Silver ran up to us and his voice was pitched like the screech of unoiled brakes. “Professor Stubbs, will you come and look at Ian? I think he’s dead!”
Chapter 4
Slithy Tove
UNCLE JOHN polished his glasses on his sleeve and looked at Silver, who was quivering like a greyhound after a hard race, and snorted violently. Silver looked as though he was going to burst into tears and my uncle thumped him on the shoulder, a blow that nearly knocked him to his knees, grumbling, “Pull yourself together, man. Where is he? In the blood-groupin’ demonstration room? Come on, Andrew.”
He stumped along the corridor, his feet thumping bluntly on the stone floor, while ours merely clicked. We did not encounter anyone. The door of the demonstration room was ajar. And my uncle pushed it wider.
We paused on the threshold. Beside the tasting-table the body of Dr. Ian Porter lay spread out, his arms and legs splayed so that he looked rather like a St. Andrew’s Cross, with his body as a fungoid growth at the crossing of the arms. Uncle John settled his glasses more firmly on his nose and strode into the room, his nostrils dilated like those of a racehorse. He sniffed violently and then snorted as he turned to us, “Stay where you are. I’ll see to this.”
Dropping on one knee beside Porter, he placed his fingers on the pulse of the right wrist, and shook his head slowly, the tangle of grey hair falling over his forehead. Then he stood up and sniffed again. He looked at the little glasses of liquid on the table and leaned over them without touching. As if someone had hit him he straightened up abruptly and turned toward us. “Come a bit nearer,” he ordered, and we approached him. “That’s far enough. Smell anythin’?”
The sickly smell with which all readers of detective stories are familiar hung around the neighbourhood of Porter’s body. “Prussic acid?” I ventured. “Umhum,” rumbled my uncle, “cyanide. Well, there’s not much we can do. You, Andrew, run and ring up the police. Silver and I will keep watch to see that no one comes in here.”
I ran along the corridors until I reached the janitor’s cubbyhole beside the front door. It was empty but I pushed the door open and, seeing it was not a dial telephone, picked up the receiver and, when answered, asked the operator to put me through to the police. “Hullo,” I said, “I am speaking from the university, where there’s a Congress of Geneticists. One of the members has just been found dead in a demonstration room and there’s a terrible smell of prussic acid in the room.” The voice at the other end did not express the least surprise but merely replied, “I will send someone along at once. Don’t let anyone go into the room. What is your name, sir?”
“Mr. Andrew Blake.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The line went dead and I left the janitor’s little office and returned to the demonstration room. Silver stood at the door and my uncle John was beside Porter’s body. He looked down at a sheet of paper on the floor beside which lay a pencil with a broken point. The paper was one of Dr. Swartz’s forms with the different columns for different tastes. It was filled in down to number fourteen—halfway down. “Harrumph,” snorted Uncle John, “the poor devil was amusin’ himself by tastin’ but he hadn’t time to write down the taste of number fifteen, for, if I’m not mistaken, it’s a glassful of cyanide. It’s funny, though. I wonder why he didn’t smell it. I’m sure I’d have thought there was something wrong if I’d smelled that. But then, of course, I use the stuff for sprayin’ fruit trees and I’m also a reader of detective stories.”
He seemed to be talking to himself. I delivered my message about allowing no one into the room and he moved toward the door. He took his short pipe out of one pocket and a piece of thick brown twist and a penknife out of the other. He appeared to be thinking deeply as he stuck the empty pipe in his mouth and shredded the tobacco into the palm of his hand. He clicked the knife shut and rubbed the brown curls between his palms. Taking the pipe from his mouth he tilted the tobacco into it, cleaning out the crevices between the fingers of his left hand with his right forefinger. He lighted his pipe and sucked strongly. He did not say anything. I knew that he was wondering whether this was going to be a difficult murder to solve and whether he could solve it. He was already seeing himself as the great detective.
