XLIII
The Story Continued
Jack went to the luncheon party the next day and so, too, did Thalia, who had played such a part, and was the public heroine of the hour. After lunch the inspector completed his story.
“If you take your minds back, gentlemen, you will remember that the name of Derrick Yale had never been heard until the first of the Crimson Circle murders. It is true that he had established himself in a city office, that he had issued circulars, had put advertisements in the paper describing himself as a psychometric detective, but the cases which came to him were very few. Of course, he did not want any cases. He was working up to his big coup. It was after the first murder, you remember, that Derrick Yale was employed by a newspaper, which wanted a good sensational story, to employ his psychometric powers in the tracking of the criminal.
“Who knew better than Yale the name of the murderer and how the murder was committed? You remember that he was able to reconstruct the crime by feeling the weapon with which it was committed. And, in consequence, a black man was arrested, in exactly the spot where Derrick Yale said he would be. Naturally when these facts were disclosed Yale’s reputation rose sky-high. It was the very situation that he expected. He knew now that a man threatened by the Crimson Circle would be inclined to call in his assistance, and that is just what happened.
“By being near his victims and gaining their confidence—for Yale was a most convincing type of man—he was able to urge them to pay the demands of the Crimson Circle, and if they refused he was on hand to encompass their death.
“Froyant might not have died, and certainly would not have died at Yale’s hands, but for the fact that, annoyed by losing so much money, he made inquiries himself. Starting on a hypothesis which was based upon the faintest suspicion, he worked up the case against Derrick Yale, and was able to identify Lightman and Derrick Yale as one and the same person. On the night of his death he sent for us, intending to make this disclosure, and as a proof that he was in some fear he had two loaded revolvers by his hand, and it is well known that Froyant disliked intensely the employment of firearms.
“And you will remember, if you have read the official minutes of the case, the Commissioner rang up Froyant in response to a call which Harvey Froyant had put through. That call gave Yale his opportunity. It was an excuse for Froyant sending us out of the room. I went first, never dreaming that he would dare do what he did. When we went into the room we wore our overcoats, and I particularly noticed that Derrick Yale kept his hand in his pocket. On the hand, gentlemen,” he said impressively, “was a motor-driver’s gauntlet, and in that hand was the knife that slew Froyant.”
“But why did he wear the glove?” asked the Prime Minister.
“In order that his hand, which I should see immediately afterwards, should not be bloodstained. The moment my back was turned, he lunged straight at Froyant’s heart, and Froyant must have died instantly. He slipped off the glove and left it on the table, walked to the door, and seemed to be carrying on a conversation with a man who was already dead.
“I knew this had happened, but I had no proof. He had brought my daughter there, intending to get her into the house, which we immediately searched, with the intention of accusing her of the crime. But she very wisely went no farther than to the back of the house and then, suspecting his plot, went home. But I am anticipating. Amongst the people whom we had to guard was James Beardmore, and James Beardmore was a land speculator, a man who knew all kinds of people, good and bad. That day he was expecting a visit from Marl, whom he had never seen, and he mentioned Marl’s name earlier in the day to his son, but not to Derrick Yale. As Marl came toward the house the last person in the world he expected to see was his fellow criminal of Toulouse Gaol, a man whom he had betrayed to his death.
“Derrick Yale must have been standing at the end of the shrubbery, and Marl caught a momentary glimpse of him and went back to the village, ostensibly to London, in a panic of fright, determined, in his fear, that he would kill Lightman before Lightman killed him. His courage must have oozed. He was not a particularly brave man, and instead he wrote a letter to Yale, pushing it under his window—a letter which Yale read and partially burnt. What the letter was I cannot tell you, except it was probably a statement that if he, Marl, was left alone, he would leave Yale alone. He could not have known in what capacity Mr. Derrick Yale was posing. The words ‘Block B’ undoubtedly referred to the Block at Toulouse Prison.
“From that moment Marl was a doomed man. He was conducting a little blackmail of his own with Brabazon, an agent of the Crimson Circle, and Brabazon must have intimated the danger to Yale who, in his capacity as detective, visited the shop to which all the Crimson Circle letters were addressed, and on the pretext of aiding justice opened them of course and saw their contents, without having the responsibility of being the person to whom they were addressed.
“It was Brabazon’s intention to bolt on the day following Marl’s murder, and with that object he had cleared out the whole of Marl’s balance and had made preparations for flight. On Marl’s death suspicion naturally fell upon him and, intimated by the Crimson Circle that he was in danger, he hurried off to the riverside house which we searched.”
Detective-Inspector Parr chuckled.
