‘Very good, sir,’ the sergeant answered, after a pause that was barely perceptible.
‘Where’s the bottle, Sir Graham?’ asked Chief Inspector Dale suddenly.
The Commissioner walked over to a filing cabinet against the wall by the window where he had placed the bottle. The corkscrew and the cork itself were lying near it.
‘It’s…here—’ he managed to say. The Commissioner, normally the most alert and ready of men, now appeared completely baffled.
‘I can’t understand it,’ he went on. ‘The bottle’s a new one.… I bought it myself only two days ago.’
Chief Inspector Dale took the bottle and examined it closely. He turned it from side to side, scrutinized the neck, and finally peered intently at the opening, and cork. At last he looked up.
‘The stopper doesn’t seem to have been tampered with as far as I can see,’ he said. Then again he carried on with his scrutiny. ‘Just a minute!’ Dale hesitated. ‘I’m not so sure.’ From the Commissioner’s desk he took a powerful magnifying glass.
‘Someone must have tampered with it!’ exclaimed Inspector Merritt. ‘Why—’
‘Then the poison must have been meant for you, Sir Graham,’ said Paul Temple quietly; ‘and not for Tyler.’
The Commissioner blinked at him. ‘Yes—it—er—looks very much like it,’ he said.
Meanwhile the body of Skid Tyler was still lying sprawled out unnaturally on the armchair. They had all been too busy with the strange mystery of his death even to think of moving the body.
‘I think we’d better get him into the other room, sir,’ Inspector Merritt said, indicating the body with a wave of his hand. ‘Then Doctor Parkes can have a look at him.’
‘Yes…Yes—er—by all means,’ agreed the Commissioner. He was still very flustered. Completely gone was all pretence of the usual calm, collected man of affairs. Many Press reporters would have given a great deal to have seen him in this state.
‘Oh, and take this bottle,’ he added to Merritt. ‘See that Mollinson gets to work on it.’
Andrew Arthur Mollinson was the research man. After a careful examination of the bottle, during which he was apt to use apparatus of every kind varying from powerful microscopes to ultra violet rays, he would in all probability be able to give an accurate picture of the history of the bottle immediately preceding the strange murder.
The Commissioner pressed a bell to summon Sergeant Leopold again. With the latter’s help, Dale and Merritt picked up the inert mass which had been Skid Tyler and struggled towards the door.
‘You might tell the doctor I’d like a word with him,’ said the Commissioner, as they were going out.
Slowly, down the corridor, they carried him. Finally laying his body flat on a couch so that Dr. Parkes could make his examination before rigor mortis set in.
‘Terrible business!’ Sir Graham remarked to Paul Temple, as soon as the door had closed. ‘I can’t possibly understand how—’ Suddenly he remembered that a ‘mere wisp of a girl’, as he regarded her, had been present right through this gruesome scene, and he turned to Steve Trent with a great measure of fatherly solicitude in his voice.
‘I say, I hope it hasn’t shaken you up, Miss Trent?’
‘No, I’m all right, Sir Graham,’ Steve replied. She had faced similar and even worse ordeals before, and she was comparatively hardened to such sights. ‘But I’m afraid I shall have to be going,’ she continued. ‘I have an appointment at four o’clock and I—’
‘Yes, of course,’ interrupted the Commissioner. ‘Of course.’
Steve Trent knew she had a story any newspaper man would willingly have given a year of his life to possess. There was only one thing to do, and that was to get to the office as fast as the first taxi would take her.
It seemed a pity to leave, but then everything of importance had already happened. In very little over an hour’s time, Sir Graham Forbes would be reading her account in The Evening Post, ‘and she thrilled in anticipation’.
First she talked over the question of the story with the Commissioner and with Temple. Sir Graham gave her full permission to report the events of the afternoon exclusively for The Evening Post, but she must use her discretion in its presentation. Her own part, her eyewitness account, she could give. But she must not, at any cost, stress the sensational side of the mystery.
They were vague instructions. But Steve Trent understood only too well the mood the Commissioner was in, and she did not care to alienate his sympathies. He had also promised her further information if she telephoned or called later in the afternoon, and it was very much to her advantage not to antagonize him.
The murder of Skid Tyler had engrossed her thoughts to such an extent that she had almost forgotten she was a reporter. But now, Steve began to tremble with excitement as the immense value of her ‘news story’ began to sink in to her consciousness.
She bade the Commissioner goodbye and thanked him. But her thoughts were elsewhere. Already she was struggling with her ‘intro’—the first few lines of the report that she felt sure would cause a sensation in Fleet Street. She arranged to meet Paul Temple at the office in about an hour’s time, after her fierce tearing rush was over. Then she said au revoir to him, and was sprinting downstairs to the main door. The ‘story’ was about to ‘break’. As Steve hurriedly looked round for a telephone box, she could literally have shouted with excitement. At the same time, she was running through the whole scene again in her mind, ready to write up her account of it.
She turned round the corner and ran as fast as she could into Westminster Bridge Station. Luckily one of the booths was vacant. In a flash she was inside and dialling her office.
‘It’s Steve Trent here. Will you find me Mr. Watts as quickly as you can? It’s urgent!’
A second’s wait, and she was through to the imperturbable news editor.
‘I’ve got a terrific “story”!’ she started. ‘Skid Tyler’s been murdered in Forbes’s room at the Yard. Forbes gave him a glass of brandy. It killed him. Poison. He was just going to spill the beans. What? Yes. Died in five minutes…Yes…in a phone box in Westminster Bridge Station…No…Yes…Temple, Dale and Merritt, nobody else, except Forbes himself.… Yes, I’m coming over now. Taking the first cab I can find. Goodbye.’
A split second later, and Steve Trent was back on the pavement waving her arm wildly at an approaching taxi.
‘The Evening Post office, as fast as you can make it. For God’s sake, get a move on!’ she added, as she flung herself into the back seat.
The offices of The Evening Post were nearly always in a state of wild excitement but Steve’s telephone call had acted like an earthquake. The number of calls passing through the telephone switchboard was suddenly trebled. Small boys sprinted up and down the corridors carrying pages of proofs. Machines were being stopped. Pages were being reset. Subeditors were swilling down quantities of hot tea.
In desperation the news editor ordered the edition which had just been printed to have the all-important news stamped on the ‘Stop Press’ column. Two minutes later he countermanded his order so that his competitors would not learn of the extraordinary happenings before his next edition had the full story.
Later, when it was all over, Steve wondered how the newspaper was ever produced, in this state of utter turmoil.
A typist was already sitting at a typewriter, ready to start typing at her dictation. By now Steve had the whole story mapped out in her mind. Throwing off her hat on to the table, she started.
After three sentences, a frenzied news editor rushed in, shouted ‘Marvellous, Steve!’ pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, and