第 27 页

"The whole thing was very simple and very ingenious," began Cravel, "but like most of the simple and ingenious things of life—"

Suddenly he stopped and dropped his head.

"My telephone bell is ringing. Can I go down?" he asked.

Betcher nodded. There was no possible chance of the man's escape. The front and the rear of the house were guarded. He looked round the room, so full of poignant, painful memories. The bed was still drawn up on the far side of the cavity— how cleverly that trap had been planned for him! And here in this room Joshua Monkford had been stricken down in his health and pride, by an unknown assassin.

He heard Cravel running up the stairs and went to the door to meet him. "It was for you," said the man, a little out of breath, "I've switched it through to this 'phone."

Although the room had been partially dismantled, the telephone was still connected with a wall plug. He bent to the floor and picked it up, took off the receiver and listened.

"There's nobody here— the line is dead," he said. "Exchange often gets that way. Wake 'em up."

Betcher's finger was on the hook when a queer premonition of danger made his flesh creep.

It was too late to inhibit the action. The hook was half pressed, but he dropped the receiver a little and then...

The explosion deafened him, and he dropped the instrument to the ground and spun round, one hand to his ear. Cravel was standing bolt upright against the opposite wall, a look of comic surprise on his white face. Blood was pouring from his face, and in the centre of his forehead was a tiny red patch. He swayed slowly left and right, then fell in a crumpled heap on the ground— dead!

Chapter 43

RUNNING to the head of the stairs, Betcher called to the man who was in charge below, and together they lifted the man on to the bed. Not an eyelash flickered. Betcher felt his wrist; it was pulseless, and, tearing open the shirt, listened at the man's heart.

"But how did it happen, sir?" asked the officer.

Arnold Long did not reply. He picked up the telephone and examined the receiver. In the centre, as in all telephone receivers, was a hole about half an inch in diameter, but, unlike other receivers, it was not backed by the sensitive diaphragm and he glanced down a rifled steel tube. Unscrewing the top, the mystery was a mystery no more. The telephone receiver was in fact modelled on the pattern of a humane-killer, with a chamber for the cartridge halfway up, and the shell was fired by an electric contact made when the hook was depressed.

And then he remembered that he had both seen and handled the telephone and had actually called the office immediately after Monkford's death. Now he understood why the firework had been thrown into Nora's room, and why Cravel had distracted his attention elsewhere. It was to take away this instrument of death and to substitute the genuine telephone.

He stopped at the local police station on his way back to town to break the news to Alice Cravel. To his surprise and relief, she learnt of her brother's death with great calmness.

"I am very glad," she said simply. "It is better that he went— in that way. He must have been behind you in line with the receiver. You had a narrow escape, Mr. Long."

"Did you know he had set that trap for me?"

She shook her head.

"No, I never dreamt he could persuade you to use the telephone. I was afraid of— of something else altogether."

By the time he got back to his flat it was midday.

"Sir Godley's valet has been telephoning all morning, sir," said his servant. "He wants me to tell you that your father has returned."

"You surprise me," said Betcher.

There was still work to be done. He interrupted a metropolitan police magistrate at his lunch, and secured certain authorizations which were necessary to him, and at half-past three, accompanied by the undaunted Rouch, who was officially on the sick list, he called at Lincoln's Inn Fields and was shown into Mr. Henry's neat office.

At the appearance of the detective, Henry collapsed. It was the first intimation he had had that Betcher Long had escaped from the trap which had been set for him.

He had not Cravel's power of dissimulation— none of his iron nerve. He sat, a limp and shaking figure, in his office chair, incapable of movement or of speech.

"Sorry to distress you. I presume that you were under the impression I had passed to my fathers? You know me, Henry, and I think you can guess why I have come. I am going to take you into custody on a charge of being concerned in the wilful murder of Joshua Monkford on the 1st of August of this year. It is my duty to caution you that what you now say may be taken down and used in evidence against you."

