by Sax Rohmer
“It’s a suggestion,” Gallaho replied, “that doesn’t leave me unmoved.”
Dr. Norton dispensed drinks for his unexpected visitors, and then:
“My recognition of the fact,” said Nayland Smith, “that fate had brought me back to Petrie’s old quarters, with their many associations, rather took me off the track. The point of our visit is this, Doctor—” He fixed his penetrating eyes upon their host: “You have been attending a Miss Demuras, who lived on the North Side of the Common—”
“Yes.” Dr. Norton visibly started. “I regret to say that she died yesterday, and was buried today.”
“Without recourse to your case-book,” Nayland Smith went on, “what roughly were the symptoms which led to her end?”
Dr. Norton passed his hand over his face, and then brushed his fair mustache. He was considering his reply, but finally: “It was a case of pernicious anemia,” he replied. “Miss Demuras had resided in the tropics. She was practically alone in the world, except for a brother — with whom she requested me to communicate, and who appeared in time to take charge of the funeral arrangements.”
“Pernicious anemia,” Nayland Smith murmured. “It’s a rather obscure thing, isn’t it, Doctor?”
“As its name implies, and I have used its popular name, it is — pernicious. It’s difficult to combat. She was in an advanced stage when I first attended her.”
“She occupied a ground-floor flat?”
“Yes.”
“Had she any personal servants?”
“No; it was a service flat.”
“I see. When did she actually die, Doctor?”
“Just before dawn yesterday. A popular hour for death, Sir Denis.”
“I know. There was a nurse in attendance, of course.”
“Yes. A very experienced woman from the local Institute.”
“She called you, I take it, to the patient, fearing that she was in extremis?”
“Yes. It was a painful surprise. I hadn’t expected it...”
“Quite. But her sudden death was consistent with her symptoms?”
“Undoubtedly. It happens that way in certain cases.”
“Had you taken any other opinion?”
“Yes. I called in Havelock Wade only last week.”
Gallaho was following the conversation eagerly, his sullen-looking eyes turning from speaker to speaker. Sterling, sitting in an armchair, had abandoned hope of mastering his intense anxiety. He didn’t know, and couldn’t grasp, what this inquiry portended. But wholly, horribly, his mind was filled with the idea that Fleurette was dead and had been buried.
“Forgive me if I seem to pry into professional secrets,” Nayland Smith went on; “but would you mind describing your late patient?”
“Not at all,” Dr. Norton replied. He began again to brush his mustache. His expression, Nayland Smith decided, was that of an unhappy man. “She was, I think, a Eurasian. I don’t know very much of the East; I have never been there. But she was some kind of half-caste — there was Eastern blood in her. Her skin was of a curiously dull, ivory color. I may as well say, Sir Denis, that she was a woman of great beauty. This uniform ivory hue of her skin was fascinating. To what extent this characteristic was due to heredity, and to what extent to her ailment, I never entirely determined...”
CHAPTER SEVEN. LASH MARKS
“I quite understand, Sir Denis,” Dr. Norton said.
“Please regard any information I can give you as yours. I venture to believe you are wrong in supposing that Miss Demuras was an associate of this group, to which you refer, but I am entirely at your disposal. I will admit here and now, that I was growing infatuated with my patient. Her death, which I had not anticipated, was a severe blow.”
Nayland Smith walked up and down, tugging at the lobe of his ear, glancing at the titles of the books, staring about the room; then:
“I suggest that Miss Demuras’s eyes were long, narrow, and very beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.”
“Of a most unusual green color, at times glittering like emeralds?”
“It occurs to me that you were acquainted with her?” said Dr. Norton, staring hard at the speaker.
“It occurs to me,” Nayland Smith replied grimly, glancing at Alan Sterling, “that both Mr. Sterling and I from time to time have come in contact with Miss Demuras! Do you agree, Sterling?”
The young American botanist fixed a pathetically eager gaze upon the face of Nayland Smith; it was taut, grim, a fighting glint in deep-set eyes.
