by Sapper
“Your efforts at drowning have not been vastly successful up to date, Carl, have they?” said Drummond genially. “Do I understand that we are both to be taken out and held under the water, or are you going to use the bath here? That is to say” – and he glanced pointedly at Yulowski – “if such a commodity exists. Or are you again going to experiment with that dope of yours?”
“Wrong on all counts,” answered Peterson. “You are far too large and strong, my dear Drummond, to be drowned by such rudimentary methods. And it is more than likely that even if we attempted to do it, the fact that you struggled would be revealed in a post-mortem examination. And that would spoil everything, wouldn’t it? No longer would it appear to be an accident: Count Zadowa’s masterly argument would all have been wasted. Why – I might as well agree at once to Yulowski’s suggestion of the bayonet. Pray give me credit, my dear young friend, for a little more brains than that.”
“I do, Theo: I assure you I do,” said Drummond earnestly. “It’s only my terrible fear that you’ll again go and make a hash of it that inspires my remarks.”
“Thank you a thousand times,” murmured the clergyman gently. He was leaning forward, his elbows on the table – and for the first time Drummond understood something of the diabolical hatred which Peterson felt for him. He had never shown it before: he was far too big a man ever to betray his feeling unnecessarily. But now, as he sat facing him, gently rubbing his big white hands together, Drummond understood.
“Thank you a thousand times,” he repeated in the same gentle voice. “And since you are so concerned about the matter, I will tell you my plan in some detail. I need hardly say that any suggestions you make on any points that may strike you will receive my most careful attention. When the car crashed into the water it carried you and your wife with it. We have got as far as that, haven’t we? As it plunged downwards you – still unconscious from your dreadful and sudden fainting fit – were hurled out. Your wife, in a magnificent endeavour to save you, rose in her seat and was hurled out too. I think we can safely say that, don’t you, seeing that the not too intelligent gatekeeper could not have seen the car as it fell?”
“Go on,” said Drummond quietly.
“Interested, I hope,” murmured Peterson. “But don’t hesitate to stop me if anything is at all obscure. I feel that you have a perfect right to suggest any small alterations you like. Well – to proceed. You were both hurled out as the car plunged into the water, and somewhat naturally you were both thrown forward. Head foremost, you will note, Drummond, you left the car – and your heads struck the stonework of the opposite pier with sickening force, just before you reached the water. In fact, a marked feature of the case, when this dreadful accident is reported in the papers, will be the force with which you both struck that pier. Your two heads were terribly battered. In fact, I have but little doubt that the coroner will decide, when your bodies are recovered some few miles downstream – that you were not in reality drowned, but that the terrific impact on the stone pier killed you instantly. Do you think it’s sound up to date?”
“I think it’s damned unsound,” remarked Drummond languidly. “If you propose to take me and endeavour to make my head impinge on a stone wall, someone is going to get a thick ear. Besides, the bridge isn’t open, and even your pal, the not too intelligent gate-keeper, might stick in his toes a bit. Of course” – he added hopefully – “you might say you were doing it for the movies. Tell him you’re Charlie Chaplin, but that you dressed in such a hurry you’ve forgotten your moustache.”
The red-headed Russian was snarling venomously.
“Let me get at him, chief. He won’t try being funny again.”
“No. I shall be too occupied sprinkling myself with insect powder,” retorted Drummond vulgarly. “Why, you lousy brute, if you got at me, as you call it, and there wasn’t half a battalion of infantry holding guns in my head, I’d break your neck with one hand strapped behind my back.”
The Russian half rose to his feet, his teeth bared, and Peterson pulled him back into his chair.
“You’ll get your chance in a moment or two, Yulowski,” he remarked savagely. Then he turned once more on Drummond, and the genial look had vanished from his face. “Doubtless your humour appeals to some people; it does not to me. Moreover, I am in rather a hurry. I do not propose, Captain Drummond, to take you to the bridge and endeavour to make your head impinge on a wall, as you call it. There is another far simpler method of producing the same result. The impinging will take place in this house. As a soldier you should know the result of a blow over the head with the butt of a rifle. And I can assure you that there will be no bungling this time. Yulowski is an expert in such matters, and I shall stay personally to see that it is done. I think we can give a very creditable imitation of what would have happened had my little story been true, and tomorrow night – I see that it is getting a little too light now for the purpose – your two bodies will be carried over and dropped in the river. The length of time you will both have been dead will be quite correct, within an hour or so – and everything will be most satisfactory for all concerned.”
Drummond passed his tongue over his lips, and despite himself his voice shook a little.
“Am I to understand,” he said after a moment, “that you propose to let that man butcher us here – in this house – with a rifle?”
“Just so,” answered Peterson. “That is exactly what you are to understand.”
“You are going to let him bash my wife over the head with a rifle butt?”
“I am going to order him to do so,” said Peterson mildly. “And very shortly at that. We must not have any mistakes over the length of time you’ve both been dead. I confess it sounds drastic, but I can assure you it will be quite sudden. Yulowski, as I told you, is an expert. He had a lot of experience in Russia.”
