CHAPTER ONE

The Bridegroom Sets Out On His Travels

Handed in 1 P.M., Monday, June 15th: KENWOOD BLAKE, EDWARDIAN HOUSE, BURY STREET, LONDON, S.W.I. MEET ME IMPERIAL HOTEL TORQUAY IMMEDIATELY EXPRESS LEAVES PADDINGTON 3.30 URGENT. MERRIVALE.

Handed in 1.35 P.M.: SIR HENRY MERRIVALE, IMPERIAL HOTEL, TORQUAY, DEVON. ARE YOU CRAZY AM TO BE MARRIED TOMORROW MORNING IN CASE YOU'VE FORGOTTEN ALSO URGENT. BLAKE.

The next document, at 2.10, showed a broader epistolatory style. It had evidently been telephoned white-hot by the old man, without regard for economy or coherence:

DON'T YOU GIVE ME ANY OF YOUR SAUCE CURSE YOU YOU BE ON THAT TRAIN ILL SEE YOU GET BACK IN TIME FOR THE SLAUGHTER I AM TO BE THERE MYSELF AINT I BUT THIS IS IMPORTANT YOU BE ON THAT TRAIN ABSOLUTE BURNING IMPERATIVE THAT YOU BE BUTLER.

Any philosophical soul, on the eve of his wedding, must suspect that some damned thing or other will go wrong. It is bound to. That is the cussedness of all human affairs. And I had learned that it was particularly the case in anything which concerned Evelyn Cheyne and myself. Thus, on that hot, murky June afternoon while I sat in my flat taking sustenance out of a tall glass and studying this telegram, it appeared that — for some reason unknown, less than twenty-four hours before the wedding — I was supposed to go to Torquay and be a butler.

It was just a little over a year after that wild business at the Chateau de I'Ile in France, which has since become known as the Unicorn Murders. Evelyn Cheyne and I were going to make a match of it: the only wonder may be why we had waited so long. It had been no fault of ours. The reason was the same reason why both of us were uneasy about this wedding — Evelyn's parents.

To say that they were holy terrors would be unjust, and conveys a wrong impression. Major-General Sir Edward Kent-Fortescue Cheyne was a good sort, and on my side; Lady Cheyne, though inclined to be weepy, was as much as could be asked for. But imagine what you think both would be like from their names: that's it. When we broke the news to them, Lady Cheyne wept a little and the General said gruffly that he hoped he could entrust his daughter's happiness to my keeping. Under these omens they were sticklers for everything going according to form. The General had arranged a formal wedding, which was something of a cross between the Aldershot Tattoo and the Burial of Sir John Moore. I need not add that it gave both Evelyn and myself the hump. He was even bringing over a great old school-pal of his from Canada, now become a notorious clergyman or a bishop or some such thing to perform the ceremony. Consequently, I did not like to think what would happen if I failed to show up on time at precisely eleven-thirty A.M. On Tuesday morning.

But here was H.M.'s telegram; and it looked like trouble.

I did what I should have done in the first place: I put through a trunk call to Torquay. But H.M. was not at the hotel, and had left no message. Then I rang up Evelyn. The wench, usually so full of the devil, was in nearly as low spirits as myself. She spoke in a small worried voice.

"Ken, it looks like trouble."

"It does."

"But Ken, are you going? I mean, the old man's done a tremendous lot for us, and I don't see how you can let him down if he asks you to go. Do you think it's-?"

She meant: "Do. you think it's Military Intelligence Department work?" H.M., who controls that network, requires a powerful stimulus to push his feet off the desk at the War Office and get him to move anywhere under his own steam. Since even the heavy labour of moving from his office to his home always produces an epic of inspired grousing, his presence in Torquay was important. All the same, I have no longer any official connection with his Department; and Evelyn, who once had a hand in it as well, had given in her resignation over a month before.

"So why me?" I said, "when he's got three dozen people with more brains ready to be called up, and particularly at a time like this? I should have to call off that dinner to-night for one thing, and that would put everybody's back up. Besides, I feel it in my bones some damned thing or other is bound to happen. Every time H.M. is ill-advised enough to stray out of his office, and drags me along with him, it always ends up in my being chased by the police."

"But are you going?"

"Wench, I've got to go. The last time, you remember, I mixed myself up in an affair where I had no business; and H.M. pulled me out… "

There was a pause, during which Evelyn appeared to be dreaming. Then the telephone emitted what seemed to be a faint chortle of pleasure. "I say, but didn't we have a grand time, though?" she crowed. "Look here, Ken: I'll tell you what: let me go along with you. Then, if we don't get back in time, we'll both be in the soup and we can get married at a registry office, which is what I want to do, anyway."

"NO! Your old man-"

"Yes, I suppose you're right," she admitted with suspicious meekness. "Anyway; whatever happens, we've simply got to have the plush-horse service at St. Margaret's, or I should never hear the last of it. But what is H.M. up to, do you think? Did you know he was in Torquay? Did anybody know he was in Torquay?"

I reflected. "Yes, I knew he was out of town. Nobody seems to know his whereabouts. Last Saturday there was an American named Stone here looking for him. Stone went to the War Office, but they either couldn't or wouldn't tell anything. Then he dug up Masters at the Yard; Masters knew nothing, and passed him on to me."

"Stone?" repeated Evelyn. "Who's Stone? Do you know what he wanted with H.M.?"

"No. He looked like a private detective. But I was too much taken up with other matters to be curious. Here: are you sure you won't mind if-?’

"Darling," said Evelyn, "you go ahead, and I'd only love to go with you. But for heaven's sake try, try to get back in time for the wedding! You know what'll happen if you don't."

I knew: very probably I should have to take her father's horse-whip away from him and sit on his head on the steps of the Atheneum. So I rang off, after farewells in which Evelyn almost tearfully implored me to take care, and began 'phoning in earnest to cancel arrangements for that night. It was a mess all the way round; and Sandy Armitage, who was to be my best man, was not pleased. It was twenty minutes past three before I finally piled into a cab-without taking so much as a tooth-brush-and reached Paddington just in time to swing aboard the train when the whistle blew. London streets looked yellow and sticky in the heat-haze, and the train-shed was worse. I sat back in the corner of an empty compartment to cool off and consider.

The mention of Stone's visit brought back to mind another puzzling thing. Stone had charged into my flat demanding to know where H.M. was, and acting in a mysterious way; but he seemed very well informed. At least the War Office seemed to have given him what help it could, so he doubtless had tolerably high credentials. Yet one thing stood out of Stone's guarded conversation: H.M., he said, had been behaving queerly. Now, of course, H.M.'s conduct at its mildest can seldom be described as homely or commonplace, and I knew that this must have reference to some current office joke which Stone (who had never met him) would not understand. Mr. Johnson Stone was a stocky, grey-haired man, with good-natured eyes behind a rimless pince-nez, and a preternaturally solemn jaw. Searching all over London after H.M. had put him into a great fume.

"They tell me," he had said, looking at me sideways, "that your Chief is a mighty queer sort of fellow. They say he's now got into the habit of going around in disguise.

This was startling even for H.M., and I became certain it referred to some joke. I gave Stone my solemn oath that the head of the Military Intelligence Department (or anybody else under him) was seldom known to go about in disguise. But somebody had evidently made a powerful impression on Stone — I could darkly see the hand of Lollypop, H.M.'s blonde secretary — and Stone went out muttering that it was a very fishy business; with which I was inclined to agree. In other words, what was the old blighter up to?

The train was due in Torquay at 7.38. It was a hot and gritty ride, with every click of the wheels diminishing the time when I must be back in London. But, when we came out into the deep trees and red soil of Devon, running for miles beside the sea, I began to feel somewhat soothed. I changed at Moreton Abbot, and just on time we pulled into Torquay station on a clear evening with the breath of the sea on the air. Outside, when I was looking round for a station wagon for the Imperial Hotel, a long blue Lanchester drew up at the kerb. A chauffeur drooped at the wheel; and in the tonneau, his hands folded over his stomach, glared H. M. But I almost failed to recognize him, and the reason was his hat.

He wore a fresh-linen Panama hat with a blue-on-white band, and its brim was turned down all around. There was the broad figure, weighing fourteen stone; the broad nose with spectacles pulled down on it; the corners of the mouth turned down, and an expression of extraordinary malevolence on the wooden face. But nobody in twenty Years, I think, had ever seen him without the top-hat which he said was a present from Queen Victoria. The effect of that festive Panama, its down-turned brim giving it the look of a bowl, and the malignant face blinking under it as he sat motionless, with his hands folded on his stomach, was not one that could be seen with gravity. I began to see the explanation of his disguise.

"Take it off," I said out of the corner of my mouth. "We know you."

H.M. was suddenly galvanized. He turned with slow and terrifying wrath. "You too?" he said. "Burn me, ain't there any loyalty in this world? Ain't there any loyalty in this world: that's what I want to know? If I hear just one more remark about disguises and false whiskers and What's wrong with this hat? Hey? What's wrong with it? It's a jolly good hat." Laboriously he removed it, revealing a bald head shining in the evening sun; he blinked at the hat with defiant respect, turned it round in his fingers, and replaced it. His sense of grievance rose querulously. "Ain't I got a right to be cool if I want to? Ain't I got a right-"

"We won't discuss that now," I said. "Speaking of loyalty: I'm here. The wedding is at eleven-thirty tomorrow morning, so let's get on with whatever business there is."

"Well… now," said H.M., rubbing his chin rather guiltily. He covered it up with an outburst about there being no reason why people should get married anyway; but at length he grudgingly admitted that both of us could be back in London on time. Then he waved a flipper at the chauffeur. "Buzz off, Charley. Mr. Butler will drive us back. Your name, Ken, is Robert T. Butler. That mean anything to you, hey?"

And then occurred revelation. "About 1917," I said, with the past opening up. "September or October. Hogenauer — "

"Good," grunted H.M. I climbed into the driver's seat, and H.M., with many curses, climbed beside me. He directed me out of town by the bus route towards Babbacombe; but I thought that under his grousing he seemed very worried, especially since he went to business at once. "It's more'n fifteen years ago, and neither of us is gettin' any younger, but I hoped you'd remember….

"You played the part of one Robert T. Butler, of New York," he grunted, with a curious obstinate look about him. "You were supposed to be an outlawed American sidin' violently with Germany in the Late Quarrel, and rather tied up with their secret service. Your business was to investigate Paul Hogenauer. Hogenauer had been givin' us a lot of headaches. The question was whether he was just what he pretended to be, a good British subject, the son of a naturalized German father and English mother: or whether he was tangled up with the feller they called L. in a bit of work that would have got him shot at the Tower. Humph. You remember now?"

"I don't remember this `L' whoever he is," I said; "but Hogenauer — yes, very well. I also remember that he got a clean bill of health. He wasn't a spy. He was just what he pretended to be."

H.M. nodded. But be put his hands to his temples under the brim of the Panama hat, and rubbed them slowly, with the same obstinate fishy look.

"Uh-huh. Yes. Now consider Paul Hogenauer a minute. Ken, that fellow was and is a genius of sorts…. When you knew him he was about thirty-five. At thirty-five he'd been offered a chair in physiology at Breslau. Then he got to tinkerin' with psychology as well; he'd got a new hobby each week. He was a chess wizard, and no bad hand at cryptograms or ciphers. To add to the staggerin', total, he was a chemist. Finally, there wasn't much about engraving he didn't know, or inks, or dyes — which was one reason why Whitehall wanted to keep on the good side of him if he wasn't a German spy. With all that, dye see, he was a simple-minded soul, with a sort of foggy honesty; or wasn't he? Burn me, son, that's just what I want to know! That's what bothers me."

H.M. scowled malignantly. I still did not see how this concerned me, and said so.

"He got a clean bill of health: sure. And I'm pretty sure there was no hanky-panky about it. But," argued H.M., "immediately after that, what does he do? In October, '17, he leaves the country for Switzerland. Well, we don't stop him. And then he turns up in Germany. And then about a month

later we get a nice, polite letter, as long as your arm and as muddled as your head, explainin' what he's going to do and the reasons for it. Half his heart (that's the words he used) is in Germany. He's goin' over to Germany. He's goin' into the little office on the Koenigstrasse where they move pins and decode letters and try to nail Allied spies. It's his conscience, he says. Now, I'll stake my last farthing he never had a suspicion he was under observation in England, and also that he never did any dirty work over here. But why all this bleedin' honesty? What made his heart suddenly flutter for Germany after three years of war? The whole point is, is he to be trusted?"

I tried to call back recollections from some time ago, and pictured a small, mild, spindly man, already going bald, with a shiny black coat and a tie like a bootlace. Like most ethers, I had been as callow as soap in those days; I remember having been rather contemptuous of him; but since, once or twice, I have wondered whether Paul Hogenauer might not have been discreetly smiling.

"It's interesting enough," I admitted, "but still I want to know where I come in. I suppose Hogenauer's in England now?"

"Oh, yes, he's in England," growled H.M. "He's been here for eight or nine months. Ken, there's some great big ugly black business, goin' on, and I can't put my finger just on it. It's all wrong. Hogenauer is mixed up in it: I don't mean that he's doin' the dirty work, but he knows who is. Or else — Well, Charters and I tumbled smack into the middle of it."

I whistled. "It sounds like a gathering of the old clan. You mean Colonel Charters?"

"Uh-huh. He didn't drop into it officially, of course; he hasn't been connected with the Department for a long time. But he's now Chief Constable of the county, and Hogenauer ran into him, and he sent a line to the old man. We're goin' to Charters's house now."

He nodded ahead. We had left the main road between Torquay and Babbacombe, and turned into a red-soil road which curved up over the great headlands beside the sea. Ahead and to the right, I could see the cliffs of Babbacombe tumble down sheer to the water, and to a strip of pebbled beach laced with a froth of surf far below. The sea was grey-blue, the beach a dazzling white, the cliffs patched with dark green, all in colours as brilliant as a picture post-card. Alone at the top of the headland in front of us, H.M.'s gesture indicated a long, low bungalow built in the South African style, with a veranda around all four sides. There was no other house near it except a smaller, more sedate house in red brick, about a hundred yards away, and separated from the bungalow by a tennis court. On this more prim house the fading sunlight caught a glitter from a doctor's brass nameplate beside the door. We were making for the door of the bungalow, which was shaded with laurels.

"And the next point," said H.M., staring ahead, "is not only whether Hogenauer's to be trusted, but whether he's sane. I told you he was pretty restless about. movin' from one hobby to another. Well, son, he's got an awful queer hobby now. It's ghosts."

"You mean spiritualism?"

"No, I don't," said H.M. "I mean he claims to have a scientific theory which will explain, on physical grounds, every ghost that ever walked and every banshee that ever wailed. There's somethin', also, about being able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus: or some such scientific fairy-tale. Ken, that feller's either a lunatic or a quack or a genius. And you've got to find out which."

CHAPTER TWO

The Inverted Flower-pot

I looked round at H.M., who was quite serious. He had turned to regard me with his head over his shoulder, the corners of his mouth drawn down and his face as wooden as ever; but with his eyes half shut in that sardonic, fishy look which I could not interpret. Then we pulled up at the veranda of the bungalow. A blue Hillman touring-car stood in the drive.

Colonel and Mrs. Charters were waiting for us on the porch. Charters I had not seen since the old days, when he had been H.M.'s right-hand man and very nearly his rival. But the years had not treated him, kindly in any way. He still kept his leanness, his stiff back, his clipped and courteous manner; yet he was an old man, and the expression round his eyes was one of worry and fretfulness — as though over

trifles. He looked as though he had missed the good things, and knew it. His dull-grey hair was close-cropped round the long head, his dull-grey eyes were kindly but tired, and I suspected that he had a set of false teeth to annoy him. The mufti smartness of his clothes was not so precise as I remembered it, but I instinctively addressed him as "sir," exactly as though it were the old days. Mrs. Charters, a good-natured dumpling of a woman in a print dress, bustled to make us welcome.

"I know it's the devil, Blake," Charters said, "to drag a man away on the evening before his wedding. Swear if you must, but listen: Merrivale and I decided you were the best one to help us." His bony grip was genial, even if his voice sounded fretful. "Come back here."

He led us to the wide veranda at the rear, overlooking a faint-gleaming sea on which there were now shadows. A cool breeze ruffled through it. There were comfortable wicker-chairs, and bottles and a bowl of ice on the table. Charters picked up a cube of ice and dropped it, with a flat clink as though he were reflecting, into a tall glass. Then he looked out over the veranda-rail, down the height of the cliffs to where, far off, the beach was dotted with the heads of bathers in the surf.

"It's very peaceful down there," he said. "I only hope to God it remains so. This is a quiet corner of the world. I didn't want this business cropping up. I thought, when we'd caught Willoughby the other week, that we had the most in excitement Devon could provide." He nodded towards a window, which evidently gave on his study, and at a tall iron safe just inside. I did not understand what he meant by Willoughby or by the glance at that safe, I only wish I had asked. Charters had turned irritable again. "That was ordinary crime, but this cursed business-!’ Did you tell him, Merrivale?"

"I said Hogenauer was here, that's all," grunted H.M.

"And," I put in, "that he was working on a machine or something to make himself invisible and carry him through the air. Look here, sir, you haven't brought me several hundred miles just to talk nonsense. What's it all about?"

Charters dropped another cube of ice into the glass. "It's about this," he said. "I didn't know Hogenauer was in England, much less living within a dozen miles of here, until about three months ago. When you came up here did you notice another house — little brick house-just over the way? Yes. There's a Dr.-Antrim living there: youngish, quite a good fellow, with a very pleasant wife. My wife took quite a fancy to her. We've struck up an acquaintance, and we've more or less run in and out of each other's houses. One evening Antrim came up here bursting with news. It appeared he had just met an old acquaintance of his — Antrim had studied in Germany — about whose scientific talents he was enthusiastic. Yes: it was Hogenauer.

"Antrim was very anxious for me to meet Hogenauer. But we never did. I didn't let on to Antrim that I knew him, and Hogenauer has kept a very tight-closed mouth about knowing me. After he heard I was here, he only came up to see Antrim once or twice, though Antrim is his doctor and Hogenauer doesn't seem to have been well. I immediately looked him up at the police station. He's registered at the alien's bureau, and since last autumn he's been living in a neat little suburban villa at Moreton Abbot, not far from here. Well, I put a man to watch him. Of course, I had nothing to go on…. "

Charters handed round some admirable gin-fizzes. A little of his old sharpness, his old doggedness, had come back when he began to outline his facts. He sat down on the veranda-rail, his arms folded and hands cradled under bony elbows.

"He's been leading an ordinary life: except for one thing. On every alternate day, between eight and nine in the evening and often until much later, he shuts himself up in his back parlour. The windows are closed up with shutters of the old-fashioned wooden kind. The man I had watching him — Sergeant Davis — tried to get close and see what was going on. One night he climbed over the garden wall, crawled up under the window, and tried to look through chinks in the shutter. And this is what he says: he says that the room was dark, but that it seemed to be very full of small, moving darts of light flickering round a thing like a flower-pot turned upside down."

H.M., who had been getting out his pipe, opened his eyes, shut them, and opened them again. His turned-down Panama hat gave his face the look of a malevolent urchin's. "Oh, love-a-duck," he said. "Look here, old son. This Sergeant Davis, is he-'

"He's absolutely reliable. You can talk to him for yourself."

"What about Hogenauer's household?"

"He keeps one manservant to do the cooking and cleaning. Or a series of them, rather. Two have already got the sack for being inquisitive. There's a new man there now."

"Any friends? Close friends, I mean?"

Charters tried to gnaw at his cropped moustache. "I was coming to that. As I say, I had my attention rather distracted by that Willoughby affair, which put me up to the eyes in work. But this much I can tell you. Hogenauer left Germany after, apparently, a quarrel with the government; and also apparently he didn't leave it with much money. Since he's been living at Moreton Abbot, he's had only one friend-in fact, outside Antrim the only man who's visited him at all. And this friend is Albert Keppel; he's dropped the `von.' "

"Uh-huh. The physicist," said H.M., making a vacant circle in the air with his pipe. "I heard him lecture. Pretty sound feller. And Keppel is a kind of exchange professor who's been lecturin' for a year at the University of Bristol. And Keppel lives in Bristol. And at Filton, in that same Bristol, is the biggest aeroplane works in England. And they're workin' double-shift, night and day, behind locked doors, on God-knows-what. Hey? Still…"

He made another circle in the air with his pipe.

"And still," I said, "I don't see what it has to do with me’

"Because L. is in England," replied Charters sharply. He got up from the rail, and began to pace the veranda. He seemed to be looking back over the past. "I dare say you didn't know L. Merrivale and I did — at least, we knew his name."

"But not the man?"

"But not the man," said Charters grimly, "or the woman. L. may be a man or a woman. There's always been a dispute about that. All we know is that L. was the cleverest limb of Satan that ever plagued the Counter-Espionage Service. My God, Merrivale, do you remember '15. The tanks? L. very nearly got away with that information, if we hadn't stopped the bolt-hole. You see, L. wasn't and isn't a German, so far as we know; yet he might be German or English or French. He's a kind of international broker for secrets, and he doesn't care particularly whom he serves so long as he's paid. He's out after the big secrets. He gets them, and he sells them to the highest bidder."

"But look here," I protested: "nearly twenty years after all the fuss, he must be a real Iron Man if he's still working. And surely you must have some clue- "

"We have," said Charters calmly. "Hogenauer has offered to tell us who L. is."

There was a pause. The light was darkening to faint purple along the water, and the cliffs threw long shadows. Inside the house I heard a clock strike the quarter-hour after eight. Charter's long face, with its high ascetic framework of bones, was now as puzzled as H.M.'s.

"It was a week ago to-night," Charters went on, considering each word, "and Hogenauer came here-alone. It was the first time I had seen him face to face since the old days when we had him under observation. We've got a small household: just my wife, my secretary, and the maid: but they were all out. There's an inspector of police named Daniels, who sometimes goes over reports with me in the evening, but he had just left. I was sitting there in my study," he pointed to the window of the room I had observed before, "at a table drawn near the window, with the lamp lighted. It was very warm, and the window was up. All of a sudden I looked up from my papers-and there was Hogenauer, standing outside the window looking in at me."

He paused, and looked at H.M. "Merrivale, it was dashed queer. You used to say I hadn't much imagination. Perhaps not; I don't know. I hadn't heard the man approach; I simply looked up, and there he was; or half of him over the sill of the window. I knew him in a second. He hadn't changed much, but he looked ill. He was as little and mild and sharp-featured as ever, but his skin looked like oiled paper over the bridge of his nose. I've seen people in a bout of malaria who had eyes just like his. He said, `Good evening,' and then — just as casual as be damned — he climbed over the sill of the window into the room, and took off his hat, and sat down opposite me. Then he said, `I want to sell you a secret for two thousand pounds."'

Charters looked satirically at both of us.

"Of course, I had to pretend I didn't know him, and what was he doing there, and how did he know me. He corrected me very mildly, and said: `I think you know me. I once wrote you a letter explaining why I was going to Germany, and why I could not reveal the dye-process on which I was working. In Berlin we knew all the men who worked against us in your bureau."'

"Bah!" snorted H.M., who was' evidently stung.

'Bluff" said Charters. "And yet I don't think it was. He might be mad, though: that was what occurred to me. The long and short of it was that he told me L. was in England, and offered to tell me who L. is, and where to find him, for two thousand pounds. I told him I was no longer in the service, and asked him why he didn't communicate with you. He said, very calmly, that to communicate with you — and to be known as having done it — would be as much as his life was worth. He said: `I want two thousand pounds, but I will not risk my life for it.' Then I asked him why he needed money so badly. He began to talk of his `invention,' or his `experiment'. Merrivale has told you as much of that as I know… and I began to think he was mad. What I can't describe is the supreme — what's the word I want? — the supreme quietness of the man, sitting with his hands folded on his hat, and his bald head, and his eyes as big and fixed as a stuffed cat's.

"Anyhow, Blake, I made a trip to London to see Merrivale next day. Hogenauer hadn't been lying; L. is believed to be in England now."

Charters stopped, and dusted the knees of his trousers like a man who wishes to get rid of the whole thing. His conscience appeared to be bothering him.

"Ho ho ho," chortled H.M., with a leer. "Charters has got it stuck in his throat; he can't go any farther; he can't tell you where you come in, Ken. But I will. You're goin' to do a spot of housebreaking."

I set down my empty glass, looked at H.M., and began to feel a trifle ill.

"Point's this," pursued H.M. obstinately, and pointed with a vast flipper. "If Hogenauer's on the level, he could get his two thousand quid. Oh, yes. We've made these little bargains before, though nobody ever whispers it to the police. I'd be willing to pay it out of my own pocket. But is be on the level? Son, there's something awful fishy about this whole business, and I smell the blood of an Englishman again. It's all wrong. There's somethin' rummy and devilish peepin' out of it, which we don't begin to understand. Therefore we got to begin to understand it. Therefore, you're goin' to bust into this beggar's house, and overhaul his papers if he's got any, and find out what the flickering lights mean when they whirl round the flower-pot. Got it?"

Charters cleared his throat. "Of course," he said, "I can't give you any official sanction.

"Exactly," I said, "so what if I'm caught? Damn it all, tomorrow I'm supposed to be married. Why don't you hire a professional burglar?"

"Because I couldn't protect a professional burglar," answered the Chief Constable rather snappishly, "and I can protect you. Besides, there will be no danger. Hogenauer is going to Bristol to-night, not later than by the eight o'clock train, and he won't be back until tomorrow. He was at Dr. Antrim's last night, and told Antrim that. As for the manservant, he's courting a girl in Torquay and won't be back until midnight at the earliest. You will have a couple of hours after dark — probably more-to make a thorough examination of an empty house." Then Charters grew uneasy, after the effervescence of the old days had subsided. "But it's damned irregular all the same," he grumbled. "I shouldn't blame you if you refused to go. Mind, Merrivale, this is your responsibility entirely. If anything should go wrong-"

I pointed out, with some heat, just whose responsibility it was. H.M. was soothing. "Looky here!" he added, with an air of inspiration, as though he were dangling a peppermint-stick in front of a child. He lumbered into the house and emerged with a small black satchel, rather like a doctor's medicine-case. From this he took a series of skeleton keys, or `twirlers' as we used to call them, a brace and bit, wedges, a forceps, and a glass-worker's diamond. Next came a clawshaped jemmy whose design was new to me, a small bottle of paraffin oil to use on the metal instruments, a pair of rubber gloves, and a very curious tiny bottle which glowed inside like a cluster of fireflies.

"The Compleat Burglar," observed H.M. with ghoulish relish. "Don't it fire your blood, Ken? This is a telescopic jemmy; finest thing made; a yard long extended, and it's got a powerful leverage. This bottle of phosphorus is much better than a flashlight. Flashlights have a habit of flyin' all over the place, and coppers see them through the window. This can't be seen, and there's enough light for any honest purpose. I say, Charters, we'd better put in some stickin'plaster for him in case he has to cut a pane out of a window. You take my advice, Ken, and try the scullery window first; that's the most vulnerable part of any house. You're wearin' a dark-blue suit, and that's all right…"

"Just a minute," I interposed. "What I want to know is, why the unnecessary camouflage? Instead of saying, `absolute burning imperative that you be butler,' why didn't you say burglar? What has my role as Robert Butler got to do with this?"

H.M. did not roar. He remained blinking steadily at me, turning over the jemmy in his hand.

"That's our second line of defence, son," he said, "in case anything goes wrong. I don't mean to minimize the risks. There's very, very nimble-minded people working against us, and the trouble is that we don't have a ghost of an idea what they're doin'. It's just possible they've laid some kind of trap. Out somewhere there're three people whose ideas or motives we don't know. First, there's Paul Hogenauer. Second, there's that apparently harmless professor of physics, Dr. Albert Keppel. Third, there's the elusive L. It may be that none of 'em has a dangerous purpose at all. Or, again, it's just possible that Hogenauer has laid some sort of trap for us — or whatever agent we send. It's just possible his goin' away to Bristol to-night is a blind. I don't say it's probable, but it's possible."

"And I may walk into this trap?"

H.M. grunted. "That's why I asked you to come here. There's plenty of smart lads who could do a neater job of jemmying a window or cavortin' on a drain-pipe, if that's all I wanted. But you met Hogenauer in the old days. You met him in the character of Robert Butler, a spy and a bitter enemy of England, and Hogenauer never forgets a face. So far as we know, he never knew any different about you. If by any chance this is a trap, you'll walk into it before you've done any damage. You can pretend to be an ally of his, you can pretend to be on his side — and you're the only one who can pretend that. You can get out of it before you're into it, if it is a trap. And you may be able to learn something."

"Or walk into a bullet," I said. "Hogenauer seems to know a whole lot about us. Has it occurred to you that he may know all about me as well, and that he knew about me in my `Butler role?"

