“It’s impossible to say without an examination,” the doctor answered. “It looks like a stroke, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. It might be a coronary attack, but I happen to know his blood pressure was normal, and his heart sound. He called in to see me only a week ago, and I examined him thoroughly. But sometimes you can be deceived. The inquest will tell us.” He eyed the body almost resentfully. “I can’t understand it. The man had no right to drop dead like this. He was a tough old sailor who ought to have been good for another twenty years. If you want my honest opinion—though I can’t possibly be certain until after the inquest—I should say he had been poisoned.”
“How would he be poisoned?” asked Mrs. Pickett quietly.
“That’s more than I can tell you. There’s no glass about that he could have drunk it from. He might have got it in capsule form. But why should he have done it? He was always a pretty cheerful sort of old man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir,” said the Constable. “He had the name of being a joker in these parts. Kind of sarcastic, they tell me, though he never tried it on me.”
“He must have died quite early last night,” said the doctor. He turned to Mrs. Pickett. “What’s become of Captain Muller? If he shares this room he ought to be able to tell us something about it.”
“Captain Muller spent the night with some friends at Portsmouth,” said Mrs. Pickett. “He left right after supper, and hasn’t returned.”
The doctor stared thoughtfully about the room, frowning.
“I don’t like it. I can’t understand it. If this had happened in India I should have said the man had died from some form of snakebite. I was out there two years, and I’ve seen a hundred cases of it. The poor devils all looked just like this. But the thing’s ridiculous. How could a man be bitten by a snake in a Southampton waterfront boarding-house? Was the door locked when you found him, Mrs. Pickett?”
Mrs. Pickett nodded. “I opened it with my own key. I had been calling to him and he didn’t answer, so I guessed something was wrong.”
The Constable spoke: “You ain’t touched anything, ma’am? They’re always very particular about that. If the doctor’s right, and there’s been anything up, that’s the first thing they’ll ask.”
“Everything’s just as I found it.”
“What’s that on the floor beside him?” the doctor asked.
“Only his harmonica. He liked to play it of an evening in his room. I’ve had some complaints about it from some of the gentlemen, but I never saw any harm, so long as he didn’t play it too late.”
“Seems as if he was playing it when—it happened,” Constable Grogan said. “That don’t look much like suicide, sir.”
“I didn’t say it was suicide.”
Grogan whistled. “You don’t think–-“
“I’m not thinking anything—until after the inquest. All I say is that it’s queer.”
Another aspect of the matter seemed to strike the policeman. “I guess this ain’t going to do the Excelsior any good, ma’am,” he said sympathetically.
Mrs. Pickett shrugged her shoulders.
“I suppose I had better go and notify the coroner,” said the doctor.
He went out, and after a momentary pause the policeman followed him. Constable Grogan was not greatly troubled with nerves, but he felt a decided desire to be somewhere where he could not see the dead man’s staring eyes.
Mrs. Pickett remained where she was, looking down at the still form on the floor. Her face was expressionless, but inwardly she was tormented and alarmed. It was the first time such a thing as this had happened at the Excelsior, and, as Constable Grogan had hinted, it was not likely to increase the attractiveness of the house in the eyes of possible boarders. It was not the threatened pecuniary loss which was troubling her. As far as money was concerned, she could have lived comfortably on her savings, for she was richer than most of her friends supposed. It was the blot on the escutcheon of the Excelsior—the stain on its reputation—which was tormenting her.
The Excelsior was her life. Starting many years before, beyond the memory of the oldest boarder, she had built up the model establishment, the fame of which had been carried to every corner of the world. Men spoke of it as a place where you were fed well, cleanly housed, and where petty robbery was unknown.
Such was the chorus of praise that it is not likely that much harm could come to the Excelsior from a single mysterious death but Mother Pickett was not consoling herself with such reflections.
She looked at the dead man with pale, grim eyes. Out in the hallway the doctor’s voice further increased her despair. He was talking to the police on the telephone, and she could distinctly hear his every word.
II
The offices of Mr. Paul Snyder’s Detective Agency in New Oxford Street had grown in the course of a dozen years from a single room to an impressive suite bright with polished wood, clicking typewriters, and other evidences of success. Where once Mr. Snyder had sat and waited for clients and attended to them himself, he now sat in his private office and directed eight assistants.
He had just accepted a case—a case that might be nothing at all or something exceedingly big. It was on the latter possibility that he had gambled. The fee offered was, judged by his present standards of prosperity, small. But the bizarre facts, coupled with something in the personality of the client, had won him over. He briskly touched the bell and requested that Mr. Oakes should be sent in to him.
Elliot Oakes was a young man who both amused and interested Mr. Snyder, for though he had only recently joined the staff, he made no secret of his intention of revolutionizing the methods of the agency. Mr. Snyder himself, in common with most of his assistants, relied for results on hard work and plenty of common sense. He had never been a detective of the showy type. Results had justified his methods, but he was perfectly aware that young Mr. Oakes looked on him as a dull old man who had been miraculously favored by luck.
Mr. Snyder had selected Oakes for the case in hand principally because it was one where inexperience could do no harm, and where the brilliant guesswork which Oakes preferred to call his inductive reasoning might achieve an
