He made no attempt to rise, but lay with slightly twitching limbs but otherwise motionless. Miss Boler stalked up to him and stood looking down on him with grim interest until Thorndyke, still holding his pistol, stooped, and, grasping one arm, gently turned him over. Then we could see the handle of the knife sticking out from his chest near the right shoulder.
“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “Bad luck to the last. It must have gone through the arch of the aorta. But perhaps it is just as well.”
He rose, and stepping across to where I sat, supported by Marion and still nursing my pistol, bent over me with an anxious face.
“What is it, Gray?” he asked. “Not a fracture, I hope?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Damaged muscle and perhaps nerve. It is all numb at present, but it doesn’t seem to be bleeding much. I think I could hobble if you would help me up.”
He shook his head and beckoned to a couple of constables, with whose aid he carried me into the studio and deposited me on the sofa. Immediately afterwards the two wounded officers were brought in, and I was relieved to hear that neither of them was dangerously hurt, though the Sergeant had a fractured arm and Barber a flesh wound of the chest and a cracked rib. The ladies having been politely ejected into the garden, Thorndyke examined the various injuries and applied temporary dressings, producing the materials from a very businesslike-looking bag which he had providently brought with him. While he was thus engaged three constables entered carrying the corpse, which, with a few words of apology, they deposited on the floor by the side of the sofa.
I looked down at the ill-omened figure with lively curiosity, and especially was I impressed and puzzled by the very singular appearance of the face. Its general colour was of that waxen pallor characteristic of the faces of the dead, particularly of those who have died from hemorrhage. But the nose and the acne patches remained unchanged. Indeed, their colour seemed intensified, for their vivid red “stared” from the surrounding white like the painted patches on a clown’s face.
The mystery was solved when, the surgical business being concluded, Barber came and seated himself on the edge of the sofa.
“Masterly makeup, that,” said he, nodding at the corpse. “Looks queer enough now, but when he was alive you couldn’t spot it even in daylight.”
“Makeup!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could makeup off the stage.”
“You can’t wear a celluloid nose off the stage, or a tie-on beard,” he replied. “But when it is done as well as this—a touch or two of nose-paste or toupée-paste, tinted carefully with greasepaint and finished up with powder—it’s hard to spot. These experts in makeup are a holy terror to the police.”
“Did you know that he was made-up?” I asked, looking at Thorndyke.
“I inferred that he was,” the latter replied, “and so did Sergeant Barber. But now we had better see what his natural appearance is.”
He stooped over the corpse, and with a small ivory paper-knife scraped from the end of the nose and the parts adjacent a layer of coloured plastic material about the consistency of modelling-wax. Then with vaseline and cotton-wool he cleaned away the red pigment until the pallid skin showed unsullied.
“Why, it is Morris after all!” I exclaimed. “It is perfectly incredible; and you seemed to remove such a very small quantity of paste, too! I wouldn’t have believed that it would make such a change.”
“Not after that very instructive demonstration that Miss D’Arblay gave us with the clay and the plaster mask?” he asked with a smile.
I smiled sheepishly in return. “I told you I was a fool, Sir;” and then, as a new idea burst upon me, I asked: “And that other man—the hook-nosed man?”
“Morris—that is to say, Bendelow,” he replied, “with a different, more exaggerated, makeup.”
I was pondering with profound relief on this answer when one of the painter-detectives entered in search of the Superintendent.
“We got into the house from the back, Sir,” he reported. “The woman is dead. We found her lying on the bed in the first-floor front; and we found a tumbler half-full of water and this by the bedside.”
He exhibited a small, wide-mouthed bottle labelled “Potassium Cyanide,” which the Superintendent took from him.
“I will come and look over the house presently,” the latter said. “Don’t let anybody in, and let me know when the cabs are here.”
“There are two here now, sir,” the detective announced, “and they have sent down three wheeled stretchers.”
“One cab will carry our two casualties, and I expect the doctor will want the other. The bodies can be put on two of the stretchers, but you had better send the woman here for Dr. Gray to see.”
The detective saluted and retired, and in a few minutes a stretcher dismounted from its carriage was borne in by two constables and placed on the floor beside Morris’ corpse. But even now, prepared as I was, and knowing who the new arrival must be, I looked doubtfully at the pitiful effigy that lay before me so limp and passive that but an hour since had been a strong, courageous, resourceful woman. Not until the white wig, the cap, and the spectacles had been removed, the heavy eyebrows detached with spirit, and the dark pigment cleaned away from the eyelids, could I say with certainty that this was the corpse of Mrs. Morris.
“Well, Doctor,” said the Superintendent, when the wounded and the dead had been borne away and we were alone in the studio, “you have done your part to a finish, as usual, but ours is a bit of a failure. I should have liked to bring that fellow to trial.”
“I sympathize with you,” replied Thorndyke. “The gallows ought to have had him. But yet I am not sure that what has happened is not all for the best. The evidence in both cases—the D’Arblay and
