"Mummy-case! Body! Dear God in heaven, Mr.
Cleek, what are you hinting at?" he gasped. "You—you don't mean that she—that Zuilika—killed him?"
"No, Major, I don't," he made reply. "I simply mean that he killed her! The body in the mummy-case is the body of Zuilika, the caliph's daughter! This is the creature you have been wasting your pity on—see!"
With that he laid an intense grip on the concealing yashmak, tore it away, and so revealed the closely shaven, ghastly hued countenance of the cornered criminal.
"My God! Ulchester himself!" said the major in a voice of fright and surprise.
"Yes, Ulchester himself, Major. In a few more days he'd have withdrawn the money, and got out of the country, body and all, if he hadn't been nabbed, the rascal. There'd have been no tracing the crime then, and he and the Señorita here would have been in clover for the rest of their natural lives. But there's always that bright little bit of Bobby Burns's to be reckoned with. You know: 'The best laid schemes of mice and men,' etcetera—that bit. But the Yard's got them, and they'll never leave the country now. Take them, Mr. Narkom, they're yours!"
* * * * *
"How did I guess it?" said Cleek, replying to the major's query, as they sat late that night discussing the affair. "Well, I think the first faint inkling of it came when I arrived here yesterday, and smelt the overpowering odour of the incenses. There was so much of it, and it was used so frequently—twice a day—that it seemed to suggest an attempt to hide other odours of a less pleasant kind. When I left you last night, Dollops and I went down to the mummy chamber, and a skeleton key soon let us in. The unpleasant odour was rather pronounced in there. But even that didn't give me the cue, until I happened to find in the fireplace a considerable heap of fine ashes, and in the midst of them small lumps of a gummy
substance, which I knew to result from the burning of myrrh. I suspected from that and from the nature of the ashes that a mummy had been burnt, and as there was only one mummy in the affair, the inference was obvious. I laid hands on the two cases and tilted them. One was quite empty. The weight of the other told me that it contained something a little heavier than any mummy ought to be. I came to the conclusion that there was a body in it, injected full of arsenic, no doubt, to prevent as much as possible the processes of decay, the odour of which the incense was concealing. I didn't attempt to open the thing; I left that until the arrival of the men from the Yard, for whom I sent Dollops this afternoon. I had a vague notion that it would not turn out to be Ulchester's body, and I had also a distinct recollection of what you said about his being able to mimic a Gaiety chorus-girl and all that sort of thing. The more I thought over it the more I realized what an excellent thing to cover a bearded face a yashmak is. Still, it was all hazard. I wasn't sure—indeed, I never was sure—until tea-time, when I caught this supposed 'Zuilika' sitting at last, and gave the spade guinea its chance to decide it."
"My dear Mr. Cleek, how could it have decided it? That's the thing that amazes me the most of all. How could the tossing of that coin have settled the sex of the wearer of those garments?"