William Le Queux - The Red Room

Upon rows of shelves were many bottles of chemicals, retorts, and delicate experimental apparatus, while on the right was a small furnace. There were also three zinc-covered tables with the miscellaneous accumulation of objects which the owner of the place had been using. I saw a blocked-up door on the right, which my companion explained let into the conservatory over the portico.

“Look!” whispered my friend in a low voice. “This way.” And he switched on the lights at the further end of the great high apartment.

I stepped forward at his side, until I distinguished, huddled up in the further corner, a human figure in dark grey trousers and black frock-coat. It seemed as though he had been propped in the corner, and his grey head had fallen sideways before death.

I went further forward, holding my breath.

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.

For a full hour we remained there in the presence of the dead.

Before that huddled figure I stood a dozen times trying to form some feasible theory as to what had actually occurred within that room.

The problem, however, was quite inexplicable. Who had killed Professor Greer?

There, upon the end of the unfortunate man’s watch-chain, were the two keys which he always carried, keys which held the secrets of his experiments away from the prying eyes of persons who were undesirable. Many of his discoveries had been worth to him thousands of pounds, and to public companies which exploited and worked them hundreds of thousands of pounds more. There, in that very room in which I stood, had the Greer process of hardening steel been perfected, a process now used in hardening the armour-plates of our newest Dreadnoughts. Yet the master brain which had thought out those various combinations, and by years of patience had perfected the result, was now before me, inactive and dead.

I shuddered at sight of that disfigured face, hideous in its limp inertness and horrible to the gaze. But Kershaw Kirk, his eyes narrower and his face more aquiline, continued his minute investigation of every object in the room. I watched him with increasing interest, noticing the negative result of all his labours.

“I shall return again to-morrow when it is light,” at last he said; “artificial light is of little use to me in this matter. Perhaps you’ll come with me again – eh?”

“I’ll try,” I said, though, to be candid, I was not very keen upon a second visit to the presence of the disfigured body of the Professor. I could not see why Kirk was so anxious to avoid the police and to keep the affair out of the papers.

“The body must be buried before long,” I remarked. “How will you obtain a medical certificate and get it buried by an undertaker?”

“Mr Holford,” he said, turning to me with an expression of slight annoyance upon his face, “I beg of you not to anticipate difficulty. It is the worst attitude a man can take up – especially in trying to solve a problem such as this. The future kindly leave entirely with me.”

At that moment I was fingering a small test-tube containing some thick grey-coloured liquid, and as I turned I accidentally dropped it upon the tiles with which the Professor had had the place paved. In an instant there was a bright flash, almost like a magnesium light, so brilliant that for a second we were both blinded.

“I wonder what that was?” he remarked, startled by the result. “One must be careful in handling what the dead man has left behind.”

“Evidently,” I said; “we cannot tell what these various experimental apparatus and tubes contain. Therefore we should handle them delicately.”

And I bent to the table to examine another tube containing some bright red crystals held over an extinguished spirit-lamp by a brass holder, an action which my companion, I noticed, watched with a curious expression.