The documents in the case

I asked him why he was so anxious to tell me all this.

“To tell your pal Harrison,” he snapped back. “He seems blasted anxious to stick his nose into my concerns. Tell him to keep out of it. I don’t like the swine.”

“I don’t see,” I said, “why you should work yourself up into this extraordinary state of mind because a man has made a few ordinary inquiries about his father. Unless, of course, you have anything special to hide.”

This seem to sober him down. He pulled his face into something more nearly resembling amiability and then suddenly began to laugh.

“I’m sorry. I lost my temper rather. Anything to hide? Good God, no—except that I’m sorry Harrison has got on to—that business with Margaret, you know. She must have let something out, accidentally. But I’ll swear the old man never knew a word about it. Not a damn thing. He was as right as rain—best of pals, and all that. But I don’t like that pup of his.”

I put down the pen with which I had been fidgeting all this time, got up and went and stood by him on the hearth-rug.

“Lathom,” I said, “why did you come here?”

He looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was on the point of getting something off his chest. I had a horrible fear of what it might be. If he had spoken, I really do not know what I should have said or done. I might—I don’t know. I was really quite horribly frightened.

But nothing came of it. He shifted his gaze and said, in a curious, embarrassed way:

“I’ve told you. I wanted to know what you’d done with Harrison—to find out how the matter stood. Afraid it’s been awkward for you. I didn’t quite realise. It can’t be helped. He’d have to know sometime, anyhow. I’d better be going.”

He held out his hand. In the state things were in, I could not take it. Either I was being a perfect Judas Iscariot, in which case I hadn’t the face to give him my hand, or else he was, in which case I felt I would rather be excused. It was all so involved that at the moment I was completely incapable of deciding anything.

“Oh!” he said. “I’ve said one or two things, haven’t I? All right. Sulk about it if you like. I’m damned if I care.”

He slammed out. After a moment I went after him. “Lathom!” I called.

I don’t know what I meant to say to him. The only answer was the hang of the outer door.

Honestly, Harrison, I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know whether I’ve been a skunk or a moral citizen. I don’t know whether I’ve warned a guilty man, or betrayed an innocent one, or the other way round. But I’m feeling like hell about it, because—well, frankly, because I cannot believe that an innocent man would have such a watertight alibi.

It’s perfectly obvious he came here to ram the alibi down my throat. But it is an alibi. I’m enclosing the paper with the names and addresses he wrote down so pat. You can investigate it all, if you like, but it’s certain to be sound. He knew it. He was perfectly confident. Besides——

Anyway, I won’t touch it. It makes me sick.

I’ve finished that statement, by the way. Here it is. I hope to God the whole thing comes to nothing and I never hear of it again. I ask you, as a favour, to leave me out of it if you can.

Yours very truly,

J. Munting

51. Statement of Paul Harrison [Continued]

Disregarding the hysterical tone of his last few sentences, I felt that on the whole Munting was right, and had behaved with more discretion and public spirit than I had credited him with.

It was obvious to me that Lathom was losing his nerve. As to his guilt, I had by now no shadow of a doubt. The blatant way in which he had marked his trail, right up from Manaton to London and back again, and his determination to let Munting know all about it, were actions entirely inconsistent with the carelessness of an innocent man. The trouble was that he was now on the alert. At any minute he might take alarm and bolt. On this account, I decided to waste no valuable time in checking his alibi. The fact that he had produced it with such confidence left me no hope of breaking it down; moreover, some of the inquiries were of a sort that could only be made satisfactorily by the police.

It was evident that I must abandon the whole idea of a return to Manaton. Only one possibility was left, namely, that the poison had been left in such a place that my father was bound to add it to the dish of fungi himself; and that this manœuvre had been carried out before Lathom left for London.

I knew that all the foodstuffs in “The Shack” had been carefully analysed and found harmless, with the exception of the half-eaten dish of fungi itself. I was, therefore, forced to conclude that the poison had been added to the beef-stock in which the fungi were stewed. Anything else would be dangerous, for the presence of muscarine in, say, the salt or the coffee would be a circumstance so suspicious as to impress even the coroner’s jury.

There was nothing difficult about this. The stock would have been prepared from Monday’s delivery of shin of beef. It was my father’s habit always to keep a pan of stock simmering on the hob. By Thursday morning there would probably be just sufficient left to cook his evening meal, after which he would boil up the new supply of shin for the rest of the week.

Now, in what form would the poison have been added? Not in the solid form, for my father would have noticed the presence of fungi in his stock. But a teacupful of poisonous liquid might easily have been poured in at any moment. I was, therefore, brought back to my previous idea that Lathom had managed to procure the Amanita muscaria and decoct the poison during my father’s absence from the hut.

But how I was ever to prove this, I did not know. I had plenty of evidence of motive and opportunity, but nothing that could put the crime beyond any reasonable doubt in the minds of twelve good and true jury-members. And besides, I was by no means satisfied of Lathom’s ability to identify Amanita muscaria with certainty. Was there no easier and more reliable method by which he might have obtained the stuff? Was it possible, for instance, to buy muscarine? If so, and if one could trace the sale to Lathom, there would be genuine evidence of criminal intent. For what innocent reason could an artist require muscarine?

The difficulties of the thing stared me in the face. Even if muscarine was procurable commercially (which I thought very unlikely, for, so far as I know, it has no medicinal use), it was impossible for me, as a private individual, to broadcast an investigation among all the chemists in the country. Only the police could do that, and I could not set the police to work without producing the very evidence which was the object of the search. There were not only chemists—there were all the research laboratories too. The thing seemed hopeless.

At this point the word “laboratories” struck a chord in my mind. Had not there been something in the Munting correspondence about a laboratory?

I had not paid much attention to the passage when I first read it, because my mind had been taken up with the idea of Lathom’s having gathered the fungus on the spot. And, indeed, the facts had been so buried in a lot of vague twaddle about the origin of life and other futile Muntingesque speculations that I had skimmed the pages over in disgust, but when I turned back to the letter I cursed myself for not having given it fuller consideration before.

