The woman sank back on the sofa, and struggled for self-possession. “I'm drugged—I don't know what I'm saying—I drank some morphia—we all did—just to taste it for once, you know . . .” she was mouthing and grinning horribly—“and it's quite taken my senses away.” “Neither you nor Mrs. Clark got much of the stuff into your systems,” Pointer said in his hard official voice; “when you two heard me on deck you each jabbed a needleful into your arms, but half of it came out again. Your wrists were all wet to the touch.” Yet as a matter of fact it was just this small amount of morphia, irritating instead of calming as a larger dose would have been, which had thrown and was throwing off its balance the cold, calculating brain of the woman whom Pointer knew was not Mrs. Erskine. “I don't know what you're talking about.” She tried again to steady her flighty wits. “Ask Mr. Russell who I am.” Carter, who was listening still as a man in a dream, saw now why the Chief Inspector had begun as he did. He had thrown the woman off her guard by fear and rage. Unstrung by the growing strain of the investigation into Robert Erskine's murder, by the morphia taken, by the revelation of how near she herself had been to the end of all things at the hands of her accomplices, she could not recover her poise, try for it as she might. Like some tight-rope walker over an abyss, she made a desperate effort to save herself even when she was already all but falling headlong. “Mr. Russell met me scores of times before my husband's death as well as since.” “He was easy to hoodwink. It was his father who had known the real Mrs. Erskine well, the younger Russell had only seen her a couple of times as a lad. But your aunt by marriage, Mrs. Fraser, of Glasgow, would only too gladly swear to you any time, as will other relations. She seemed to think that your death stopped the pressing home of some claim against you about the illegal sale of a cottage of hers. She sent me your photo. . . .” The woman in the white wig, and artificially shaped eyebrow, bit her grey lips.