I did not take the Jaguar into Birmingham proper; I put her into a half-smashed, bombed-out old building I found quite by chance some few miles out of the city, and prayed that she would wait there for me till my business was done. It was then about four-thirty in the morning.
At a little tea-and-biscuit place in the suburbs I had a hearty breakfast, and read in an early edition the terrifying tale of the Manchester Horrors. It seemed that the infamous Slasher had been tentatively identified when he was tracked by the police to his lair in a well-known hotel; he was thought to be either a certain Irish communist agitator, or else a celebrated American gangster who I happened to know had been killed in 1937....
I walked on down to Birmingham and took a room in an obscure house in a slum district, run by a blowzy slattern who answered to "Old Mag." The parlor was equipped with a weary wireless set and an assortment of highly-flavored gentlemen in the last stages of disrepair. One of them looked like a racetrack tout fallen on evil days, another I could have sworn was a professional mugger. A fitting den for the Manchester Slasher!
I was careful not to touch anything at all until I had gone out and bought a pair of thin silk gloves, which I wore at all times thereafter. The proprietor of the pawnshop gave me a knowing wink as he handed them to me. I'm sure he thought I was a cat-burglar or a safe-cracker. No one in my new home deigned to notice them. I must mention that, quite by accident and not through any searching on my part, I had happened to strike a place where none of the other-world brutes lived; I had been prepared to see a number of them here, but only found the lowly humans I have spoken of.
I spent my first evening in going over my clothing and other possessions, ripping out name tags, obliterating initials, and cleaning off fingerprints. I would not be trapped again as I had nearly been in Manchester.
The second day and the early evening thereof I walked through the streets, thinking furiously. And the only conclusions I could come to anent my problems were bitter and lonely and hopeless.
Going "home" about eight o'clock, I wandered into the parlor and was accosted diffidently by a very low-looking form of life, which begged the pleasure of my company in a nearby hooch hut. I agreed. I would have stood drinks to a wolverine if the creature would have listened to me. I was starved for speech.
When I had bought him a few rounds, his taste running to that noble old British concoction, a four-o'-gin-hot, we began to talk freely: of anything, the weather, the latest race results, the difficulty of getting "real prime raw gin"....
He was a curious fellow. The name he gave me was Arold Smiff, which I imagine had once been Harold Smith; he was small and stringy and of a tobacco-brown hue, with eyes in which liquor-broken veins had long since stained the irises and the white to an all-over muddy-crimson. He stank like a shebeen, his breath would have shriveled a brass monkey, but I soon noticed something really odd about him—he did not seem to be at all intoxicated. I made bold to comment on this.