Two facts emerged very clearly from the welter of surrounding nonsense:

Here at last was something definite. Supposing that a bottle of muscarine had by any chance formed part of the collection, what was easier than for Lathom to have helped himself to it?

I did not know whether it was possible for an outside person to penetrate the laboratories of St. Anthony’s College unchallenged, but this I could easily find out by the simple process of going there. Probably I should only have to ask to see some doctor or student. Lathom, for instance, could have asked to see this man Leader, whom he already knew. Leader might very well be able to give us some help in the matter. Munting was my point of contact with Leader, and the next step was obviously to go round and get a note of introduction.

Munting, of course, showed great unwillingness to interfere in the matter. His interview with Lathom seemed to have upset him badly. At length, however, I persuaded him that he had a duty in the matter.

“If you refuse to help me,” I said, “and I am able to prove the murder, you will be something very like an accessory after the fact.”

Mrs. Munting, who, in practical common sense, is worth ten of her husband, agreed with this point of view.

“It would be very unpleasant if you got into trouble about it, Jack. I do think if Mr. Lathom really has done this dreadful thing, you oughtn’t to stand in the way of getting it found out. A man like that is very dangerous. And they say that when a poisoner has once committed a murder and got away with it, he is very likely to try it again. It might be you or young Mr. Harrison next time.”

“Do you really think so?” he muttered, unhappily.

“I do. And oh, Jack! Do think of the awful cruelty of letting that poor man die such a painful, lingering death, all alone in that place, without a soul to come near him. Anyone who could do that would be an absolute monster. I don’t care what excuse he had.”

“That’s been haunting me,” said Munting—and he did look very white and ill. “All right, Harrison. I’ll see it through. Look here, I’ll come along to the place with you.”

We walked in complete silence till we came to St. Anthony’s. There were numbers of people passing in and out through the wide entrance, and nobody took the slightest notice of us.

“I think the labs. are up this staircase,” said Munting, leading the way. “And here’s where we hang up the hats and coats,” he added, rattling his umbrella into a hat-stand placed inside the heavy swinging door.

“Is that usual?” I inquired.

“We did it last time,” said Munting, “I remember it distinctly. And as the idea is to see whether it’s feasible to roam unchallenged about the place, we may as well look as much like the inhabitants as possible. If Lathom did come here poison-hunting, he’d scarcely have omitted that precaution.”

Having thus shed the outward insignia of visitors, we found ourselves in a wide corridor, smelling faintly of chemists’ shops, with numbered doors on either side. A few men in white overalls passed us, but took no notice of us. We walked briskly, as though with a definite objective, and, selecting at random a door near the end of the corridor, pushed it boldly open.

A big room, full of sinks and tables and well-lit by large windows, presented itself to our view. A student sat at a bench near us with his back to the door. He was boiling something in a complicated apparatus of glass tubes over a Bunsen burner. He did not look up. Over by the window four men were gathered round some sort of experiment, which apparently absorbed all their attention. A sixth man, mounted on a pair of steps, was searching for something in a cupboard. He glanced round as we entered, but, seeing that we did not look likely to assist him in finding what he wanted, ignored us, and, coming down, went up to the student with the apparatus.

“What’s become of the . . . ?” (something I didn’t catch) he asked irritably.

“How should I know?” demanded the other, who was pouring some liquid into a funnel and seemed annoyed at the interruption. “Ask Griggs.”

We backed out again, unregarded, and tried another door. Here we found a small room, with a solitary, elderly man bending over a microscope. He removed his eye from the lens and looked round with a scowl. We begged his pardon and retired. Before we had closed the door, his head was back at the eyepiece again, while his right hand, which had never stopped writing, continued to take notes.

We intruded, with equal ease and equally unchallenged, into a lecture-room, where forty or fifty students were gathered round a demonstrator at a blackboard; into two more laboratories, one empty and the other containing two absorbed men and a dead rabbit, and finally into yet a fourth laboratory, where a dozen or so students were laughing and talking and seemed to be waiting for somebody.

One of these, having nothing particular to do, came forward and asked if we wanted anybody in particular. Munting replied that he was looking for Mr. Leader.

“Leader?” said the student. “Let me see. He’s a second-year man, isn’t he? Where’s Leader, anybody know?”

A young man in spectacles said he fancied Leader was in Room 27.

“Oh, yes, to be sure. Try 27—along the corridor on the right, up the steps and the second door on the left. If he’s not there, I expect they’ll be able to tell you. Not at all, pleasure.”

We found our way to Room 27, and there, among a group of students, found Leader, who greeted Munting with loud demonstrations of joy. I was introduced, and explained that I was anxious for a little information, if he could spare the time.

He led us to a quiet corner, and Munting reminded him of his previous visit with Lathom and the conversation about synthetic poisons. He was only too delighted to assist us, and led us along at once to another room, inhabited only by the usual couple of absorbed men in a far corner, who took no notice of us.

“Here you are,” said Leader, cheerfully, displaying an open cupboard, stacked with glass bottles. “Convincing demonstration of the way we’ve got Mother Nature beat. Synthetic thyroxin—some stuff you produce in your own throat, handy and available without the tedious formality of opening you up. A small daily dose gives you pep. Camphor, our own brand, cures cold and kills beetles. Take a sniff and admire the fine, rich, natural aroma. Cinchona, all my own work, or, strictly speaking, Professor Benton’s. Adrenalin—that’s the stuff to make your hair stand on end; full of kidney punch. Muscarine—not so pretty as scarlet toadstools, but just as good for giving you tummy-ache. Urea——”

“That’s very interesting, isn’t it?” said Munting.

“Very,” said I. My hand shook a little as I took the bottle from Leader. It was a squat, wide-mouthed glass jar, about half-full of a whitish powder, and clearly labelled “Muscarine (Synthetic) C₅H₁₅NO₃.”

“It’s rather deadly, I suppose,” I added, with as much carelessness as I could assume.