All this time Silver had said nothing, but had remained at the door trembling. Suddenly he started to speak quickly, and his voice was like the sound of nutmegs being grated. “I left him here at a quarter-past one and went down to my hotel to get some notes for my paper this afternoon. When I got back I found him lying there, like that, dead.” He ran a finger round inside his collar. “It’s very hot in here, isn’t it?” He suddenly put his hand up to his forehead and started to sob violently, a dry metallic throbbing.
Uncle John took out his watch, an enormous silver turnip that nearly filled the palm of his hand. “It’s just three minutes to two now,” he observed, paying no attention to Silver, “and we left the common room at about eighteen minutes to. Well, say it took the same time for us to get over here as it took for Silver to examine Porter, it would seem that he found him somewhere about twenty to two.”
There were steps in the corridor and we turned to see the janitor approaching, followed by about half a dozen men. His face was shocked as he said, “Is one of you gentlemen Mr. Blake? Did you ring up for the police?” I assured him that I had indeed telephoned the police and his face cleared a little; anything, I could see, was better than that he should be the victim of a practical joker.
A youngish man, in a neat grey suit, came forward. “Mr. Blake,” he asked and again I admitted my identity, “I’m Inspector Hargrave. I got your message and came straight up. Would you introduce me to these gentlemen, please?” I introduced my uncle and Professor Silver.
The inspector acknowledged the introductions politely and then went on into the demonstration room, followed by his men, who carried their truck and gear in large leather cases. The inspector looked at Porter’s body and then at the glasses on the table. Just as my uncle had done he jerked back when his head came above number fifteen. His men were setting up cameras on tripods and looking round the room. The inspector looked at his watch and then toward the door.
At that moment the janitor came down the passage followed by a little man in a black suit carrying a black bag. Carefully averting his eyes from the body on the floor, the janitor looked straight at Inspector Hargrave and announced, in a voice as hollow as an echo, “Dr. Flanagan for you, Inspector.” The little doctor pushed past us, his eyes fixed on the corpse, but my uncle John reached out and grabbed his shoulder, swinging him round, and boomed, “Well, Joe Flanagan, you’re lookin’ well.”
The doctor stared at him and exclaimed, “John Stubbs, by all that’s wonderful. It must be twenty years since I saw you and I didn’t expect to find you mixed up in sudden death. I thought that your line was vegetable, slow growing and slow dying.” He laughed and his laughter sounded as though someone had pulled out the wrong stop on a church organ. Silver shuddered at the sound of the laughter and the doctor looked at him and straightened his face, remarking, “Once I’ve finished with this business, John, we must have a drink together for old times’ sake.”
He bustled over to the body and looked up at Inspector Hargrave, who said, “It’s all right, Doctor, you can go ahead. We’ve finished for the present.” The doctor bent down and rolled Porter over, revealing a broken dropper under his neck and a teaspoon. One of the policemen shovelled the fragments upon a piece of paper and laid them on the table. The doctor bent over and put his nose toward Porter’s mouth. “Ach,” he said, and straightened his head; he lifted the eyelids and looked at the eyes closely.
At that moment there was a disturbance in the passage. The noise-makers were Dr. Swartz, Mary and Peter, and the young man and girl whose names I did not know. “Well, well, and what’s the matter here,” said Dr. Swartz, and then he saw the body, twisted about like a half-filled sack of potatoes. He removed his corn-cob and whistled slowly between his teeth, “So he
’s got it at last. Well, he’s been asking for it the last fifteen years to my certain knowledge.”
I noticed that the inspector was listening intently and trod heavily on the lank American’s foot. He put his pipe back in his mouth and rolled it to one side. “I suppose this means that my demonstration is off for today,” he observed ruefully. “Well, that’s a dam’ nuisance.”
Neither Mary nor Peter had said anything. Peter looked at me and said, “Well, this is none of my business so I suppose I’ll be getting along.” The inspector interrupted him, “Just a moment, sir, if you please. I’m afraid I’ll need to ask you all a few questions first. Jenkins,” he turned to one of his men, “just run along and ask the janitor if I can have the use of two unoccupied rooms.”
