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Page 46
"What about the Chinaman?"
"Since there is no other means of entrance to the conservatory save
through the study, Kwee must have hidden himself there at some time
when his master was absent from the room."
"Croxted found the communicating door closed. What killed the Chinaman?"
"Both Miss Edmonds and Croxted found the study door locked from the inside.
What killed Strozza?" retorted Smith.
"You will have noted," continued the Inspector, "that the secretary is
wearing Sir Lionel's dressing-gown. It was seeing him in that, as she looked
in at the window, which led Miss Edmonds to mistake him for her employer--
and consequently to put us on the wrong scent."
"He wore it in order that anybody looking in at the window would
be sure to make that mistake," rapped Smith.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because he came here for a felonious purpose. See." Smith stooped
and took up several tools from the litter on the floor.
"There lies the lid. He came to open the sarcophagus.
It contained the mummy of some notable person who flourished
under Meneptah II; and Sir Lionel told me that a number of valuable
ornaments and jewels probably were secreted amongst the wrappings.
He proposed to open the thing and to submit the entire contents
to examination to-night. He evidently changed his mind--
fortunately for himself."
I ran my fingers through my hair in perplexity.
"Then what has become of the mummy?"
Nayland Smith laughed dryly.
"It has vanished in the form of a green vapor apparently," he said.
"Look at Strozza's face."
He turned the body over, and, used as I was to such spectacles,
the contorted features of the Italian filled me with horror, so--
suggestive were they of a death more than ordinarily violent. I pulled aside
the dressing-gown and searched the body for marks, but failed to find any.
Nayland Smith crossed the room, and, assisted by the detective,
carried Kwee, the Chinaman, into the study and laid him fully in the light.
His puckered yellow face presented a sight even more awful than the other,
and his blue lips were drawn back, exposing both upper and lower teeth.
There were no marks of violence, but his limbs, like Strozza's, had been
tortured during his mortal struggles into unnatural postures.
The breeze was growing higher, and pungent odor-waves from
the damp shrubbery, bearing, too, the oppressive sweetness of
the creeping plant, swept constantly through the open window.
Inspector Weymouth carefully relighted his cigar.
"I'm with you this far, Mr. Smith," he said. "Strozza, knowing Sir
Lionel to be absent, locked himself in here to rifle the mummy case,
for Croxted, entering by way of the window, found the key on the inside.
Strozza didn't know that the Chinaman was hidden in the conservatory--"
"And Kwee did not dare to show himself, because he too was there
for some mysterious reason of his own," interrupted Smith.
"Having got the lid off, something,--somebody--"
"Suppose we say the mummy?"
Weymouth laughed uneasily.
"Well, sir, something that vanished from a locked room without
opening the door or the window killed Strozza."
"And something which, having killed Strozza, next killed the Chinaman,
apparently without troubling to open the door behind which he lay concealed,"
Smith continued. "For once in a way, Inspector, Dr. Fu-Manchu has employed
an ally which even his giant will was incapable entirely to subjugate.
What blind force--what terrific agent of death--had he confined
in that sarcophagus!"
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