"Uh-huh," said H.M., nodding rather vaguely. "Sure, Ken; it was the first thing I thought of. But somehow… I move in mysterious ways of cussedness. You may have noticed it. I got plans at the back of my head; I see a move and jump or two on funny gambits, as Charters can tell you; oh, yes. And somehow I don't think you're in as much danger as you might be. I know I seem to be askin' an awful lot of you, especially at a time like this; and you'd be quite right to tell me to go and jump in the bay. But will you trust the old man?"

"Right," I said. "Let's get on with it. When do I start?"

"Good," said Charters quietly. "You'd better have something to eat first. It won't be dark until close on ten o'clock, but you'd better start about nine and reconnoitre the neighbourhood. Sergeant Davis wrote down Hogenauer's address for me somewhere: I think it's `The Larches,' Valley Road, Moreton Abbot. The servant, as I told you, will be going to see a girl and you'll have a clear road. You'll take a car, of course, but I don't need to tell you to park it some distance away from the house. Take Merrivale's car: or mine if you prefer it, unless Serpos has got it out now…."

H.M. seemed mildly disturbed.

"This Serpos, now," he suggested. "That's your secretary, ain't it? Exceedingly limp feller I saw up here last night?"

Charters was sarcastic. "You always were a suspicious beggar, Merrivale. Sinister-sounding foreign name, eh, and the legend of the villainous secretary? Nonsense! Young Serpos is about as meek and mild as they make 'em. I knew his father quite well. Serpos is an Armenian: but educated in England, of course. He worked in a bank in London, but his health wasn't any too good, and I gave him easier work in a healthier climate. Rather amusing chap," Charters admitted grudgingly, "and an expert mimic when you get him started. He'd make money on the halls."

"It's a queer international stew all the same," muttered H.M. shaking his head. "And while we're on the subject, Charters, who's this Dr. Antrim?"

"No more foreigners. And," said the Chief Constable, "if you're looking for suspicious characters near at hand, I think you can safely forget it." He chuckled. "Antrim is a big Irishman. You'll like him. His wife is a dashed pretty girl: much too pretty to be a trained nurse, which I believe she was before they were married. She helps him with his work. Of course, the life of a country G.P. isn't very exciting, any more than the rest of our lives are…."

He stopped, rather guiltily, as we heard heavy footfalls clumping through the main hall of the house. H.M. swept up the kit of the Compleat Burglar, and had just snapped shut the catch of the little bag when a tall figure lumbered out on the veranda.

"I say, Charters-" the newcomer began excitedly, and stopped when he saw us. "Sorry," he added. "Didn't know you had visitors. Excuse me. Some other time."

I thought, correctly, that this must be Dr. Antrim. He was a lean, rather awkward young man with hair the colour of mahogany, some freckles, a long jaw, and a brown eye like a genial cow: but he conveyed, nevertheless, an impression of competence. His hands were quiet and strong if his man

ner was not. His dark clothes were neat to the point of primness, as though a woman had pulled at his tie and steadied all points like somebody putting up a tent, before he was allowed to go out. Evidently he had just come in from a round of calls, for there was the bulge of a stethoscope in his breast-pocket and he looked dusty. Also, something appeared to be worrying him badly. Charters called him back, and began to introduce us.

What prompted H.M. - whether it was his elephantine sense of humour, or some genuine purpose — I did not know. But H.M. cut in. "This," he said, pointing to me, "is Mr. Butler. He's drivin' back to London to-night."

"Yes, certainly," observed Antrim, without relevancy. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen — er — supper. I didn't get any tea to-day, and I'm pretty well starved. Yes." Then he spoke to Charters, smiling with a bad assumption of ease. "I seem to have mislaid my wife. You haven't seen Betty anywhere about, have you, Colonel?"

Charters looked at him curiously. "Betty? No: not since this morning. Why?"

"Mrs. Charters said she thought she saw her getting on a bus. Er "

"Look here," said Charters in a flat tone, "what the devil's the matter with you, man? Speak up! What's wrong?"

"Nothing wrong. I just wondered "

"Stop that confounded jumping," said Charters testily. "You're not usually like this because Betty gets on a bus."

Antrim pulled himself together. Another thought appeared to have occurred to him, which he wished to dispel in our minds. He gave a sidelong glance at us, and spoke more genially. "Oh, I don't think she's running away or anything like that. Fact is, there's been a slight mistake. Nothing important, of course, and it's easily rectified; but it 'ud be damned awkward-" He stopped. "I suppose I ought to tell you. Fact is, a couple of bottles seem to have been misplaced or got lost in my dispensary. I don't think they're missing, and they'll turn up, but it's "

"Bottles?" said H.M. sharply, and opened his eyes. "What bottles?"

"It looks like negligence, and it would be bad for me. The trouble is, they're both little bottles of about the same size. And, to look at 'em, you'd think they contained the same stuff. Of course, they're both labelled, so there's no harm done. One is potassium bromide, ordinary nerve sedative, in the crystalline form. But the other, worse luck, contains strychnine salts — very soluble stuff."

There was a pause. H.M.'s face remained wooden, but I saw that he was biting hard on the stem of his pipe.

CHAPTER THREE

The Shutters of Suburbia

It was a quarter past nine when I set out on my weird travels. I ate a plate of sandwiches and drank a bottle of beer while a route was mapped out for me to Moreton Abbot, some ten miles away. Things did not now look so bad: with luck, I should be able to get the business done and return to Charters's by midnight, with everything off my mind. I did not realize the nervous strain under which I was fuming, although the sandwiches seemed tasteless and the beer flat.

H.M. and Charters I left in the latter's study. Both were very worried over Antrim's information. As I was going out, I remember Charters's saying that he would show H.M. some exhibits in the Willoughby case, whatever it might be. I also noticed that the blue Hillman touring-car was no longer in the drive outside the bungalow. Stowing away the Compleat Burglar's kit under a rug in the tonneau — it was more of a cursed nuisance than anything else, since I meant to use only the skeleton keys or the glass-cutter — I climbed into H.M.'s Lanchester and let drive for the great adventure.

It was not quite dark. A strip of pale clear sky lay along the west, but smoky blue had begun to obscure it; and below, along the main highway, street-lamps were winking into flame. The lane down which I ran the car was deeply shadowed. On either side were high hedgerows, and beyond them white-blossoming apple trees. In short, all was peace — for precisely fifty Seconds. I had come to the mouth of the lane opening into the main road. In the highway was the homely sight of a bus stopping by a street lamp, and somebody in a white linen suit climbing down. Then, in the hedgerow to my right, there was a sound of violent crackling. Somebody said, "Pss-t!" A face, looking paler by reason of the gloom and its mahogany-coloured hair, was poked through the hedge. It was followed by a shambling body, and, as I stopped the car, Dr. Antrim laid his hand on the door.

"Excuse me," he said. "I know you'll think this is confounded cheek, but it's pretty urgent. My own car's gone bust — no time to fix it — you know. They said you were driving to London to-night. Could you manage to drop me off at Moreton Abbot?"

This was dilemma before the adventure had even begun. Antrim's eyes appeared to have a steady shine in the gloom.

"Moreton Abbot," I said, as though the name were unfamiliar. "Moreton Abbot? What part of Moreton Abbot?"

"Valley Road. It's just on the outskirts. Dignity be damned, no time for dignity now. It's very important," urged Antrim, running a finger round under a tight collar. "Fact is, a patient of mine lives there. Name of Hogenauer. It's very important."

If I didn't take him, he would probably take a bus and go anyway. If I did take him, it might wreck the whole of my little enterprise; but at least I should have him under my eye and know when I could start housebreaking in safety. Nevertheless, the decision was taken out of my hands. The passenger who had got off the bus in the main highway had just turned into the mouth of the lane. I saw a stocky man in a white linen suit, wearing a straw hat and smoking a cigar. The man hesitated, and then came towards the car.

"I wonder if you could tell me " said a familiar hearty voice, in an almost deferential tone, and then broke off. "Well, well, well!" it crowed. "If it isn't Blake! Imagine running into you down here! How are you, Mr. Blake?"

The last light shone on the alert pince-nez, with the little chain going to the ear, of Mr. Johnson Stone — still on H.M.'s trail. Stone's round, fresh-complexioned face was turned up with great amiability, but he had the look of one whose inner temper is wearing thin. Even as he extended his hand, a new thought appeared to strike him.

"Here," he said in a somewhat aggrieved tone, "were you holding out on me? Did you know where Merrivale was after all? I've only just tracked him down. Out of the pure goodness of my heart, just to do him a favour, I've hunted all over England for him when I was supposed to be taking a holiday; and right at this minute I'm supposed to be visiting my son-in-law in Bristol. If you people have been holding out on me — "

"Beg pardon, sir," interposed Antrim curtly. Antrim had been looking steadily at me. "I understood that this fellow's name was Butler."

"Well, it was Blake when I met him in London," answered Stone, regarding him curiously. "But it's possible that he's going round in disguise as well as the rest of 'em. I'm getting a little tired of all this."

"It's possible he is," said Antrim in a curious voice-and then his big figure disappeared through the gap in the hedge. Stone blinked. There was a pause.

"I'm sorry if I've spoiled anything, he said calmly, "I wouldn't have, if I'd known. But that took me off balance, and if you intend to go around giving false names you ought to let me know in advance. I've always regarded the English as a pretty level-headed sort of people, but, so help me Jinny, this is the queerest country I ever got into! I ought to be in Bristol to-night. And if I ever do catch up with Merrivale, which seems unlikely —‘

I let in the clutch. "He's up there. But there's one thing I'd ask and plead of you: for God's sake stop harping on that tedious joke about disguise — particularly when you meet H.M. And whatever else you do, don't mention his hat."

The car moved down into the main road. I had the satisfaction of seeing Stone put up a hand bewilderedly to his pince-nez, and of creating some mystification on my own account. He seemed to be puffing vigorously at his cigar. But Antrim had bolted like a rabbit at the mention of a false name: why? I had lost any chance I might have had of learning something from Antrim, though it was some consolation to reflect that I hadn't the remotest notion as to the subject on which I might have learned something. It was all a game in the dark, and very shortly I would literally be playing a very dangerous game in the dark.

I took my time over that drive to Moreton Abbot, leaving Torquay by a roundabout way through the deep lanes. But, when I wound into Moreton Abbot, the first street I found was Valley Road. It was very long, very broad, not too well-lighted, and a picture of suburban respectability. There were long ranks of detached and semi-detached houses, neat and low-built, in stucco or brick or stone, imaginatively or sedately painted, but all looking curiously alike in their mere closeness to each other. Each had a small front-garden minutely laid out with flowers. Each had a brown-painted gate inscribed with some more or less relevant name. Most of the houses were lighted; cyclists toiled along the road with plodding pedals; and through an open window a radio was talking hoarsely.

Though it is usually next to impossible to find a house by name rather than by number, I cruised past "The Larches" almost at once. The name was fresh-painted on the gate. It had (surprisingly) a larch like a stunted pine-tree growing on either side of a white-painted front door, and it looked even more respectable than its neighbours. But I was relieved to see that the houses on either side were already dark. There appeared to be an alley running along the rank at the rear, and it might have been the safest way in unobserved; but alleys usually mean watchdogs.

I drove on for several hundred yards, and swung into a gloomy turning labelled Liberia Avenue, where I could stop the car and consider. The question was how far away I should park the car. I pulled up to the kerb and lit a cigarette.

And at the same time a hand fell on my shoulder from behind.

A very large policeman was looking down at me in the twilight, with a sort of sad and gloomy satisfaction like Monte Cristo in the melodrama; by the glow of the dashlamps I could see the sergeant's stripes on his arm. At the same moment another policeman appeared at the front. of the car, directing a beam from a bull's-eye lantern at the number-plate.

"You're under arrest," said the sergeant. "I have to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence- That the right number?" he added over his shoulder.

"Ah," agreed his companion. "AXA 564. That's it. Bit of luck, this. Then they both looked at me intently. "Sst!" warned the second man, after this sinister pause. "Black bag, sir. Black bag that they told us to look out for."

"Right," said the sergeant. He examined the front of the car, finding nothing more significant than my feet; then he looked in the rear, felt under the rug, and with granite triumph produced the case of the Compleat Burglar. "Out you get, my bucko. Got any objection to my opening this?"

By this time I had (somewhat) got my wits about me.

"I have. A very strong objection. Don't talk rot. In the first place, you've got your formula all wrong. Before you put a man under arrest, especially somebody who's innocent, you're supposed to tell him what he's charged with."

"I don't mind," answered the Law grimly. "For a starter, with the theft of a motor-car. And then we'll go on to grand larceny. Since you know so ruddy much about legal forms, you'll know that the maximum sentence for grand larceny is fourteen years."

"Who charges me with all this?"

The sergeant permitted himself a grunt approaching a laugh. "A gentleman named Sir Henry Merrivale and Colonel Charters, who happens to be Chief Constable of thissur county. Eh, Stevens?"

For a second or two I tried to convince myself that this was not a bad dream. With that peculiar cussedness and cross-purpose which always dogs my adventures under H.M.'s direction, it was plain that some mistake had been made; but, in the devil's name, what mistake? This was obviously H.M.'s Lanchester. I knew it as well as I knew my own car at home. Yes, but suppose H.M. and Charters hadn't sent out any such charge at all? Suppose this was a first attempt of the cloudy Enemy? There came into my mind Charters's mention of his secretary, named Serpos, and Charters's comment: "An expert mimic when you get him started." Whereupon I fixed the sergeant with a hypnotic eye.

"Look here," I said. "You're making a mistake. There's no use arguing with you: all I want to do is prove you're making a mistake. I'm on a very serious mission for the Chief Constable. Let's go along to the police station, by all means; you give me two minutes at a telephone, and I'll prove it. Isn't that fair enough? Neither Sir Henry Merrivale nor Colonel Charters ever sent any such message as that."

The sergeant looked at me curiously. It is never wise to say too much. Then he climbed into the back of the car, keeping his hand on my shoulder.

"Hang on to the running-board, Stevens," he ordered. "You drive straight on. Yes, it's fair enough: if you can prove it." He chuckled. "Bluff don't go down with me, my bucko. General alarm was sent out twenty minutes ago from Torquay police station. And the two gentlemen you spoke of came in person to turn in the alarm. In person, my bucko. So they didn't send it out, didn't they? They turned in them charges against you. They also said to keep an eye out for a black bag you would be carrying."

"Sergeant, everybody can't be crazy. Who am I supposed to be?"

"I dunno, answered my captor, with broad indifference. "You've probably got plenty of names. They said one of the aliases you might use might be Kenwood Blake."

I took a deep breath and a firmer grip of the steeringwheel, but the car almost stalled as we set off. If this was for some reason a genuine trick played by the mysterious-moving two who had sent me on this expedition, all I could say was that it was a damned dirty, low-down trick. But I couldn't credit that. I also played with the idea that these might be bogus policemen, though that melodramatic notion was soon dispelled.

The police station was in Liberia Avenue, where it curved to the left only a hundred yards or so from the main road. It was a low-built converted house, set back from the street in a paved yard, with an arc-light burning over the door. My captors took me out of the car and marched me with stately triumph into the charge-room. Behind the desk a fat sandy-haired sergeant, with the collar of his tunic unfastened, sat writing in a book. A clock on the wall over his head said ten minutes to ten. I saw, with unholy relief, a telephone on the desk.

"Got him the minute we stepped out of the station," said my sergeant, and his colleague at the desk whistled. "All in order. Here's the black bag. He wants to phone Colonel Charters. Yes: we'll ring up Torquay and make the report. Stevens — put him in there." He nodded toward a door at the back of the room. "Now, now, this part of it's private, my bucko! You'll get your chance to speak."

I had no choice. The careful Stevens opened the door into a little low room with a back door and a back window, after which he poked his head out of the window. Despite the dusk figures and faces were still distinct, and there was a bright arc-lamp in the rear yard. Two policemen were tinkering with the motor of an Austin police-car, while a motorcycle man looked on: there was no possibility of a jail-break. Then Stevens hurried into the outer room, shutting the door, to listen to what promised to be a highly interesting conversation by telephone. It was. I was down on the floor, in a highly curious posture, with my ear to the crack under the door, and probably as boiling mad as anybody in the British Isles.

After getting through to Torquay, the sergeant exchanged some amenities in a leisurely fashion. "Ha ha," he said. "Yes, we've got him safe enough. Smart work, eh? Do you think I could speak to Colonel Charters? No, not the superintendent! Yes, Colonel Charters! He personally instructed me," declared my beauty of a sergeant, with pompous intonation, "to — well, try his private wire, then. He's probably at home." There was a long pause. "Not in? Well, is there a gentleman there named Merrivale? No? Any message? This fellow tried a great bluff that he wanted to talk to him. Is there any, message?" Then the sergeant appeared struck dumb with surprise. "Not to charge him? What do you mean, we're not to charge him? He's accused of-"

Another long pause ensued, while there seemed to be explanations: and then gradually the sergeant's tone changed, into a roaring chuckle.'

"No!" he said. "No? You don't say! Well, well, well!" (By this time my curiosity and wrath had reached almost a point of mania.) "Is that so? And he probably thought he was doing well, I suppose, the poor fool. Ha ha ha." He grew serious. "Yes, but if neither of the gentlemen will charge him, what are we going to do with him? What did they say? Ah! Yes, that's the best thing. I'll tell you what: we'll put him down in the cells for to-night. Then we'll bring him to Torquay to-morrow morning, and they can talk to him. About eleven o'clock, say? Right. How are the wife and kids?"

And at eleven-thirty to-morrow morning I was due for a very different sort of appointment.

I scrambled up off the floor, at that state where fury becomes, coolness and clear sight, to make an inspection of the room. It was a bare enough place. A green-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling, over a deal table with a well-thumbed detective-story magazine on top of it, and a couple of kitchen chairs around. There was a sink and water-tap, with a dissipated-looking roller towel hung up beside it. But my eye was drawn to the three wooden lockers built against the wall. Inside the first locker I found what I had hoped to find: a uniform-tunic neatly arranged on a hanger. There was a helmet on the shelf above, a belt coiled beside it, and a bull's eye lantern. As H.M. had noticed, I was wearing a dark blue suit, and my own trousers would suffice. It took just ten seconds to put on the tunic and helmet, buckle the belt round my waist, and hang the lantern from it, in order to become the Compleat Policeman. It wasn't a bad fit. From the outer room I could hear the sergeant still droning at the telephone; and, through the open window to the rear yard, somebody was commenting on the lascivious habits of carburetors. The back way was the only way out. And I admit that I was feeling queasy in the stomach when I approached it.

I backed out of the place, as though I were turning round to close the door behind. Six steps led down into the yard. If the men in the yard glanced up, as they naturally would, they would see a familiar back and helmet. The great dangerpoint was that arc-lamp over the door. My legs felt light, and the queasy feeling had increased, when I carefully closed the door. Then I turned round full under the arc. At the same time I casually switched on the lantern, and swung the brilliant beam straight in their faces. They were all bending over the engine of the Austin, so that it caught them flat.

"Gaa!" roared one, and jumped. "Take that blasted thing What's the game, Pierce?"

They had all looked away. I came down the steps, not too quickly. The light bad to be moved, but I could count on about a second's blindness after it. At the rear of the yard was a tolerably high wall, with double gates giving on an alley. I heard my own footsteps ringing on the pavement of that yard, with an almost goose-step regularity in my effort to keep them slow. I didn't dare look round now, for I had a feeling that eyes were on me.

A voice said, "That's not Pierce," — and I cut loose for it.

The rear gates were only two feet ahead now, and there was a padlock and chain hanging loose from them. Those gates were spiked at the top, so that it would want careful climbing to get over them. I jumped through, slammed the gates with a crash like a falling lift, closed the padlock, and pitched away the key. For the first time I glanced behind. There were no shouts from that yard: no shouts, and no fuss. They were coming for me as quietly as a cage of animals, black against the light, and one arm came through like a paw as the gates crashed. The rear door of the station was open now, and a voice was calling with deadly efficiency:

"Thompson, over the wall. Dennis, through the sidegate next door and up the alley. Stevens, up the street as far as you like and get him from the front. Pierce-"

This was something like a chase to rouse a man's wits. While I ran up the alley, the geography of the place became clearer. In coming into Liberia Avenue from Valley Road-, I had made a left-hand turning, and the police station was almost at the end of the former street. It was a right-angle. If I doubled back now, I could get into the alley running at the rear of Valley Road. If I stayed in the open, they could nail me easily. It became clear that my only sanctuary was the place where I had originally intended to go: "The Larches," an empty house. The attention of householders I was not afraid of; my uniform was the best kind of security against that; and the neighbourhood would shortly be buzzing with policemen.

I was pelting in the dark along a narrow, rocky alley with garden walls on either side. Each had its ash-bin outside, and the roof of its miniature greenhouse faint-gleaming by starlight over the wall. High up behind me a beam of light shot out, and I saw one of my pursuers poised on the wall over the police station gate before he jumped. Hitherto the night had been so quiet that I heard the thud when he landed in the alley: but now the dogs began. That devilish din of barking masked the noise when I overturned a few ash-bins in the path of the man behind me. I had stormed round the turning now, into the lane behind Valley Road, so that his light could not find me. From behind there was a crash as apparently he met one of the ash-bins, and the light vanished; I hoped to heaven he had broken it. But people were moving in Valley Road itself, out beyond the houses between, and even at that considerable distance a white beam pierced through the trees into my face.

They were closing in. Several windows in the neighbourhood were going up with a bang; I could discern the heads of early-retiring householders poked out like turtles. My only course now was to switch on my lantern.boldly, beat the brush with a halloo, and pretend to be a real policeman searching for myself-while hoping with some fervency that I could find the back gate of "The Larches." That was the snag. Every one of those cursed gates looked alike. I was panting hard when my lantern flickered over one fence, into a tidy garden with paths laid out in white pebbles, and caught a larch-tree as neatly as you catch a fish. It might be a coincidence, but I should have to risk it. I pulled open the gate, closed it behind me, and ran smack into bottles.

There seemed to be dozens of bottles. They were ranked up just inside the gate; my imagination magnified them into a forest even as my foot sent them rolling and clanking and bumping as though they were alive, with din enough to rouse everyone in Valley Road. To taut nerves they became monsters. I turned my lantern down while I seemed to slip and wade in empty bottles. They were not even honest beer-flagons, but they had contained a particularly villainous brand of German mineral-water — with a taste rather like Epsom salts-which I remembered by the blue-and-red label. So far, the houses on either side of "The Larches" had remained dark and quiet. But now, in the house to the right, an upstairs window was half raised. I saw a woman's head in curl-papers edged in the window as though she were listening at it, and heard a voice speaking shrilly to me.

I steadied myself, and tried to get my breath.

"Sorry to disturb you, madam," I said, with a heavy imitation of a Force manner, "but there's an escaped murderer loose. He's a homicidal maniac, and the neighbourhood ought to have been warned, but don't worry, we'll catch him."

The window went down with even greater celerity than I had hoped for, and the curtain swept over it. I stood alone among bottles, sweating blind and listening to my heart bump. It had become uncannily quiet again. The dogs' barking was dying away. Even the pursuit, though that was quiet enough, seemed to have taken another direction. I could not understand why — unless they had spotted me, and were silently closing in.

Nothing stirred except a faint wind in the trees. Suburbia (which some, I believe, are foolish enough to call dull) was dozing under clear starlight. I went quietly up the path, which was outlined along its borders with white pebbles, past geometrical flower-beds and a tall post supporting a radio aerial. The scullery of "The Larches" projected some dozen feet from the flat line of the house. Besides the scullery door, and the door to a coal-house, there was a third door facing out on the garden. To the right of this were two windows, closely shuttered. These were undoubtedly the windows of the mysterious back-parlour, through a chink in whose shutters Sergeant Davis had seen the lights flicker round "a thing like a flower-pot turned upside down."

Even while I was wondering how I should be able to get into the house without any of the Compleat Burglar's kit, I found myself approaching those windows. It seemed an ordinary suburban house, and yet I did not like it, It looked wrong.

I went up to the window nearer the door, and tried to peer through the slits in the shutter — without result. It was dead black inside. Even when I put my lantern to the slit, and tried to look in alongside it, there was only a blur. The window itself, however, did not appear to be closed. Next I tried the farther window. As I put the lantern to the chink, it made a faint rattling sound on the wood: and I could have sworn that there was a movement in the room. I could not identify it — it was something like a rustling — but it almost made me drop the lantern. This time the slit was a trifle larger, so that I could see something very dimly and darkly on the edge. It was something of rounded shape, like the back of a chair. And projecting over the top of it, at a queer unnatural angle, was something like a flower-pot turned upside down. It seemed to be of the same reddish colour, although I could not be certain in that blur, and it did not move. There was no reason in the world why such a sight should seem horrible to a prosaic-minded man in a suburban garden: I can only tell you that it did. As I stood back from the window, wiping my forehead, I heard the rustling movement again.

I tried the shutters. Both were tight-fastened. More as an automatic gesture than with any hope, I moved along and tried the knob of the door. But the door was unlocked.

Though I tried to ease it open gently, the thing creaked and cracked at every foot. Ahead was the main hall of the small house, with the front door facing me some thirty feet ahead. And that front door was now open. In the aperture, the key of the front door still in his hand, a man stood silhouetted against the faint glow of the street-lamps outside, looking at me.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Poison-Bottle

"Who's there?" a voice said with a quick and shaky start.

For reply I pressed the button of my lantern, turning it sideways so that he could see the uniform. If it had been chosen deliberately, I could have selected no better or more reassuring garb. I heard a sort Of 'Pluh!' of relief. The newcomer groped after a wall-switch, and the lights went up.

We were in a narrowish hall, somewhat frowsily kept after the spick-and-span exterior. There was a porcelain umbrella stand, and on one wall a Teutonic water-colour, circa 1870, of a girl in billowy skirts dancing before a table at which sat two resplendent officers with spiked helmets and beer-mugs. In the doorway — he still seemed reluctant to close it — the newcomer stood blinking.

He was a young man, small and slight, but his air or clothes had a portentousness which made him seem much Older. When not frightened (as he was now), his manner would be grave and somewhat superior. He wore his hair slicked down, parted at the side and brought across his forehead in a slight curve after the fashion of the Old-style barman. His features were sharp, rather hollowed under the cheek-bones, but with good-natured, cocky eyes and a cocky shoulder. No one, he seemed to say, would get the better of him. He wore careful dark clothes, with a wing collar and black tie: also, he carried a bowler hat and gloves. His accent was the accent of London. This, beyond doubt, was Hogenauer's servant, who was supposed to be out with a girl. If I had gone through with my burglary scheme, I should have had a very thin time of it.

"You put the wind up me, you did," he declared accusingly. "What's the game?"

"This door was open," I explained. "I looked in to make sure everything was all right. We're after somebody in the neighbourhood, and..’

"Ere!" he said, galvanized. "You don't think the beggar's in this house, do you? Who are you after? It must be somebody dangerous. The whole street's full of coppers."

It was; and that was the trouble. I reassured him instantly that there was nobody in the house, for I was afraid he might go out and bawl for all the rest of the police. It was a ticklish position, and I wished to God he would come in and close the door. There were familiar footfalls in the road outside as my late friends patrolled it: there was I, standing smack in the middle of a bare narrow hail illuminated like a theatre, Open to the inspection of anybody who passed. But I couldn't duck back to hide, Or even order him to close the door, in case it roused his suspicions. While he fiddled with his cuffs, and looked hesitantly from the street back to me, the footfalls clumped nearer…

"It's a long job," I grumbled, and turned towards the back door. "Well, I'll be getting on."

"Ere, stop a bit!" he protested, and did what I had hoped for. He closed the door and hurried towards me, evidently wanting to keep a policeman at his elbow when there were cut-throats in the suburbs. He produced a packet Of Gold Flakes, and became persuasive. "NO need to rush Off, is there! 'Ave a fag. Gaow on; 'ave one. There's nobody to mind the smoking. Your sergeant needn't see you, and my governor's away for the evening. There you are!"

"I don't mind if I do," said the Law, relaxing his sternness. "Thank you kindly, sir. You're Mr. Hogenauer's gentleman, aren't you?"

Now this was very much overdoing the bobby-business,

but the other took to it. He nodded with an air of good-natured condescension as he lit a match. "That's me, constable. Bowers is my name — Henry Bowers, at your service. Only been at this job two weeks. Of course, the job is — but — " The dashes do not indicate words, but shrugging gestures which I could not quite interpret. "But never mind that," he said with ghoulish eagerness. "Who is it you're after? What's he done? Is it murder?"