“You inhuman devil!” muttered Drummond dazedly. “You can do what you like to me, hut for Heaven’s sake let her off.”
He was staring fascinated at the Russian, who had risen and crossed to a cupboard in the wall. There was something almost maniacal in the look on his face – the look of a savage, brute beast, confronted with the prey it desires.
“Impossible, my dear young friend,” murmured Peterson regretfully. “It affords me no pleasure to have her killed, but I have no alternative. To see you dead, I would cross two continents,” he snarled suddenly, “but” – and his voice became normal again – “only bitter necessity compels me to adopt such measures with Phyllis. You see, she knows too much.” He whispered in Count Zadowa’s ear, who rose and left the room, to return shortly with half a dozen more men.
“Yes, she knows too much, and so I fear I cannot let her off. She would be able to tell such a lot of most inconvenient things to the police. This house is so admirably adapted for certain of our activities that it would be a world of pities to draw undesirable attention to it. Especially now that Count Zadowa has been compelled to leave his own office, owing entirely to your reprehensible curiosity.”
But Drummond was paying no attention to him. His eyes were fixed on the Russian, who had come back slowly into the centre of the room, carrying a rifle in his hand. It was an ordinary Russian service rifle, and a bayonet was fixed in position. Yulowski handled it lovingly, as he stood beside Peterson – and suddenly Count Zadowa turned white and began to tremble. To throw a bomb into a room and run for your life is one thing: to sit at a table in cold blood and witness a double execution is another. Even Peterson’s iron nerves seemed a little shaken, and his hand trembled as he removed his cigar. But there was no sign of relenting on his face; no sign of faltering in his voice as he spoke to the men who had just come into the room.
“In the interests of us all,” he remarked steadily, “I have decided that it is necessary to kill both the prisoners.” He made a sign, and Drummond, sitting almost paralysed in his chair, found both his arms gripped
, with three men hanging on to each.
“The man,” continued Peterson, “has been interfering with our work in England – the work of the Red International. He is the leader of the Black Gang, as you probably know; and as you probably do not know, it is he and his gang who have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of some of our most trusted workers. Therefore with regard to him there can be no second thought: he deserves death, and he must die. With regard to the woman, the case is a little different. She has done us no active harm – but she is a member of the bourgeois class, and she is his wife. Moreover she knows too much. And so it becomes necessary that she should die too. The reason why I am adopting this method of putting them both out of the way, is – as I have already explained to all save you newcomers – that, when the bodies are discovered, the cause of death will appear to be accidental. They will both of them seem to the police to have gone over the edge of the bridge in the car, and hit their heads on the pier opposite. And tomorrow night you will carry the bodies to the river and drop them in. And that” – he resumed his cigar – “I think is all.”
Yulowski handled his rifle lovingly, and once again his teeth showed in a wolfish grin.
“Which shall I take first, chief?” he said carelessly.
“The point is immaterial,” returned Peterson. “I think perhaps the woman.”
Drummond tried to speak and failed. His tongue was clinging to the roof of his mouth: everything in the room was dancing before his eyes. Dimly he saw the red-headed brute Yulowski swinging his rifle to test it: dimly he saw Phyllis sitting bolt upright, with a calm, scornful expression on her face, while two men held her by the arms so that she would not move. And suddenly he croaked horribly.
Then he saw Yulowski put down the rifle and listen intently for a moment.
“What’s the matter?” snapped Peterson irritably.
“Do you hear the different note to that dynamo?” said Yulowski.
‘What the hell’s that got to do with it?” roared Peterson. “Get on with it, damn you – and attend to the dynamo afterwards.”
Yulowski nodded, and picked up his rifle again.
“The last time,” he said, turning on Drummond with a dreadful look of evil in his face, “that this rifle was used by me was in a cellar in Russia – on even more exalted people than you. I brought it especially with me as a memento, never thinking I should have the pleasure of using it again.”
He swung it over his head, and Drummond shut his eyes – to open them again a moment later, as the door was flung open and a man distraught with terror dashed in.
“The Black Gang!” he shouted wildly. “Hundreds of them – all round the house. They’ve cut the wires.”
With a fearful curse Peterson leaped to his feet, and the men holding Drummond, dumbfounded at the sudden turning of the tables, let go his arms. Yulowski stood staring foolishly at the door, and what happened then was so quick that none of the stupefied onlookers raised a finger to prevent it.
With the howl of an enraged beast, Drummond hurled himself on the Russian – blind mad with fury. And when two seconds later a dozen black-cowled, black-hooded figures came swarming in through the door, for one instant they paused in sheer horror.
Pinned to the wall with his own bayonet which stuck out six inches beyond his back, was a red-headed, red-bearded man gibbering horribly in a strange language; whilst creeping towards a benevolent-looking clergyman, who crouched in a corner, was a man they scarce recognised as their leader, so appalling was the look of malignant fury on his face.
