Call Mr. Fortune. H. C. Bailey
“I hope that I do not understand you, sir. You appear insolent.”
“Oh, sir, there will be no delicacy in handling the affair. You went to Dr. Fortune’s room this morning.” The Archduke gave a glance at Reggie, who sat intent on stirring his tea. “He was preparing an injection of strychnine for his patient.”
“Hallo, what’s that?” Reggie cried, and nodded at the window. “Oh, I suppose it’s the car, Lomas. Your fellows will have found her and brought her round.”
“The car, sir?” the Archduke said, and Lomas put up his eyeglass.
“The car that did the deed.”
The Archduke slid across to the window. Lomas, too, stood up and looked out. They turned and stared at Reggie, who was sipping his tea. Lomas frowned. “There’s nothing there, Fortune.”
The Archduke smiled. “Dr. Fortune has hallucinations,” and he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his face, sat down, and drank his tea in gulps.
“We’ll keep to the point, if you please.” Lomas was annoyed. “Dr. Fortune told you that two of his strychnine tablets would kill a man. He went out of the room. While he was gone you dropped half a dozen tablets into the injection prepared for your brother. I have to demand, sir, that you leave England by the next boat.”
The Archduke burst out laughing. “The good Dr. Fortune! As you have seen, he has hallucinations. He hears what is not, dreams what never was. But if I were a policeman, Mr. Lomas, I should not make Dr. Fortune a witness. You become ridiculous.”
“He is not the only witness, sir. One of my men was behind the curtain.”
The Archduke poured himself out another cup of tea. “May I give you some more, Dr. Fortune? No? I fear you are malicious, my friend.” He laughed a little. “And you, sir. We sometimes find a policeman corrupt in our country. We do not permit him to trouble us.”
“You brought a German car into England, sir,” Lomas said. “Where is that car?”
“Your spies do not seem very good, Mr. Lomas. Come, sir, enough of this. I——” The Archduke started from his seat with a cry. His body was bent in a bow. A horrible grin distorted his face. He fell down and was convulsed. … He gasped; his pale cheeks became of a dusky blue. He writhed and lay still. …
“So that’s that,” Reggie said. “I wondered what he wanted with half a dozen.”
“What is it?” Lomas muttered.
“Oh, strychnine poisoning. He’s swallowed a grain or so.”
“My God! Can you do anything?”
Reggie shrugged. “He’s as dead as the table.” …
After a while, “Well! It’s a way out,” Lomas said. “But I can’t understand the fellow.”
“Oh, I don’t understand it all,” Reggie admitted. “He was out to kill his brother. That meant being Emperor. But why kill him now more than before? And the Archduchess. She is straight enough, I know. But just how she was to this fellow I don’t see.”
“There’s not much in that,” Lomas said. “Maurice couldn’t stand the Court, and it was common talk he meant to resign the succession. While he was quiet over here in England Leopold felt safe. But lately they tell me Maurice has been making up his mind to go back. Duty to his country, don’t you know? The Archduchess was strong against it. She hates all the business of royalty. But Maurice is a resolute sort of fellow even with a woman. Leopold came over to see what he could do. I suppose he set the Archduchess on to make Maurice give up the idea and stay quiet. They worked together—or that’s the notion at the Bohemian Embassy. She’s a gipsy, what, but she’s straight. She is not in this. It wasn’t her car. Well, when Leopold found there was nothing doing he set about the murder. He was a bad egg, don’t you know? There was a woman in Rome—they kicked him out there. But it was a sound scheme. He had it all straight—except the wrong tyres on his car. Good touch, the hatpin. Seemed like a woman in a rage. He knew a lot about women—one kind of woman.”
There was a tap at the door. The two walked forward.
“Sir Lawson Hunter, sir.” The footman tried in vain to see the Archduke.
“Yes, bring him up,” Reggie said.
Sir Lawson bustled in. “New case for you, sir.” The two men moved apart and Sir Lawson saw the body.
“Poisoned himself. Taken strychnine,” Lomas said.
“Oh, don’t bias him,” said Reggie. “He doesn’t like that.”
“Good Gad!” Sir Lawson’s eyes bulged.
“Yes, that beats me, Fortune.” Lomas waved his hand at the body. “I would have sworn he hadn’t the pluck.”
“Oh, he hadn’t. He meant it for me. I changed the cups.”
“You——” Lomas stared at him. “That was when you heard the car!”
“That was why I heard the car.”
“And you let him take the dose!”
“Yes. Seemed fair. You see, I picked up that poor fellow he smashed last night.”
“Good Gad!” said Sir Lawson.
The footman was again at the door. Dr. Fortune was wanted at the telephone. “There’s one here, isn’t there? Put me through.” The footman, hardly able to speak at the sight of the dead Archduke, retired gulping.
The bell rang. Reggie took up the receiver. “Yes. Yes. At once,” and he put it down. “I must be going. Serious case. Mrs. Jones’s little girl may have German measles.”
CASE II
THE SLEEPING COMPANION
BIRDIE screamed like a sea-gull and leapt on to the stage. The audience rumbled the usual applause, and Dr. Reginald Fortune put up his opera-glasses. He considered himself a connoisseur in the art of music halls, and Birdie Bolton was unique and bizarre. She was no longer young, and had never been pretty. A helmet of black hair, a gaunt face which never smiled, a body as lean as a boy’s, which sometimes slouched and sometimes jerked—such were her charms. She wore nothing much above the waist but diamonds, and below it barbaric flounces in a maze of colour. She began to sing in a voice wildly unfit for the strange creature she looked—a small, sweet voice—and what she sang was a simple ditty about her true love forsaking her. And then she went mad. There was a shrieking chorus—can you imagine a steam whistle playing rag-time?—and a dance of weird, wild vehemence. The lean body was contorted a dozen ways at once, the long white arms whirled and stabbed. She seemed to be a dozen women fighting, and each of them a prodigy of force. It was not a pretty dance, but it had meaning.
Birdie sank down panting on her crazy rainbow flounces and nodded at the audience which thundered at her.
Dr. Reginald Fortune shut up his opera-glasses. “She’s a bit of a wonder, you know,” he said to the naval lieutenant who was his companion.
“It’s a wild bird,” the lieutenant agreed, and as the rest of the revue was merely frocks and the absence of frocks they went off to supper.
In the morning, which was Sunday, Birdie Bolton came to see Dr. Reginald Fortune. It was her remarkable creed that she could not live in a noise, and so for years she had owned a house in the still rural suburb of Westhampton where Reggie and his father practised. The elder Dr. Fortune at first looked after her, but when Reggie came on the scene Miss Bolton, declaring with her usual frankness that she liked her doctors young, turned herself over to him.