It was dead black inside. There were no sounds now. Bowers was quietly shaking in my grip, pressing up against the wall to get out of the line of the door, and he spoke with fierce calmness. "Are you loopy? Blow your whistle, you fool. There's a dangerous.."
I groped along the wall for a light-switch. There was a switch, but when I clicked it no response came. I still had the lantern hanging at my belt. Its broad beam swept across the room towards a wall of books; then it turned to the right and stopped. Along the right-hand wall were the two shuttered windows. Across the room, some feet out from the farther window was a broad claw-footed table; behind that table, and sideways to the door, stood a low padded armchair; and in the armchair a man sat grinning at me.
It was a pretty nasty sight. "Grinning" is the proper word, though it hardly completes the description of a face pulled all out of shape like rubber or putty. The neck was hunched a backwards in an arch, the face partly turned in the direction of the door, and the man's little thin body was arched forwards as though he would propel himself out of the chair, although his feet seemed to have become entangled with the legs of the chair. His face — which seemed all teeth and eyes — I might not immediately have recognized as that of Paul Hogenauer if it had not been for the pointed lobe of his ear. The white eyeball glittered under the light, and did not blink. It required no medical knowledge at all to know that Hogenauer was dead, and very little more knowledge to be aware that he had died of strychnine poisoning.
But there was something else, which lent a festive air to his appearance. He wore one of those smoking-jackets fashionable thirty years ago, of heavy dark cloth faced with faded and dingy red lapels. And on his high bald skull he wore an adornment fashionable many years before that "a smoking-cap" shaped like a Turkish fez. It had a tassel hanging down beside his ear. It was faded to a grimy reddish-orange. It looked like a flower-pot turned upside down. And under it the dead man sat with his head against his shoulder and grinned.
But Paul Hogenauer had not made those rushing, rustling noises I had several times heard in here. Bowers was right. There was someone in the room, someone alive, and waiting. I slowly moved the light around. The parlour was an ordinary enough library-workroom, some fifteen feet by eighteen, with light brown paper on the walls and a dark brown patterned carpet on the floor. In the left-hand wall there was a cupboard: the only place where anyone could conceivably hide. Bookcases stood along the wall facing the door. The mantelpiece was in the wall to the right, between the shuttered windows, with alien, curiously childlike touches in the cuckoo-clock up over it and the long china-bowled pipes banging in tassels from the mantelshelf. In the middle of the room stood a round table on which were a few magazines, an empty glass, and a bottle of mineral-water two-thirds full. But your gaze always went back to the flat-topped desk behind which Hogenauer sat grinning in his red fez. Over the desk hung an electric flex with an unshaded socket at the end of it. Though the socket was empty, a large bulb lay on the desk at the opposite side from the dead man.
I took one step into the room-and thought I saw the cupboard door move. But I was not concerned so much about the person hiding in the cupboard as about Bowers, and what Bowers might do when he saw that thing in the chair.
There are pleasanter positions than finding a dead body, in the company of a nervous man already growing suspicious of you, at the same time the police were nosing round the house. Nevertheless, there was good in this. It would give me a legitimate excuse to get to the telephone, as I had been wanting to do from the first. Under the pretence of calling the police station, I could ring up H.M. to find out what in the unholy blazes they meant by having me arrested as a thief, and to get Charters to call off his hounds before they had me again. So I spoke reassuringly to Bowers.
"Come on in. It's all right. It's dead. It can't hurt us."
Strangely enough, he straightened up a little at that. He risked a look round the door post, and, though he went a trifle limp when he saw it, he bad himself under control.
"Mr. Hogenauer's been poisoned," I said. "It's either suicide or murder. In any case, I must 'phone the station. Where's the 'phone?"