Part 15

“There is one other little matter,” said Wardale as he rose to depart. “I have got a suit-case here which Mrs. Beddingfield lent me to bring some things up to town. It is one that Mr. Macauley left behind when he went away from the boarding-house. Mrs. Beddingfield suggested that I might leave it at his chambers when I had finished with it; but I don’t know his address, excepting that it is somewhere in the Temple, and I don’t want to meet the fellow if he should happen to have come up to town.”

“Is it empty?” asked Thorndyke.

“Excepting for a suit of pyjamas and a pair of shocking old slippers.” He opened the suit-case as he spoke and exhibited its contents with a grin.

“Characteristic of a negro, isn’t it? Pink silk pyjamas and slippers about three sizes too small.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke. “I will get my man to find out the address and leave it there.”

As Mr. Wardale went out, Polton entered with the enlarged photographs, which showed the footprints the natural size. Thorndyke handed them to me, and as I sat down to examine them he followed his assistant to the laboratory. He returned in a few minutes, and after a brief inspection of the photographs, remarked:

“They show us nothing more than we have seen, though they may be useful later. So your stock of facts is all we have to go on at present. Are you going home to-night?”

“Yes, I shall go back to Margate to-morrow.”

“Then, as I have to call at Scotland Yard, we may as well walk to Charing Cross together.”

As we walked down the Strand we gossiped on general topics, but before we separated at Charing Cross, Thorndyke reverted to the case.

“Let me know the date of the inquest,” said he, “and try to find out what the poison was--if it was really a poison.”

“The liquid that was left in the bottle seemed to be a watery solution of some kind,” said I, “as I think I mentioned.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke. “Possibly a watery infusion of strophanthus.”

“Why strophanthus?” I asked.

“Why not?” demanded Thorndyke. And with this and an inscrutable smile, he turned and walked down Whitehall.

Three days later I found myself at Margate sitting beside Thorndyke in a room adjoining the Town Hall, in which the inquest on the death of Mrs. Toussaint was to be held. Already the coroner was in his chair, the jury were in their seats and the witnesses assembled in a group of chairs apart. These included Foxton, a stranger who sat by him--presumably the other medical witness--Mrs. Beddingfield, Mr. Wardale, the police superintendent and a well-dressed coloured man, whom I correctly assumed to be Mr. Macauley.

As I sat by my rather sphinx-like colleague my mind recurred for the hundredth time to his extraordinary powers of mental synthesis. That parting remark of his as to the possible nature of the poison had brought home to me in a flash the fact that he already had a definite theory of this crime, and that his theory was not mine nor that of the police. True, the poison might not be strophanthus, after all, but that would not alter the position. He had a theory of the crime, but yet he was in possession of no facts excepting those with which I had supplied him. Therefore those facts contained the material for a theory, whereas I had deduced from them nothing but the bald, ambiguous mathematical probabilities.

The first witness called was naturally Dr. Foxton, who described the circumstances already known to me. He further stated that he had been present at the autopsy, that he had found on the throat and limbs of the deceased, bruises that suggested a struggle and violent restraint. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but whether that failure was due to shock, terror, or the action of a poison he could not positively say.

The next witness was a Dr. Prescott, an expert pathologist and toxicologist. He had made the autopsy and agreed with Dr. Foxton as to the cause of death. He had examined the liquid contained in the bottle taken from the hand of the deceased and found it to be a watery infusion or decoction of strophanthus seeds. He had analyzed the fluid contained in the stomach and found it to consist largely of the same infusion.

“Is infusion of strophanthus seeds used in medicine?” the coroner asked.

“No,” was the reply. “The tincture is the form in which strophanthus is administered unless it is given in the form of strophanthin.”

“Do you consider that the strophanthus caused, or contributed to death?”

“It is difficult to say,” replied Dr. Prescott. “Strophanthus is a heart poison, and there was a very large poisonous dose. But very little had been absorbed, and the appearances were not inconsistent with death from shock.”

“Could death have been self-produced by the voluntary taking of the poison?” asked the coroner.

“I should say, decidedly not. Dr. Foxton’s evidence shows that the bottle was almost certainly placed in the hands of the deceased after death, and this is in complete agreement with the enormous dose and small absorption.”

“Would you say that appearances point to suicidal or homicidal poisoning?”

“I should say that they point to homicidal poisoning, but that death was probably due mainly to shock.”

This concluded the expert’s evidence. It was followed by that of Mrs. Beddingfield, which brought out nothing new to me but the fact that a trunk had been broken open and a small attaché case belonging to the deceased abstracted and taken away.