The Drums of Fu-Manchu (11 page)

* * *

“I discovered the tragedy not five minutes ago.” Bailey spoke and looked as a man distraught. “You must understand that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory since noon and at last I determined to face any rebuff in order to induce him to rest. I beg, gentlemen, that you will return there with me now! Hale, the chauffeur, and Bordon, the doctor’s mechanic, are trying to cut out the lock of the door!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The overstrung man, waving us to follow, already was leading the way along a passage communicating with the rear of the house.

“When I reached the laboratory,” he cried back, now beginning to run, “through the grille in the door I saw the doctor lying face downwards… I immediately returned for assistance… It was hearing the approach of your car that brought me to the porch to meet you.”

A somewhat straggling party, we followed the hurrying figure through a dim garden and along a path which zig-zagged, sloping slightly upwards to a coppice of beech trees. He knew the way, but we did not. Inspector Gallaho, stumbling and growling, produced a flashlamp for our guidance.

The laboratory was some two hundred yards removed from the house, a squat brick building with a number of high-set windows, screened and iron-barred. The entrance was on the further side, and as we approached I heard a sound of hammering and wrenching.
Onto a gravel path and around the corner we ran, and there, where light shone out through a grille in a heavy door, I saw two men at work with chisels, hammers and crowbars.

“Are you nearly through?” Bailey panted.

“Another two minutes should do it, sir.”

“Surely there is more than one key!” Smith snapped.

“I regret to say there is only one. Doctor Jasper always held it.”

We crowded together to look through the thick glass behind the grille.

I saw a long, narrow workroom, well lighted. It resembled less a laboratory than a machine shop, but I noticed chemical impedimenta, mostly unfamiliar. That which claimed and held my attention was the figure of a short, thick-set man wearing a white linen coat. He lay face downward, arms outstretched, some two paces from the door. Owing to his position, it was impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the back of his head. But there was something grimly significant in the slump of the body.

The workmen carried on unceasingly. I thought I had heard few more mournful sounds than those of the blows of the hammer and splintering of stout wood as they struggled to force a way into the locked laboratory.

“This is ghastly,” Smith muttered, “ghastly! He may not be dead. Have you sent for a doctor?”

“I am myself a qualified physician,” Bailey replied, “and following Inspector Gallaho’s advice, I have not notified the local police.”

“Good,” said Gallaho.

“I am still far from understanding the circumstances,” snapped Nayland Smith, with the irritability of frustration. “You say that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory all day?”

“Yes. His ways have become increasingly strange for some
time past. Something—I can only guess what—evidently occurred which threw him into a state of nervous tension some ten days or a fortnight ago. Then again, last Wednesday to be exact, he seemed to grow worse. I have come to the conclusion, Sir Denis, that he had received two of these notices. The third—I dictated its contents to the inspector over the telephone—must actually have come by the second post this morning.”

“Are you certain of this?”

“All his mail passes through my hands, and I now recall that there was one letter marked ‘Personal & Private’ which naturally I did not open, delivered at eleven forty-five this morning.”

“Eleven forty-five?”

“Yes.”

I saw Smith raise his wrist watch to the light shining out from the grille.

“Two minutes short of midnight,” he murmured. “The message gave him twelve hours. We are thirteen minutes too late.”

“But do you realise, Sir Denis,” the secretary cried, “that he is alone, and locked in? This door is of two-inch teak set in an iron frame. To batter it down would be impossible—hence this damnable delay! How can the question of foul play arise?”

“I fear it does,” Smith returned sternly. “From what you have told me I am disposed to believe that the ultimate result of these threats was to inspire Doctor Jasper to complete his experiments within the period granted him.”

“Good heavens!” I murmured, “you are right, Smith!”

The chauffeur and the mechanic laboured on the door feverishly, their hammer blows and the splintering of tough wood punctuating our conversation.

“He doesn’t move,” muttered Gallaho, looking through the grille.

“Might I ask, Mr Bailey,” Smith went on, “if you assisted Doctor Jasper in his experiments?”

“Sometimes, Sir Denis, in certain phases.”

“What was the nature of the present experiment?”

There was a perceptible pause before the secretary replied. “To the best of my belief—for I was not fully informed in the matter—it was a modified method of charging rifles—”

“Or, one presumes, machine guns?”

“Or machine guns, as you say. An entirely new principle which he termed ‘the vacuum charger.’ ”

“Which increased the velocity of the bullet?”

“Enormously.”

“And, in consequence, increased the range?”

“Certainly. My employer, of course, is not a medical man, but a doctor of physics.”

“Quite,” snapped Smith. “Were the doctor’s experiments subsidised by the British government?”

“No. He was working independently.”

“For whom?”

“I fear, in the circumstances, the question is rather an awkward one.”

“Yet I must request an answer.”

“Well—a gentleman known to us as Mr Osaki.”

“Osaki?”

“Yes.”

“You see, Kerrigan”—Smith turned to me—“here comes the Asiatic element! No description of Mr Osaki (an assumed name) is necessary. Descriptions of any one of Osaki’s countrymen sound identical. This Asiatic gentleman was a frequent visitor, Mr Bailey?”

“Oh yes.”

“Was he a technician?”

“Undoubtedly. He sometimes lunched, with the doctor and spent many hours with him in the laboratory. But I know for a fact that at other times he would visit the laboratory without coming through the house.”

“What do you mean exactly?”

“There is a lane some twenty yards beyond here and a gate. Osaki sometimes visited the doctor when he was working, entering by way of the gate. I have seen him in the laboratory, so this I can state with certainty.”

“When was he here last?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yesterday evening. He spent nearly two hours with Doctor Jasper.”

