The Wychford Poisoning Case

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by The Crime Club by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1926

Copyright © Estate of Anthony Berkeley 1926

Introduction © Tony Medawar 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1926, 2017

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008216429

Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780008216436

Version: 2016-12-15

Dedication

TO

E. M. DELAFIELD

MOST DELIGHTFUL OF WRITERS

MY DEAR ELIZABETH,

There is only one person to receive the dedication of the book which has grown out of those long criminological discussions of ours. You will recognise in it many of your own ideas, which I have unblushingly annexed; but I hope you will also recognise the attempt I have made to substitute for the materialism of the usual crime-puzzle of fiction those psychological values which are (as we have so often agreed) the basis of the universal interest in the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life. In other words I have tried to write what might be described as a psychological detective story.

In any case I offer you the result as a small expression of my admiration of your work and of my gratitude for the gift of your friendship.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

I. MARMALADE AND MURDER

II. STATING THE CASE

III. MR SHERINGHAM ASKS WHY

IV. ARRIVAL AT WYCHFORD

V. ALL ABOUT ARSENIC

VI. INTRODUCING MISS PUREFOY

VII. MOSTLY IRRELEVANT

VIII. TRIPLE ALLIANCE

IX. INTERVIEW WITH A HUMAN BURR

X. SHOCKING TREATMENT OF A LADY

XI. ENTIRELY FEMININE

XII. THE HUMAN ELEMENT

XIII. WHAT MRS BENTLEY SAID

XIV. INTERVIEW WITH A GREAT LADY

XV. MISS BLOWER RECEIVES

XVI. CONFERENCE AT AN IRONING-BOARD

XVII. MR ALLEN TALKS

XVIII. MR SHERINGHAM LECTURES ON ADULTERY

XIX. INTRODUCING BENTLEY BROTHERS

XX. MR SHERINGHAM SUMS UP

XXI. DOUBLE SCOTCH

XXII. ENTER ROMANCE

XXIII. FINAL DISCOVERIES

XXIV. VILLAINY UNMASKED

XXV. ULTIMA THULE

Footnote

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

ANTHONY BERKELEY COX—or Anthony Berkeley as he is best known—was born on 5 July, 1893 in Watford, a town near London. His father was a doctor and his mother was descended from the Earl of Monmouth, a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I. At school, Berkeley was what we would now call a high achiever—Head of House, prefect, Colour Sergeant in the Officer Training Corps and an expert marksman. In 1911, he left school to read Classics at University College, Oxford, but his university career was cut short by the First World War and, between 1914 and 1918, Berkeley served in France in the 7th Northamptonshire Regiment, reaching the rank of Lieutenant, and also in the Royal Air Force.

After the war, Berkeley spent a couple of years ‘trying to find out what nature had intended him to do in life’ before he discovered that he had the most extraordinary knack for writing comic stories for the many weekly magazines and newspapers that carried such fiction in the 1920s. Thankfully, Berkeley also decided to try his hand at something more serious, a detective mystery.

His first attempt, The Layton Court Mystery, was published anonymously in 1925 by Herbert Jenkins. The book marked the debut of Roger Sheringham, a man with more than a hint of his creator about him—in particular, like Berkeley, he was an Oxford man and his health had been compromised during the war. The Layton Court Mystery features a closed circle of suspects and a suitably unpleasant victim who is found dead in a locked room; the murderer’s identity comes as a devastating surprise. In dedicating the novel to his father, Berkeley explained that he had ‘tried to make the gentleman who eventually solves the mystery behave as nearly as possible as he might be expected to do in real life. That is to say, he is very far removed from a sphinx and he does make a mistake or two occasionally.’

Sheringham’s tendency to make ‘a mistake or two occasionally’ may very well have been inspired by E.C. Bentley’s famous novel Trent’s Last Case, published a dozen years earlier. Certainly, fallibility was to become something of a trademark for Roger Sheringham.

