“But this isn’t a poison! This is a book about a poison. The book can’t kill!”
At once Hanaud replied to him:
“Can’t it?” he cried sharply. “Listen to what Mademoiselle said a minute ago. Below the hilt of this arrow marked ‘Figure F,’ the Professor has written a tiny note.”
This particular arrow was a little different from the others in the shape of its shaft. Just below the triangular iron head the shaft expanded. It was as though the head had been fitted into a bulb; as one sees sometimes wooden penholders fine enough and tapering at the upper end, and quite thick just above the nib.
“ ‘See page 37,’ ” said Hanaud, reading the Professor’s note, and he turned back the pages.
“Page 37. Here we are!”
Hanaud ran a finger halfway down the page and stopped at a word in capitals.
“Figure F.”
Hanaud hitched his chair a little closer to the table; Ann Upcott moved round the end of the table that she might see the better; even Jim Frobisher found himself stooping above Hanaud’s shoulder. They were all conscious of a queer tension; they were expectant like explorers on the brink of a discovery. Whilst Hanaud read the paragraph aloud, it seemed that no one breathed; and this is what he read:
“ ‘Figure F is the representation of a poison arrow which was lent to me by Simon Harlowe, Esq., of Blackman’s, Norfolk, and the Maison Grenelle at Dijon. It was given to him by a Mr. John Carlisle, a trader on the Shiré River in the Kombé country, and is the most perfect example of a poison arrow which I have seen. The Strophanthus seed has been pounded up in water and mixed with the reddish clay used by the Kombé natives, and the compound is thickly smeared over the head of the arrow shaft and over the actual iron dart except at the point and the edges. The arrow is quite new and the compound fresh.’ ”
Hanaud leaned back in his chair when he had come to the end of this paragraph.
“You see, Monsieur Frobisher, the question we have to answer. Where is today Simon Harlowe’s arrow?”
Betty looked up into Hanaud’s face.
“If it is anywhere in this house, Monsieur, it should be in the locked cabinet in my sitting-room.”
“Your sitting-room?” Hanaud exclaimed sharply.
“Yes. It is what we call the Treasure Room—half museum, half living-room. My uncle Simon used it, Madame too. It was their favourite room, full of curios and beautiful things. But after Simon Harlowe died Madame would never enter it. She locked the door which communicated with her dressing-room, so that she might never even in a moment of forgetfulness enter it. The room has a door into the hall. She gave the room to me.”
Hanaud’s forehead cleared of its wrinkles.
“I understand,” he said. “And that room is sealed.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen the arrow, Mademoiselle?”
“Not that I remember. I only looked into the cabinet once. There are some horrible things hidden away there”; and Betty shivered and shook the recollection of them from her shoulders.
“The chances are that it’s not in the house at all, that it never came back to the house,” Frobisher argued stubbornly. “The Professor in all probability would have kept it.”
“If he could,” Hanaud rejoined. “But it’s out of all probability that a collector of rare things would have allowed him to keep it. No!” and he sat for a little time in a muse. “Do you know what I am wondering?” he asked at length, and then answered his own question. “I am wondering whether after all Boris Waberski was not in the street of Gambetta on the seventh of May and close, very close, to the shop of Jean Cladel the herbalist.”
“Boris! Boris Waberski,” cried Jim. Was he in Hanaud’s eyes the criminal? After all, why not? After all, who more likely if criminal there was, since Boris Waberski thought himself an inheritor under Mrs. Harlowe’s will?
“I am wondering whether he was not doing that very thing which he attributed to you, Mademoiselle Betty,” Hanaud continued.
“Paying?” Betty cried.
“Paying—or making excuses for not paying, which is more probable, or recovering the poison arrow now clean of its poison, which is most probable of all.”
At last Hanaud had made an end of his secrecies and reticence. His suspicion, winged like the arrow in the plate, was flying straight to this evident mark. Jim drew a breath like a man waking from a nightmare; in all of that small company a relaxation was visible; Ann Upcott drew away from the table; Betty said softly as though speaking to herself, “Monsieur Boris! Monsieur Boris! Oh, I never thought of that!” and, to Jim’s admiration there was actually a note of regret in her voice.
It was audible, too, to Hanaud, since he answered with a smile:
“But you must bring yourself to think of it, Mademoiselle. After all, he was not so gentle with you that you need show him so much good will.”
A slight rush of colour tinged Betty’s cheeks. Jim was not quite sure that a tiny accent of irony had not pointed Hanaud’s words.
“I saw him sitting here,” she replied quickly, “half an hour ago—abject—in tears—a man!” She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of distaste. “I wish him nothing worse. I was satisfied.”
Hanaud smiled again with a curious amusement, an appreciation which Frobisher was quite at a loss to