Since he now appeared to have no idea of calling in anybody else, I piled it on rather thickly about a burglar-murderer who had robbed the Chief Constable of the county. "So it's a good job you're indoors, sir. Funny thing, though. How does it happen that, if the boss is out for the night, you're in? I wouldn't, if it was me."

Bowers shifted. "Ah, that," he said. "That's my conscience. Do I have a cushy job here? Do I appreciate it? Not half!" He became confidential. "Good wages, not much to do, and every night off if I want it. So I don't take any chances with it. I pay attention to the emperor, whatever he says. See?" Drawing down the comers of his mouth and half closing his eyes, Bowers tapped his chest with an air of profound shrewdness. "Well, this morning after breakfast he says to me, 'Harry, I'm going to Bristol this evening.' And laughed when he said it. 'But,' he says, you might come in early to-night, because I may have a visitor'

"He said he was going to Bristol, but still he expected a visitor?"

"That's it. I tell you straight, I often think the governor's a bit-" Bowers tapped his forehead significantly. "Ruddy queer sense of humour 'e's got, and I never know whether he means what he says or not. So I do whatever he says. See? I'll tell you how it was.

"This morning after breakfast, as I say, he said he was going to Bristol in the evening. I says, 'Shall I pack a bag?' He says, 'No, I won't need a bag,' — and laughed again. I says, 'You'll be at Dr. Keppel's, I suppose?' (This Dr. Keppel is another Squarehead, sort of a professor, who lives in a hotel at Bristol.) He says, 'Yes, I'll be at Dr. Keppel's, but I don't think Dr. Keppel will be there; in fact, I've got every hope that he'll be out.' Then was when he told me we might have a visitor tonight. I ask you!"

The reason for Bowers's loquacity I could see in his own uneasiness. He was smoothing at his dark, slicked-down hair, and peering into corners of the hall. But this gave a new turn to possibilities in the business. It would appear that Hogenauer himself might be intending to do a spot of burglary, or at least secret visiting: that he was going to pay a quiet call at Keppel's hotel when he could make sure Keppel was out: and that the `visitor' he expected here might be Keppel himself, brought on some wild-goose mission. Why?

Such a possibility had clearly occurred to the far from dull-minded Bowers.

"So I thinks to myself," says Bowers, with a sort of pounce: "the governor goes to Bristol, and Keppel comes here. Eh! The more so, mindyer, because Keppel's right here in Moreton Abbot — or he was this morning, anyway. Keppel came here this morning, dropped in about eleven o'clock, and had a talk with the governor. I don't know what they said, because they talked in German, but the governor gave Keppel a little packet like an envelope folded in half. Very friendly, they was. Oh, yes. Of course, it's none of my business, but, I tell you straight, I didn't like it."

I gave an imitation of a man pondering heavily.

"But your governor," I said, "told you to come in early to-night. You didn't come in very early, did you?"

"No, and that's just it," cried Bowers, with a sort of defensive aggressiveness. "Because why! I'll tell you. Because, the last thing my governor said this afternoon… I went out before he did, just after I gave 'im his tea… the last thing he said, in that quiet glassy-eyed way of his, was: 'Yes,

Harry, I think you may have a visitor to-night, but I doubt if you'll see him'."

There was a pause. It was not a comfortable pause.

"Now I ask you," said Bowers in a cooler tone.

"Here! You think your governor — or Keppel — was up to some funny business?"

The other evidently saw that he had gone too far. "Not my governor," he declared with quiet earnestness. "That I'll swear to. You know that: anybody at your police station knows that. He was much too anxious to keep on the good side of the slops. He's a foreigner, d'jersee? He's registered at the police station, but he's always been in a stew and sweat for fear they'll make him leave the country at the end of six months or nine months or whatever it is. Not him! Why, I could tell you-"

"You could tell me what?"

I became aware that I had either altered my voice or overstressed by curiosity as a policeman. There was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the hall. Though he tried to seem casual, Bowers was studying me with his head a little on one side, and in his small quick eyes there was a dawning of what might be suspicion.

"See here, mister," said my little cock-sparrow, and took a step forward, "just 'oo are you, anyhow? Sometimes you talk like a copper, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you act like a copper, and sometimes you act like-"

Before his mind could jump any farther along that line of thought, something had to be done. "I'll tell you what I am," said the aggressive Law. "I'm a man who means to get on in the world, that's what I am. I mean to be a sergeant before I'm many years older. Understand that, cocky? And, if you want to know it, that's why I've been watching this house for some time."

"Go on!" he said, and fell back.

"We know that there are things in this house that want explaining. We know that three nights out of a week your boss locks himself up in the back parlour, with shutters on the windows. But we've seen an odd kind of light through that window — I've seen it myself. We know he's working on an invention or an experiment of some kind. What is it? It's not only what we want to know; it's what Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office want to know."

"Come off it," said Bowers with pale scepticism, after a pause. But his eyes remained fixed. "Why, I'll tell you straight," he added quietly, "there's nothing in that room. Don't I know it? I tidy up there every day. And there's nothing at all except a lot of books. He don't even keep anything locked; not even his desk. I've looked. If he wants to shut himself up there in the evenings, that's his business, but he don't work at any experiments there. You want to see? I can show you right now."

He was pointing towards the door of the room, on the left-hand side as you faced the rear of the hall. Then he looked at it, and moved a step closer, and his voice went up a note or two.

"The key's in it on the outside," he said, "and where the hell's the knob?"

"What's wrong;"

He was jabbing his finger at a small octagonal hole from which the knob on its spindle should have protruded. Both knob and spindle were missing. But the key was in the lock, hanging almost loosely enough to fall out. Bowers opened his mouth, hesitated, and then went down like a terrier to search on the floor. It was bare floor except for a thinshanked chair not far from the door: but under the chair he

found what he was looking for. He found a knob of bright brown terracotta, loosely fitted on the spindle. But there was no knob on the other end of it.

Then Bowers found his voice.

"There's somebody in there," he said. "Dontcher see what happened? The knob inside's been loose for a long time; the governor asked me to mend it for him. Somebody went in there, and shut the door. Then somebody tried to come out. But the knob was loose and wouldn't turn the rod, and he fooled with it, and pulled it in and out, and then this came away and fell on the floor. And now he's in there and can't open the door. The door ain't locked, but the latch is caught and it's as good as a lock becos he can't turn it. And now he's in there, with the other knob in his hand…"

"Hogenauer?"

"I shouldn't think it was very likely, should you?" said Bowers simply. "No. Not the governor. But there's that burglar loose that you coppers are chasing-"

I took the knob and spindle out of his hand. At the same moment we both heard a noise, a sort of rushing noise, on the other side of the door. Without any warning, with no change of expression, Bowers started to make for the front-door to get out into the street. I lunged and got hold of his arm, or in a few seconds more we should have had the place invaded by my friends from the police station at Bowers's call. With some fumbling I got the spindle into place, holding Bowers's arm with my other hand; then I turned the knob and pushed the door open.

It was dead black inside. There were no sounds now. Bowers was quietly shaking in my grip, pressing up against the wall to get out of the line of the door, and he spoke with fierce calmness. "Are you loopy? Blow your whistle, you fool. There's a dangerous.."

I groped along the wall for a light-switch. There was a switch, but when I clicked it no response came. I still had the lantern hanging at my belt. Its broad beam swept across the room towards a wall of books; then it turned to the right and stopped. Along the right-hand wall were the two shuttered windows. Across the room, some feet out from the farther window was a broad claw-footed table; behind that table, and sideways to the door, stood a low padded armchair; and in the armchair a man sat grinning at me.

It was a pretty nasty sight. "Grinning" is the proper word, though it hardly completes the description of a face pulled all out of shape like rubber or putty. The neck was hunched a backwards in an arch, the face partly turned in the direction of the door, and the man's little thin body was arched forwards as though he would propel himself out of the chair, although his feet seemed to have become entangled with the legs of the chair. His face — which seemed all teeth and eyes — I might not immediately have recognized as that of Paul Hogenauer if it had not been for the pointed lobe of his ear. The white eyeball glittered under the light, and did not blink. It required no medical knowledge at all to know that Hogenauer was dead, and very little more knowledge to be aware that he had died of strychnine poisoning.

But there was something else, which lent a festive air to his appearance. He wore one of those smoking-jackets fashionable thirty years ago, of heavy dark cloth faced with faded and dingy red lapels. And on his high bald skull he wore an adornment fashionable many years before that "a smoking-cap" shaped like a Turkish fez. It had a tassel hanging down beside his ear. It was faded to a grimy reddish-orange. It looked like a flower-pot turned upside down. And under it the dead man sat with his head against his shoulder and grinned.

But Paul Hogenauer had not made those rushing, rustling noises I had several times heard in here. Bowers was right. There was someone in the room, someone alive, and waiting. I slowly moved the light around. The parlour was an ordinary enough library-workroom, some fifteen feet by eighteen, with light brown paper on the walls and a dark brown patterned carpet on the floor. In the left-hand wall there was a cupboard: the only place where anyone could conceivably hide. Bookcases stood along the wall facing the door. The mantelpiece was in the wall to the right, between the shuttered windows, with alien, curiously childlike touches in the cuckoo-clock up over it and the long china-bowled pipes banging in tassels from the mantelshelf. In the middle of the room stood a round table on which were a few magazines, an empty glass, and a bottle of mineral-water two-thirds full. But your gaze always went back to the flat-topped desk behind which Hogenauer sat grinning in his red fez. Over the desk hung an electric flex with an unshaded socket at the end of it. Though the socket was empty, a large bulb lay on the desk at the opposite side from the dead man.

I took one step into the room-and thought I saw the cupboard door move. But I was not concerned so much about the person hiding in the cupboard as about Bowers, and what Bowers might do when he saw that thing in the chair.

There are pleasanter positions than finding a dead body, in the company of a nervous man already growing suspicious of you, at the same time the police were nosing round the house. Nevertheless, there was good in this. It would give me a legitimate excuse to get to the telephone, as I had been wanting to do from the first. Under the pretence of calling the police station, I could ring up H.M. to find out what in the unholy blazes they meant by having me arrested as a thief, and to get Charters to call off his hounds before they had me again. So I spoke reassuringly to Bowers.

"Come on in. It's all right. It's dead. It can't hurt us."

Strangely enough, he straightened up a little at that. He risked a look round the door post, and, though he went a trifle limp when he saw it, he bad himself under control.

"Mr. Hogenauer's been poisoned," I said. "It's either suicide or murder. In any case, I must 'phone the station. Where's the 'phone?"

"Uh?" he said. "Then who was making those noises? Who?’

"Never mind that. Where's the 'phone?"

"There's no 'phone," said Bowers blankly, and the ground went from under my feet. "No 'phone. The governor don't like 'em." He was still held by that curious dullness of shock, without thought for more than the figure in the chair, and he spoke in an almost ordinary tone. "I say, it's all wrong. The furniture's all changed about!"

"What?"

"'Strue. Look: move the light. That big desk where he

you know," he nodded, "that's usually in front of the other window." He indicated another hanging lampcord by the window nearer us, with a brown-and-yellow lamp-shade patterned in German lettering. "And that shade is always on the other light. That clock over the mantel — it don't belong there: it belongs on the wall opposite. Them long pipes should be on the big desk. The chairs are all changed…. For God's sake get some light!"

I thought it was safe to let go his arm now. I hurried over and picked up the bulb from the desk, telling Bowers to throw the switch from the door. And, just before he did so, the cupboard door opened.

Bowers gave a yelp as something came out. I almost missed getting the light into the socket, but it went on: it was a 200 watt bulb, and it made a naked glare which momentarily blinded both of us. Whatever had come out of the cupboard did not make a run for the door, or even move fast. On the contrary, the figure sat down in a chair..

Then we found ourselves looking at a very pale, very quiet-faced woman sitting bolt upright in the wing-chair. Though her breast rose and fell perkily, she eyed us as calmly as she could. She was very good-looking in spite of a somewhat blunt nose and broad mouth; her dark-yellow hair was parted in the middle and drawn over her ears, and her blue eyes were reddish round the lids. She wore a tweed suit with a white silk blouse and dark tie, and her fingers were gripped round a snakeskin handbag. As though to show how cool she was, she took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter out of the handbag. Then she lit a cigarette, although the flame of the lighter at first missed it altogether.

"I thought I had better come out," she said, "before I made a spectacle of myself, being dragged out. I suppose you'll want this?"

Again she reached into the handbag, and took out a small corked bottle about a third full of a whitish crystalline powder.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Four cuff-links

"This-?" I said. I moved over automatically, and took the bottle. It was labelled in neat handwriting, "Potassium bromide. Half a teaspoonful in half a glass of water when required. L.D.A."

The woman, despite her fierce ease of manner, was nearly at a collapse after the long strain.

"At least I shall be able to get out of here," she said. "That bottle, officer, contains strychnine salts. You can see, or your — your coroner will be able to see, that poor Mr. Hogenauer died of strychnine poisoning. Bit there's one thing I must tell you now. If there's any fault in this, it's mine. My husband had nothing to do with it. He's just beginning his career… " She beat her fist softly on the arm of the chair, and her voice grew jumpy again. "I don't know what happened, but it's all my fault."

"You're Mrs. Antrim, aren't you?"

She stared up. "You know about it already? Then Larry — my husband — Dr. Antrim-?"

"I saw him at the Chief Constable's this evening," I said evasively. "What happened?"

"That's what I don't know! Mr. Hogenauer was a patient of my husband's. He came to the house last night… " She paused, and looked at Bowers in appeal. "You remember. You were with him. You're Mr. Hogenauer's servant, aren't you?"

"Yes'm," replied Bowers, who was pressing his hands together. The curve of his slicked hair bad come into shreds. "When the governor went out, which wasn't often, he hired a car at the garage and I drove him."

"He talked with my husband," continued Mrs. Antrim, nodding carefully at the pattern in the carpet. "The doctor gave him bromide; ordinary nerve-sedative. I manage the doctor's surgery: I mean the dispensing part of it. I studied medicine; I don't mind death, as a rule."

She looked sharply sideways, and back again, and held the cigarette to her lips.

"Well, I took down off the shelf what I thought was the bromide bottle; ordinary ten-fluid-ounce bottle. It was labelled bromide, it was in the right place, and it looked In any case, I weighed out what I thought was a quarter-ounce of bromide, as the doctor had directed me, and put it into a half-ounce bottle. That's the bottle you've got there.

"It wasn't until this evening that I was in the surgery again. Then I noticed that the ten-ounce bromide bottle on the shelf was now about half-full, whereas the night before it had been almost empty after I took out the dose. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Then I began to get panicky especially when I found that the label was a little gummy, as though something had been pasted over it.

"I looked everywhere on the shelves. The only sign of something wrong was that the bottle of strychnine had been pushed back out of line on the shelf. It was the same size as the bromide bottle. Its label was gummy. And it was nearly empty, just as I remembered the bottle from which I had given Mr. Hogenauer the dose.

"Then I knew. Somebody had switched the bottles. Some body had pasted a bromide label over the strychnine, and a strychnine label over the bromide. And, in mistake for bromide, I had given Mr. Hogenauer 120 grains, or a quarter-ounce, of pure strychnine salts. And, after I had done that,

somebody went into the surgery again, pulled off the fake labels, and put the bottles back in their proper places.

"It would have been easy to get into the surgery," she added blankly. "There's a French window, and we never keep it locked up until the time my husband goes to bed at night."

True or not — and I supposed they were true — here were some very startling statements. I had to keep a wooden face, but I wondered how I could question her without betraying myself. Ordinary G.P.'s as a rule, do not keep such an enormous quantity of strychnine at hand; they have no use for it, since in its medical form it comes in preparations already made up. And above all they do not usually keep it in ten-fluid-ounce bottles displayed conspicuously on a shelf.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, "but that's rather a lot of poison, isn't it? How much of the stuff have you got there?"

"Sometimes as much as two ounces. I–I don't, suppose I can make it clear to you, but my husband specializes in nervous and heart diseases. That's the reason for the strychnine formate.{"Strychninae Formas (C,H,2O2N2, H.COOH) occurs in the form of a white crystalline powder composed of small acicular crystals. It is soluble in water (about 1 in 5) and in alcohol. Strychnine formate is used as a nerve stimulant and muscular tonic with other formates in the preparation of compound syrups and elixirs. It has been administered hypodermically in doses of 0.001 gramme (%7 grain)"-British Pharmaceutical Codex (1934), p. 1019.} He does a tremendous lot of work with it; he's consultant for the Ken Hill Hospital, and he's very keen on handling their cases. Ordinarily, of course, a doctor hasn't time to make up his own strychnine solutions, but Larry insists on doing it. The-the bottle had the required red label. I don't want you to think

She looked round dazedly for a place to put the cigarette, and I took it out of her hand and threw it into the empty grate. She leaned her head quietly against the back of the chair, but the muscles of her throat were working. "I wonder," she said, "whether I could have some brandy? I've been locked up in this room "

"Sorry, ma'am," Bowers told her hoarsely, "but the poor old governor was a t.t. There's nothing in the house, only…" I could have sworn there was a tear in the corner of his eye. He nodded towards the glass and the bottle of mineral-water on the centre table. It was the "Eisenwasser" with the blue-and-red label, the same sort of bottle as those over which l; had stumbled at the back gate of the house.

"Don't touch that, you fool!" I said. "That's probably the glass be drank from. He mixed himself what he thought was a bromide in that mineral-water — "

"Yes, I thought of that," said Mrs. Antrim, sitting up, quickly, "but how was it he didn't know straightaway he wasn't taking bromide? He couldn't have been mistaken like that. I don't suppose you know what strychnine salts are. They're easily soluble, but they're the most horribly bitter-tasting stuff you could find. He must have known something was wrong at the first sip. But he drank over half a glassful."

"He wouldn't have known it if he drank it in the mineral-water. That's the point. It tastes worse. Here-" I brought Bowers into it. "Go out and get Mrs: Antrim some real water from the kitchen."

Even in her daze and uncertainty, I thought that she looked at me in a curious way, and Bowers scurried out. I asked her if she wished to go into another room, but she refused, holding tightly to the arms of the chair. One thing was clear: I was in a much worse mess than before. I couldn't go out of the house, which was sanctuary, and at the same time I couldn't stay in. If the police discovered me here — and, in Bowers's or Mrs. Antrim's panicky condition, betrayal seemed likely — it was not merely that I should be clapped back into the police station, for sooner or later I could telephone to H.M. and prove my identity. But now I should be held as a material witness for the inquest: and I was to be married the next morning. The best course was to duck out of the house, get rid of my policeman's uniform, and trust to luck. Yet if I made one suspicious move, Bowers would be after me. I looked towards the window. Something momentarily flickered on the shutter. Faintly beyond, past the open sashes, was a noise of footsteps and muffled voices in the alley to indicate that my pursuers were tolerably close at hand. My safety was this lighted house, since they would look in all the dark corners first…

"What's the matter with you?" asked Mrs. Antrim suddenly and sharply. "What are you going to do? Will you just stand there? Don't you have to inform your superiors or whatever it is? I can't stand this much longer."

"Just one moment, madam. I shall have to have your story first, if you please…. How did you come to be here?"

"Oh — that." She shuddered. "Yes. Yes, I'll tell you that, but I can't understand why you stand there like a mummy. What was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, when I discovered this evening that the bottles had been changed-"

"At what time was that?"

"At about a quarter to eight. Thereabouts. I was expecting Larry — Dr. Antrim-home at any minute. And I had given all that strychnine to Mr. Hogenauer. And I couldn't alarm Larry: I tell you I couldn't! The only thing to do was to try to get in touch with Mr. Hogenauer. I didn't think he'd taken the stuff already, or we should jolly well have beard of it. But I couldn't telephone him: I knew he didn't have a phone in the house. That was pretty ghastly, if you like. I knew I had to come over here at once. I looked out of the window; we live next door to Col-" She paused, and lifted a hand to shade her steady, rather large and shinylidded eyes. She seemed puzzled. "You said, didn't you, that you saw my husband at Colonel Charters's?"

"Yes, ma'am. Routine business," I said briskly. "Go on, please."

"Two men I didn't know, one of them in an outrageous-looking hat, were just driving up in an open car. The colonel's Hillman was in the drive, and I knew he wouldn't mind if I took that to come over here. So I hid the two bottles in my room; it was sheer panic really, because they couldn't do any damage now; and I ran over to the colonel's. But just as I was leaving our house, I saw someone — I think it was Mr. Serpos, the colonel's secretary — come out of the house and get into the Hillman and drive away. I hailed him, but he didn't stop. So I had to catch a bus. It's a roundabout way, and takes ages, and afterwards I had to walk here from the bus-stop. It was past nine o'clock when I got here…."

"Yes?"

She spoke now in a monotonous voice. "I banged on the door, but there wasn't any answer. Then I went round the house and tried the back door, and looked in at the windows. I knew it had happened. I knew it even before I looked in through the shutter and saw that red hat sticking up over the back of the chair. I called out, but it didn't move."

"How did you see it — the cap, I mean? How did you know what it was? You may as well know," I added quickly, "that we've been a good deal interested in what has been going on here."

"So?" she said with a curiously Teutonic inflection, and looked at me steadily. Then she spoke with quiet emphasis. "I think you are right. I think you would do vary well to investigate. That's what I was going to tell you. There will be trouble about this, but my husband is not going to be involved — or myself either, if I can help it… Well. I saw that hat because there was then a light in this room. But it wasn't a usual sort of light. I'll tell you about that in a second.

"I found out that the back door was open. So I came in. I had to know. The door to this room was locked, with the key on the inside. But you can see for yourself," she pointed, "it's an old-fashioned lock, with the key loose. You push a piece of paper under the door; then you push the key out from your side, and it drops on the paper, so that you can pull it through under the door. Oh, yes, I'm quite capable: thank you. I did that with a piece of newspaper I found in the scullery. Then I unlocked the door from the outside. Now look here."

She got up from the chair. She was small, with a sturdy figure like a swimmer's, but she was still unsteady on her feet. She went over to the fireplace, and pointed to the hearth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Bowers, with a glass of water in his shaky hand, had come back into the room. But she paid no attention to the water, and I believe Bowers drank it himself. She was pointing to an object lying on the brown tiling of the hearth, which I had seen when I threw her cigarette into the grate, but which I believed to be an ordinary fountain-pen. It was not. I picked it up, and it was a flash-light shaped like a pen-another of the knickknacks which apparently Hogenauer had loved-with its tiny bulb smashed.

"When I came in here," Mrs. Antrim went on coolly, "the room was dark except for this, which was switched on and the switch caught. It was lying here," she put her hand on the mantelshelf, "and there was a little stream of light going diagonally past Mr. Hogenauer's body… like this."

Placing the pen diagonally on the mantel, she drew an imaginary line in the air towards the desk. It passed about two feet over Hogenauer's head, slanted over the desk on a line with the lamp-cord, and ended on one of the open bookshelves against the wall.

"I was curious," said Mrs. Antrim, with a little colour in her cheeks now, "to know what book or books that light was pointing straight to. The answer was: to none. See for yourself. There's a gap in the shelf just where it ended, and a couple of books have been taken out. You can see by the curved markings in the dust."

I followed her to the other side of the desk. The missing books were the two middle volumes of a set, elaborately tooled and gilded, of an old work on aeronautics before the invention of the heavier-than-air machine: Astra Castra, Experiments and Adventures in the Atmosphere, 1865.

"Now why?" she cried, almost pleadingly. "Why should he be sitting here in the dark, dead, with a little light shinning across at a gap in the bookshelves? And that's not all. Look at his desk-on the blotter."

After this spurt she had backed away again, for none of us liked the grin of the little dead man growing stiff as whale-bone in the chair. It was beginning to haunt me. The desk was swept clean of litter, except for one thing. There was a tray of pens and pencils neatly arranged, and a large desk-blotter with brown leather edges. But on the blotter, in a heap as though they had fallen from the dead man's hands, lay four pairs of silver cuff-links.

Four pairs of cuff-links. Threaded through them was a length of heavy string, as though the dead man had been trying to tie them together like beads, knotting each in the middle and knotting them closely together. There was a loop at the end. I looked from that (at least) unusual exhibit up to the gap in the bookshelves, where there were missing two volumes of an early work on aeronautics. I also remember Bowers's statement, when we first came into the room, that most of the furniture had been changed around: the desk at a different window, the clock on a different wall, the position of all the chairs altered. We seemed to have got into a homely suburban Topsy-Turvy House.

"Well?" said Mrs. Antrim quickly.

I regarded her with great stolidness. "Just so, ma'am. Did you notice all this when you first came in? Or what did you do?"

She seemed a little taken aback. "Why — yes, I suppose so, subconsciously. I remembered it, anyhow. But first I turned on the big light over the desk, and made sure Mr. Hogenauer was dead."

"And how long should you say he'd been dead when you got here?"

"It's hard to say. But only a few minutes, I should think. I got here about a quarter-past nine. -The strychnine wouldn't have taken a long time to kill him: a long time for strychnine, that is. It's usually pretty lengthy and unpleasant. He couldn't have lasted more than half an hour after he'd drunk it; probably only twenty minutes. His health was bad, and he was going on for sixty. Say he drank it about quarter to nine."

"Go on, ma'am. What did you do after you found he was dead?"

"First," she said grimly, "I looked round for the bottle labelled bromide. It was standing over there on the mantel. That was how I happened to hit that little flashlight with my elbow, and knock it off the mantel and smash it. No, and I don't mind telling you what I was going to do, either! I was going to wash that bottle and take it away with me-"

Bowers made a noise in this throat.

"And why not?" she asked defiantly. "I'd have done it, too, if the next awful business hadn't happened. I'd shut the door when I came in. So I picked up the bottle, and started out for the scullery to wash it. But the knob was loose, and wouldn't turn to unlatch the door. I suppose I must have been upset or frightened; anyhow, I began to yank and fiddle with it. Then the knob came off in my hand, and the rest of it, with that iron thingummyjig, fell out into the hall. If you can imagine anything more horrible happening to you, I'd like to have you tell me what it is."

"And the best thing that could have happened to you, too," cried Bowers accusingly. "Accessory after the fact. If you'd pinched that bottle and run away, you'd 'a' been accessory after the fact, that's what."

She looked at him coldly.

"That's about all, officer. I was shut up in here with that thing. Of course, I thought of getting out through one of the windows. But just look at them! Apparently poor old Hogenauer always kept the sashes up but the shutters closed. The bolts of the shutters have rusted in the sockets, and I couldn't budge them. If I got panicky, you can't blame me. I even thought of picking up a chair and trying to break the shutters open. It's all very well to be bold, bloody, and resolute; but I'm not strong enough for that sort of work, and, besides, I should have roused the whole neighbourhood. Still, I was just on the point of wanting to try it when I heard a horrible commotion out at the back somewhere, and dogs barking or men running or something. I was so jumpy that I simply reached up and unscrewed the light out of the socket, hot as it was. In a minute you came in at the back; and talked to some woman in the next house about a murderer being loose hereabouts." She made a grimace. "I think you know everything else, although I don't think you know how I felt being shut up in the dark with it."

"Thank you very much," I said with an official air, and only wished I had a notebook to make it look right. "There's just one thing, Mrs. Antrim. When Mr. Hogenauer was at your house last night, didn't he tell you he meant to go to Bristol this evening?"

She opened her eyes. "He certainly didn't tell me that. He may have told my husband. And, anyway, we're jolly sure he didn't go."

"We are. But," I said to Bowers, "that's what he told you?" "It is! And all the rest of the things I've told you is true, too!"

"But you didn't see him go; you didn't drive him to the station or anything like that?"

"I told you I didn't! I told you the last time I saw the governor alive was just after tea, maybe six o'clock, when he said I could go out if I liked. Then was when he said again to come in early, becos we would probably have a visitor that night."

Here I tried to get the muddle straightened. "He told you he intended to call on Dr. Keppel in Bristol, and that he had every reason to hope Dr. Keppel would be out. In fact, Keppel is here in Moreton Abbot somewhere, and Mr. Hogenauer believed that Keppel would come here to-night. Is that what you understood? Yes. But Hogenauer doesn't go to Bristol, and Keppel doesn't come here."

"Maybe 'e's come," muttered Bowers in a sinister voice, "and gone."

"You mean he might have had something against your employer?"

That word "employer" struck another note of suspicion, but Bowers only looked sullen. "How should I know? They always talked German."

"What's Dr. Keppel like?"

"Like? I dunno. Something like the governor, little and thin, except he's got a limp in the leg and a lot of greyish hair all stuck out. Besides, whoever changed them bottles, and put the poison in place of the bromide, was back in the doctor's house in Torquay. There's where you want to look, old cock."

"You little liar," said Mrs. Antrim.

