There was something in his voice which changed the officer’s opinion of the situation. He directed the light of his lantern upon the open letter and seemed to be stricken with wonder.
“If you have any doubts,” continued Smith—“you may not be familiar with the Commissioner’s signature—you have only to ring up Scotland Yard from Dr. Petrie’s house, to which we shall now return, to disperse them.” He pointed to Forsyth. “Help us to carry him there. We must not be seen; this must be hushed up. You understand? It must not get into the press—”
The man saluted respectfully; and the three of us addressed ourselves to the mournful task. By slow stages we bore the dead man to the edge of the common, carried him across the road and into my house, without exciting attention even on the part of those vagrants who nightly slept out in the neighborhood.
We laid our burden upon the surgery table.
“You will want to make an examination, Petrie,” said Smith in his decisive way, “and the officer here might ‘phone for the ambulance. I have some investigations to make also. I must have the pocket lamp.”
He raced upstairs to his room, and an instant later came running down again. The front door banged.
“The telephone is in the hall,” I said to the constable.
“Thank you, sir.”
He went out of the surgery as I switched on the lamp over the table and began to examine the marks upon Forsyth’s skin. These, as I have said, were in groups and nearly all in the form of elongated punctures; a fairly deep incision with a pear-shaped and superficial scratch beneath it. One of the tiny wounds had penetrated the right eye.
The symptoms, or those which I had been enabled to observe as Forsyth had first staggered into view from among the elms, were most puzzling. Clearly enough, the muscles of articulation and the respiratory muscles had been affected; and now the livid face, dotted over with tiny wounds (they were also on the throat), set me mentally groping for a clue to the manner of his death.
No clue
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