“Fairly so,” said Leader. “Not quite as powerful as the natural stuff, I believe, but quite disagreeable enough. A teaspoonful would settle your hash all right, and leave a bit over for the dog. Nice symptoms. Sickness, blindness, delirium and convulsions.” He grinned fondly at the bottle. “Like to try some? Take it in a little water and the income-tax won’t bother you again.”

“What’s it made of, Leader?” asked Munting.

“Oh—inorganic stuff, you know—all artificial. I couldn’t say offhand. I can look it up if you like.” He hunted in a locker and produced a notebook. “Oh, yes, of course. Cholin. You start with artificial cholin.”

“What’s that? Something to do with the liver?”

“Well, yes, in the ordinary way. But you can make it by heating ethene oxide with triethylamine. That gives you your cholin. Then you oxidise it with dilute nitric acid—the stuff you etch with, you know. Result, muscarine. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“And if you analyse it again chemically, could you tell the difference between that and the real stuff?”

“Of course not. It is the real stuff. I don’t think we’ve got any of the natural muscarine about the place, or you’d see. But there’s no difference at all, really. Nature’s only a rather clumsy kind of chemist, don’t you see. You’re a chemical laboratory; your body, I mean—so am I—so’s everybody—only rather a careless and inaccurate one, and given to producing unnecessary flourishes and ornaments, like your face, or toadstools. There’s no need to make a toadstool when you want to produce muscarine. If it comes to that, I don’t suppose there’s any real need for your face—from a chemical point of view. We could build you up quite easily in the labs, if we wanted to. You’re mostly water, you know, with a little salt and phosphates and all that kind of thing.”

“Come, Leader, that won’t quite do. You couldn’t make me walk and talk, could you?” (This was Munting, of course.)

“Well, no. There’s a trifling hitch there, I admit—always supposing anybody wants to hear your bright conversation.”

“Then there is something—what I call Life—which you can’t imitate.”

“Well, yes. But I daresay we shall find it some day. It can’t be anything very out-of-the-way, can it? I mean, there’s an awful lot of it knocking about. The trouble is, one doesn’t seem to be able to find it by chemical analysis. If one could, you know, it would probably turn out to be something quite ordinary, and then one could make it.”

“The lost formula of Rossum’s Universal Robots, eh?”

“Very likely,” said Leader, “that’s a play, isn’t it? I never go to high-brow plays. All rot, you know—more in your line. But there it is. Analyse you and you’re just so much dead matter. Analyse toadstools, and you get this muscarine stuff. Makes one think a bit less of the marvels of Nature, don’t it?”

“Except,” said Munting, who had by now mounted on his usual hobby-horse, “except for the small accident of Life, which is, as you say, a triviality, no doubt, but yet——”

I interrupted him.

“We don’t want to waste Mr. Leader’s time with metaphysics.”

“No,” said Munting, obstinately, “but what I want to know——”

A tremendous clattering of feet in the corridor heralded the throwing open of the door and the irruption of a large number of young men in overalls.

“Oh, Lord,” said Leader, “we’ll have to clear out.” He looked at his watch. “I say, do you mind if I barge off? There’s a demonstration I’ve simply got to attend. Nuisance, but I’m rather behindhand with Dimmock’s subjects. Must mug it up somehow. Awfully pleased to have seen you. Can you find your way out?”

“Just a moment,” said Munting. “You remember the fellow I brought with me last year—Lathom—the artist?”

“Yes, of course—the fellow who was so keen on poisons. Asked such a lot of questions about the right dose, and was so struck with our synthetic stuff. Didn’t seem able to get over the fact that you couldn’t distinguish artificial muscarine from the natural product by chemical analysis. Very intelligent bloke I thought he was—for an artist. I remember him perfectly. Why?”

“Have you seen anything of him since?”

“No. Why?”

“I just wondered. He said something once about looking you up.”

“Well, he didn’t. Perhaps he came in the vac. There’s nobody here then, except the swots and the dunces trying to cram themselves for the exams. Tell him to come in term-time. I really must buzz along. I say, come and feed one night, won’t you?”

Munting promised to do so, and Leader escaped, cannoning violently into the demonstrator as he dashed out. We followed, not wishing to be caught and interrogated.

“That was Benton,” said Munting, looking back at the closing door. “I wish we could have had a word with him. If Leader——”

“About the origin of life, I suppose? You’re cracked about the origin of life. It’s the origin of death we’re investigating. We’ve got what we came for. It’s clear enough that anybody might have walked in and helped himself to a dose of that stuff. Look at those places we went into. No one to stop us—and it’s term-time, too. In the vac. the place is absolutely deserted. If Lathom was over here in the vac.—and he was. Don’t you remember those letters of Margaret Harrison’s? He was here in July.”

“Yes,” agreed Munting, thoughtfully. “Yes, I quite see that. But the difficulty is to prove it. Just because it’s so easy to get in, it’s a million to one against anybody having noticed you. And you can’t expect a jury to accept a vague possibility like that. If there was any analysable difference between natural and synthetic muscarine, then, of course, you would have something genuine to go upon. Because it would be quite impossible to eat synthetic muscarine by accident—except in a laboratory. But apparently there is no difference.”

This sobered me. I had been feeling that we were well on the way to solve the problem. But now I saw very clearly that we were just as far away as ever. No jury in the world would accept this involved and unsubstantiated theory. True, people are ready enough to believe that an adulterer is very likely a murderer as well. But if it comes to the question of probability, which will they rather believe? That a man elaborately stole a rare and incomprehensible laboratory product which none of them have ever heard of, and elaborately administered it under involved and peculiar circumstances? Or that an eccentric experimenter with “unnatural” foods accidentally poisoned himself with toadstools? The answer is obvious.

Moreover, to obtain a conviction, there must be no doubt possible. The murder theory must be overwhelmingly more likely than the accident theory. Judges are careful to point this out.

I was as certain that Lathom had poisoned my father with synthetic muscarine as that I was alive. But I began to be equally certain that Lathom had hit upon a method of murder that was utterly and completely proof against proof.

52. Statement of John Munting

[Additional and concluding portion.]

This damned business of Lathom’s.

