“Poor little lad! Too bad, too bad!” sympathized Sir Charles, feelingly, and, possibly, would have said more but that Cleek’s voice broke in softly, but with a curiously sharp note underlying its sleekness.
“In the pitch darkness, Mr. Beachman?” it inquired. “The pitch darkness of a public hotel at dinner time? Isn’t that rather extraordinary?”
“It would be, under any other circumstances, sir, but that infernal clap of thunder interfered in some way with the electric current, and every blessed light in the hotel went smack out—whisk! like that!—and left the place as black as a pocket. Everybody thought for the moment that the wires must have fused, but it turned out that there was nothing the matter with them—only that the current had been interrupted for a bit—for the lights winked on again as suddenly as they had winked out.”
“By Jupiter!” Cleek cracked out the two words like the snapping of a whip lash, then quickly turned round on his heel and looked straight and intently at the telegraph operator.
“Speak up—quick!” he said in the sharp staccato of excitement. “I am told that when that crash came and the diverted message began there was a force that almost knocked you off your stool. Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied, “perfectly true. It was something terrific. The Lord only knows what it would have been if I’d been touching the instrument.”
“You’d have been as dead as Julius Cæsar!” flung back Cleek. “No wonder she cut away to see what was wrong, the vixen! No wonder the lights went out! Mr. Narkom, the limousine—quick! Come along, Sir Charles; come along, Mr. Beachman—come along at once!”
“Where, Mr. Cleek—where?”
“To the top floor of the house next door to the Ocean Billow Hotel, Sir Charles, to see ‘Miss Greta Hilmann’s’ precious pensioners,” he made answer, rather excitedly. “Unless I am wofully mistaken, gentlemen, one part of this little riddle is already solved, and the very elements have conspired to protect England to become her foeman’s executioner.”
He was not mistaken—not in any point with regard to that house and the part it had played in this peculiar case—for, when they visited it and demanded in the name of the law the right to enter and to interview “the bedridden woman and the crippled girl who occupied the top floor,” they were met with the announcement that no such persons dwelt there, nor had ever done so.