointed out.
‘Yes, I know, bother it! It looks nasty, Alec; very nasty! I wonder if she really was trying to poison him all the time, and somebody stepped in and finished the job for her? Upon my word, it does begin to look uncommonly like it.’
‘He might have got it into him by accident, Roger,’ Sheila called out from the table by the window. ‘Supposing he thought the arsenic and lemon-juice was concentrated lemonade, or anything like that. He might have been thirsty, and mixed some with water. How about that?’
‘It’s possible, of course,’ Roger agreed. ‘And yet—! I don’t know. Lemonade in a medicine-bottle? And again, would she have left it lying about? It’s no good disguising it from ourselves, there are difficulties.’
‘I say, you’re not coming round to the idea of Mrs Bentley’s guilt after all, are you?’ Alec wanted to know.
‘Oh, no; I think we’ve proved that that’s out of the question. But I do think we ought to keep in view the possibility that she may at one time have had a guilty intention, whether she gave it up later or whether somebody else nipped in before she could carry it out. I don’t know that I think it’s altogether probable, mind you; but—well, I do find this question of how arsenic got into the skin and nails an uncommonly difficult one to answer.’
‘Isn’t there any way it might have got there without anyone having given him arsenic at all? Any natural way?’
‘Funny you should have mentioned that,’ Roger replied, holding a match over the bowl of his pipe. ‘There are one or two questions I want to ask the doctor about that very point after dinner this evening.’
‘And talking of dinner, there’s the gong,’ Sheila put in. ‘Damn—these papers have made my hands simply filthy! Here are the photos, Roger. I must fly.’
After dinner Roger detained Dr Purefoy as he was about to follow the others out of the dining-room. ‘I say, just a minute before we go into the drawing-room, doctor. I want to ask you two more questions about arsenic.’
Dr Purefoy smiled. ‘I shall have to begin thinking of a padlock for the surgery door if you go on like this, Sheringham.’
‘It is rather an obsession, isn’t it?’ Roger laughed, ‘But I think you know what I’m doing down here. I told Mrs Purefoy under pledge of the most terrific secrecy.’
‘For an artist in words,’ said Dr Purefoy mildly, ‘I think you might have put that a little better.’
‘It didn’t sound very well, did it?’ Roger admitted. ‘But one never expects a wife to have any secrets from her husband, however terrific; that’s understood. Rather neatly got out of, I fancy. Well, what I wanted to ask you was this; could one reasonably expect to discover arsenic in the nails and hair and skin of anybody who had died from—who had died a perfectly natural death?’
‘That depends,’ said the doctor cautiously. ‘One would want to know what sort of medicine he’d been taking, and that sort of thing.’
‘Well, let me put my question in a different way. Does the presence of arsenic in the extremities like that point decisively to an attempt at poisoning?’
‘Oh, dear, no! A sufficient quantity of any medicine containing arsenic would quite account for that. A little arsenic goes a very long way in the human body, you know.’
‘But it must have come from a medicine, you would say?’ Roger persisted.
‘In other words, the medicine Bentley had been taking didn’t contain arsenic, and is there any other way in which it could have got into his system? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
‘You read me like an open book,’ Roger murmured, and they both laughed. ‘I’m just worrying about the arsenic in the extremities for the moment; not the fatal dose in his tummy.’
Dr Purefoy leaned against the back of a tilted chair and stroked his jaw thoughtfully. ‘Well, with an ordinary person I should say no; with Bentley, it’s impossible to say one way or the other. You see, one doesn’t know in the least whether the medicines prescribed for him were the only ones he took. He might have been dosing himself with a tonic containing arsenic of which there’s no record at all.’
‘Ah!’ Roger observed. ‘Arsenic is used in tonics, is it?’
‘Oh, very largely. Nearly all tonics contain arsenic or strychnine, and often both.’
‘That,’ said Roger, ‘is very interesting. I believe you’ve given me an idea.’
In the drawing-room a few minutes later he bent over Sheila. ‘I say,’ he said in a low voice, ‘you might cut me out a photo of Bentley from those papers of yours too, will you? I think I can find a use for it as well tomorrow.’
For the rest of the evening the Wychford Poisoning Case was allowed to rest silently on its laurels.
Directly after breakfast the next morning Roger was conveyed once more to the station, Sheila again acting as chauffeuse. Having a busy but dull day in front of him, as he expected, he was going up alone, leaving Alec in the care of Sheila and her mother.
At half-past six that evening he returned, weary but not ill-pleased with himself, to discover Alec sitting over the drawing-room fire with a book.
‘Hallo, Alexander,’ he said. ‘All alone? Where’s the other member of the trio?’
‘Goodness knows! Haven’t seen her since lunch-time. Some lad came round in a red car and wanted to take her out to golf, and that was that.’
‘Gross dereliction of duty!’ Roger said warmly. ‘She left you to look after yourself?’
‘Oh, well,’ Alec grinned, ‘they did ask me to go too, but they weren’t very pressing. Besides, I hate playing gooseberry. Well, any news?’
‘Yes and no.’ Roger replied, holding his hands to the fire. ‘Jolly parky tonight, isn’t it? That little compatriot of yours refused to acknowledge either Brother Alfred or Allen as the purchaser of the arsenic, and quite emphatic he was about it too.’
Alec whistled. ‘I say! And we know it wasn’t a woman, don’t we? That exhausts our whole list of suspects.’
