“It’s not conclusive, Alleyn. There might be a fourth injected where we couldn’t see it. Inside the ear, under the hair, or even into the exact spot where one of the others was given.”

“I see. Oh, well, I must bustle away and solve the murder.”

“Let me know if there’s anything further I can do.”

“Thank you, I will. Good-bye.”

Alleyn went out, changed his mind and struck his head round the door.

“If I send you a pill or two, will you have them dissected for me?”

“Analysed?”

“If you’d rather. Good-bye.”

Alleyn took a taxi to the Brook Street home. He asked a lugubrious individual in a chastened sort of uniform if Sir John Phillips was in the hospital. Sir John had not yet come in. When would he be in? The lugubrious individual was afraid he “reely couldn’t say.”

“Please find someone who can say,” said Alleyn. “And when he’s free give Sir John this card.”

He was invited to wait in one of those extraordinary drawing-rooms that can only be found in expensive private hospitals in the West End of London. Thick carpet, subfusc curtains of pseudo-empire pattern and gilt-legged chairs combined to disseminate the atmosphere of a mausoleum. Chief Inspector Alleyn and a marble woman whose salient features were picked out embarrassingly in gilt stared coldly at each other. A nurse came in starchily, glanced in doubt at Alleyn, and went out again. A clock, flaunted aloft by a defiant bronze-nude, swung its pendulum industriously to and fro for twenty minutes. A man’s voice sounded somewhere and in a moment the door opened and Phillips came in.

He was, as usual, immaculate, a very model for a fashionable surgeon, with his effective ugliness, his eye-glass, his air of professional cleanliness, pointed by the faint reek of ether. Alleyn wondered if the extreme pallor of his face was habitual.

“Inspector Alleyn?” he said. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“Not a bit, sir,” said Alleyn. “I must apologise for bothering you, but I felt you would like to know the report of the postmortem as soon as it came through.”

Phillips went back to the door and shut it quietly. His face was turned away from his visitor as he spoke.

“Thank you. I shall be relieved to hear it.”

“I’m afraid ‘relieved’ is scarcely the word.”

“No?”

Phillips faced round slowly.

“No,” said Alleyn. “They have found strongly marked traces of hyoscine in the organs. He must have had at least a quarter of a grain.”

“A quarter of a grain!” He moved his eyebrows and his glass fell to the floor. He looked extraordinarily shocked and astonished. “Impossible!” he said sharply. He stooped and picked up his monocle.

“There has been no mistake,” said Alleyn quietly.

Phillips glanced at him in silence.