Call Mr. Fortune

car. Good touch, the hatpin. Seemed like a woman in a rage. He knew a lot about women⁠—one kind of woman.”

There was a tap at the door. The two walked forward.

“Sir Lawson Hunter, sir.” The footman tried in vain to see the Archduke.

“Yes, bring him up,” Reggie said.

Sir Lawson bustled in. “New case for you, sir.” The two men moved apart and Sir Lawson saw the body.

“Poisoned himself. Taken strychnine,” Lomas said.

“Oh, don’t bias him,” said Reggie. “He doesn’t like that.”

“Good Gad!” Sir Lawson’s eyes bulged.

“Yes, that beats me, Fortune.” Lomas waved his hand at the body. “I would have sworn he hadn’t the pluck.”

“Oh, he hadn’t. He meant it for me. I changed the cups.”

“You⁠—” Lomas stared at him. “That was when you heard the car!”

“That was why I heard the car.”

“And you let him take the dose!”

“Yes. Seemed fair. You see, I picked up that poor fellow he smashed last night.”

“Good Gad!” said Sir Lawson.

The footman was again at the door. Dr. Fortune was wanted at the telephone. “There’s one here, isn’t there? Put me through.” The footman, hardly able to speak at the sight of the dead Archduke, retired gulping.

The bell rang. Reggie took up the receiver. “Yes. Yes. At once,” and he put it down. “I must be going. Serious case. Mrs. Jones’s little girl may have German measles.”

Case II

The Sleeping Companion

Birdie screamed like a seagull and leapt on to the stage. The audience rumbled the usual applause, and Dr. Reginald Fortune put up his opera-glasses. He considered himself a connoisseur in the art of music halls, and Birdie Bolton was unique and bizarre. She was no longer young, and had never been pretty. A helmet of black hair, a gaunt face which never smiled, a body as lean as a boy’s, which sometimes slouched and sometimes jerked⁠—such were her charms. She wore nothing much above the waist but diamonds, and below it barbaric flounces in a maze of colour. She began to sing in a voice wildly unfit for the strange creature she looked⁠—a small, sweet voice⁠—and what she sang was a simple ditty about her true love forsaking her. And then she went mad. There was a shrieking chorus⁠—can you imagine a steam whistle playing ragtime?⁠—and a dance of weird, wild vehemence. The lean body was contorted a dozen ways at once, the long white arms whirled and stabbed. She seemed to be a dozen women fighting, and each of them a prodigy of force. It was not a pretty dance, but it had meaning.

Birdie sank down panting on her crazy rainbow flounces and nodded at the audience which thundered at her.

Dr. Reginald Fortune shut up his opera-glasses. “She’s a bit of a wonder, you know,” he said to the naval lieutenant who was his companion.

“It’s a wild bird,” the lieutenant agreed, and as the rest of the revue was merely frocks and the absence of frocks they went off to supper.

In the morning, which was Sunday, Birdie Bolton came to see Dr. Reginald Fortune. It was her remarkable creed that she could not live in a noise, and so for years she had owned a house in the still rural suburb of Westhampton where Reggie and his father practised. The elder Dr. Fortune at first looked after her, but when Reggie came on the scene Miss Bolton, declaring with her usual frankness that she liked her doctors young, turned herself over to him.

By daylight Miss Bolton dressed, and even overdressed, the part of a brisk British spinster. She was very tailor-made and severely tweedy, and thus looked leaner than ever. But her eyes retained a gleam of devilment.

“You gave us a great show last night,” Reggie said.

“Were you in front?” said Miss Bolton, and made a face. “Oh, Lord! Sorry. I was rotten.”

Reggie understood that his professional interest was required.

“What’s the trouble?” he said cheerfully.

“That’s your show,” said Miss Bolton. “Put me through it.”

The conversation then became confidential and dull upon the usual themes of a medical examination. At last, “Well, you know, we don’t get to anything,” Reggie said. “This is all quite good and normal. What’s making you anxious?”

“Dreams,” said Miss Bolton. “Why do I have dreams? I never dreamed in my life till now.”

“What sort of dreams?”

“Oh, any old sort. Bally rot. One night it was a motorbus chivvying me on the stage. One night May”⁠—May Weston was her companion⁠—“May would keep parrots in the bathroom. Then I hear a noise and wake up and there isn’t any noise.”

“Do you have this every night?”

“Snakes! Not much. Now and again. But I say, doc, it’s not fair. I don’t drink and I don’t drug. But I’ll be seeing pink rats if this goes on.”

“Is there anything worrying you just now?”

Was it possible that Miss Bolton blushed? Reggie could not be sure. “You’re a bright boy, doc. Be good!” She shook hands and gripped like a man. The big emerald she always wore ground into his fingers. “Birdie, the strong girl. Bye-bye,” she laughed.

On the next morning Reggie was just out of his bath when he was told that Miss Bolton’s housekeeper had rung up. Miss Bolton had had an accident and would he go at once. “Tell Sam,” said Reggie, and jumped into his trousers. Samuel Baker, a young taxi-driver whose omniscient impudence had persuaded Reggie to enlist him as chauffeur and factotum, had the car round and some sandwiches inside it by the time Reggie was downstairs. Neither he nor Reggie lost time.

Normanhurst, Miss Bolton’s house, stands by itself in an acre or so of garden, and is in the mid-Victorian or amorphous style. As Reggie jumped out of the car, the housekeeper opened the door. She was a brisk, buxom woman; she looked, and perhaps was, just what a housekeeper ought to be.

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Betts?” Reggie said.

“It’s very serious, sir. This way, please.” She led the way to Birdie Bolton’s boudoir, stopped, took a key from her apron pocket, and unlocked