The Detective Club: The Wychford Poisoning Case by Anthony Berkeley

Author:Anthony Berkeley [Berkeley, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

INTERVIEW WITH A GREAT LADY

THE next morning Roger, fully dressed, sought Alec’s bedroom before breakfast, while its occupant was still in process of shaving himself. ‘Alec,’ he said without preamble, ‘I’ve decided what we must do first of all today.’

‘Oh?’ said Alec through soap. ‘Well, it must be pretty urgent if it’s got you up and dressed by this time.’

‘It is. We must go and make the acquaintance of Mrs Allen. I ought to have done it before, but I haven’t had time.’

‘Yes, and talking of Mrs Allen,’ Alec chimed in, lifting his chin to an acute angle, ‘it occurred to me after I went to bed last night that this news of yours puts another person on our list of suspects.’

‘Yes, it does,’ Roger agreed instantly. ‘Allen, you mean. I’ve been thinking about that too. He could just as easily have given that packet to Bentley and stuffed him up with a fool yarn about it being some wonderful secret medicine as anybody else.’

‘Better,’ said Alec laconically.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well—dam’ fishy, isn’t it? I mean, he’s in love with Mrs Bentley, and Mrs Bentley’s in love with him.’

‘Exactly. That’s just the conclusion I’ve been arriving at. It never seems to have struck anybody before, but the motive imputed to Mrs Bentley (wanting to get rid of her husband) applies just as strongly to Allen. The husband’s got to be got rid of somehow if these two are to come together, and one might have done it just as much as the other. Taking the case on its bare bones I should say that the chances in these circumstances are decidedly in favour of the man taking the law into his hands in this way, not the woman. You can bet that Mrs Bentley had told him all about the sort of life she led with him and what a little blighter he was, and how he knocked her down and gave her a black eye. That’s enough to make any man see red when he’s fond of a woman.’

‘But what about Mrs Allen?’

‘Oh, yes, I’m not losing sight of her. But then there are bound to be all sorts of details that we don’t know anything about. Absolutely bound to be! For instance, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Bentley had refused to let his wife have a divorce. In a case like this, that’s simply asking to be murdered.’

‘But if he’d been carrying on with Mary Blower?’

‘But did Mrs Bentley know that? And in any case she couldn’t divorce him without his consent, because of her affair with Allen.’

‘But did Bentley know about that?’

Roger laughed. ‘Goodness only knows! As I said, we’re groping entirely in the dark. We don’t know what they knew about each other, and we don’t know all the little details of all these people’s connections with each other. Mrs Saunderson, for instance. How do we know that she hadn’t got some cause for furiously hating Mrs Bentley? She talks as if she

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