We entered. The laboratory was really an enlarged gardener’s hut which the absent owner of Villa Jasmin had converted into a small studio. It had a glass window running along the whole of one side. A white-topped table now occupied a great part of the space before it, and there was a working bench in a corner opposite the door. In racks were rows of test tubes, each bearing a neatly written label, and there were files of specimen slides near the big microscope.
I noted the new pane of glass in a section of window which had been cut out one night less than a month ago when some strange burglar had broken in and explored the place. Since that time Petrie had had steel shop-blinds fitted to the interior of the windows, which could be closed and locked at night.
He had never secured any clue to the identity of the intruder or formed any reasonable theory as to what his object could have been.
At the moment, several of the windows were open, and sunlight streamed into the place. There was a constant humming of bees in the garden outside. Petrie took up a little sealed tube, removed the stopper, and shook out the contents of the tube into a glass tray. He turned to me, a strange expression upon his haggard brown face.
“Can you identify this. Sterling?” he asked. “It’s more in your line than in mine.”
I found it to consist of several bruised leaves, originally reddish purple in colour, attached to long stalks. I took up a lens and examined them carefully, the doctor watching me in silence. I saw, now, that there were pollen- like fragments adhering to a sticky substance exuded by the leaves.
There were some curious brown blotches, too, which at first I took to be part of the colouring, but which closer examination showed to be due to a stain.
“It’s
Petrie did not interrupt me, and:
“There are stains of what looks like dark brown mud,” I went on, “and minute shiny fragments of what might be pollen—”
“It isn’t pollen,” Petrie broke in. “It’s bits of the wing and body of some very hairy insect. But what I’m anxious to know, Sterling, is this—”
I put down the lens and turned to the speaker curiously. His expression was grimly serious.
“Should you expect to find that plant in Europe?”
“No, it isn’t a European variety. It could not possibly grow even as far South as this.”
“Good. That point is settled.”
“How do you account for the stains?”
“I don’t know how to account for them,” Petrie replied slowly, “but I have found out what they are.”
“What are they?”
“Blood!—and what’s more, human blood.”
“Human blood!”
I stopped, at a loss for words.
“I can see I am puzzling you, Sterling. Let me try to explain.”
Petrie replaced the fragments in the tube and sealed it down tightly.
“It occurred to me this morning,” he went on, “after you had gone, to investigate the spot where our latest patient had been at work. I thought there might be some peculiar local condition there which would give me a new clue. When I arrived, I found it was a piece of steeply terraced kitchen gar-^ den—not unlike our own, here. It ended in a low wall beyond which was a clear drop into the gorge which connects Ste Claire with the sea.
“He had been at work up to sunset last evening about halfway down, near a water tank. He was taken ill during the night, and this morning developed characteristic symptoms....
“I stood there—it was perfectly still; the people to whom the villa is leased are staying in Monte Carlo at present—and I listened for insects. I had gone prepared to capture any that appeared.”
He pointed to an equipment which lay upon a small table.
“I got several healthy mosquitoes, and other odds and ends. (Later examination showed no trace of parasite in any of them.) I was just coming away when, lying in a little trench where the man had apparently been at work up to the time that he knocked off—I happened to notice
He pointed to the tube containing the purple leaves.
“It was bruised and crushed partly into the soil.”
He paused, then:
“Except for the fragments I have pointed out,” he added, “there was nothing on the leaves. Possibly a passing lizard had licked them...I spent the following hour searching the neighbourhood for the plant on which they grew. I drew blank.”
We were silent for some time.
“Do you think there is some connection,” I asked slowly, “between this plant and the epidemic?”
Petrie nodded.
“Of course,” I admitted, “it’s certainly strange. If I could credit the idea—which I can’t —that such a species could grow wild in Europe, I should be the first to agree with you. Your theory is that the thing possesses the properties of a carrier, or host, of these strange germs; so that anyone plucking a piece and smelling it, for instance, immediately becomes infected?”
“That was not my theory,” Petrie replied, thoughtfully. “It isn’t a bad one, nevertheless. But it doesn’t explain the bloodstains.”
He hesitated.
“I had a very queer letter from Nayland Smith to-day,” he added. “I have been thinking about it ever since.”
Sir Denis Nayland Smith, ex-Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was one ofPetrie’s oldest friends, I knew, but:
“This is rather outside his province, isn’t it?” I suggested.
“You haven’t met him,” Petrie replied, labouring his words as it seemed. “But I think you will. Nayland Smith has one of the few first-class brains in Europe, and
He ceased speaking, staggered and clutched at the table edge. I saw him shudder violently.
“Look here, doctor,” I cried, grasping his shoulders, “you are sickening for ‘flu or something. You’re overdoing it. Give the thing a rest, and—-”
He shook me off. His manner was wild. He groped his way to a cupboard, prepared a draught with unsteady hands, and drank it. Then from a drawer he took out a tube containing a small quantity of white powder.
“I have called it 654,” he said, his eyes feverishly bright. “I haven’t the pluck to try it on a human patient. But even if Mother^Nature has turned topsy-turvy, I believe this may puzzle her!”
Watching him anxiously:
“Strictly speaking, you ought to be in bed,” I said. “Your life is valuable.”
“Get out,” he replied, summoning up the ghost of a smile. “Get out. Sterling. My life’s my own, and while it lasts I have work to do....”
chapter fourth
SQUINTING EYES
I spent the latter part of the afternoon delving in works of reference which I had not consulted for many months, in an endeavour to identify more exactly the leaves so mysteriously found by Petrie.
To an accompaniment of clattering pans, old Mme Dubonnet was preparing our evening meal in the kitchen and humming some melancholy tune very cheerily.
Petrie was a source of great anxiety. I had considered ‘phoning for Dr. Cartier, but finally had dismissed the idea. That my friend was ill he had been unable to disguise; but he was a Doctor of Medicine, and I was not. Furthermore, he was my host.
That he was worried about his wife in Cairo, I knew. Only the day before he had said, “I hope she doesn’t take it into her head to come over—much as I should like to see her.” Now, I shared that hope. His present appearance would shock the woman who loved him.
