A splintering crash announced that the end of the task of forcing the door was drawing near.
“Had the doctor any other regular visitors?” jerked Smith.
“None. There was one lady whom I gathered to be a friend although he had never spoken of her—Mrs. Milton. She lunched here three days ago and was shown over the laboratory.”
“Describe Mrs. Milton.”
“It would be difficult to describe her. Sir Denis. A woman of great beauty of an exotic type, tall and slender, with raven black hair—”
“Ivory skin,” Smith went on rapidly, “notably long slender hands, and unmistakable eyes, of a quite unusual color, nearly jade green—”
“Good heavens!” cried Bailey, “you know her?”
“I begin to believe,” said Nayland Smith, and there was a curious change of quality in his voice, “that I do know her. Kerrigan”—he turned to me—”we have heard of this lady before?”
“You mean the woman who visited General Quinto?”
“Not a doubt about it! I absolve Ardatha: this is a zombie—a. corpse moving among the living! This woman is a harbinger of death and we must find her.”
“You don’t suggest,” cried Bailey, “that Mrs. Milton is in any way associated—”
“I suggest nothing,” snapped Smith.
A resounding crash and a wrenching of metal told us that the lock had been driven through. A moment later and the door was flung open.
I clenched my fists and for a moment stood stock still.
An unforgettable, unmistakable, but wholly indescribable odor crept to my nostrils.
“Kerrigan!” cried Smith in a stifled voice and sprang into the laboratory—”you smell it, Kerrigan? He’s gone the same way!”
Bailey had hurried forward and now was bending over the prone body. In the stuffy atmosphere of this place where many queer smells mingled, that of the strange deathly odor which I must always associate with the murder of General Quinto predominated to an appalling degree.
“Get those blinds up! Throw the windows open!”
Hale, the chauffeur, ran in and began to carry out the order, as Smith and Bailey bent and turned the body over . . .
Then I saw Bailey spring swiftly upright. I saw him stare around him like a man stricken with sudden madness. In a voice that sounded like a smothered scream:
“This isn’t Doctor Jasper,” he cried; “it’s Osoki!”
In The Laboratory
“The green death! The green death again!” said Nayland Smith.
“Whatever is it?” There was awe in my voice. “It’s ghastly! In heaven’s name what is it?”
We had laid the dead man on a sort of day bed with which the laboratory was equipped, and under the dark Asiatic skin
already that ghastly greenish tinge was beginning to manifest itself.
The place was very quiet. In spite of the fact of all windows being opened that indescribable sweetish smell—a smell, strange though it may sound, of which I had dreamed, and which to the end of my life I must always associate with the assassination of General Quinto—hung heavily in the air.
Somewhere in a dark background beyond the shattered door the chauffeur and mechanic were talking in low voices.
Mr. Bailey had gone back to the house with Inspector Gallaho. There was hope that the phone call which had immediately preceded the death of Osaki might yet be traced.
The extension to the laboratory proved to be in perfect order, but the butler was in so nervous a condition that Gallaho had lost patience and had gone to the main instrument.
“This,” said Smith, turning aside and staring down at a row of objects which lay upon a small table, “is in many ways the most mysterious feature.”
The things lying there were those which had been in the dead man’s possession. There was a notebook containing a number of notes in code which it would probably take some time to decipher, a wad of paper money, a cigarette case, a railway ticket, a watch, an ivory amulet and a bunch of keys on a chain.
But (and this it was to which Nayland Smith referred) there were two keys—Yales—unattached, which had been found in the pocket of the white coat which Osaki had been wearing.
“We know,” Smith continued, “that both these keys are keys of the laboratory, and Mr. Bailey was quite emphatic on the point that Doctor Jasper possessed only one. What is the inference, Kerrigan?”
I sniffed the air suspiciously and then stared at the speaker.
“I assume the inference to be that the dead man also possessed a key of the laboratory.”
“Exactly”
“This being the case, why should two be found in his possession?”
“My theory is this: Doctor Jasper, for some reason which we have yet to learn, hurried out of the laboratory just before Osaki’s appearance, and—a point which I think indicates great nervous disturbance—left his key in the door. Osaki, approaching, duplicate key in hand, discovered this. Finding the laboratory to be empty he put on a white jacket—intending to work, presumably—and dropped the key in the pocket in order to draw Doctor Jasper’s attention to this carelessness when the doctor returned.”
“No doubt you are right, Smith!”
“You are possibly wondering, Kerrigan, why Osaki, finding himself being overcome by the symptoms of the Green Death, of which we know one to be an impression of beating drums, did not run out and hurry to the house.”
“I confess the point had occurred to me.”
“Here, I think, is the answer. We know from the case of General Quinto that the impression of beating drums is very real. May we not assume that Osaki, knowing as he certainly did know that imminent danger overhung Doctor Jasper and himself, believed the menace to come from the outside—believed the drumming to be real and deliberately remained in this place?”
“The theory certainly covers the facts, but always it brings us back to —”
“What?”
“The mystery of how a man . . .”
“A man locked in alone,” Smith snapped, “can nevertheless be murdered and no clue left to show what means has been employed! Yes!” the word sounded almost like a groan. “The second mystery, of course, is the extraordinary behavior of Doctor Jasper . . .”
He paused. From somewhere outside came the sound of running footsteps, a sudden murmur of voices, then—I thought Hale, the chauffeur, was the speaker:
“Thank God, you’re alive, sir!”
A man burst into the laboratory, a short, thick-set, dark man, hair disheveled and his face showing every evidence of the fact that he had not shaved for some time. His eyes were wild—his lips were twitching, he stood with clenched hands looking about him. Then his pale face seemed to grow a shade paler. Those staring eyes became focused upon the body lying on the sofa.
“Good God!” he muttered, and then addressing Smith:
“Who are you? What has happened?”
“Doctor Martin Jasper, I presume?”
“Yes, yes! But who are you? What does this mean?”
“My name is Nayland Smith; this is Mr. Bart Kerrigan. What it means. Doctor Jasper, is that your associate Mr. Os.aki has died in your place!”
Dr. Martin Jasper
“You are indeed a fortunate man to be alive.” Nayland Smith gazed sternly at the physicist. “You have been preparing a deadly weapon of warfare—not for the protection of your own country, but for the use of a belligerent nation.”
“I am entitled,” said Dr Jasper, shakily wiping his wet brow, “to act independently if I choose to do so.”
“You see the consequences. As he lies so you might be lying. No, Doctor Jasper. You had received three notices, I believe, from the Si-Fan.”
Dr Jasper’s twitching nervousness became even more manifest.