It seemed doubtful whether I could spin out this questioning much longer, for they were both waiting for me to do something. Yet Bowers's dark hint about Dr. Keppel permitted me to do without suspicion exactly what I had been sent here to do: search the room, and particularly the desk, under pretext of looking for something missing. Though I searched with considerable thoroughness, there was nothing

at all in the room, either suspicious or otherwise. The desk itself was almost empty. The room was very neat except for a sprawled newspaper, evidently the paper Mrs. Antrim had used in her jugglery with the key to this room, lying beside the desk.

But there was something on the blotter. I picked up the string of cuff-links and put it to one side, to see whether there might be anything under the blotting-pad; and there were a few lines of very clear letters where something had been blotted on the white surface. There were other smudges and occasional letters criss-crossing, but these seemed to stand out. They appeared to be in English.

"Hold it up to a mirror!" said Bowers excitedly. "He was writing a letter this morning. I seen 'im at it."

"Writing a letter to whom?"

"I dunno. He posted it himself. But he wrote a lot of letters." Bowers pointed to the book of stamps. "Always at it. What's more, those words weren't on that blotter yesterday: I remember, becos I looked at the blotter to see whether it wanted changing. Hold it up to a mirror!"

I picked up the whole pad and went to the mirror over the fireplace. And, in small finicky handwriting, in English, and in as flat terms as could have been used, was the following barefaced message:

fast planes. I will make the attempt to-night, and I assure Your Excellency that I have every hope of success. The envelope is in the upper right-hand pigeon-hole of Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in view of Keppel's doubts, to have had two reliable men hero. But if I succeed in obtaining possession of the envelope we shall be in possession of knowledge which….’

Here it crossed another trail, and became indecipherable. I looked at it, yet I could not believe it. It was too stark and simple. "You will find the pirates' treasure buried under the old elm-tree in the archbishop's garden": it had the same sort of hissing melodrama. It was as casual as an invitation to dinner. It lay on a blotting-pad as openly as though somebody had drawn an arrow to indicate it. And, above all, it was in English.

But why not? Round the Service there has grown up a phantom legend of codes and ciphers and secret passwords and similar flummery. Its members do not in reality go about hissing at each other, nor does the cipher exist which C2 department cannot solve. I can still remember the disappointment I once felt to learn that King's Messengers are not accustomed to traveling in wigs, with a couple of forged passports: they travel in a railway compartment labelled, Reserved for the King's Messenger. When a man has something to say, he usually says it straight out. This was not wartime. There was no reason why even the Post Office, let alone the War Office, should ordinarily be curious about letters written from a neat little villa in a neat little suburb not far from the sea.

"It looks terribly official," said Mrs. Antrim after a pause. She spoke uneasily. "I say, you don't suppose?’

I looked at Bowers. "You never saw the names of any of the people he wrote letters to?"

"No, I didn't. All I know is that they weren't letters to anybody in a European country."

"How do you know that?"

"Stamps," said Bowers instantly, and with some shrewdness. "I collect stamps, and that's 'ow I notice sometimes. You ought to know that postage to here or to America is three-halfpence to European countries it's more, see? Every letter the governor sent out, or at least every letter I ever noticed, had a brown three-halfpenny stamp. - 'Ullo!"

He turned round. I had picked up the newspaper, and as a sort of official gesture was wrapping up the blotting-paper in it, when back came those confounded dogging footsteps in the alley behind the house. They must just have been passing the rear gate, evidently still unsuspicious, when near at hand there was the sharp crack of a window being raised. It was not difficult to identify it as the window of the house next to this, from which the irate female had addressed me a while ago. This time the female, evidently to attract the attention of the searchers in the alley, made a noise like a soda-water syphon.

"Have you got him yet?" she bawled in a hoarse stage-whisper.

There was a silence. "Not yet, Mrs. M'Corseter," answered the voice of the sergeant who had arrested me. "But we'll get him: don't worry. The neighbourhood is patrolled. He can't get away."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," said Mrs. M'Corseter fiercely, "great big hulking fellows like you! It's a shame, that's what 1 call it, it's a downright shame if decent people can't sleep in their beds at night without having homicidal maniacs running loose-"

"Eh?"

Mrs. M'Corseter proceeded to describe a butchered neighbourhood in a way which would have made anyone's flesh creep.

"Here, now!" said the sergeant, flustered. "There's no homicidal maniac, ma'am. It's only "

"Don't you try to deceive me," said Mrs. M'Corseter. "I'm a taxpayer, and I won't have it. It was a policeman that told me it was a nasty, dangerous crazy-man, with a razor all over blood; so don't you try to deceive me, young man! What's more, your policeman took very good care he didn't run up against any nasty, dangerous crazy-man. He didn't take any chances; not him! He went into `The Larches' next door, and he hasn't come out yet, and what he's doing there all this time I don't know

Again there was a thunderous pause.

"But I know," said the sergeant. "In you go, Dennis!"

There was a rush of feet, a creak as the back gate swung open, and then another holocaust of flying bottles. My two companions very slowly turned to stare at me.

CHAPTER SIX

The Hundred-pound Newspaper

Dowry came the hounds, bottles or no; my sanctuary was now one with Nineveh and Tyre; and ahead loomed an imminent prospect of clink. There was no time to argue or explain.

"Excuse me," I said, and cut for it again.

It would have been a simple matter, since I was nearest the door, to have closed the door behind, pulled out the loose spindle, and left my two companions imprisoned there. But I didn't want to do that. The door must be left as wide open as possible, for it was conceivable that the sight of a very unusual corpse would stop my pursuers long enough to give me a few seconds' lead.

Those policemen — there seemed to be two of them, right enough-could cover ground. I was myself no laggard about getting out into the hall, but they were within a step of the back door when I reached the front one. But I did not go out the front door: games like this had been played in the old days. I switched off the lights in the hall, opened the door, and closed it with a slam. Then I ducked across the dark hall into the half-open door of a room on the right-hand side, fronting the street.

It was a dark, stuffy, waxy little room, with the ghosts of antiquated furniture showing in the gleam of a street-lamp through the window. In my hands, carried automatically, was the newspaper in which I had been wrapping up the blottingpad: and it suggested an idea even as the law burst in at the back door. I had not expected Mrs. Antrim to scream, since she did not appear to be of the screaming sort, but it is not to be denied that at the entrance of the law she let out an appalling yip which at least served to direct their attention to the body. As fast as possible I was climbing out of the tunic, the helmet, and the belt. Perhaps they should have been tossed aside altogether, but I was reluctant to do that, having seen how useful a passport they were anywhere. My own coat I had been compelled to leave behind at the police station. So I took off my waistcoat, rolled up my sleeves, and tucked the shirt under at the neck, thus presenting a picture of a suburbanite taking the air en deshabille on a summer night. The rest of the stuff I rolled up in the newspaper, tucking under its edges, just as the sergeant was calling hoarsely out in the hall, and somebody pelted for the front door.

I went to the window and peered out cautiously behind the lace curtain. The street-lamp was feeble enough, and one larch threw a dense shadow at one side of the window. The front door opened. It was not the sergeant who came out; so far as I could make out, when he stopped briefly to flash his light round into the front yard, "Dennis" was one of the men who had been tinkering about with the Austin back at the police station. He had never seen my face. Dennis limped a little, and pressed one hand to the knee of his trousers.

When he twitched round, his face wore a malignancy which is never permitted to members of the Force, but which was justifiable. And he was not to be gulled by any such kid's trick as I had played. He ran out into the street, looked left and right along an empty road, made a brief play with his light into front gardens, and then swung back to the house. He knew I was still inside. You could tell it by the expression on his face under the street-lamp. I ducked back just in time, as the beam from his lamp flashed into my window, then across at the window opposite, and up. He hurried up the walk, and I heard him speaking to the sergeant just inside the front hall.

"Blow your whistle, then," said the sergeant's muffled tones. "Cover the front, and I'll keep the back until we "

It had to be risked. I got the window up as softly as I could manage, and slid across the sill with the paper-bundle in my arms. Dennis appeared to be well inside the door, and the shadow of the tree was strong. I went down flat, keeping well to the ground in some of the soggiest dew ever produced by the suburbs. The noise of the window being raised, and even the creak of a low fence as I got over it on to the pavement, was masked in the squawking of an aitchless uproar put up by Bowers inside the house. I was within an ace of getting away with it, with my feet solidly planted on the pavement, when Dennis swung out of the house not a dozen feet away, and saw me even as he put his police-whistle to his lips.

If I had tried to run away, if I had tried to walk away, or if I had even stood still, he would have been after me. Doubtless it is a question of what fraction of a second exists between the time the eye sees and the time the brain registers; but that split second, that flash of the dark world, is the quarry's only chance. The only chance is to walk straight up to the devil and pull his whiskers.

The gate of "The Larches" was less than five feet away. As Dennis looked up I strode towards it, turned boldly in at the gate with my bundle held in front of me, and almost ran into him.

"Why don't you look where's you're going?" I snarled.

"Laundry!" I added, and thrust the bundle at him.

This was too much.

"I don't want the sanguinary copulating laundry," howled

Dennis, who had been under a great strain that night. "Laundry," I persisted. "For Mrs. M'Corseter, Valley Road. She said it was urgent."

Dennis was so angry that, when he blew the police whistle, even the blast had a shaky querulousness. Through the hall door, half open, I could see the sergeant, followed by Bowers and Mrs. Antrim, going to cover the back door; if they turned round, it was nemesis and clink. I had to keep my voice to a hoarse plaintive mutter of the same sort. I thought of attempting to alter my countenance in that fashion which police tradition attributes to Charles Peace, but I decided on the value of artistic restraint. Although Dennis was momentarily off-guard, he might not care for the spectacle of a laundryman snaking faces at him in the front garden.

"Next door, he snapped. "She would," he added, apparently referring to Mrs. M'C. "Clear off! — stop a bit! Have you seen.?"

I said I hadn't. "But here! What do you fellows want to go crawling about on the roofs for? I saw a policeman climbing up on that there roof," I declared in an aggrieved tone, "and"

"Ah!" said Dennis. "Clear out, now!"

It was about time, since two more of the Law were coming up the street in the other direction. Dennis had turned towards the house to impart the intelligence that the fugitive had taken to the sparrow-tops, confirming their belief of his presence in the house. Those who were approaching on the pavement seemed to be within earshot, so I counted on the belief that they had heard Dennis's, "Clear out!" Forgetting Mrs. M'Corseter's, I turned away and strolled off in the opposite direction from them, whistling.

The seconds lengthened, but there was no sound of pursuit. I expected it, since matters would be clear enough if they should happen to spot that open window behind the shadow of the larch: yet there was no noise at all except a stir and mutter. Nobody else was in the street. Nevertheless, at any minute I might encounter another scouring-party, and they would not be in the same frame of mind as P.C. Dennis. I walked not too hurriedly, in the direction away from Liberia Avenue, breathing deeply of the night air and revolving murderous plans which concerned H.M. Just as a church-clock struck eleven somewhere to the west, I came to an intersecting street and saw what I had hoped for: a telephone-box.

It was illuminated, of course, and its glass sides gave no more shelter than a show-case; but once I could reach Charters or H.M. I was not concerned with that. Putting down my bundle, I felt in my pocket after coins. Then was when I remembered most distinctly that my wallet was in the breast pocket of the coat at the police station. In my trousers pocket I found the sum of threepence-halfpenny in coppers — no more.

Nevertheless, since Torquay was only ten odd miles off, threepence should suffice for the call. I got the Exchange, and explained exactly what I wanted, making it official business: I must speak personally with Colonel Charters, either at the central office or at his home. Even at the last moment I was afraid that the cussedness of all human events would prevent it, and I almost yelped with relief when, out of the buzzing and gear-shifting along the line, Charters's voice wormed through.

"My pal," I said, putting into it all the concentrated venom that the words would hold.

Either Charters or the telephone cleared its throat, noisily. Charters spoke in that stiff manner which authority always uses even when it has dropped a brick.

"Blake? Sorry, Blake. I'm afraid we've made a mistake. It's quite all right: you'll be released immediately: I've already sent the order through. Merrivale discovered I suppose you're at the police station?"

"No, I am not at the police station. I am at a telephone-box somewhere out in the wilds, in my shirtsleeves and with exactly one halfpenny in my pocket. The whole constabulary of Moreton Abbot has been chasing me for what seems like the last two days, after throwing me into clink on your order. In a bundle right here I've got a stolen policeman's uniform, a lantern, and the rest of my own clothes. I may add that I would like to strangle you with the necktie."

"You tried to escape? Blake, I didn't know you could be such a fool! If you had only been content to sit down and wait-"

I shut my eyes. "Colonel Charters," I said, "the time is short and it is no good arguing with a man who has a sense of gratitude like yours. What I am trying to tell you is that I DID escape. And before we go any farther, will you for God's sake tell me what did happen and why I was arrested?"

Charters was shaky and bewildered.

"It was Serpos — Joseph Serpos, you know. My secretary. I can't believe it, Blake; I never thought he'd do anything like that. As a matter of fact, he must have had it all planned out in advance. He planned to rob my safe here and make a getaway. He knows I'm not a rich man, of course, but still he doesn't seem to know that those things in the safe were exhibits in the Willoughby case. He wasn't here at the time we caught Willoughby. The fool! Anyhow, he packed a black bag and got into my car and drove away over an hour before you left…"

"Yes, but why arrest me?"

"It was Dr. Antrim's fault. Antrim says he met you going down the drive. He was nervous, or muddled, or I don't know what. Just as you left, you remember, Merrivale and I were going to look at the exhibits in the Willoughby case. We discovered the robbery — and a polite, finicky note from Serpos saying he was leaving, and it would be useless to try to track him. Just then Antrim came in. For some reason he seemed to have unholy suspicions of you. He swore you must have robbed the safe, because he'd seen you escaping in my car. Naturally we knew it was Serpos who had robbed it, but we thought Serpos had pinched Merrivale's Lanchester because it was faster…. Whereupon," said Charters bitterly, "Merrivale conceived the brilliant and subtle idea that the whole switch of cars was a plot: that Serpos had deliberately chosen the Lanchester so that we should think you had gone in it: that Serpos, if he were stopped, would pretend to be you. So I sent out an order to arrest a man in a Lanchester numbered AXA 564, who would carry a black bag and might give the name of Blake. Antrim swore flatly, you see, that you'd gone away in a blue Hillman.

"He must be blind. They don't look anything alike. Besides there was somebody else there when I talked to Antrim: an American named Stone."

"Who," said Charters grimly, "said he didn't know one of our cars from another. Don't talk to me about Stone! There was the hell of a row up here between him and Merrivale; but never mind that now. We didn't tumble to the business about the cars until I got the message that the black bag of the sinister criminal they bad caught contained a set of burglar's tools." (In the background I could hear H.M.'s voice squawking fiendishly, apparently with some protest or some message he wanted transmitted.) "But I suppose you don't see you've ruined everything, Blake? I don't know how you escaped. All the same, you won't have a chance now to have a look at Hogenauer's house, or in the big desk, or "

"On the contrary," I said, "on the contrary, I have already done it in spite of your bloodhounds."

I recounted all the facts, as fast and as concisely as I could. In the middle of it the Exchange butted in for some more money, but we got the charges reversed after some wrangling. Also, there appeared to be a little trouble at the other end of the wire while Charters was passing on the information as I gave it. I could hear H.M. in the background, and another voice as well. I concluded by quoting

word for word, as far as I could remember, the words on the blotter.

"Consequently, I shouldn't have got away at all if the coppers hadn't been so flabbergasted at discovering that body that they were off balance. And here's the point: it's all very well to say you've telephoned through to the police station and told them to release me. But the point is that now they want me as the key witness in a murder case. Even though they're convinced I didn't have anything to do with the murder, still it'll be cheerio to any wedding to-morrow if they catch up with me. Will you try to get busy and think of a way out of this?"

Hogenauer-drank-strychnine — " said Charters dully. The telephone seemed to go dead, and I jiggled it. "Merrivale will take over," Charters added.

"How de do, Ken?" rumbled H.M.'s voice, casually.

"As to your part in this affair," I said, "I remain coldly silent. But in all fairness, have another inspiration! Think of some subtle means by which I can pull myself out of this. Can you do it?"

"Well… now," said the old man. I could picture him scratching the side of his jaw with one finger. "I been sittin' and thinkin' here in the last couple of minutes, and I believe I got it. Uh-huh, we can get you out of it-1'

"Yes?"

`The envelope is in the upper left-hand pigeon-hole in Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol'," H.M. quoted. "Well, now, Ken," he said with an air of inspiration, "the only thing for you to do is to hurry on to Bristol and pinch that envelope before Keppel gets back. Hey?"

I stood back and studied the telephone. For sheer, consummate, unadulterated nerve; for nerve which sprang like a fountain at the stars and poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit; this proposal seemed to outmatch anything I had heard that night.

"Won't you be satisfied until I stay in jail?" I inquired. "Is it absolutely necessary for me to get twenty years in order to make you happy? What's the matter with you, anyway? H.M., I won't do it, and that's flat."

"I bet you do, though," said the old man gleefully. "You want to bet, hey? Listen, Ken. Dammit, don't carry on like that! You're goin' to do it of your own free will. Do you know who's at Charter's place, do you know who's standin' at my elbow talkin' to me this very minute? Well, I'll tell you. It's your light o' life, your petit morceau de fluff, your intended bride, Evelyn Cheyne…" "What?"

"Uh-huh. (Shut up, wench!)" He howled at someone behind him, and then turned back to the telephone. "How can I help it if she follows you? Am I to blame if she insists on chasm her true love? She got here not ten minutes after you'd left, walked in bright and breezy and beamin', and said she wasn't going to miss whatever fireworks were on display. Now, if you won't go to Bristol, she's offered to go herself; so I think you better go along and protect her. She takes awful chances, son…’

"No, it ain't `blackmail,' either! Don't you say that. Bum me, Ken, can't you see this is the only way to do it? If it'll comfort you any, I'll absolutely guarantee that Charters and I can arrange it so that you don't get dragged into this business of Hogenauer's death at all, so that you ain't called as a witness and never show your nose anywhere. But I can't do it immediately: I mean I can't do it smack within the next couple of hours: there's got to be some wire-pullin' first. D'ye see that? And it's the next couple of hours that count. Ken, you got to go on to Bristol straight as a homin' crow, and pinch that envelope before Keppel gets back to his hotel. You got to go by train, too. It's a pretty long way, and what we want is speed."

"With a halfpenny in my pocket," I said, "and without a coat-'

"Sure!" agreed H.M. comfortably, "and that's where the wench comes in. There's a late train up from Plymouth that gets into Moreton Abbot at 11.20. It's a fast train to London, but it makes several stops, and Bristol is one of 'em. It'll be touch-and-go if we can make it, but we'll snap the wench to Moreton Abbot as fast as we can, and I think she can make it. You meet her on the platform. She can't pick you up where you are, because the station's clear over at the other side of town from Valley Road, and she'd miss the train for sure. She'll meet you at the station with plenty of money, and one of Charters's coats if you're so goddam sartorially fussy. And there you are. Hey?"

"That's fine. What if she misses the train?"

"Now, now," growled H.M. soothingly. "You can find a way to Bristol if she does. We got to hurry, Ken. Bye-bye."

The line went dead.

Even that little thread of communication was cut off. In vain I jiggled the hook. In vain I pointed out to unresponsive carbon that I had never before been in Moreton Abbot in my life, and had no notion as to where the railway-station might be — except the encouraging fact that it was on the other side of town. Under the circumstances, I should probably have to ask a policeman.

However, it would not do to remain in an illuminated box on a street corner, open to any inspection. I stepped out into a grateful cool after the thick heat of that box, and still the gloomy streets seemed deserted. At random I chose a turning (it had high hedges on either side, and was sufficiently ill-lighted), where I leaned back against the hedge to consider the position.

To get to that station there was only one course I could safely employ, but it was the best one. I still had my Compleat Policeman's outfit. There were still plenty of motor-cars abroad. I could put on the outfit again, stop some car with official stateliness, and ask to be driven to the station in order to head off a wanted man whom we believed to be escaping by the 11.20 train.

It did no good merely to stand and swear. My wench, with her usual taste for devilment, had insisted on walking straight into the middle of this tangle: and now it appeared that I must see her through it. I should have been warned by Evelyn's chortle of pleasure that afternoon, and her suspicious meekness when I had ordered her to stay behind. It occurred to me to wonder what her father, the major-general, might be thinking at that moment. Of course, our being together made it a little better, but it did not improve the hare-brained course. It is all very well to talk of the open road, the bright eyes of danger, and similar cliches, but I am a Scot and I have a Scot's caution.

For I couldn't make any sense of the puzzle: I wondered most of all what H.M. made of it. In the matter of expressing opinions about anything, it is usually almost impossible to stop him. But he had said nothing. Of course, it may have been the telephone. Like myself, H.M. dislikes talking at length over the telephone: he prefers talking face to face: and protracted conversations on a wire make him fidget. We were both inclined to throw the facts at each other quickly and disjointedly. Yet I had not even been able to learn what it was Serpos had stolen out of the safe, something which seemed to be so valuable and over which so much fuss had been made.

And that was nothing compared to the curious circumstances of the murder. Back at "The Larches" in Valley Road, a man sat dead of strychnine poisoning. The centre of the puzzle was clear enough — obviously he had mixed the dose himself, mistaking it for bromide, in a glass of particularly nauseous mineral-water — but the edges were clouded. We had a series of events like this:

This morning, at breakfast, Hogenauer told Bowers he was going to Bristol, that he had made certain Keppel would be out, and that he meant to pay a secret visit to Keppel's hotel. He also warned Bowers to expect a visitor at "The Larches" that night, presumably Keppel himself. During the morning, Hogenauer wrote a letter to someone he addressed as "Your Excellency," beginning at one fragment with a reference to "fast planes," mentioning that he would "make the attempt to-night" on an envelope in Keppel's desk, and breaking off with a remark about valuable knowledge. Keppel was now believed to be in Moreton Abbot. On the same morning, he came to see Hogenauer, and when he left — according to Bowers — Hogenauer gave him something which locked like "an envelope folded in half." Hogenauer was last seen alive by Bowers at six o'clock, when Bowers left the house. At this time Hogenauer warned Bowers of a prospective visitor that night, adding that Bowers would probably not see him. Hogenauer drank the poison about a quarter to nine o'clock. His body was discovered, a little over a half an hour afterwards, by Mrs. Antrim. The door of the room was locked on the inside. Inside the room (a) a number of articles of furniture had been changed round, (b) a light placed on the mantelshelf indicated a gap in the shelves from which two books on aeronautics were missing, and (c) on Hogenauer's desk were four pairs of cuff-links.

At this point I realized that I must stop puzzling and get to business. It would not do to delay too long in getting to the station. I unwrapped my bundle. I put on waistcoat and tie again, and commenced buttoning up the policeman's tunic for the second stage of my adventures. My watch, still safe in the waistcoat pocket, said that it was now fifteen minutes past eleven. Over the top of a rise appeared the

head-lamps of a car, crawling leisurely, and it was now time to act. I tossed away the newspaper — which had served several purposes that night since Mrs. Antrim said she had found it in the scullery-and, as it flopped wide in the hedge, it served its last purpose. Something white fluttered

out of the now loose pages, and fell on the pavement.

I picked it up. It was a £ 100 bank-note.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Devil in the Bag

"To the railway-station?" said the man in the car. "Yes, certainly: glad to take you. Jump in. As a matter of fact, I'm going there myself."

He was a fat, comfortable, chuckling sort of fellow in a brown tweed cap, peering out from an ancient touring-car which had dusty side-curtains flopping at the back. He hospitably held open the door of the front seat, but I got into the back instead.

"If you don't mind," I said. "This crook I told you about will be on the watch. If he sees a policeman, it'll be all up. I'd better keep back here out of sight. You said you were going to the station. Er — are you taking the 11.20 train?"

"Me? Oh, no; no, no, no, no, no," declared the other, with a broad wave of his hand. The car moved away, taking a direction well opposite to Valley Road. "I'm meeting it. My wife gets back from the States to-night. It's a boat-train; at least, it meets the Queen Victoria at Plymouth. Probably won't be on time. Those boat-trains seldom are."

This was good news, although hanging about the station in the open was not a part I cared for My companion took a great deal of interest in the villain who had robbed the Chief Constable, questioning me closely about it, and working himself up into a towering rage over the state of British justice. I was well protected by the dusty side-curtains, and did not fear observation when we passed through the central part of the town. But the station was much further off than I had expected. We dawdled along, while my companion talked genially, and I could almost hear the watch ticking under the Law's coat. Meantime, I was puzzling and stumbling over the question of that £I00 note, thrust away in the leaves of a discarded newspaper. Mrs. Antrim bad said she found it in the scullery — apparently this tallied, for it was a Daily Telegraph dated four days back-but you seldom find people treating £100 notes in this fashion. Therefore Mrs. Antrim had not found the paper in the place she said, or the note had not been in it when she found it, and therefore what?

"By George, she's on time!" said my companion.

We had swung round into the open space before the long, low, dun-roofed station, and the hands of a clock in a low tower pointed to half a minute before 11.20. From some distance away we could hear the whistle of a train, that flying sound which is torn away in the next instant, and the roar behind it. Along the front of the station a few taxicabs — but no Evelyn. Between the two wings of the building, a folding iron gate to the station platform was being rattled open, and a ticket-porter stood in the entrance. - I had not even a penny which would get the ticket entitling me to go out on the platform: still, that did not matter if Evelyn failed to arrive. The great danger was that there might be a real policeman prowling round the station. What I wanted to do was remain in the shelter of the car until I could reconnoitre. But my companion gave me no chance.'

"Is he here?" he whispered hoarsely.

"No. I think"

"Then he's probably out on the platform," said the other. His stout legs, in plus-fours and brown stockings, seemed to twinkle as he hopped out of the car. "I say, this is something to tell the wife and kids!" He threw open the door of the tonneau, showing me up to the eyes of the taxi-drivers and a dispirited porter or two. "Hadn't you better hurry up, old man? I've got to meet the missus in a minute or two, and I'd like to see the end of this before "

There was nothing to do but get out. The faces of the onlookers wavered and changed with interest as I walked across towards the ticket-barrier; several of the curious closed in behind. My companion had hurried ahead, putting his penny into the ticket-machine, giving it a resounding clank, and waddling to join me with an air which roused even more curiosity among the onlookers. Through the barrier I took a quick survey of the platform outside. There were about half a dozen people on it — but no Evelyn. The noise of the approaching train now seemed to make the whole station vibrate; round a curve its headlight crept, broadened, and ran silver along the rails.

"Go on through!" urged my companion. "You don't need a ticket: does he?" He appealed to the guard at the barrier. "There's a big criminal trying to get away by this train — robbery — robbed the Chief Constable-"

The guard opened and shut his ticket-punch. Behind me an excited voice spoke. A hand, with a square grimy fingernail in wrinkled flesh, was poked past my shoulder and pointed through the barrier at the platform outside.

"Yes," said the voice, "and there he is now."

The train burst in, drowning the words, but we had all heard them. Full in the glare of the headlight, as though its reflection from the rails caught him up, a man stood by himself at the edge of the platform above the tracks. He was a tallish, weedy, limp man, a trifle stooped; his neck was craned round, and he was staring at us over his shoulder. He wore large spectacles, and had a long limp blue-chinned face. But if ever I saw an expression of fear on a human face, it was glazed there. He did not move, he only stared. For one bad moment I thought he was going to topple forward straight under the wheels of the train. But he recovered himself. The train went past with a slamming roar and a flashing of windows, slowing down with a dull kind of sigh; and, in a backwash of grit the man turned round and began to walk swiftly away.

A voice was already calling out to stop the man who had robbed somebody. I think even the ticket-taker deserted his post when we hurried through the barrier: I had to go along, because they all turned to look at me even as they took the first step. I could have given a healthy-sized groan at this further example of the cussedness of human affairs. Our quarry did not go far, or try to go far. A porter only touched him on the arm, and he turned shakily.

When we got up to where he stood, a couple of my companions I stopped in unbelief, and I almost blurted out an apology. The man in front of us was a clergyman — or was dressed like one. He had on the dark coat, the dickey, the clerical collar from which his weedy neck projected, and had a soft dark hat set squarely on his head. If he had kept his nerve at that moment, the hunters might have excused themselves, and I — should have been able to fade away. But he did not keep his nerve. His forehead was wet, and his eyes behind the spectacles had a fishy glaze.

"All right," he said, not much above a whisper. "All right, all right," he went on rapidly, with a faintly foreign intonation. "I'll go with you. I knew I couldn't get away with it. I knew I wouldn't have the luck to get away with it. I knew that damned Antrim woman saw me, just when I was going out to the car-"

I looked down at the black bag he was carrying, and knew something too.

"You're Mr. Joseph Serpos, aren't you?" I said.

