A man was lying flat on the floor—it was Inspector O'Connor. He had succeeded in slipping noiselessly, like a snake, below the curtain into the cabinet. Craig had told him to look out for wires or threads stretched from Mrs. Popper's clothing to the bulging curtain of the cabinet. Imagine his surprise when he saw that she had simply freed her foot from the shoe, which I was carefully holding down, and with a backward movement of the leg was reaching out into the cabinet behind her chair and was doing the rapping with her toes.
Lying on the floor he had grasped her foot and caught her heel with a firm hand. She had responded with a wild yell that showed she knew she was trapped. Her secret was out.
Hysterically Mrs. Popper began to upbraid the inspector as he rose to his feet, but Farrington quickly interposed.
“Something was working against us to-night, gentlemen. Yet you demanded results. And when the spirits will not come, what is she to do? She forgets herself in her trance; she produces, herself, the things that you all could see supernaturally if you were in sympathy.”
The mere sound of Farrington's voice seemed to rouse in me all the animosity of my nature. I felt that a man who could trump up an excuse like that when a person was caught with the goods was capable of almost anything.
“Enough of this fake seance,” exclaimed Craig. “I have let it go on merely for the purpose of opening the eyes of a certain deluded gentleman in this room. Now, if you will all be seated I shall have something to say that will finally establish whether Mary Vandam was the victim of accident, suicide, or murder.”
With hearts beating rapidly we sat in silence.
Craig took the beakers and test-tubes from the shelf behind the curtain and placed them on the little deal table that had been so merrily dancing about the room.
“The increasing frequency with which tales of murder by poison appear in the newspapers,” he began formally, “is proof of how rapidly this new civilisation of ours is taking on the aspects of the older civilisations across the seas. Human life is cheap in this country; but the ways in which human life has been taken among us have usually been direct, simple, aboveboard, in keeping with our democratic and pioneer traditions. The pistol and the bowie-knife for the individual, the rope and the torch for the mob, have been the usual instruments of sudden death. But when we begin to use poisons most artfully compounded in order to hasten an expected bequest and remove obstacles in its way—well, we are practising an art that calls up all the memories of sixteenth century Italy.
“In this beaker,” he continued, “I have some of the contents of the stomach of the unfortunate woman. The coroner's physician has found that they show traces of morphine. Was the morphine in such quantities as to be fatal? Without doubt. But equally without doubt analysis could not discover and prove it in the face of one inconsistency. The usual test which shows morphine poisoning failed in this case. The pupils of her eyes were not symmetrically contracted. In fact they were normal.