“Positive,” I answered. “Absolutely positive. He had an unmistakable voice, and I knew him very well.”
And at that moment from the window there came a startled exclamation. The second constable had pulled the curtains, and he was standing there staring at the floor.
“Gaw lumme,” he remarked. “Look at that.”
We looked. Lying on the floor, stone dead, and twisted into a terrible attitude was Robin’s terrier. We crowded round staring at the poor little chap, and it seemed to me that the strange smell had become much stronger.
Suddenly there came a yell of pain, and one of the policemen, who had bent forward to touch the dog, started swearing vigorously and rubbing his fingers.
“The little beggar is burning hot,” he cried. “Like touching a red-hot coal.”
He looked at his finger, and then there occurred one of the most terrible things I have ever seen. Literally before our eyes the fingers with which he had touched the dog twisted themselves into knots: then the hand: then the arm. And a moment later he crashed to the ground as if he’d been poleaxed, and lay still.
I don’t know if my face was like the others, but they were all as white as a sheet. It was so utterly unexpected, so stunningly sudden. At one moment he had been standing there before us, a great, big, jovial, red-faced man: the next he was lying on the carpet staring at the ceiling with eyes that would never see again.
“Don’t touch him,” said a hoarse voice which I dimly recognised as my own. “For God’s sake, don’t touch him. The poor devil is dead anyway.”
The other policeman, who had gone down on his knees beside the body, looked up stupidly. Ordinary accidents, even straightforward murder, would not have shaken him, but this was something outside his ken.
“I don’t understand, sir,” he muttered. “What killed him?”
“He was killed because he touched that dead dog,” said Sinclair gravely. “We can none of us tell any more than that, officer. And this gentleman is afraid that if you touch him the same thing may happen to you.”
“But it’s devil’s work,” cried the constable, getting dazedly to his feet. “It ain’t human.”
For a while we stood there staring at the dead man, while the landlady rocked hysterically in a chair with her apron over her head. Of the four of us only I had the remotest idea as to what must have happened: to the others it must have seemed not human, as the policeman had said. And even to me with my additional knowledge the thing was almost beyond comprehension.
Robin’s wonderful invention; the strange smell which seemed to be growing less, or else I was getting accustomed to it; the dead dog, from which the smell obviously came; and finally the dead policeman, were all jumbled together in my mind in hopeless confusion. That Joe had been killed by this damnable thing his master had perfected was fairly obvious; but why in Heaven’s name should Robin have killed a dog whom he adored? The guinea-pig I could understand—but not Joe.
“It looks as you say, constable, like devil’s work,” I said at length. “But since we know that that does not happen we can only conclude that the devil in this case is human. And I think the best thing to do is to ring up Scotland Yard and get someone in authority here at once. This has become a little above our form.”
“I agree,” said Sinclair soberly. “Distinctly above our form.”
The constable went to the telephone, and the taxi-driver stepped forward.
“If it’s all the same to you, gents,” he said, “I think I’ll wait in the cab outside. I kind of feel safer in the fresh air.”
“All right, driver,” said Sinclair. “But don’t go away: they’ll probably want your evidence as well as ours.”
“Inspector MacIver coming at once, sir,” said the constable, replacing the receiver with a sigh of relief. “And until he comes I think we might as well wait downstairs. Come along, mother: there ain’t no good your carrying on like that.”
He supported the old landlady from the room, and when we had joined him in the passage he shut and locked the door and slipped the key in his pocket. And then, having sent her down to her basement, we three sat down to wait for the Inspector.
“Cigarette, Bobby?” said Sinclair, holding out his case. “Helps the nerves.”
“Thank you, sir: I don’t mind if I do. It’s fair shook me, that has. I’ve seen men killed most ways in my time—burned, drowned, hung—not to say nothing of three years in the war; but I’ve never seen the like of that before. For ’im just to go and touch that there dead dog, and be dead ’imself.” He looked at us diffidently. “Have you got any idea, gentlemen, as to what it is that’s done it?”
“It’s some ghastly form of poison, constable,” I said. “Of that I’m pretty certain. But what it is, I know no more than you. Mr. Gaunt was a marvellous chemist.”
“A damned sight too marvellous,” said the policeman savagely. “If it’s ’im what’s done it I’m thinking he’ll find himself in Queer Street when he comes back.”
“I think it’s if he comes back,” I said. “There’s been foul play here—not only with regard to that dog, but also with regard to Mr. Gaunt. He idolised that terrier: nothing will induce me to believe that it was he who killed Joe. Don’t forget that cry for help over the telephone. Look at all that blood. It’s my firm belief that the clue to the whole mystery lies in the Australian gentleman whom he was going to meet tonight. He left me at Prince’s to do so. Find that man, and you’ll find the solution.”
“Have you any idea what he looks like?” asked Toby.
“That’s the devil of it,” I answered. “I haven’t the slightest. All I can tell you is that he must be a fairly