Still the young man did not speak. His brown eyes stared into vacancy. He was powerless to move, beyond consecutive thought, and not until the detective caught his arm and pulled him erect did his senses function.

"Where's— where is Cravel?" he asked thickly.

"Dead," said Betcher Long.

The man gazed at him uncomprehendingly.

"Dead, eh?" and then he began to chuckle. "That is funny. Sonny dead, eh? Damn' funny!"

He was rolling his head from side to side, shaking with stupid laughter, as they hurried him across the sidewalk into the waiting taxi.

Chapter 44

MISS REVELSTOKE had spent a very exasperating forenoon. She was bereft of her secretary at a moment when her correspondence was unusually large, and she had no inclination to open the pile of letters that waited on her desk. Some of the letters were registered, all were urgent, for they contained bills which had been shelved for months.

Her financial position was not a particularly good one at the moment. She had had to sell stocks at a loss; her expenses had been very heavy, and there had been certain vexatious lawsuits initiated against her. One immediate effect of Joshua Monkford's death which she could not have foreseen was that the bank had called in a very large overdraft, and had followed up the notice of its intention with a writ and the attachment of certain securities.

Among the minor troubles of that morning was the eccentric behaviour of her telephone. She had made three attempts to get through to Heartsease, and every time the number was engaged. Nor had she been any more successful when she attempted to communicate with her lawyer; and the note she had sent by hand, dispatching a maid in a taxicab, had never been delivered, though this she did not know.

In moments of distraction Miss Revelstoke had one sure refuge. She opened her work-basket and took out a piece of delicate cambric, threaded a needle, and began to sew. And she was so working when, glancing through the front window, she saw the taxicab stop and Betcher Long get out, and with him two other men, who, she did not doubt, were police officers.

The maid was hurrying along the hall to answer the bell when Miss Revelstoke intercepted her.

"I will answer the door. Go back to the servants' hall," she said, and watched the girl until she was out of sight.

She had a small pair of scissors in her hand, and the fine wire communicating between bell-push and servants' hall ran along the wall within her reach. She stretched up her arm and cut the wire, passed out through her study into the courtyard behind, stopping only to put on her hat and take her bag from the table.

Opening the garage door, she started the engine and swung the machine, not to the right, which would bring her to the front of the house, but to the left. She could, and did, slip through a side street here, and came to Ladbroke Grove near the railway station. Here she stopped the machine and went up the steps and bought a ticket for Liverpool Street. Within a quarter of an hour of her reaching that terminus, the Clacton express pulled out of the station, carrying in a first-class carriage an unconcerned woman who was systematically examining the evening papers she had bought.

She was alone in her compartment, and with the aid of a comb and a small powder bag, she managed to produce a remarkable change in her appearance.

Clacton-on-Sea is a popular resort, crowded, at this period of the year, with trippers and holiday-makers. And three times a week an excursion steamer called on its way from Tilbury, and for a very small sum it was possible to travel to Ostend, spend a night in that resort of beauty and fashion, and return on the following morning. The boat left within an hour of Miss Revelstoke's arrival, and she was one of its passengers. She carried no baggage but her umbrella and the two tightly packed pockets attached to an underskirt which she wore by day and had folded under her pillow by night.

No passports were required from the excursionists, and if they had been, Miss Revelstoke had one to produce. She walked over the cobbled streets of Ostend until she came to the broad promenade, crowded at this hour with gay humanity.

Miss Revelstoke was not gay, but was very adaptable, and the quasi-carnival in progress had a special appeal for her. She might sacrifice her dignity and wear a mask with the rest of the revellers, but there was no reason why she should. She was here on business; there were quite a number of good shops where women's clothing could be bought, and on the Place des Armes a store or two where she could acquire the dress of a well-to-do peasant woman. She hated black bonnets, but she bought one, and an old-fashioned mantle and a long, heavy skirt and spring-side boots. These, with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and a heavy-looking bag, were all the disguise that she needed. When she had changed in the little hotel where she took a room, and had washed some of the dye out of her hair with strong soda-water, even Betcher Long might not have recognized her.