“My God! the net’s closing in on us again!” he whispered. “You seem to have an extra sense, Sir Denis, where this man and his people are concerned. It’s uncanny... but it may be a coincidence.”
Inspector Gallaho had resumed his favorite pose. He was leaning on the mantelshelf, moving his thin-lipped mouth as if chewing phantom gum. He was out of his depth, but nothing in his expression revealed this fact.
“I suggest that Miss Demuras was tall, and very slender?” Nayland Smith continued. “She had exquisite hands, slenderfingered and indolent — patrician hands with long, narrow, almond nails, highly varnished?”
“You are right. I see you knew her.”
“Her voice was very soothing — almost hypnotic?”
Dr. Norton started violently, and stood up.
“This is either clairvoyance,” he declared, “or you knew her better than I knew her. The implication is that Demuras is not her name. Don’t tell me that she was a criminal...”
“There still remains a margin of doubt,” said Nayland Smith, rapidly. He suddenly turned and stared at Sterling. “I have just recalled something that you told me — something that you witnessed in Ste. Claire de la Roche... When the Chinese punish, they punish severely. There’s just a chance.”
He twisted about again, facing Dr. Norton. But the latter had construed the meaning of his words. His sanguine color had ebbed; he was become pale.
“Ah!” cried Nayland Smith, “I see that you understand me!”
Norton nodded, and dropped back into his chair.
“There is no further room for doubt,” he acknowledged. “Whoever my patient was, clearly you knew her. Throughout the time that I attended her, nearly two weeks, she definitely declined to permit me to make a detailed examination. By which I mean that she objected to exposing her shoulders. In this she was adamant. My curiosity was keenly aroused. She had no other physical reticences. Indeed, her mode of dress and her carriage, might almost be described as provocative. But she would never permit me to apply my stethoscope to her back. By means of a trick, as I frankly confess, and which need not be described, I succeeded in obtaining a glimpse of her bare shoulders. She was unaware of this...”
He paused, looking from face to face. He was beginning to regain his naturally fresh color. He was beginning to realize that his beautiful patient had not been what she seemed.
“There were great weals on her delicate skin — healed, but the scars were still visible. At some time, and not so long ago, she had been lashed — mercilessly lashed.”
He clenched his fists, staring up at Nayland Smith.
The latter nodded, and resumed his restless promenade of the carpet; then:
“Do you understand, Sterling?” he snapped.
Sterling was up — his restlessness was feverish.
“I understand that Fah Lo Suee is dead — that she died alone, in that flat.”
“Dead!”
“Sir Denis!” Dr. Norton stood up. “I have been frank with you: be equally frank with me. Who was this woman?”
“I don’t know her real name,” Nayland Smith replied, “but she is known as Fah Lo Suee. She is the daughter of Dr. Fu-Manchu.”
“What?”
“And it was he, her father, who in exercising his parental prerogative left the scars to which you refer.”
“My God!” groaned Dr. Norton— “the fiend! — the merciless fiend! A delicate, tenderly nurtured woman! — and an ailing woman at that
!”
“Possibly,” snapped Nayland Smith. “Delicately nurtured — yes. I am anxious, doctor, to protect your professional reputation. Your certificate was given in good faith. There is no man on the Register who would not have done the same in the circumstances. Of this, I assure you. But—” he paused— “I must have a glimpse of the body of your late patient.”
“Why?”
“I think it can be arranged, sir,” growled Gallaho. “I put a few inquiries through this evening after Mr. Sterling phoned me at the Yard, and I found that the deceased lady has been buried in a family vault in the old part of the Catholic Cemetery.”
“That is correct,” Dr. Norton interrupted. “Her only surviving relative, a brother, Manoel Demuras, with whom she had requested the nurse to get into communication, came from Lisbon, as I understand, and the somewhat hurried funeral was due to his time being limited.”
“Can you describe this man?” snapped Nayland Smith.
“His ugliness was almost as noticeable as his sister’s beauty. The yellow streak was very marked.”
“You mean he might almost have passed for a Chinaman?”
“Not a Chinaman...” Dr. Norton stroked his mustache and stared up at the ceiling. “But perhaps a native of Burma — or at least, as I should picture a native of Burma to look.”
