The Drums of Fu Manchu f-9 Read online

  Hot on the words came Gallaho, wrenching his tightly fitting bowler from his close-cropped skull and leaving a mark like a scar around his brow.

  “Yes?” snapped Smith and took a step forward. “What is it? You have news!”

  “News, yes!” the detective answered bitterly—”but has it come too late?”

  He pulled out his pocket case and withdrew a slip of paper which he tossed on to the desk in front of Smith. As Smith picked it up I sprang to my feet and hurried forward. Over his shoulder I read—it was written in pencil, in plain block letters—the following:

  Final notice

  The Council of Seven of the Si-Fan grants you twelve hours in which to carry out its orders.

  PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL

  Nayland Smith’s expression had something wild in it as he turned to Gallaho.

  “To whom was this sent?” he snapped

  “Doctor Martin Jasper.”

  Smith’s expression changed; his face became almost blank.

  “Who the devil is Doctor Martin Jasper?”

  “I have looked him up, sir. He has a row of degrees; he’s a research man and for some time was technical director of the great Caxton armament factory up in the north.”

  “Armament factory? I begin to understand. Where does he live?”

  “That’s the significant thing, sir. It may account for the presence of Doctor Fu Manchu where we found him—or rather, where we lost him. This Doctor Martin Jasper lives at a house called Great Oaks just on the Suffolk border, not ten miles, as the crow flies, from the Monks’ Arms.”

  Great Oaks

  It was a cross-country journey and the night was misty and moonless; but although unknown to us by name clearly enough Dr Martin Jasper was someone of importance in the eyes of the Si-Fan.

  Smith attacked the matter with feverish energy.

  A special train was chartered. The railway officials were given twenty-five minutes in which to clear the line. Arrangements were made for a car to meet us at our journey’s end. And at about that hour when after-theatre throngs are congesting the West End thoroughfares, we set out in the big Rolls, Fey at the wheel.

  Nayland Smith’s special powers (which enabled him to ignore traffic regulations) and the wizard driving of Fey, resulted in a dash through London’s crowded streets which even I, who had known so many thrills, found exciting.

  Smith uttered scarcely a word either to myself or to Gallaho, until arriving at the terminus he was assured by a flustered stationmaster that the special was ready to start. Once on board and whirling through that dark night, he turned to the inspector.

  “Now, Gallaho, the full facts!”

  “Well sir”—Gallaho steadied himself against the arm rest, for the solitary coach was rocking madly—”I have very little to add.” He pulled out his notebook. “This is what I jotted down during the telephone conversation.”

  “The local police are not in charge then?” Smith snapped.

  “No sir, and I took the step of requesting that they shouldn’t be notified.”

  “Good.”

  “It was a Mr. Bailey, the doctor’s private secretary, who called up the Yard.”

  “When?”

  “At ten-seventeen—so we’ve wasted no time! This was what he told me.” He consulted his notes. “The doctor, who is engaged upon experiments of great importance in his private laboratory, had alarmed his secretary by his behavior—that is in the last week or so. He seemed to be in deadly fear of something or someone, so Mr. Bailey told me. But whatever was bothering him he kept it to himself. It came to a head though last Wednesday. Something reduced Doctor Jasper to such a state of utter panic that he abandoned work in his laboratory and for hours walked up and down his study. Today he was even worse. In fact Mr. Bailey said he looked positively ill. But somewhere around noon as the result, it seems, of a long telephone conversation—”

  “With whom?”

  “Mr. Bailey didn’t know—but as a result, the doctor resumed work, although apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He worked right on up till tonight, refusing to break off for dinner. His behavior so alarmed his secretary that Mr. Bailey took the liberty of searching the study to see if he could find any evidence pointing to the cause of it.”

  “And he found…”

  “The original of the message I showed you.”

  “No other message?”

