LADY OF THE NIGHT

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1935, Page 13

LADY OF THE NIGHT

■' (By

Sydney Horlor)

CHAPTER XXXIII (continued.)

He paused before continuing: “Now we do not wish you to think in these, your last moments, that we are unconscionable brutes. On the contrary, the method of your passing over will be swift and practically painless. Our colleague the doctor"-he waved a hand in the direction of Merritt —“whom you, Holiday, at least, have had the pleasure of meeting before, has certain highly developed scientific gifts. These he has been good enough to place at our disposal. Among his recent inventions is a certain chemical compound which when injected has the property not only of stopping the heart’s action very speedily—there are many poisons, of course, which will do this—but also of causing the human body literally to disappear; bones, blood, and flesh just vanish, leaving nothing, according to Merritt, but a fine dust which not even the most skilful pathologists of crime will be able to identify. You wiU see the overwhelming advantage of this, of course-in the past, whilst it has been a comparatively pimple matter to kill, it has often been an embarrassing consideration what to do with the corpse. That difficulty I trust the forthcoming test will effectively solve. If it is successful, Science will have scored another signal triumph. Until now, Merritt has not had the opportunity of putting his discovery to a fair trial, and he is naturally delighted at the prospect. He does not appear very pleased, but that is merely his manner; inwardly, I am convinced, he is vainly . endeavouring to overcome his elation . . . Lulu, may I ask if you are ready ? Holiday, you will excuse me if I take the, liberty of removing your collar ...” As he felt the tingers of his enemy touch his, fl<t?h, Holiday imagined that he must go mad. Yet his pride kept him silent. He could not plead with Stadenfeld, it was useless to attempt to struggle. “Darling, forgive me” sobbed Valerie. It was the distress of the girl he loved which made him break out into violent speech. • “Stadenfeld!” he cried, hate swelling bo that his heart threatened to burst, “you will hang for this!”. The man flicked the speaker’s cheek with the tips of his fingers. “A poor satisfaction,” he sneered. ■ 1 am sure you would much rather be given the chance to settle with me yourself. However, ■we are wasting time . . . Lulu.” . . The woman took from Merritt a phial and a hypodermic needle. As she moved towards Holiday a scream tore the air. Valerie’s tortured nerves had cracked at last. ... “Keep her quiet!” commanded a voice. It was the masked man speaking for the first time. „ ~ Stadenfeld obeyed the other. Taking off his coat he flung it over the girl’s head, and tying the sleeves tightly,.made a rough kind of gag. “Oh, God, I can’t stand this! The veiled woman at the door turned her face away. The eyes of the murderess were like . a snake’s as they approached nearer and nearer. Even Holiday’s furious hate could not fight the terror which the sight inspired; he felt himself become cold and rigid. So this was to be the end —to die like a rat in a filthy cellar at the hands of a female thug who took a fiendish delight in the most awful of crimes. A strange, terrible destiny—and yet, in that final moment of life, he had an exultancy of soul which drove out his former terror and made him smile into the contorted face of his murderess. The change in his face was so unexpected, so inexplicable, that the woman, in the act of plunging the charged needle into his skin, stopped. And in that same instant a revolver shot filled the cellar , with reverberating sound. A hideous scream followed so quickly on the revolver-shot that the one started before the other died away. Holiday saw Lulu Chartres lifting the hand which had held the”needle. It was now empty, and not a pretty sight, for blood was spurting from it. “Stand back, all of you—let them go! Do you hear me, let them go!” Holding a revolver in a shaking hand, and shouting hysterically, Mrs. Laidley Craig menaced the crowd of assassins. It was obvious she was bordering on madness; the scene she had been brought there to witness, following on her former fear, had almost turned her brain. She was thoroughly distraught. “You she-devil,” shouted back Lulu, facing the woman who had fired the shot, “I’ll kill you for this!” In. her insensate fury she shook her maimed hand so that blood spurted on the other. It was Pandervell who took command of the situation. “Steady yourself, Lulu,” he commanded, and to Mrs. Laidley Craig; “Put that revolver away! What do you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Laidley Craig laughed hysterically. “I’m going to prevent murder being done—l ■ can’t stand it! —listen to me, I can’t stand it!” The words bespoke raw, tortured nerves. The next moment Holiday would have cried a warning. But before he could speak, a hand—Stadenfeld's—had closed over his mouth. And whilst he was thus gagged, the thing was don-; Merritt, who had slunk round to the back of Mrs. Laidley Craig, sprang on the woman from behind like some treacherous creature of the jungle, and brought her to the ground. “Now we can proceed,” said Pander-, veil. The revolver which he had taken from the woman who had been choked into insensibility was in his hand. “As Lulu is unfortunately incapacitated you had better take over, Merritt. The operation should have been performed by you in the first place.” The man he addressed picked up the phial and examined its contents. “A good deal has been wasted, but there should be sufficient,” he commented. “Get on with, it, man !” snapped Pandervell. “Good God! Is all the night t to be wasted ?” The cosmopolitan had been shaken out of his usual exquisite suavity. “Very well” —Merritt examined the needle. “What about me? Do you think I am going to' stay here and bleed to death ?” Exhibiting the wreckage of her right hand, Lulu stormed at Pandervell: “This stunt can wait; I want Merritt to see to my hand.” “You know where to find what you want,” was the stern reply; “fetch the things and Merritt shall bind up your hand. In any case, leave, because your stridency is singularly abhorrent to me.” The speaker moved the revolver so impatiently in his hand that all the bellicosity died out of her manner. “Yes—all right,” she said submissively, and without any further protest, left the place. “Now,' Merritt,” exhorted Pandervell. “I think, Stadenfeld. that you can permit Miss Insall to breathe freely once again.” Stadenfeld, smiling, stepped across and untied the sleeves of his coat. Valerie’s face was the colour of ivory, and her body was perfectly still. With a tremendous feeling of thankfulness, Holiday realised that she had faulted. Nature had stepped in to save her. “She is unconscious,” said Pandervell, * ’