"Y-yes. I — how did they find me in this?" He fumbled at the breast of his clerical outfit, in a sort of weak bewilderment and savagery. I thought the man was going to cry. "I — had it all arranged. These clothes. Passport. I-"

"Give him the usual warning!" interposed a crafty voice out of the crowd, in some excitement. "You must give him the usual warning. That's the law."

Serpos put a hand to his forehead. "Get me out of here," he said. "I–I give myself up. You'd better take this. It's got the-you know — in it. You'd better take it."

The black bag, containing whatever it was he had stolen, was put into my hands.

"Ain't you going to write down what he says?" interposed the crafty voice again. "Where's your notebook? You must write down what he says. Where's your no-o-otebook?"

I was getting pretty flustered. Symbolically speaking, I wished to give the crafty voice a push in the face. Around us the group was increasing, while I stood with a prisoner whom I was forced to capture, and a bag containing stolen goods in my hand. What the devil was I going to do with him? This time the matter was past doubt: it was the sort of rumpus which would inevitably draw down a real Robert within a few more minutes.

I looked out over the crowd, seeing all sorts of faces — but nowhere did I see Evelyn. There was some confusion caused by people getting off the train (my zealous friend in the tweed cap was embracing a stout lady, but looking over her shoulder to see what went on), and a clutter of trucks hung round the luggage-van. The train breathed noisily in faint steam. Its coaches, coloured in brown and cream, had their doors and windows crowded with heads; through other windows I could see the red-shaded lamps of a restaurant-car, and I ached for sustenance beyond the resources of a halfpenny; finally, a board along' the coach-roofs bore the inscription: PLYMOUTH, BRISTOL & PADDINGTON, which meant

the open road to London.

Then I saw Evelyn at last.

She was just turning round after getting into a fast-class compartment, and peering out of the open door. She looked nervous and worried now; her eyes searched the platform;

Immediately behind her in the same compartment I saw none other than Mr. Johnson Stone, just in the act of putting his straw hat down on a corner seat. He straightened up, with a glow on his alert pince-nez and a cigar in his mouth. Then he caught sight of me.

He looked at my uniform, and it is no exaggeration to say that his eyes bulged. I saw him reach across and pluck Evelyn by the arm. "For God's sake, look," Stone said, "he's disguised again."

The crafty voice was persisting beside me. "Why don't you search him?" it hissed. "Maybe he's got a gun. Here, I'll run and call another p'iceman"

While I ordered the crowd to stand back, I made a gesture towards Evelyn which I hope she interpreted as a warning to stay where she was until I could get out of this. If I bolted for the train now, the fat would be in the fire and I should be caught. On the other hand, the train must be almost ready to pull out. From the corner of my eye I saw a harassed and worried station-master hurrying up with a watch in his hand.

"Here, what's going on here?" he protested. "What's the matter, constable?"

"Sorry, sir. This man's given himself up; he's wanted for larceny in Torquay. The Chief Constable-"

The station-master peered at me. "Stop a bit: who are you? You've never been assigned to this station. I know every policeman in this whole tow

"No, sir. I'm from Torquay. Special service."

"Ah, good," said the station-master, with a breath of relief. "We can't have trouble and arrests all over this station. (Stand back, if you please, my friends!) Then you can take him back to Torquay. Number 3 — down platform; over there — just coming in — last train to Torquay to-night. Come along: I'll take you. No fuss, now."

Already a couple of doors were slamming on the London train.

"Listen," I said, and pulled the station-master to one side; "very important. Sorry, but I must look at the swag in this valise first. Is there a private place close at hand, where I can take him?" I nodded towards Serpos, who had not moved. "And can you drive these people away? Also, if you could go and keep a compartment empty on the Torquay train-?"

"I'll attend to it myself," said the station-master, "and I'll have this platform clear in two seconds. Compartment? Yes.

You can take him into the waiting-room, if you like. There'll be nobody there."

Serpos was wiping the corner of his eye, and he tried to jerk his arm away as I hustled him across to the waiting-room. It was a dim place where, at the moment, there did not even seem to be anyone behind the window of the booking-office. I was relieved to see that a half-open door led to the street outside.

"All right," I said. "Get out! Through that door. Quick, before they see you!"

Serpos had sat down limp as a laundry-bag on a bench against the wall, under a peeling poster declaring the merits of Something-on-Sea. He had his hands pressed to his face, and there were hollows between the ligaments down the backs of them. I thought he was sobbing, but he was only cursing in a low, cold, shaky voice. From between his hands came a rambling monologue.

"Damn them. Damn them. I thought the police were fools. I knew the police were fools. That's what h-hurts. I always said that a clever man — It wasn't the Antrim woman, either. If I hadn't wasted all that time, if I'd gone right away, instead of hiding that car, and s-spending three hours laying a false trail"

I felt rather sorry for him, and anyhow, I had the swag safe enough in the black bag. "Do you hear?" I said. "I'm letting you go. Get out, can't you?"

He rolled up a white wet face, earnest in its great spectacles. A whole fusillade of slamming doors ran along the line of the train.

"No," he said, "no, I'll take my medicine. I'll go back with you. Then maybe"

He rolled up his head again, for a flash I could have sworn I saw a crafty look in that glazed brown eye; something shrewd and fighting behind his limp manner. It occurred to me that this pose of repentance was much overdone. If at that moment I had interpreted the look in his eye, I might have had the key to the whole murder-case. But his thoughts appeared to go back on something I had said, and quite suddenly his face grew less muddled, and, it had a shine like pale butter.

Then he got up. '

"I see," he said softly. "You want me to run away, do you? You never came from the police. You never came from Charters or Merrivale. I know where you come from. And you know all about it. Yes, I think I shall get away after all. Now, my friend, hand me back that bag. If you don't, I'll set up an alarm and bring the whole place down on us… and you'll have to prove who you are."

Whr-e-e-e went the guard's whistle outside.

At our left there was a door labelled `Gentlemen.' Serpos, I think, was too stunned to resist or even cry out, for I dropped the bag on the floor and hustled him through that door. Inside there were several cubicles with doors stretching from the floor nearly to the roof. A good heave shot him through into one of them, and I closed the door on him. Above the handle there was a little nickelled dial round which ran the polite inscription, `Occupied' or `Vacant.' That dial must turn in order to let the handle turn and let anybody out. I took my halfpenny and wedged it down into the dial against `Occupied,' so that the handle could not be turned from inside.

His howl rose up, followed by a furious bang on the door, just as I slipped out into the waiting-room, picked up the bag, and made with no great haste for the train. The dim platform was now deserted; it had closed up, like a theatre, at the end of our disturbance. Although the train was in motion, it was gliding slowly. I wanted to let most of those flashing windows roll past and get into a carriage near the end, so that my arrival should not be noticed.

But even a second's delay was too long. In the last carriage of the train I spotted an empty first-class compartment. I pulled open the door, and was running along beside it to get purchase for a jump inside, when there was a shout from inside the waiting-room. Out of the door popped a little man in shirt-sleeves, with a green shade over his eyes. And at the same time my friend the station-master came hurrying round the corner. The man with the green shade howled at him.

"Sir," he said, "there's a clergyman shut up in the lavatory using the most 'orrible language that — "

The rest of it was lost in the slam of the compartment door when I jumped inside, and in the deepening rattle and click of the wheels. We were flying past an anaemic gas-lamp: I could not tell whether they had seen me. But, as we swept out of the station, I took off my helmet and poked my head round the edge of the door to risk a backward look. They did not seem to be much excited. Nevertheless, I saw the station-master pointing to the room which housed the telegraph-office.

If they had seen me, they could telegraph or telephone ahead and get me without fuss. Even if they had not, I was sick as a dog of this infernal masquerading as a policeman; I wanted to get into decent clothes again. It was absolutely necessary to get rid of the policeman's outfit: if anyone on this train saw me, and the alarm was later flashed through, it would be all up. Evelyn was bringing me a spare coat, and Evelyn was somewhere on this train. But I could not go scouting through the train in this rig to look for her..

Serpos's valise, of course. It would probably contain a change of clothes. Momentarily the thought occurred to me that it might contain only another clerical disguise: a prospect so hideous as to make me physically queasy in the stomach. But that did not matter, for a clerical outfit meant merely a black coat, and black coats look much alike, and I was already wearing an ordinary dark blue suit.

This was so much of a relief that I flopped down on the grey upholstery and sat for a moment pleasurably getting my breath. All the same, it would not do to stay here. Somebody might look in at any minute. A lavatory was indicated, to get rid of the Compleat Policeman. Also, I was fiery with curiosity to look into the bag and see what the devil it was that Serpos had stolen. That will-o'-the-wisp had danced in front of me all night, and I meant to settle its hash now.

I opened the corridor-door and peered out. It was deserted. The train moved now with a dancing sway, jerking and whirling above a clackety-roar of the wheels, and a long blast from the whistle was torn behind as we gathered speed. She was a flyer. Bristol, so far as I could remember, must be something less than eighty miles away. Less than an hour and a half should get us there — for another spot of burglary.

Nil desperandum. The Compleat Policeman tiptoed the few remaining feet which separated this compartment from the lavatory, and got safely inside with the door latched. Then I set to work on the valise. It was an ordinary black-leather one, new and shining, and it was not locked. I opened it, and in a minute more I was frantically throwing things aside, digging into it, turning it upside down, without result.

Serpos had done me. That weedy, weepy, blue-chinned young man in spectacles, with the odd gleam in his eye, had somehow hoaxed us all at last. For there was no loot of any kind in the bag. Except for some spare clothing, a few toilet necessities, a book, a passport and a steamship ticket, it was as empty as a real clergyman's.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Six Feet of Earth

Outside the blast of the whistle rose mockingly, and through the half-open window you could hear a deeper clackety-roar of the wheels. I balanced myself against the wall, attempting to read sense into Mr. Joseph Serpos's conduct.

What most struck me was the realization of how consummate an artist this young man had been. There was another clerical outfit in the bag: naturally, since he had a steamship ticket and would have to stand a customs inspection somewhere: there was no other sort of garb at all. Even the book was a devotional work called Sermons from a Sussex Parish. Now, all the clergymen I have ever known have been thoroughly good fellows, the sort who were as much interested in sport as in anything else, and with whom you could sit up all night yarning over a pipe and glass without thinking of them as parsons. But Serpos had chosen to get himself up like a comic-opera vicar, and he had got himself up well. The passport was made out in the name of the Rev. Mr. Thomas Caulderon, The Vicarage, Grayling Dene, Somerset, and "missionary work" was noted on it. His ticket was taken by the cargo-and-passenger-boat Northern Sultan, sailing on Wednesday, June 17th, from Tilbury Docks to Odessa.

This man was not as young, either in age or in experience, as he looked. The photograph on the passport was his own, showing him with lank black hair cut straight across his forehead, and an expression of piety which seemed to be mocking me: even the government-seal looked genuine. If he was such a thorough-paced artist as this, why had he burst out in fear and blubbering when he was accosted at the station? — and then, afterwards, why had he slipped into that amazing change of cunning behind the sallow face? This man was as big a puzzle as Hogenauer himself. Somehow, I felt, there was one little fact which in about half a dozen words could explain all the vast incongruities of this case, if we could find it; but that fact had slipped round the corner as neatly as Mr. Serpos.

Again this theorizing would not do. I must hurry up and get into the black coat so that I could go to find Evelyn. Whereupon, after examining each of the articles of clothing to make sure nothing was hidden, I discovered the next item of cussedness. There was a black coat, all right. But it was a damned long thin morning-coat, with a tail.

I tried it on, and the effect was so awful that I took it off again. Whereas my arms stuck two inches out of the sleeves, and the coat threatened to burst across the shoulders, still Serpos's taller build made the tail of the thing come down to my calves: the whole giving a pleasing effect with a blue-serge suit and a rather loud tie. To walk through an English train in that garb, when at the next stop they would be looking for a fugitive, would be to ask for capture. There was only one refuge, since nobody expects parsons to be models of sartorial elegance…

Five minutes later (at precisely eleven-thirty, twelve hours before the wedding) I walked out of that lavatory in full clerical costume, including the collar. The ensemble, while tight and rickety, should pass muster; and I endeavoured to adjust my face to it. In one hand I had the valise containing relics of a departed policeman, and in the other hand a volume of sermons. I walked as pontifically as possible, though with a simmering temper. The train was a long one; and being a boat-train, pretty well filled. The passengers appeared to be mostly Americans or Canadians: there were jollifications in progress in several of the compartments. I passed through the corridors of three coaches, peering into each compartment in search of Evelyn; and I must have looked so ecclesiastical that one girl hastily got up off some young fellow's lap, and another swallowed whisky the wrong way. It was at the beginning of the fourth coach that I found Evelyn. She was sitting in an outside corner seat, and her eyes looked as though she were on the verge of tears; a circumstance so remarkable that I hastened to pull open the door. Across from her sat Mr. Johnson Stone. Stone saw my costume, and his jaw dropped. He took the cigar out of his mouth.

"Jesus-Christ!" he said.

This was too much.

"Look here," I said, and got my breath, ‘I ask you, for the last time, will you for God's sake give up that blasted joke about disg "

"Ss-st!" warned Evelyn, and her eyes moved in the direction of the corner seat towards the corridor. I glanced down, and found myself looking into the frosty gaze of a genuine Anglican clergyman.

He did not seem (from casual inspection, at least) to be the dominie for your money. He was on the long and thin side, but he had a large, pale, sideways-turned face like a watch-dog, and grizzled hair brushed in thin strands across his skull, and half-glasses over which he was peering up. His legs were crossed, and one of them was pressed back against the seat in order to let me pass by, which made him look as though he were doing contortion-exercises. He did not say anything. But he had The Times, and he rustled it. He continued to peer up.

On the spur of the moment the only thing I could think of to say was, "Pax vobiscum"; and, as that had a somewhat pedantic sound, I did not venture to say it. There was one of those heavy silences which can exist at their worst in railway carriages, when people want to speak to each other but are restrained by the presence of strangers. It was broken only by the clacking of the wheels and the rustle of a cool breeze through the half-open window. In the midst of it I moved decorously past to sit down beside Evelyn.

The wench was looking a trifle stuffed-up with unseemly mirth, but I must admit she played her part well. Her hazel eyes were rapt. Evelyn's. skin glows with that brownish-gold flesh-tint which is so seldom seen in real flesh, and on occasion she can assume a more innocent look than anything off an Easter-card. She spoke in that bright, eager, gushing tone which animates many women on the approach of the clergy.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're here," she cried. "I was so afraid we'd missed you! We saw you get on the train, of course, but I've been searching all over for you, and I simply couldn't find. Oh, excuse me. Mr. Stone, this is the Rev. Mr. She stopped, in beautiful confusion and perplexity. "Oh, I say, how awfully stupid of me! The Rev. Mr.-T'

"Caulderon," — I said. "Thomas Caulderon."

"Of course! Mr. Stone, this is the Rev. Mr. Caulderon."

Stone looked as though it had been on the tip of his tongue to say, "Oh, yeah?" His fresh-complexioned face glowered behind the pince-nez. But he responded like a gentleman, inclining his head gravely and making a slight gesture with the cigar.

"Glad to meet you, sir," he said gruffly. "You'll have to excuse my language; I was a little startled at seeing you. Sit down. Put your bag up on the rack. This young lady's been very worried about you, and she's been looking all over the train for you. Where have you been?"

"Only in the lavatory," I said affably. "These things-ah-take time, you know."

This was a mistake. Considering my extremely pontificial Manner, I realized instantly that it was a mistake. There was another silence. My fellow-pastor did not exactly look up from The Times; but I felt a sort of aura as his eyes slid sideways. He was very leisurely; he folded up his paper, and seemed to consider for a time; then he got up, went slowly out of the compartment, and pulled the door shut after him. We had not got rid of him, since his luggage remained in the rack above the seats, but the air of tensity had been lifted from that compartment.

Evelyn sat back in the corner..

"Well, Ken," she said meekly.

"Well," I said, "you got yourself into it after all, didn't you?"

She remained meek, but her eyes were dancing. "Honestly, old boy, wasn't it the only thing to do? Seriously, now. If by any chance you'd failed to appear tomorrow, you know what would have happened, don't you? Whereas now that we're both in it

After all, I suppose it was. At the very sight of this girl, my whole attitude towards this adventure had changed. It remained black, it remained dangerous, but now I was beginning to enjoy it. All things looked excellent. I picked Evelyn up and sat her in my lap: becoming conscious at the same time that my fellow-preacher was peering fishily through the glass from the corridor. So I shoved her off again decorously, not before she had given demonstration of affection, and instead I picked up Sermons from a Sussex Parish. Stone spoke ventriloquially, without opening his lips.

"That's fine," he said. "Now why don't you go out and tell him to put his shirt on `Gay Tomato' for the 3.30 at Gatwick?" But my clerical friend had disappeared — wondered uncomfortably just how suspicious he had become — and Stone went on in the tone of a parent lecturing his elder son for staying out late. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he continued, "gallivanting around the country in fancy-dress, when you've got a fine girl like that waiting for you of home!" Quite suddenly he stopped, as something appeared to occur to him, and looked coldly out of the window.

"Now, now! Not again," pleaded Evelyn. "Ken, Mr. Stone isn't speaking to any of us. There was the most awful row back there, and it was all H.M.'s fault. I don't know quite what it was: something about H.M.'s new hat: I only got to Colonel Charters's house when it was all over. But no sooner had Mr. Stone got there than H.M. wouldn't listen to him and chucked him out of the house, and they were both standing there swearing at each other and threatening to punch each other in the nose. I ran after Mr. Stone down the drive, because I know what H.M.'s like, but by that time he wouldn't listen. I think it's a jolly shame, because Mr. Stone came all the way from America just to tell H.M. something…. "

"Forget it," growled Stone, much mollified, nevertheless. "I told you this was a pleasure trip — I came over to see my daughter and son-in-law in Bristol. That's all. But I tried to see Merrivale in order to oblige a friend of mine on the other side. Anyway, Miss Cheyne, I'm glad I met you again. I'm glad there's somebody connected with that old so-and-so who appears to have a grain of sense."

Evelyn frowned. "You see, Ken, I met Mr. Stone again at the Moreton Abbot station, when we were both taking this train. And I've been trying to find out what it was he wanted to tell H.M. He isn't — well, very communicative. But it's something that concerns a person called `L'."

There was a pause. Evelyn was looking at me steadily, and I wondered how much she knew. They must have seen by my expression that this meant a great deal. The whole atmosphere of that compartment had subtly changed. Stone was regarding me with narrowed eyes.

"Something's up, eh?" he asked quietly.

"Something is very damnably up," I said, and looked at Evelyn. "Do you know the whole story?"

"I know what H.M. told me," she answered, "and part of what you said over the 'phone. But that's not what I want to know, Ken. What on earth have you been up to? I've got a whole suit of clothes for you," she indicated a valise in the rack above. "It's an old one that Colonel Charters wore before he got so thin, and he says it should fit you. He's very thorough. He even put in a clasp-knife in case you should have to do some more burglaring. Oh, and I've also got a ticket for you, to prove you got aboard the train in legal style. But did anyone see you get aboard in that policeman's outfit? Did anybody get suspicious? I saw you run across and get on the train, when I was just ready to jump out myself; and then I couldn't find you anywhere afterwards"

"I don't know. That's what has been worrying me. Does the train make any stops between here and Bristol?'

"Just one: Exeter, I think. We should be there very shortly."

"We'll know, then, anyhow. But that's not the point. Mr. Stone, you had some information to give Sir Henry Merrivale about an international agent, or plain spy, once known as L?"

"That's right," said Stone, studying me. He had now become like a man playing poker, or like a man in a witness-box.

"Did you ever hear of Paul Hogenauer?"

'No.’

"Hogenauer now lives in England, apparently at peaceful business. During the war be was a member of the German intelligence service in Berlin. He has always been known as a conscientious and honest man. Recently he has been working on an experiment or invention, for which he said he needed money. Therefore, he offered to betray the identity of L. for two thousand pounds."

Stone's expression did not change: he remained puffing gently and almost tenderly at his cigar.

"To-night Hogenauer was murdered. He was poisoned with strychnine, under some very curious circumstances. This may or may not be connected with L. but you can see the probability. If you know anything about L., it's vitally important that you should tell us what it is. We don't have any credentials on us, but at least you know who we are. If we could find out who L. is, and what he's doing"

"I know who he is," said Stone, "and what he's doing."

He sat back into the corner, squaring his shoulders into it. Briefly, I thought I could see in those deceptive blue eyes something like scepticism, but he appeared to come to a decision. First, he solemnly got out his cigar-case and offered it to me, as though it were a handshake to seal a bond. Then he took a wallet from his breast-pocket, and a sheaf of papers.

"That's fair enough. I'll tell you," he said. "But first I want to hear something from you: you'll see why. So I suppose you'll want to see my credentials. I'm from Pittsburgh — I happen to be Assistant Commissioner of Police. Understand, I only came into this semi-officially, and because the Secretary of War at Washington happens to be a great friend of mine. Take a look at these. Also, here's an introductory letter from the Secretary of War. Also a passport….

"Now then," he added, lighting a match for my cigar, "if you think you can trust me, tell me the whole story from A to Izzard. Then I'll swap information, and I don't think you'll be the loser. Well?"

"Go on, Ken," said Evelyn. "I want to get it straight myself. And there are a couple of questions H.M. told me to ask you."

This time I went over the business at great length, while the night-wind grew cooler through the window, and the wheels clacked drowsily, and Stone's white suit accumulated cinders.

so," I said, "we've got another instalment of puzzles since H.M. got the last bulletin. It's now not only an affair of furniture changed in a room, and two missing books, and four pairs of cuff-links. Add to that a £100 note hidden away in a newspaper which Mrs. Antrim says she found cast away in the scullery. I'm not for a moment suggesting that Mrs. Antrim poisoned Hogenauer. She'd hardly feed a man with strychnine out of her own laboratory, and then rush over to make sure he'd taken it. But just how does she figure in the muddle? Then there's Serpos. Who is Serpos? What is he? On the face of it, there's nothing whatever to connect Serpos with Hogenauer. Yet the evening Hogenauer is poisoned is the evening Serpos chooses to run away with… whatever he did run away with. Look here, Evelyn, you were with H.M. back there. What the devil did Serpos steal, anyway?"

She shook her head. She was hunched back into a travelling-coat, her hands cradled in her sleeves, and the hazel eyes looked more subdued now.

"I don't know. You don't seem to realize, Ken, that it's only been a couple of hours since this whole thing started. Back there they were all rushing about, and swearing, and I rather got elbowed aside. They only saw a use for me, and said what a nice gal I was, when you were stranded in Moreton Abbot without money or clothes." She looked up and grinned. "You seem to have done fairly well for yourself, though," she crowed. "Ken, I hate to say it, but I'm almost proud of you."

Stone grunted.

"Well, if you ask me," he said, "it's taking fool risks. I tell you, this fellow Merrivale is even crazier than he's made out! This is no place for you, young lady." He glowered at Evelyn, who wrinkled her nose at him, and then she commenced to study the floor with an expression of sinister wisdom. "If I understand you… by the way, fhat is your name, actually?"

`Blake."

"You're absolutely positive of that?" "Yes."

"All right," said Stone, in some relief. "If I understand you, you're sent smack-bang to burgle a hotel room before Keppel gets back to Bristol. It seems to me you're taking a whale of a big risk, because you don't know just when Keppel is due back. Hogenauer thought he'd be out to-night, yes. But I wouldn't call Hogenauer too good a judge of what's likely to happen: Hogenauer's dead. There's something rotten in the whole set-up, especially as-" He checked himself, and brooded. "Seems to me you treat burglary pretty lightly over here. How are you going to work it? Do you know Bristol?"

I know Bristol very well, for I like it above all English cities. And I paritularly remembered the Cabot Hotel, which is at the top of College Green, just after you pass the Cathedral and the Library; large, old-fashioned, comfortable, and sedate. -

"It shouldn't be very difficult," I told him. "I'll engage a room on the same floor as Keppel. Even if he's got his door locked, it's an old-fashioned place and you can almost open the doors with a hairpin."

"H'm," said Stone. "Well, it's your funeral. But what does Merrivale think of it?"

Evelyn had been peering out of the windows; we were coming into Exeter. She turned round as though she fere about to say something, in a worried fashion. Then she regarded Stone, and shook her head.

"No fair play! Never mind what H. M. thinks of it, for the moment. But it's your turn now, Mr. Stone. You said, if Ken fould tell you everything that happened, you'd make an exchange. Right? You said you'd tell us who L. is, and what he's doing?"

Stone contemplated her with the same sceptical and half-amused expression. He nodded.

"All right," he conceded. "I'll tell you just exactly what you want to know. L.'s real name is Lord — John Stuart Lord, to be exact. He was originally an American citizen, though he's pretended to be a good many nationalities and always got away with it. And you want to know what he's doing now? He's lying under six feet of earth in Woodlawn Road Cemetery…. What I'm trying to tell you is that L died of pneumonia, in Pittsburgh, over six weeks ago."

CHAPTER NINE

The Two Clergymen

Stone sat back, contemplating us gently, and chuckled.

"Then Hogenauer lied when he said-" Evelyn cried, after a pause.

"Yes, Hogenauer lied."

"Wait a minute!" I protested. "This is rather strong news to spring on us all of a sudden. Hogenauer was pretty positive that L. was alive, and in England, a week ago. I'm not necessarily doubting you, but have you got any proof of what you say?"

"Plenty of proof," said Stone. He broke off as a ticket-collector came in, and Evelyn slipped into my hand the ticket she had bought at Moreton Abbot. The ticket-collector was a spare sandy-haired man-with a spare sandy moustache: a Scot if I ever saw one. We were all uneasily silent when he took our tickets, for the train was pulling into Exeter, and if news of a wanted man had been sent ahead we should hear it very soon. The ticket-collector grunted and withdrew.

"I got into it by accident," Stone pursued, "and this is the way it happened. I was out at Forbes Field-that's the ballpark at home — seeing a game, and afterwards I dropped into the Schenley Hotel. The manager's a friend of mine: he called me aside and asked whether I could see someone upstairs. He said this fellow was dying, and insisted on talking to some, unimportant official in the police department, and was raving about it.

"I went up, and there was a handsome old boy, about sixty-five, propped on some pillows and hardly able to breathe. It was bright spring feather, but he was choking to death of pneumonia. He managed to ask me if I knew him. I said Nope, I hadn't that pleasure. Then he sort of smiled and pointed to a trunk. The manager and I opened it

"Well," said Stone, in a somewhat awed voice. "I don't need to give you all the details, but if there was ever a cabinet of Secret History opened, it was opened right there in that hotel room. Half the stuff I couldn't understand, because it was in foreign languages, but there were three or four decorations that anybody could understand. And from different countries: this L. played no favourites. There he was smiling away like a crazy man while he watched us at it.

"Afterwards he tried to tell his story. It boiled down to this. He had a daughter somewhere, and he didn't know where. He wasn't what you'd call an attentive parent; he was all for Number One and iced champagne on his own table. But he had a pretty tidy sum put by, and nobody else to leave it to, and he was trying to make amends. He thought the police could handle it better than any lawyers, because there weren't many clues to work on, so he begged me to get moving and find this girl. All be knew was that she'd been married about six years before to a young fellow who had just graduated from an Irish medical college. He didn't even know the man's name — except the first name, which was Lawrence. But there was a blurry kind of snapshot of him. That's not usually as much help as it sounds. All the same, I'm certain I've met the man. I'm certain I saw him to-night."

Stone frowned, and seemed hesitant.

"You mean," I said, "Dr. Lawrence Antrim."

"I think so. Mind," said Stone aggressively, and pointed his cigar, "at the moment it's none of my business. How many times have I got to tell you I'm on a holiday? I'll cable home, naturally, and let 'em track it down through the proper channels. Besides, it wasn't to find the girl or her husband that I was supposed to get in touch with Merrivale.

"The old boy died on the evening of the same day I went up to see him. It wasn't very spectacular," complained Stone, who seemed somewhat annoyed and disappointed at this. He chewed his cigar. "That is, he didn't give a big long speech or make a flourish or talk about the old days — I admit I was interested to hear something about it. He just took a couple of quick breaths, and looked as though he were sore about something, and died.

"Naturally, with all that stuff in the trunk, I thought I'd better get in touch with Washington. My God, were they interested! I learned afterwards that this L. was just about as big a name, in his own way, as the world's ever known. And there he was, folded up and ordinary like anybody else…. Here's the point, though. At Washington they told me it was believed L. was in England. They thought it would relieve Whitehall a whole lot if they learned L. was safely six feet under the earth, and they could call off their dogs. I don't know whether you know it, but no official cognizance between countries is taken of spies in peace-time. There's a polite pretence that they don't exist. However — since I was coming to England anyway — the Secretary thought it might be a good idea if I slid in quietly, and spoke to Merrivale, and set Whitehall's mind easy. You know what happened. That lunatic in the Panama hat…"

About us now was the bustle of Exeter station. A handtruck, laden with cigarettes and magazines, rolled past on the platform. The train breathed noisily. As yet there was no sign of discovery. And, even while I peered out of the window, I was more flustered by this new discovery than by any possibility of being caught.