  “No other.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing that he could in any way connect with the remarkable behavior of his employer. He went to the laboratory, which is separate from the house, but Doctor Jasper refused to unlock the door and said that on no account was he to be disturbed. Very wisely, Mr. Bailey called up Scotland Yard, and that’s about all I know.”

  Onward we raced through the black night, at one point passing very near to the scene of my last meeting with Ardatha. Within me I fought desperately to solve the mystery of those enigmatic eyes. Even when she looked at me with scorn, mocked me, fought with me, they seemed to mirror a second Ardatha, submerged, all but hidden perhaps from herself—a frightened soul who appealed, appealed for help—protection.

  The whistle shrieked wildly. We went through stations at nightmare speed. Once we roared past a sidetracked express. I had a fleeting glimpse of lighted windows, staring faces.

  A useful-looking Daimler met us at the station where we were received with some ceremony by the stationmaster. But brushing all inquiries aside. Smith climbed into the car followed by myself and Gallaho, and we set out for Great Oaks. Once on the way Smith glanced at his watch.

  “I take it you don’t know, Gallaho, at what time the original of this message was received?”

  “No, Mr. Bailey couldn’t tell me.”

  Then having followed a high and badly kept yew hedge for some distance, the car was turned in between twin stone pillars and began to mount a drive which ascended slightly through a grove of magnificent oaks. I saw the house ahead. A low-pitched, irregular building, the characteristics of Great Oaks were difficult to discern, but the place was evidently of considerable age.

  “Hullo!” muttered Smith; “what’s this? Some new development?”

  Light streamed out into the porch and I could see that the front door was open.

  As our car swung around and was pulled up before the steps two men ran down. They evidently had been awaiting us.

  Smith sprang out to meet them. Gallaho and I followed. One of the pair was plainly a butler; the other, a youngish, dark-haired man with a short military moustache, whom I assumed normally to be of healthy coloring but who looked pale in the reflected light, stepped forward and introduced himself.

  “My name is Horace Bailey,” he said in an agitated voice. “Do you come from Scotland Yard?”

  “We do,” said Gallaho. “I’m Detective Inspector Gallaho—this is Sir Denis Nay land Smith, and Mr. Kerrigan.”

  “Thank God you’re here!” cried Bailey, and glanced aside at the butler, who nodded sympathetically.

  Both faces, I saw as we all entered Great Oaks, were stamped by an expression of horrified amazement.

  “I have a foreboding,” said Smith, glancing about the entrance hall in which we found ourselves, “that I come too late.”

  Mr. Bailey slowly inclined his head and something like a groan came from the butler.

  “Good God, Kerrigan! A second score to the enemy!”

  He dropped down on a leather-covered couch set in a recess over which hung a trophy of antlers. For a moment his amazing vitality, his electrical energy seemed to have deserted him, and I saw a man totally overcome. As I stepped towards him he looked up haggardly.

  “The facts, Mr. Bailey, if you please.” He spoke more slowly than I remembered ever to have heard him speak. “When did it happen? Where? How?”

  “I discovered the tragedy not five minutes ago.” Bailey spoke and looked as a man distraught. “You must understand that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory since
noon and at last I determined to face any rebuff in order to induce him to rest. I beg, gentlemen, that you will return there with me now! Hale, the chauffeur, and Bordon, the doctor’s mechanic, are trying to cut out the lock of the door!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  The overstrung man, waving us to follow, already was leading the way along a passage communicating with the rear of the house.

  “When I reached the laboratory” he cried back, now beginning to run, “through the grille in the door I saw the doctor lying face downwards . . . I immediately returned for assistance . . . It was hearing the approach of your car that brought me to the porch to meet you.”

  A somewhat straggling party, we followed the hurrying figure through a dim garden and along a path which zigzagged, sloping slightly upwards to a coppice of beech trees. He knew the way but we did not. Inspector Gallaho, stumbling and growling, produced a flashlamp for our guidance.

