/He/ stood, holding the half-swooning girl, peering into the face he
could only see by the reflected light of his lantern, and then
suddenly the safe fell back from him without warning, leaving a gaping
cavern.
He lifted her in his arms, ran across the vestibule into the open air.
Somebody shouted his name in the distance, and he ran blindly towards
the voice. Once he stumbled over a great crack that had appeared in
the earth, but managed to recover himself, though he was forced to
release his grip of the girl.
She was alive… breathing… her breath fanned his cheek and gave him new
strength.…
The sound of falling walls behind him; immense, hideous roarings and
groanings; thunder of sliding chalk and rock and earth--he heard only
the breathing of his burden, felt only the faint beating of her heart
against his breast.
“Here you are!”
Somebody lifted Margaret Belman from his arms. A big soldier pushed
him into a wagon, where he sprawled at full length, breathless, more
dead than alive, by the side of the woman he loved; and then, with a
whirr of wheels, the ambulance sped down the hillside towards safety.
Behind him, in the darkness, the House of Tears shivered and crackled,
and the work of ancient masons vanished piecemeal, tumbling over new
cliffs, to be everlastingly engulfed and hidden from the sight of man.
Dawn came and showed to an interested party that had travelled by road
and train to the scene of the great landslide, one grey wall, standing
starkly on the edge of a precipice. A portion of the wrecked floor
still adhered to the ruins, and on that floor the blood-stained bed
where old man Flack had laid his murdered servant.…
The story which Olga Flack told the police, which appears in the
official records of the place, was not exactly the same as the story
she told to Mr. Reeder that afternoon when, at his invitation, she
came to the flat in Bennett Street. Mr. Reeder, minus his glasses and
his general air of respectability, which his vanished side-whiskers
had so enhanced, was at some disadvantage.
“Yes, I think Ravini was killed,” she said, “but you are wrong in
supposing that I brought him to my room at the request of my father.
Ravini was a very quick-witted man, and recognised me. He came to
Larmes Keep because he”--she hesitated--“well, he was rather fond of
Miss Belman. He told me this, and I was rather amused. At that time I
did not know his name, although my husband did, and I certainly did
not connect him with my father’s arrest. He revealed his identity, and
I suppose there was something in my attitude, or something I said,
which recalled the schoolgirl he had met years before. The moment he
recognised me as John Flack’s daughter, he also recognised Larmes Keep
as my father’s headquarters.
“He began to ask me questions: whether I knew where the Flack million,
as he called it, was hidden. And of course I was horrified, for I knew
why Daver had allowed him to come.
“My father had recently escaped from Broadmoor, and I was worried sick
for fear he knew the trick that Daver had played. I wasn’t normal, I
suppose, and I came near to betraying my father, for I told Ravini of
his escape. Ravini did not take this as I had expected--he rather
overrated his own power, and was very confident. Of course, he did not
know that father was practically in the house, that he came up from
the cave every night----”
“The real entrance to the cave was through the safe in the vestibule?”
said Mr. Reeder. “That was an ingenious idea. I must confess that the
safe was the last place in the world I should have considered.”
“My father had it put there twenty years ago,” she said. “There always
was an entrance from the centre of the Keep to the caves below, many
of which were used as prisons or as burying-places by the ancient
owners of Larmes.”
“Why did Ravini go to your room?” asked Mr. Reeder. “You will excuse
the--um--indelicacy of the question, but I want----”
She nodded.
“It was a last desperate effort on my part to scare Ravini from the
house--I took it on my way back that night. You mustn’t forget that I
was watched all the time; Daver or my mother were never far from me,
and I dared not let them know, and through them my father, that Ravini
was being warned. Naturally, Ravini, being what he was, saw another
reason for the invitation. He had decided to stay on until I made my
request for an interview, and told him that I wanted him to leave by
the first train in the morning after he learnt what I had to tell
him.”
“And what had you to tell him?” asked Mr. Reeder.
She did not answer immediately, and he repeated the question.
“That my father had decided to kill him----”
Mr. Reeder’s eyes almost closed.
“Are you telling me the truth, Olga?” he asked gently, and she went
red and white.
“I am not a good liar, am I?” Her tone was almost defiant. “Now, I’ll
tell you. I met Ravini when I was little more than a child. He meant…
a tremendous lot to me, and I don’t think I meant very much to him. He
used to come down to see me in the country where I was at school…”
“He’s dead?”
She could only nod her head. Her lips were quivering.
“That is the truth,” she said at last. “The horror of it was that he
did not recognise me when he came to Larmes Keep. I had passed
completely from his mind, until I revealed myself in the garden that
night.”
“Is he dead?” asked Mr. Reeder for the second time.
“Yes,” she said. “They struck him down outside my room.… I don’t know
what they did with him. They put him through the safe, I think.” She
shuddered.
J. G. Reeder patted her hand.
“You have your memories, my child,” he said to the weeping girl, “and
your letters.”
It occurred to him after Olga had gone that Ravini must have written
rather interesting letters.