“No, it is the truth, Mr. Sharman—alias Barnes—alias half a dozen other names. Your record is at Scotland Yard, together with your finger prints. I have them in my pocket. Truly, yours is a dastardly and ingenious game. You poisoned poor Berton with the same decoction of mushroom-juice that you are now using on your wife!”
Without a second’s delay the man Martin sprang at Geoffrey, who was close to the edge of the Crow’s Cliff—the execution place of the Middle Ages. Next moment the young radio-engineer, feeling himself gripped suddenly and rushed to the edge of the precipice, executed, to save his life, a very clever manœuvre, and by dint of some swift athletic turns he succeeded in swinging round his adversary until the latter had his back to the precipice.
The two men fought for life, there upon the very brink of the grave! Martin was determined to silence his accuser.
But Geoffrey, who at Oxford had learnt the Japanese system of self-defence, suddenly gripped the assassin by the waist, and rushing him backwards to the cliff, flung him from him with force, crying:
“That is your fate—the same that every secret poisoner deserves!”
There was a scream, and next instant the scoundrel struck a pointed rock just below. Then he fell heavily from crag to crag until, a few seconds later, he lay deep down in the undergrowth at the cliff foot, mangled and dead—his fate being indeed a just one.
Next day the Imparçial, in Madrid, printed a long account of the tragic discovery, with a photograph of the dead English servant. The paper called it “The Mystery of the Crow’s Cliff.” But even to-day Mr. Mapleton with the doctor and Mrs. Garcia naturally regard the whole affair as a tragic mystery, for they still aver that the butler Martin was one of the most trustworthy of servants, and believe that he must have met with foul play at the hands of some low-born enemy. Mrs. Mapleton alone suspects the truth!
Three months after the affair Geoffrey Falconer, who had been paid a very considerable sum for the rights of his improved microphone amplifier and for several improvements in wireless calling devices, asked Mrs. Beverley for her daughter’s hand.
The “Wild Widow” admired him, and after a long discussion, gave her consent. So six months ago they were married at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and at the wedding nearly half the engineering staff from the Marconi Works at Chelmsford attended.
Truly the guilty secrets of many men and women have been detected by means of wireless, that science which daily reveals its further wonders to those persevering experimenters who seek so patiently to penetrate its mysteries.