The queer little one-sided smile cocked up the corner of Cleek's
mouth. "Sure of that, Sir Charles?" he inquired placidly. "Sure that
she was not? I am told, it is true, that she left the note saying
she was going to drown herself, and disappeared four nights ago; I am
also told that since the date of Mr. Beachman's suspension this
place has been under constant guard night and day, but I have _not_
been told, however, that any of the guards saw her leave the place.
No, no, no! Don't jump to conclusions so readily, gentlemen. She
will be out of it now,--out and never likely to return; the news of
that miscarried message would warn her that something was wrong,
and she would be 'up and out of it' like a darting swallow. The
question is, how and when did she get out? Let's have in the guard
and see."
The sentries were brought in one after the other and questioned. At
no time since they were first put on guard, they declared--at _no
time_, either by day or by night--had any living creature entered
or left the house up to now, except the Admiral Superintendent, his
secretary, the auditor, and the nurse who had been summoned to look
after the stricken girl. To that they one and all were willing to
take solemn oath.
There is an old French proverb which says: "He that protests too much
leads to the truth in spite of himself." It was the last man to be
called who did this.
"No, sir, nobody passed, either in or out, I'll take my dying oath
to that," asserted he, his feelings riled up by the thought that this
constant questioning of his statement was a slur upon his devotion
to his duty. "There aren't nobody going to hint as I'm a slacker as
don't know what he's a-doing of, or a blessed mug that don't obey
orders; no, sir--no fear! Sir Charles's orders was, 'Nobody in or
out' and nobody in or out it was; my hat! yuss! Why, sir"--turning
to the dock master--"you must 'a' known; he must 'a' told you. I
wouldn't allow even young Master Reggie in last night when he came
a-pleading to be let in to get the school books he'd left behind."
"When he _what_?" almost roared the dock master, fairly jumping.
"Good lord, Marshall, have you gone off your head? Do you mean to
claim that you saw my boy here--last night?"
"Certainly, sir. Just after that awful clap of thunder it was--say
about eight or ten minutes after; and what with that and the darkness
and the way the wind was howling, I never see nor heard nothing
of him coming till I got to the door, and there he was--in them
light-coloured knickers and the pulled-down wideawake hat I'd seen
him wear dozens of times--with his coat collar turned up and a
drippin' umbrella over his head, making like he was going up the
steps to try and get in. 'Who's there?' as I sings to him, though I
needn't, for the little light was streaking out through the windows
showed me what he was wearing and who it was well enough. 'It's
me--Master Reggie, Marshall,' he says. 'I've come to get my school
books. I left 'em behind in the hurry, and father says he's sure
you'll let me go in and get 'em.' 'Oh, does he?' says I. 'Well,
I'm surprised at him and at you, too, Master Reggie, a-thinking I'd
go against orders. Word is that nobody gets in; and nobody _does_,
even the king hisself, till them orders is changed. So you just come
away from that door, and trot right away back to your pa,' I says to
him, 'and ask him from me what kind of a sentry he thinks Bill
Marshall is.' Which sets him a-snivelling and a-pleading till I
has to take him by the shoulder, and fair drag him away before I
could get him to go as he'd been told."
"Well done, Sophie!" exclaimed Cleek. "Gad! what a creature of
resource the woman is, and what an actress she would make, the
vixen! No need to ask you if your son really did come over here
last night, Mr. Beachman; your surprise and indignation have answered
for you."
"I should think it would, by George!" rapped out the dock master.
"What sort of an insane man must you have thought me, Marshall, to
credit such a thing as that? As if I'd have been likely to let a
delicate fifteen-year-old boy go out on an errand of any kind in a
beast of a storm like last night's, much less tell him that he was
to ask a sentry, _in my name_, to disobey his orders. Good God!
gentlemen, it's simply monstrous! Why, look here, Sir Charles; look
here, Mr. Cleek! Even if I'd been guilty of such a thing, and the
boy was willing to go out, he couldn't have done it to save his
life. The poor little chap met with an accident last night and he's
been in bed ever since. He was going down the stairs on his way to
dinner when that terrific clap of thunder came, and the blessed
thing startled him so much that, in the pitch darkness, he missed
his footing, fell clear to the bottom of the staircase, and broke
his collar bone."
"Poor little lad! Too bad, too bad!" sympathized Sir Charles,
feelingly, and, possibly, would have said more but that Cleek's
voice broke in softly, but with a curiously sharp note underlying
its sleekness.
"In the pitch darkness, Mr. Beachman?" it inquired. "The pitch
darkness of a public hotel _at dinner time_? Isn't that rather
extraordinary?"
"It would be, under any other circumstances, sir, but that infernal
clap of thunder interfered in some way with the electric current,
and every blessed light in the hotel went smack out--whisk! like
that!--and left the place as black as a pocket. Everybody thought
for the moment that the wires must have fused, but it turned out
that there was nothing the matter with them--only that the current
had been interrupted for a bit--for the lights winked on again as
suddenly as they had winked out."