after a glance; “well, it cannot be helped

. . . Merritt.” Holiday would not close his eyes; by some strange association of ideas, he thought of an American he knew in the war years who had been caught inside the German lines and shot as a spy. The officer in charge of the firing-party had written home to the dead man’s family in the States, saying: “He died like a hero, refusing to have his eyes bandaged.” He felt the breath of Merritt as the man bent towards him. There was one consolation —the fellow, if he had been a doctor, could be expected not to bungle the job ... There came the touch of the needle on his flesh—and then, from somewhere quite near, a scream that rose and. swelled until it died down in a kind of shuddering moan, awful to hear. “What the devil’s that?” he heard Pandervell shout. “Stadenfeld, you stay here.” The speaker thrust open the door, ana in the next moment was hurled violently backwards. A grotesque figure-amply paunched, crudely moustached, and mouthing strange oaths,—came hurtling into the cellar, swinging what looked like a short black rod in his hand—a rod, however, that was as pliable as the body of a snake. “Miss Insall!” this apparition shouted, and when he saw the unconscious body of the girl, “by Gosh!” Both Stadenfeld and Merritt were transfixed by the unexpected sight of this intruder, and before they could recover from their surprise, a voice that stung them like a whip-lash sounded from the door. “Put your hands above your head—both of .you! Get a jerk into it now, for I’ve already lost my temper!” Holiday did not recognise the speaker, but he knew the voice. Bishop had turned up after all. The million-to-one chance had come off. He asked for nothing more; he was quite content. , It was four hours later—in Holiday s flat. Much had been done in that time. To begin with, Pandervell, Stadenfeld, Merritt, and the woman Chartres were in the hands of the police. To. a thoroughly bewildered Surrey police inspector the distinguished quartette had been delivered ’by Bishop—now stripped of his disguise arid' speaking with the crispness of authority. “But one of these men is Mr. Hector Pandervell,” expostulated the inspector; “Mr. Pandervell is one of the most distinguished—” “Crooks, not only in Surrey, but in the whole of Europe,” cut in Bishop; “I’ll just phone through to London and get Scotland Yard to speak to you themselves.”

