“Why, it is Morris after all!” I exclaimed. “It is perfectly incredible; and you seemed to remove such a very small quantity of paste, too! I wouldn’t have believed that it would make such a change.”
“Not after that very instructive demonstration that Miss D’Arblay gave us with the clay and the plaster mask?” he asked with a smile.
I smiled sheepishly in return. “I told you I was a fool, Sir;” and then, as a new idea burst upon me, I asked: “And that other man—the hook-nosed man?”
“Morris—that is to say, Bendelow,” he replied, “with a different, more exaggerated, make-up.”
I was pondering with profound relief on this answer when one of the painter-detectives entered in search of the Superintendent.
“We got into the house from the back, Sir,” he reported. “The woman is dead. We found her lying on the bed in the first-floor front; and we found a tumbler half-full of water and this by the bedside.”
He exhibited a small, wide-mouthed bottle labelled “Potassium Cyanide,” which the Superintendent took from him.
“I will come and look over the house presently,” the latter said. “Don’t let anybody in, and let me know when the cabs are here.”
“There are two here now, sir,” the detective announced, “and they have sent down three wheeled stretchers.”
“One cab will carry our two casualties, and I expect the doctor will want the other. The bodies can be put on two of the stretchers, but you had better send the woman here for Dr. Gray to see.”