“There was Eastern blood of some sort in the Demurases,” growled Gallaho. “They settled in London nearly a century ago, and at one time had a very big business as importers of Madeira wine. The firm has been extinct for twenty years. But there’s a family vault in the old Catholic Cemetery, and that’s where the body lies.”
“I see.”
And thereupon Nayland Smith did a singular thing... Crossing the room, he jerked the curtain aside, and threw up the window!
All watched him in mute astonishment. Waves of fog crept in, like the tentacles of some shadowy octopus. He was staring down in the direction of the street. He turned, reclosed the window and readjusted the curtain.
“Forgive me, Doctor,” he said, smiling; and that rare smile, breaking through the grim mask, almost resembled the smile of an embarrassed schoolboy. “A liberty, I admit. But I had a sudden idea — and I was right.”
“What?” growled Gallaho, ceasing the chewing operation, and shooting out his jaw.
“We’ve been followed. Somebody is watching the house...”
CHAPTER EIGHT. FOG IN HIGH PLACES
That phenomenal fog was getting its grip upon London again when the party set out. But in the specially equipped car, fair headway was made. At the mysterious, deserted house of Professor Ambroso, Gallaho and Sterling were dropped. The detective had certain important inquiries to make there relative to the accessibility of the adjoining ground-floor flat from the studio of Pietro Ambroso. Nayland Smith went on alone.
He had established contact by telephone from Dr. Norton’s house with the man he was going to see. He knew this man, his lack of imagination, his oblique views of life. He knew that the task before him was no easy one. But he had attempted and achieved tasks that were harder.
The slow progress of the car was all but unendurable. Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably, peering out first from one window, then from another. In the brightly lighted West End streets better going was made, and at last the car pulled up before a gloomy, stone-porched house a few paces from Berkeley Square.
In a coldly forbidding library, a man sat behind a vast writing-table. Its appointments were frigidly correct. His white tie, for he was in evening dress, was a miracle of correctness. He did not stand up as Sir Denis was shown in by a butler whose proper occupation was that of an undertaker.
“Ah! Smith.” He nodded and pointed to an armchair. “Just in time.” He glanced at a large marble clock. “I have only five minutes.”
Nayland Smith’s nod was equally curt.
“Good evening, Sir Harold,” he returned, and sat down in the hard, leather-covered chair.
Sir Denis Nayland Smith’s relations with His Majesty’s Secretary for Home Affairs had never been cordial. Indeed it is doubtful if Sir Harold Sims, in the whole course of his life, had ever known either friendship or love. Nayland Smith, staring at the melancholy face with its habitual expression of shocked surprise, thought that Sir Harold’s scanty hair bore a certain resemblance to red tape chopped up. From a pocket of his tweed suit, Nayland Smith took out several documents, opened them, glanced at them, and then, standing up, placed them on the large, green blotting-pad before Sir Harold Sims.
“You know,” said the latter, adjusting a pair of spectacles, and glancing down at the papers, “your methods have always been too fantastic for me, Smith. I mean, they were when you were associated with the Criminal Investigation Department. This thing, which you are asking me to do, is irregular — wholly irregular.”
Nayland Smith returned to the armchair. A man of vision and dynamic energy, he always experienced, in the proximity of Sir Harold Sims, an all but unconquerable urge to pick up His Majesty’s Secretary and to shake him until his teeth rattled.
“There are times, Sir Harold,” he said, quietly, “when one can afford to dispense with formalities. In this case, your consent is necessary; hence my intrusion.”
“You know—” Sims was scanning the documents suspiciously— “this bugbear of yours, this obsession with the person known as Fu-Manchu, has created a lot of unpleasant feeling.”
This was no more than a statement of fact. Sir Denis’s retirement from the Metropolitan Police had coincided fairly closely with the appointment of Sir Harold to the portfolio which he still held.
“You may term it an obsession if you like — perhaps it is. But you are fully aware, Sir Harold, of the extent of my authority. I am not alone in this obsession. The most dangerous man living in the world today is here, in England, and likely to slip through our fingers. Any delay is dangerous.” Sir Harold nodded, setting one document aside and beginning to read another.