‘Yes, it really is most awkward; and when we thought we were getting along so nicely too. Still, I’ve got a bit of good news to offset that. I’ve discovered how that arsenic got into Bentley’s hair and so on, and it wasn’t through the criminal administration of it on the part of anybody else.’
‘By Jove, that’s a good bit of work. Mrs Bentley’s cleared of that, then. Good! How did it come there?’
Roger pulled a chair up to the fire and sat down. ‘Well, I asked the doctor-man a few questions last night, and he mentioned the word tonic. That set me thinking. Bentley had a poor physique, hadn’t he? But on the other hand, he was fond of his fling. What more natural, then, than that he should treat himself now and then to a tonic, such tonic containing in all probability arsenic? I’ve therefore been spending most of the day carting that photograph of him round to all the chemists in the neighbourhood of his office, and asking them whether they remember supplying tonics containing arsenic to that sort of face. And sure enough, in the end I struck oil! Quite a small shop, in a dingy little back-street. The proprietor told me that he knew the man by sight well, though he’d never heard his name (I’d taken good care to cut the name off the bottom of the photo, of course), and that he had been in the habit of coming into the shop quite often, at least three or four times a week and sometimes twice in a single day, and asking for a special pick-me-up of his own devising. That pick-me-up, I need hardly add, contained among other ingredients arsenic. The amount of arsenic he would have collected in his body in that way would amply account for its presence in his toenails and eyebrows. So there we are!’
‘I say!’ Alec exclaimed. ‘Could that be the cause of his death, do you think? A—a surfeit of arsenical pick-me-ups?’
‘Oh, Lord, no! There’d only be a tiny amount of arsenic in each. I went into that; about three-fiftieths of a grain. It’s a perfectly ordinary thing. No, there’s no question of anything like that. You’d have to drink something like fifty pick-me-ups straight on end to get a fatal dose that way. Its only interest is to show how he got the arsenic into his extremities.’
‘And very interesting too,’ Alec agreed. ‘You really are rather a marvel, Roger, the way you seem able to dig these things out.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing much in it,’ Roger said carelessly. ‘Just a small modicum of sense, a small modicum of obstinacy and a very large modicum of good luck. Anyhow, I don’t seem able to dig out the identity of the blighter who bought that arsenic—in other words, the real criminal. You see, we’ve got to examine such a dreadfully wide field now that our six particular pet suspects are eliminated. Good Lord, it might be anyone Bentley had ever known! I’m going to get Sheila to cut out for me every single person connected with the case whose picture appears in her papers and try that assistant with them tomorrow—everybody! Doctors, servants, women—’
‘But if he said it wasn’t a woman?’
‘How do we know it wasn’t a woman disguised as a man? Mrs Allen, for instance. Mrs Allen, I feel sure, would make an excellent boy, with the addition of a small moustache and a billy-cock hat on her shingled—’
‘Hallo, you frowsters!’ cried Sheila, bursting without warning into the room.
Roger twisted round in his chair to look at her as she pulled off her hat and gloves and tossed them on to a chair. Her cheeks were pink with rushing through the cold air and her eyes sparkling.
‘Where have you been, you bad girl?’ he asked sternly.
‘Playing golf,’ said Miss Purefoy innocently.
‘Who with?’
The pink in Miss Purefoy’s cheeks deepened slightly. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ she demanded aggressively.
‘Charlie Braithwaite, the gent’s name was,’ Alec supplied.
‘Why did you leave your poor little guest all alone and forlorn while you went off and enjoyed yourself with Charlie Braithwaite?’ Roger continued with much enjoyment.
‘I didn’t, you ass! He had mother to talk to. Besides, we asked him to come and he wouldn’t.’
Roger eyed her with mock severity. ‘And why not? Because he doesn’t like playing gooseberry! And quite rightly too. Oh, Sheila, I wouldn’t have thought it of you. I thought you were a good little girl!’
‘Roger, you perfect idiot, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ returned Miss Purefoy with tremendous dignity, the effect of which was somewhat spoilt by the positively flaming effect of her cheeks.
‘Oh, Sheila!’ Roger grinned maliciously. ‘Oh, Sheila! And I thought you were not only a good little girl, but a truthful one too. I thought—’
But Miss Purefoy had fled.
The conversation at dinner that evening turned quite a lot upon the absent Mr Charles Braithwaite. In the end, a pudding-plate having been broken, a tumbler of lemonade upset over Sheila’s frock and the entire contents of the water-jug cascaded over Alec’s devoted head, Mrs Purefoy had to prohibit any further use of the fatal name that evening. It is amazing in how many ways one can say a name without ever saying it at all.
Armed with his sheaf of photographs, Roger departed the next morning as usual. But this time he was not long absent. Within two hours he was back again and entering Sheila’s room, where its owner and Alec, in expectation of his early return, were ready waiting for him, the latter reading a novel over the fire, the former busy at her ironing-board.
Roger closed the door behind him and looked at them moodily. Alec had never seen his mercurial friend so serious before. In the end it was Sheila who broke the silence.
‘You haven’t found him, Roger?’ she cried, putting her iron on its rest and gazing at him through the thin steam which was rising from the board.
‘On the contrary,’ Roger said sombrely, ‘I have. And it’s the very devil!’
‘You’ve found out who bought that arsenic?’ Alec demanded, slewed round in his chair. ‘Who?’
Roger stared at him for a moment. ‘Bentley himself!’ he said gravely.