“Quite so, quite so—unless—it doesn’t matter. That’s all, thank you, Doctor, and very many thanks.”
“A word, please, Mr. Cleek,” interposed the doctor as he turned to move away and leave him. “I am afraid I was not very communicative nor very cordial when you asked me if I had any idea of the means employed to bring about the unfortunate man’s death; may I hope that you will be better mannered than I, Mr. Cleek, if I ask you if you have? Thanks, very much. Then, have you?”
“Yes,” said Cleek. “And so, too, will you, if you will make a second blood test, with the specimens you have, at a period of about forty-eight hours after the time of decease. It will take quite that before the presence of the thing manifests itself under the influence of any known process or responds to any known test. And even then it will only be detected by a faintly alcoholic odour and excessively bitter taste. The man has been murdered—done to death by that devil’s drug woorali, if I am not mistaken. But who administered it and how it was administered are things I can’t tell you yet.”
“Woorali! Woorali! That is the basis of the drug curarin, produced by Roulin and Boussingault in 1828 from a combination of the allied poisons known to the savages of South America and of the tropics by the names of corroval and vao, is it not?”
“Yes. And a fiend’s thing it is, too. A mere scratch from anything steeped in it is enough to kill an ox almost immediately. The favourite ‘native’ manner of using the hellish thing is by means of a thorn and a blowpipe. But no such method has been employed in this case. No thorn nor, indeed, any other projectile has entered the flesh, nor is there one lying anywhere about the floor. Be sure I looked, Doctor, the instant I suspected that woorali had been used. Pardon me, but that must be all for the present. I have other fish to fry.”
CHAPTER XXIX
The “frying” of them took the shape of first going outside and walking round the Stone Drum, and then of stepping back to the door and beckoning Narkom and Lord Fallowfield and young James Drake out to him.
“Anybody in the habit of sitting out here to read or paint or anything of that sort?” he asked abruptly.
“Good gracious, no!” replied Lord Fallowfield. “Whatever makes you ask such a thing as that, Mr. Cleek?”