Page:Edgar Wallace - The Green Rust.djvu/79

Rh the doctor had taken from his pocket. There were four little phials and one of these was uncorked.

"Digitalis!" he read. "That shouldn't kill him, doctor."

He looked at van Heerden thoughtfully, then picked up the phial again. It bore the label of a well-known firm of wholesale chemists, and the seal had apparently been broken for the first time when van Heerden opened the tiny bottle.

"You have sent for the police?" Beale asked the agitated manager.

"Oui, m'sieur—directly. They come now, I think."

He walked to the vestibule to meet three men in plain clothes who had just come through the swing-doors. There was something about van Heerden's attitude which struck Beale as strange. He was standing in the exact spot he had stood when the detective had addressed him. It seemed as if something rooted him to the spot. He did not move even when the ambulance men were lifting the body nor when the police were taking particulars of the circumstances of the death. And Beale, escorting the shaken girl up the broad staircase to a room where she could rest and recover, looked back over his shoulder and saw him still standing, his head bent, his fingers smoothing his beard.

"It was dreadful, dreadful," said the girl with a shiver. "I have never seen anybody—die. It was awful."

Beale nodded. His thoughts were set on the doctor. Why had he stood so motionless? He was not the kind of man to be shocked by so normal a phenomenon as death. He was a doctor and such sights were common to him. What was the reason for this strange paralysis which kept him chained to the spot even after the body had been removed?

The girl was talking, but he did not hear her. He knew instinctively that in van Heerden's curious attitude was a solution of Prédeaux's death. "Excuse me a moment," he said.

He passed with rapid strides from the room, down the broad stairway and into the palm-court.