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

“I believe so. No man of Mortimer’s class could simulate fear in the way he did this morning. He was mortally afraid, old son. Don’t you see why? Because he knew that he carried something which, if carelessly handled, might recoil upon himself!”

“A snake,” I suggested.

“I hardly think so.”

I sat forward, a sudden thought striking me.

“Penn,” I cried, “what do you suppose happened to the thing after it poisoned Parsons?”

He spread out his hands.

“Ask me another!”

“Mortimer wouldn’t have taken it. He wouldn’t have risked touching it with his hands — and he left his scarf behind on the floor.”

“Which means—”

“That it may be here now!”

I got to my feet and moved about the room uneasily, surveying the cornices and the floor and every fold in the blue casement curtains, with Pennington, his feet on the mantelshelf, watching me.

And the longer I searched, the more feasible my theory appeared. A thing that had lain unsuspected between the folds of a greasy scarf might have taken refuge anywhere.

I turned up the corner of the carpet gingerly and let it fall again, loosing into the atmosphere a faint cloud of dust; moved the golf-bag from the recess in which it now reposed and looked behind it; tried the underneath of each piece of furniture in turn.

V

“No luck?” inquired Pennington presently.

I shook my head.

Settling myself in my chair again, I surveyed him reproachfully.

“I’ve got to sleep in this place,” I reminded him, “and you haven’t!”

“Try leaving the light on!”

His superior smile annoyed me.

“What in the name of everything,” I demanded, “is the use of that?”

“Every use in the world, if the brute’s what I think it is.”

“And supposing it isn’t! What then? It bit Parsons in the daylight.”

“Because it was thrown at him — and couldn’t help it!”

He burst out laughing, and just at that moment the phone bell in the hall rang. I ran down and picked up the receiver. It was Hodges calling.

“That you, Mr. Gray? — Sergeant Hodges here. I’ve picked up Joe again — found him on the Batavia boat trying to ship for Holland. Put up a bit of a fight when I tackled him, but he’s quieter now—”

“Hang on a minute,” I answered, and called the news up to Pennington.

Pennington strolled out on to the landing.

“Tell him to slip the bracelets on him and bring him down here. We may as well get to the bottom of this. Joe Mortimer, with the gallows at the back of his mind, may prove more communicative than we found him this morning. In any case it’s worth trying.”

I gave the message to Hodges and went back.

It was ten minutes to eleven by the clock on the mantelpiece when a car drew up outside and a long ring at the bell announced the arrival of Hodges and his prisoner.

Joe entered first, propelled from the rear by his captor, who politely removed his hat for him — a gray velour this time, new and glossy. A change into a blue serge suit and collar and tie lent an air of respectability that the freckled face positively denied!

He paused just inside the door, his legs defiantly apart, the black eye gained in the struggle with Hodges painfully evident.

Pennington nodded to him from his chair.

“Well, Joe!” he greeted him. “Here again, I see!”

Mortimer scowled, but said nothing.

Watching Pennington, I saw the pupils of his eyes contract. The boyish expression had vanished completely; there appeared in its place a queer, set-expression that reminded me somehow of Chanda-Lung, the only man in creation that I believe Mortimer feared.

“Two men died this morning,” he rasped out, “and both in the same manner. You know that, Mortimer, don’t you? You are being charged with both those crimes!”

The man with the sandy hair stiffened suddenly and his thin lips moved one over the other. I felt that we were being treated to a view of the real Mortimer now — the man who had started life in a London slum, learned boxing by fighting for his newspaper pitch, drifted on to the race courses and out to sea.

Fear had crept into those shifty eyes again, a subdued, sullen emotion that-contrasted strangely with his shuddering terror of the morning. In his saner moments he had told us that he was not afraid of death.

I wondered if this threat of the gallows would startle him — or whether he would decide to carry his story with him to another world.

Hodges had closed the door and was leaning against it, a little proud of his capture, more than anxious lest he should slip through his fingers again. A curtain fluttered in the cool breeze from an open window.

Mortimer’s lips parted.

“I carried out my orders, guv’nor,” he said huskily; “that’s all.”

“What was it you brought here in your scarf, Joe?”

The question rapped out like a pistol-shot, swift and deadly in its effect. It pierced Mortimer’s armor of obstinate silence and sent him stumbling backward against the bag of clubs propped in a corner.

“I never brought nothing there, guv’nor,” he gasped. “Straight I didn’t.” He clasped his manacled hands in front of him and stared in an agony of terror into the accusing eyes of Chinese Pennington.