It provided only one answer: the answer to Antrim's curious conduct that night, and the reason why he had become so frightened and suspicious of me when I — a friend of H.M. - was accused by Stone of coming to Torquay under a "false name." In other words, how much did Antrim know? Did he know, or suspect, that his wife was the daughter of a tolerably well-known figure on the shady side of international politics? Did he in some fashion think that the British government was interested in him?

Evelyn shook her head slowly.

"I say, Ken," she protested, "this makes even less sense than it did a while ago. What becomes of all the 'orrid plots and alarums? With L. out of the picture, how does Hogenauer fit into it? Hogenauer says L. is in England, and offers to tell who he is: well, Hogenauer lies. Why? Furthermore, where's the motive for Hogenauer's murder? If L. were alive, you might think he had killed Hogenauer to shut his mouth. But L. was dead and buried over a month before Hogenauer even made his proposal… I mean, of course, that is…"

"You mean," Stone said grimly, "if I'm telling the truth."

"Yes," I said. "What's the exact proof of all this?"

"Oh, proof-!" Stone shook his fist. He crushed out his cigar, slapped at the knees of his trousers, and faced us with a sort of wild patience. "What kind of proof do you want? Nobody knew L., did they? At least, nobody who will come out and speak up now. He was never finger-printed. He was never mugged. He was never even detained on suspicion. If you've got no clues to a man while he's alive, how are you going to get clues after he's dead, except by the evidence he carries with him? The American War Department is satisfied, and I'm satisfied. Of course, you might think I'm telling you a lot of ghost stories, but I hope you can see some reason why I'd be doing it. I've chased all over England just to find Merrivale and tell him this, and all I got was a kick in the pants for my pains. So take it or leave it as you like. I don't want to get mad over this thing, and I'll give you all the help I can. But either you do believe me or you don't; and in any case let's skip it."

We were rolling out of Exeter. Evelyn and I looked at each other while Stone glowered at us: and it was impossible not to believe him. Evelyn soothed him down again while the miles rattled off behind us.

"But there's one important thing in connection with it," I said. "Why was L. in America? That is, was he on business? Was he occupied on any scheme then?"

"No. No, I'm pretty certain he wasn't."

"Why?"

"Because he said so," answered Stone with solemn heat. "Now, remember, he didn't conceal one thing about himself. He knew he was a goner, and he told the whole truth. Would there be any reason for lying then?" Stone settled back luxuriously and contemplated the pictures over the seats. "You've said I haven't done enough talking to justify what I've heard. But it strikes me there are a couple of points in connection with this murder that you're all overlooking."

"Go on."

"All right: tell me if I've got it straight. Last night Hogenauer goes to Antrim's house, and complains about his nerves or whatever it was; Antrim prescribes bromide, and Mrs. Antrim makes up the order. Somebody who wants to poison Hogenauer has got into the dispensary, switched the bromide and strychnine bottles, and pasted different labels on them. All right!" said Stone with emphasis, and extended his hand levelly. "Now, what I want to know is how in Sam Hill a murderer could know Antrim was going to give bromide, so that the bottles could be switched beforehand? How did the murder find it out? And, if he found it out, how was there time to go racing in and fool around with the bottles between the time Antrim said, `Bromide,' and the time his wife handed it out?"

Evelyn looked over at me, and her hazel eyes were shining.

"I think he's got it, Ken," she said. "But where does that lead us? Towards Mrs. An — "

Stone waved his hand.

"I don't know. That's your business," he replied off-handedly. "I told you this was no business of mine and I don't want to put ideas into your head.."

"Which you're doing."

"Which I'm doing, Blake, my lad," he agreed, with a curious trace of amusement in the bland blue eyes behind the pince-nez. Again he seemed to be playing poker. "So I'll give you another one on the house. The bottles might have been switched: might. It's possible. But, even so, the murderer took a longer chance than I'd want to take about something else-if you get me? How could the murderer be sure Hogenauer was going to drink strychnine in that one particular mineral-water which would hide the taste? Most people-damn near everybody, I'd say — mix a bromide in ordinary plain water. If Hogenauer had done that, he'd have known something was wrong at the first sip."

"Probably," I said, because Hogenauer drank nothing else. I told you about that lorry-load of bottles all over the back garden. Bowers said he was a teetotaller, and also he very likely didn't even drink the ordinary water out of the tap."

Stone sat forward. "That's exactly what I'm driving at. But who knew that? Who could know that he drank only mineral-water?"

"His doctor, I suppose," said Evelyn, after a pause.

"Oh, yes: his doctor: I admit that. But more likely somebody who either lived in his house-or was a constant visitor to his house. Get me?"

"You mean Bowers or Keppel."

"Or Keppel," said Stone with great emphasis. He leaned over and tapped me on the knee. "The only constant visitor he did have! This is the way I look at it, Blake. I pride myself on being go-ahead. I've had a lot of fun, and got a whole lot of information, about reading this Experimental Psychology. You've got to figure out how a man's mind is going to work.

"Now look at this murder. Under the circumstances, the police must assume — which is what you're all assuming — that it was an inside job. I mean, that somebody who had access to Antrim's place: somebody close at hand: sneaked in and changed the bottles. Therefore the field's limited. Therefore the police don't look any farther. But suppose that's just what the murderer wants you to think?

"Suppose that what Mrs. Antrim served Hogenauer yesterday evening really was honest-to-God bromide and nothing else? All right! — Hogenauer comes home with it. If he had medicine from the doctor, why didn't he take a dose of it last night? That's what I want to know. But maybe he did take it, and it didn't hurt him because it was really bromide. All right!" said Stone growing more excited as he grew more earnest. "But somebody learned he'd got the bromide at Antrim's, and therefore thought of a mighty slick little plan.

"So this person, during the night, goes over to Antrim's and does a little of the Observe-My-Neighbour burglary that seems to be so popular in this neck of the woods. He gets into Antrim's dispensary. There are the bottles on the shelves- perfectly honest bottles; see what I mean? The bromide bottle now has a lot gone out of it, but the bottle of strychnine salts is full: because nobody has touched it. Well, this somebody has in his pocket a big dose of ordinary bromide powder that he could get at any drug-store. So he fills up the real bromide bottle. Then he goes over and steals a hefty dose of strychnine salts out of the other bottle. Next he pushes the strychnine bottle way out of line in the shelf, so it'll be noticed next morning. He sticks some traces of mucilage on each label. Maybe he's even written a couple of fake labels, and crumpled them up and thrown them somewhere that they'll be found later.

"So you can see what a set-up he's got now. It'll be noticed, all right. He'll have proof that, by a change of bottles, Hogenauer got strychnine; and that, later on, somebody put the bottles back in their right places. And in his pocket he's now got a sweet consignment of the poison ready to use on Hogenauer.

"I don't have to tell you how easy it would be, do I?" demanded Stone, sitting back. "All he's got to do is go and pay a visit to Hogenauer next day. He can get Hogenauer out of sight for a couple of minutes, and load the little bromide bottle with strychnine. The next dose Hogenauer takes — whiff! And there's rock-bottom proof Hogenauer must have got the poison at Antrim's. And you told me yourself that the only one who did visit Hogenauer to-day was Keppel.

"How am I doing?" Stone broke off to inquire, with broad complacency.

Again the blast of the whistle rose in mocking flight. In the course of trailing after H.M.'s investigations I have heard some devilishly ingenious explanations of murder-traps, but this one I had to consign to the top order. It was neat. It was simple. It would work.

Evelyn had a wrinkle over one eyebrow. "Yes, I know what you're thinking, Ken," she remarked moodily. "You're remembering the Chateau de I'Ile last year, and all those explanations… d'Andrieu… Auguste. You remember arguing with Auguste as to whether your valise did or didn't have a false bot — " She paused, and looked up with a startled expression at Serpos's bag in the rack over our heads. "Shades of Flamande! No, I don't suppose it could be. I say, Mr. Stone, it's terribly ingenious, and what do you know about Keppel?"

"Nothing," acknowledged Stone, in cherubic complacence. "Never heard his name until to-night."

"What was his motive?"

"Listen, young lady. I don't say that's the solution: I'm just giving you a suggestion. As for motive, it seems that Hogenauer was trying pretty hard to steal something off Keppel; suppose Keppel wanted to return the compliment? According to what Hogenauer said to that fellow Bowers, it looks likely. But on the other hand… I've got a good notion to go along with you two, and keep an eye on you. If the worst came to the worst, my son-in-law might be able to help — "

"Ss-st!" said Evelyn, in the same warning ventriloquial tone Stone had used before. "'Ware dog-collars."

The door of the compartment rasped open. The lean clergyman with the half-glasses, his stiff bearing showing signs of purpose, stood in the aperture and studied me frostily. Then he moved aside. Behind him showed the peering eyes and sandy moustache of the ticket-collector, who looked suspicious but rather sheepish. The parson nodded towards me.

"That is the man," he said.

We hear much of inward groans: I had several of them. Trouble clung obstinately to my coat-tails no matter what the disguise was. I glanced out of the window, trying to adjust my face. We had long ago flashed past Taunton station, and I wondered how long it would be before we reached Bristol. I was pretty certain that no report about me had come from the police; but what did this dominie have up his sleeve? I turned on him in pontifical haughtiness.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the Compleat Clergyman, with dignity a-towering, "but were you by any chance speaking to me?"

"I was, sir," replied my pal, in the same fashion. He had a harsh, precise voice with a trace of colonial accent in it; and before he spoke there was a rasp and whir in his throat, as though a clock were going to strike. "Understand me!"

He held up his hand, and looked from the uneasy ticket-collector to me. "If a genuine mistake has been made, I shall be happy to apologize. I do not affirm, sir, that you are a criminal or even a civil lawbreaker. But I trust I do not go beyond my duty when I say that this masquerading as a clergyman, particularly with the conduct in which you have chosen to indulge to-night, must be, and will be, stopped. Such a mockery of holy orders "

I jumped up,

"This is really intolerable!" said the Compleat Clergyman. "Do you insinuate, sir, that I am not a genuine — "

"I do," returned my friend. He nodded towards Evelyn, and looked back at the ticket-collector. "And, if I am not mistaken, that young lady is his accomplice."

"Bust him one in the snoot, reverend," Stone said to me, evidently stung by this unchivalrous reference to Evelyn. Evelyn had assumed her Easter-card expression, now of a spiritual horror. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" said Stone warmly, "running around and making trouble for innocent people who-"

The ticket-collector clucked his tongue, and looked gloomily at us, but said nothing.

"Innocent people!" said my friend. "Ha ha ha. You will permit me, sir, the indulgence of a smile. Ha ha ha." He turned to the ticket-collector. "Allow me to repeat precisely what occurred. As this train was leaving a station called (I believe) Moreton Abbot, I distinctly observed this young man run out of the station. He was then dressed in the uniform of a police-constable, and he had in his hand that dark suit-case which you now perceive in the rack beside my own luggage. He boarded the train. This young lady was quite obviously expecting him; since, when he failed to appear within the next five minutes, she went in search of him. Not long afterwards he appeared in this compartment, apparelled in that grotesque travesty of a clerical costume which you now observe him to be wearing. You do not deny all this, sir?"

"Most certainly I do."

My friend folded his arms. "Perhaps you also deny the sequel? Of this young man's subsequent conduct I say little. I pass over his blasphemous language when he entered here, and these two gentlemen cursed at each other in greeting. I pass over his conduct with this young lady, behaviour which I can only describe as the beginning of a libidinous orgy. I wish to make my position clear. If this is the result of a prank or a wager, I have no wish to cause unpleasantness for this young man beyond insisting that he have the decency to leave off this insulting masquerade. I admire high spirits as well, I trust, as anyone else. But — if you will allow me to express an opinion in which I should be only too happy to be proved wrong — I cannot help feeling that something more serious lies at the bottom of it all. To be candid, I should not be surprised if this man were a criminal whom the police are anxious to apprehend. If this proves to be the case, I shall insist that he be put under restraint and handed over to the authorities in the next town."

Stiffly he pointed to the black bag on the rack.

"You have denied my allegations, sir," he said. "Well, prove it. Open that bag."

CHAPTER TEN

The Flying Corpse

This was getting tolerably bad. Everywhere I turned that night, there seemed to be clink at the end of it. The ticket-collector, still silent, turned on me his sad and gloomy expression, giving a curious grunt with a rising inflection.

"No, sir," I said. "I most certainly will not open that bag.’

"You will not open the bag," stated the other formally, and folded his arms again. "And why won't you open the bag, sir, may I ask? Why won't you open the bag?"

"Because it's not mine."

This took him under the ear, but it confirmed his suspicions. He whirred in his throat, looked grimly at the ticket-collector, and regarded me with a terrible smile. He wasn't a bad old boy, and it must have made him furious to see such goings-on in canonicals, so there was good excuse for his accusation.

"You deny," he said, "you deny that you brought a bag in here?"

"No, I don't. But it wasn't that one. My bag is there."

Now it was time to bless Charters's thoroughness in sending me some wearing apparel. I pointed to the valise Evelyn had brought.

"I might have anticipated this, indeed," declared my friend, wagging his head. "Is there any use of his pretending further? I myself can give testimony that the bag he indicates was brought into this compartment by that young lady herself."

Evelyn, her eyes beaming, reached up and took it down. "Open it," she said to the ticket-collector, sweetly.

That functionary, delving deep, produced a tweed suit — clearly Charters's — a pair of pyjamas, a straight-bladed razor, a shaving-brush, and a stick of shaving-soap; and by this time the ticket-collector was turning a very sour eye on a furious clergyman. Then he broke his oracular silence at last.

"Ye'll no' maintain," be said, "that this belongs to the young lady, will ye? For mysel', I'll no judge ye; but, if ye maun hae my opeenion, sin, ye're as daft as auld Jamie."

"Crazy as a bed-bug, agreed Stone. "Or drunk."

"Ay," agreed the other. He took up the coat, and examined the tailor's label with a sinister squint. "You, sir you'll no' mind givin' your name, now?"

"Martin Charters," I said, and Stone shut his eyes.

The ticket-collector examined the label, nodded in satisfaction, and grunted. Then he looked at the black bag on the rack. "Ay. But that —?"

Evelyn pointed dramatically at my antagonist, and entered flushed into the battle. "It's his," she declared. "I saw him bring it in. But I don't think he's drunk, really. I think it's all a part of a nasty, clever plot to throw suspicion on the Rev. Mr. Charters while he gets away: that's what I think! Why should he talk about somebody being a criminal, unless he's one himself? And as for casting those nasty aspersions on my virtue… he says I went out of the compartment. Well, I did! Do you know why?"

"Eh?"

"He made indecent proposals to me," said Evelyn, and her eyes filled with tears.

My antagonist went the colour of an oak-leaf in autumn.

"This is really intolerable," he said breathlessly. "For sheer matchless impudence, this is beyond any contingency I could ever have suspected or conceived of. I shall be happy to prove my identity and my good character by the testimony of any of those who travelled with me in the liner. I–I " He was so furious that he gibbered. "I have been for twenty-two years rector of St. Josephus's Church of Toronto-"

"So he's escaping," said Evelyn, folding her own arms and nodding in an ominous way. "He's running away. If you examine that black bag of his, I'll just bet you find a forged passport, or disguises and things, and maybe a steamship ticket to somewhere in the wilds "

The ticket-collector reached up and yanked down the black bag. And that was how we came at last to discover what Mr. Joseph Serpos had really stolen.

The bag was resting in the hollow of the cloth netting, well down against the bar which prevents luggage from sliding out. It is conceivable that the lower part of the bag, with the metal studs along the edgings at the bottom, caught against the bar when the valise was pulled out. I am not certain precisely what happened. But, as the ticket-collector jumped back, about two inches of the bottom of the bag flew loose on a hinge: and in the next instant the whole compartment was showered with paper money.

To my dazed wits it seemed that, outside a bank, I had never seen so much money in my life. Through the partly open window of the compartment a strong breeze was blowing, and the cloud of currency whirled and circled round our heads. Some of it was loose, some of it in packets. There were batches of five-pound, ten-pound and even fifty-pound notes; including some packets of pound and ten-shilling notes. We did not stop to think. We pounced after it instinctively, to gather it up before it should be blown wide out of the window or into the corridor. Stone dived to pull up the strap and shut the window, losing his hat outside in the confusion. But even in the confusion, I am glad to say, I remembered my impoverished state well enough to thrust a packet of ten-shilling notes into my pocket. We gathered it up as well as we could. The ticket-collector stood back, breathing hard, and eyed the rector of St. Josephus's with malevolence.

"Hauld the skellum," he said briefly, "while I get help. Bristol in five minutes."

We seemed to be flying even faster now, the train swaying and plunging. In pale dignity the rector sat down and gibbered. His eloquence in his own defence so choked him that no coherent word slipped out. I tried to talk to him, explaining that things would be all right presently; but he called me thief and swindler in such blood-curdling if unprofane fashion, and threatened with such firmness to consecrate his life to putting all of us behind bars, that I presently left off. After all, he had only done his duty in denouncing me; but I did not mean to fall foul of the police after all the events of that night.

The ticket-collector returned with two other officials just as we were rolling into Temple Meads station at Bristol. There were not many people, except porters, on the big platform at that hour of the morning. But one of the ticket-collector's companions, after grimly surveying the heap of money, put his face against the window and pointed. He was indicating a stocky man in a bowler hat, whose figure swept past as the man in the bowler hat tried to hurry towards the front of the train.

"I know that chap," was the comfortless news. "He's from the police department — Inspector Somebody. By George, they've tumbled to it! They probably know this fellow's on the train, and they're here to arrest — "

"Duck," I said to Evelyn, and reached up after Charters's bag on the rack. "As soon as we stop, duck!"

The man in the bowler hat had already raised his arm and made a gesture towards our compartment. One of the officials had let down a window with a bang, and was leaning out to shout along the platform.

"I'll get the inspector," I said. "We're witnesses, you know."

I opened the door, and bumped out into a concealing screen of porters. The bag I pulled after me with one hand, and Evelyn with the other. The man in the bowler hat was a little way down the platform. I could have sworn he saw me face to face, and they must have received my description by this time. Yet he was marching towards that compartment without even glancing at me, though for a moment Evelyn and I were full under the light of the platform lamps. Why he paid no attention I was not to learn (with profanity) until later. We turned round a bookstall, and made for the stairs leading down into the tunnel under the vast stretch of Temple Meads. Even when we emerged into the station on the other side, there was still no sign of pursuit. We looked at each other. Evelyn seemed a trifle dazed.

"He looked at us;" she said in an awed voice. "He looked right at you, the police-inspector did, and he didn't even notice. There's nobody following us now. It isn't right. How do you explain it?"

I admitted that I was past explaining anything in this mix-up. "Except that Serpos made a real haul and didn't get away with it. Serpos's behaviour is even more obscure. There must have been eight or ten thousand pounds in the bottom of that bag."

"All that lovely money," said Evelyn dreamily, "that we've got to leave behind… I say, do you suppose the detective's not paying any attention to you means that H.M. has wangled it at last, and they're not chasing you any longer?"

"It's possible, yes. But I tell you with all sincerity that I am not going to drop into a police station and inquire. Besides, it has suddenly occurred to me that we're not even in Charters's jurisdiction any longer. We're not in Devon. We're in either Somerset or Gloucestershire, depending on the side of the river."

Evelyn inspected me. "The Man of the Forty Races," she said tenderly. "Darling, will you for God's sake find the nearest lavatory and take off that parson's outfit and get into Charters's coat? Canonicals don't become you: you've got a look as though you had just robbed the poor box. Also, it's suddenly occurred to me that the spectacle of a hatless clergyman showing up at the Cabot Hotel with only one suitcase and a wench without a wedding-ring is going to queer our pitch most awfully."

I told her she had a low mind, and she inquired, with candour, whether I knew anyone who hadn't.

"It is not," I added with dignity, "that I have any objection to taking off this infernal outfit. But it would appear that I am spending my wedding-eve chiefly in lavatories or in jail, and it's getting to be a nuisance. Besides, no sooner will I climb into Charters's coat than along will come Stone and swear I'm disguised again. It's fate. It's — "

"Now, now," said Evelyn. "Stone has seen that disguise; and, anyway, where's the disguise about a tweed coat? Don't stand there orating, Ken, or they'll be after us… Hurry!"

She was right. I now understand the meaning of the phrase "fully clothed and in his right mind." Once out of that clerical collar, I felt a new man again. In three minutes I had left the lavatory and rejoined her in the breezy square outside the station: and still there was no sign of pursuit. When I bundled Evelyn into the nearest taxi, a clock in the high pointed tower over the station indicated five minutes to two. But on one point I was fiendishly determined. There should be no more disguises or false names that night, with mix-ups of the sort through which we had already floundered. Not ropes or thumb-screws would induce me to give any name other than my own. I explained this to Evelyn, while the cab turned right and then bore to the left, through narrow silent streets in the direction of Bristol Bridge.

"Yes, I know,", Evelyn said thoughtfully, "but don't you think it may be necessary?"

"Necessary? How?"

She brooded. "Well, I mean — first of all, you've got to find out whether Keppel is still out. You can't just walk into the hotel and coolly begin burgling his rooms before you know whether or not he's in, can you? And, if Keppel is as tricky a sort as Stone seems to think, this `out all evening may be a blind. First of all, you'll have to pretend to have an urgent appointment with him. Then, if he's really out, you can get a room on the same floor and crack the crib. Urgent appointment. H'm. Couldn't you be Professor Blake of the University of Edinburgh?"

"No, I could not."

"Yes, but you've got to be something!"

"The `urgent appointment' will do well enough. If we get into a tight corner, I'll tell whatever lie is necessary. But meantime — "

The cab turned up the rise at Bristol Bridge, and then down the long curve of Baldwin Street to the Centre. The great square of the Centre was deserted except for two policemen talking under a clock; a few late electric signs, red and yellow, still flashed away with monotonous gaiety; and the river, winding among buildings as it has done since Bristol was once a city with its streets full of ships, had turned to silver. We went up the slope of College Green, past the Park where Victoria's statue looks out from an eternal whisepering conference of leaves, past the Royal Hotel, past the Cathedral, to the Cabot Hotel some two hundred yards further on.

The Cabot is sedate enough, four-square and four-storeyed in grey stone, with geraniums in the window-boxes and a tall stone pillar on either side of the door. I paid the taxidriver from the packet of notes I had pinched out of Serpos's hoard, submitting that I had an excellent right to some of the swag. A sleepy night-porter opened the glass doors of the vestibule. We went through into a tall, narrow hall, carpeted to the baseboards in some flowered stuff, with woodwork so old that the cracks showed even through its many brown coats of paint. There were steel-engraving sporting prints on the walls, and brass warming-pans hanging from the paneling, and the general air of a comfortable place curtained in for centuries. Towards the left, a light burned

inside a kind of fort with frosted glass windows. A young man with poised eyebrows bobbed up inside it.

"Yes, sir," he said heartily.

I asked for Dr. Keppel, explaining that we had come a long way on an urgent appointment, and must see him despite the hour of the night. The clerk automatically reached for the plug of the telephone switchboard, but he stopped.

"Sorry, sir," he said. "Dr. Keppel is out."

"Out? At this hour of the night? But surely-"

The clerk seemed puzzled. "Yes, sir. He's never out as late as this; not after ten, as a rule. Just one moment." He ducked to one side, towards a letter rack, and pulled out a small card. "Yes. He left a message. I wasn't on duty when he went out, but here it is. He said he was going out about nine o'clock, and mightn't return until late."

This was somewhat disconcerting news. Keppel, whom we supposed to be in Moreton Abbot, had at least been in the hotel here this evening up until nine o'clock.

"Ah. He returned from Moreton Abbot, then?"

"Moreton Abbot? Yes, sir. He got back this afternoon, they tell me."

"Really, this is extremely annoying!" said Evelyn, in her best business-woman's tone. "There is a limit to secretarial duties! I suppose I must be prepared to take shorthand notes at any time of the night or morning, but when a definite appointment has been made… Professor Blake-"

My murderous look stopped her, but the clerk grew alert. "But," I suggested, "we may wait in his rooms?"

The clerk hesitated. "Sorry, sir. That's the last of the message. He says if any visitors should call on him, they — that is, he'd rather they didn't wait there. Sorry sir. You understand. My orders. Dr. Keppel-well, he's like that."

"Then at least," I said frostily, "we may take rooms of our own. My secretary is rather tired…"

The clerk eagerly assented to this. Would we like rooms on the same floor as Dr. Keppel? We would. Would we like connecting rooms? We would. The clerk reached after two keys from the rack, pushed forward the ledger, and beckoned the night-porter. Then he smiled.

"Just as a matter of form, sir," be said; "the lady not having any luggage — you understand-"

We all considered this a very good joke as I paid him. I signed for both of us, and told the truth. But, as the night-porter led us to a creaky lift, Evelyn and I looked at each other. So Keppel had left a message that, if any visitors called, they must not be allowed to wait in his room? Good God, was it possible he expected us? While the lift swayed upstairs, past high and broad corridors with white-painted doors, I tried to enumerate possible traps. It was just possible Keppel was waiting for us; yet, with all these precautions, it did not seem likely.

His rooms were on the top floor. We went down a hall muffled in dark carpet, with the faint frowsty smell which haunts old hotels. It had been built in a spacious time; the rooms were very large, and there were few of the white-painted doors on either side.

"Which," I said to the porter, speaking instinctively in a low voice, "are Dr. Keppel's rooms?"

He nodded towards two doors in the left-hand wall, the last two along that wall. Though the hall was dusky, having only a dim globe in a cut-glass bowl at the head of the staircase by the lift, we could see those doors distinctly: and the ground went from under our feet again. Ordinarily, as I had remembered, the ancient locks of those doors could be picked with a nail-file or a button-hook. But the careful Dr. Keppel bad had both his doors fitted with Yale locks: you could see them gleaming.

We did not say anything, although Evelyn, behind the porter's back, lifted her hands to the level of her ears and shook venomous fists. Our two rooms were at the end of the hall, forming the narrow side of the oblong. We were decorously shown into them, and I got rid of the porter with money…

Then I sat down in one of those mummified overstuffed chairs, and looked round a high room with a very long chandelier and a brass bed. The curtains were blowing slightly at the window. Then there was some fumbling with bolts in a door in the side wall; the door opened, and Evelyn came in. She had removed her hat, and her dark bobbed hair was disarranged. She went to the mirror over the white marble mantelpiece, took a comb out of her bag, and thoughtfully began to run the comb through her hair. Quite suddenly she began to laugh.

"Well, Ken" she said. "We're here. And also we're beaten. Can you pick a Yale lock?" "No."

Her reflection faced me out of the mirror. "At this time to-morrow night," she went on, "we're supposed to be in the Blue Train going felicitously to the South of France. What's the betting we don't make it? We can't get that envelope now-"

I made sulphurous remarks to the effect that we would make the train, and that the envelope was within reach. This room lay directly in line with Keppel's suite, with only the thickness of a wall between. I went to the window and looked out past the blowing curtains. The tricks of eighteenth century builders had their merits: just outside, and only a couple of feet below the window there was a stone ledge running the whole length of the building on that side. It passed beneath Keppel's windows as well. It ran sixty feet above the gardens and trees behind the Library, and the cloisters of the Cathedral School; but it was a good two feet wide, as safe as a path to walk on. Although the moon was partly behind the shoulder of the building, still I could see that path with great clearness in the skim-milk light.

"Do you think you'd better?" said Evelyn quietly, from behind my shoulder.

There was a good clasp-knife in the pocket of Charters's coat. I gave Evelyn directions.

"We don't know when Keppel will be in, but it may be any minute. Stay here, and keep the door to the hall partly open. You've got a straight view down the length of it, of the lift and the staircase. If anyone comes up-"

"What does Keppel look like?"

"I don't know — wait! Bowers said something about him. Little, with a lot of greyish hair sticking up, and he limps. That's distinctive enough. But if you see anybody who looks dangerous "

She nodded, and glanced round quickly. Then she picked up the tooth-glass from the wash-stand.

