“It is let to an invalid, it is true,” the landlady, a motherly, unsuspecting old soul, told them when they made the demand. “But it is a gentleman, not a lady. A professional gentleman, I believe—artist or sculptor, something of that sort—and never until last night has anybody been with him but his niece, who makes occasional calls. Last night, however, a nephew came—just for a moment; indeed, it seemed to me that he had no more than gone upstairs before he came down again and went out. Pardon? No, nobody has called to-day, neither has the gentleman left his room. But he often sleeps until late.”
He was sleeping forever this time. For when they came to mount the stairs and force open the door of the room, there, under a half-opened skylight, a dead man lay, one screwed-up, contracted hand still clutching the end of a flex, which went up and out to the telegraph wires overhead. On a table beside the body a fused and utterly demolished telegraph instrument stood; and it was evident from the scrap of flex still clinging to this that it had once formed part of that which the dead hand held; that it had snapped somehow, and that the man was attempting to re-attach it to the instrument when death overtook him.
“Gentlemen, the wire tapper—Boris Borovonski!” said Cleek, as he bent over and looked at him. “Step here, Mr. Beachman, and tell me if this is not the man who played the part of ‘Miss Greta Hilmann’s’ interesting papa.”
“Yes, yes!” declared the dock master excitedly, after he, too, had bent over and looked into the dead face. “It is the very man, sir, the very one! But who—but why—but how?” He then looked upward in a puzzled way to where the flex went up and out through the skylight and, threading through a maze of wires, hooked itself fast to one.
“Electrocuted,” said Cleek, answering that inquiring glance. “A few thousand volts—a flash of flame through heart and head and limbs, and then this! See his little game, Mr. Narkom? See it, do you, Sir Charles? He was taking the message from the tapped wire with that flex, and the fragment that reached the telegraph office only got through when the flex snapped. The furious gale did that, no doubt, whipping it away from its moorings, so to speak, and letting the message flash on before he could prevent it.
“Can’t you read the rest when you look up and see that other wire—the thick one with the insulated coating torn and frayed by contact with the chimney’s rough edge? It is not hard to reconstruct the tragedy when one sees that. When the flex snapped he jumped up and grabbed it, and was in the very act of again attaching it to the instrument when he became his own executioner. Look for yourself. The wild wind must either have blown the flex against the bared wire of the electric light or the bared wire against the flex—that we shall never know—and in the winking of an eye he was annihilated.
“No wonder the lights in the hotel went out, Mr. Beachman. The whole strength of the current was short-circuited through this man’s body, and it crumpled him up as a glove crumples when it is cast in the fire. But the dead hand, which had recovered the broken flex, still held it, you see, and no more of the ‘tapped’ message went down the dockyard wire. So long as that message continued, so long as the instrument which sent it continued to send it, it was ‘received’ here—a mere silent, unrecorded, impotent thrill locked up in the grip of a dead man’s hand.
“And look there—the pile of burnt paper beside the fused instrument and the cinder of a matchbox against it. The force which obliterated life in him infused it into the ‘dipped’ heads of those little wooden sticks, and flashed them into flame. So long as there was anything for that flame to feed upon it continued its work, you see, and Sophie Borovonski found nothing to take away with her, after all. Gentlemen, the State secrets that were stolen will remain England’s own—the records were burnt, and the dead cannot betray.”