The victim was apparently nearly sixty, with hair and moustache turning
white, rather stoutly built, and broad-shouldered. His position was
distorted and unnatural, as though he had twisted himself in the final
agonies of death. The thin waxen hands were clenched tightly, and the
linen collar was burst from the neck, while the Professor's dark blue
fancy vest bore a stain where the assassin's knife had struck him
unerringly in the heart.
Of his features I, a stranger, could distinguish but little, so swollen,
livid, and scarred were they that I was instantly horrified by their
sight. The disfigurement had been so terrible that there remained
hardly any semblance to a human face.
"Well," exclaimed Kirk at last, "you have seen it! Now what is your
opinion?"
We were standing alone in the great laboratory, for Antonio and his
brother had remained downstairs at my companion's suggestion.
I looked round that great silent workshop of one of the most
distinguished chemists of the age, and then I gazed upon the mortal
remains of the man upon whom so many honours had been showered. Warped,
drawn, crouching, with one arm uplifted almost as though to ward off a
blow, the body remained a weird and ghastly object.
"Has it been moved?" I inquired when I recovered speech.
"No; it is just as we found it--just as the unknown assassin left it,"
he said. "The disfigurement, as far as I can judge, has been caused by
some chemical agency--some acid or other substance placed upon the face,
with fiendish cruelty, immediately before death."
I bent closer to the lifeless face in order to examine it, and
afterwards agreed with him. It was undoubtedly a murder prompted by a
fierce and bitter vengeance.
"The work of a madman, it may be," I suggested.
But Kershaw Kirk shook his head, saying: "Not of a madman, but of a very
clever murderer who has left not a trace of his identity."
"Do you think that the Professor was struck down at the spot where he
now is?" I asked, for my friend seemed to be something of an expert in
the habits of the criminal classes.
"I think not. Yet, as you see, the place is in no way disordered.
There is no sign whatever of a struggle."
I looked around, and as far as I could discern everything was as it
should be. Upon the nearest table in the centre was a very delicate
glass apparatus in which some experiments had recently been made, for
certain yellowish liquids were still within. Had this table been
violently jarred, the thin glass tubes would have been disarranged and
broken, a fact which showed conclusively that the fatal blow had been
struck with great suddenness and in silence.
It had not occurred to Kirk to examine the dead man's pockets before,
and now, kneeling at his side, he was in the act of doing so.
The various objects he took out, first examined, and afterwards handed
them to me. There were several letters, none of any great importance,
some chemical memoranda scribbled in pencil upon a piece of blank paper,
a gold presentation watch and chain, fifteen pounds odd in money, and a
few minor trifles, none of which threw any light upon the mysterious
tragedy.
My companion made another careful examination of the body. Then, rising
to his feet, he walked slowly around the laboratory, in further search,
it seemed to me, of anything that the assassin might have left behind.
But by his countenance I saw that this eccentric man who dealt in
secrets, as he had admitted to me, was much puzzled and perplexed. The
enigma was complete.
So complicated and extraordinary were the whole circumstances that any
attempt to unravel them only led one at once into an absolute
_cul-de-sac_.
To whom had the dead man signalled in the Morse code by raising and
lowering the blind?
Someone, friend or enemy, had been waiting outside near Clarence Gate in
Regent's Park in the expectation of a message.
He received it from the Professor's own hands, those hands which before
the dawn were cramped in the stiffness of death.