Simmonds assented, and finally the trio returned to the ante-room.
"We'd like to look over the rest of the house," Grady said to Rogers, who was sitting erect again, looking more like himself, and the four men went out into the hall together. I remained behind with Hughes and Freylinghuisen. They had lifted the body to the couch and were making a careful examination of it. Heavy at heart, I sat down near by and watched them.
That Philip Vantine should have been killed by enthusiasm for the hobby which had given him so much pleasure seemed the very irony of fate, yet such I believed to be the case. To be sure, there were various incidents which seemed to conflict with such a theory, and the theory itself seemed wild to the point of absurdity; but at least it was a ray of light in what had been utter darkness. I turned it over and over in my mind, trying to fit into it the happenings of the day—I must confess with very poor success. Freylinghuisen's voice brought me out of my reverie.
"The two cases are precisely alike," he was saying. "The symptoms are identical. And I'm certain we shall find paralysis of the heart and spinal cord in this case, just as I did in the other. Both men were killed by the same poison."
"Can you make a guess as to the nature of the poison?" Hughes inquired.
"Some variant of hydrocyanic acid, I fancy—the odour indicates that; but it must be about fifty times as deadly as hydrocyanic acid is."
They wandered away into a discussion of possible variants, so technical and be-sprinkled with abstruse words and formulae that I could not follow them. Freylinghuisen, of course, had all this sort of thing at his fingers' ends—post-mortems were his every-day occupation, and no doubt he had been furbishing himself up, since this last one, in preparation for the inquest, where he would naturally wish to shine. I could see that he enjoyed displaying his knowledge before Hughes, who, although a family practitioner of high standing, with an income greater than Freylinghuisen's many times over, had no such expert knowledge of toxicology as a coroner's physician would naturally possess.
The two detectives and the coroner came back while the discussion was still in progress and listened in silence to Freylinghuisen's statement of the case. Grady's mahogany face told absolutely nothing of what was passing in his brain, but Simmonds was plainly bewildered. It was evident from his look that nothing had been found to shed any light on the mystery; and now that his suicide theory had fallen to pieces, he was completely at sea. So, I suspected, was Grady, but he was too self-composed to betray it.
The coroner drew the two physicians aside and talked to them for a few moments in a low tone. Then he turned to Grady.
"Freylinghuisen thinks there is no necessity for a post-mortem," he said. "The symptoms are in every way identical with those of the other man who was killed here this afternoon. There can be no question that both of them died from the same cause. He is ready to make his return to that effect."