a sort of store-room just now, sir," said Parks. "Mr. Vantine is just back from Europe, and we've been unpacking in there some of the things he bought while abroad."
"I guess that's all," said Goldberger, after a moment. "Send in Mr.
Vantine, please."
Parks went out, and Vantine came in a moment later. He corroborated exactly the story told by Parks and myself, but he added one detail.
"Here is the man's card," he said, and held out a square of pasteboard.
Goldberger took the card, glanced at it, and passed it on to
Simmonds.
"That don't tell us much," said the latter, and gave the card to Godfrey. I looked over his shoulder and saw that it contained a single engraved line:
M. THÉOPHILE D'AURELLE
"Except that he's French, as Parks suggested," said Godfrey. "That's evident, too, from the cut of his clothes."
"Yes, and from the cut of his hair," added Goldberger. "You say you didn't know him, Mr. Vantine?"
"I never before saw him, to my knowledge," answered Vantine. "The name is wholly unknown to me."
"Well," said Goldberger, taking possession of the card again and slipping it into his pocket, "suppose we lift him onto that couch by the window and take a look through his clothes."
The man was slightly built, so that Simmonds and Goldberger raised the body between them without difficulty and placed it on the couch. I saw Godfrey's eyes searching the carpet.
"What I should like to know," he said, after a moment, "is this: if this fellow took poison, what did he take it out of? Where's the paper, or bottle, or whatever it was?"
"Maybe it's in his hand," suggested Simmonds, and lifted the right hand, which hung trailing over the side of the couch.
Then, as he raised it into the light, a sharp cry burst from him.
"Look here," he said, and held the hand so that we all could see.
It was swollen and darkly discoloured.
"See there," said Simmonds, "something bit him," and he pointed to two deep incisions on the back of the hand, just above the knuckles, from which a few drops of blood had oozed and dried.
With a little exclamation of surprise and excitement, Godfrey bent for an instant above the injured hand. Then he turned and looked at us.
"This man didn't take poison," he said, in a low voice. "He was killed!"
CHAPTER III
THE WOUNDED HAND
"He was killed!" repeated Godfrey, with conviction; and, at the words, we drew together a little, with a shiver of repulsion. Death is awesome enough at any time; suicide adds to its horror; murder gives it the final touch.
So we all stood silent, staring as though fascinated at the hand which Simmonds held up to us; at those tiny wounds, encircled by discoloured flesh and with a sinister dash of clotted blood running away from them. Then Goldberger, taking a deep breath, voiced the thought which had sprung into my own brain.
"Why, it looks like a snake-bite!" he said, his voice sharp with astonishment.
And, indeed, it did. Those two tiny incisions, scarcely half an inch apart, might well have been made by a serpent's fangs.
The quick glance which all of us cast about the room was, of course, as involuntary as the chill which ran up our spines; yet Godfrey and I—yes, and Simmonds—had the excuse that, once upon a time, we had had an encounter with a deadly snake which none of us was likely ever to forget. We all smiled a little sheepishly as we caught each other's eyes.
"No, I don't think it was a snake," said Godfrey, and again bent close above the hand. "Smell it, Mr. Goldberger," he added.
The coroner put his nose close to the hand and sniffed.
"Bitter almonds!" he said.
"Which means prussic acid," said Godfrey, "and not snake poison." He fell silent a moment, his eyes on the swollen hand. The rest of us stared at it too; and I suppose all the others were labouring as I was with the effort to find some thread of theory amid this chaos. "It might, of course, have been self-inflicted," Godfrey added, quite to himself.
Goldberger sneered a little. No doubt he found the incomprehensibility of the problem rather trying to his temper.
"A man doesn't usually commit suicide by sticking himself in the hand with a fork," he said.
"No," agreed Godfrey, blandly; "but I would point out that we don't know as yet that it is a case of suicide; and I'm quite sure that, whatever it may be, it isn't usual."
Goldberger's sneer deepened.
"Did any reporter for the Record ever find a case that was usual?" he queried.
It was a shrewd thrust, and one that Godfrey might well have winced under. For the Record theory was that nothing was news unless it was strange and startling, and the inevitable result was that the Record reporters endeavoured to make everything strange and startling, to play up the outré details at the expense of the rest of the story, and even, I fear, to invent such details when none existed.
Godfrey himself had been accused more than once of a too-luxuriant imagination. It was, perhaps, a realisation of this which had persuaded him, years before, to quit the detective force and take service with the Record. What might have been a weakness in the first position, was a mighty asset in the latter one, and he had won an immense success.
Please understand that I set this down in no spirit of criticism. I had known Godfrey rather intimately ever since the days when we were thrown together in solving the Holladay case, and I admired sincerely his ready wit, his quick insight, and his unshakable aplomb. He used his imagination in a way which often caused me to reflect that the police would be far more efficient if they possessed a dash of the same quality; and I had noticed that they were usually glad of his assistance, while his former connection with the force and his careful maintenance of the friendships formed at that time gave him an entrée to places denied to less-fortunate reporters. I had never known him to do a dishonourable thing—to fight for a cause he thought unjust, to print a fact given to him in confidence, or to make a statement which he knew to be untrue. Moreover, a lively sense of humour made him an admirable companion, and it was this quality, perhaps, which enabled him to receive Goldberger's thrust with a good-natured smile.
"We've got our living to make, you know," he said. "We make it as honestly as we can. What do you think, Simmonds?"
"I think," said Simmonds, who, if he possessed an imagination, never permitted it to be suspected, "that those little cuts on the hand are merely an accident. They might have been caused in half a dozen ways.