Carl Peterson was no coward. In the world in which he moved, there were many strange stories told of his iron nerve and his complete disregard of danger. Moreover Nature had endowed him with physical strength far above the average. But now, for perhaps the first time in his life, he knew the meaning of stark, abject terror.
The sinister men in black – members of that very gang he had come over to England to destroy – seemed to fill the room. Silently, as if they had been drilled to it, they disarmed everyone: then they stood round the walls – waiting. No one spoke: only the horrible imprecations of the dying Russian broke the silence, as he strove feebly to pull out the rifle and bayonet from his chest, which had fixed him to the wall as a dead butterfly is fixed in a collection with a pin.
Peterson had a fleeting vision of a girl with white face and wide, staring eyes, beside whom were standing two of the motionless black figures as guards – the girl whom he had just sentenced to a dreadful and horrible death, and then his eyes came back again as if fascinated to the man who was coming towards him. He tried to shrink farther into his corner, plucking with nerveless fingers at his clerical collar – while the sweat poured off his face in a stream. For there was no mercy in Hugh Drummond’s eyes: no mercy in the great arms that hung loosely forward. And Peterson realised he deserved none.
And then it came. No word was spoken – Drummond was beyond speech. His hands shot out and Peterson felt himself drawn relentlessly towards the man he had planned to kill, not two minutes before. It was his turn now to wonder desperately if it was some hideous nightmare, even while he struggled impotently in his final frenzy with a man whose strength seemed equal to the strength of ten. He was choking: the grip on his throat was not human in its ferocity. There was a great roaring in his ears, and suddenly he ceased to struggle. The glare in Drummond’s eyes hypnotised him, and for the only time in his life he gave up hope.
The room was spinning round: the silent black figures, the dying Yulowski, the girl – all seemed merged in one vast jumble of colour growing darker and darker, out of which one thing and one thing only stood out clear and distinct on his dying consciousness – the blazing eyes of the man who was throttling him. And then, as he felt himself sinking into utter blackness, some dim sense less paralysed than the rest seemed to tell him that a change had taken place in the room. Something new had come into that whirling nightmare that spun round him: dimly he heard a voice – loud and agonised – a voice he recognised. It was a woman’s voice, and after a while the grip on his throat relaxed. He staggered back against the wall gasping and spluttering, and gradually the room ceased to whirl round – the iron bands ceased to press upon his heart and lungs.
It was Irma who stood there: Irma – whose piteous cry had pierced through to his brain: Irma who had caused those awful hands to relax their grip just before it was too late. Little by little everything steadied down: he found he could see again – could hear. He still crouched shaking against the wall, but he had got a respite anyway – a breathing-space. And that was all that mattered for the moment – that and the fact that the madness was gone from Hugh Drummond’s eyes.
The black figures were still standing there motionless round the walls; the Russian was lolling forward – dead; Phyllis was lying back in her chair unconscious. But Peterson had eyes for none of these things: Count Zadowa shivering in a corner – the huddled group of his own men standing in the centre of the room he passed by without a glance. It was on Drummond his gaze was fixed: Drummond, who stood facing Irma with an almost dazed expression on his face, whilst she pleaded with him in an agony of supplication.
“He ordered that man to brain my wife with a rifle butt,” said Drummond hoarsely. “And yet you ask for mercy.”
He passed his hand two or three times over his forehead as Irma once again broke into wild pleadings; then he turned and stared at Peterson. She stopped at last, and still he stared at the gasping clergyman as if making up his mind. And, in truth, that was precisely what he was doing. Like most big men he was slow to anger, but once his temper was roused it did not cool easily. And never before in his life had he been in the grip of such cold, maniacal fury as had held him during the last few minutes. Right from the start had Peterson deceived him: from the very moment when he had entered his sitting-room at the Ritz. He had done his best to murder him, and not content
with that he had given orders for Phyllis and him to be butchered in cold blood. If the Black Gang had not arrived – had they been half a minute later – it would have been over. Phyllis – his Phyllis – would have been killed by that arch-devil whom he had skewered to the wall with his own rifle. And as the thought took hold of him, his great fists clenched once more, and the madness again gleamed in his eyes. For Peterson was the real culprit: Peterson was the leader. To kill the servant and not the master was unjust.
He swung round on the cowering clergyman and gripped him once again by the throat, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat. He felt the girl Irma plucking feebly at his arm, but he took no notice. In his mind there was room for no thought save the fixed determination to rid the world for ever of this monstrous blackguard. And still the motionless black figures round the wall gave no sign, even when the girl rushed wildly from one to the other imploring their aid. They knew their leader, and though they knew not what had happened to cause his dreadful rage they trusted him utterly and implicitly. Whether it was lawful or not was beside the point: it was just or Hugh Drummond would not have done it. And so they watched and waited, while Drummond, his face blazing, forced the clergyman to his knees, and the girl Irma sank half-fainting by the table.