People write books about murders, and the nice young men and women in them enjoy the job of detecting. It is a good game and I like reading the books. But the emotions of the nice young people are so well-regulated, or so perfunctory, or something. They don’t feel like worms and get put off their dinners when they have succeeded in squeezing a damaging admission out of a friend. They don’t seem to suffer from fits of retching terror for fear they should find out something definite. Nor, while struggling with these complicated miseries, do they ever have to fulfil contracts with publishers. Sometimes they are filled with a stern sorrow—a nice, Brutus-like sentiment. I envy their nerves.

My nerves went back on me about the time of our visit to St. Anthony’s. I took a kind of hysterical pleasure in pointing out that we had no proof of the murder. I didn’t want proof. I didn’t want to know. It was like writing one of those horrible letters which call for a decisive answer one way or another. You post it and wait, and you know that one morning you will see your correspondent’s handwriting on an envelope, and feel as hollow as a piece of bamboo. And you wait. Nothing comes. And after a time you say, “It’s been lost in the post. Now I need not know. Not now, at any rate. I can still pretend that it’s all right. Nothing will happen to-day. I can eat my dinner and listen to the wireless—and perhaps it will go on like that for ever.”

The answer to the Lathom problem seemed to have been lost in the post. We did not talk about it at home. My wife knew that I winced from it. It made other subjects impossible, too. Women, for instance, and the way they influence their lovers—we would start as far off as Gordon Craig’s theatre-masks or Gryll Grange and Lord Curryfin’s echeia, and before we had gone far, the figure of Clytemnestra would come bobbing over the horizon, and I would be talking hurriedly, dismissing it, rushing into technicalities about epode and stasimen, or about the chorus or the machines—anything. Or if Elizabeth merely asked what we should have for dinner, it seemed difficult to think of anything that was not flavoured with mushrooms or founded on beef-stock. We lived for a whole week on fish once, so sensitive did our minds become.

I got over it, more or less, after a time and, mercifully, Lathom let me alone. It was not till March that a faint reminding echo of the thing sounded faintly over the breakfast-table. I got a note from Mr. Perry, the parson to whom I had once lent a volume of Eddington. At the sight of his name I got a kind of painful twitching in the sore place.

The note was to invite me to dinner. An old college friend of his, the extremely celebrated Professor Hoskyns, was coming over to spend the evening with him. Hoskyns is, of course, a very brilliant physicist, and Perry thought it would interest me to meet him. One or two other people were coming as well. If I could put up with a very simple meal, he thought we should enjoy a really enjoyable talk.

My first instinct was to refuse. I hated the idea of going into the district and of seeing anybody even remotely connected with the Harrisons. But the idea of meeting Hoskyns was fascinating. I have that kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on, even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself, and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make. A pap-fed, negative, twentieth-century mind, open on all sides and wind-swept by every passing gust. Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the Harrisons. In the end, I accepted, and I rather think Elizabeth must have conveyed some sort of warning to Perry, for the Harrisons were not mentioned.

Perry’s shabby little sitting-room seemed crowded with men and smoke when I arrived. Professor Hoskyns, long, thin, bald, and much more human-looking than his Press photographs, was installed in a broken-springed leather armchair and called Perry “Jim.” There was also a swarthy little man in spectacles, whom they both called “Stingo,” and who turned out to be Professor Matthews, the biologist, the man who has done so much work on heredity. A large, stout, red-faced person with a boisterous manner was introduced as Waters. He was younger than the rest, but they all treated him with deference, and it presently appeared that he was the coming man in chemistry. Desultory conversation made it clear that Matthews, Hoskyns and Perry had been contemporaries at Oxford, and that Waters had been brought by Matthews, with whom he was on terms of the heartiest friendship and disagreement. A thin youth, with an eager manner and an irrepressible forelock, completed the party. He sported a clerical collar and informed me that he was the new curate, and that it was “a wonderful opportunity” to start his ministry under a man like Mr. Perry.

The dinner was satisfying. A vast beef-steak pudding, an apple-pie of corresponding size, and tankards of beer, quaffed from Perry’s old rowing-cups, put us all into a mellow humour. Perry’s asceticism did not, I am thankful to say, take the form of tough hash and lemonade, in spite of the presence on his walls of a series of melancholy Arundel prints, portraying brown and skinny anchorites, apparently nourished on cabbage-water. It rather tended to the idea of: “Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer,” and I judged that in their younger days, my fellow-guests had kept the progs busy. However, the somewhat wearisome flood of undergraduate reminiscence was stemmed after a time with suitable apologies, and Matthews said, a little provocatively:

“So here we all are. I never thought you’d stick to it, Perry. Which has made your job hardest—the War or people like us?”

“The War,” said Perry, immediately. “It has taken the heart out of people.”

“Yes. It showed things up a bit,” said Matthews. “Made it hard to believe in anything.”

“No,” replied the priest. “Made it easy to believe and difficult not to believe—in anything. Just anything. They believe in everything in a languid sort of way—in you, in me, in Waters, in Hoskyns, in mascots, in spiritualism, in education, in the daily papers—why not? It’s easier, and the various things cancel out and so make it unnecessary to take any definite steps in any direction.”

“Damn the daily papers,” said Hoskyns. “And damn education. All these get-clever-quick articles and sixpenny text-books. Before one has time to verify an experiment, they’re all at you, shrieking to have it formulated into a theory. And if you do formulate it, they misunderstand it, or misapply it. If anybody says there are vitamins in tomatoes, they rush out with a tomato-theory. If somebody says that gamma-rays are found to have an action on cancer-cells in mice, they proclaim gamma-rays as a cure-all for everything from old age to a cold in the head. And if anybody goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish about splitting the atom.”

“Yes,” said Matthews, “I thought I saw some odd remarks attributed to you the other day about that.”

“Wasting my time,” said Hoskyns. “I told them exactly what they put into my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of life—that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.”

“Ah!” said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, “but if the Church gives them a set of formulæ for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulæ or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.”

“You’re not up-to-date enough,” said Waters. “They like their formulæ to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.”

