“I have been more fortunate than you this morning,” he resumed. “It appears that Armstrong had another book in the press when he died, so that his publishers have been in active communication with his executor—or rather his executrix.”
The correction startled me. Tarleton had laid some emphasis on the feminine termination.
“She is Armstrong’s sister, his only one. He had no other near relations, so far as the publishers could tell me, and with his solitary, wandering life he is not likely to have had any intimate friends. At all events, he left everything he possessed to his sister. I have made sure of that by looking up the will at Somerset House.”
The atmosphere seemed to become heavier as he spoke. At last the quarry was almost in sight. If the explorer had kept any of the mysterious poison it must have passed into his sister’s possession on his death.
“The publisher couldn’t tell me whether she was a married woman or a widow,” the specialist continued, “but he gave me her name and address: Mrs. Amelia Baker, Carlyle Square, Chelsea.”
“Carlyle Square!” I ejaculated. “That is within a stone’s throw of the Domino Club.”
My chief gave me a look of mild disappointment.
“Is that the only thing that strikes you? What about the name?”
“Amelia Baker.” I repeated the name to myself. “Baker”—surely one of the commonest of English surnames. There must be hundreds of Bakers in the London Directory. And yet I had a dim consciousness of some association with it that I couldn’t quite fix. Tarleton’s patience gave out before my helplessness.
“Think? Where did you come across that name last?” He snatched out a slip of paper from his breast pocket and passed it across the table.