  The laboratory was some two hundred yards removed from the house, a squat brick building with a number of high-set windows, screened and iron-barred. The entrance was on the further side, and as we approached I heard a sound of hammering and wrenching. Onto a gravel path and around the corner we ran, and there, where light shone out through a grille in a heavy door, I saw two men at work with chisels, hammers and crowbars.

  “Are you nearly through?” Bailey panted.

  “Another two minutes should do it, sir.”

  “Surely there is more than one key!” Smith snapped.

  “I regret to say there is only one. Doctor Jasper always held it.”

  We crowded together to look through the thick glass behind the grille.

  I saw a long, narrow workroom, well lighted. It resembled less a laboratory than a machine shop, but I noticed chemical impedimenta, mostly unfamiliar. That which claimed and held my attention was the figure of a short, thick-set man wearing a white linen coat. He lay face downward, arms outstretched, some two paces from the door. Owing to his position, it was impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the back of his head. But there was something grimly significant in the slump of the body.

  The workmen carried on unceasingly. I thought I had heard few more mournful sounds than those of the blows of the hammer and splintering of stout wood as they struggled to force a way into the locked laboratory.

  “This is ghastly,” Smith muttered, “ghastly! He may not be dead. Have you sent for a doctor?”

  “I am myself a qualified physician,” Bailey replied,”and following Inspector Gallaho’s advice, I have not notified the local police.”

  “Good,” said Gallaho.

  “I am still far from understanding the circumstances,” snapped Nayland Smith, with the irritability of frustration. “You say that Doctor Jasper has been locked in his laboratory all day?”

  “Yes. His ways have become increasingly strange for some time past. Something—I can only guess what—evidently occurred which threw him into a state of nervous tension some ten days or a fortnight ago. Then again, last Wednesday to be exact, he seemed to grow worse. I have come to the conclusion, Sir Denis, that he had received two of these notices. The third—I dictated its contents to the inspector over the telephone—must actually have come by the second post this morning.”

  “Are you certain of this?”

  “All his mail passes through my hands, and I now recall that there was one letter marked ‘Personal & Private’ which naturally I did not open, delivered at eleven forty-five this morning.”

  “Eleven forty-five?”

  “Yes.”

  I saw Smith raise his wrist watch to the light shining out from the grille.

  “Two minutes short of midnight,” he murmured. “The message gave him twelve hours. We are thirteen minutes too late.”

  “But do you realize. Sir Denis,” the secretary cried, “that he is alone, and locked in? This door is of two-inch teak set in an iron frame. To batter it down would be impossible—hence this damnable delay! How can the question of foul play arise?”

  “I fear it does,” Smith returned sternly. “From what you have told me I am disposed to believe that the ultimate result of these threats was to inspire Doctor Jasper to complete his experiments within the period granted him.”

  “Good heavens!” I murmured, “you are right. Smith!” The chauffeur and the mechanic labored on the door feverishly, their hammer blows and the splintering of tough wood punctuating our conversation.

  “He doesn’t move,” muttered Gallaho, looking through the grille. “Might I ask, Mr. Bailey,” Smith went on, “if you assisted Doctor Jasper in his experiments?”

  “Sometimes, Sir Denis, in certain phases.” “What was the nature of the present experiment?” There was a perceptible pause before the secretary replied. “To the best of my belief—for I was not fully informed in the matter—it was a modified method of charging rifles—” “Or, one presumes, machine guns?”

  “Or machine guns, as you say. An entirely new principle which he termed ‘the vacuum charger.’“

  “Which increased the velocity of the bullet?”

  “Enormously.”

  “And, in consequence, increased the range?”

  “Certainly. My employer, of course, is not a medical man, but a doctor of physics.”

  “Quite,” snapped Smith. “Were the doctor’s experiments subsidized by the British government?” “No. He was working independently.”

  “For whom?”

  “I fear, in the circumstances, the question is rather an awkward one.”

  “Yet I must request an answer.”

  “Well—a gentleman known to us as Mr. Osaki.”

