The library was a scene of confusion. Marceline was screaming; the loud, continuous screams of hysteria. De Saules was ineffectually shouting at her, pleading with her. Captain Corrigan took one look out of his hard eyes, walked up and slapped her across the face.
“Shut up!” he said. “Sit down.”
It acted like magic. Marceline fell onto the sofa, stopped screaming. The room jolted into calm as if ice water had been sluiced through it.
Captain Corrigan turned around, looked at the dead man. Sandra saw even the scalp on his blunt bullet head move with surprise as he observed that outthrust paper – white tongue.
“When’d this happen?” His hard eyes swiveled like turret guns at De Saules.
“Just now, not two minutes ago!”
“What had he been drinking?”
“Drinking!” De Saules’ point of beard jabbed up and down with the irregular movement of his jaw. “Nothing! He was reading that note – that note that prophesied his death!” He darted across, picked up the crumpled rice paper from the rug. “Here! This!”
Corrigan read it. A little man with a black bag bustled in and kneeled down by the corpse, but Corrigan paid no attention. The mouth in his blunt face opened with a jerk as he looked up at De Saules.
“Where’d this come from?”
“I brought it!” Sandra’s eyes were like vivid stars. “It’s from that Chinese, Dow – the one that gave me the acid tube!”
“What!” The difference in tone as Corrigan spoke to Sandra was noticeable. “That Chinaman who brought you the acid tube! You mean he’s mixed up in this?”
“Yes! Yes! Mr Delaunay had just read it. He got very angry. He jumped up and-” She groped for words. “He simply fell over, crying out something about his tongue! That was all! He didn’t take anything; he didn’t drink anything; we all saw him!”
Corrigan looked from her to De Saules to Marceline. He looked at the note. His hard eyes had an expression as if he were surrounded by a group of lunatics. His voice reflected it. “He’s dead of a corrosive poison. He must have swallowed it right in front of you.”
“Perfectly correct.” The medical examiner’s voice was as precise as an icicle. “Absolutely typical reaction – the white tongue, the serrated mucous membrane. The throat shows the same bleaching, all the way to the head of the pharynx. It’s oxalic acid, the quickest-acting of the common poisons.”
Corrigan’s eyes shot to the group. “The quickest-acting! You hear that?” His glance swung back to the doctor. “Could it be used for murder?”
“Impossible.” The doctor pursed his lips flatly. “Not unless one of them fed it to him a moment before he fell dead. He’s a feeble old man. The reaction was instantaneous.”
Marceline burst in. It sounded for a moment as if her hysteria were about to recur. “But we saw him! We saw him! He didn’t take anything! He didn’t!”
“Yes!” De Saules’ hawklike head jabbed out. “Two, three, four of us saw it! Are you telling us we’re all mad?”
Corrigan’s eyes looked jarred in their hard depths. This weight of testimony was beginning to tell on him. His glance shot to the doctor.
“Could he have held it in his mouth?”
The doctor gave an incredulous thin snort. “My dear man, this is a corrosive acid. It serrates the mucous membrane. The first touch of it would erode his tongue.”
“But this is impossible! Impossible!” Corrigan’s eyes battered everyone in savage bewilderment. “Do you realize this is not a poison like arsenic – that’s tasteless, that you can take an hour or so before it acts – this is a corrosive, it acts instantly! He couldn’t have held it in his mouth! He couldn’t! Yet you say he didn’t take anything! How did he get it?”
“The only possibility is a capsule,” said the doctor’s thin, piercing voice. He was primly polishing a pair of half-moon glasses. “Suppose – an absurdity even on the face of it – that in some manner a capsule had been lodged in his mouth. With the swelling of the tongue, the membranes, the capsule would still be there. There is no capsule. I have examined his mouth and throat thoroughly.”
There was entire silence. Captain Corrigan sat down on the table, a slow, jarring movement. The manifest impossibility of what was before them locked them all in a kind of mental blankness. A man had been killed, before the eyes of four witnesses, in a perfectly obvious way – he had swallowed a corrosive poison – yet the thing was as impossible as that a railroad tie could be put into the mouth of a milk bottle.
Into the silence a man stumbled, executing an unsteady semicircle through the library door like the reel of a dervish. A dressing gown made a disheveled scarlet circle around him. He came up at sight of the corpse, grabbing hold of a chair and staring down with haggard, puffy eyes.
“Who’s this?” snapped Corrigan.
Marceline spoke rapidly. “He’s a guest. His name’s Lonnie Wyatt. He’s been asleep all afternoon.”
“A guest!”
Corrigan stared at Wyatt. Mud splattered his patent leather shoes, the black serge bottoms of his Tuxedo trousers. The stale fumes of liquor reeked from him; his weakly boyish face, puffed with dissipation, gave a series of jerks as though he were about to fall headlong over the body. The plain-clothes man accompanying Corrigan grabbed hold of Wyatt, shoved him in a chair. Marceline’s voice cut in with the same quick rapidity. There was no hint of hysteria in it now.
“It’s a little difficult to explain. We found him lying outside our entry in this condition this morning. I… we… took him in and took care of him because he’s a friend.”
The singularity of this explanation, along with the singularity of the man’s appearance, caused Captain Corrigan to look, not at the drunken Wyatt, but at Marceline. A slight movement of his head indicated the corpse.
“You’re his daughter?”
“Yes. I was legally adopted at seventeen.”
Corrigan narrowed his hard eyes slightly. “Oh.” He switched his glance to the Vandyked De Saules.
“You’re a relative, too?”
“A very distant one.” De Saules stopped fingering his beard to make a deprecating gesture. “I met Mr Delaunay for the first time yesterday.”
“I see.” Corrigan’s head shot around. “Where’s that Chinese maid?”
The butler bustled out hurriedly into the hall. Sandra sat down quietly in a corner chair, pressed her hands to her temples. It was useless to question the maid. Captain Corrigan was making random gestures like a man who has run into a brick wall. Events still whirled, a mad patchwork, in her own mind. Tags of them flared out at her. Dow’s bland yellow face smiling over his cigarette; the feel of the note in her hand; the old man’s tongue gaping speechlessly in his mouth as he read it; his frightful plunge headlong into the lamp to the floor. She shuddered. What vicious, horrible enigma, spurting flashes of bizarre color like some enigmatic jewel, was here?
She looked at Gawdy, sitting with his big florid face outthrust, his eyes like robins’ eggs. He had seen part of it, the others another part, but only she had seen it all. Gropingly she tried to reconstruct events.
Dow – that incomprehensible Chinese, with his suave, creased eyes, his impeccable English, his violet-perfumed cigarette – had come up to her office, given her the bamboo tube and the note. The tube contained a horrible fate for the Delaunay maid, the note a prophecy of Mr Delaunay’s death. She had carried the note to Mr Delaunay; the old man had no more than read it, when, as if by conjunction of cause and effect, he had screamed up to his feet, plunged down dead. Dead by a corrosive poison – oxalic acid – which seared, burned, bleached his mouth, whose action was instantaneous, which no one had administered to him!
It was impossible. It was incredible. Only the evidence of her eyes assured her of something as impossible as witchcraft. Dow – the squat, suave Dow – knew this! Knew Mr Delaunay was to die! Warned him of it! Why? How did Dow know about it? What was Dow to that secluded old man? Why, if Dow were behind the attempt, should he warn the very object of the crime? Was the Chinese merely a tool in the hands of-