His friend drew his hand across his forehead then pressed his fingers on his eyes, as though trying to remember.
“I am sorry, Louie,” he said at last, “but I have not the faintest recollection of receiving any message, or of leaving the box. I can remember the ballet, or rather the first part of it. After that my mind is a blank. The next thing I remember is waking up this morning and feeling very rotten. I feel at sixes and sevens still.”
Not until lunch time was Stapleton able to see Jessica, and then she complained of a headache and of feeling utterly limp. When he questioned her she replied that she had no recollection of drinking champagne at the sideboard, or even of talking to him after supper. She remembered her anxiety about Archie, she said, and coming home in the car, and Stapleton sitting beside her at supper, and chemin de fer and roulette being played. But there her memory stopped.
“That is as I expected,” Stapleton said when she had ceased speaking. “Your symptoms are similar to Archie’s. I should say, therefore, that you were both doped with the same drug, one effect of which apparently is to deaden memory not from the time it is taken, but from a little while before it is taken. I think it is clear that the individual who came to the Alhambra with a message for you intended, by some means, to give you the drug then. But Archie took the message, went out, and presumably met the person who brought it. Then, having failed to see you, this person succeeded in drugging Archie, came on here—he, or it may have been a woman, was evidently among your guests—and actually drugged you in your own house. Now the question is—why was it done? and by whom?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Have you missed anything? Is your jewelry intact, and are your other valuables safe?”
“I hope so. I haven’t looked.”
“Then you had better look at once.”
And then it was the discovery was made that the safe in her boudoir had been opened and ransacked. It had contained, in addition to a rope of priceless pearls and a quantity of uncut diamonds, four thousand five hundred and sixty-eight pounds in Bank of England notes, Treasury notes, and cash, moneys kept there for banking the roulette and the other games of chance frequently played at her house. The lot had vanished, and the safe had been relocked and the key replaced in the little bag which Jessica always carried concealed about her person. Unless a duplicate key had been employed, which seemed hardly probable.
Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson was in despair; yet she did not make a scene or become hysterical as so many women would have done in the circumstances. On the contrary, she kept her wits about her, and remained singularly calm.