too late.”
Mr. Bailey slowly inclined his head and something like a groan came from the butler.
“Good God, Kerrigan! A second score to the enemy!”
He dropped down on a leather-covered couch set in a recess over which hung a trophy of antlers. For a moment his amazing vitality, his electrical energy seemed to have deserted him, and I saw a man totally overcome. As I stepped towards him he looked up haggardly.
“The facts, Mr. Bailey, if you please.” He spoke more slowly than I remembered ever to have heard him speak. “When did it happen? Where? How?”
“I discovered the tragedy not five minutes ago.” Bailey spoke and looked as a man distraught. “You must understand that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory since noon and at last I determined to face any rebuff in order to induce him to rest. I beg, gentlemen, that you will return there with me now! Hale, the chauffeur, and Bordon, the doctor’s mechanic, are trying to cut out the lock of the door!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The overstrung man, waving us to follow, already was leading the way along a passage communicating with the rear of the house.
“When I reached the laboratory” he cried back, now beginning to run, “through the grille in the door I saw the doctor lying face downwards . . . I immediately returned for assistance . . . It was hearing the approach of your car that brought me to the porch to meet you.”
A somewhat straggling party, we followed the hurrying figure through a dim garden and along a path which zigzagged, sloping slightly upwards to a coppice of beech trees. He knew the way but we did not. Inspector Gallaho, stumbling and growling, produced a flashlamp for our guidance.
The laboratory was some two hundred yards removed from the house, a squat brick building with a number of high-set windows, screened and iron-barred. The entrance was on the further side, and as we approached I heard a sound of hammering and wrenching. Onto a gravel path and around the corner we ran, and there, where light shone out through a grille in a heavy door, I saw two men at work with chisels, hammers and crowbars.
“Are you nearly through?” Bailey panted.
“Another two minutes should do it, sir.”
“Surely there is more than one key!” Smith snapped.
“I regret to say there is only one. Doctor Jasper always held it.”
We crowded together to look through the thick glass behind the grille.
I saw a long, narrow workroom, well lighted. It resembled less a laboratory than a machine shop, but I noticed chemical impedimenta, mostly unfamiliar. That which claimed and held my attention was the figure of a short, thick-set man wearing a white linen coat. He lay face downward, arms outstretched, some two paces from the door. Owing to his position, it was impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the back of his head. But there was something grimly significant in the slump of the body.
The workmen carried on unceasingly. I thought I had heard few more mournful sounds than those of the blows of the hammer and splintering of stout wood as they struggled to force a way into the locked laboratory.
“This is ghastly,” Smith muttered, “ghastly! He may not be dead. Have you sent for a doctor?”
“I am myself a qualified physician,” Bailey replied,”and following Inspector Gallaho’s advice, I have not notified the local police.”
“Good,” said Gallaho.
“I am still far from understanding the circumstances,” snapped Nayland Smith, with the irritability of frustration. “You say that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory all day?”
“Yes. His ways have become increasingly strange for some time past. Something—I can only guess what— evidently occurred which threw him into a state of nervous tension some ten days or a fortnight ago. Then again, last Wednesday to be exact, he seemed to grow worse. I have come to the conclusion, Sir Denis, that he had received two of these notices. The third—I dictated its contents to the inspector over the telephone—must actually have come by the second post this morning.”
“Are you certain of this?”
“All his mail passes through my hands, and I now recall that there was one letter marked ‘Personal & Private’ which naturally I did not open, delivered at eleven forty-five this morning.”
“Eleven forty-five?”
“Yes.”
I saw Smith raise his wrist watch to the light shining out from the grille.
“Two minutes short of midnight,” he murmured. “The message gave him twelve hours. We are thirteen minutes too late.”
“But do you realize. Sir Denis,” the secretary cried, “that he is alone, and locked in? This door is of two-inch teak set in an iron frame. To batter it down would be impossible—hence this damnable delay! How can the question of foul play arise?”
“I fear it does,” Smith returned sternly. “From what you have told me I am disposed to believe that the ultimate result of these threats was to inspire Doctor Jasper to complete his experiments within the period granted him.”
“Good heavens!” I murmured, “you are right. Smith!” The chauffeur and the mechanic labored on the door feverishly, their hammer blows and the splintering of tough wood punctuating our conversation.
“He doesn’t move,” muttered Gallaho, looking through the grille. “Might I ask, Mr. Bailey,” Smith went on, “if you assisted Doctor Jasper in his experiments?”
“Sometimes, Sir Denis, in certain phases.” “What was the nature of the present experiment?” There was a perceptible pause before the secretary replied. “To the best of my belief—for I was not fully informed in the matter—it was a modified method of charging rifles—” “Or, one presumes, machine guns?”
“Or machine guns, as you say. An entirely new principle which he termed ‘the vacuum charger.’“
“Which increased the velocity of the bullet?”
“Enormously.”
“And, in consequence, increased the range?”
“Certainly. My employer, of course, is not a medical man, but a doctor of physics.”
“Quite,” snapped Smith. “Were the doctor’s experiments subsidized by the British government?” “No. He was working independently.”
“For whom?”
“I fear, in the circumstances, the question is rather an awkward one.”
“Yet I must request an answer.”
“Well—a gentleman known to us as Mr. Osaki.”
“Osaki?”
“Yes.”
“You see, Kerrigan”—Smith turned to me—”here comes the Asiatic element! No description of Mr. Osaki (an assumed name) is necessary. Descriptions of any one of Osaki’s countrymen sound identical. This Asiatic gentleman was a frequent visitor, Mr. Bailey?”
“Oh yes.”
“Was he a technician?”
“Undoubtedly. He sometimes lunched with the doctor and spent many hours with him in the laboratory. But I know for a fact that at other times he would visit the laboratory without coming through the house.”
“What do you mean exactly?”
“There is a lane some twenty yards beyond here and a gate. Osaki sometimes visited the doctor when he was working, entering by way of the gate. I have seen him in the laboratory, so this I can state with certainty.”
“When was he here last?”
“To the best of my knowledge, yesterday evening. He spent nearly two hours with Doctor Jasper.”
“Trying, no doubt, to set his mind at rest about the second notice from the Si-Fan. Then this morning the third and final notice arrives. But Mr. Osaki, anxious about results, phones at noon—”
“Binns, the butler, thinks the caller this morning was Osaki—” “Undoubtedly urging him to new efforts,” jerked Smith. “You understand, Kerrigan?”
