She stared at the others. Her eyes roamed over Marceline, with her flashy brunet prettiness, heightened now by a kind of feverish acuteness, her eyes as brilliant as black jewels. She looked at De Saules, fingering his spike of beard, the sly eyes in his hawklike olive face retracted, withdrawn. She looked at the drunken Wyatt, sprawled backward, breathing stertorously, his puffy weak young face already sinking into the coma of sleep. What parts did they play in this hideous, incredible puzzle?
And the baby! The boy! That tiny waif of humanity, caught up in the meshes of this horrible thing, his little body an innocent sacrifice to its hideous aim! Every time she closed her eyes, she heard him screaming. She gripped her hands until her nails pierced her palms. In some way she felt responsible for him; she could not get the sight of him off her mind, the load of him off her heart.
She stared at the Chinese maid. Corrigan was jabbing questions at her; the girl’s sloe-black eyes were pitiful in terror. Sandra was sure the girl was as innocent, as ignorant of all this, as she herself. Corrigan grabbed up the note. He was reading out the part of it that said: “The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter.” De Saules suddenly shoved out his hawklike head, a sharp hand.
“Look. There’s something written on the other side of that!”
“What?” Corrigan whipped the paper over. He stared at a single typed sentence, read in a loud voice: “The murderer will attempt to conceal the means of murder in the garage.”
“In the-” Corrigan gaped round.
“The garage! What kind of-”
The butler plunged into the room. His eyes were bulging like duck eggs.
“Sir,” he shouted, “the garage is on fire!”
There was a simultaneous rush that way. Sandra went, too, as far as the kitchen entry, when a kind of jolt, an inner hunch, brought her up. It was an intuition of the same sort she had had about the baby in the office. This time she obeyed it. The others had poured out of the house. She turned and darted back to the library.
Immediately she was in the doorway a nameless fear clutched her. The lights were out. That long window had not been open, plunging a bar of moonlight across the floor.
She whirled, drawing in air for a shout, when someone slammed her against the wall, jabbed a gun into her warm throat.
“Be perfectly quiet.”
She was staring into the yellow face of Dow!
The scream froze in her throat. She could no more have cried out than a block of stone. His oblique eyes were very close, creased as they had been in the office, but glittering with a lethal quality like the button eyes of an adder. He was breathing very hard. Sweat made a saffron sheen on his round face. But his voice, quicker perhaps, more hissing, had still the oily blandness of the office.
“Sit down. Here.”
He forced her into a chair. She was cold, paralyzed. Not three feet from her came the stertorous breathing of the drunken Wyatt; there before her was that yellow face, coolly talking.
“Do not move, Miss Grey. If you do, I shall most certainly kill you. A little diversion – the garage fire – to get everyone out. One moment, and your utter silence, are all I need.”
He was gone from her, dragging something on the floor. At first she thought it was the stupefied Wyatt; then she realized it was the corpse. His voice was once more at her elbow.
“I will be right here, very close, so if you move, I can shoot at once.” He touched her with the cold barrel. Then he was crouching, busy beside the chair.
Her mind was sick, spinning. Her eyes crawled sideways. She saw, vaguely in the dark, his squat body kneeling on the corpse, saw his shoulders working, saw the dead head move up in answer to his movements. Her soul swooned in the nadir of horror. He was doing something – doing something to the body! Her frozen mind could only picture, snatched from some long-lost childhood book, the sight of ghouls – ghouls hunched so over dead bodies, their talons busy with dead flesh.
He had not stopped talking. His voice flowed on with the same oily suaveness, only a flooding together of the sibilants showing his tremendous haste. There was even a fleering, mocking note in it, as though, in spite of the desperate jeopardy of his position, whatever horrible game he was playing, he was playing it with imperturbable coolness, even bravado.
“One moment. One short moment, Miss Grey. Am I the murderer? No, dear lady. I would not be so insanely rash as to be here if I were.” She heard the thud of his knees on the floor. “The murderer is, shall we say, a friend – a mutual friend, Miss Grey.”
There was the tinkle on the floor as of some metallic instrument.
“What am I here for? What is my object?” His voice had a hideous relish. “A simple thing. Profit. I did not want this taken for suicide. That was his aim, Miss Grey. Mine is absolutely different. And now it is accomplished.”
He was past her, a squat powerful figure, as soft-footed as a cat. He was silhouetted for one second in the moonlit window, gone.
Sandra found that scream then. It was piercing, wild, full-bodied, all her healthy young lungs could do. Feet crashed in the back, Corrigan’s yelclass="underline" “Who is it?”
The house was alive with noise. Corrigan was in the room; the lights went on.
She could only gasp: “Dow… Dow! He’s gone… through that window!”
Corrigan was already plunging through the open casement.
Sandra turned. She was beside the corpse. She could feel it, sense it there beside her left foot. Her hands were over her face. Something stronger than shuddering reaction, an irresistible, horrible attraction drew her like a magnet. She took her hands away.
The glazed eyes in that staring white face looked up at her. Just the same – but not the same. In that gaping mouth the hammer-headed, fungously white plug was missing.
Dow had cut out the corpse’s tongue!
III
Sunlight through the Venetian blinds of Captain Corrigtan’s office made bars of light and shade over the heap of police photographs on his desk, over Sandra’s slim hands, leafing through them. As she dropped each photograph, Gawdy picked it up, scrutinizing it with his big florid face outthrust, his blue eyes sharp. Captain Corrigan paced up and down the office. The floor creaked under his heavy step. His bullet head looked jammed between his shoulders, his hard eyes as if he had not slept all night. De Saules, incessantly fingering his spike of beard, sat a little removed, his cool eyes flitting, not over the photographs of Captain Corrigan, but over Sandra’s trim body, her velvety absorbed eyes, the color in her young cheeks.
Sandra tossed aside the last photograph of a Chinese with a criminal record.
“I can’t find him, Captain Corrigan. He’s just not here.”
Captain Corrigan looked at Gawdy as if here were his last hope.
Gawdy shook his head. “He’s none of these.”
Corrigan came up. His voice was like an explosion. “We’ve got to find out! We’ve ransacked the Chinese quarter, combed the city all night!” His jaws clicked shut, worked. “There was nothing in the old man’s mouth to take out! Nothing! What was he after? The tongue was cut – cut by a scalpel – sliced out at the roots! Why? Why?”
His eyes raged at all three. Gawdy’s handsome face was blank. De Saules took his hand from his beard, smoothed his brows, shook his head. Sandra bit her lip. She was thinking: “They’re stumped. The police. They can’t get anywhere. How could they? They know even less than I do.”
Corrigan slapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of the other. “That yellow devil put that sentence on the back of the note – about the garage – merely to make us rush out pell-mell when he started the fire. He was hiding, watching the house, slipped in when we swallowed the bait. But what for? Why did he cut out the tongue? Why?”