"Right you are, old boy. If you can burgle a window, leave it open and we'll leave this one open too. If I see anyone coming close, I'll shut the door, and then throw this glass down on the hearth and smash it. You should be able to hear it like a shot. Only, Ken, for God's sake be caref — "

I climbed out. We have all seen the thing done on the films: where the spectacle of a person shuffling with shaky legs along a ledge is supposed to be funny. It is not funny. It is not as easy as it looks. At first you have no difficulty with your feet or legs, but from the waist up to the shoulders you seem to be shaking and swaying out over the edge. For some reason you feel naked. You notice sounds more: the surge of wind rustling in trees sixty feet below, or the gritty scrape of your own shoes. When you see the world below, it seems to swing outward and the whole business becomes only half real. But that is when your knees and legs begin to shake.

I was pressing my left shoulder to the wall, and groping ahead in the grime with my right hand. There was a sensation of rocking tipsily before I got my fingers round the frame of the nearest window. So far as I could see, there were four windows in Keppel's suite. I held on to the frame of the nearest one, feeling hot all over, and edged forward.

The window was wide open.

Wide open. Even the blind was up, and the blind moved or flapped gently when a vast rustling of wind rose in the trees below. The window was an empty black rectangle, into which very little light could penetrate. And I did not like it.

It seemed to invite too much. It seemed to lure you in, as though even the blind were whispering. My natural instinct was to put my hand through, take hold of the sill on the inside, and pull myself through. Yet there are other whispers as well, and in the brain a tiny bell gives warning. Even when you are stuck like a poultice to the wall sixty feet up, something whispers like the wind in the trees. Look out, it says. Don't touch that window. Don't touch

With my right hand I got the clasp-knife out of my pocket, and pressed the catch that snapped open the blade. I poked it inside, felt about in empty air, and ran it along the sash. Nothing. Along the sill there seemed to run, as far as I could discern in the dim light, a tiny groove. I drew the blade of the knife along it.

Look out, I tell you. Don't touch that window. Don't touch —.

And then, with a crash like a guillotine, the window fell.

It seemed to leap or spring at me, because the dim light flashed on its pane as it dropped, and the crash filled the world with noise. I went back like a hinge, flapping against the wall, and only my grip on the window-frame kept me up. That window snapped off the blade of the knife as it might have snapped off something else. For I had caught a gleam of something else as it fell. There was good reason for that, groove in the sill. Into the underside of the window was fastened a whetted blade, the whole length of the window. If I had automatically reached inside and taken hold of the inner edge, the pressure of my fingers or the weight of my hand across the sill would have brought down that miniature guillotine. And four of my fingers would now be lying on the sill, shorn off just above the palm.

These thoughts go fast. I know they go fast, because the knife had fallen out of my hand when I lurched back against the wall. And the whole explanation and picture of that little guillotine went through my head before I heard the knife slap in the branches of a tree below.

I stood for a second, and shut my eyes. I would have given a thousand pounds for just two seconds to relax my legs and sit down.

If all the windows were fitted up like this, it was useless to try getting in. But I was now more afraid to go back than to go forward, since it meant letting go something to which I could hold. I shut my mind against fancies, and edged along the intervening distance to the next window; but the fancies were thick nevertheless. The next window was closed, but it was not locked. I gave it an experimental push with shaky fingers on the glass, and it raised about an inch, then an inch more. There seemed to be no groove inside. It must be tested. I caught the side of my loose coat, wrenched it round and up, and thrust it through the aperture; then yanked the window shut.

The coat was not sliced by another such neat mechanism, as I discovered when I pulled it out. I pushed the window up, risked my luck against more guillotine booby-traps, and tumbled through to safety.

Curtains were drawn over this window. It was very dark inside the room, for the dim light showed only the edge of a colourless carpet. I stood entangled in the curtains, wiping my forehead with them. The only other light was under the sill of the door leading to the hall. There seemed to be nothing sinister here. After a decent interval for the stiffening of the legs, I struck a match.

It was a study, right enough. The match showed books somewhere, and a couple of etchings on the wall. Moreover, I had got the desk first shot; it was against the wall between the two windows, and I found it when my hand moved to the left. It was a desk after the French pattern, high, narrow, and with a folding lid, made of polished rosewood and certainly not of a sort to safeguard valuables. The key was in the lock. I struck another match and opened the lid. There were pigeon-holes on either side, stuffed with papers-except the pigeon-hole on the upper left-hand side. Here, exactly according to plan, there was a solitary envelope. I touched it gingerly, but no trap showed a fang. It was only when I pulled it out (the flap was gummed down, and it was sealed with red wax) that I felt something on my fingers.

Lamp-black.

A thick coating of it had been smeared on the wood round the envelope, so that whoever touched it would take away traces. I stood staring at it, trying to find the trap.

It could have been no actual noise in the room which made me turn round, except perhaps the faint flapping of the blind. Nor was there even an impression that anyone had moved. Yet I struck a third match, and moved forward into the room..

The first thing I saw was a small round table on which stood a bottle bearing a red-and-blue label, and a single glass. Then, beyond it, a long table with a padded chair. Then a reddish smoking-cap stuck up at an angle; then eyeballs glazed with death, and a face distorted with strychnine. And, just before the match burnt my fingers and went out, I saw Paul Hogenauer sitting in the chair grinning at me.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Guillotine-Window

There are sights which do not penetrate deeply into the mind because the mind refuses to credit them. The mind says: You didn't see this. You couldn't have seen it. The thing remains stuck there as flat and shallow as a picture post-card, but as vivid. Then common sense begins to assert itself, and your five wits to tick again, and you realize that you did see it.

Paul Hogenauer, in his red fez and with his twisted grin, could not be sitting in that chair. But he was.

Even the brief light of that match, when it went out, had made images expand and contract before my eyes in the dark. I stood looking at the dark, seeing Hogenauer as plainly as I had seen him a moment ago. He had slipped down in the chair from the position he had assumed in Moreton Abbot some seventy-odd miles away. His chin was thrust up a little more, and his head turned a little more to one side, as though he were contemplating an artistic effect.

The first thing that occurred to me was the sentence H.M. had spoken that night, his first mention of Hogenauer's new theory: "There's something about being able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus." Well, he appeared to have done it. A dead man had done it.

I backed away two steps, and bumped into a chair, and mechanically sat down. In one hand I still had the envelope, which seemed to be rather a weighty envelope; in the other I had a sliver of a burnt match. The match I dropped on the floor. The envelope, with an equally mechanical motion, I put into my pocket. Striking more matches would be no good. There had come over me a craving for light, a frightened craving which brought me up out of the chair: and I had to tell myself to go steady, or the hag and the hungry goblin would have easy prey. On the top of the rosewood desk there had been a little lamp with a dull-yellow shade. At least I could find the desk again in the dark, for it was between the two windows. I groped across to it, feeling my way gently, and pulled the chain of the lamp.

It was still there, sitting in the padded chair. I remember wondering vaguely whether the room as well would be exactly like that little suburban parlour at "The Larches." It was not. It was a big, high room, more severe and with a black-and-white taste as sharply defined as the lines of the etchings on the walls. Although there were not many books, there were a great many neat stacks of papers. The fireplace was in the right-hand wall as you stood with your back to the windows. The table faced it from some distance down the room, so that the dead man siting behind it would have the western light from the far window over his right shoulder rather than his left….

Someone tapped on the window from behind. I whirled round, and saw Evelyn outside the guillotine-window. She was trying to push it up, even as she stared through at the dead man.

To have shouted, to have made a violent gesture of any sort, might have made her lose her grip on that window; for it is not to be denied that she was very pale, and that her long-lashed eyes looked enormous, almost ghostly, behind the glass. But for her to get that window up would mean the fall of the knife across her fingers, like a paper-cutting block in a newspaper office. The devil was playing his fish on a long line tonight, and I don't doubt he enjoyed it. But it was the worst moment in the affair. I don't suppose I could have shouted even if I had wished to. I moved over slowly, blotting out the sight of the dead man and trying to hold her eye. Someone kept repeating steadily and monotonously:

"The other window. Take your hands off that window. Go to the other window. The other window. Take your hands off that window. The other — "

She understood. She disappeared. In two seconds more I was hauling her across the sill of the other window, yanking her through in a way that must have bruised her knees. She was in her stocking feet for that journey; and, though she seemed a trifle out of breath, she was calm enough to smile.

"Sorry, Ken," she said quietly. "But I couldn't stay there. You were so long. You were so long I thought something must have hap — "

"It has. Are you all right?"

"Quite. Except that we're both filthy dirty. I say, you're hurting my hands! Not so hard, old boy: what's the matter: there's nothing wrong with my hands?"

No, there was not. I had never loved her more than at that moment, although I could not have said so, and, anyway, this was hardly what you could call the proper place for the amenities of courtship. She looked round the corner of my arm.

"Who-who is it, Ken?"

"Unless I've gone completely off my chump, it's Hogenauer.'

"But that's —'

"I know."

She looked again. "But he's got hair," she burst out, in a curious tone. "You said Hogenauer was bald. He's got hair. I saw it through the window; I was looking at the back of him. It was all sticking out under that cap." After a pause she added: "Something must have given you rather a ghastly turn, Ken. That can't be Hogenauer. But I don't think we need to be afraid that Keppel will catch us now."

Something like this is often required to put a man's wits back into line. I know that it cleared my head. As 1 walked over to where the little corpse sat grinning, I remembered what Bowers had said earlier to-night. What's Dr. Keppel like? "Something like the governor, little and thin….

The face, of course, was pulled and colored out of recognition by the strychnine. But 'this man,' despite his red fez, did not wear a smoking-jacket like Hogenauer; he had on an ordinary dark coat, with a prim white collar and a string tie. I lifted off the fez, and a wiry brush of greyish black

hair sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, completely altering the aspect of the face. To make sure there was no deception, I even gave the hair a tug; but that almost pulled the body sideways, and I left off. He was cold and stiff. Then I looked down at his left leg, at the cane lying on the carpet beside him. There could no longer be any doubt: this man was Dr. Albert Keppel.

"Ken," said Evelyn from the foot of the table, "look here."

I joined her at the little round table on which stood the bottle of mineral-water and the empty glass.

"He even drank the same sort of mineral-water as Hogenauer," she went on, "and-you see it?"

Beside the glass lay an ordinary buff envelope, somewhat crumpled, and folded over in half. I picked it up, first trying to cleanse my hands of grime on a handkerchief. The envelop was empty, but there was something gritty inside. I shook it a little: a few grains of whitish powder ran together inside. When I touched one of them to the tip of my tongue, there was a faintly bitter taste. These were traces of the strychnine salts.

"Didn't Bowers tell you," said Evelyn, staring blankly across the room, "that when Keppel called on Hogenauer this morning, Hogenauer gave him something like `an envelope folded in half?' Yes."

"Yes, this is it. He gave him a dose of strychnine. And Keppel took it. So far as I can judge, they've been dead about the same length of time."

She had begun to tremble. "Put it down, Ken! Put it down! We've left finger-prints all over the place. Seriously — don't you think we'd better get out of here? Did you get the envelope you came for? The one in the desk?"

"Yes."

"Then that's all we're supposed to do. If they catch us here now…" She stopped, for she could not let go the puzzle. "I say, are there-are there any cuff-links on the desk, or any books missing, or anything like the arrangement you saw in the other place?"

We went back to the table. This work-table was as untidy as Hogenauer's had been clean. There were little bundles of note-sheets, scribbled with mathematical formula; and (to me) similarly cryptic markings; I presumed they were notes for Keppel's physics lectures. There were books with notesheets thrust into them to keep the places, and several coloured pencils. But all these had been pushed aside to make a clear path down the middle of the table. In this cleared space lay a flattish piece of glass, some three inches in diameter. Its underside was flat, its top very slightly convex. It lay against a bronze ash-tray in which were the stumps of many cigars. Close to it, on one of the note-sheets, symbols had been idly scrawled with a blue pencil. Thus:

If a' be the angle of refraction, and t the thickness of the plate, then

BC cos a’ = t

BD = 2BC sin a’ = 2t tan a’

2 µBC — Bd = 2tµ cos a'

"It's something," said Evelyn, "to do with light, or the refractions of light, or got it! I know what that piece of glass is, anyhow. It's the lens of a child's magic-lantern."

Quite suddenly she stopped talking. She stopped, and held out her hand, and spoke in a different voice, little above a whisper.

"Put out that light, quick. There's someone coming upstairs, and they'll see it under the crack of the door."

After getting my bearings as to Evelyn's position, I moved over and pulled the chain of the lamp; then I joined her in the dark. From out in the hall you could plainly hear the whir of the ascending lift. The hotel was so quiet that you could even hear the lift creaking, and the little bump as it came to a stop on this floor. It was probably only some guest returning late-certainly it was not Keppel come to unmask us-but, all the same, Evelyn was breathing hard in the dark.

There was a small jerking and bumping sound as somebody stepped out of the lift. There were no foot-falls on the soft carpet outside, but we could hear a very low voice speaking as two people approached.

"Here, hold on a bit," said the voice of the hotel clerk. It was no longer either professionally hearty or colourless; it was sharp, and it was shrewd. "We've got to decide what we're going to do. The trouble is, it may be a genuine mistake. He may have got it by mistake. If that's the case, I'd risk my job by cutting up a row, to say nothing of waking up the manager and phoning the police. We don't want any trouble for the hotel. But, if I'm right," the voice whispered exultantly, "there'll be a whole lot of profit for —‘

The voice of the night-porter then seemed to growl an excited question.

"That's what it is," replied the clerk. They had evidently stopped. "Take a look at it. It's a counterfeit ten-shilling note. He gave me four of them to pay for the rooms. Mind you, it's a damn good counterfeit. I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't worked for six years in a bank before I took over this job-"

With her lips against my ear, Evelyn whispered in a kind of despairing wail. She said: "Oh, Lord, what have we done now?"

"Shh!"

"I'll tell you what they've done," said the clerk's voice, heard with such uncanny promptitude under the crack of the door that he seemed to be answering us. We both moved back a little. "As I say, it may be a mistake. But he paid me out of a packet of new notes — all new, all ten-shillings and it seemed to be the only money he had. Does that look as though he'd got 'em innocently?

"He give me half a dollar," whispered the night-porter suddenly. "Lordlummycharley, maybe?"

"Ah, blow your half-crown," said the other in lordly callousness. "Sh! Keep quiet, and keep away from that door! Steady. Your half-crown's safe enough. That came out of the change I gave him. But listen: here's what I think. All four of those notes were counterfeit, and they were pretty nearly perfect counterfeits. I'll just bet you there's only one man in England who could have made 'em. I wasn't altogether satisfied with this `Blake' and his `secretary' when they came in here; that's why I made 'em pay in advance. And I'll bet you, my lad, that we've caught two members of the Willoughby gang."

Evelyn faintly gurgled in the dark. The night-porter, in a series of grunts, appeared to be registering a question or a protest. I do not know what sound your heart may be presumed to make when it goes into your boots, as mine did then; but we were very mixed and onomatopoetic together.

"Don't you read the newspapers?" demanded the clerk. "Shh! SHH! Quiet. It's been all over the front page of the Post and the World for the last fortnight. Willoughby was the American forger — best of his kind in the world. Super-engraver. They knew he was over here, and they knew he had a plant for manufacturing the stuff somewhere in the West Country

"Ah," agreed the porter, "but —‘

"I know. They caught Willoughby last week and found his plant near Torquay. Willoughby started shooting, and barricaded himself in; they had to shoot to get him, and they got him through the head. There was eight or ten thousand pounds' worth of counterfeit stuff in his plant. The inquest is next week-"

I could have bowed in the dark. For now we might perceive, unrolled in beautiful simplicity, the whole story of the cross-tangle as it concerned the money and as it concerned Joseph Serpos and as it concerned the elusive Willoughby case. When I had been arrested at Moreton Abbott in mistake for Serpos, and the sergeant had talked on the 'phone to Torquay, it now became clear why the sergeant had been so hilariously amused. "And he probably thought he was doing well, I suppose, the poor fool!" Also I recalled Charters's words to me on the phone, when he had explained how Serpos had robbed his safe without knowing that the contents of the safe were exhibits in the Willoughby case. "He wasn't here at the time we caught Willoughby. The fool!" In other words, Mr. Joseph Serpos had made plans as elaborate as a master-criminal's in order to pinch a sackful of counterfeit money.

However, it explained Serpos's unusual conduct when he was caught. It explained why be had first broken down almost in tears; and why, when his wits pulled together, he said with bogus humility that he wished to go back and take his medicine: the whole Uriah-Heepish behaviour with the shrewd look behind it. For he realized what he had done. He also realized that no very steep charge would be pressed against him. And yet… and yet…

And yet, 1 realized, this was no help to us in our situation. The clerk was speaking again.

"There were two or three others in that Willoughby gang," he persisted. "And I tell you I know that's who they are. I've got a gun. It's that one that's been downstairs in the drawer. It hasn't been fired in years, but it's loaded, and-"

I hurried Evelyn away from the door, over towards the dim line of windows. We had to go. carefully in the dark, and by miscalculation I almost knocked over the little table bearing the bottle and glass. I spoke against Evelyn's ear.

"Did you lock the door out into the hall?"

"Yes. I thought of that."

"Then we can beat them back to the room. If they catch us here it's good-bye, and it'll have to be the ledge again. Do you feel up to it?" '

"Yes."

She was half-way through the window, going steadily, when she turned round again. "Ken, I forgot. The door of your room is locked. But mine isn't. If they don't get any answer from your room, they'll go to mine. And there's a communicating door between."

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Quiet Hotel

We beat them by a short head; but we beat them. When the clerk threw open the communicating door, we were standing in my room by the mantelpiece, and I was lighting cigarettes for Evelyn and myself. The trouble was that it is devilish difficult to assume an air of outraged dignity when you're grimy, dishevelled, and when the lady had no shoes on. There had not even been time for that.

That fellow had charged at the door, evidently convinced that we had done a bunk. I had heard him hammering vainly at my door while we shuffled along the ledge. Now he entered by the open way, and stopped dead.

Before I had not noticed him: he had been only a professional Voice masked under a dim light in the glass fort downstairs. Now he emerged as an energetic young man with flat fair hair, a rather high colour, serious eyes under sandy brows, and a heavy jaw. His clothes were good, and rather worn. He had one hand in the pocket of his jacket: it was gripped round something which made a suggestive bulge there. After throwing open the door, he stopped dead — and I could see in his expression the sort of position in which he thought he had found us. You could almost hear the word: "Misconduct, eh?" Yet this sort of thing usually startles the person who walks in more than the person who is walked in upon. He was definitely flustered.

"Good evening," I said politely. "Well?"

His suspicions, it was clear, were struggling with his professional bearing. The question was whether he would go back into his chrysalis or emerge from it. His tone showed a mixture of the two.

"I — came in," he said. "You didn't answer my knock."

"No," I agreed. "Well?"

There was a pause. Then, after a glance at the night-porter behind, he got it out.

"I'm sorry if there's been a mistake," he said; "but do you usually pay your bills with counterfeit money?"

His higher colour, at that remark, seemed to say, "Rather neat way of putting it." I thought I detected in this young man a keen student of the films. If so, it was all the worse. His eyes had a shiny look, and he breathed rather fast: undoubtedly he was prepared for trouble.

"Counterfeit money? What the devil do you mean, counterfeit money?"

"I repeat, sorry if there's a mistake. You gave me four ten-shilling notes. All of them are bad."

Evelyn and I looked at each other, as though at a private revelation which had just startled us.

"I wonder!" said Evelyn, acting at the very top of her form. "Could it be… that car you sold"

"And," I said, "he paid me in bundles of notes. New notes"

We did not offer to explain to him; we threw sentences at each other as though we were solving a problem of our own, growing more and more excited over it without the matter being of the least concern to anyone else. Then Evelyn, with a look well below freezing, broke off and gave him a glance. You could see that it had shaken his reassurance.

"Both of us seem to have made a mistake," she told him. "However, please don't let it worry you. There is plenty of perfectly good money in my handbag in the other room."

Now he was looking at our grimy state, and his eye wandered across to the window. Then he made his decision. He volplaned down into honest speech, and I liked him for it.

"Look here," he said, "if I'm making a ruddy fool of myself, I'll find it out fast enough. But I think you're a couple of crooks, and I think you've been up to something here tonight. Got any objection to being searched?"

"Yes."

Nodding and bracing himself, he took the revolver out of his pocket. Again his film-training came to his assistance. "Get 'em up," he said.

"Nonsense," cried Evelyn.

"Get 'em up," he said, and meant it. At the back of his bead he was probably enjoying this, despite his uneasiness. It was just possible that he might cut loose with a harmless shot or two to show his mastery of the situation; and the moment that people begin firing harmless shots is the moment that somebody gets hit. Up went our hands, a queer situation for a sedate English hotel-room with a picture of "Deer Drinking by Moonlight" on the wall. Then he beckoned to the night-porter.

"Search 'em."

The porter, who was not a film-goer, looked uncomfortably at Evelyn and made protesting noises. The clerk was flustered.

"Well, search him, anyhow. Hop to it."

The porter, who I could have sworn was apologizing under his breath, began gingerly to put his hands in my pockets and take out the collection of articles I had been all night transferring from one costume to the other. The first thing he found was the red-sealed envelope. The second thing he found was that £100 bank-note.

"Gawdlummycharley!" said the porter, opening it out.

"Bring it here," ordered our captor. I am not likely to forget him fingering that bank-note, looking up and down from it in quick jerks of his head, so as never to take his eyes off us. The muzzle of his revolver was dusty, and I think there was a fragment of cobweb inside the barrel; but it was not an object with which anybody was likely to play tricks. Then he looked up in a blaze of triumph.

"That settles it. This note is counterfeit too — yes, and not a very good counterfeit either. Willoughby's hand must have slipped. My lad, we've caught Willoughby's mob right enough."

I peered round at Evelyn. So the note which had been in the newspaper which Mrs. Antrim said she had found in Hogenauer's scullery, — that note, was bad. And it would appear that in some fashion Hogenauer himself bad been twisted into this business of the counterfeit money. The thing was getting to be too much for my staggering wits, and the clerk grinned like a cat from Chester.

"Get to the house-phone," he ordered the porter, "and wake up Mr. Collins. Also 'phone the police station, and tell 'em we've got two of the Willoughby gang on toast. There's a thousand pounds reward out for them. `Kenwood Blake.' `Evelyn Cheyne.' I wonder what your real names are? Don't move or I'll drill you."

"Oh, for God's sake!" I said in some disgust. "Stop that kind of talk and listen to reason. Do we get a chance to explain? This is more serious than you think."

"It can't be more serious than I think," he informed me. "I took a long shot and it's come off. You can explain at the police station." He considered. Without a doubt, there was enough evidence against us to send the Archangel Gabriel to clink; he knew he was right; and he began to see himself as a hero.

"Here," he added thoughtfully. "This is a story that'll interest the outside world. Just to do your duty, you might ring up the `Press' office. It's — it's a story that'll interest every London paper too. I don't think it's too late to get it in; but anyway there'll be room in Stop Press-"

And also a tasty morsel for Major-General Sir Edward Kent-Fortescue Cheyne to read when he opened his paper at breakfast.

"That," I said, "would be fine publicity for the hotel, wouldn't it? Yes, it would. In your eye. Then you'll have neither the reward nor your job. Will you allow us to prove. who we are? Also, do you mind if I take my hands down?"

He studied this. "Right. But put your hands in your pockets and keep 'em there." Then the porter handed him the long red-sealed envelope which vas the will-o'-the-wisp we had been chasing throughout this entire case, and which was now passing irretrievably out of my hands. "What's in this?"

"Just some papers."

"Probably some more counterfeit money."

"Well, why don't you open it and see, then?" I said. I was in such a heat of wild curiosity to know what that envelope contained that, at the moment, I should not have minded if he had read whatever was in it. "Go ahead — open it."

"Trap of some kind, eh?" he said swiftly. He contemplated the envelope. "Anyhow, we'll see later. Here, Frank. Take this envelope downstairs with you and lock it up in the safe."

Good-bye. Good-bye for ever. And there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it. He was handing it to the porter when he stopped and looked more sharply at it. "It's smeared all over," he muttered. "Dirty. Just like… What is the stuff on it? Lamp-black, by George!"

The porter — our apologetic friend Frank, who had a wart on his cheek-opened his eyes and spoke unexpectedly.

"Is 'e?" he inquired with interest. "Lamp-black! Gawdlummycharley, I bought lamp-black for Mr. Keppel last night. He sent me out for it. Nine-pennyworth. Ah."

"I begin to see," observed our captor, and his eyes were shinning. "Keppel! You asked' for him when you came in, and made sure he was out. You didn't make any appointment, or he'd have been in; he's fussy. You got out that window. You walked along the ledge. You got into his room… Frank! Have you got the master-key to the Yale lock on Dr. Keeper's door?"

"Ah," said Frank.

"We're going down there now to have a look. You two march in front of me, and don't try any tricks… Wait! Who's that coming upstairs?"

Momentarily he had glanced towards the door, and that second might have been the time to knock his weapon aside. But I did not attempt it, for at Frank's reply our last hope went up the chimney and all future prospects of a wedding dissolved in smoke. Frank replied that it was p'leece. Frank said that it was Inspector Murchison from the Bridewell — which I took to be police headquarters — and Frank seemed relieved. Our captor let out a relieved whoop and call to the deliverer, while Evelyn shut her eyes. Into the room came the burly man with the bowler hat, whom we had seen at the station. He looked round the group, and surveyed us sardonically. But that was not the end of it. Peering beyond his shoulder, eager and pink of face, trotted Mr. Johnson Stone.

Stone pointed to me.

"That's the man," he said.

Evelyn spoke in a somewhat strangled voice, after a pause. "OOoo, you Judas," she breathed. "So it was a game after all! It was ghost stories you were telling us after all. L. isn't dead. I'll bet you're L. yourself. You set him on us, did you? Well, I hope you're satisfied."

Stone cast up his eyes. For a moment he stared and went pinker. Then he spoke in the same tangled tone.

"So now," he said, "now I'm a Judas, am I? That's fine. That's just dandy. I hereby take a solemn oath that never again, never if I live to be a billion, will I ever put out a helping hand to anybody again. I'll kick 'em in the face! I'll kill 'em! I'll Listen, you lunkheads, why didn't you wait and let me explain?" He put out a hand and seized the inspector by the shoulder, as though to steady himself. "You poor, blithering, blistering….. Listen. The fellow wasn't at the station to arrest you. He never heard of you in his life. He wasn't coming to our compartment to grab you. He was at the train to meet me. He's my son-in-law, you one-horned limbs of a piebald cow, the son-in-law I've been talking about all evening and the one I said could probably help you! But would you listen? No. And now, as far as I'm concerned you can take your envelopes and your Keppels and your Hogenauers, and you can I make a pause here, remembering that scene in the prosaic hotel-room with the ‘Deer Drinking by Moonlight’ on the wall. It marked the change. It marked the crossing of the Jordan and the parting of the roads. It did not mean peace, for there was no peace in this case until the end of it; but at least it meant the end of our flying career as fugitives from justice. Though I was not certain of this at the moment, I know that I had seldom felt such a sense of relief.

Evelyn spoke in a small voice. "Does that mean," she said, "that-er"

"Take it easy," growled Stone. "What kind of a jam have you got into now?"

Murchison glanced at the clerk, and rattled coins in his pocket. "Anything wrong?" he asked casually.

Stone's son-in-law, in essentials, was a sort of older and Anglicized version of Stone himself. Also, there was about him something which reminded me of our friend Humphrey Masters. He was about thirty-five, heavy in the body, square in the jaw, and with light-blue eyes under wrinkled lids, which gave him an older look. When he took off his bowler bat, which is the Force's way of indicating that there is a truce from duty, he showed wiry brown hair standing up like a brush. He had two furrows round the sides of his mouth, and a slow easy way of talking, which again was like Masters. He stood tapping his fingers on his hat, looking almost absently at the clerk; and I guessed that Stone had told him the whole story.

"Anything wrong," he repeated, "Mr.-'

"Robinson," said the other. He appeared somewhat dazed, and acutely conscious of the revolver in his band. The atmosphere of the room did not now go with it. "I should rather think," he went on slowly, "there was a whole lot wrong. I've caught two members of the Willoughby gang."

"Nonsense," said Murchison.

Murchison was grinning broadly, with an indulgent air. The clerk stared from one to the other of us.

"I seem to have got in wrong, somehow," he observed. "You're all looking at me as though I'd done something. I.tell you this man gave me four counterfeit ten-shilling notes, and he's got a counterfeit £100 note in his pocket-!"

Murchison seemed a trifle startled at this, but he only went over and clapped the other on the shoulder, with a sort of shepherding motion, as though he were gently easing him out of the room.

"Now, now, take it easy," he urged. "I know all about that. I can vouch for this lady and gentleman. They're all right."

