The Poison-Bottle
"Who's there?" a voice said with a quick and shaky start.
For reply I pressed the button of my lantern, turning it sideways so that he could see the uniform. If it had been chosen deliberately, I could have selected no better or more reassuring garb. I heard a sort Of 'Pluh!' of relief. The newcomer groped after a wall-switch, and the lights went up.
We were in a narrowish hall, somewhat frowsily kept after the spick-and-span exterior. There was a porcelain umbrella stand, and on one wall a Teutonic water-colour, circa 1870, of a girl in billowy skirts dancing before a table at which sat two resplendent officers with spiked helmets and beer-mugs. In the doorway — he still seemed reluctant to close it — the newcomer stood blinking.
He was a young man, small and slight, but his air or clothes had a portentousness which made him seem much Older. When not frightened (as he was now), his manner would be grave and somewhat superior. He wore his hair slicked down, parted at the side and brought across his forehead in a slight curve after the fashion of the Old-style barman. His features were sharp, rather hollowed under the cheek-bones, but with good-natured, cocky eyes and a cocky shoulder. No one, he seemed to say, would get the better of him. He wore careful dark clothes, with a wing collar and black tie: also, he carried a bowler hat and gloves. His accent was the accent of London. This, beyond doubt, was Hogenauer's servant, who was supposed to be out with a girl. If I had gone through with my burglary scheme, I should have had a very thin time of it.
"You put the wind up me, you did," he declared accusingly. "What's the game?"
"This door was open," I explained. "I looked in to make sure everything was all right. We're after somebody in the neighbourhood, and..’
"Ere!" he said, galvanized. "You don't think the beggar's in this house, do you? Who are you after? It must be somebody dangerous. The whole street's full of coppers."
It was; and that was the trouble. I reassured him instantly that there was nobody in the house, for I was afraid he might go out and bawl for all the rest of the police. It was a ticklish position, and I wished to God he would come in and close the door. There were familiar footfalls in the road outside as my late friends patrolled it: there was I, standing smack in the middle of a bare narrow hail illuminated like a theatre, Open to the inspection of anybody who passed. But I couldn't duck back to hide, Or even order him to close the door, in case it roused his suspicions. While he fiddled with his cuffs, and looked hesitantly from the street back to me, the footfalls clumped nearer…
"It's a long job," I grumbled, and turned towards the back door. "Well, I'll be getting on."
"Ere, stop a bit!" he protested, and did what I had hoped for. He closed the door and hurried towards me, evidently wanting to keep a policeman at his elbow when there were cut-throats in the suburbs. He produced a packet Of Gold Flakes, and became persuasive. "NO need to rush Off, is there! 'Ave a fag. Gaow on; 'ave one. There's nobody to mind the smoking. Your sergeant needn't see you, and my governor's away for the evening. There you are!"
"I don't mind if I do," said the Law, relaxing his sternness. "Thank you kindly, sir. You're Mr. Hogenauer's gentleman, aren't you?"
Now this was very much overdoing the bobby-business,
but the other took to it. He nodded with an air of good-natured condescension as he lit a match. "That's me, constable. Bowers is my name — Henry Bowers, at your service. Only been at this job two weeks. Of course, the job is — but — " The dashes do not indicate words, but shrugging gestures which I could not quite interpret. "But never mind that," he said with ghoulish eagerness. "Who is it you're after? What's he done? Is it murder?"
Since he now appeared to have no idea of calling in anybody else, I piled it on rather thickly about a burglar-murderer who had robbed the Chief Constable of the county. "So it's a good job you're indoors, sir. Funny thing, though. How does it happen that, if the boss is out for the night, you're in? I wouldn't, if it was me."
Bowers shifted. "Ah, that," he said. "That's my conscience. Do I have a cushy job here? Do I appreciate it? Not half!" He became confidential. "Good wages, not much to do, and every night off if I want it. So I don't take any chances with it. I pay attention to the emperor, whatever he says. See?" Drawing down the comers of his mouth and half closing his eyes, Bowers tapped his chest with an air of profound shrewdness. "Well, this morning after breakfast he says to me, 'Harry, I'm going to Bristol this evening.' And laughed when he said it. 'But,' he says, you might come in early to-night, because I may have a visitor'
"He said he was going to Bristol, but still he expected a visitor?"
