“Maybe it would. The pain had passed and the nausea, but it had left him weak and the paralysis was creeping over the lungs of him so that he was fighting like mad for breath, reeling and stopping and lurching forward again. He was choking and gasping when Terry and me first turned him over and he died with a heave and a snort as if a ton weight had landed on the chest of him. It was agony that I saw in his face and the horror of knowing he’d been poisoned; he knew who did it, too, or I miss my guess, for ’twas that he was trying to tell when the end came!”
“What else did you see?” The inspector’s tone held an unwonted note of asperity. “I want to know everything that happened, Mac, from the first minute you laid eyes on the fellow! If you had told me last night before the watchman opened the gates we might have saved precious time!”
“I’d nothing to tell but the look on Hughes’ face and him trying so hard to speak, and that I thought maybe he’d been running like that because he was delirious from pain and not in liquor. There was no mark on him when we carried him into the station-house, at least none that showed, and it come to me it must be poison. But with nothing more to go on than just my own private suspicions, I didn’t want to air them unless the autopsy proved there was grounds for them. I’ll be reminding you, inspector, that I’ve resigned from the Force long since and the new methods—”
“New methods be damned!” exploded the inspector. “You’ve said that about every case we’ve worked out together since you did resign, but you’ve come back long enough each time to find out the truth when no one else could. I told Orbit last night that you were a special deputy of mine, and by the Lord you are from now on, till we’ve found out who killed Hughes.”
“Yes, sir,” McCarty said meekly, avoiding Dennis’ eye, but the latter had an immediate difficulty of his own on his mind.
“If Hughes took that poison, or ’twas give to him, either before or just after he left the house, ’twill be on that block between those two locked gates that Mac will be looking first for clues, and they’re guarded night and day; you heard what that watchman said,” he remarked wistfully. “You’ll be getting a pass for Mac, likely, but unless a fire starts inside big enough for a general alarm there’ll be no chance of me following him, inspector, and ’twill be the first case ever he tackled since he left the Force that I didn’t get in on with him from start to finish, every minute I was off duty.”
“Don’t worry, Riordan,” Inspector Druet smiled. “I’ve never been able to figure out which of you two has the luck, but your teamwork can’t be beaten and I’ll see that you get a pass along with Mac. I’ve had a diagram of the New Queen’s Mall prepared and brought this copy with me for you two so you may know without loss of time who owns each house and which ones are occupied.”
He produced a folded paper on which the street had been roughly mapped out, with spaces, in which names and numbers had been written, blocked off from it on either side. The two bent their heads over it eagerly.
“You see there, Denny?” McCarty pointed with his forefinger. “Looking from the Avenue, the opposite gate to that we went into last night, the corner house, Number Two, on the south side belongs to the Goddards. That’ll be the stout, bald fellow with the little red mustache and the twinkle in his eye, you mind him? Next to it, but separated by that bulge that looks like a conservatory, is Number Four, Orbit’s house; then comes Mrs. Bellamy’s, Number Six, where that butler Snape works and after that, Eight and Ten, but they’re marked ‘closed.’”
“The Falkinghams, Number Eight, have lived abroad for more than twenty years and the sole heiress to Number Ten is Georgianna Davenant, a little girl of twelve away at school,” the inspector interposed. “That finishes the Mall on the south side, but starting at the western end again, a great house taking up the entire space opposite both Goddard’s and Orbit’s and bearing two numbers, ‘one’ and ‘three’ is occupied by the Burminster family, who originally owned most of the block and were the moving spirits in having it enclosed with gates. Number Five is the Sloanes’; you met two of the three generations last night—”