The Wychford Poisoning Case. Anthony Berkeley
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.’
‘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 note-book, 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!’