She made her discarded clothes into a bundle, which she put under her arm, and, paying her bill— the landlady was so interested in some grievance of her own that she scarcely noticed the transformation— she walked to the marine station. On the way, she acquired a large umbrella, and this, with her bundle, completed the picture.

That night she reached Brussels and slept in a third-rate hotel, confiding to the concierge that she was a Walloon and had been on a visit to her son in eastern Flanders. Her French was perhaps a little too classical for a Walloon, but the concierge never for a moment thought that she was anything but what she pretended to be, for she tipped him meanly and refused a cab to carry her to the eastern station.

She went no farther than Liege. Here she got lodgings in a respectable part of the town and spent her time in studying the English newspapers which she purchased at the railway station, mispronouncing their titles vilely.

Cravel was dead, Alice and Henry under arrest. She worried much about Henry, for she was very fond of him, and worried more when she learnt that "the prisoner was unable to appear, and the doctors certified that he was in such a condition of mind that he might not be fit to plead."

A month passed. The preliminary hearing of the two was adjourned from week to week. And then she noticed with a frown that the Crown proposed to offer no evidence against Alice, and that she had been discharged. She had never liked Alice. Alice was a friend of Jackson Crayley, and Alice was full of scruples at times.

Madame Pontière, as she called herself, seemed likely to become a settled institution of Liege. She had obtained a police card of identity, duly filled up, and nothing seemed likely to disturb her serenity, for she learnt from the newspapers that she had disappeared and was believed to have gone to America.

And then, one morning, when she was coming out of the Cathedral, her big prayer book in her gloved hand, she came face to face with a man who raised his hat to her.

"Miss Revelstoke, I presume?" he said politely, and she walked back to the police office with Betcher Long, offering no comment, no reproach, and no threat. But Betcher felt that he was walking on those sunlit streets with stark murder personified.

The extradition proceedings were not protracted. One morning Miss Revelstoke stepped out of the Sûreté office accompanied by a woman police officer, and was put into a train that made a non-stop run to Brussels all too quickly. The transfer across Brussels was carried out with dispatch, and at five o'clock on a gray morning she landed at Dover. It was only then that she spoke directly to Betcher. Throughout the journey she had maintained a stony silence, and when he had spoken to her, had apparently not heard him. Now, as they walked up the platform to the train, she turned her head slightly. "How is Henry?" she asked.

"I am afraid," said Betcher, "that your son will never be able to plead."

She made no reply; not so much as a flicker of eyelid betrayed the despair in the heart of this iron-willed woman.

As the train was running through Bromley she spoke again.

"Alice squealed, of course? She was born that way— soft as butter. Not even the doctor could stiffen her."

It was the first news that Betcher Long had of Cravel's profession.

On the day "Miss Revelstoke" was sent to penal servitude for life, and the smiling, foolish young man who stood by her side in the dock was ordered to be detained during the King's pleasure, Betcher Long came into the office of his chief and handed him a written letter.

Colonel Macfarlane read it very carefully.

"I'm sorry about this, Betcher," he said. "Just when your name has gone forward for promotion. You have a record now— due to be a chief detective-inspector at twenty-seven would beat all records. But if you feel you ought to go, I can't stop you. And on the whole, I think you are right to cut out police work and turn your mind to money-making. When do you want to be released?"

"At once," said Betcher, "if that is possible."

Colonel Macfarlane put the letter into his "immediate" basket.

"I'll see what I can do about it. It may be two or three days before we can get your discharge through. But what is the hurry?"

Betcher did not answer this quite satisfactorily. He reached Berkeley Square at the moment his father's car stopped before the door, and Sir Godley and Nora Sanders got out. She had been away in the country; had not heard how the trial had ended. When, later, Betcher told her, she shuddered.

"It is very dreadful," she said in a low voice. "And I'm sorry for her— in a way."

"I suppose I ought to be sorry, too," said Sir Godley, selecting a cigar from the box on his library table. "And yet I can't be."