Part 8

“Very well, Jane,” said Foxton, and as the maid retired, he deliberately helped himself to another fried egg and, looking across the table at me, exclaimed: “Isn’t that always the way? Come immediately--now--this very instant, although the patient may have been considering for a day or two whether he’ll send for you or not. But directly he decides, you must spring out of bed, or jump up from your breakfast, and run.”

“That’s quite true,” I agreed; “but this really does seem to be an urgent case.”

“What’s the urgency?” demanded Foxton. “The woman is already dead. Any one would think she was in imminent danger of coming to life again and that my instant arrival was the only thing that could prevent such a catastrophe.”

“You’ve only a third-hand statement that she is dead,” said I. “It is just possible that she isn’t; and even if she is, as you will have to give evidence at the inquest, you don’t want the police to get there first and turn out the room before you’ve made your inspection.”

“Gad!” exclaimed Foxton. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes. You’re right. I’ll hop round at once.”

He swallowed the remainder of the egg at a single gulp and rose from the table. Then he paused and stood for a few moments looking down at me irresolutely.

“I wonder, Jervis,” he said, “if you would mind coming round with me. You know all the medico-legal ropes, and I don’t. What do you say?”

I agreed instantly, having, in fact, been restrained only by delicacy from making the suggestion myself; and when I had fetched from my room my pocket camera and telescopic tripod, we set forth together without further delay.

Beddingfield’s Boarding House was but a few minutes’ walk from Foxton’s residence, being situated near the middle of Ethelred Road, Cliftonville, a quiet, suburban street which abounded in similar establishments, many of which, I noticed, were undergoing a spring-cleaning and renovation to prepare them for the approaching season.

“That’s the house,” said Foxton, “where that woman is standing at the front door. Look at the boarders, collected at the dining-room window. There’s a rare commotion in that house, I’ll warrant.”

Here, arriving at the house, he ran up the steps and accosted in sympathetic tones the elderly woman who stood by the open street door.

“What a dreadful thing this is, Mrs. Beddingfield! Terrible! Most distressing for you!”

“Ah, you’re right, Dr. Foxton,” she replied. “It’s an awful affair. Shocking. So bad for business, too. I do hope and trust there won’t be any scandal.”

“I’m sure I hope not,” said Foxton. “There shan’t be if I can help it. And as my friend, Dr. Jervis, who is staying with me for a few days, is a lawyer as well as a doctor, we shall have the best advice. When was the affair discovered?”

“Just before I sent for you, Dr. Foxton. The maid noticed that Mrs. Toussaint--that is the poor creature’s name--had not taken in her hot water, so she knocked at the door. As she couldn’t get any answer, she tried the door and found it bolted on the inside, and then she came and told me. I went up and knocked loudly, and then, as I couldn’t get any reply, I told our boy, James, to force the door open with a case-opener, which he did quite easily as the bolt was only a small one. Then I went in, all of a tremble, for I had a presentiment that there was something wrong; and there she was, lying stone dead, with a most ’orrible stare on her face and an empty bottle in her hand.”

“A bottle, eh!” said Foxton.

“Yes. She’d made away with herself, poor thing; and all on account of some silly love affair--and it was hardly even that.”

“Ah,” said Foxton. “The usual thing. You must tell us about that later. Now we’d better go up and see the patient--at least the--er--perhaps you’ll show us the room, Mrs. Beddingfield.”

The landlady turned and preceded us up the stairs to the first-floor back, where she paused, and softly opening a door, peered nervously into the room. As we stepped past her and entered, she seemed inclined to follow, but, at a significant glance from me, Foxton persuasively ejected her and closed the door. Then we stood silent for a while and looked about us.

In the aspect of the room there was something strangely incongruous with the tragedy that had been enacted within its walls; a mingling of the commonplace and the terrible that almost amounted to anticlimax. Through the wide-open window the bright spring sunshine streamed in on the garish wall-paper and cheap furniture; from the street below, the periodic shouts of a man selling “sole and mack-ro!” broke into the brisk staccato of a barrel-organ and both sounds mingled with a raucous voice close at hand, cheerfully trolling a popular song, and accounted for by a linen-clad elbow that bobbed in front of the window and evidently appertained to a house painter on an adjacent ladder.

It was all very commonplace and familiar and discordantly out of character with the stark figure that lay on the bed like a waxen effigy symbolic of tragedy. Here was none of that gracious somnolence in which death often presents itself with a suggestion of eternal repose. This woman was dead; horribly, aggressively dead. The thin, sallow face was rigid as stone, the dark eyes stared into infinite space with a horrid fixity that was quite disturbing to look on. And yet the posture of the corpse was not uneasy, being, in fact, rather curiously symmetrical, with both arms outside the bed-clothes and both hands closed, the right grasping, as Mrs. Beddingfield had said, an empty bottle.

“Well,” said Foxton, as he stood looking down on the dead woman, “it seems a pretty clear case. She appears to have laid herself out and kept hold of the bottle so that there should be no mistake. How long do you suppose this woman has been dead, Jervis?”

I felt the rigid limbs and tested the temperature of the body surface.

“Not less than six hours,” I replied. “Probably more. I should say that she died about two o’clock this morning.”

“And that is about all we can say,” said Foxton, “until the post-mortem has been made. Everything looks quite straightforward. No signs of a struggle or marks of violence. That blood on the mouth is probably due to her biting her lip when she drank from the bottle. Yes; here’s a little cut on the inside of the lip, corresponding to the upper incisors. By the way, I wonder if there is anything left in the bottle.”

As he spoke, he drew the small, unlabelled, green glass phial from the closed hand--out of which it slipped quite easily--and held it up to the light.

“Yes,” he exclaimed, “there’s more than a drachm left; quite enough for an analysis. But I don’t recognize the smell. Do you?”

I sniffed at the bottle and was aware of a faint unfamiliar vegetable odour.