“The last victim, Mr. Raphael Willings,” here Parr spoke very clearly and deliberately, “owes his life to the fact that he conceived an unhealthy attachment for my daughter. She was struggling with him, when, looking over her shoulder, she saw a hand come from behind the curtain holding the very knife that had been stolen earlier in the day by Yale (again in his capacity as detective). It was aimed at Mr. Willings’s heart, but by a superhuman effort, she thrust him aside, but not so far as to save him completely. Yale, of course, was on hand to discover the outrage (I should imagine he was very annoyed when he found it was not a murder), and of course he had no difficulty in fixing it upon mother—upon Thalia Drummond Parr.
“Consider the cleverness of his operations!” said Parr admiringly. “He had thrust himself into the front rank of private detectives, so that he was on hand to receive information which was invaluable to him as the Crimson Circle. He was eventually taken to police headquarters—at my suggestion—where the most important documents came under his notice. Some of them were not quite as important as he thought, but it saved Mr. Beardmore’s life when Yale had the first handling of a photograph of himself taken a few moments before the abortive execution.
“Now, gentlemen, are there any other points that you wish cleared up? There is one I will clear up which is probably not obscure. Two days ago I told Yale that great criminals are usually brought to their end through ridiculous mistakes. Yale had the effrontery to tell me that he had called at Mr. Willings’s house after he had left and that the servants had told him where Thalia and Willings had gone. That alone was sufficient to damn him, because he had not been near Willings’s house since the morning, and had arrived at the country place at least an hour before the servants had come.”
“The question that disturbs me for the moment,” said the Prime Minister, “is what reward we can give to your daughter, Mr. Parr? Your promotion is of course an easy matter to arrange, for there is an assistant-commissionership vacant at this moment; but I don’t exactly see what we can do for Miss Drummond, except of course to give her the monetary reward which is due for having brought about the capture of this dangerous criminal.”
Then a husky voice spoke. It sounded to Jack as though it were his, and the rest of the people about the table seemed to be under the same impression.
“There is no need to bother about Miss Parr,” said this strange voice, that was speaking Jack’s thoughts, “we are getting married very soon.”
When the buzz of congratulation had subsided, Inspector Parr leant toward his daughter.
“You didn’t tell me, mother,” he said reproachfully.
“I didn’t even tell him,” she said, looking at Jack wonderingly.
“Do you mean to say he hasn’t asked you to marry him?” demanded her amazed father.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, “and I haven’t told him I would marry him either, but I had a feeling that something like this would happen.”
Lightman, or Yale, as he was best known, was an exemplary prisoner. His only complaint against the authorities was that they would not let him smoke on his way to his execution.
“They order these things much better in France,” he said to the governor. “Now, the last time I was executed—”
To the chaplain he expressed the warmest interest in Thalia Drummond.
“There is a girl in a million!” he said. “I suppose she will marry young Beardmore—he is a very lucky fellow. Personally, women arouse very little enthusiasm in me, and I ascribe my success in life to this fact. But if I were a marrying man, I think Thalia Drummond would be the very type I should search for.”
He liked the chaplain because the padre was a big human man who could talk interestingly on places and things and people, and Derrick Yale had seen most of the fascinating places in the world.
On a grey March morning a man came into his cell and strapped his hands.
Yale looked at him over his shoulder.
“Have you ever heard of M. Pallion? He was a member of your profession.”
The executioner did not reply, being by etiquette forbidden to discuss other matters than the prisoner’s forgiveness for the deed which was about to be committed.
“You should find out something about Pallion,” said Yale, as the procession formed, “and profit by his example. Never drink. Drink was my ruin! If it were not for drink I should not be here!”
This little conceit kept him amused all the way to the scaffold. They slipped the noose about his neck and covered his face with a white cloth, and then the executioner stepped back to the steel lever.
“I hope this rope won’t break,” said Derrick Yale.
It was the last message from the Crimson Circle.
Colophon
The Crimson Circle
was published in 1922 by
Edgar Wallace.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Sergio Tellez,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2025 by
An Anonymous Volunteer
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Clockmaker,
a painting completed in 1921 by
Ollila, Yrjö.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
June 23, 2025, 1:40 a.m.
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