“All right.” Lomas waved him away. “Damme, it is a bad business. What am I to do with this, Fortune?” He held up papers in a strange script, papers of all sorts and sizes, some torn and discoloured, some fresh.
Reggie went to look. “Arabic,” he said. “And this is Persian.” He studied them for a while. “A sort of dossier, a lot of evidence about some case or person. Lomas old thing, you’ll have to call in the Foreign Office.”
“Lord, we can translate them ourselves. It’s the mass of it!”
“Yes, lot of light reading. I think I should have a talk to the Foreign Office. Well, that’s your show. Me for the body.”
Lomas lay back in his chair. “What’s in your head?”
“I won’t let anything into my head. There is no evidence. But I’m wondering if we’ll ever get any. It’s a beautiful crime—as a crime. A wicked world, Lomas old thing.”
On the day after, Reggie Fortune came into Lomas’s room at Scotland Yard and shook his head and lit one of Lomas’s largest cigars and fell into a chair. “Unsatisfactory, highly unsatisfactory,” he announced. “I took Harvey down with me. You couldn’t have a better opinion except mine, and he agrees with me.”
“And what do you say?”
“I say, nothing doing. He had no medical history. There was nothing the matter with the man, yet he died of heart failure and suffocation. That means poisoning by aconitine or a similar alkaloid. But there is no poison in the price list which would in a quarter of an hour kill quietly and without fuss a man in perfect health. I have no doubt a poison was injected into him by that puncture on the hand, but I don’t know what it was. We’ll have some analysis done, of course, but I expect nothing of that. There’ll be no trace.”
“Unique case.”