The Beauty-Killer

Four more figures dashed out through the curtains—two women and two men. The inspector and Monsieur Dupont joined them. Guided by the sounds in front of them, they dashed across the garden at the top of their speed.

A black wall of earth loomed up before them, like the rising of a gigantic wave. It was strongly rivetted, and must have been at least ten feet high. It was quite inaccessible from where the pursuers stopped beneath it.

"Look! Look!" a woman screamed.

They looked up.

"My God!" the inspector exclaimed.

On the height above them, silhouetted against the pale sky of the summer night, they saw a figure—its arms uplifted in an attitude of majesty, of triumphant defiance. The white light of the moon lit up a face terrible beyond words in its pride, its sin, and its utter madness.

"I am the Beauty-Killer! I killed Colette d'Orsel! I killed Margaret McCall. I killed Christine Manderson...."

Another figure scrambled up out of the darkness on to the height, and the silver head of Oscar Winslowe gleamed in the light. For a moment he crouched—then sprang forward with a yell. The two figures swayed backwards in a fierce struggle.

"They will go down!" a man's voice cried. "It is the edge of a gravel pit. The fence will not bear. There is a sheer drop of fifty feet."

"Let them go," another woman sobbed. "It is the best way."

And, even as she spoke, there was the sound of tearing woodwork. The struggling figures stood out for an instant with startling clearness—then disappeared like the sudden shutting off of a moving picture. And the whole night seemed to wince at the thud that followed. "We must go down," the man's voice said, breaking the silence in an awestruck whisper. "There is a way round the other side."

They followed him round the edge of the pit. It seemed like walking round the world. They descended a steep slope—and then, in the vast gray silence, a circle of pale faces surrounded the dead bodies of Oscar Winslowe, and John Tranter.