He led me into a large room around which I glanced curiously and not without surprise. One side was occupied by a huge copying camera, the other by a joiner’s bench. A powerful back-geared lathe stood against one window, a jeweller’s bench against the other, and the walls were covered with shelves and tool-racks, filled with all sorts of strange implements. From this room we passed into another which I recognized as a chemical laboratory, although most of the apparatus in it was totally unfamiliar to me.
“I had no idea,” said I, “that the practice of Medical Jurisprudence involved such an outfit as this. What do you do with it all? The place is like a factory.”
“It is a factory,” he replied with a smile; “a place where the raw material of scientific evidence is worked up into the finished product suitable for use in courts of law.”
“I don’t know that that conveys much to me,” said I. “But you are going to perform some sort of experiment; perhaps that will enlighten me.”
“Probably it will, to some extent,” he replied, “though it is only a simple affair. We have a parcel here which came by post this evening and we are going to see what is in it before we open it.”
“The devil you are!” I exclaimed. “How in the name of Fortune are you going to do that?”
“We shall examine it by means of the X-rays.”
“But why? Why not open it and find out what is in it in a reasonable way?”
Thorndyke chuckled softly. “We have had our little experiences, Mayfield, and we have grown wary. We don’t open strange parcels nowadays until we are sure that we are not dealing with a ‘Greek gift’ of some sort. That is what we are going to ascertain now in respect of this.”
He picked up from the bench a parcel about the size of an ordinary cigar-box and held it out for my inspection. “The overwhelming probabilities are,” he continued, “that this is a perfectly innocent package. But we don’t know. I am not expecting any such parcel and there are certain peculiarities about this one that attract one’s attention. You notice that the entire address is in rough Roman capitals—what are commonly called ‘block letters.’ That is probably for the sake of distinctness; but it might possibly be done to avoid a recognizable handwriting or a possibly traceable typewriter. Then you notice that it is addressed to ‘Dr. Thorndyke’ and conspicuously endorsed ‘personal.’ Now, that is really a little odd. One understands the object of marking a letter ‘personal’—to guard against its being opened and read by the wrong person. But what does it matter who opens a parcel?”