I shot the black car out into the street, turned left and lost myself in the maze of Manchester. The distant whistling of the searchers died out behind me.

Now, I thought, I was in the bloody soup. My description would be circulated in the other world, first of all. Well, I look like the common man, and that wouldn't help them much. Second, however, they'd be sure to discover that a fellow came into a garage in the vicinity and took his two-seater at the very time the bobbies were hunting the Manchester Slasher (as the papers called me) thereabouts. That's elementary police work. So up to there all I really had to fret over was the ordinary human bloodhound business.

I'd given the garage a false name, naturally, when I took the old girl in to leave her. A purely automatic precaution. Lucky I have a turn for the criminal life, said I to myself smugly. Nothing to identify her with me, Will Chester of London.

Then there was my gear in the hotel.

Whoa! I slapped the wheel with one palm. I'd given the hotel the same fake name—Robert Hood—but in my Gladstone were half a dozen items with my own label on them. I'd intended a quick baggageless dash out of the city, before they traced me to the garage and sent out a call for a black Jaguar; but to leave without that damning luggage would be to present my true identity to the police in a matter of a few days, or even less. I headed for the hotel. Minutes counted, but so did that accursed Gladstone bag.

Then I bethought myself of the garage again. Of course they knew where I had been staying! That meant that within two minutes of the police—they—arriving at the garage and discovering that I had come in and hared out, the hotel would be receiving a call about me.

I groaned aloud. The Jaguar, sensitive to my thought waves or perhaps to the unconscious pressure of my foot, pounced forward at a law-shattering speed. Minutes counted? Seconds!

The hotel was no fly-by-night, tuppenny-ha'penny wee place, for I had seen no reason on earth why I should not be comfortable while on my crusade; I put the Jaguar alongside the curb within a dozen paces of the entrance, walked nonchalantly in and demanded my key. The desk clerk was listening to the telephone. "One moment," he said, and then to me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece, "I think this is for you, sir."

My mind speeded up and raced like a mad thing. No one would be calling me, so it must be about me; therefore the police had already found the garage; and the clerk must only have heard them say my name (my false name) within the instant. I imagined that they had said, "Have you a Mister Robert Hood staying there?" or something of the sort. Now I had two choices: I could bolt at once, leave my luggage to be inspected, and subsequently have my face plastered on every newspaper in England as the Manchester Slasher; or I could brazen it out. Instinctively I chose the right course, the only course. I bluffed to the top of my bent.