‘But what has that to do with a case of this kind?’ I demanded.
Madelyn picked up the sixth sheet of smudged paper.
‘We have here the fingerprints of Wendell Marsh’s murderer!’
I did not even cry my amazement. I suppose the kaleidoscope of the day had dulled my normal emotions. I remember that I readjusted a loose pin in my waist before I spoke.
‘The murderer of Wendell Marsh!’ I repeated mechanically. ‘Then he was poisoned?’
Madelyn’s eyes opened and closed without answer.
I reached over to the desk, and picked up Mr Marsh’s letter of the morning post at Madelyn’s elbow.
‘You have found the man who forged this?’
‘It was not forged!’
In my daze I dropped the letter to the floor.
‘You have discovered then the other man in the death-struggle that wrecked the library?’
‘There was no other man!’
Madelyn gathered up her possessions from the desk. From the edge of the row of books she lifted a small, red-bound volume, perhaps four inches in width, and then with a second thought laid it back.
‘By the way, Nora, I wish you would come back here at eight o’clock. If this book is still where I am leaving it, please bring it to me! I think that will be all for the present.’
‘All?’ I gasped. ‘Do you realise that –’
Madelyn moved toward the door.
‘I think eight o’clock will be late enough for your errand,’ she said without turning.
The late June twilight had deepened into a sombre darkness when, my watch showing ten minutes past the hour of my instructions, I entered the room on the second floor that had been assigned to Miss Mack and myself. Madelyn at the window was staring into the shadow-blanketed yard.
‘Well?’ she demanded.
‘Your book is no longer in the library!’ I said crossly.
Madelyn whirled with a smile.
‘Good! And now if you will be so obliging as to tell Peters to ask Miss Jansen to meet me in the rear drawing-room, with any of the friends of the family she desires to be present, I think we can clear up our little puzzle.’
7
It was a curious group that the graceful Swiss clock in the bronze drawing-room of the Marsh house stared down upon as it ticked its way past the half hour after eight. With a grave, rather insistent bow, Miss Mack had seated the other occupants of the room as they answered her summons. She was the only one of us that remained standing.
Before her were Sheriff Peddicord, Homer Truxton, Dr Dench, and Muriel Jansen. Madelyn’s eyes swept our faces for a moment in silence, and then she crossed the room and closed the door.
‘I have called you here,’ she began, ‘to explain the mystery of Mr Marsh’s death.’ Again her glance swept our faces. ‘In many respects it has provided us with a peculiar, almost a unique problem.
‘We find a man, in apparently normal health, dead. The observer argues at once foul play; and yet on his body is no hint of wound or bruise. The medical examination discovers no trace of poison. The autopsy shows no evidence of crime. Apparently we have eliminated all forms of unnatural death.
‘I have called you here because the finding of the autopsy is incorrect, or rather incomplete. We are not confronted by natural death – but by a crime. And I may say at the outset that I am not the only person to know this fact. My knowledge is shared by one other in this room.’
Sheriff Peddicord rose to his feet and rather ostentatiously stepped to the door and stood with his back against it. Madelyn smiled faintly at the movement.
‘I scarcely think there will be an effort at escape, Sheriff,’ she said quietly.
Muriel Jansen was crumpled back into her chair, staring. Dr Dench was studying Miss Mack with the professional frown he might have directed at an abnormality on the operating table. It was Truxton who spoke first in the fashion of the impulsive boy.
‘If we are not dealing with natural death, how on earth then was Mr Marsh killed?’
Madelyn whisked aside a light covering from a stand at her side, and raised to view Raleigh’s red sandstone pipe. For a moment she balanced it musingly.
‘The three-hundred-year-old death tool of Orlando Julio,’ she explained. ‘It was this that killed Wendell Marsh!’
She pressed the bowl of the pipe into the palm of her hand. ‘As an instrument of death, it is almost beyond detection. We examined the ashes, and found nothing but harmless tobacco. The organs of the victim showed no trace of foul play.’
She tapped the long stem gravely.
‘But the examination of the organs did not include the brain. And it is through the brain that the pipe strikes, killing first the mind in a nightmare of insanity, and then the body. That accounts for the wreckage that we found – the evidences apparently of two men engaged in a desperate struggle. The wreckage was the work of only one man – a maniac in the moment before death. The drug with which we are dealing drives its victim into an insane fury before his body succumbs. I believe such cases are fairly common in India.’
‘Then Mr Marsh was poisoned after all?’ cried Truxton. He was the only one of Miss Mack’s auditors to speak.
‘No, not poisoned! You will understand as I proceed. The pipe, you will find, contains apparently but one bowl and one channel, and at a superficial glance is filled only with tobacco. In reality, there is a lower chamber concealed beneath the upper bowl, to which extends a second channel. This secret chamber is charged with a certain compound of Indian hemp and dhatura leaves, one of the most powerful brain stimulants known to science – and one of the most dangerous if used above a certain strength. From the lower chamber it would leave no trace, of course, in the ashes above.
‘Between the two compartments of the pipe is a
