If ever Craig startled me it was by his quiet reply. ‘I’ve isolated it in their blood, extracted it, sterilised it, and I’ve tried it on myself.’
In breathless amazement, with eyes riveted on Craig, we listened.
‘Altogether I was able to recover from the blood samples of both of the victims of this crime six centigrams of the poison,’ he pursued. ‘Starting with two centigrams of it as a moderate dose, I injected it into my right arm subcutaneously. Then I slowly worked my way up to three and then four centigrams. They did not produce any very appreciable results other than to cause some dizziness, slight vertigo, a considerable degree of lassitude, and an extremely painful headache of rather unusual duration. But five centigrams considerably improved on this. It caused a degree of vertigo and lassitude that was most distressing, and six centigrams, the whole amount which I had recovered from the samples of blood, gave me the fright of my life right here in this laboratory this afternoon.
‘Perhaps I was not wise in giving myself so large an injection on a day when I was overheated and below par otherwise because of the strain I have been under in handling this case. However that may be, the added centigram produced so much more on top of the five centigrams previously taken that for a time I had reason to fear that that additional centigram was just the amount needed to bring my experiments to a permanent close.
‘Within three minutes of the time of injection the dizziness and vertigo had become so great as to make walking seem impossible. In another minute the lassitude rapidly crept over me, and the serious disturbance of my breathing made it apparent to me that walking, waving my arms, anything, was imperative. My lungs felt glued up, and the muscles of my chest refused to work. Everything swam before my eyes, and I was soon reduced to walking up and down the laboratory with halting steps, only preventing falling on the floor by holding fast to the edge of this table. It seemed to me that I spent hours gasping for breath. It reminded me of what I once experienced in the Cave of the Winds of Niagara, where water is more abundant in the atmosphere than air. My watch afterward indicated only about twenty minutes of extreme distress, but that twenty minutes is one never to be forgotten, and I advise you all, if you ever are so foolish as to try the experiment, to remain below the five-centigram limit.
‘How much was administered to the victims, Doctor Nott, I cannot say, but it must have been a good deal more than I took. Six centigrams, which I recovered from these small samples, are only nine-tenths of a grain. Yet you see what effect it had. I trust that answers your question.’
Doctor Nott was too overwhelmed to reply.
‘And what is this deadly poison?’ continued Craig, anticipating our thoughts. ‘I have been fortunate enough to obtain a sample of it from the Museum of Natural History. It comes in a little gourd, or often a calabash. This is in a gourd. It is blackish brittle stuff encrusting the sides of the gourd just as if it was poured in in the liquid state and left to dry. Indeed, that is just what has been done by those who manufacture this stuff after a lengthy and somewhat secret process.’
He placed the gourd on the edge of the table where we could all see it. I was almost afraid even to look at it.
‘The famous traveller, Sir Robert Schomburgh, first brought it into Europe, and Darwin has described it. It is now an article of commerce and is to be found in the United States Pharmacopoeia as a medicine, though of course it is used in only very minute quantities, as a heart stimulant.’
Craig opened a book to a place he had marked:
‘At least one person in this room will appreciate the local colour of a little incident I am going to read – to illustrate what death from this poison is like. Two natives of the part of the world whence it comes were one day hunting. They were armed with blowpipes and quivers full of poisoned darts made of thin charred pieces of bamboo tipped with this stuff. One of them aimed a dart. It missed the object overhead, glanced off the tree, and fell down on the hunter himself. This is how the other native reported the result:
‘“Quacca takes the dart out of his shoulder. Never a word. Puts it in his quiver and throws it in the stream. Gives me his blowpipe for his little son. Says to me goodbye for his wife and the village. Then he lies down. His tongue talks no longer. No sight in his eyes. He folds his arms. He rolls over slowly. His mouth moves without sound. I feel his heart. It goes fast and then slow. It stops. Quacca has shot his last woorali dart.”’
