“Hulloa, old fellow!” he exclaimed, greeting me and taking me aside. “I thought I’d run down and see what’s in this. Funny affair it seems, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I answered. “A most remarkable mystery. But why have you come out here?”
“Soon after you left I went to find Lily, but she’s gone into the country. So having nothing else to do I came down to see what had occurred. I knew, of course, from Patterson’s telegram, that it was something unusual.”
“Have you been upstairs?”
“Yes, I’ve been worrying around this last half-hour, while you and Patterson have been making inquiries next door. I’ve been having a look about with the Doctor. It seems that there’s some wonderful apparatus in the laboratory—a discovery for liquefying hydrogen. Has he told you about it?”
“Yes,” I responded. “What’s your theory?”
“By Jove! old fellow,” he said smiling, “the whole affair is so devilish uncanny, with those snakes upstairs, water boiling without any heat beneath it, and one thing and another, that I’m utterly at a loss how to account for it all.”
“You think they’ve been murdered?”
“Of course,” answered the astute Cleugh. “But the doctor can’t discover how. There is not a scratch upon them. The discovery of those flash notes on the man looks as though he were a bit of a swell swindler, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. Then taking him across to the dining-table I explained how we had discovered the three cards concealed beneath the plates.