He once more drew out the cork and held the bottle towards her. She took it from him and having smelled at it, replied promptly:
“It smells to me like lavender. Possibly the bottle has had lavender water in it, though I shouldn’t, myself, have chosen a benzine bottle to keep a perfume in.”
“I don’t think it was lavender water,” said the superintendent. “That, I think, is nearly colourless. But the liquid that was in this bottle was red. As I hold it up to the light, you can see a little ring of red round the edge of the bottom. I daresay the chemists will be able to tell us what was in the bottle, but the question now is, who put it there? You are sure you can’t tell us anything about it, Mr. Wallingford?”
“I have never seen it before, I assure you,” the latter protested almost tearfully. “I know nothing about it, whatsoever. That is the truth, Superintendent; I swear to God it is.”
“Very well, Sir,” said Miller, writing a brief note on the label and making an entry in his note-book. “Perhaps it is of no importance after all. But we shall see. I think we have finished this room. Perhaps, Sergeant, you might take a look at the drawing room while I go through Mr. Monkhouse’s room. It will save time. And I needn’t trouble you any more just at present, Mr. Wallingford.”
The secretary retired, somewhat reluctantly, to the dining room while Barbara led the way to the first floor. As we entered the room in which that unwitnessed tragedy had been enacted in the dead of the night, I looked about me with a sort of shuddering interest. The bed had been stripped, but otherwise nothing seemed to be changed since I had seen the room but a few days ago when it was still occupied by its dread tenant. The bedside table still bore its pathetic furnishings; the water-bottle, the little decanter, the books, the candle-box, the burnt-out lamp, the watch—though that ticked no longer, but seemed, with its motionless hands, to echo the awesome stillness that pervaded that ill-omened room.
As the superintendent carried out his methodical search, joined presently by the sergeant, Barbara came and stood by me with her eyes fixed gloomily on the table.
“Were you thinking of him, Rupert?” she whispered. “Were you thinking of that awful night when he lay here, dying, all alone, and I— Oh! the thought of it will haunt me every day of my life until my time comes, too, however far off that may be.”
I was about to make some reply, as consolatory as might be, when the superintendent announced that he had finished and asked that Wallingford might be sent for to be present at the examination of his room. I went down to deliver the message, and, as it would have appeared intrusive for me to accompany him, I stayed in the dining room with Madeline, who, though she had recovered from the shock of the detectives’ arrival, was still pale and agitated.
“Poor Tony seemed dreadfully upset when he came back just now,” she said. “What was it that happened in the library?”