Terror Keep

the misty gloom where this interminable Jacob’s ladder ended on some solid floor. Not for a fortune would she have looked behind, or vertigo would have seized her. Her breath was coming in long sobs; her heart beat as though it would burst. She dared pause for an infinitesimal time to recover breath before she continued her flight. He was an old man; she could outdistance him. But he was a madman, a thing of terrible and abnormal energy. Panic was leaving her; it exhausted too much of her strength. Upward and upward she climbed, until she was in gloom, and then, when it seemed that she could get no farther, she reached the head of the stairs. A broad, flat space, with a rocky roof which, for some reason, had been straightened with concrete pillars. There were dozens of these pillars⁠ ⁠… once she had taken a fortnight’s holiday in Spain; there was a cathedral in Cordoba of which this broad vault reminded her⁠ ⁠… all sense of direction was lost now. She came with terrifying suddenness to a blank wall; ran along it until she came to a narrow opening where there were five steps and here she stopped to turn on her light. Facing her was a steel door with a great iron handle, and the steel door was ajar.

She pulled it toward her, ran through, pulled the door behind her; it fastened with a click. It had something attached to its inner side, a steel projection⁠—as she shut the door a box fell with a crash. There was yet another door before her, and this was immovable. She was in a tiny white box of a room, three feet wide, little more in depth. She had no time to continue her observations. Someone was fumbling with the handle of the door through which she had come. She gripped in desperation at the iron shelf and felt it slide a little to the right. Though she did not know this, the back part of the shelf acted as a bolt. Again she heard the fumbling at the handle and the click of a key turning, but the steel door remained immovable, and Margaret Belman sank in a heap to the ground.

XVIII

J. G. Reeder came downstairs, and those who saw his face realized that it was not the tragedy he had almost witnessed which had made him so white and drawn.

He found Gray in Daver’s office, waiting for his call to London. It came through as Reeder entered the room, and he took the instrument from his subordinate’s hand. He dismissed the death of Daver in a few words, and went on:

“I want all the local policemen we can muster, Simpson, though I think it would be better if we could get soldiers. There’s a garrison town five miles from here; the beaches have to be searched, and I want these caves explored. There is another thing: I think it would be advisable to get a destroyer or something to patrol the waters before Siltbury. I’m pretty sure that Flack has a motor boat⁠—there’s channel deep enough to take it, and apparently there is a cave that stretches right under the cliff.⁠ ⁠… Miss Belman? I don’t know. That is what I want to find out.”

Simpson told him that the lorry carrying the gold had been seen at Sevenoaks, and it required a real effort on Mr. Reeder’s part to bring his mind to such a triviality.

“I think soldiers will be best. I’d like a strong party posted near the quarry. There’s another cave there where Daver used to keep his wagons. I have an idea you might pick up the money tonight. That,” he added, a little bitterly, “will induce the authorities to use the military!”

After the ambulance had come and the pitiable wreck of Daver had been removed, he returned to the man’s suite with a party of masons he had brought up from Siltbury. Throwing open the lid of the divan, he pointed to the stone floor.

“That flag works on a pivot,” he said, “but I think it is fastened with a bolt or a bar underneath. Break it down.”

A quarter of an hour was sufficient to shatter the stone flooring, and then, as he had expected, he found a narrow flight of stairs leading to a square stone room which remained very much as it had been for six hundred years. A dusty, bare apartment which yielded its secret. There was a small open door and a very narrow passage, along which a stout man would walk with some difficulty, and which led to behind the panelling of Daver’s private office. Mr. Reeder realized that anybody concealed here could hear every word that was spoken. And now he understood Daver’s frantic plea that he should lower his voice when he spoke of the marriage. Crazy Jack had learned the secret of his daughter’s degradation. From that moment Daver’s death was inevitable.

How had the madman escaped? That required very little explanation. At some remote period, Larmes Keep had evidently been used as a show place. He found an ancient wooden inscription fixed to the wall, which told the curious that this was the torture chamber of the old Counts of Larme; it added the useful information that the dungeons were immediately beneath and approached through a stone trap. This the detectives found, and Mr. Reeder had his first view of the vaulted dungeons of Larmes Keep.

It was neither an impressive nor a thrilling exploration. All that was obvious was that there were three routes by which the murderer could escape, and that all three ways led back to the house, one exit being between the kitchen and the vestibule.

“There is another way out,” said Reeder shortly, “and we haven’t found it yet.”

His nerves were on edge. He roamed from room to room, turning out boxes, breaking open cupboards, emptying trunks. One find he made: it was the marriage certificate, and it