“It is!” Inspector Druet’s voice shook with loathing. “This is the most damnable thing, Mac! He must have sat in that very chair where you are now, gloating over it as he wrote!—‘Once more I have usurped the prerogative of providence! I have taken a useless, sickly life, foredoomed to failure because it lacked the stamina to combat difficulties. Weakness! the only sin in the world! Had Horace Goddard lived he would have profaned art with mediocrity and as I look at the masterpieces about me I rejoice that his poor efforts are destined never to see the light,—destined because I so willed it, I am destiny! It was the luminal that put the thought into my mind, although I had no idea then whom I should remove. I forgot I possessed any till I looked over the store in my laboratory this morning. Two grains of that innocent looking coal tar product would bring oblivion in twenty minutes and the coma would last for two or three hours, during which time death might be brought about in a dozen different ways! I played with the thought, it fascinated me, and I could fix my mind on nothing else, although Giambattista was coming to play this afternoon. If I could only know once more those intoxicating moments of last Friday night!
“‘It was, then, just after lunch, that Horace slipped over to ask if he might study my Fragonard for a little while. He came by way of the side door and none of the servants had seen him. I realized this and as I looked at him it came to me what a really unnecessary life his was, except in the fatuous eyes of his parents! What a subject for that coal tar product—and then I thought of the coal itself, that Ching Lee had spoken about yesterday. How easy it would be to render Horace insensible and bury him under an avalanche of coal!
“‘I could not resist the idea, it took possession of me! I coaxed the boy up to my sitting-room, induced him to drink a glass of milk in which I dropped two miraculous grains of luminal, and then I went and telephoned the coal-dealer. If he could not deliver, the boy would wake none the worse and my plan would only be deferred, but the order went through and when I rejoined him Horace was already drowsy. I shall never forget the exquisite agony of suspense during that half-hour. Horace slept at last and although I had to call the coal-dealer twice more my plan succeeded! I carried Horace to the cellar unseen and just in time, for the coal arrived and the crash of it tumbling down the chute was like the roll of maddening drums! To hear it was enough, I did not want to see, and I was again in my sitting-room spraying the black dust from my flowers when the man McCarty and his associate were ushered in. I am not quite sure about McCarty; I have not underrated him, he is the type of the one-time policeman, elemental, phlegmatic, devoted to routine and without initiative, and yet he seemed to-day to be studying me!’”
“He had me right!” McCarty grinned. “’Twas what I went there for!”
“And me thinking you were stalling, and not getting it at all!” Dennis shook his head. “He’d a grand opinion of himself, all right, but a poorly-read one of you, Mac!”
“Orbit goes on to mention Trafford’s call to inquire for Horace while you were here.” The inspector had been reading ahead. “Then he starts on to rave about the musicale and how he felt with the lad’s body under his very feet; he says that at the organ he surpassed Giambattista on the violin and he was drunk with what he had pulled off all the evening.”
“He played all by himself later,” McCarty observed. “A funny, childish little tune and yet with something threatening and malicious about it, and whilst Denny was getting shaved this morning I found out what it was—a witch’s song from an opera called ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ after the crone has lured children to her house and made away with them! That ought to have told me something if I’d known what it was!”
“He says nothing of planning another murder, does he?” Dennis asked. “He must have run wild when he committed one the very next day—!”
“The laboratory is open now, sir.” Ching Lee had reappeared so noiselessly that he seemed to have sprung into being on the threshold. “No one is there.”
“No one!” The inspector started up with a cry, cramming the papers into his pocket. “My God, he has escaped, after all!”