"By Jupiter!" Cleek cracked out the two words like the snapping of a
whip lash, then quickly turned round on his heel and looked straight
and intently at the telegraph operator.
"Speak up--quick!" he said in the sharp staccato of excitement. "I am
told that when that crash came and the diverted message began there
was a force that almost knocked you off your stool. Is that true?"
"Yes, sir," the man replied, "perfectly true. It was something
terrific. The Lord only knows what it would have been if I'd been
touching the instrument."
"You'd have been as dead as Julius Caesar!" flung back Cleek. "No
wonder she cut away to see what was wrong, the vixen! No wonder the
lights went out! Mr. Narkom, the limousine--quick! Come along, Sir
Charles; come along, Mr. Beachman--come along at once!"
"Where, Mr. Cleek--where?"
"To the top floor of the house next door to the Ocean Billow Hotel,
Sir Charles, to see 'Miss Greta Hilmann's' precious pensioners,"
he made answer, rather excitedly. "Unless I am wofully mistaken,
gentlemen, one part of this little riddle is already solved, and
the very elements have conspired to protect England to become her
foeman's executioner."
He was not mistaken--not in any point with regard to that house and
the part it had played in this peculiar case--for, when they visited
it and demanded in the name of the law the right to enter and to
interview "the bedridden woman and the crippled girl who occupied the
top floor," they were met with the announcement that no such persons
dwelt there, nor had ever done so.
"It is let to an invalid, it is true," the landlady, a motherly,
unsuspecting old soul, told them when they made the demand. "But
it is a gentleman, not a lady. A professional gentleman, I
believe--artist or sculptor, something of that sort--and never until
last night has anybody been with him but his niece, who makes
occasional calls. Last night, however, a nephew came--just for a
moment; indeed, it seemed to me that he had no more than gone
upstairs before he came down again and went out. Pardon? No,
nobody has called to-day, neither has the gentleman left his room.
But he often sleeps until late."
He was sleeping forever this time. For when they came to mount
the stairs and force open the door of the room, there, under a
half-opened skylight, a dead man lay, one screwed-up, contracted
hand still clutching the end of a flex, which went up and out to the
telegraph wires overhead. On a table beside the body a fused and
utterly demolished telegraph instrument stood; and it was evident
from the scrap of flex still clinging to this that it had once
formed part of that which the dead hand held; that it had snapped
somehow, and that the man was attempting to re-attach it to the
instrument when death overtook him.
"Gentlemen, the wire tapper--Boris Borovonski!" said Cleek, as he
bent over and looked at him. "Step here, Mr. Beachman, and tell me
if this is not the man who played the part of 'Miss Greta Hilmann's'
interesting papa."
"Yes, yes!" declared the dock master excitedly, after he, too, had
bent over and looked into the dead face. "It is the very man, sir,
the very one! But who--but why--but how?" He then looked upward in
a puzzled way to where the flex went up and out through the skylight
and, threading through a maze of wires, hooked itself fast to one.
"Electrocuted," said Cleek, answering that inquiring glance. "A few
thousand volts--a flash of flame through heart and head and limbs,
and then this! See his little game, Mr. Narkom? See it, do you, Sir
Charles? He was taking the message from the tapped wire with that
flex, and the fragment that reached the telegraph office only got
through when the flex snapped. The furious gale did that, no doubt,
whipping it away from its moorings, so to speak, and letting the
message flash on before he could prevent it.
"Can't you read the rest when you look up and see that other
wire--the thick one with the insulated coating torn and frayed by
contact with the chimney's rough edge? It is not hard to reconstruct
the tragedy when one sees that. When the flex snapped he jumped up
and grabbed it, and was in the very act of again attaching it to the
instrument when he became his own executioner. Look for yourself.
The wild wind must either have blown the flex against the bared wire
of the electric light or the bared wire against the flex--that we
shall never know--and in the winking of an eye he was annihilated.
"No wonder the lights in the hotel went out, Mr. Beachman. The whole
strength of the current was short-circuited through this man's body,
and it crumpled him up as a glove crumples when it is cast in the
fire. But the dead hand, which had recovered the broken flex, still
held it, you see, and no more of the 'tapped' message went down the
dockyard wire. So long as that message continued, so long as the
instrument which sent it continued to send it, it was 'received'
here--a mere silent, unrecorded, impotent thrill locked up in the
grip of a dead man's hand.
"And look there--the pile of burnt paper beside the fused instrument
and the cinder of a matchbox against it. The force which obliterated
life in him infused it into the 'dipped' heads of those little wooden
sticks, and flashed them into flame. So long as there was anything
for that flame to feed upon it continued its work, you see, and
Sophie Borovonski found nothing to take away with her, after all.
Gentlemen, the State secrets that were stolen will remain England's
own--the records were burnt, and the dead cannot betray."