The Problem of the Green Capsule Read Free Page A

chocolates, everyone who could have done this at certain established times, is a person well known in Sodbury Cross. Do I make myself clear?”
    Here the dark glasses looked very hard at Marcus’s listener.
    “I think so, sir.”
    “Speaking for myself,” continued Marcus, “I am anxious to get back home——”
    “Good Lord, yes!” exploded Doctor Joe, with powerful relief. “Decent cigarettes. Decent tea. Decent——”
    From the shadows of the peristyle, the stern-faced and exceptionally ugly-faced young man spoke for the first time. He had a deep voice, which gave his somewhat mysterious words the effect of a Sibylline prophecy. His hands were dug into the pockets of a blue blazer.
    “Sir,” said Wilbur Emmet, “we should not have been away in July and August. I do not trust the early silver to McCracken.”
    “Please understand me, Mr. Harding,” said Marcus sharply. “We are not a band of pariahs. We do as we please. We take a holiday when we please, and come home when we please: at least, I do. I am particularly anxious to get back home, because I think I can solve the problem that has been tormenting them. I knew a part of the answer months ago. But there are certain—” Again, hesitating, he lifted his hand in the air, shook it, and brought it down on his knee. “If you come to Sodbury Cross, you will find certain innuendoes. Certain atmospheres. Certain whispers. Are you prepared for them?”
    “Yes,” said George.
    To the man who was watching them from the doorway of the atrium, there always remained a picture of that group in the garden, framed in ancient pillars and strangely symbolic of what was to happen. But his thoughts were not metaphysical now. He did not go farther into the house of Aulus Lepidus the poisoner. Instead he turned round and went out into the Street of Tombs, where he walked a little way up towards the Herculaneum Gate. A tiny blur of white smoke coiled and crawled round the cone of Vesuvius. Detective-Inspector Andrew MacAndrew Elliot, Criminal Investigation Department, sat down on the high footway, lighted a cigarette, and stared thoughtfully at the brown lizard that darted out into the road.

Chapter II
BITTER SWEET
    On the night that murder was done at Bellegarde, Marcus Chesney’s country house, Inspector Elliot left London in his car—of which he was inordinately proud—and arrived in Sodbury Cross at half-past eleven. It was a fine though very dark night after a day of brilliant sunshine, and warm for the third of October.
    There had been, he thought gloomily, a kind of fatality about it. When Superintendent Hadley told him to take over, he did not say what was in his mind. Haunting him was not only a Pompeian scene, but a certain ugly business at a chemist’s shop.
    “As usual,” Hadley had complained bitterly, “we’ve been called in when the trail is as cold as last year’s flatiron. Nearly four months ago! You did very well on a cold trail in that Crooked Hinge business, so you may be able to do something. But don’t be too optimistic. Do you know anything about it?”
    “I—read something about it at the time, sir.”
    “Well, it’s being stirred up again. Devil of a row, it appears, since the Chesney family got back from a trip abroad. Anonymous letters, scrawls on the wall, that sort of thing. It’s a dirty business, my lad: poisoning kids.”
    Elliot hesitated. There was a dull anger in him. “Do they think it was one of the Chesney family, sir?”
    “I don’t know. Major Crow—that’s the Chief Constable—has his own ideas. Crow is inclined to be more excitable than you’d think to look at him. When he gets an idea, he freezes to it. All the same, he’ll give you the facts. He’s a good man, and you ought to work well under him. Oh, and if you need any help, Fell is close at hand. He’s at Bath, taking the cure. You might ring him up and see that he does some work for a change.”
    Andrew MacAndrew Elliot, young, serious-minded, and