I.
WELL, said the doctor, you say I’ve been very secretive lately. Perhaps I have. However, I don’t mind telling you—just you fellows—the whole history of the affair that has preoccupied me. I shan’t assert that it’s the most curious case in all my experience. My experience has been pretty varied, and pretty lively, as you know, and cases are curious in such different ways. Still, a poisoning business is always a bit curious, and this one was extremely so. It isn’t often that a person who means to commit murder by poison calls in a physician to assist him and deliberately uses the unconscious medico as his tool. Yet that is exactly what happened. It isn’t often that a poisoner contrives to hit on a poison which is at once original, almost untraceable, and to be obtained from any chemist without a doctor’s prescription. Yet that, too, is exactly what happened. I can assure you that the entire episode was a lesson to me. It opened my eyes to the possibilities which lie ready to the hand of a really intelligent murderer in this twentieth century. People talk about the masterpieces of poisoning in the middle ages. Pooh! Second-rate! They didn’t know enough in the middle ages to achieve anything which a modern poisoner with genius would deem first-rate; they simply didn’t know enough. Another point in the matter which forcibly struck me was the singular usefulness of a big London hotel to a talented criminal. You can do precisely what you please in a big hotel, and nobody takes the least notice. You wander in, you wander out, and who cares? You are only an item in a crowd. And when you have reached the upper corridors you are as lost to pursuit and observation as a needle in a haystack. You may take two rooms, one after the other, in different names, and in different parts of the hotel; the servants and officials will be none the wiser, because the second floor knows not the third, nor the third the fourth; you may oscillate between those two rooms in a manner to puzzle Inspector Anderson himself. And you are just as secure in your apartments as a mediæval baron in his castle—yes, and more! On that night there were over a thousand guests in the Grand Babylon Hotel (there was a ball in the Gold Rooms, and a couple of banquets); and in the midst of all that diverse humanity, unperceived, unsuspected, a poignant and terrible drama was going on, and things so occurred that I tumbled right into it. Well, I’ll tell you.
II.
I was called in to the Grand Babylon about nine p.m.; suite No. 63, second floor, name of Russell. The outer door of the suite was opened for me by a well-dressed woman of thirty or so, slim, with a face expressive and intelligent rather than handsome. I liked her face—I was attracted by its look of honesty and alert good-nature.
“Good evening, doctor,” she said. She had a charming low voice, as she led me into a highly-luxurious drawing-room. “My name is Russell, and I wish you to see a young friend of mine who is not well.” She hesitated and turned to an old bald-headed man, who stood looking out of the window at the twilight panorama of the Thames. “My friend’s solicitor, Mr. Dancer,” she explained. We bowed, Mr. Dancer and I.
“Nothing serious, I hope,” I remarked.
“No, no!” said Miss Russell.
Nevertheless, she seemed to me to be extremely nervous and anxious, as she preceded me into the bedroom, a chamber quite as magnificent as the drawing-room.
On the bed lay a beautiful young girl. Yes, you may laugh, you fellows, but she was genuinely beautiful. She smiled faintly as we entered. Her features had an ashy tint, and tiny drops of cold perspiration stood on the forehead. However, she certainly wasn’t very ill—I could see that in a moment, and I fixed my conversational tone accordingly.