We stood in silence until the detective reappeared, followed slowly by the janitor. The inspector spoke to him in an undertone and then turned to us, “Will you ladies and gentlemen please follow me? I’m sorry to disturb you like this, but I have my duty to do, you know.”
Like one of those crocodiles in which schoolgirls enjoy their ration of fresh air, we followed him. First came my uncle and Professor Silver, then Dr. Swartz and myself, his assistants, and Mary and Peter. One of the detectives walked at the tail of this procession, as if to see that none of us evaporated on the journey.
The janitor inserted a Yale-key into a lock and opened a door. We found ourselves in another corridor, with a large room at the far end, an office on the left-hand side and a laboratory on the right. These were the Director of Chemistry’s private offices. Inspector Hargrave looked into the large room and then into the office. “Well,” he said, “I think you’d better wait here and I’ll go into the office and Detective Jenkins will tell you when I want you.” He looked at us and asked, “Which of you gentlemen was it found the body?”
The shivering Silver quaked a little more to indicate that he was the discoverer of the unpleasant treasure trove. The inspector looked at him sympathetically, saying, “Will you come with me, sir? You look as though this had been a shock. Would you like a drink?”
Silver nodded his head weakly and his lock of hair bobbed slowly up and down. Inspector Hargrave nodded to the man who had brought up the tail of our procession and he disappeared, returning in a few minutes with a glass half-full of brandy and water, which he handed to Silver, who drank it off straight.
We were alone in the room but the detective, Jenkins, stood at the door, silent as a ghost but just as effective in preventing conversation about the subject which was uppermost in all our minds. My uncle John, like a shaggy old Highland bull, lumbered about the room, pulling books out of the shelves, flipping the pages over in an absent-minded way and then replacing them. As he usually replaced them upside down I followed him slowly and corrected this.
No one said anything and it was a relief when we heard Inspector Hargrave call to Jenkins, “Please ask Professor Stubbs to come along now.”
My uncle ruffled his hair, put another match to his pipe, and left the room surrounded by clouds of smoke, leaving me with the impression that I had just seen Elijah wafted up to heaven and that I, the earnest disciple, was waiting for his cloak to fall upon my shoulders.
Mary and Peter were whispering in a corner and the young man and the girl were seated one at each end of the couch, in strict propriety, with their eyes fixed straight ahead of each of them. Dr. Swartz seemed to be engaged in some mathematical problem, for he was covering the backs of envelopes with small neat figures and then crossing them out, while his empty corn-cob rose and fell between his eyes and his chin, metronomic in its regularity.
Occupying the bottom row of one of the bookcases I saw a morocco-bound set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I went across and took out the volume containing cyanide. Unfortunately I could not understand that and, as there was a cross reference to prussic acid, I exchanged the volumes. This article was very nearly as obscure from my point of view, but I managed to extract from it the information that prussic acid was a highly volatile liquid, an extremely fast poison and one that was very simply prepared. I thought that, if the materials had been in the various bottles which I saw in the lab when I had written up my notes, I would have been able to make it myself. The instructions appeared to be simple enough for a child; even one less intelligent than Macaulay’s proverbial schoolboy.
I was digesting this entrancing information which I had just begun to swallow when Jenkins popped his head into the room. “Will you come this way, Mr. Blake, please?” I put the Encyclopaedia carefully back into its place and followed the detective. There was a hollow feeling in my stomach which reminded me horribly of walking along a passage to the headmaster’s study, knowing that I would receive first an unpleasant lecture and then a beating.
Inspector Hargrave was seated behind a desk, with his back to the window. He motioned me to a chair opposite. At one end of the desk, looking very cramped, a young detective sat entrenched behind a reporter’s notebook.
“Mr. Blake,” the inspector said, “I am sorry to have inconvenienced you in this way, but you must understand that it is my duty to investigate the circumstances of Dr. Porter’s death. I gather from your uncle, Professor Stubbs, that you are not a scientist, and I think I would probably find it useful if you could give me your impressions of the late Dr. Porter and also any facts that you know about his death. That is, I would like you to tell me when you last saw him alive and any other details you can remember.”
