The seven days that followed Kenyon’s talk with Craigie and Fellowes were the worst he had ever experienced.
The one thing that cheered him was that Mary Randall was still with the Chesters. Her father was in Paris; his letters, she told Kenyon, were cheerful and contained no cause for alarm. Mick Randall, tiring of Greylands, came to London to play for the Aqua Club—and at Aubrey Chester’s invitation, made his headquarters at the Regent’s Park house.
Fear was ever present in Kenyon’s mind that the mark of the crescent would show on the fingers of his friends. He was haunted by the possibility, and it was a nightmare each time he visited the house, each time he looked, each time he kept his fears to himself, for he dared not talk of them.
Kenyon knew, Miller knew, as well as Craigie and Fellowes. The Department Z agents were on the look out for the marks, but no one else had been told of them.
That was the nightmare.
The mark of the crescent was everywhere. In buses, trams, trains, in the streets, in shops, in private houses, those tell-tale marks were seen. Members of the police force, errand boys, dustmen, owners of exclusive shops in the West End, soldiers and sailors had them. Clerks and navvies had them. Friends of the Chesters, honest-to-God folk as Kenyon knew them, had the marks.
It was nearly impossible to enter a shop without seeing one or more of the assistants with that curious pink crescent. Servants and patrons at the Éclat had them, and at the Carilon Club. Actors and actresses had the marks, as frequently as members of the stalls and hilarious fans in the gallery. There was no distinction between classes or parties. In every walk of life and every section of society, the mark of the crescent could be seen.
The thing was haunting. Kenyon found himself looking at the hands of every man and woman he passed. Its creeping advance was as insidious as a plague.
Forbes had said a lot. Other doctors, repeating the autopsies on the two dead men, had confirmed his words—although without Forbes’s underlying emphasis. The two men had been addicted to a drug that was comparatively unknown, but those medicos did not realise the far-reaching effects of it. Forbes had known its full significance, otherwise he would not have spoken as he had.
The days went by, and nothing happened—beyond the regular reports from the various agents of the widespread influence of the marks. That was no proof, Craigie and Kenyon realised, that there was any actual growth: the reports could mean the thing was merely being noticed more. But the threat it contained was frightening. A dozen times a day Kenyon remembered Forbes’s words.
‘The man’s eaten away with poison. He wouldn’t have lasted another month… it’s not cocaine and it’s not arsenic, it’s a combination.’
The police-surgeon had meant that it was a drug containing a mixture of various component parts of arsenic and cocaine.
How was the stuff being administered? Was it in food, or in cigarettes? What was the most likely way of introducing it to men and women so far untainted by it? Tobacco was a convenient method; so was food and drink. And what kind of craving was it that had driven Ahmet Ali berserk, and eaten away Wyett’s willpower and intelligence?
Kenyon shivered.
It wasn’t like fighting against something that was known. It wasn’t like using guns and knowing the other side was using them. It was fighting corruption in the dark. Anyone around him could be tainted; as it was, he estimated, at least one in ten of the population of London and the big towns certainly were. Four million addicts, in England alone.…
It was not long before he discovered that Wyett and Denbigh Morse were addicts—and marked with the crescent. But he failed to induce either of them to talk.
Wyett told him that he was talking out of the back of his neck. The fiery colonel was still drinking more than usual, but managed to keep sober: ‘Imagination, my dear Kenyon, imagination. There’s nothing wrong with me, for instance, nothing. Drugs—pah!’
His contempt for the very word seemed obvious; if he was acting, he was acting consummately.
The Rev. Denbigh Morse, Mary’s favourite relative, was quietly sceptical. In neither case, of course, did Kenyon suggest that his men were victims; he introduced the subject baldly and asked whether they had noticed anything which might lend support to the theory that the drug-plague was rife.
‘I’ve met nothing at all to suggest it, Kenyon.’ The Rev. Denbigh took a pinch of snuff and sneezed. ‘Tcha! Nothing at all. We’re all behaving quite normally down here. What—er—makes you think otherwise?’
Kenyon dodged the question, and returned to London after his visit. The men seemed to know nothing, yet Mary had heard Wyett discussing the thing with Arnold Serle.
So the Colonel had been lying.
Arnold Serle seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.
The Persian Sales establishment continued to thrive. It had many clients, some of whom were drug-marked, others who were free. Wally Davidson and Bob Curtis were tiring of their watch, but admitted that every time they were tempted to call it a waste of time they looked at the next man’s fingers. Very often—too often—they found the mark.
The light-hearted humour of those two giants faded. The facetious back-biting of the Arrans almost ceased. Among the agents of Department Z there was a tension that had never been reached before. All of them realised that the drug-plague was in their midst. None of them knew how, or why, but all of them sensed the danger.
They felt as if they were in the grip of a nightmare—and they did not know what would happen when they woke from it.