“Why, so they are,” said Perry. “Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.”

“And possibly act on them, you think?” said Matthews. “But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.”

“That’s not altogether true,” said Perry.

“Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgment for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.”

“But surely,” struck in the curate, “we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgments for sin. How about those eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?”

“If it was anybody’s sin,” said Perry, “it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.”

“And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,” added Waters. “Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.”

“Why should it be?” said Matthews. “Nature does not work by a scheme of poetical justice.”

“Nor does God,” said Perry. “We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell, Stingo?”

“No,” said Matthews. “It is you that have tried to keep up that story about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace the chain back and you will find every link hold—you yourself, compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way—back to Arboreal Man, to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer, shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you place your image of God?”

“Well,” said Perry, “I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her, and how silly we should all have looked then.”

“But it was all guess-work,” retorted Matthews, “unless you call it inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had said that man was made of sea-water, he would have been nearer the truth.”

“Well,” said Waters, “he put the beginnings of life on the face of the waters, which wasn’t so very far off.”

“But how did life begin?” I asked. “After all, there is a difference between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.”

“That’s for Waters to say,” said Matthews.

“I can’t be very didactic about that,” said the chemist. “But it appears possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic to Organic through the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t—so far—succeeded in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function of Matter.”

“The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,” I suggested.

“That’s all very well,” said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud of tobacco-smoke, “but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter, as if you knew what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your sea-water. Go back to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in nothingness. And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews, when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can be—that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to make in order to reason at all—but how it started or why it started is just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a god to explain it.”

“Why should it ever have started at all?” said Matthews. “As Matter passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another. Why should we suppose a beginning—or an end if it comes to that? Why not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its transformations and starting again?”

“Why, my lad,” replied Hoskyns, “because in that case you will come slap up against the second law of thermo-dynamics, and that will be the end of you.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Perry, “the formula that starts so charmingly about ‘Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage’—that appears to be all the Law and the Prophets nowadays.”

“Yes,” said Hoskyns. “Its general meaning is that Time only works in one direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been run through, Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end, presumably a beginning.”

“And the end is implicit in the beginning?” said I.

“Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.”

“Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,” said I, “in the randomness of things.”

“Presumably,” said Hoskyns.

There was a pause.

“What is Life?” I asked, suddenly.

“Well, Pontius,” said Waters, “if we could answer that question we should probably not need to ask the others. At present—chemically speaking—the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of bias—a lop-sidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its oddness.”

“I’ve said that kind of thing myself,” I said, rather astonished, “just as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by accident?”

“More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a symmetric, optically inactive compound into a single, asymmetric, optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this planet, something happened to the molecular structure of things. They got a twist, which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing mechanically—at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation of Life.”

“Thank you,” said Perry. “Do you mind saying the first part over again, in words that a child could understand?”

“Well, it’s like this,” said Waters. “When the planet cooled, the molecules of that original inorganic planetary matter were symmetric—if crystallised, the crystals were symmetric also. That is, they were alike on both sides, like a geometrical cube, and their reversed or mirror-images would be identical with themselves. Substances of this kind are said to be optically inactive; that is to say, if viewed through the polariscope, they have no power to rotate the beam of polarised light.”

“We will take your word for it,” said Perry.

“Oh, well, that’s quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations in the æther—need I explain æther?”

“I wish you could,” said Hoskyns.

“We will pass æther,” said Perry.

“Thank you. Well, ordinarily the ætheric vibrations which propagate the light takes place in all directions at right angles to the path of the ray. If you pass the ray through a crystal of Iceland spar, these vibrations are all brought into one plane, like a flat ribbon. That is what is called a beam of polarised light. Very well, then. If you pass this polarised light through a substance whose molecular structure is symmetric, nothing happens to it; the substance is optically inactive. But if you pass it through, say, a solution of cane sugar, the beam of polarised light will be twisted, and you will get a spiral effect, like twisting a strip of paper either to the right or to the left. The cane sugar is optically active. And why? Because its molecular structure is asymmetric. The crystals of sugar are not fully developed. There is an irregularity on one side, and the crystal and its mirror image are reversed, like my right hand and my left.” He laid the palm of the right hand on the back of the left to show his meaning. We all frowned and practised on our own hands.

“Very good,” continued Waters. “Now, we can produce in the laboratory, by synthesis from inorganic substances, other substances which were at one time thought to be only the products of living tissues—camphor, for instance, and some of the alkaloids used in medicine. But what is the difference between our process and that of Nature? What happens is this. The substance produced by synthesis always appears in what is called a racemic form. It consists of two sets of substances—one set having its asymmetry right-handed and the other left-handed, so that the product as a whole behaves like an inorganic, symmetric compound; that is, its two asymmetrics cancel one another out, and the product is optically inactive and has no power to rotate the beam of polarised light. To get a substance exactly equivalent to the natural product, we have to split it into its two asymmetric forms. We can’t do that mechanically. We can do it by the exercise of our living intelligence, of course, by laboriously picking out the crystals. Or we can do it by swallowing the substance, when our bodies will absorb and digest the dextro-rotating form of, for example, glucose, and pass the lævo-rotating form out unchanged. Or we can get a living fungus to do it for us, such as blue mould, which will feed on and destroy the dextro-rotatory half of the racemic form of paratartaric acid and leave unchanged the lævo-rotatory half, which is the artificial, laboratory-made half. But we can’t, by one mechanical laboratory process, turn an inorganic, inactive, symmetric compound into one single, asymmetric, optically active compound—and that is what living matter will do cheerfully, day by day.”

Waters finished his exposition with a smart little thump of the fist on the table. I knew what that was. It was the postman’s knock, bringing the answer to that letter of mine. A horrid sinking feeling at the solar plexus warned me that in a very few minutes I should have to ask a question. Why need I do it? The subject was remote and difficult. I could easily pretend not to understand. If there really was a difference between the synthetic and the natural product, it was not my business to investigate it. Waters was changing the subject. He had gone back to the first day of creation. Hang him! Let him stay there!