"That's it. I tell you straight, I often think the governor's a bit-" Bowers tapped his forehead significantly. "Ruddy queer sense of humour 'e's got, and I never know whether he means what he says or not. So I do whatever he says. See? I'll tell you how it was.
"This morning after breakfast, as I say, he said he was going to Bristol in the evening. I says, 'Shall I pack a bag?' He says, 'No, I won't need a bag,' — and laughed again. I says, 'You'll be at Dr. Keppel's, I suppose?' (This Dr. Keppel is another Squarehead, sort of a professor, who lives in a hotel at Bristol.) He says, 'Yes, I'll be at Dr. Keppel's, but I don't think Dr. Keppel will be there; in fact, I've got every hope that he'll be out.' Then was when he told me we might have a visitor tonight. I ask you!"
The reason for Bowers's loquacity I could see in his own uneasiness. He was smoothing at his dark, slicked-down hair, and peering into corners of the hall. But this gave a new turn to possibilities in the business. It would appear that Hogenauer himself might be intending to do a spot of burglary, or at least secret visiting: that he was going to pay a quiet call at Keppel's hotel when he could make sure Keppel was out: and that the `visitor' he expected here might be Keppel himself, brought on some wild-goose mission. Why?
Such a possibility had clearly occurred to the far from dull-minded Bowers.
"So I thinks to myself," says Bowers, with a sort of pounce: "the governor goes to Bristol, and Keppel comes here. Eh! The more so, mindyer, because Keppel's right here in Moreton Abbot — or he was this morning, anyway. Keppel came here this morning, dropped in about eleven o'clock, and had a talk with the governor. I don't know what they said, because they talked in German, but the governor gave Keppel a little packet like an envelope folded in half. Very friendly, they was. Oh, yes. Of course, it's none of my business, but, I tell you straight, I didn't like it."
I gave an imitation of a man pondering heavily.
"But your governor," I said, "told you to come in early to-night. You didn't come in very early, did you?"
"No, and that's just it," cried Bowers, with a sort of defensive aggressiveness. "Because why! I'll tell you. Because, the last thing my governor said this afternoon… I went out before he did, just after I gave 'im his tea… the last thing he said, in that quiet glassy-eyed way of his, was: 'Yes,
Harry, I think you may have a visitor to-night, but I doubt if you'll see him'."
There was a pause. It was not a comfortable pause.
"Now I ask you," said Bowers in a cooler tone.
"Here! You think your governor — or Keppel — was up to some funny business?"
The other evidently saw that he had gone too far. "Not my governor," he declared with quiet earnestness. "That I'll swear to. You know that: anybody at your police station knows that. He was much too anxious to keep on the good side of the slops. He's a foreigner, d'jersee? He's registered at the police station, but he's always been in a stew and sweat for fear they'll make him leave the country at the end of six months or nine months or whatever it is. Not him! Why, I could tell you-"
"You could tell me what?"
I became aware that I had either altered my voice or overstressed by curiosity as a policeman. There was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the hall. Though he tried to seem casual, Bowers was studying me with his head a little on one side, and in his small quick eyes there was a dawning of what might be suspicion.
"See here, mister," said my little cock-sparrow, and took a step forward, "just 'oo are you, anyhow? Sometimes you talk like a copper, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you act like a copper, and sometimes you act like-"
Before his mind could jump any farther along that line of thought, something had to be done. "I'll tell you what I am," said the aggressive Law. "I'm a man who means to get on in the world, that's what I am. I mean to be a sergeant before I'm many years older. Understand that, cocky? And, if you want to know it, that's why I've been watching this house for some time."
"Go on!" he said, and fell back.
"We know that there are things in this house that want explaining. We know that three nights out of a week your boss locks himself up in the back parlour, with shutters on the windows. But we've seen an odd kind of light through that window — I've seen it myself. We know he's working on an invention or an experiment of some kind. What is it? It's not only what we want to know; it's what Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office want to know."
