Morrison hung his head for a moment, clenching and unclenching his fists; then he looked up swiftly, and the light of a new resolution was in his eyes.
'I'll take the chance, sir,' he said, speaking with some emotion, 'and I hope, sir'—turning momentarily to Colonel Warrington—'that you'll be as lenient as you can; for I didn't know there was any harm in what I did.'
'Don't expect any leniency from me!' cried the Colonel. 'If there has been a breach of discipline there will be punishment, rely upon it!'
'I admit the breach of discipline,' pursued the man doggedly; 'but I want to say, here and now, that I've no more idea than anybody else how the——'
Smith snapped his fingers irritably.
'The facts—the facts!' he demanded. 'What you
'Well, sir,' said Morrison, clearing his throat again, 'when the prisoner, Samarkan, was admitted, and I put him safely into his cell, he told me that he suffered from heart trouble, that he'd had an attack when he was arrested and that he thought he was threatened with another, which might kill him——'
'One moment,' interrupted Smith, 'is this confirmed by the police officer who made the arrest?'
'It is, sir,' replied Colonel Warrington, swinging his chair around and consulting some papers upon his table. 'The prisoner was overcome by faintness when the officer showed him the warrant and asked to be given some cognac from the decanter which stood in his room. This was administered, and he then entered the cab which the officer had waiting. He was taken to Bow Street, remanded, and brought here in accordance with some one's instructions.'
'
'He told me,' continued Morrison more steadily, 'that he suffered from something that sounded to me like apoplexy.'
'Catalepsy!' I suggested, for I was beginning to see light.
'That's it, sir! He said he was afraid of being buried alive! He asked me, as a favor, if he should die in prison to go to a friend of his and get a syringe with which to inject some stuff that would do away with all chance of his coming to life again after burial.'
'You had no right to talk to the prisoner!' roared Colonel Warrington.
'I know that, sir, but you'll admit that the circumstances were peculiar. Anyway, he died in the night, sure enough, and from heart failure, according to the doctor. I managed to get a couple of hours leave in the evening, and I went and fetched the syringe and a little tube of yellow stuff.'
'Do you understand, Petrie?' cried Nayland Smith, his eyes blazing with excitement. 'Do you understand?'
'Perfectly.'
'It's more than I do, sir,' continued Morrison, 'but as I was explaining, I brought the little syringe back with me and I filled it from the tube. The body was lying in the mortuary, which you've seen, and the door not being locked, it was easy for me to slip in there for a moment. I didn't fancy the job, but it was soon done. I threw the syringe and the tube over the wall into the lane outside, as I'd been told to do.
'What part of the wall?' asked Smith.
'Behind the mortuary.'
'That's where they were waiting!' I cried excitedly. 'The building used as a mortuary is quite isolated, and it would not be a difficult matter for some one hiding in the lane outside to throw one of those ladders of silk and bamboo across the top of the wall.'
'But, my good sir,' interrupted the Governor irascibly, 'whilst I admit the possibility to which you allude, I do not admit that a dead man, and a heavy one at that, can be carried up a ladder of silk and bamboo! Yet, on the evidence of my own eyes, the body of the prisoner, Samarkan, was removed from the mortuary last night!'
Smith signaled to me to pursue the subject no further; and indeed I realized that it would have been no easy matter to render the amazing truth evident to a man of the Colonel's type of mind. But to me the facts of the case were now clear enough.
That Fu-Manchu possessed a preparation for producing artificial catalepsy, of a sort indistinguishable from death, I was well aware. A dose of this unknown drug had doubtless been contained in the cognac (if, indeed, the decanter had held cognac) that the prisoner had drunk at the time of his arrest. The 'yellow stuff' spoken of by Morrison I recognized as the antidote (another secret of the brilliant Chinese doctor), a portion of which I had once, some years before, actually had in my possession. The 'dead man' had not been carried up the ladder; he had climbed up!
'Now, Morrison,' snapped Nayland Smith, 'you have acted wisely thus far. Make a clean breast of it. How much were you paid for the job?'
'Twenty pounds, sir' answered the man promptly, 'and I'd have done it for less, because I could see no harm in it, the prisoner being dead, and this his last request.'
'And who paid you?'
Now we were come to the nub of the matter, as the change in the man's face revealed. He hesitated momentarily, and Colonel Warrington brought his fist down on the table with a bang. Morrison made a sort of gesture of resignation at that, and—
'When I was in the Army, sir, stationed at Cairo,' he said slowly, 'I regret to confess that I formed a drug habit.'
'Opium?' snapped Smith.
'No, sir, hashish.'
'Good God! Go on.'
'There's a place in Soho, just off Frith Street, where hashish is supplied, and I go there sometimes. Mr. Samarkan used to come, and bring people with him—from the New Louvre Hotel, I believe. That's where I met him.'
'The exact address?' demanded Smith.
'Cafe de l'Egypte. But the hashish is only sold upstairs, and no one is allowed up that isn't known personally to Ismail.'
'Who is this Ismail?'
'The proprietor of the cafe. He's a Greek Jew of Salonica. An old woman used to attend to the customers upstairs, but during the last few months a young one has sometimes taken her place.'
'What is she like?' I asked eagerly.
'She has very fine eyes, and that's about all I can tell you, sir, because she wears a yashmak. Last night there were two women there, both veiled, though.'
'Two women!'
Hope and fear entered my heart. That Karamaneh was again in the power of the Chinese Doctor I knew to my sorrow. Could it be that the Cafe de l'Egypte was the place of her captivity?
Chapter 24 CAFE DE L'EGYPTE
I could see that Nayland Smith counted the escape of the prisoner but a trivial matter by comparison with the discovery to which it had led us. That the Soho cafe should prove to be, if not the headquarters at least a regular resort of Dr. Fu-Manchu, was not too much to hope. The usefulness of such a haunt was evident enough, since it might conveniently be employed as a place of rendezvous for Orientals—and furthermore enable the cunning Chinaman to establish relations with persons likely to prove of service to him.
Formerly, he had used an East End opium den for this purpose, and, later, the resort known as the Joy-Shop. Soho, hitherto, had remained outside the radius of his activity, but that he should have embraced it at last was not surprising; for Soho is the Montmartre of London and a land of many secrets.
'Why,' demanded Nayland Smith, 'have I never been told of the existence of this place?'
'That's simple enough,' answered Inspector Weymouth. 'Although we knew of this Cafe de l'Egypte, we have never had the slightest trouble there. It's a Bohemian resort, where members of the French Colony, some of the Chelsea art people, professional models, and others of that sort, foregather at night. I've been there myself as a matter of fact, and I've seen people well known in the artistic world come in. It has much the same clientele as,