I told him that I did not know Porter well, having only met him the previous day, but that I had not felt attracted by what I had seen of him. I was congratulating myself upon my skill in avoiding any mention of the dance when Inspector Hargrave held up his hand. “Just a moment, Mr. Blake,” he said smoothly, “just a moment. I understand that you had a—well, let’s call it a disagreement, with Dr. Porter last night. Is that correct?”
“No,” I replied firmly, determined that I was not going to get mixed up in any murder if I could help it. “What happened was that Dr. Porter, who was extremely drunk, was fooling about and I tapped him playfully and he passed-out.”
The inspector nodded wisely, but I felt that he did not believe me. “Go on, Mr. Blake,” he urged gently, “tell me what you know of the events of this morning.”
Feeling that it would not improve my situation if I slurred over anything else, I gave him as full an account of the morning as I could manage, including all sorts of details which had nothing to do with my actions, hoping vaguely that I was boring him as a recompense for his unbelieving look. When I mentioned Porter’s visit to the blood-grouping room he again held up his hand. “Half a minute, Mr. Blake, who was present in the room when Dr. Porter announced his intention of working there at lunchtime?”
I thought for a moment and replied, “Dr. Swartz, his two assistants, Dr. Hatton, Miss Lewis and myself.” He looked across to the shorthand writer and said, “Got that?” The writer nodded briskly and held his pencil poised ready to take down the next thing I said.
The rest of my story did not take long. I said nothing about Peter’s flurried look when we had encountered him running after Mary, thinking that he probably would prefer to give his own account of how he had spent the morning and that there was no point in sowing unnecessary suspicion in Inspector Hargrave’s too receptive mind.
I thought I had finished, when the inspector beckoned with his hand, a gesture to me to remain seated. “I suppose, Mr. Blake,” he said, “it’s just a matter of form—but you have someone who can vouch for the fact that you were in the deserted laboratory from about a quarter to one until half-past?”
“Of course not,” I retorted, irritated, “haven’t I just said that I went there in order to be alone. I don’t call it being alone if I take along half a dozen witnesses to vouch for my actions.” The inspector smiled. “That’s all right,” he said, “I just have to ask. I have to work to a routine and if I don’t ask questions like that those higher up come down on me like a load of bricks for writing i
ncomplete reports. I think that is all I want from you at present. Thank you very much, Mr. Blake, you have been very long-suffering.”
I felt that I had perhaps spoken a trifle rudely so I did my best to look apologetic, and murmured something about being only too pleased if I had been of any use. Inspector Hargrave smiled and said, “That is very kind of you. I wonder whether you could go to the demonstration room and get one of my men and show him the laboratory where you sat to write out your notes? Thank you.”
Outside in the corridors there were one or two small groups hanging about, and I heard the name Porter mentioned once or twice as I brushed past them, ignoring the curious glances that were cast at me. I remembered, with a wistful vagueness that, in spite of flood, battle and sudden death, I was a journalist. So I phoned the local office of the rag and gave them as much of the lowdown as I could, considering that I knew nothing low about the case and was as far from a showdown as the inspector.
A uniformed policeman stood outside the door of the demonstration room. I told him that I had a message from Inspector Hargrave. He opened the door a couple of inches, standing in front of the crack so that I could not see inside, and said hoarsely, “Message from the inspector.” A stout sergeant, in a shiny blue serge suit, came out and I told him that Inspector Hargrave had asked me to take him along to the lab. to show him where I had been working.
Swinging his arms in a military manner, the sergeant followed me along the corridors until we arrived at the door of the lab. I threw open the door and walked over to the place where I had seated myself that morning, flanked by the Bunsen burners. I looked round the room and thought that I had not realised its size during the time I had been working there. At the far end of the room, beside a white porcelain sink, there was a mass of glass tubing and retorts and several wide-mouthed bottles with glass stoppers, and tall ones with narrow necks.
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