‘N’en sais-tu bien le moyen?’
That night the condition is fulfilled. Once more the sleeping lady takes her midnight journey to her husband’s laboratory. Once more her unconscious hand pours out the deadly draught. But this time it is no slow poison that she takes. It is a powerful and burning acid that, even as it awakes her from her trance, shrivels her with a horrible and instant death. One shrill and quickly stifled shriek alarms the inmates of the house, and when they hurry to the spot they find only a disfigured corpse, lying with bare feet and disordered night-dress in the darkness of the stormy November night, and with the fatal glass still clasped in its hand.
One shrill and quickly stifled shriek alarms the inmates of the house, and when they hurry to the spot they find only a disfigured corpse, lying with bare feet and disordered night-dress in the darkness of the stormy November night, and with the fatal glass still clasped in its hand.
My task is done. In possession of the evidence thus placed before you, your judgment of its result will be as good as mine. Link by link you have now been put in possession of the entire chain. Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidences, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution almost too horrible to contemplate? That is the first question to be asked, and it is one to which I confess myself unable to reply. The second is more strange, and perhaps even more difficult still. Supposing the latter to be the case—are crimes thus committed susceptible of proof, or even if proved, are they of a kind for which the criminal can be brought to punishment?
34 ‘Taylor on Poisons.’ 2nd edition, p. 98, et inf.
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The Notting Hill Mystery Page 16
