He reached over for the box on the table, opened it, and pulled out just such a leather wallet as he had described, and then a short knife of unusual shape, which he laid beside it under the light.
“Ever seen a knife like that?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was unusual in shape, short, rather broad-bladed with curved hand-guard, obviously a stabbing dagger, but of what nationality I could not say. But what held my eye more than its shape was the faint filigree of silvery metal lines hammered or welded into the bluish steel of the blade. They seemed to form letters of a kind, though not easily decipherable.
Forsyth picked it up and examined it. “I have, but”—he looked at us both—“they were in a museum, and labelled ‘Scandinavian—old,’ and they didn’t have this filigree stuff.”
“I thought you’d say something like that,” said Wrexham. “I looked up a book on old weapons as soon as I got back to India. Now for exhibit No. 2, as the policeman calls it.”
He opened the wallet and took out a flat object wrapped in folds of soft cloth, which he unrolled.
“I don’t think you’ve ever seen things like that in any museum,” he said as he laid the object down.
We both bent over it and simultaneously exclaimed.
It was a little portrait of a girl, painted on what seemed to be a sort of matt-stone or very hard plaster. The colours were fresh and vivid, and the art was of a high standard. But the face held us more then than the fashion of its depicting.
It was a girl looking slightly downward, as though at something she was holding in her hands. Masses of heavy brown hair with a glint of gold, eyes of deepest blue with a violet tinge screened with long lashes, under finely pencilled dark-brown eyebrows, and a skin of rose and ivory with faint blue transparent shadows down the graceful curve where the neck entered the filmy garment that swathed the outlined shoulders.