"Oh, sir—I'm very glad to see you!" He hardly needed to say more. His face told what had happened before he went on, "Mr. Craig has just died, sir."
"Just died!" Houghton looked stunned.
Match drew out his watch. "Just a quarter of an hour ago, sir."
It was not yet nine o'clock.
"Dr. Lindrum upstairs?"
"No, sir. He was kept away all night by a maternity case. But he's started for here at last. He'll arrive any minute now. We tried for Dr. Williams, but he was away too. There's been a bad fire over at Chesham Millwall. Poor Mr. Craig." Match shook his head with a look of retrospective pity. "It was awful, sir. Till just at the end. The end was peaceful."
Gilchrist turned to go back to his car. There would be no consultation now.
"Don't go!" Houghton said brokenly. "Lindrum won't be long. And we shall want you."
It was irregular, but Gilchrist asked Match a few questions, at first almost automatically, then with alert interest. At one of the replies he shot a sudden swift glance at Houghton, who was listening closely. Houghton's eyes were on the doctor's face, but they could read nothing there.
Match explained that the nurse had just gone to lie down, utterly worn out with trying to cope with the hours of agony that had preceded her patient's death. The ladies had also gone back to their bedrooms. When Gilchrist finally stood silent, looking at a hunting print on the wall as though it very much puzzled him, Houghton touched his arm and motioned to the stairs. Gilchrist followed him. Match would have preceded them, but Houghton made him a sign to stay where he was. The butler, however, came on up.
"Here's the key to the room, sir," he said, handing it over. One of Gilchrist's swift glances ran over him, but Match stepped down again with his eyes on the ground.
Houghton took the key without comment, and going on up, unlocked the door.
The bed was covered with a sheet. Beneath it, as they turned it back, lay Ronald Craig's dead body. Houghton stood for a long moment looking down at his cousin with the grieved and horrified expression of a man who does not want to believe the evidence of his eyes, then he turned away.
"There's a letter, or part of a letter, rather, which he meant to send me yesterday, I think. It hadn't come before we left town. I wonder if it's lying about anywhere..."
Gilchrist had only eyes for the body before him. Bending down, he studied it with the same kind of attention, though in a heightened degree, that he had paid to the final answers of the butler.
Houghton meanwhile found a bunch of keys on the corner of the mantel, and unlocking the writing cabinet went systematically through it. There was no "part of a letter" inside. He had just relocked it, when Lindrum hurried in. He, too, went to the bed for a second, before he shook hands with Houghton, who introduced the doctor from London.
"It's too late for a consultation," Lindrum said, shaking his head sorrowfully. "Terribly sorry I couldn't get here last night," he went on to Houghton, speaking in a voice that sounded genuinely pained. "But it was touch and go all night long with a confinement case, and Dr. Williams couldn't come either, most unfortunately. He was kept at the hospital owing to a fire that injured a lot of people." Lindrum turned to the bed again. "Not that we could have done anything. Though it was so frightfully sudden...malaria and dysentery are tricky things apart, let alone combined...Well, I have the death certificate with me and—"
"I want a word with you, Dr. Lindrum," Gilchrist interrupted. "I'm too late for a consultation, as you say, but I should like to talk the illness over with you." There was an undercurrent of command in Gilchrist's tone.
Houghton said that he would wait in the library to hear their conclusions, and would they kindly lock the door and bring him the key when they had done? He particularly requested that no one was to be allowed to enter on any pretext whatever.
The two doctors assured him that they would do as he wished, but, in point of fact, they scarcely heard him. As soon as the door had closed, Gilchrist wheeled on the other man.
"Look here, were you giving him arsenic, and was it an overdose? Do you do your own dispensing?"
Lindrum stared at the speaker with dropped jaw.
"Speak, man!" Gilchrist said impatiently. "He died of arsenic poisoning." He jerked his head toward the bed. "As clear a case as could be. The symptoms of the final attack as detailed by the butler—besides, look at his gums, his lids. Now, if it was an honest accident, one of your own prescribing or dispensing, God forbid that I should ruin you. But I must be sure. What were you giving him?"
"I deny it!" Lindrum said, his voice shaking. "Your guess, I mean. Absolutely. The case was possibly gastric influenza—"
Gilchrist interrupted, and in a quiet, level voice ran over the symptoms as told him, and as evident in the dead man before them, which, to his thinking, stood for poison, and arsenic poison at that.
"Each one is compatible with my reading of the case." Lindrum spoke stoutly enough, but there was a look of suppressed terror in his eyes.
"No, they're not!" Gilchrist said bluntly. Then, in a gentler tone: "You see, poisons are my specialty. Whereas, I don't suppose you've ever had a case before." He was sorry for the other chap. "There's no shadow of doubt," he went on inexorably, "but that he was poisoned, and, to account for certain things"—he mentioned them in detail—"he must have had the poison administered to him in small doses—very small indeed, I think—for some weeks, and then, yesterday, he got a heavy dose that finished him off."
There was a long pause. Lindrum's face had grown whiter and whiter as the other proceeded.
"If you're right—" he said now shakily, "you may be—I don't say you are, but you may be—it's my ruin!"
"Not necessarily—" Gilchrist spoke under his breath, though they were both talking very low. "Think well! Could it have been some blunder? Grammes for grains? Anything of that sort?"
"He had a tonic of his own"—Lindrum's voice was as gray as his lips, it was the voice of a man facing horrible things—"an arsenic tonic. Some quack stuff. I warned him to discontinue it. But he was an obstinate man. It's possible he was still taking it..."
"That might account for the small doses, but his end was due to a definite largish dose taken, according to the butler's account, in the afternoon. I'll stake my reputation that I'm not out in saying so much. How can you explain the final dose? By the way, I don't see any medicine at all in the room."
Lindrum did not look around. He made no reply. He was evidently overwhelmed, either by what had happened, or by Houghton's having brought this man down at once to the deathbed.
Gilchrist's face hardened. Then, as the other stammered, "I—I—" and seemed to be choked by emotion, it softened again.
"The truth!" he urged. "If it's a blunder, and you can prove it to me—I must be sure on that point, of course—there need be no autopsy. Houghton may suspect—"
"He will!" muttered Lindrum, biting his lips.
"He may. But there's no one so vindictive that they would want to pillory a man for an honest blunder, let alone a friend. He said you were a friend of the dead man as well as of himself?"
Lindrum nodded. He looked as though he could not speak. Sinking into a chair, he sat with a hand pressed against his eyeballs, almost, a keen observer might have said, as though shutting out some sight, some remembered sight that had now grown unbearable to recall.
Suddenly Gilchrist caught sight of the door handle turning. Very cautiously, very tentatively. Apparently the person on the other side was not sure if the door was locked or not. A second later it opened, also very gently, and Gilchrist saw a white, haggard woman's face staring in at them. On the instant, noiselessly, silently, the door closed again. Gilchrist went to the door and locked it.
"He's