“In the chair near the body,” he explained. “It has her initials in the corner. And inside a theater program for a performance of ‘Iris’ in a London theater in 1899.”
Dr. Lytton reached for the object with an exclamation. His hands seized it and, thrusting it into the light of the candles, he remained lost in an ecstatic contemplation of it.
“Good God!” he muttered abruptly. “I knew it. Yes, I was right.”
De Medici smiled slowly at the scientist’s elation.
“A brain,” he thought. “It plays with a delightful puzzle. He knows something.” There flitted through his mind the memory of Dr. Lytton’s accomplishments.... An exuberant modernist among the pathologists of the country.... “He came here to corroborate something,” he continued musing: “He suspects that I and not Florence did the murder. Yes, an obvious and romantic theory. Even Norton played with it at the inquest. I turned De Medici for a moment and killed a man.... Inherited homicidal mania ... hm.”
“An odd thing about Ballau,” Dr. Lytton was saying. He had seated himself and was copying something from the program. He talked cheerfully as he wrote. “A man like Ballau without a breath of scandal about his name. Rather strange, don’t you think? A lover of beautiful things. Unmarried, with no restrictions. And yet not the sign of a woman or of an affair in his life. I’ve talked to a dozen people who knew him as well as I did. All collaborate on a halo for the man. And thereby hangs an idea. Virtue, no less than vice, has its pathologic mainsprings, eh?”
His eyes beamed excitedly over the program.
“Twelve names in the cast,” he continued. “I’m taking them down. Names are always something. A name is a beginning. Did you tell Florence of this?”
“Yes.”
“And she grew excited,” pursued Dr. Lytton as he finished his writing. “Did you mention the Goldsmith Theater to her?”