What Scotland Yard said after Bishop had got through to Eden Leycester was sharp and to' the point; the inspector was to be responsible for the custody of the four prisoners until a policewaggon arrived from London. — “I suppose Mrs. Laidley Craig' should have been included with that precious bunch,” said. Bishop, drinking his excellent coffee which had rounded off the hurried meal, prepared by Somers, “but the scandal will be blazing enough now, once the newspapers get the least inkling of this affair. Anyway, I turned a blind eye on the woman and she slipped away. It would be interesting to know what account —if any—she will give her husband of to-night’s proceedings.” “Before you start telling us anything,” said Holiday, “there is just one question I should like answered: What was the place where Valerie and I were taken?” “It was a large cellar buried away below a lodge in Pandervell’s grounds. No,” with a grin, “I’m certainly not going to tell you anything else to-night—-not even how I found it, out, or how I got inside. I should imagine you have had sufficient excitement for one evening. Valerie, my dear,” turning to the girl, “I’m going to take you home straight away; you look as though you want at least a week’s sleep without any interruptions.' Let me remind you that it’s 2 a.m., and that I have to go to see the Chief before I go to bed myself. As a matter of fact, he’s waiting up for me.” Valerie rose and smiled at Holiday. “I suppose I shall have to obey this bully, Gerald?” “You have my permission to do so to-night, but'from to-morrow you obey no one but me.” Bishop grinned at the sight of the colour mounting in the girl’s cheeks. “Like that, is it ? Well—before I forget it—congratulations!” “Thanks, old man,” replied Holiday. “If it hadn’t been for you—but, oh what’s the use . . .?” When Somers entered the room to clear, he saw. his master shaking Bishop’s right hand whilst Valerie had hold of the other. . Bishop looked over the girl’s head. “Is Grainger still on the premises, Somers ?” “If the food he’s got through hasn’t killed him, sir.” “Good! Tell him he is engaged to drive Miss Insall home.” “When do T see you again?” Holiday asked Bishop as they shook hands for the last time at the street-door. “I’ll call round to-morrow afternoon and finish the story,” was the reply. “Good-night, Jerry, dear,” said Valerie. After she • had gone, Holiday lifted his face to the • stars he had believed he would never see again. CHAPTER XXXIV. BISHOP TELLS THE TRUTH. “It is a somewhat . astonishing story I have to tell,” continued Bishop, pulling at the pipe he had lit. “It centres in the first place around that disgusting crime, blackmail, which more than one judge has recently remarked platitudincusly is nothing short of moral murder. “Blackmail is one of the oldest of crimes, of course, but it has lost none of its potency through the ages. The man or woman, with knowledge of the guilty secret, who wields the threat of exposure is always to be feared—especially if the persecuted person occupies a high position. “I should regard Hector Pandervell as the leading blackmailer of our time, which is peculiarly prolific in the noxious breed. Certainly he was the finest artist. Rarely appearing on the stage himself, he yet held London society—or a very prominent part of it—in a grip of velvet-gloved iron.” "But how ?” put in Holiday. Bishop smiled as a professor might have done in enlightening a favourite pupil. “That is soon told," he said, “if you cast your mind back to the war years, you may remember that in a fabulously sensational cause celebre, reference was made to an infamous volume styled ‘The Black Book.’ In this vast dossier, for it was reputed to be nothing less, the German Secret Service were supposed to have entered certain discreditable particulars concerning various prominent English personalities. The presumption was that the enemy intended to use this information in order to exert pressure upon these people and force them to become traitors in one of many ways.” “There was only a yarn—and a pretty tall one at that,” scoffed his listener. “I know it to have been true,” was the serious rejoinder. “What?” To be continued.)