Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/115

106 "From my enemies. I saw them knocking at your door. That is why I came in by the window."

"Would it not have been more prudent" I began.

"Hush!" she whispered, tapping her exquisitely-modelled musical comedy teeth with her shapely Italian forefinger. "They are at hand. Play your part well." Then, with unsuspected strength and a knowledge of the arrangements of my modest apartment that staggered me, she tore open the door of the book-case, flung the corpse that it contained on to my dissecting table, and without a moment's hesitation took its place and pulled the door to after her.

"Open in the name of the law!"

Rather perturbed as to what the fair creature required me to do, I obeyed the summons and was relieved to see before me the burly form of Inspector Badger of the Detective Service, an officer with whom I was well acquainted.

"Rum case, that of the murdered prima-donna, Dr. Humdrum," he remarked affably. As he spoke he took a seat on the corner of the dissecting table and thus, luckily enough, overlooked its grim burden in the glance of keen professional scrutiny that he cast round the room. "I thought that I'd just look you up and see if you knew anything about it before I ordered any arrests."

"Murdered prima-donna!" I stammered. "I haven't even heard of it. Surely you don't suspect?"

"Suspect you?" said the Inspector with a hearty laugh. "Why, no, sir; but as it happens a bone button, wrapped in a sheet of paper bearing one of your prescriptions, had been used to gag the poor creature with. That and the yard of pigtail tied round her neck are our only clues as yet."

At the mention of these details I could not repress a start, which would scarcely have escaped Badger's notice