"He was killed!" repeated Godfrey, with conviction; and, at the words, we drew together a little, with a shiver of repulsion. Death is awesome enough at any time; suicide adds to its horror; murder gives it the final touch. So we all stood silent, staring as though fascinated at the hand which Simmonds held up to us; at those tiny wounds, encircled by discoloured flesh and with a sinister dash of clotted blood running away from them. Then Goldberger, taking a deep breath, voiced the thought which had sprung into my own brain. "Why, it looks like a snake-bite!" he said, his voice sharp with astonishment. And, indeed, it did. Those two tiny incisions, scarcely half an inch apart, might well have been made by a serpent's fangs. The quick glance which all of us cast about the room was, of course, as involuntary as the chill which ran up our spines; yet Godfrey and I--yes, and Simmonds--had the excuse that, once upon a time, we had had an encounter with a deadly snake which none of us was likely ever to forget. We all smiled a little sheepishly as we caught each other's eyes. "No, I don't think it was a snake," said Godfrey, and again bent close above the hand. "Smell it, Mr. Goldberger," he added. The coroner put his nose close to the hand and sniffed. "Bitter almonds!" he said. "Which means prussic acid," said Godfrey, "and not snake poison." He fell silent a moment, his eyes on the swollen hand. The rest of us stared at it too; and I suppose all the others were labouring as I was with the effort to find some thread of theory amid this chaos. "It might, of course, have been self-inflicted," Godfrey added, quite to himself. Goldberger sneered a little. No doubt he found the incomprehensibility of the problem rather trying to his temper. "A man doesn't usually commit suicide by sticking himself in the hand with a fork," he said. "No," agreed Godfrey, blandly; "but I would point out that we don't know as yet that it _is_ a case of suicide; and I'm quite sure that, whatever it may be, it isn't usual." Goldberger's sneer deepened. "Did any reporter for the _Record_ ever find a case that _was_ usual?" he queried. It was a shrewd thrust, and one that Godfrey might well have winced under. For the _Record_ theory was that nothing was news unless it was strange and startling, and the inevitable result was that the _Record_ reporters endeavoured to make everything strange and startling, to play up the outré details at the expense of the rest of the story, and even, I fear, to invent such details when none existed. Godfrey himself had been accused more than once of a too-luxuriant imagination. It was, perhaps, a realisation of this which had persuaded him, years before, to quit the detective force and take service with the _Record_. What might have been a weakness in the first position, was a mighty asset in the latter one, and he had won an immense success.