The Red Room. Le Queux William
that there remained hardly any semblance to a human face.
“Well,” exclaimed Kirk at last, “you have seen it! Now what is your opinion?”
We were standing alone in the great laboratory, for Antonio and his brother had remained downstairs at my companion’s suggestion.
I looked round that great silent workshop of one of the most distinguished chemists of the age, and then I gazed upon the mortal remains of the man upon whom so many honours had been showered. Warped, drawn, crouching, with one arm uplifted almost as though to ward off a blow, the body remained a weird and ghastly object.
“Has it been moved?” I inquired when I recovered speech.
“No; it is just as we found it – just as the unknown assassin left it,” he said. “The disfigurement, as far as I can judge, has been caused by some chemical agency – some acid or other substance placed upon the face, with fiendish cruelty, immediately before death.”
I bent closer to the lifeless face in order to examine it, and afterwards agreed with him. It was undoubtedly a murder prompted by a fierce and bitter vengeance.
“The work of a madman, it may be,” I suggested.
But Kershaw Kirk shook his head, saying: “Not of a madman, but of a very clever murderer who has left not a trace of his identity.”
“Do you think that the Professor was struck down at the spot where he now is?” I asked, for my friend seemed to be something of an expert in the habits of the criminal classes.
“I think not. Yet, as you see, the place is in no way disordered. There is no sign whatever of a struggle.”
I looked around, and as far as I could discern everything was as it should be. Upon the nearest table in the centre was a very delicate glass apparatus in which some experiments had recently been made, for certain yellowish liquids were still within. Had this table been violently jarred, the thin glass tubes would have been disarranged and broken, a fact which showed conclusively that the fatal blow had been struck with great suddenness and in silence.
It had not occurred to Kirk to examine the dead man’s pockets before, and now, kneeling at his side, he was in the act of doing so.
The various objects he took out, first examined, and afterwards handed them to me. There were several letters, none of any great importance, some chemical memoranda scribbled in pencil upon a piece of blank paper, a gold presentation watch and chain, fifteen pounds odd in money, and a few minor trifles, none of which threw any light upon the mysterious tragedy.
My companion made another careful examination of the body. Then, rising to his feet, he walked slowly around the laboratory, in further search, it seemed to me, of anything that the assassin might have left behind. But by his countenance I saw that this eccentric man who dealt in secrets, as he had admitted to me, was much puzzled and perplexed. The enigma was complete.
So complicated and extraordinary were the whole circumstances that any attempt to unravel them only led one at once into an absolute cul-de-sac.
To whom had the dead man signalled in the Morse code by raising and lowering the blind?
Someone, friend or enemy, had been waiting outside near Clarence Gate in Regent’s Park in the expectation of a message.
He received it from the Professor’s own hands, those hands which before the dawn were cramped in the stiffness of death.
Chapter Four
A Silent Message
For a full hour we remained there in the presence of the dead.
Before that huddled figure I stood a dozen times trying to form some feasible theory as to what had actually occurred within that room.
The problem, however, was quite inexplicable. Who had killed Professor Greer?
There, upon the end of the unfortunate man’s watch-chain, were the two keys which he always carried, keys which held the secrets of his experiments away from the prying eyes of persons who were undesirable. Many of his discoveries had been worth to him thousands of pounds, and to public companies which exploited and worked them hundreds of thousands of pounds more. There, in that very room in which I stood, had the Greer process of hardening steel been perfected, a process now used in hardening the armour-plates of our newest Dreadnoughts. Yet the master brain which had thought out those various combinations, and by years of patience had perfected the result, was now before me, inactive and dead.
I shuddered at sight of that disfigured face, hideous in its limp inertness and horrible to the gaze. But Kershaw Kirk, his eyes narrower and his face more aquiline, continued his minute investigation of every object in the room. I watched him with increasing interest, noticing the negative result of all his labours.
“I shall return again to-morrow when it is light,” at last he said; “artificial light is of little use to me in this matter. Perhaps you’ll come with me again – eh?”
“I’ll try,” I said, though, to be candid, I was not very keen upon a second visit to the presence of the disfigured body of the Professor. I could not see why Kirk was so anxious to avoid the police and to keep the affair out of the papers.
“The body must be buried before long,” I remarked. “How will you obtain a medical certificate and get it buried by an undertaker?”
“Mr Holford,” he said, turning to me with an expression of slight annoyance upon his face, “I beg of you not to anticipate difficulty. It is the worst attitude a man can take up – especially in trying to solve a problem such as this. The future kindly leave entirely with me.”
At that moment I was fingering a small test-tube containing some thick grey-coloured liquid, and as I turned I accidentally dropped it upon the tiles with which the Professor had had the place paved. In an instant there was a bright flash, almost like a magnesium light, so brilliant that for a second we were both blinded.
“I wonder what that was?” he remarked, startled by the result. “One must be careful in handling what the dead man has left behind.”
“Evidently,” I said; “we cannot tell what these various experimental apparatus and tubes contain. Therefore we should handle them delicately.”
And I bent to the table to examine another tube containing some bright red crystals held over an extinguished spirit-lamp by a brass holder, an action which my companion, I noticed, watched with a curious expression.
Was it suspicion of myself?
“Well, my dear friend,” he exclaimed suddenly as he stood beside the table, “the problem is, as you see, rendered the more difficult of solution by the inexplicable fate which has overtaken the Professor’s daughter. Here is a man against whom, as far as we know, nobody in the world had a grudge, who receives a telegram which he is careful to destroy, makes a preconcerted signal at his drawing-room window, and goes upon a journey to Edinburgh. We know that he went, for the conductor recollects asking if he would take an early cup of tea. Again, he received his daughter’s telegram and replied to it. Yet at the same time he was in Edinburgh he was in this very room behind two locked doors of which he alone had the key, the victim of a brutally murderous attack! These doors were locked, and to enter here both he and the assassin must have passed through the boudoir within a yard or so of his daughter.”
“Is there no other means of access except through the boudoir?” I asked. “Have the windows been examined?”
“Yes; all the windows were screwed down on the inside. To-morrow, in the light, you shall satisfy yourself. I must come here to search for any finger-prints,” was his hasty reply. “When I caused these doors to be opened, I was careful not to allow the locksmith to see that any tragedy had occurred. The man was paid, and went away in ignorance. Yet when Miss Ethelwynn realised the truth she was as one demented. At first she refused to leave the place, but I persuaded her, and she went with her maid to her aunt’s. I impressed upon her the value of silence, and she gave me her word that she would say nothing of what had occurred.”
“What about her maid Morgan?”
“She