“I shall be bothered by the Roman Catholic authorities,” he murmured; “you know how troublesome they can be. If you could give me two or three days, in order that the matter might be regularized...”
“It is tonight, or never,” snapped Nayland Smith, suddenly standing up.
“Really...”
Sir Harold began to shake his head again.
“It is perhaps unfair of me to remind you that I can bring pressure to bear.”
Sir Harold looked up.
“You are not suggesting that you would bother the Prime Minister with this trivial but complicated affair?” he asked pathetically.
“I am suggesting nothing. I only ask for your signature. I should not be here if the matter were as trivial as you suppose.”
“Really — really, Smith...”
The light-blue eyes peering through spectacle lens were caught and arrested by the gaze of eyes deep-set, steely and penetrating. Sir Harold hated this man’s driving power — hated his hectoring manner, the force of a personality which brooked no denial...
Five minutes later the police car was stealing through a mist, yellow, stifling, which closed in remorselessly, throttling London.
CHAPTER NINE. THE TOMB OF THE DEMURASES
“You are sure there is no other means of access to the cemetery?”
“Quite, sir.”
The quavering voice of the old attendant was in harmony with his venerable but wretched appearance. He seemed to belong to the clammy mist; to the phantom monuments which peered through it. He might have been an exhalation from one of the ancient tombs. His straggling gray beard, his watery, nearly sightless eyes, his rusty black garb. A mental vision of Fleurette appeared before Alan Sterling — young, tall, divinely vigorous, an exquisite figure of health and beauty; yet perhaps she lay here, stricken down inscrutably in the bloom and fullness of spring, whilst such shadowy, unhappy beings as this old mortuary keeper survived, sadly watching each fallen bud returning to earth, our common mother, who gives us life, in whose arms we sleep.<
br />
“I’ve got men at both gates, sir,” Gallaho growled, “and two more patrolling. Anybody suspicious, they have orders to hold. A rather queer thing has been reported: may have no bearing on the case, but—”
“What?” Nayland Smith asked.
“A small head-stone has been stolen!”
“A small head-stone?”
“Yes, Sir Denis. From a child’s grave. Seems a useless sort of theft, doesn’t it?”
“Possibly not!” he snapped. “I’m glad you mentioned this, Inspector.”
He nodded to the old man.
A dim light shone out from the door of the lodge. It was difficult to imagine the domestic life of this strange creature whose home was amongst sepulchres; all but impossible to believe that he knew anything of human happiness; that joy had ever visited that ghastly habitation.
“Mr. Roberts?”
A young man wearing a dark, waisted overcoat and a muffler conceived in Eton colors, stepped languidly forward out of veiling mists. He wore a soft black hat of most fashionable shape; his small, aristocratic features registered intense boredom. From a pocket of his overcoat he produced a number of documents, and handed them to the old man, gingerly, as if offering a fish to a seal.
“Everything is in order,” he said; “you need not trouble to look them over.”
“There’s no need to waste time,” growled Gallaho. “Let’s have the key.” He raised his voice. “Dorchester!” he shouted.
A uniformed constable appeared, carrying a leather bag, as:
“I suppose it’s all right,” quivered the old mortuary keeper, looking down blindly at the papers in his hand. “But I shall have to enter it all up, you know.”
“You can do that while we’re on the job,” said Gallaho. “The keys.”
When, presently, led by a constable carrying a red lantern they proceeded in silence along a narrow path around which ghostly monuments clustered, it might have been noted, save that the light was poor, that Mr. Roberts, Sir Harold Sims’ representative, looked unusually pale. To the left they turned, along another avenue of tombs, and then to the right again, presently penetrating to the oldest part of the cemetery. Gray and awesome, fronted by sentinel cypress trees, ill-nourished and drooping, a building resembling a small chapel loomed out of the fog. There was a little grassy forecourt fronted by iron railings, and a stained glass window right and left of a massive teak door intricately studded with iron nails. A constable in plain clothes was standing there.