“So that, as Professor Japp said, as long ago as 1898, ‘The phenomena of stereo-chemistry support the doctrine of vitalism as revived by the younger physiologists, and point to the existence of a directive force, which enters upon the scene with Life itself and which, in no way violating the laws of the kinetics of atoms’—that ought to comfort you, Hoskyns—‘determines the course of their operation within the living organism. That is that at the moment when Life first arose, a directive force came into play—a force of precisely the same character as that which enables the intelligent operator, by the exercise of his will, to select one crystallised enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite.’ I learnt that passage by heart once, as a safeguard against cocksureness and a gesture of proper humility in face of my subject.”

“In other words,” said Matthews, “you believe in miracles, and something appearing out of nowhere. I am sorry to find you on the side of the angels.”

“It depends what you mean by miracles. I think there is an intelligence behind it all. Else, why anything at all?”

“You have Jeans on your side anyway,” put in Hoskyns. “He says, ‘Everything points with overwhelming force to a definite event, or series of events, of creation at some time or times, not infinitely remote. The universe cannot have originated by chance out of its present ingredients.’ I can’t tell you what produced the first molecules of gas, and you can’t tell me what produced the first asymmetric molecules of Life. The parson here may think he knows.”

“I don’t know,” said Perry, “but I give it a name. I call it God. You don’t know what the æther is, but you give it a name, and deduce its attributes from its behaviour. Why shouldn’t I do likewise? You people are making it all very much easier for me.”

It was no good. I had to ask my question. I burst in, violently, inappropriately, on this theological discussion:

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that it is possible to differentiate a substance produced synthetically in the laboratory from one produced by living tissue?”

“Certainly,” said Waters, turning to me in some surprise, but apparently accepting my tardy realisation of this truth as mere vagary of my slow and unscientific wits. “So long, of course, as the artificial substance remains in the first or racemic form, for this would be optically inactive, while that from the living tissues would rotate the beam of polarised light, when viewed in the polariscope. If, however, that racemic form had been already split up by the intelligent operator, or some other living agency, into its two dextro- and lævo-rotary forms, it would be impossible to distinguish between them.”

I saw a path of escape opening up. Surely the synthetic muscarine at St. Anthony’s would have had this other operation performed on it. There was no reason at all why I should interfere. I relapsed into silence, and the conversation wandered on.

I was recalled to myself by a movement about me. Matthews was explaining that he had to be getting home. Waters rose to accompany him. In a minute he would be gone and the opportunity lost. I had only to sit still.

I got up. I made my fatuous farewells. I said I had a perfectly good wife to go home to. I thanked my host and said how much I had enjoyed the evening. I followed the other men out into the narrow hall, with its loaded umbrella-stand and ugly, discoloured wall-paper.

“Dr. Waters,” I said.

“Yes?” He turned smiling towards me. I must say something now or he would think me a fool.

“May I have a word with you?”

“By all means. Which way do you go?”

“Bloomsbury,” said I, hoping desperately that he lived at Hendon or Harringay.

“Excellent, I am going that way myself. Shall we share a taxi?”

I murmured something about Professor Matthews.

“No, no,” said he, “I’m going by tube to Earl’s Court.”

We found our taxi and got in.

“Well, now?” said Waters.

I was in for it now. I told him the whole story.

“By God,” he said, “that’s damned interesting. Fine idea for a murder. Of course, any jury in the country would be only too ready to believe it was accident. Tempting Providence, and all that. And unless your man was fool enough to use the synthetic muscarine in its racemic form, you know, I’m very much afraid he’s pulled it off. There’s a chance, of course. They may not have gone further than that. Why didn’t you ask Benson while you were about it?”

“I thought of doing so,” I admitted. “At least, I didn’t know about this racemic business, but I thought there might be some way of telling the artificial stuff from the real. But Harrison seemed satisfied——”

“He would be. I know these people. Wrapped up in their own subjects. An engineer—he ought to know something about molecular structure. But no. He’s no occasion to study Organic, so it doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything to know about it. The word of a first-year student at Anthony’s is enough for him. You have more imagination. Why didn’t you——?”

“I don’t know that I quite wanted to.”

“Let bad alone, eh? But damn it, it’s interesting. I say, what a scoop for the papers, if it comes off! ‘First murder ever caught by the polariscope.’ Better than Crippen and the wireless. Only they’ll have a bit of a job explaining it. Now, look here, what are we going to do about it? Who did the analysis?”

“Lubbock.”

“Oh, yes—Home Office man, of course. We’ll have to get on to him. It’s chance if he’s kept the stuff by him. What? Oh, he has. That’s all right then. We’ve only got to take a squint at it and then we shall know. I mean, if the stuff really is racemic, we shall know. If not, we never shall. What’s the time? Quarter-past eleven. No time like the present. Here, driver!”

He thrust his head out of the window and gave an address in Woburn Square.

“It’s all on our way, and Lubbock never goes to bed before midnight. I know him well. He’ll be keen on this.”

His energy swept me up, feebly protesting, and in a few minutes’ time we were standing on Sir James Lubbock’s doorstep, ringing the bell.

The door was opened by a manservant, of whom Waters inquired whether Sir James was at home.

“No, sir. He is working late to-night, sir, at the Home Office. I think it’s the arsenic case, sir.”

“Oh, of course. That’s luck for us, Munting. We’ll run down and catch him there. You might give him a ring, Stevens, and say I’m coming down to see him on an urgent matter. You know who I am?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Dr. Waters. Very good, sir. You’ll find him in the laboratory, sir.”

“Right. We’d better hurry up, or we may just miss him.”

We plunged back into the taxi.

“Shall we find any difficulty in getting in?”

“Oh, no. I’ve been there before. We’re making very good time. Provided he hadn’t started before Stevens got through to him, he’ll wait for us. Ah! here we are.”

We drew up at a side door in the big Government building. After a short colloquy with the man on duty, we were passed through. I stumbled at Waters’ heels through a number of dreary corridors, till we fetched up in a kind of small ante-room.