"Come off it," said Bowers with pale scepticism, after a pause. But his eyes remained fixed. "Why, I'll tell you straight," he added quietly, "there's nothing in that room. Don't I know it? I tidy up there every day. And there's nothing at all except a lot of books. He don't even keep anything locked; not even his desk. I've looked. If he wants to shut himself up there in the evenings, that's his business, but he don't work at any experiments there. You want to see? I can show you right now."
He was pointing towards the door of the room, on the left-hand side as you faced the rear of the hall. Then he looked at it, and moved a step closer, and his voice went up a note or two.
"The key's in it on the outside," he said, "and where the hell's the knob?"
"What's wrong;"
He was jabbing his finger at a small octagonal hole from which the knob on its spindle should have protruded. Both knob and spindle were missing. But the key was in the lock, hanging almost loosely enough to fall out. Bowers opened his mouth, hesitated, and then went down like a terrier to search on the floor. It was bare floor except for a thinshanked chair not far from the door: but under the chair he
found what he was looking for. He found a knob of bright brown terracotta, loosely fitted on the spindle. But there was no knob on the other end of it.
Then Bowers found his voice.
"There's somebody in there," he said. "Dontcher see what happened? The knob inside's been loose for a long time; the governor asked me to mend it for him. Somebody went in there, and shut the door. Then somebody tried to come out. But the knob was loose and wouldn't turn the rod, and he fooled with it, and pulled it in and out, and then this came away and fell on the floor. And now he's in there and can't open the door. The door ain't locked, but the latch is caught and it's as good as a lock becos he can't turn it. And now he's in there, with the other knob in his hand…"
"Hogenauer?"
"I shouldn't think it was very likely, should you?" said Bowers simply. "No. Not the governor. But there's that burglar loose that you coppers are chasing-"
I took the knob and spindle out of his hand. At the same moment we both heard a noise, a sort of rushing noise, on the other side of the door. Without any warning, with no change of expression, Bowers started to make for the front-door to get out into the street. I lunged and got hold of his arm, or in a few seconds more we should have had the place invaded by my friends from the police station at Bowers's call. With some fumbling I got the spindle into place, holding Bowers's arm with my other hand; then I turned the knob and pushed the door open.
It was dead black inside. There were no sounds now. Bowers was quietly shaking in my grip, pressing up against the wall to get out of the line of the door, and he spoke with fierce calmness. "Are you loopy? Blow your whistle, you fool. There's a dangerous.."
I groped along the wall for a light-switch. There was a switch, but when I clicked it no response came. I still had the lantern hanging at my belt. Its broad beam swept across the room towards a wall of books; then it turned to the right and stopped. Along the right-hand wall were the two shuttered windows. Across the room, some feet out from the farther window was a broad claw-footed table; behind that table, and sideways to the door, stood a low padded armchair; and in the armchair a man sat grinning at me.
It was a pretty nasty sight. "Grinning" is the proper word, though it hardly completes the description of a face pulled all out of shape like rubber or putty. The neck was hunched a backwards in an arch, the face partly turned in the direction of the door, and the man's little thin body was arched forwards as though he would propel himself out of the chair, although his feet seemed to have become entangled with the legs of the chair. His face — which seemed all teeth and eyes — I might not immediately have recognized as that of Paul Hogenauer if it had not been for the pointed lobe of his ear. The white eyeball glittered under the light, and did not blink. It required no medical knowledge at all to know that Hogenauer was dead, and very little more knowledge to be aware that he had died of strychnine poisoning.
But there was something else, which lent a festive air to his appearance. He wore one of those smoking-jackets fashionable thirty years ago, of heavy dark cloth faced with faded and dingy red lapels. And on his high bald skull he wore an adornment fashionable many years before that "a smoking-cap" shaped like a Turkish fez. It had a tassel hanging down beside his ear. It was faded to a grimy reddish-orange. It looked like a flower-pot turned upside down. And under it the dead man sat with his head against his shoulder and grinned.
