“Well,” said Miller, “we shall have to find out what it is. Will you pass me that bit of sealing-wax, Sergeant?”
He reclosed the packet with the greatest care and having sealed both the ends with his signet-ring, enclosed it in an envelope and put it into his inside breast pocket. Then he returned to the little nest of drawers. The second drawer was empty, but on pulling out the third, he uttered an exclamation.
“Well, now! Look at that! Somebody seems to have been fond of physic. And there’s no doubt as to what this is. Morphine hydrochlor, a quarter of a grain.”
As he spoke, he took out of the drawer a little bottle filled with tiny white discs or tablets and bearing on the label the inscription which the superintendent had read out. Wallingford gazed at it with a foolish expression of surprise as Miller held it up for our—and particularly Wallingford’s—inspection; and Barbara, I noticed, cast at the latter a side-long, inscrutable glance which I sought in vain to interpret.
“Morphine doesn’t seem much to the point,” Miller remarked as he wrapped the little bottle in paper and bestowed it in his inner pocket, “but, of course, we have only got the evidence of the label. It may turn out to be something else, when the chemical gentlemen come to test it.”
With this he grasped the tab of the bottom drawer and drew the latter out; and in a moment his face hardened. Very deliberately, he picked out a small, oblong envelope, which appeared once to have contained a box or hard packet, but was now empty. It had evidently come through the post and was addressed in a legible business hand to “A. Wallingford Esq., 16 Hilborough Square.” Silently the superintendent held it out for us all to see, as he fixed a stern look on Wallingford. “You observe, Sir,” he said, at length, “that the post-mark is dated the 20th of August; only about a month ago. What have you to say about it?”
“Nothing,” was the sullen reply. “What comes to me by post is my affair. I am not accountable to you or anybody else.”
For a moment, the superintendent’s face took on a very ugly expression. But he seemed to be a wise man and not unkindly, for he quickly controlled his irritation and rejoined without a trace of anger, though gravely enough:
“Be advised by me, Mr. Wallingford, and don’t make trouble for yourself. Let me remind you what the position is. In this house a man has died from arsenic poisoning. The police will have to find out how that happened and if any one is open to the suspicion of having poisoned him. I have come here to-day for that purpose with full authority to search this house. In the course of my search I have asked you for certain information, and you have made a number of false statements. Believe me, Sir, that is a very dangerous thing to do. It inevitably raises the question why those false statements should have been made. Now, I am going to ask you one or two questions. You are not bound to answer them, but you will be well advised to hold nothing back, and, above all, to say nothing that is not true. To begin with that packet of powder. What do you say that packet contains?”
Wallingford, who characteristically, was now completely cowed by the superintendent’s thinly-veiled threats, hung his head for a moment and then replied, almost inaudibly, “Cocaine.”