“I feel strongly persuaded,” I said, “that I am on a visit to the dentist.”

“And you hope very much he’ll say there’s nothing to be done to you this time. I, on the contrary, hope very much that it’s something malignant and unusual. Have a fag.”

I accepted the fag. I tried to think of Harrison, perishing horribly in his lonely shack, but instead I could only see Lathom with his hair rumpled and his teeth set, painting with his usual careless brilliance. I got the idea that God or Nature or Science or some other sinister and powerful thing had set a trap for him, and that I was pushing him into it. I thought it was ruthless of God or whoever it was. Pom, pomty; pom, pomty; pom, pomty; pom, pomty—I was nervously humming something and I couldn’t think what. Oh, yes— Haydn’s Creation—that bit, where the kettle-drums thump so gently, so ruthlessly, on one note—“And-the-spi-rit-of-God (pomty) moved-upon-the-face-of-the-waters-(pom)”—only apparently it wasn’t the Spirit of God, but an asymmetric molecule, which didn’t fit the rhythm. Somebody was walking down the corridor, with a soft, muffled beat, rather like kettle-drums. “Let there be light (pomty-pom) and there was——”

The door opened.

I recognised Sir James Lubbock at once, of course, though now, in a white overall and pair of crimson carpet slippers, he presented an appearance less point-devise than he had done at the inquest. He greeted Waters cordially and received my name with a faint look of puzzledom.

“Mr. Munting? Yes—let me see, haven’t we met before?”

I reminded him of Manaton.

“Of course, of course. I knew I knew your face. Mr. Munting, the novelist. Delighted to make your acquaintance under more pleasant auspices.”

“I don’t know that they are much more pleasant,” said Waters. “As a matter of fact, it’s the Harrison case we wanted to see you about.”

“Really? Has something fresh turned up? You know, the other day I had a letter from the man’s son. Rather an odd letter. He seemed to have got the idea that there was more in the case than met the eye. Hinted that we might have found something else—strychnine or something. Quite ridiculous, of course. There wasn’t the faintest doubt about the cause of death. Muscarine poisoning. Perfectly straightforward.”

“Just so. By the way, Lubbock, did it by any chance occur to you to give that muscarine the once-over with the polariscope?”

“With the polariscope? Good heavens, no. Why should it? That wouldn’t tell one anything. You know all about muscarine. Dextro-rotatory. Nothing abstruse about it.”

“Oh, quite. But we’ve been having a little discussion, and—as a matter of fact, Lubbock, it would relieve Mr. Munting’s mind—and mine—considerably, if you would just check up on that point.”

“Well, if you insist, there’s nothing easier. But what’s the mystery?”

“Nothing at all, probably. Just an extra bit of collateral evidence, that’s all.”

“You’ve something at the back of your mind, Waters. Can’t I be allowed to know?”

“I’ll tell you after you’ve done it.”

Sir James Lubbock shook his handsome grey head.

“That’s Waters all over. He’s like Sherlock Holmes. Never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”

“No,” said Waters. “It’s just native caution. Don’t want to commit myself and be made to look foolish.”

“Oh, well, come along and we’ll get it over.”

“Aren’t we interrupting your work?” I said. I hope this question was prompted by politeness, but I think I spoke in a vain hope of delaying the crisis.

“Not a bit. I’d just finished—was packing up, in fact, when I got your message.”

We traversed some more corridors and eventually came out into a large laboratory, faintly lit by a single electric bulb. An attendant was just locking a cupboard. He turned as he saw us.

“It’s all right, Denis. I’ll see to things. You can trot away home.”

“Very well. Good night, Sir James.”

“Good night.”

Sir James switched on some more lights, flooding the gaunt room with what Poe has called somewhere a “ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Stepping across to a tall cupboard labelled with his name, he unlocked it with a key that hung upon his watch-chain.

“Here’s my bluebeard’s chamber,” he said, smiling. “Relics of all kinds of crimes and tragedies. Bottled murders. Bottled suicides. Plenty of plots for novels here, Mr. Munting.”

I said I supposed so.

“Here we are, Harrison. Extract from stomach. Extract from vomit. Extract from dish of fungus. Which is it you particularly want, Waters?”

“Doesn’t matter. Try the extract from the dish of fungus. It’ll be less open to—that is, it is possibly better for our purpose. What’s this, Lubbock?”

“That? Oh, that’s a fresh solution of muscarine I made myself for control purposes, to assist in determining the strength.”

“Made from the fungus?”

“Yes. I don’t altogether guarantee that I’ve isolated the principle. But it’s near enough.”

“Oh, yes. I’d like to have a look at that, too, if I may.”

“By all means.”

He brought the bottles out and set them on one of the laboratory tables. In appearance they were indistinguishable—the same white salt that I had seen before in the laboratory at St. Anthony’s.

Sir James Lubbock unlocked another cupboard, and produced a large, heavy instrument, rather like a telescope fixed to a stand. He put it down beside the two bottles and departed in search of water. While he was preparing solutions from the respective bottles of muscarine, Waters turned to me.

“You’d better have this quite clear in your mind—I mean, you’d like to know what you may expect to see, exactly.”

“Yes,” I said. “At present I feel rather like the good lady in The Moonstone, who wanted to know when the explosion would take place.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be so exciting as that. Cheer up, man, you look as white as a sheet. At the further end of the instrument is a thin plate of the semi-transparent mineral, tourmaline. You’ve seen it in jewellers’ shops. Pretty stuff, and all that, and, what is more to the purpose, it has a very finely foliated structure. In a ray of ordinary light, the vibrations take place in all directions, but when passed through a slice of tourmaline they are confined to one plane, and the light is then polarised. We talked about that at dinner—you remember. This slice of tourmaline is called the polariser. Right. Now at this end, near the eyepiece, is a second slice of tourmaline, which can be rotated, and which is called the analyser. Now, when the analyser is turned so that its foliations are parallel to those of the polariser, light will pass through both, but if the analyser is turned so that its foliations are at right angles to those of the polariser, then no light will pass and there will be darkness. All clear so far?”