The Layton Court Mystery sold well and, enthused by the sales figures, Anthony Berkeley decided to focus on writing novels and to make Roger Sheringham the central figure of a series of mysteries. Sheringham’s second case, also published anonymously (the byline of the jacket was simply ‘By the author of The Layton Court Mystery’), was The Wychford Poisoning Case.

The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926) is the rarest of Berkeley’s detective fiction. It was the first of his novels to be published by Collins but, unlike other Sheringham mysteries, has not until now been reissued, even in a paperback edition. It is unclear why this was but it has been suggested that it may have been because Berkeley felt acute embarrassment at a brief, irrelevant but bizarre scene in which an annoying young woman is subjected to corporal punishment. Whether or not the scene was meant ironically or simply as comic relief, it reads oddly today and, as with the casual anti-semitism that pollutes some Golden Age mysteries, leaves modern readers uncomfortable. Sexist aberrations aside, the novel is strong and the explanation of the poisoning is characteristically unexpected and outrageous. It is also noteworthy for being dedicated to Berkeley’s long-standing friend, the aristocratic Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture under her rather more prosaic pseudonym, E.M. Delafield.

Unlike The Layton Court Mystery, The Wychford Poisoning Case is based on a real-life murder—that of James Maybrick, a Liverpool businessman, in 1889. Like many other writers of the era, Berkeley had a deep interest in what has come to be called ‘true crime’, writing essays on various different cases over the years—indeed, The Wychford Poisoning Case would not be the only occasion on which Berkeley would draw on what he called ‘the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life’. The Wychford Poisoning Case is also notable for the innovative consideration of psychology as a method of crime detection, pioneered some fifteen years earlier by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg with their stories of Luther Trant. This was an approach that Anthony Berkeley would eventually perfect with Malice Aforethought (1931), in which he gave an ingenious study of a murderer, and in two other novels, all of which were published under a different pen name, Francis Iles.

The first two Sheringham mysteries sold well and the detective’s popularity was such that his name would be included in the title of the third, Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927), which for the first time in the series was published as by Anthony Berkeley.

In all, Sheringham appears in ten novel-length detective stories, one of which, The Silk Stocking Murders (also reissued in this Detective Club series), is dedicated by Berkeley to none other than A.B. Cox! Sheringham is also mentioned in passing in two of Berkeley’s non-series novels, The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and Trial and Error (1937), and appears in a novella and a number of short stories, including two recently discovered ‘cautionary’ detective problems published during the Second World War.

Though undoubtedly one of the ‘great detectives’ of the Golden Age, Roger Sheringham is not a particularly original creation. As already noted, there is much of E.C. Bentley’s Philip Trent about Sheringham, as there is about many other Golden Age detectives, including Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. And, emulating Bentley’s iconoclastic approach to the genre, Berkeley delighted in turning its unwritten rules upside down. Thus, while Sheringham’s cases conform, broadly, to the principal conventions of the detective story—there is always a crime and there is always at least one detective—the mysteries are distinctive and memorable for the way in which they drove the evolution of crime and detective stories. Each of the novels brings something new and fresh to what Berkeley had previously dismissed as the ‘crime-puzzle’. Several do have what can be described as twist endings but that is to diminish Berkeley’s ingenuity and undervalue his importance in the history of crime and detective fiction.

While other luminaries wrought their magic consistently—Agatha Christie in making the most likely suspect the least likely suspect, and John Dickson Carr in making the impossible possible—Anthony Berkeley delighted in finding different ways to structure the crime story. ‘Anthony Berkeley is the supreme master not of “the twist” but of the “double twist”,’ wrote Milward Kennedy in the Sunday Times, but his focus was not so much on adding a twist at the end but on twisting the genre itself.

Astonishingly, it is more than 75 years since the publication of Berkeley’s final novel, As for the Woman (1939), which appeared under the pen name of Francis Iles. And yet his influence lives on. Berkeley did much to shape the evolution of crime fiction in the 20th century and to transform the ‘crime puzzle’ into the novel of psychological suspense. In the words of one of his peers, Anthony Berkeley Cox—more than most—‘deserves to become immortal’.

TONY MEDAWAR

September 2016

CHAPTER 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.’

CHAPTER 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 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.’