The smooth, smiling face of the Frenchwoman with its shrewd black eyes and thin lips rose before me. As my chief had said, this was the worst case of all.
“If that woman has them it may be some time before we hear of them,” the specialist pursued in a meditative tone. “She may wait till the inquiry into the death is over, and the case disposed of as far as the police are concerned. Then the victims will each receive a discreet letter, probably from an agent, informing them that certain letters which appear to be in their handwriting have been found, and asking if they wish to have them returned. There won’t be a word about money in the first communication, you may be sure. The victims will simply be invited to call on the agents and inspect the letters. That woman knows her business, I fancy.”
It was horrible to think of Violet being slowly drawn into the serpent’s coils. There would be less mercy to look for in such a woman than in Weathered himself.
The physician moved his shoulders as if to shake off an unpleasant burden.
“We will put that aside for the moment, and consider the question of the murder. Everything now depends on the information I expect to find waiting for me when we get back. If my diagnosis is correct, Weathered died from a poison described in the book I have told you of, Across Sumatra, by Captain Armstrong. The natives have some name for it which I forget, but I have called it Upasine.”
“Upasine!” I repeated the name in stupefaction.
“Yes. You have heard, no doubt—everybody has heard—of the famous upas tree. According to the tales of the old explorers, it was a tree that exhaled a deadly vapour, so that the traveller who went to sleep beneath its shelter never woke again. The bones of animals were found scattered round the trunk, and they were supposed to have perished in the same way, by going to sleep within the deadly radius.”
“But surely,” I said in astonishment, “surely no one believes that any longer? I thought it had been proved to be a fable.”
The great expert shook his head.
“There are not many fables that haven’t some truth in them,” he pronounced. “The legendary glories of Timbuktu were dismissed at one time as travellers’ tales, but it turned out there was a city called Timbuktu on the southern edge of the desert of Sahara; that it was the great market to which the caravans from the Mediterranean coast made their way, and even that it once possessed something like a university, when it became a refuge for the Moors who were driven out of Spain. The accounts of the upas tree and its fatal shadow were dismissed in the same shallow way without any inquiry as to how they originated. Armstrong happened to be an intelligent man, and he told me that one of the objects of his exploration of Sumatra had been to find out the truth about the upas.”