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Updated: May 17, 2025
Glancing up, I found Nayland Smith's gray eyes watching me. "You see the mark, Petrie?" he snapped. I nodded. The dead man upon the table was a Burmese dacoit! "What do you make of it?" I said slowly. "At the moment," replied Smith, "I scarcely know what to make of it. You are agreed with the divisional surgeon that the man unquestionably a dacoit died, not from drowning, but from strangulation.
I found him very much upset. He told me that General Nayland is accusing us by which he meant this Team of furnishing secret information on our subproject to Komintern agents. He said that British Intelligence agents at Smolensk had learned that the Red Triumph laboratories there were working along lines of research originated at MacLeod Team Center here.
Whilst Van Roon, his evil gaze upon the bed, held the candle aloft, the mulatto, with a curious preparatory writhing movement of the mighty shoulders, lowered his outstretched fingers to the disordered bed linen... I pushed open the cupboard door and thrust out the Browning. As I did so a dramatic thing happened. A tall, gaunt figure shot suddenly upright from beyond the bed. It was Nayland Smith!
For as though Nayland Smith's words had been heard by the ghostly inhabitant of Graywater Park, as though the tortured priest sought once more release from his age-long sufferings there came echoing, hollowly and remotely, as if from a subterranean cavern, the sound of knocking. From whence it actually proceeded I was wholly unable to determine.
"No," he replied, smiling dryly; "burying something!" Dusk found Nayland Smith and me at the top bedroom window. We knew, now that poor Forsyth's body had been properly examined, that he had died from poisoning. Smith, declaring that I did not deserve his confidence, had refused to confide in me his theory of the origin of the peculiar marks upon the body.
From this state I was awakened and brought back to the realities by a sound which ever afterward I was doomed to associate with that ghastly scene. This was the squealing of the rats. The red mist seemed to disperse at that, and with frightfully intense interest, I began to study the awful torture to which Nayland Smith was being subjected.
What had been the meaning of that scream which I had heard but to which in my frantic state of mind I had paid comparatively little attention? There was a great stirring all about me. "Smith!" I cried from the window; "Smith, for mercy's sake where are you?" Footsteps came racing up the stairs. Behind me the door burst open and Nayland Smith stumbled into the room.
Removed scarce a yard from me as he was, I could hear Nayland Smith's soft, subdued breathing; but my eyes were all for the darkened hall-way, for the smudgy outline of the stair-rail with the faint patterning in the background, which, alone, indicated the wall.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed opium-smokers had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma. Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness, I, too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending lower and lower, until it came within a few inches of my own.
Stretched flat upon the floor lay Nayland Smith, partially stripped, his arms thrown back over his head and his wrists chained to a stout iron staple attached to the wall; he was fully conscious and staring intently at the Chinese doctor.
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