“When I say ‘we searched it,’ I mean Yale searched it. In other words, he went into the room where he knew Brabazon was, and came down reporting that all was clear.”
“There is one point I’d like you to clear up—the chloroforming of Yale in his office,” said the Prime Minister.
“That was clever, and deceived me for a moment. Yale handcuffed, strapped and chloroformed himself after he had put the money in an envelope and dropped it down the letter-chute—it was addressed to his private residence. Do you remember, sir, that the postman left the building, having cleared the box, a few minutes after the ‘outrage’? Unfortunately for Yale, I had let Thalia into the room and put her into the cupboard, where she witnessed the whole comedy and retrieved the chloroform bottle which he had put into a drawer of his desk.”
“The last victim, Mr. Raphael Willings,” here Parr spoke very clearly and deliberately, “owes his life to the fact that he conceived an unhealthy attachment for my daughter. She was struggling with him, when, looking over her shoulder, she saw a hand come from behind the curtain holding the very knife that had been stolen earlier in the day by Yale (again in his capacity as detective). It was aimed at Mr. Willings’s heart, but by a superhuman effort, she thrust him aside, but not so far as to save him completely. Yale, of course, was on hand to discover the outrage (I should imagine he was very annoyed when he found it was not a murder), and of course he had no difficulty in fixing it upon mother—upon Thalia Drummond Parr.
“Consider the cleverness of his operations!” said Parr admiringly. “He had thrust himself into the front rank of private detectives, so that he was on hand to receive information which was invaluable to him as the Crimson Circle. He was eventually taken to police headquarters—at my suggestion—where the most important documents came under his notice. Some of them were not quite as important as he thought, but it saved Mr. Beardmore’s life when Yale had the first handling of a photograph of himself taken a few moments before the abortive execution.
“Now, gentlemen, are there any other points that you wish cleared up? There is one I will clear up which is probably not obscure. Two days ago I told Yale that great criminals are usually brought to their end through ridiculous mistakes. Yale had the effrontery to tell me that he had called at Mr. Willings’s house after he had left and that the servants had told him where Thalia and Willings had gone. That alone was sufficient to damn him, because he had not been near Willings’s house since the morning, and had arrived at the country place at least an hour before the servants had come.”
“The question that disturbs me for the moment,” said the Prime Minister, “is what reward we can give to your daughter, Mr. Parr? Your promotion is of course an easy matter to arrange, for there is an assistant-commissionership vacant at this moment; but I don’t exactly see what we can do for Miss Drummond, except of course to give her the monetary reward which is due for having brought about the capture of this dangerous criminal.”
Then a husky voice spoke. It sounded to Jack as though it were his, and the rest of the people about the table seemed to be under the same impression.
“There is no need to bother about Miss Parr,” said this strange voice, that was speaking Jack’s thoughts, “we are getting married very soon.”
When the buzz of congratulation had subsided, Inspector Parr leant toward his daughter.
“You didn’t tell me, mother,” he said reproachfully.
“I didn’t even tell him,” she said, looking at Jack wonderingly.
“Do you mean to say he hasn’t asked you to marry him?” demanded her amazed father.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, “and I haven’t told him I would marry him either, but I had a feeling that something like this would happen.”
Lightman, or Yale, as he was best known, was an exemplary prisoner. His only complaint against the authorities was that they would not let him smoke on his way to his execution.
“They order these things much better in France,” he said to the governor. “Now, the last time I was executed—”
To the chaplain he expressed the warmest interest in Thalia Drummond.
“There is a girl in a million!” he said. “I suppose she will marry young Beardmore—he is a very lucky fellow. Personally, women arouse very little enthusiasm in me, and I ascribe my success in life to this fact. But if I were a marrying man, I think Thalia Drummond would be the very type I should search for.”
He liked the chaplain because the padre was a big human man who could talk interestingly on places and things and people, and Derrick Yale had seen most of the fascinating places in the world.
On a grey March morning a man came into his cell and strapped his hands.
Yale looked at him over his shoulder.
“Have you ever heard of M. Pallion? He was a member of your profession.”
The executioner did not reply, being by etiquette forbidden to discuss other matters than the prisoner’s forgiveness for the deed which was about to be committed.
“You should find out something about Pallion,” said Yale, as the procession formed, “and profit by his example. Never drink. Drink was my ruin! If it were not for drink I should not be here!”
This little conceit kept him amused all the way to the scaffold. They slipped the noose about his neck and covered his face with a white cloth, and then the executioner stepped back to the steel lever.
“I hope this rope won’t break,” said Derrick Yale.
It was the last message from the Crimson Circle.