We looked at each other, and the horror of the thing sank deep into our minds. Woorali. What was it? There were many travellers in the room who had been in the Orient, home of poisons, and in South America. Which one had run across the poison?
‘Woorali, or curare,’ said Craig slowly, ‘is the well-known poison with which the South American Indians of the upper Orinoco tip their arrows. Its principal ingredient is derived from the Strychnos toxifera tree, which yields also the drug nux vomica.’
A great light dawned on me. I turned quickly to where Vanderdyke was sitting next to Mrs Ralston, and a little behind her. His stony stare and laboured breathing told me that he had read the purport of Kennedy’s actions.
‘For God’s sake, Craig,’ I gasped. ‘An emetic, quick – Vanderdyke.’
A trace of a smile flitted over Vanderdyke’s features, as much as to say that he was beyond our interference.
‘Vanderdyke,’ said Craig, with what seemed to me a brutal calmness, ‘then it was you who were the visitor who last saw Laura Wainwright and John Templeton alive. Whether you shot a dart at them I do not know. But you are the murderer.’
Vanderdyke raised his hand as if to assent. It fell back limp, and I noted the ring of the bluest lapis lazuli.
Mrs Ralston threw herself toward him. ‘Will you not do something? Is there no antidote? Don’t let him die!’ she cried.
‘You are the murderer,’ repeated Kennedy, as if demanding a final answer.
Again the hand moved in confession, and he feebly moved the finger on which shone the ring.
Our attention was centred on Vanderdyke. Mrs Ralston, unobserved, went to the table and picked up the gourd. Before O’Connor could stop her she had rubbed her tongue on the black substance inside. It was only a little bit, for O’Connor quickly dashed it from her lips and threw the gourd through the window, smashing the glass.
‘Kennedy,’ he shouted frantically, ‘Mrs Ralston has swallowed some of it.’
Kennedy seemed so intent on Vanderdyke that I had to repeat the remark.
Without looking up, he said: ‘Oh, one can swallow it – it’s strange, but it is comparatively inert if swallowed even in a pretty good-sized quantity. I doubt if Mrs Ralston ever heard of it before except by hearsay. If she had, she’d have scratched herself with it instead of swallowing it.’
If Craig had been indifferent to the emergency of Vanderdyke before, he was all action now that the confession had been made. In an instant Vanderdyke was stretched on the floor and Craig had taken out the apparatus I had seen during the afternoon.
‘I am prepared for this,’ he exclaimed quickly. ‘Here is the apparatus for artificial respiration. Nott, hold that rubber funnel over his nose, and start the oxygen from the tank. Pull his tongue forward so it won’t fall down his throat and choke him. I’ll work his arms. Walter, make a tourniquet of your handkerchief and put it tightly on the muscles of his left arm. That may keep some of the poison in his arm from spreading into the rest of his body. This is the only antidote known – artificial respiration.’
Kennedy was working feverishly, going through the motions of first aid to a drowned man. Mrs Ralston was on her knees beside Vanderdyke, kissing his hands and forehead whenever Kennedy stopped for a minute, and crying softly.
‘Schuyler, poor boy, I wonder how you could have done it. I was with him that day. We rode up in his car, and as we passed through Williston he said he would stop a minute and wish Templeton luck. I didn’t think it strange, for he
said he had nothing any longer against Laura Wainwright, and Templeton only did his duty as a lawyer against us. I forgave John for prosecuting us, but Schuyler didn’t, after all. Oh, my poor boy, why did you do it? We could have gone somewhere else and started all over again – it wouldn’t have been the first time.’
At last came the flutter of an eyelid and a voluntary breath or two. Vanderdyke seemed to realise where he was. With a last supreme effort he raised his hand and drew it slowly across his face. Then he fell back, exhausted by the effort.
But he had at last put himself beyond the reach of the law. There was no tourniquet that would confine the poison now in the scratch across his face. Back of those lack-lustre eyes he heard and knew, but could not move or speak. His voice was gone, his limbs, his face, his chest, and, last, his eyes. I wondered if it were possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that endured by a mind which so witnessed the dying of one organ after another of its own body, shut up, as it were, in the fullness of life, within a corpse.
