Then came Sir James’s voice, queer and puzzled.
“I say, Waters. There’s something funny here. Just have a look, will you?”
With a final squeeze, Waters loosened his grip of me and took Sir James’s place before the instrument. He moved the cylinder back and forth once or twice and said, in a judicial tone, “Well!”
“What do you make of that?” said Sir James.
“One of two things,” said Waters, briskly, “either it’s a suspension of the law of Nature, or this muscarine of yours is optically inactive.”
“What do you suggest?” demanded Sir James.
“I suggest,” said Waters, “that this is a synthetic preparation in racemic form.”
“But how could—?” Sir James broke off, and in the corpse-light I watched his face as he revolved the possibilities in his mind. “You know what that means, Waters.”
“I might hazard a guess.”
“Murder.”
“Yes, murder.”
There was another pause, in which the silence seemed to become absolutely solid. Then Sir James said, very slowly:
“The man was murdered. My God, this is a lesson to me, Waters. Never to overlook anything. Who would ever have thought—? But that’s no excuse. I shall have to—I must verify it first, though. Do the preparations again. But—what put you on to this?”