“Very well. Good night, Sir James.”
“Good night.”
Sir James switched on some more lights, flooding the gaunt room with what Poe has called somewhere a “ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Stepping across to a tall cupboard labelled with his name, he unlocked it with a key that hung upon his watch-chain.
“Here’s my bluebeard’s chamber,” he said, smiling. “Relics of all kinds of crimes and tragedies. Bottled murders. Bottled suicides. Plenty of plots for novels here, Mr. Munting.”
I said I supposed so.
“Here we are, Harrison. Extract from stomach. Extract from vomit. Extract from dish of fungus. Which is it you particularly want, Waters?”
“Doesn’t matter. Try the extract from the dish of fungus. It’ll be less open to—that is, it is possibly better for our purpose. What’s this, Lubbock?”
“That? Oh, that’s a fresh solution of muscarine I made myself for control purposes, to assist in determining the strength.”
“Made from the fungus?”
“Yes. I don’t altogether guarantee that I’ve isolated the principle. But it’s near enough.”
“Oh, yes. I’d like to have a look at that, too, if I may.”
“By all means.”
He brought the bottles out and set them on one of the laboratory tables. In appearance they were indistinguishable—the same white salt that I had seen before in the laboratory at St. Anthony’s.