I looked in bewilderment at the scratch on his face. ‘How did he do it?’ I asked.
Carefully Craig drew off the azure ring and examined it. In that part which surrounded the blue lapis lazuli, he indicated a hollow point, concealed. It worked with a spring and communicated with a little receptacle behind, in such a way that the murderer could give the fatal scratch while shaking hands with his victim.
I shuddered, for my hand had once been clasped by the one wearing that poison ring, which had sent Templeton, and his fiancée and now Vanderdyke himself, to their deaths.
MADELYN MACK
Created by Hugh Cosgro Weir (1884-1934)
A fascinating female Sherlock, Madelyn Mack is a young and glamorous American woman with a genius for criminology who works as a private detective in New York. (Although the story below is set in Boston.) Like Conan Doyle’s character, she is possessed of startling deductive abilities. She has her own Watson in the journalist Nora Noraker, who narrates her adventures, and, also like Holmes, she has her eccentricities and foibles. She collects gramophone records, commissioning exclusive performances from famous musicians. During particularly difficult cases, she stores cola berries in a locket around her neck, using them to keep herself awake for days on end. Her creator was Hugh Cosgro Weir, born in Illinois, who had a varied career as a writer, advertising guru, Hollywood screenwriter and magazine publisher. His stories about her first appeared in magazines and then were collected in the volume Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective in 1914. Weir may have based his character on a real-life woman detective named Mary E Holland who was a well-known figure in Chicago in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Madelyn Mack, now nearly forgotten, was popular enough in her day to be the heroine of several films starring Alice Joyce, an actress who appeared in more than 200 movies during the silent era.
CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER
I
Raymond Rennick might have been going to his wedding instead of to his – death. Spick and span in a new spring suit, he paused just outside the broad arched gates of the Duffield estate and drew his silver cigarette case from his pocket. A self-satisfied smile flashed across his face as he struck a match and inhaled the fragrant odour of the tobacco. It was good tobacco, very good tobacco – and Senator Duffield’s private secretary was something of a judge!
For a moment Rennick lingered. It was a day to banish uncomfortable thoughts, to smooth the rough edges of a man’s problems – and burdens. As the secretary glanced up at the soft blue sky, the reflection swept his mind that his own future was as free from clouds. It was a pleasing reflection. Perhaps the cigarette, perhaps the day helped to deepen it as he swung almost jauntily up the winding driveway toward the square white house commanding the terraced lawn beyond.
Just ahead of him a maple tree, standing alone, rustled gaily in its spring foliage like a woman calling attention to her new finery. It was all so fresh and beautiful and innocent! Rennick felt a tingling thrill in his blood. Unconsciously he tossed away his cigarette. He reached the rustling maple and passed it…
From behind the gnarled trunk, a shadow darted. A figure sprang at his shoulders, with the long blade of a dagger awkwardly poised. There was a flash of steel in the sunlight…
It was perhaps ten minutes later that they found him. He had fallen face downward at the edge of the driveway, with his body half across the velvet green of the grass. A thin thread of red, creeping from the wound in his breast, was losing itself in the sod.
One hand was doubled, as in a desperate effort at defence. His glasses were twisted under his shoulders. Death must have been nearly instantaneous. The dagger had reached his heart at the first thrust. One might have fancied an expression of overpowering amazement in the staring eyes. That was all. The weapon had caught him squarely on the left side. He had evidently whirled toward the assassin almost at the instant of the blow.
Whether in the second left him of life he had recognized his assailant, and the recognition had made the death-blow the quicker and the surer, were questions that only deepened the horror of the noon-day.
As though to emphasize the hour, the mahogany clock in Senator Duffield’s library rang out its twelve monotonous chimes as John Dorrence, his valet, beat sharply on the door. The echo of the nervous tattoo was lost in an unanswering silence. Dorrence repeated his knock before he brought an impatient response from beyond the panels.
