"I know."
She looked again. "But he's got hair," she burst out, in a curious tone. "You said Hogenauer was bald. He's got hair. I saw it through the window; I was looking at the back of him. It was all sticking out under that cap." After a pause she added: "Something must have given you rather a ghastly turn, Ken. That can't be Hogenauer. But I don't think we need to be afraid that Keppel will catch us now."
Something like this is often required to put a man's wits back into line. I know that it cleared my head. As 1 walked over to where the little corpse sat grinning, I remembered what Bowers had said earlier to-night. What's Dr. Keppel like? "Something like the governor, little and thin….
The face, of course, was pulled and colored out of recognition by the strychnine. But 'this man,' despite his red fez, did not wear a smoking-jacket like Hogenauer; he had on an ordinary dark coat, with a prim white collar and a string tie. I lifted off the fez, and a wiry brush of greyish black
hair sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, completely altering the aspect of the face. To make sure there was no deception, I even gave the hair a tug; but that almost pulled the body sideways, and I left off. He was cold and stiff. Then I looked down at his left leg, at the cane lying on the carpet beside him. There could no longer be any doubt: this man was Dr. Albert Keppel.
"Ken," said Evelyn from the foot of the table, "look here."
I joined her at the little round table on which stood the bottle of mineral-water and the empty glass.
"He even drank the same sort of mineral-water as Hogenauer," she went on, "and-you see it?"
Beside the glass lay an ordinary buff envelope, somewhat crumpled, and folded over in half. I picked it up, first trying to cleanse my hands of grime on a handkerchief. The envelop was empty, but there was something gritty inside. I shook it a little: a few grains of whitish powder ran together inside. When I touched one of them to the tip of my tongue, there was a faintly bitter taste. These were traces of the strychnine salts.
"Didn't Bowers tell you," said Evelyn, staring blankly across the room, "that when Keppel called on Hogenauer this morning, Hogenauer gave him something like `an envelope folded in half?' Yes."