But Paul Hogenauer had not made those rushing, rustling noises I had several times heard in here. Bowers was right. There was someone in the room, someone alive, and waiting. I slowly moved the light around. The parlour was an ordinary enough library-workroom, some fifteen feet by eighteen, with light brown paper on the walls and a dark brown patterned carpet on the floor. In the left-hand wall there was a cupboard: the only place where anyone could conceivably hide. Bookcases stood along the wall facing the door. The mantelpiece was in the wall to the right, between the shuttered windows, with alien, curiously childlike touches in the cuckoo-clock up over it and the long china-bowled pipes banging in tassels from the mantelshelf. In the middle of the room stood a round table on which were a few magazines, an empty glass, and a bottle of mineral-water two-thirds full. But your gaze always went back to the flat-topped desk behind which Hogenauer sat grinning in his red fez. Over the desk hung an electric flex with an unshaded socket at the end of it. Though the socket was empty, a large bulb lay on the desk at the opposite side from the dead man.
I took one step into the room-and thought I saw the cupboard door move. But I was not concerned so much about the person hiding in the cupboard as about Bowers, and what Bowers might do when he saw that thing in the chair.
There are pleasanter positions than finding a dead body, in the company of a nervous man already growing suspicious of you, at the same time the police were nosing round the house. Nevertheless, there was good in this. It would give me a legitimate excuse to get to the telephone, as I had been wanting to do from the first. Under the pretence of calling the police station, I could ring up H.M. to find out what in the unholy blazes they meant by having me arrested as a thief, and to get Charters to call off his hounds before they had me again. So I spoke reassuringly to Bowers.
"Come on in. It's all right. It's dead. It can't hurt us."
Strangely enough, he straightened up a little at that. He risked a look round the door post, and, though he went a trifle limp when he saw it, he bad himself under control.
"Mr. Hogenauer's been poisoned," I said. "It's either suicide or murder. In any case, I must 'phone the station. Where's the 'phone?"
"Uh?" he said. "Then who was making those noises? Who?’
"Never mind that. Where's the 'phone?"
"There's no 'phone," said Bowers blankly, and the ground went from under my feet. "No 'phone. The governor don't like 'em." He was still held by that curious dullness of shock, without thought for more than the figure in the chair, and he spoke in an almost ordinary tone. "I say, it's all wrong. The furniture's all changed about!"
"What?"
"'Strue. Look: move the light. That big desk where he
you know," he nodded, "that's usually in front of the other window." He indicated another hanging lampcord by the window nearer us, with a brown-and-yellow lamp-shade patterned in German lettering. "And that shade is always on the other light. That clock over the mantel — it don't belong there: it belongs on the wall opposite. Them long pipes should be on the big desk. The chairs are all changed…. For God's sake get some light!"
I thought it was safe to let go his arm now. I hurried over and picked up the bulb from the desk, telling Bowers to throw the switch from the door. And, just before he did so, the cupboard door opened.
Bowers gave a yelp as something came out. I almost missed getting the light into the socket, but it went on: it was a 200 watt bulb, and it made a naked glare which momentarily blinded both of us. Whatever had come out of the cupboard did not make a run for the door, or even move fast. On the contrary, the figure sat down in a chair..
Then we found ourselves looking at a very pale, very quiet-faced woman sitting bolt upright in the wing-chair. Though her breast rose and fell perkily, she eyed us as calmly as she could. She was very good-looking in spite of a somewhat blunt nose and broad mouth; her dark-yellow hair was parted in the middle and drawn over her ears, and her blue eyes were reddish round the lids. She wore a tweed suit with a white silk blouse and dark tie, and her fingers were gripped round a snakeskin handbag. As though to show how cool she was, she took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter out of the handbag. Then she lit a cigarette, although the flame of the lighter at first missed it altogether.
"I thought I had better come out," she said, "before I made a spectacle of myself, being dragged out. I suppose you'll want this?"
Again she reached into the handbag, and took out a small corked bottle about a third full of a whitish crystalline powder.