Shaw looked thunderstruck.
“Has he gone mad?”
“Yes. He’s in love. Show me this note left by Regan.”
He went racing up the steps. Shaw had left the laboratory door open.
“There—on the table.”
Nayland Smith bent over Regan’s strange message. He turned.
“Sure it’s his writing?”
“Looks like it—allowing for a shaky hand. He’d evidently cut himself. See—there are specks of blood here.” Shaw pointed. “And I think blood has been wiped from the floor just below.”
Nayland Smith pulled at the lobe of his ear. His brown face looked drawn, weary, but his eyes shone like steel. The green twilight of this place, the eerie throbbing which seemed to penetrate his frame, he disliked, but knew he must ignore. A moment he stood so, then turned and ran back to the phone. He called police headquarters, gave particulars of what had happened, and:
“Check all night taxis,” he directed rapidly, “operating in this area. All clinics and hospitals in the neighborhood. Recall Detectives Beaker and Holland, on duty at the door here between eight and four. Order them to report to Raymond Harkness.”
He hung up, called another number, and presently got Harkness.
“I’m afraid we lose, Harkness,” he said. “I’m at the Huston Building. Something very serious has occurred tonight. I fear the worst. The two men posted below must have tripped up, somewhere. They will report to you. Make each take oath and swear he never left the door for a moment. Then call me. I shall be here . . .”
In the throbbing laboratory, Martin Shaw was making entries in the log. He looked up as Nayland Smith came in.
“Of course,” he said, “I can see something has happened to poor Regan. But it’s not clear to me that there’s anything else to it.”
“Not clear?” rapped Smith. “Why should a man who generally hangs around the place at all hours—Sam—receive a faked call to get him to Philadelphia? Is it a mere coincidence that Regan deserts his post the same night? For some time before twelve o’clock—we don’t know for how long—no one was on duty here.”
“There’s an entry in the book timed eleven-fifteen.”
“Very shaky one. Still leaving a gap of forty-five minutes.”
“If you mean some foreign agent got in, how did he get in?”
“He probably had a duplicate key, as I have. The F.B.I, got mine from the locksmith who made the originals. Couldn’t someone else have done the same thing? Or borrowed, and copied, an existing key?”
“But nothing has been disturbed. There’s no evidence that anyone has been here.”
“There wouldn’t be!” said Smith grimly. “Dangerous criminals leave no clues. The visitor I suspect would only want a short time to examine the plant—and to borrow Craig’s figure of the transmuter valve—”
“That would mean opening the safe.”
“Exactly what we have to do—open the safe.”
“No one but Dr. Craig has a key—or knows the combination.”
“There are other methods,” said Nayland Smith drily. “I am now going out to examine the safe.”
He proceeded to do so, and made a thorough job of it. Shaw came down and joined him.
“Nothing to show it’s been tampered with,” Smith muttered . . . “Hullo! who comes?”
He had detected that faint sound made by the private elevator. He turned to face the lobby; so did Shaw.
The elevator ascended, stopped. A door banged. And Morris Craig ran in.
“Smith!” he exclaimed—and both men saw that he was deathly pale. “What’s this? What has happened? I was brought here by two detectives—”
“Serves you right!” rapped Nayland Smith. “Don’t talk. Act. Be good enough to open this safe.”
“But”
“Open it.”
Craig, his hand none too steady, pulled out his keys, twirled the dial, and opened the safe. Nayland Smith and Martin Shaw bent over his shoulders.
They saw a number of papers, and Craig’s large drawing board.
But there was nothing on the board! A moment of silence followed—ominous silence.
Then Nayland Smith faced Craig.
“I don’t know,” he said, and spoke with unusual deliberation, “what lunacy led you to desert your job tonight. But I am anxious to learn”—he pointed—”what has become of the vital drawing and the notes, upon which you were working.”
Morris Craig forced a smile. It was an elder brother of the one he usually employed. Some vast, inexpressible relief apparently had brought peace to his troubled mind.
“If that’s all,” he replied, “the answer’s easy. I had a horrible idea that—something had happened—to Camille.”
Nayland Smith exchanged a glance with Shaw.
“Ignoring the Venusburg music for a moment”—the words were rapped out in his usual staccato manner—”where is the diagram?”
Morris Craig smiled again—and the junior smile was back on duty. He removed his topcoat, stripped his jacket off, and groped up under his shirt. From this cache he produced a large, folded sheet of paper and another, smaller sheet—the one decorated with a formula like a Picasso painting.
“In spite of admittedly high temperature at time of departure, I remembered that I was leaving town in the morning. I decided to take the job with me. If”—he glanced from face to face—”you suspect some attempt on the safe, all the burglar found was—Old Mother Hubbard. I carry peace to Falling Waters.”
Chapter XVI
The library at Falling Waters was a pleasant room. It was panelled in English oak imported by Stella Frobisher. An open staircase led up to a landing which led, in turn, to rooms beyond. There were recessed bookcases. French windows gave upon a paved terrace overlooking an Italian garden. Sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Punch, and Country Life bulked large on the shelves.
There was a handsome walnut desk, upon which a telephone stood, backed by a screen of stamped Spanish leather. Leather-covered armchairs and settees invited meditation. The eye was attracted (or repelled) by fine old sporting prints. Good Chinese rugs were spread on a well-waxed floor.
Conspicuous above a bookcase, and so unlike Stella’s taste, one saw a large, glazed cabinet containing a colored plan of the grounds surrounding Falling Waters. It seemed so out of place.
On occasional tables, new novels invited dipping. Silver caskets and jade caskets and cloisonne caskets contained cigarettes to suit every palate. There were discreet ornaments. A good reproduction of Queen Nefertiti’s beautiful, commercialized head above a set of Balzac, in French, which no member of this household could read. A bust of Shakespeare. A copy of the Discus Thrower apparently engaged in throwing his discus at a bust by Epstein on the other side of the library.
A pleasant room, as sunshine poured in to bring its lifeless beauties to life, to regild rich bindings, on this morning following those strange occurrences in the Huston research laboratory.
Michael Frobisher was seated at the walnut desk, the phone to his ear. Stein, his butler-chauffeur, stood at his elbow. Michael Frobisher was never wholly at ease in his own home. He remained acutely conscious of the culture with which Stella had surrounded him. This morning, his unrest was pathetic.
‘“But this thing’s just incredible! . . . What d’you say? You’re certain of your facts, Craig? Regan never left a note like that before? . . . What d’you mean, he hasn’t come back? He must be in some clinic . . . The police say he isn’t? To hell with the police! I don’t want police in the Huston laboratory . . . You did a wise thing there, but I guess it was an accident . . . Bring the notes and drawing right down here. For God’s sake, bring ‘em right down here! How do we know somebody hasn’t explored the plant? Listen! how do we know?”