“Trying, no doubt, to set his mind at rest about the second notice from the Si-Fan. Then this morning the third and final notice arrives. But Mr Osaki, anxious about results, phones at noon—”

“Binns, the butler, thinks the caller this morning was Osaki—”

“Undoubtedly urging him to new efforts,” jerked Smith. “You understand, Kerrigan?”

“For heaven’s sake are you nearly through?” cried Bailey to the workmen.

“Very nearly, sir. It’s a mighty tough job,” the chauffeur replied.

To the accompaniment of renewed hammering and wrenching:

“There are two other points,” said Bailey, his voice shaking nervously, “which I should mention, as they may have a bearing on the tragedy. First, at approximately half past eleven, Binns, who was in his pantry at the back of the house, came to me and reported that he had heard the sound of three shots, apparently coming from the lane. I attached little importance to the matter at the time, being preoccupied about the doctor, and assuming that poachers were
at work. The second incident, which points to the fact that Doctor Jasper was alive after eleven-thirty, is this:

“A phone call came which Binns answered. The speaker was a woman—”

“Ah!” Smith murmured.

“She declined to give her name but said that the matter was urgent and requested to be put through to the laboratory. Binns called the doctor, asking if the line should be connected. He was told, yes, and the call was put through. Shortly afterwards, determined at all costs to induce the doctor to return to the house, I came here and found him as you see him.”

A splintering crash announced that the end of the task of forcing the door was drawing near.

“Had the doctor any other regular visitors?” jerked Smith.

“None. There was one lady whom I gathered to be a friend, although he had never spoken of her—Mrs Milton. She lunched here three days ago and was shown over the laboratory.”

“Describe Mrs Milton.”

“It would be difficult to describe her. Sir Denis. A woman of great beauty of an exotic type, tall and slender, with raven-black hair—”

“Ivory skin,” Smith went on rapidly, “notably long slender hands, and unmistakable eyes, of a quite unusual colour, nearly jade green—”

“Good heavens!” cried Bailey, “you know her?”

“I begin to believe,” said Nayland Smith, and there was a curious change of quality in his voice, “that I
do
know her. Kerrigan”—he turned to me—“we have heard of this lady before?”

“You mean the woman who visited General Quinto?”

“Not a doubt about it! I absolve Ardatha: this is a
zombie
—a corpse moving among the living! This woman is a harbinger of death and we must find her.”

“You don’t suggest,” cried Bailey, “that Mrs Milton is in any way associated—”

“I suggest nothing,” snapped Smith.

A resounding crash and a wrenching of metal told us that the lock had been driven through. A moment later and the door was flung open.

I clenched my fists and for a moment stood stock still.

An unforgettable, unmistakable, but wholly indescribable odour crept to my nostrils.

“Kerrigan!” cried Smith in a stifled voice and sprang into the laboratory—“you smell it, Kerrigan? He’s gone the same way!”

Bailey had hurried forward and now was bending over the prone body. In the stuffy atmosphere of this place where many queer smells mingled, that of the strange deathly odour which I must always associate with the murder of General Quinto predominated to an appalling degree.

“Get those blinds up! Throw the windows open!”

Hale, the chauffeur, ran in and began to carry out the order, as Smith and Bailey bent and turned the body over…

Then I saw Bailey spring swiftly upright. I saw him stare around him like a man stricken with sudden madness. In a voice that sounded like a smothered scream:

“This isn’t Doctor Jasper,” he cried; “it’s
Osaki
!”

“
T
he Green Death! The Green Death again!” said Nayland Smith.

“Whatever is it?” There was awe in my voice. “It’s ghastly! In heaven’s name what is it?”

We had laid the dead man on a sort of day bed with which the laboratory was equipped, and under the dark Asiatic skin already that ghastly greenish tinge was beginning to manifest itself.

The place was very quiet. In spite of the fact of all windows being opened that indescribable sweetish smell—a smell, strange though it may sound, of which I had dreamed, and which to the end of my life I must always associate with the assassination of General Quinto—hung heavily in the air.

Somewhere in a dark background beyond the shattered door the chauffeur and mechanic were talking in low voices.

Mr Bailey had gone back to the house with Inspector Gallaho. There was hope that the phone call which had immediately preceded the death of Osaki might yet be traced.

The extension to the laboratory proved to be in perfect order, but the butler was in so nervous a condition that Gallaho had lost
patience and had gone to the main instrument.

“This,” said Smith; turning aside and staring down at a row of objects which lay upon a small table, “is in many ways the most mysterious feature.”

The things lying there were those which had been in the dead man’s possession. There was a notebook containing a number of notes in code which it would probably take some time to decipher, a wad of paper money, a cigarette case, a, railway ticket, a watch, an ivory amulet and a bunch of keys on a chain.

But (and this it was to which Nayland Smith referred) there were two keys—Yales—unattached, which had been found in the pocket of the white coat which Osaki had been wearing. “We know,” Smith continued, “that both these keys are keys of the laboratory, and Mr Bailey was quite emphatic on the point that Doctor Jasper possessed only one. What is the inference, Kerrigan?”

I sniffed the air suspiciously and then stared at the speaker. “I assume the inference to be that the dead man also possessed a key of the laboratory.”

“Exactly.”

“This being the case, why should
two
be found in his possession?”

“My theory is this: Doctor Jasper, for some reason which we have yet to learn, hurried out of the laboratory just before Osaki’s appearance, and—a point which I think indicates great nervous disturbance—left his key in the door. Osaki, approaching, duplicate, key in hand, discovered this. Finding the laboratory to be empty, he put on a white jacket—intending to work, presumably—and dropped the key in the pocket in order to draw Doctor Jasper’s attention to this carelessness when the doctor returned.”