"Indeed it is. Engaged? Then may I offer you my congratulations, Miss McCall? I won't detain you any longer, as I know you must be anxious to get along. A little freedom in the fresh air will do you good. We shall meet again later, I've no doubt. Good-bye."
She nodded to him brightly and disappeared down the hill, and Cleek could hear her soft feet beating upon the carpet as she passed down the stairs.
Once out of sight of her, he darted into the room which he knew was Lady Paula's, and closed the door softly behind him, turning the key in the lock. It was just the sort of boudoir he would have imagined her choosing—a place all soft pillows and low divans, and hung in silks of Eastern colourings, so that it resembled nothing so much as the home of a sultan's favourite, from the low Turkish stool standing by the couch-side, with the little filigree box of cigarettes upon it, accompanied by a match-case en suite, to a tiny jewelled inlaid holder bearing a half-smoked cigarette in it. Cleek picked it up, smelt it, smelt it again, and then pursed his lips up into a low whistle of astonishment.
"My lady indulges in a delicate drug now and again, does she?" he told himself, examining the thing with some distaste. "And for that reason one may find excuse for the hysteria of this morning. That lends fresh colour to the case, certainly. For a drug-fiend in plain parlance is little more than a fool, and a half-balanced fool at that.... I'll take a peep at those drawers in that secretaire, my lady, and see if you have anything to reveal to me. For an ambitious drug-fiend would stop at nothing to gain her own ends, and if those same ends should happen to be such a heritage as this for her son and herself.... Hello! what's this? Tablets, eh? But the bottle unmarked."
He drew one out of the little phial and laid it in the palm of his hand, and with the other thumb as piston, ground it down to fine powder and then, sniffed it, recollecting that story which Maud Duggan had told him of her suspicions with regard to the poisoning of her father. But after he had touched the tip of his tongue to it, he smiled a little.
"H'm. Nothing but aspirin. I thought as much, certainly, when she told me the story. So that explodes that little theory once and for all—if there was anything in it from the beginning.... Nicely appointed chamber, I must say." He walked leisurely about it, lifting a pillow there, and dropping it back into its place, and straightening the set of a chair, pushed out of its usual position by a very obvious hurry of the room's occupant.
And he was just in the act of doing this trivial thing when he came upon a little screw of paper lying in a twisted ball beneath a chair which stood close up to the Turkish stool, and evidently dropped by accident (which undoubtedly was the fact). Cleek stooped to pick it up, smoothed it out in his fingers, and then of a sudden sucked in his breath, and every muscle in that well-organized frame of his went taut as iron. For the paper—innocent as it looked—contained news which certainly was enough to startle the most unsuspicious police-constable in existence. For, written across its surface, having neither name nor address nor date, and in a calligraphy which was undoubtedly foreign, were the words:
Meet me at three o'clock by the G. F. Road. Everything successfully carried out. Muffled clapper. Must see you. Utmost importance.
A. M.
"Hello! Hello!" rapped out Cleek in the sharp staccato of excitement. "Then she did have something to do with it, after all, did she? Gad! a dollar to a ducat that there's someone else in this affair whom we've never even hit upon yet! What a bit of luck Dollops turned up at that moment—when she was just on the way! Let's see—what's the time? Three o'clock. Gad! I'll nip along myself, and come in at the finish, and hear what I can hear from the good lady's lips herself, and see who the dickens it is who's meeting her. There's more in this than meets the eye, Cleek my boy, and don't you forget it!"