At any time the interior of that huge, stone-walled, steel-lined tube must have been unlovely and depressing to all but the man who laboured in it. But to-night, with that man sitting dead in it, with his face to the open window, a lamp beside him, and stiff hands resting on the pages of a book that lay open on the desk’s flat top, it was doubly so; for, added to its other unpleasant qualities, there was now a disagreeable odour and a curious, eye-smarting, throat-roughening heaviness in the atmosphere which was like to nothing so much as the fumes thrown off by burnt chemicals.
Cleek gave one or two sniffs at the air as he entered, glanced at Mr. Narkom, then walked straightway to the desk and looked into the dead man’s face. Under the marks of the scratches and cuts upon it—marks which would seem to carry out the idea of an animal’s attack—the features were distorted and discoloured, and the hair of beard and moustache was curiously crinkled and discoloured.
Cleek stopped dead short as he saw that face, and his swaggering, flippant, cocksure air of a minute before dropped from him like a discarded mantle.
“Hullo! this doesn’t look quite so promising for the animal theory as it did!” he flung out sharply. “This man has been shot—shot with a shell filled with his own soundless and annihilating devil’s invention, lithamite—and bomb throwing is not a trick of beasts of a lower order than the animal tribe! Look here, Mr. Narkom—see! The lock of the desk has been broken. Shut the door there, Nippers. Let nobody leave the room. There has been murder and robbery here; and the thing that climbed that tree was not an animal nor yet a bird. It was a cut-throat and a thief!”
Naturally enough, this statement produced something in the nature of a panic; Miss Renfrew, indeed, appearing to be on the verge of fainting, and it is not at all unlikely that she would have slipped to the floor but for the close proximity of Mrs. Armroyd.
“That’s right, madame. Get a chair; put her into it. She will need all her strength presently, I promise you. Wait a bit! Better have a doctor, I fancy, and an inquiry into the whereabouts of Mr. Charles Drummond. Mr. Narkom, cut out, will you, and wire this message to that young man’s employer.”
Pens and papers were on the dead man’s desk. Cleek bent over, scratched off some hurried lines, and passed them to the superintendent.
“Sharp’s the word, please; we’ve got ugly business on hand and we must know about that Drummond chap without delay. Miss Renfrew has not been telling the truth to-night! Look at this man. Rigor mortis pronounced. Feel him—muscles like iron, flesh like ice! She says that he spoke to her at a quarter to eight o’clock. I tell you that at a quarter to eight this man had been dead upward of an hour!”
“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Narkom; but his cry was cut into by a wilder one from Miss Renfrew.
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” she protested, starting up from her seat, only to drop back into it, strengthless, shaking, ghastly pale. “It could not be—it could not. I have told the truth—nothing but the truth. He did speak to me at a quarter to eight—he did, he did! Constable Gorham was there—he heard him; he will tell you the same.”