There, upon the end of the unfortunate man’s watch-chain, were the two keys which he always carried, keys which held the secrets of his experiments away from the prying eyes of persons who were undesirable. Many of his discoveries had been worth to him thousands of pounds, and to public companies which exploited and worked them hundreds of thousands of pounds more. There, in that very room in which I stood, had the Greer process of hardening steel been perfected, a process now used in hardening the armour-plates of our newest Dreadnoughts. Yet the master brain which had thought out those various combinations, and by years of patience had perfected the result, was now before me, inactive and dead.
I shuddered at sight of that disfigured face, hideous in its limp inertness and horrible to the gaze. But Kershaw Kirk, his eyes narrower and his face more aquiline, continued his minute investigation of every object in the room. I watched him with increasing interest, noticing the negative result of all his labours.
“I shall return again to-morrow when it is light,” at last he said; “artificial light is of little use to me in this matter. Perhaps you’ll come with me again—eh?”
“I’ll try,” I said, though, to be candid, I was not very keen upon a second visit to the presence of the disfigured body of the Professor. I could not see why Kirk was so anxious to avoid the police and to keep the affair out of the papers.
“The body must be buried before long,” I remarked. “How will you obtain a medical certificate and get it buried by an undertaker?”
“Mr Holford,” he said, turning to me with an expression of slight annoyance upon his face, “I beg of you not to anticipate difficulty. It is the worst attitude a man can take up—especially in trying to solve a problem such as this. The future kindly leave entirely with me.”
At that moment I was fingering a small test-tube containing some thick grey-coloured liquid, and as I turned I accidentally dropped it upon the tiles with which the Professor had had the place paved. In an instant there was a bright flash, almost like a magnesium light, so brilliant that for a second we were both blinded.
“I wonder what that was?” he remarked, startled by the result. “One must be careful in handling what the dead man has left behind.”
“Evidently,” I said; “we cannot tell what these various experimental apparatus and tubes contain. Therefore we should handle them delicately.”
And I bent to the table to examine another tube containing some bright red crystals held over an extinguished spirit-lamp by a brass holder, an action which my companion, I noticed, watched with a curious expression.