“Perfectly.”

“Very well. Now, if, when the analyser is thus turned to darkness, I place the solution of an optically active substance between the two slices of tourmaline the light will—you can tell me that yourself—it’s a band of light, remember.”

“I remember. Yes. The band of light will be rotated as it passes through.”

“That’s right. It will come round into line with the foliations of the analyser, and——”

“Come through!” said I, triumphantly.

“Thank God for a man of intelligent mind. As you rightly say, it will come through. And therefore you will see——”

“Light!” said I.

(Pom, pomty; pom, pomty—if I could have got rid of that relentless drum-beat. My heart seemed to be going very heavily too.)

“But if,” went on Waters, with his eye on Sir James, who was stirring his solutions with a glass rod over the sink, “if the substance should be optically inactive—if, for example, it should turn out to be a synthetic product, prepared from inorganic substances in the laboratory—then it will not rotate the beam of polarised light. The darkness will persist.”

I saw that.

“Well, now you perfectly understand. If, when we put the muscarine solution in the polariscope, we get light, it proves nothing. Either the stuff is natural, or else the synthetic preparation has already been split up into its two active forms, and we can make no pronouncement about it. But if we get darkness—then it’s a pretty dark business, Mr. Munting.”

I nodded.

“Well, Waters,” said Sir James, cheerfully “finished your lecture?”

“Quite. The pupil is highly commended.”

“Good. Now, I’m in your hands, Waters. What do you want me to do?”

“I think we’ll have the control solution first, if you don’t mind. Now, Mr. Munting, you will see how this substance, prepared from the living tissue of a fungus, rotates the beam of polarised light. Right you are, sir.”

Sir James handed me a glass cylinder, filled with a colourless solution. I sniffed at it, but it had no smell.

“I shouldn’t taste it if I were you,” said Sir James, a little grimly. He struck a match and lit a Bunsen burner, the flame of which played upon a small mass of something held above it by a platinum projection.

“Sodium chloride,” said Waters; “in fact, not to make unnecessary mystery about it, common salt. Shall I switch off?”

He snapped off the lights, and we were left with only the sodium flame. In that green, sick glare a face floated close to mine—a corpse-face—livid, waxen, stamped with decay—sharp-shadowed in the nostrils and under the orbits—Harrison’s face, as I had seen it in “The Shack,” opening a black mouth of complaint.

“Spectacular, isn’t it?” said Sir James, pleasantly, and I pulled myself together and realised that I must look just as ghastly to him as he to me. But for the moment the face had been Harrison’s, and from that moment Lathom was nothing to me any more.

Sir James settled down to his experiment with comfortable deliberation. He placed the cylinder containing the solution in the polariscope, adjusted the eyepiece and looked. Then he turned to Waters.

“So far,” he said, dryly, “the laws of Nature appear to hold good. Do you want to see?”

“I should like Mr. Munting to see,” said Waters. “Here you are. Wait a minute. We’ll take the cylinder out for a moment. Come along. You shall do it yourself.”

My heart was thumping. To my excited imagination it seemed to shake the table as I took Sir James’s place before the polariscope.

“We’ll start,” said Waters, “with the analyser parallel to the polariser. Right you are. You see your beam of light? Now here’s the adjustment. Turn it yourself.”

I turned it, and the light vanished.

“Hold on to it,” said Waters, cheerfully, “so that you can be sure there’s no hanky-panky. I’m putting the muscarine solution in again. Now then!”

As he slipped the glass cylinder into place the circle of light returned.

“Yes,” I said, “I see it.”

“Convincing demonstration of a miracle,” said Waters, “and the lop-sidedness of things in general. That’s all right, then. Now we’ll have a look at the stuff that killed Harrison. No. Respect for our governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. We’ll let Sir James have a go first.”

Sir James, with a shrug, took my place at the instrument. Waters put his hand on my arm.

With maddening deliberation, the analyst set the first cylinder carefully on one side and took up the other. My mouth was dry as I watched him. He put the cylinder into the polariscope and looked. There was a pause. Then a grunt. Then his hand came up, feeling for the adjustment. There was another pause and an exclamation of impatience. Then his eyes was jerked back from the eyepiece and his head peered round to examine the exterior of the instrument. Waters’ grip on my arm became painful in its tightness. Sir James’s hand came round again, feeling, this time, for the cylinder. He took it out, held it up, looked at it and replaced it with very great care. He looked again, and there was a long silence.

Then came Sir James’s voice, queer and puzzled.

“I say, Waters. There’s something funny here. Just have a look, will you?”

With a final squeeze, Waters loosened his grip of me and took Sir James’s place before the instrument. He moved the cylinder back and forth once or twice and said, in a judicial tone, “Well!”

“What do you make of that?” said Sir James.

“One of two things,” said Waters, briskly, “either it’s a suspension of the law of Nature, or this muscarine of yours is optically inactive.”

“What do you suggest?” demanded Sir James.

“I suggest,” said Waters, “that this is a synthetic preparation in racemic form.”

“But how could——?” Sir James broke off, and in the corpse-light I watched his face as he revolved the possibilities in his mind. “You know what that means, Waters.”

“I might hazard a guess.”

“Murder.”

“Yes, murder.”

There was another pause, in which the silence seemed to become absolutely solid. Then Sir James said, very slowly:

“The man was murdered. My God, this is a lesson to me, Waters. Never to overlook anything. Who would ever have thought——? But that’s no excuse. I shall have to—I must verify it first, though. Do the preparations again. But—what put you on to this?”

“Let’s go and get a drink,” said Waters, “and we’ll tell you all about it. You’d better have a look at this first, Mr. Munting.”

I looked through the instrument. Dead blackness. But if the thing had shown all the colours of the rainbow, I should have been in no state to draw any conclusions from it. I sat stunned while somebody switched on the lights, extinguished the Bunsen burner and locked all the apparatus up again.

Then I found myself straggling after the other two, while they talked about something or the other. I had an idea that I came into it, and presently Waters turned back and thrust his arm into mine.