  “Osaki?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see, Kerrigan”—Smith turned to me—”here comes the Asiatic element! No description of Mr. Osaki (an assumed name) is necessary. Descriptions of any one of Osaki’s countrymen sound identical. This Asiatic gentleman was a frequent visitor, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Was he a technician?”

  “Undoubtedly. He sometimes lunched with the doctor and spent many hours with him in the laboratory. But I know for a fact that at other times he would visit the laboratory without coming through the house.”

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “There is a lane some twenty yards beyond here and a gate. Osaki sometimes visited the doctor when he was working, entering by way of the gate. I have seen him in the laboratory, so this I can state with certainty.”

  “When was he here last?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, yesterday evening. He spent nearly two hours with Doctor Jasper.”

  “Trying, no doubt, to set his mind at rest about the second notice from the Si-Fan. Then this morning the third and final notice arrives. But Mr. Osaki, anxious about results, phones at noon—”

  “Binns, the butler, thinks the caller this morning was Osaki—” “Undoubtedly urging him to new efforts,” jerked Smith. “You understand, Kerrigan?”

  “For heaven’s sake are you nearly through?” cried Bailey to the workmen.

  “Very nearly, sir. It’s a mighty tough job,” the chauffeur replied. To the accompaniment of renewed hammering and wrenching:

  “There are two other points,” said Bailey, his voice shaking nervously, “which I should mention, as they may have a bearing on the tragedy. First, at approximately half past eleven, Binns, who was in his pantry at the back of the house, came to me and reported that he had heard the sound of three shots, apparently coming from the lane. I attached little importance to the matter at the time, being preoccupied about the doctor, and assuming that poachers were at work. The second incident, which points to the fact that Doctor Jasper was alive after eleven-thirty, is this:

  “A phone call came which Binns answered. The speaker was a woman”

  “Ah!” Smith murmured.

  “She declined to give her name but said that the matter was urgent and requested to be put through to the laboratory. Binn
s called the doctor, asking if the line should be connected. He was told, yes, and the call was put through. Shortly afterwards, determined at all costs to induce the doctor to return to the house, I came here and found him as you see him.”

  A splintering crash announced that the end of the task of forcing the door was drawing near.

  “Had the doctor any other regular visitors?” jerked Smith.

  “None. There was one lady whom I gathered to be a friend although he had never spoken of her—Mrs. Milton. She lunched here three days ago and was shown over the laboratory.”

  “Describe Mrs. Milton.”

  “It would be difficult to describe her. Sir Denis. A woman of great beauty of an exotic type, tall and slender, with raven black hair—”

  “Ivory skin,” Smith went on rapidly, “notably long slender hands, and unmistakable eyes, of a quite unusual color, nearly jade green—”

  “Good heavens!” cried Bailey, “you know her?”

  “I begin to believe,” said Nayland Smith, and there was a curious change of quality in his voice, “that I do know her. Kerrigan”—he turned to me—”we have heard of this lady before?”

  “You mean the woman who visited General Quinto?”

  “Not a doubt about it! I absolve Ardatha: this is a zombie—a. corpse moving among the living! This woman is a harbinger of death and we must find her.”

  “You don’t suggest,” cried Bailey, “that Mrs. Milton is in any way associated—”

  “I suggest nothing,” snapped Smith.

  A resounding crash and a wrenching of metal told us that the lock had been driven through. A moment later and the door was flung open.

  I clenched my fists and for a moment stood stock still.

  An unforgettable, unmistakable, but wholly indescribable odor crept to my nostrils.

  “Kerrigan!” cried Smith in a stifled voice and sprang into the laboratory—”you smell it, Kerrigan? He’s gone the same way!”

  Bailey had hurried forward and now was bending over the prone body. In the stuffy atmosphere of this place where many queer smells mingled, that of the strange deathly odor which I must always associate with the murder of General Quinto predominated to an appalling degree.