Chapter IV.
The Nail
“My God!” Farrell exclaimed, stepping closer and pushing aside the gray hair, thus clearly revealing the awful truth.
A flat-headed nail, the head rather more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, had been driven into the skull with such force that it showed merely as a metal disk. Having been hidden by the dead man’s hair, it had remained unnoticed until Moore’s quick eyes espied it.
Farrell picked at it a little, but it was far too firmly fastened to be moved by his fingers.
“What shall we do?” the Inspector asked, helplessly. “Shall we try to get Doctor Rogers back?”
“No,” returned the Coroner, “he’s just starting on a long trip. Let him go. He could do nothing and it would be a pity to spoil his journey. His diagnosis of apoplexy was most natural in the circumstances, for the symptoms are the same. I, too, thought death was the result of an apoplectic stroke. But now we know it is black murder, the case comes directly within my jurisdiction, and there’s no occasion to recall Doctor Rogers.”
“You’re right,” Ames assented, “but who could have done this fearful thing? I can hardly believe a human being capable of such a horror! Mr. Moore, you simply must take up this case. It ought to be a problem after your own heart.”
Every word the man uttered made me dislike him more. To refer to this terrible tragedy as a problem after Moore’s own heart seemed to me to indicate a mind callous and almost ghoulish in its type.
I knew Kee well enough to feel sure that he would investigate the murder, but not at the behest of Harper Ames.
He only acknowledged Ames’s speech by a noncommittal nod and turned to Detective March.
“We have our work cut out for us,” he said, very gravely. “I have never seen a stranger case. The murderer must have been a man of brute passions and brute strength. That nail is almost imbedded in the bone, and, I fancy, needed more than one blow of the hammer that drove it in. But first, as to the doors and windows. You tell me they were locked this morning?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Griscom, the butler, as Moore looked at him.
He was a smallish man, bald and with what are sometimes called pop-eyes. He stared in a frightened manner, but he controlled his voice