‘Can you come, sir?’ the valet burst out. ‘Something awful has happened, sir. It’s, it’s –’
The door was flung open. A ruddy-faced man with thick white hair and grizzled moustache, and the hints of a nervous temperament showing in his eyes and voice, sprang into the hall. Somebody once remarked that Senator Duffield was Mark Twain’s double. The Senator took the comparison as a compliment, perhaps because it was a woman who made it.
Dorrence seized his master by the sleeve, which loss of dignity did more to impress the Senator with the gravity of the situation than all of the servant’s excitable words.
‘Mr Rennick, sir, has been stabbed, sir, on the lawn, and Miss Beth, sir –’
Senator Duffield staggered against the wall. The valet’s alarm swerved to another channel.
‘Shall I get the brandy, sir?’
‘Brandy?’ the Senator repeated vaguely. The next instant, as though grasping the situation anew, he sprang down the hall with the skirts of his frock coat flapping against his knees. At the door of the veranda, he whirled.
‘Get the doctor on the ’phone, Dorrence – Redfield, if Scott is out. Let him know it’s a matter of minutes! And, Dorrence –’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Tell the telephone girl that, if this leaks to the newspapers, I will have the whole office discharged!’
A shifting group on the edge of the lawn, with that strange sense of awkwardness which sudden death brings, showed the scene of the tragedy.
The circle fell back as the Senator’s figure appeared. On the grass, Rennick’s body still lay where it had fallen – suggesting a skater who has ignominiously collapsed on the ice rather than a man stabbed to the heart. The group had been wondering at the fact in whispered monosyllables.
A kneeling girl was bending over the secretary’s body. It was not until Senator Duffield had spoken her name twice that she glanced up. In her eyes was a grief so wild that for a moment he was held dumb.
‘Come, Beth,’ he said, gently, ‘this is no place for you.’
At once the white-faced girl became the central figure of the situation. If she heard him, she gave no sign. The Senator caught her shoulder and pushed her slowly away. One of the women-servants took her arm. Curiously enough, the two were the only members of the family that had been called to the scene.
The Senator swung on the group with a return of his aggressiveness.
‘Someone, who can talk fast and to the point, tell me the story. Burke, you
have a ready tongue. How did it happen?’
The groom – a much-tanned young fellow in his early twenties – touched his cap.
‘I don’t know, sir. No one knows. Mr Rennick was lying here, stabbed, when we found him. He was already dead.’
‘But surely there was some cry, some sound of a scuffle?’
The groom shook his head. ‘If there was, sir, none of us heard it. We all liked Mr Rennick, sir. I would have gone through fire and water if he needed my help. If there had been an outcry loud enough to reach the stable, I would have been there on the jump!’
‘Do you mean to tell me that Rennick could have been struck down in the midst of fifteen or twenty people with no one the wiser? It’s ridiculous, impossible!’
Burke squared his shoulders, with an almost unconscious suggestion of dignity. ‘I am telling you the truth, sir!’
The Senator’s glance dropped to his secretary’s body and he looked up with a shudder. Then, as though with an effort, his eyes returned to the huddled form, and he stood staring down at the dead man, with a frown knitting his brow. Once he jerked his head toward the gardener with the curt question, ‘Who found him?’ Jenkins shambled forward uneasily. ‘I did, sir. I hope you don’t think I disturbed the body?’
The Senator shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He did not raise his head again until the sound of a motor in the driveway broke the tension. The surgeon had arrived. Almost at the same moment there was a cry from Jenkins.
The gardener stood perhaps a half a dozen yards from the body, staring at an object hidden in the grass at his feet. He stooped and raised it. It was a woman’s slipper!
As a turn of his head showed him the eyes of the group turned in his direction, he walked across to Senator Duffield, holding his find at arm’s length, as though its dainty outlines might conceal an adder’s nest.
American Sherlocks Page 25
