Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

Chanda-Lung, for all his uncanny ingenuity, could not have been here too! We had heard him escape and seen the car that helped him! And then I spotted Mortimer’s cap on the floor by my golf-bag, and a yard or so of thick green scarf trailing across the carpet.

Something moved convulsively on the far side of the table, and groaned. I crossed the room, moving cautiously, and stumbled upon the recumbent form of Inspector Parsons.

His fingers clutched at his throat and it was not until I had lifted him into a chair that I noticed there the same chain of crimson marks that I had found on the body at the opposite house.

“He — tricked — me!” he managed to get out. “It was — in — his scarf!” And then his eyes closed.

Pennington came in and we moved him to my bed. I went down and rang up a doctor. By the time I got back the blinds were drawn and the man with the Chinese eyes was experimenting on Parsons with a hypodermic syringe and a selection of strange drugs in a flat aluminium case.

“I think he’s easier,” he said in a low voice. “If we pull him out of this we’ll have a lot to thank old Professor Okura for and his ‘Malay Poisons and their Antidotes!’ ”

He tapped the case.

Bending over Parsons, I was inclined to agree. His breathing was fairly regular and the rash at his throat looked less vivid.

“How did you know which to use?” I asked.

“I didn’t. I glanced through the symptoms in Okura’s little book — and took my chance.”

For the moment his answer staggered me, until I remembered his vast experience of native habits and his previous experiences with Okura’s aluminium box.

I found myself jerked back to Everitt’s house in Kensington on the night that the White Owl called. Pennington himself had been the victim then — and I the physician.

Stricken with a drug that normally killed in ten seconds, he had given me the number of the antidote to use! And then there was the case of Ducros at Argeles.

By the evening Parsons was better.

We had seen him in the hospital after a day of fruitless wandering in the district Mortimer had named. Hodges had trailed the runaway car, overhauled it in Kennington — and found it empty! The driver had been taken to the Yard and questioned, but had divulged nothing. He was being detained for further examination.

We returned to my rooms for dinner, as bang up against a blank wall as we ever had been. The subtle combination of Chinese and Hindu that walked the earth as Chanda-Lung carried out its work effectively, drawing false scents across the trail and vanishing completely while we followed them.

The irritating point was that we had fallen into a trap, succumbed to what seemed to me afterward as the simplest piece of strategy conceivable.

I gave my views to Pennington from my armchair after dinner.

“We’ve been too regular in our habits, Penn,” I insisted. “Chanda-Lung knows this place well, knows, too, that we get together pretty frequently here. Like you with the dope, he chanced his arm — and chanced it pretty well!

“You may argue that it was lucky for him that the Hendersons were away at Bognor, although we know him to be equal to drugging an entire household to achieve his end. Joe Mortimer was too dark a horse to be trusted; we should have remembered that. Look at his record!”

Pennington screwed up his eyes and moved his head slowly up and down, smoking steadily all the time.

“He’s a wily bird right enough,” he admitted.

“The whole affair must have been planned from the start,” I continued.

“Very probably.”

“Joe getting drunk and being run-in with the knife and things in his possession. That was a clever move. His well-assumed horror, the talk about Chanda-Lung’s eyes, the face at the window— It had us all guessing, Penn. You must admit that.”

The man in the chair opposite was still nodding.

“I’m prepared to admit anything,” he returned placidly. “I m too confoundedly tired to argue. But doesn’t it strike you as queer that it was Parsons who stopped behind with Mortimer? Any one of us might have stayed—”

“That was luck, too,” I suggested. Pennington yawned.

“It smacks more to me like the long arm of coincidence. Chanda-Lung couldn’t have foreseen that. No, Gray, I incline to the opinion that the use of Parsons’s name as an intended victim was purely haphazard. The scheme was to wipe out one of us; it didn’t matter which. That is just my opinion and we needn’t bother ourselves to verify it.

“Our problem is solve the mystery of the Crimson Death. You noticed Mortimer’s scarf? It was lined with sheet-rubber and the Stitches had been ripped at one end when we found it. Whatever it was made those ghastly marks on Parsons’s throat was concealed in there — and it was alive, Gray, all the time!”

I glanced at him uneasily.

“Alive?”