kaleidoscope of spangled darkness that swallowed up consciousness, she heard a thousand miles away, the report of an automatic, that echoed and reechoed deliriously through an eternity of empty blackness.
She woke up in bed, with a splitting headache.
Opening her eyes sleepily, she grasped the general geography of the room in a dazed sort of way. The blinds were drawn, and the only light came from a softly shaded reading lamp by the side of the bed. There was a dressing table in front of the window, and a washstand in one corner. Everything was unfamiliar. She couldn't make it out at first-- it didn't seem like her room.
Then she turned her head and saw the man who sat regarding her steadily, with a book on his knee, in the armchair beside the bed, and the memory of what had happened, before the drug she had inhaled overcome her, returned in its full horror. She sat up, throwing off the bedclothes, and found that she was still wearing the dress in which she had left the flat. Only her shoes had been removed.
The effort to rise made the room swim dizzily before her eyes, and her head felt as if it would burst.
'If you he still for a moment,' said Raxel suavely, 'the headache will pass in about ten minutes.'
She put her hand to her forehead and tried to steady herself. All her strength seemed to have left her, and even the terror she felt could not give her back the necessary energy to leap out of bed and dash out of the door and out of the house.
'You'll be sorry about this,' she said faintly. 'You can't keep me here for ever, and when I get out and tell the police--'
'You will not tell the police,' said Raxel soothingly, as one might point out the fallacies in the argument of a child. 'In fact, I should think you will do your best to avoid them. You may not remember doing it, but you have killed a man. What is more, he was a detective.
She looked at him aghast.
'That man who was tied up?'
'He was a detective,' said Raxel. 'This is his house. I may as well put my cards on the table, I am a criminal, and I had need of your services. The detective you killed was on my trail, and it was necessary to remove him. I killed two birds with one stone. We captured him in the North, and brought him back here to his own house in London, a prisoner. His housekeeper's absence had already been assured by a fake telegram summoning her to the deathbed of her mother in Manchester. I then brought you here, drugged you with bhang, and gave you an automatic pistol.'
She was aghast at a sudden recollection.
'I heard a shot--just as everything went blank. ...'
'You fired it,' said Raxel smoothly, 'but you are unlikely to remember that part.'
Betty Tregarth caught her breath.
'It's impossible!' she cried hysterically. 'I couldn't--'
Raxel sighed.
'You will disappoint me if you fail to behave rationally,' he said, 'The ordinary girl might be pardoned for such an outburst; but you, with your scientific training, should not need me, a layman, to explain to you the curious effects that bhang has upon those who take it. A blind madness seizes them. They kill, not knowing whom they kill, or why. That is what you did. Your first shot was successful. Naturally, you fired first at the unfortunate Inspector Henley, because I had so arranged the scene that he was the first man you saw at the instant when the drug took effect. I might mention that we had some difficulty in overpowering you afterwards and taking the pistol away from you. Henley died an hour later.'
It was true--what Raxel had said was an absolute scientific fact. Granted that she had been drugged as he said, she would easily have been capable of doing what he said she had done.
'The terrifying circumstances,' Raxel went on unemotionally, 'probably hastened your intoxication. Your immediate impulse was to escape from the room at all costs, and Henley was the one man who stood between you and the door. You shot your way out--or tried to. It is all quite understandable.
'O God!' said Betty Tregarth softly.
Raxel allowed her a full five minutes of silence in which to grasp the exact significance of her position, and at the end of that time the pain in her head had abated a little.
'I don't care,' she said dazedly. 'I'll see it through--I'll tell them I was drugged.'
'That is no excuse for murder,' said Raxel, 'and taking drugs is, in itself, an offense.'
'But I can tell them everything about it--how you brought me here. There's proof. You telephoned. The exchange can prove that.'
'The exchange can prove nothing,' said Raxel. 'I did not telephone--I should be a very poor tactician to have overlooked such an obvious error. Your line was tapped, and the exchange has no record of the call. I must ask you to realize the circumstances. You will be taken away from here, and the house will be left exactly as we found it. The only fingerprints will be yours on the automatic you used. Nothing has been moved, and Inspector Henley will be found lying dead here when the police are summoned by his housekeeper on her return. We have treated him very gently during his captivity; and before we leave, the ropes that bound him will be removed, so that from an examination of his body it will be impossible to prove that he was not completely at liberty, in his own house--as any man, even a detective, has every right to be. The scene will be staged in such a way that the detectives, unless they are absolute imbeciles, will deduce that Henley was entertaining a woman here, and that for some reason or other she shot him. The woman, of course, will be you. But your finger-prints are not known to the police, and there will be nothing to incriminate you unless I should write and tell them, in an anonymous letter, where they scan find the owner of the fingerprints on the gun, I don't want to have to do that.'
'Then what do you want?'
'Your loyal support,' said Baxel. 'To-morrow you will go to Coulter's and tell them that your doctor has advised you to take a rest cure, as you are in danger of a nervous breakdown. You will tell your brother the same story. Then you will go down with me to an inn in South Wales, which I have recently purchased, and in which I have installed an expensive laboratory. There you will work for me--and it will only be for three weeks. At the end of that time, if you have done your work satisfactorily, you will be free to go home and return to your job, and I will pay you a thousand pounds for your services. Incidentally, I can assure you that you will not be asked to do anything criminal. I required a qualified chemist on whose silence I could rely--that is all. Therefore I took steps to secure you. I do not think any jury would be likely to hang you, but you would certainly go to prison for a long time--if you were not sentenced to be detained at Broadmoor during His Majesty's pleasure--and fifteen years spent in prison would rob you of the best part of your life. As an alternative to such a punishment, I think you should find my suggestion singularly acceptable.'
'And what am I supposed to do in this laboratory?
He answered her question in three brief sentences, and she gasped.
'Why do you want that?' she answered.
'That is no concern of yours,' answered Raxel. 'You will not be asked to associate yourself with my use of it, and so you need have no fear that you will be incriminating yourself. I promise you that when you have made a sufficient quantity for my ends, I shall ask nothing more of you. Nothing shall be done to stop your return home, and no one need ever know what you have been doing. You can, if you like, adopt me as your physician, and tell any inquirers that you are taking a cure under my personal supervision. We can arrange that. Also, I give you my word of honour that no harm shall come to you while you are in my employ.'
He looked at his watch.
'It is half-past ten,' he said. 'You have hardly been unconscious an hour, though I expect you have been wondering how many days it has been. There is plenty of time for you to give me your answer and be back at the flat by the time your brother returns. And there is only one answer that you can possibly give.'
Besides the huge flying Hirondel that was the apple of his eye, Simon Templar possessed another and much less conspicuous car which ran excellently downhill, and therefore he was able to descend upon Llancoed at a clear twenty miles an hour.
The car (he called it Hildebrand, for no reason that the chronicler, or anyone else in this story, could ever discover) was of the model known to the expert as 'Touring,' which is to say that in hot weather you had the choice of baking with the hood down, or broiling with the hood up. In wet weather you had the choice of getting soaked with the hood down, or driving to the peril of the whole world and yourself while completely encased in a
