“What!”
I had been seated on the edge of the little table, but at that I sprang up. Sir Denis nodded grimly.
“But was he—addicted to drugs?”
“Apparently. He was a widower who lived alone in a flat in Curzon Street. There was only one resident servant—a man who had been with him for many years.”
“It’s Fate,” I groaned. “What a ghastly coincidence!”
“Coincidence!” Sir Denis snapped. “There’s no coincidence! Sir Mansion’s consulting rooms in Wimpole Street, where he kept all his records and pursued his studies, were burgled during the night. I assume that they found what they had come for. A large volume containing prescriptions is missing.”
“But, if they found what they came for——”
“That was good enough,” he interrupted. “Hence my assumption that they did. Sir Manston had a remarkable memory. Having destroyed the prescription book, the next thing was to destroy...that inconvenient memory!”
“You mean—he was murdered?”
“I have little doubt on that point,” Sir Denis replied harshly. “The butler has been detained—but there’s small hope of learning anything from him, even if he knows. But I gather, Sterling—” he fixed a penetrating stare upon me—”that a similar attempt was made here to-night.”
“Here? Whatever do you mean, Sir Denis?”
But even as I spoke the words I thought I knew, and:
“Why, of course!” I cried—”the dacoit!”
“Dacoit,” he rapped. “What dacoit?”
“You don’t know? But, on second thoughts, how could you know! It was shortly after you left. Someone looked in at the window of Petrie’s room——”
“Looked in?” He glanced up at the corresponding window of Sister Therese’s room. “It’s twelve feet above ground level.”
“I know. Nevertheless, someone looked in. I heard a faint scuffling—and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of a yellow hand as the man dropped back.”
“Yellow hand?” Sir Denis laughed shortly. “Our cross-eyed friend from the Villa Jasmin, Sterling! He was spying out the land. Shortly after this, I suggest, the lady arrived?”
I stared at him in surprise.
“You are quite right. I suppose Sister Therese told you?
Mrs. Petrie came a few minutes afterwards.”
“Describe her,” he directed tersely.
Startled by his maritaer, I did my best to comply, when:
“She has green eyes,” he broke in.
“I couldn’t swear to it. Her veil obscured her eyes.”
“They are green,” he affirmed confidently. “Her skin is the colour of ivory, and she has slender, indolent hands. She is as graceful as a leopardess, of the purring which treacherous creature her voice surely reminded you?”
Sir Denis’s sardonic humour completed my bewilderment. Recalling the almost tender way in which he had spoken the words, “Poor Karamaneh,” I found it impossible to reconcile those tones with the savagery of his present manner.
“I’m afraid you puzzle me,” I confessed. “I quite understood that you held Mrs. Petrie in the highest esteem.”
“So I do,” he snapped. “But we are not talking about Mrs. Petrie!”
“Not talking about Mrs. Petrie! But——”
“The lady who favoured you with a visit to-night. Sterling, is known as Fah Lo Suee (I don’t know why). She is the daughter of the most dangerous man living to-day. East or West—Dr. Fu Manchu!”
“But, Sir Denis!”
He suddenly grasped my shoulders, staring into my eyes.
“No one can blame you if you have been duped. Sterling. You thought you were dealing with Petrie’s wife: it was a stroke of daring genius on the part of the enemy——”
He paused; but his look asked the question.
“I refused to permit her to touch him, nevertheless,” I said.
Sir Denis’s expression changed. His brown eager face lighted up.
“Good man!” he said in a low voice, and squeezed my shoulders, then dropped his hands. “Good man.”
It was mild enough, as appreciation goes, yet somehow I valued those words more highly than a decoration.
“Did she mention my name?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
I thought a while, and then:
“No,” I replied. “I am positive on the point.”
“Good!” he muttered, and began to pace up and down again. “There’s just a chance—just a chance he has overlooked me. Tell me, omitting no detail that you recall, exactly what took place.”
To the best of my ability, I did as he directed.
He interrupted me once only: when I spoke of that sepulchral warning—
“Where was the woman when you heard it?” he rapped.
“Practically in my arms. I had just dragged her back.”
“The voice was impossible to identify?”
“Quite.”
“And you could not swear to the fact that Petrie’s lips moved?”
“No. It was a fleeting impression, no more.”
“It was after this episode that she subjected you to her hypnotic tricks?”
“Hypnotic tricks!”
“Yes—you have narrowly escaped. Sterling.”
“You refer,” I said with some embarrassment for I had been perfectly frank—”to my strange impulses?”
He nodded.
“No. It was the voice which broke the spell.”
He twitched his ear for some moments, then:
“Go on!” he rapped.
And when I had come to the end:
“You got off lightly,” he said. “She is as dangerous as a poised cobra! And now, I have another job for you.”
“I’m ready.”
“Hurry back to Villa Jasmin—and call me up here if all’s well there. Have you a gun?”
“No. I lent mine to the chauffeur.”
Take this.” He drew an automatic from his topcoat pocket.
“Drive like hell and shoot if necessary. You are a marked man.
»
As I hurried out. Dr. Carter hurried in. “Ah!” Nayland Smith exclaimed. “I regret troubling you, doctor; but I want you to examine Petrie very carefully.” “What! there is some change?” “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”
chapter tenth
GREEN EYES
the two-seater which had been placed at Petrie’s disposal was no beauty, but the engine was fairly reliable, and I set out along the Comiche about as fast as it is safe to travel upon such a tortuous road.
I suppose it had taken me a ridiculously long time to grasp the crowning horror which lay behind this black business. As I swung around the dangerous curves of that route, the parapet broken in many places and the mirror of the Mediterranean lying far below on the right, my brain grew very active.
The discovery of a fly-catching plane near the place where a man had been seized by this frightful infection, coupled with our finding later a similar specimen in Petrie’s laboratory, had suggested pretty pointedly that human agency was at work. Yet, somehow, in spite of the apparition of that grinning yellow face in the kitchen garden of the villa, I had not been able to realize, or not been able to believe, that human agency was actually directing the pestilence.
Sir Denis Nayland Smith had adjusted my perspective. Someone, apparently a shadowy being known as Fu Manchu, was responsible for these outbreaks!
And the woman who had posed as Petrie’s wife, the woman who had tried, and all but succeeded in her attempt to bewitch me, was of the flesh and blood of this fiend. She was Chinese; and her mission had been—what?
To poison Petrie—as Sir Mansion Rorke had been poisoned?
As I swung into the lighted tunnel cut through the rock, I laughed aloud when that seeming absurdity presented itself to my mind.