The clerk hunched his neck down into his shoulders. "Then I'm in the soup," he replied frankly. "But there's something very funny going on here, and I've got a right to know what it is. I think I'll wake up Mr. Collins — that's the manager-and get him to find out what it is, if I can't. Hang it, man, look at them! They burgled Dr. Keppel's room. Look at this envelope. If you'll just go down there, you can see for yourself. You know Dr. Keppel yourself. You've been here to see him. Well, I tell you this man must have.."

Under his rather sleepy and paternal air, I thought Murchison looked very worried at this. He cleared his throat and shifted his heavy shoulders.

"Did you see him enter the room?" he asked quickly.

"No, but if you'll only go down there-"

"Where is Dr. Keppel?"

"He hasn't come in yet."

"Now suppose," suggested Murchison, with the air of one making a fair business proposition, "you leave this to me, eh? Just for a little while? You can take my word for it that these people aren't criminals. But I want to talk to them. Suppose you go downstairs and wait until I call you. Just leave everything to me, and you won't have anything to worry you. Yes, yes, yes, I know you were `only doing your duty'; no, there'll be no trouble'

"Have a cigar," said Stone affably.

A somewhat dazed clerk, with a cigar in one hand and a cobwebbed revolver in the other, was shepherded out of the room. When the door was closed, the two others turned to us. Murchison's air of sleepy-smiling bonhomie was gone; his heavy face, with the puckered eyelids looked ugly and worried. He held the red-sealed envelope which he had deftly slid out of Robinson's hand, and he tapped it against his hat. Stone was worried too: he spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, peering over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed.

"Listen," Stone said hoarsely. "I didn't tell him about it. That is, I didn't introduce the subject, until after he'd told me something. Then I had to tell him, and we got over here as fast as we could. Bill here-"

"Wait a bit, Pop," said Murchison irreverently. After a pause, during which the breath whistled in his nostrils, the inspector spoke in a very quiet voice. "He's dead, isn't he?"

The breeze still blew the curtains at the window. Evelyn went over softly and huddled down into the padded chair.

"Dead? Who?"

"You know who I mean. Dr. Keppel."

I drew a deep breath. "Yes, he's dead. He's sitting in that room down there, in exactly the same position as… Here, by the way: do you know about Hogenauer?"

"Yes. The head of the family here told me after I'd disgorged my bit of information, which I didn't know was important." He smiled sardonically. "I thought it was a bit of a good story to greet the visitor with. It wasn't. It Let's get this straight. Keppel's dead, then. Strychnine poisoning, I suppose?"

"That's it; and in the same brand of mineral-water as Hogenauer. They're sitting in just the same position at the table, and Keppel's got on a cap like Hogenauer. But how did you know it?"

"Because I knew Keppel was going to drink the stuff," Murchison answered bitterly. "No, no, I don't mean he was going to drink strychnine, and you can lay a small bet that neither did he. As for this envelope," be juggled with it, "as a matter of fact, I put it into the pigeon-hole of the desk myself. I was here this afternoon, you see. It was all a part of the same — well, so far as I can see or so far as I'm concerned, the same hoax."

From the chair Evelyn spoke almost casually.

"We're terribly grateful to you," she told him, "for pulling us out of that mess. But if you know the explanation of all this: then before I go completely off my rocker: before I turn into as stark gibbering a lunatic as Mr. Stone thinks I am: will you please, please tell us what this is all about?"

Murchison shook his head. "That's it. I don't know. All I know is what happened this afternoon. And that I'm likely to get into a devil of a lot of trouble myself."

He walked over and put his hat down on the bed. Then be folded his arms and stared at the floor, repeating, "Nice mess! Pretty mess!" as though he were calling on a dog to do tricks.

"Oh, ah. Well, Dr. Keppel.rang me up this afternoon, and asked me if I could come over here. I know him slightly. I've also met his friend, Mr. Hogenauer. You see, both of them were very anxious to keep on the good side of the law. Keppel not so much as Hogenauer, I admit. I gather Hogenauer had got in to a row in Germany, and was afraid we might deport him."

"Whoa there! There's been a lot of talk," Stone interposed, blinking curiously at me, "about a fellow named `L.' — and international plots-and maybe —‘

"International plots my foot," said Murchison explosively. He glanced up with a sort of heavy keenness. "Excuse me, Mr. Blake. Mind you, I don't want to contradict any Powers That Be, or put my oar in where I've got no business. But I have got business here now, worse luck; and I tell you quite frankly I think it's rubbish. Those two? Keppel and Hogenauer? I'll lay you a tanner that if Hogenauer ever saw so much as a dog without a license, he'd go and report it to the Moreton Abbot police station."

"Harmless," I said, "perhaps. But did you know that Keppel's got a sort of miniature guillotine rigged up on a window in there?"

Murchison jerked up his head. "Miniature guillotine? What do you mean?"

"That can wait for a minute. Go on with what you are saying."

"Well — it's not much." He rubbed his leathery jaw, and at that moment he looked older than Stone. "Sometimes I used to drop in on Keppel, at his invitation. He wasn't a recluse like the other one. I liked to hear him talk. Ever see him in action? Little chap standing up very straight, eyes half-shut, two fingers pinched together in the air as though he'd got hold of an idea by the tail. Fussy, bustling sort. But I liked him. He could talk on the subject of Light (that was his branch); you didn't know quite what he was talking about, but it sounded damn interesting with all those thingummyjigs. Understand? Oh, ah, well.

"This afternoon he rang me up and asked me if I could come over here. That was about four o'clock. When I got here he said he wanted `expert advice.' I said, on what? Then he showed this envelope. The flap was gummed down, but there was no red seal on it. Then he said, `I want to put this envelope in such a position that nobody who came in here secretly could possibly get at its contents.' "

"Yes?" I prompted, as he paused.

"Naturally, I said, `why don't you lock it up in the hotel safe? Are you afraid of burglars?' He said I didn't understand. He's got a very patient air, though his English gets mixed up when he's excited. He said something to the effect that this was a kind of trap. He said he wanted to make certain nobody could put over any hanky-panky on him: move the letter: read it: touch it. He said he'd got some lamp-black to spread in such a position that if the letter were moved at all there'd be traces. I showed him another trick. See this?"

He held out the envelope and pointed to the seal. We all crowded round. Evelyn had ducked into her own room, to put on her shoes and tidy herself up; but at this she emerged like a cuckoo out of a clock.

"What about it?" Stone asked suspiciously. "I don't see anything. It looks like a blob of plain wax to me. Hold on! It's a finger-print."

"It's Keppel's finger-print," Murchison told him with dour complacency. "There are ways of forging seals, but you can't do any bread-crumb trick that will imitate this. It's too delicate. Well, I put the envelope into the pigeon-hole and arranged it for him. Then I asked what the game was. He said if I would come round the next morning he would tell me. That was all."

"But the strychnine?"

Murchison swore under his breath. "There's the worst of it. I said, `Are you going to wait up to catch somebody at that envelope?' He said that he'd probably be asleep. I said, `asleep?' Then he got out a yellowish envelope with a dose of white powder in it, and showed it to me. I remember his exact words, because he was so precise about 'em. He said:

`My friend Mr. Hogenauer gave me this, and assured me it was ordinary bromide. I do not believe him. I think he has tried to give me a sleeping-powder and insisted that I take it. I have tasted the powder, and it is bitter. That means it is veronal'."

I whistled.

"Veronal! And that's why he took it as meek as a lamb!"

Stone was exasperated. "You say this and that. You say it might be this or that, but still you're not making much sense that I can see — Why don't you settle it? Why the devil don't you open the envelope?"

Murchison nodded.

"Yes. He told me to come her; to-morrow morning and open the envelope to `see fair play.' That's what I'm worried about-"

With a quick gesture he tore open the envelope.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Return of L

Inside were folded several thick sheets of paper, covered with a large and spidery, but very clear handwriting. Murchison glanced at the first few lines, and his expression altered.

"What is it?" asked Stone rather hoarsely. "Read it!"

"It's the solution," said Murchison, without lifting his eyes. "It's dated June 15th, 3.00 P.M., and it's addressed to me. You better all come here."

He spread out the sheets on the table in the middle of the room.

This account [ran the spidery handwriting] will serve both as an explanation to you and as the test 1 mean to apply to my friend Hogenauer. You are the sole witness to the failure or the success of this experiment, which I made solely to convince my friend of his folly. I have mentioned the matter to no one: I should not, as you can understand, care to have it known that a man of facts associated himself with any such "odyllic" quackery. It has been noticed that when a man of strongly scientific mind has passed his best physical age, and is threatened by arterio-sclerosis which may end in brain-apoplexy, he very often turns to studies which are exactly the reverse of scientific. From a host of minor ailments it leads to the hardening of the arteries of the brain: it is a fact of nature we need not discuss. You have met Mr. Hogenauer, and you have seen his appearance of illness. He has been under superficial medical care for some time; and, though he has obeyed minor rules drinking only mineral-water, when he was formerly fond of stimulants; and giving up smoking, even though he kept by him the collection of pipes out of which he used to get so much enjoyment-still he remains mentally active. In short, the former scientist is now obsessed with proving the truth of Clairvoyance. It has been remarked that poets do not go mad, but mathematicians do. The poet only wishes to get his head into the heavens. It is the scientist who wishes to get the heavens into his head: and it is his head which splits. These thoughts wake self-distrust; but let us be fair to Hogenauer. His belief in Clairvoyance (1 use the term loosely) has no connection with spiritism or an other world. It is a branch of that subject called Animal Magnetism which has been under so much dispute from Mesmer to Heidenhain. It presupposes that some sensitive subject, in a hypnotic trance, can accurately describe objects in a room at some distance removed-even a room of which the subject in his waking consciousness has no knowledge. There have been apparent instances of this. I do not deny it. But, unlike Hogenauer, I should explain it in the difference between Sensory Impressions and Memory. Memory depends on the direction of the attention to sensations. If the effort of attention be strong, the recollection will be vivid; and the converse is true. Sensory perceptions come and go, like shadows of clouds on a hill, without any attempt at fixing them, and consequently with no recollection of them. The sensory perceptions may have existed for so short a time as to leave no perception behind. It is generally admitted by physiologists that the cerebral hemispheres are the seat of the higher mental operations — such as attention — although the interdependence of these hemispheres with the lower sensory ganglia, which receive all sensory impressions in the first instance, and with motor-ganglia which are the starting points of motor-impulses, is not understood. One portion of the nervous system may work without the other.-Thus, during free cerebral activity we pay little attention to what we see or hear, and consequently remember nothing. As a practical example: Hogenauer has many times visited me at this hotel. His conscious mind may be convinced that he has seen no other room except my own. But a half-open door, as he passes along a corridor, may have made a sensory record which is not (and cannot be) released until cerebral activity is destroyed by the hypnotic state. Thus Braid's old term of ysvpov-vnv or "nerve-sleep," may be an exactly literal definition. Hogenauer's theory is as old as the Egyptian belief in the ka, or the German superstition of the doppelganger. That is to say, the projection of a sympathetic subject outside material bounds — exactly as a magic-lantern, picture is thrown on a wall. Hogenauer believes that he needs no operator to put him into a hypnotic state, or direct him. I do not, of course, quarrel with this. Any medical man will tell you that self-hypnosis is easily managed in a sympathetic subject. My friend's method is this: All devices for self-hypnotism depend on a beam of light meeting a broken, polished surface, preferably a moving surface, on which the subject's eyes are fixed. This broken surface should be placed from a foot to eighteen inches above the level of the eye. Thus, in a darkened room, a thin shaft of light is caused to fall across my friend's desk directly in line with the foot of a lamp-cord hanging above the desk. At the end of the lamp-cord, where the bulb ordinarily hangs, is suspended a cluster of small bright objects-silver is the best medium-which shall present the broken surface. The string itself is of twine which may be twisted in such fashion (you have seen a similar principle in child's toys) that it shall slowly revolve. The light, passing across it, strikes back a series of tiny dazzling refractions from the silver surface; and it is upon this that the subject, sitting in his chair, fixes his eyes. I suggested this method to him. 1 leave out technical details, though I have worked out the light equations for him. He recently tells me that in only one respect is it unsuccessful. The beam of light, passing beyond the revolving surface, encounters a bookshelf on which there are some volumes highly gilded. The refraction of light from this gilt, broken as the beam is by the first surface, creates another glow which tends to distract the eye. He has informed me that, on the occasion of this "experiment," he will remove the gilt-bound books…

Someone was speaking.

"Oh, my eye," breathed Evelyn. "My own eye! Ken, is this true? Is that the way the room was arranged?"

I was thinking back on the first curious evidence I had beard in the case; the report that Sergeant Davis, who had crept up one night to look through a chink in the shutters of Hogenauer's parlour; had made to Charters: "He says that the room was dark, but that it seemed to be very full of small, moving darts of light flickering round a thing like a flower-pot turned upside down." So that, then, was how Hogenauer thought he was able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus.

"It's just how the room was arranged," I admitted. "There was a loop in the end of that string, to hang it from the light."

"Move over," said Stone; "I can't see the foot of the page. Now turn it; next page! Yes, but what about the furniture being changed around? That — "

It will readily be understood that, in a man suffering from morbid idiopathic action, such experiments can be dangerous. Not only is my friend convinced if his own ability to project his own mind, but he is anxious to convince me that I can do the same. It is true that, both mentally and physically, we have a great deal in common; we are first cousins, and, like Hogenauer, I am a good hypnotic subject. So much, again, I have never denied. He contends that, if we were to throw ourselves into a hypnotic state at the same hour — he in his own home, I in mine — and if physical conditions were made the same for both of us, then I should be able to "pay a visit" to his rooms at the same time that he "paid a visit to mine." I replied that I had no doubt of my ability, by concentration, to attain a state of self-hypnosis. The sequel I denied, because there would be no means of proving it. While in the cataleptic state, influenced by thoughts already planted in my subconscious mind, it was possible I might receive a hallucination of having "visited" his study at Moreton Abbot. Having been there many times, I should have too vivid a memory of it. He told me-only this morning — that he would arrange a suitable test for this: viz., he would so alter the arrangement of furniture in his study that if, on waking, I could recall the position in which it stood, then there would be irrefutable proof that this could be no mere projection of memory….

"Have you got to the bottom of that page?" inquired Evelyn. "Because, if you have, let us take an interval out for groaning. There was undoubtedly method in the old boy's madness. Also, you can see the explanation of dear Mr. Hogenauer's jocular remarks to that servant what's his name-"

"Bowers?"

'M. Bowers, yes. about paying a visit to Keppel tonight. Grand sense of humour, I don't think. `I am going to Bristol to-night.' `Shall I pack a bag?' `No, I won't need a bag,' — ha, ha, ha. `Yes, I'll be at Dr. Keppel's, but I don't think Dr. Keppel will be there: in fact, I've got every hope that he'll be out.' And his final dig: `Yes, Harry, I think you may have a visitor to-night, but I doubt if you'll see him.' So," concluded Evelyn, tapping the papers, "this morning Keppel went to Hogenauer's house to arrange the details-,

… arrange the details [said the dead man's handwriting]. And so we come to the point of all these sheets, and the reason why I inflict on you such a detailed statement. This morning he made a further suggestion. He showed me a bottle which he said contained "bromide powders," suggesting that — since we should both be under some mental excitement at the time of the experiment, and might find difficulty in concentrating sufficiently to induce a quick state of hypnosis — we should both take a dose of the nerve sedative just fifteen minutes before the experiment began. He poured a dose of about a dram, or, roughly, a teaspoonful, into an envelope, and gave it to me. He further suggested that we should both swallow the sedative in mineral-water, so that conditions should be the same. I hope you do not smile at the spectacle of two elderly gentlemen playing nonsensical games. I agree to all this because I mean to save Paul Hogenauer's mental health; and I have done more absurd things to convince men of less important truths. But here I may say that I became suspicious. For the test I have imposed on him is this: I have said that I shall put a certain piece of writing into an envelope, seal it up, and place it in the upper left-hand pigeon-hole of my desk. If he can read what is written inside, and afterwards quote its contents correctly to me, I have promised to give more credit to his belief. Yet (you, being a practical man, will ask) why does he give me a bromide? 1 am a practical man as well. I believe my friend to be an honest man; but I do not need to point out that even honest men have resorted to charlatanism — in the teeth of skeptics — in order to prove what they believe to be a truth. Hence some, I fear, of our "miracles." Suppose, then, that what he has given to me as a bromide is really a sleeping-draught? In order to demonstrate the accuracy of that which he cannot scientifically prove, he has conceived the idea of putting me to sleep for some hours while he comes here in the flesh to get at that envelope. It is only a suspicion, yet I have direct confirmation of it. I tasted the white powder, and found it bitter: unlike a bromide. But I know, therefore, what in all probability it is. It is veronal, a strong sleeping-draught. I mean to go through with this, and take the dose. But I have also taken precautions to see that this letter cannot be tampered with. By the time you read this, you will have helped me. In addition to making it impossible for any trickery to take place, I have instructed the hotel to allow nobody into my rooms until I "return." At fifteen minutes to nine to-night, I shall take the dose. For my own self-hypnosis, I have chosen the medium of a sheet of convex glass, actually the lens of a magic-lantern. The windows of my study, you may have noticed, face the west; I have calculated the angle of the sun, low at that hour. It should strike through the far window with just sufficient strength to draw a proper reflection from the crystal without attaining (in convex glass) the effect of a burning-glass; but, in order to prevent distortion, I must raise the window. God knows, I am giving his experiment a fair chance! Whether my friend intends fraud, or whether I am entirely mistaken — as is possible-in any case he must be roused out of these experiments. I should not care to see him certified. Even if he kept all mention of them to himself and to me, and worked secretly, it would be bad enough. But he has a passion for writing letters. Even in the old days of the war, when he chose to go back to our native country and ally himself with secret-service operations, this strange friend of mine must write a full account of his motives to the Chief of the British Counter — Espionage Service. He has never, I think, forgotten those days. Many friends remain to him in England, though he sees few of them. What he does is to write notes. Why' he should write mysterious notes, making dark hints about a subject on which he is working, but never mentioning its nature, I do not know: but doubtless a psychiatrist would. This is bad enough when it comes to writing to private individuals. But when he chooses to write to such people as the Chairman of the British Medical Association, and even to the Home Secretary, I must point out that the Home Secretary probably suspects the existence of some sinister political plot, and I should not be surprised to find us both being watched. This is ridiculous. I have, therefore, urged my friend to write and correct such impressions. I believe he did so, at last, this very morning — to a seat of authority. At least they will know he is honest, even if they suspect him of being mad. But I know, too, that he believes I suspect him of fraud in the managing of his "experiment" to-night. He showed me a copy of the letter, in which I noticed significant words. It went something like: "I have always denied that the soul, or spirit, or life-force, or what ever you wish to call it, is confined to hard-and-fast planes. I will make the attempt to-night, and I assure Your Excellency that I have every hope of success. The envelope is in the upper left-hand pigeon-hole of Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in view of Keppel's doubts, to have had two reliable men here, — as witnesses, without a doubt. Does he mean no trickery, then? In any case, the letter will be received to-morrow and will clear up whatever suspicions may exist. Tomfoolery! At least it has been sent to a man who will thoroughly understand: His Excellency the Chief of the Military Intelligence Department, Sir Henry Merrivale.

There were a few more words, but we did not look at them. Stone brought his hand down slowly on the table, and spoke in an awed, hollow, ecstatic tone.

"Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy," he said, in such a youthful-sounding voice that we turned to peer at him. "Right this way, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up. This way to the big tent. Only ten cents, one dime, the tenth part of a dollar, to see the Cheshire cat chase its tail. See it chase its tail all round the tent. See the Grand Walrus, the One and Original Lummox, in a grand race with two operatives to grab a letter that will be delivered to him by the mail-man to-morrow morning."

Evelyn turned on him, flaming.

"You shut your head!" she said fiercely. "How was he to know it? Wouldn't you have done just what he did? I admit he dropped a brick, but was it his fault? That letter "

Inspector Murchison was cautious. "That letter-hurrum, well, it explains a good deal, miss," he said, and you could a!most hear the echo of Humphrey Masters's voice.

"It explains the whole damn sheebang," Stone announced off-handedly. "Where are all your mysterious spy-plots now? It's just like what Keppel wrote here: it's two elderly gentlemen playing a nonsensical game. What do you say, Blake?"

"I say it's not as simple as that. What sort of explanation have we got after all?"

"What sort of explanation?"

"Yes. There's an explanation of a series of peculiar contradictions in the physical evidence, a string of queernesses like the string of cuff-links. The oddities are accounted for. We know why some books were missing from a shelf, why furniture was changed in a room, why lights flickered round a flower-pot turned upside down. Well? Where does it get us after all? Remember, there's still the fact that someone poisoned Hogenauer. Why? If all this is true — why? No L. No spy-plot. But why did Hogenauer mention L., and why did he want two thousand pounds for betraying his identity? What good would two thousand pounds be to him in forwarding an experiment like this? Then there's the question of the counterfeit money."

"What money?"

I explained, briefly. "Whereupon Serpos steals the money and does a bunk, on the same evening that Hogenauer is poisoned. But in a newspaper in Hogenauer's scullery is a counterfeit £100 note. Was Hogenauer tied up into the gang, somehow? Go on: swear at H.M. all you like. But I'd be willing to bet he's playing a much deeper game than any of us could guess."

Murchison drew a vast breath and shook himself.

"Well, that's neither here nor there. My job, right now-" He looked towards the door, scowling. "Mess! Ruddy mess, that's what it is! And I-well, I assisted, in a manner of speaking. There's only one consolation. The end of the business isn't here. The end of the business is back in Torquay. Someone there gave Hogenauer the poison, and Hogenauer gave it to Dr. Keppel. There can't be any investigation., from this end. All we've got to do is pick up the pieces. Point is, Mr. Blake, what do you intend to do?"

"Ring up H.M at Torquay and report: with feeling. Then our part of the business is finished. Afterwards-'

"Yes?"

I faced it. "That depends entirely on you. Officially, you've got us. In two places tonight I've been the first to discover a body! I must be wanted rather badly. On the other hand, H.M. promised protection. If we've walked into the frying pan with you, we're past hope. But, if you've talked to Stone, you must know that we're supposed to be in London to be married at eleven-thirty to-morrow morning."

Murchison regarded us with a heavy and sleepy smile.

"If what the governor says about you is true," he remarked, with a sudden come-down from his official manner when he nodded towards Stone, "you haven't had a decent bit of luck since you left Torquay. And you haven't officially `discovered this body," he jerked his head, "yet. But I want you to understand my position. I'm not the Chief Constable. I'm not even the superintendent. I'm a common-or-garden detective-inspector with none too brilliant a record at that. I can't turn you loose, officially, and let you get back to London, even if you could find a way back at this time in the morning. It's certain you can't stay in Bristol, for there'll be a big whoop when this news goes to headquarters. But there is one thing I can do: I can put you in a police-car and send you back to Torquay. Then it's their business. What they see fit to do I can't say. You're wanted as witnesses by the Chief Constable there, and that's all I know about it. Follow me?"

There was a pause.

"And from Mechlin church-steeple we heard the half-chime,"

recited Evelyn ecstatically.

"And Joris broke silence with, `Yet there is time!'"

"Ken, we may be going back in the other direction, but it's the only thing that can save us; and we'll be at that wedding yet! I say, thanks most awfully. You've pulled us through."

"Thank him, Miss Cheyne," grunted Murchison, and nodded towards Stone. "He seems to have taken a fancy to you. Is everything agreed? Right. I'll go down and discover the body now. You three had better stay here, and keep in the background as much as possible. No, wait; you'd better come along with me, Mr. Blake. You'll have to get through to Torquay before a crowd gathers, and there's a telephone in Dr. Keppel's rooms."

We went out into the dim corridor, closing the door behind us. Down by the cut-glass lamp at the stairs, a mysterious and furtive head first poked itself round and then dodged back in singularly ghostly fashion. Murchison first whistled. and then ran after it. It turned out to be the head of the night-porter, who was sheepish. From him Murchison procured the pass-key and opened the door of Keppel's sittingroom.

There was a light-switch at the left of the door. Once the chandelier was illuminated in that large white-papered room with the etchings on the walls, it had lost most of its terror. It was still bleak. The little corpse in the chair was still grotesque enough. But we had learned the explanation and dug the core out of the mystery: there could now be room for pity. Murchison closed the door and stood with his back against it.

"H'm," he said.

"Poor devil," he added, after a pause.

"Yes. It's the unnecessary thing. The superfluous murder "

Murchison weighed something in his hand. He nodded towards a door in the left-hand wall, beside the white-marble mantelpiece.

"That goes to the bedroom," he said. "The telephone's in there. But about this ‘unnecessary'- I dunno. Yes, I dare say it was. But there's something I can't quite get through my head. A lot of us have heard of Sir Henry Merrivale; I know I have. And I can't help feeling he's got a whole lot more up his sleeve than the governor," he nodded vaguely back in a direction which represented Stone's presence, "seems to think. You've said it yourself. A lot of ordinary details are explained, like cuff-links and missing books and moved furniture; and they turn out to be the easiest of the lot to explain. It's Hogenauer's other behaviour that's hardest to explain. If he was a harmless old dodderer doing nothing more than a spot of crystal-gazing, why should anybody want to murder him?"

"The Punch and Judy murders," I said. "All the alarms and excursions, all the high hocus-pocus of spy-doings, have turned out to be no more real than a child's Punch and Judy puppet show. There is no `L.' There is no — "

Sharply and stridently in those quiet rooms, a telephone rang.

You could almost imagine that a ghostly tingling and echo came from the glass and bottle on the little round table. Murchison went over quickly and threw back the portiere on the door to the bedroom. He did not even bother to turn on a light. The telephone stood on a little stand just inside, to the left of the door.

"Yes," he said, more as a statement than as a question.

It was so still that I could hear a soft voice murmuring in the receiver, although I could distinguish no words. Murchison stood half in shadow and half in light, one shoulder humped; his big, rather bovine face was turned to the sitting-room, and his eyes were blank.

Then he spoke. "Who is this speaking?… Yes, he's dead. Yes, he was poisoned…. Who is this speaking?" Without altering his dull tone, he put his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke softly to me. "Get hold of that porter. Tell him to go downstairs like hell and get the clerk on the switchboard and find out where this call's coming from. I'll try to hold him until-"

The night-porter was not far away from the door; he almost tumbled through when I opened it. Fortunately he had caught no glimpse of the figure in the chair inside. But he seemed to understand, did slow-moving Frank; Frank made remarkable time to the lift, and I heard it humming downstairs as I went back into Keppel's rooms. Murchison was still speaking softly to the telephone. He had the air of one who, gently and with gloved hands, is trying to draw out a nest of wasps.

"If this is a joke, I haven't got any more time to talk with you…. Don't gobble. Who are you? Who is this, then?"

By one of those curious gear-changes or volcanic disturbances along the telephone system, there was in the receiver a violent sort of plop which seems to split your ear-drum. Murchison moved the receiver away from his ear. I was close to him. I could distinctly hear the soft voice which crept out of the receiver.

"This is L. speaking," it said. "Would you like to know the truth about the money?"

There was a whispering, soft, very unpleasant laughing on the wire.

Then the line went dead.

For a couple of seconds Murchison automatically jiggled the hook. Then he got through to the switchboard downstairs. "Are you after that call? Right. Get it. Get it or I'll have your hide. Keep at it. Ring me here the minute-yes." He put down the receiver slowly, and looked up. "It was an assumed voice, of course. Mr. Blake, I've got an idea I've been talking to the murderer. And I've got an idea he's a rather more ugly customer than a puppet."

He lumbered out slowly into the room, his hands in his pockets.

"L.," he said.

I didn't know what to say. The case was turning upside down again.

"You also," Murchison went on, in the same heavy voice, "told me something about a window fixed up like a miniature guillotine?'

The 'phone rang again, and he went after it. Afterwards he turned round with an air that was something between satisfaction and doubt.

"No difficulty about that," he informed me. "It was a trunk call, and easy to trace. The number was Torquay 0066. It appears to be the house of Dr. Lawrence Antrim."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Punch and Judy Show

The moon was low behind the headlands, and, although the sky had turned blacker yet, in another hour or more it would be dawn. Through that hush the police-car turned up into a familiar lane. On either side were high hedges, with the dim white of apple-blossom beyond; the wet scent of dew and sea mingled with it, and the soil of Devon slept. We were returning up the headland on which stood Charters's villa and Antrim's house. From some distance away a church clock whispered the quarter-hour to four.

The police-car contained the constable who drove it, and Evelyn, and myself — and Mr. Johnson Stone. Stone had insisted on coming back with us. Half the reason why he had put into Murchison's head the idea of sending us back, he pointed out, was that he wished to return and see old soand-so's face when the old so-and-so learned the truth. I had put through a brief trunk-call to the old so-and-so, giving a brief flutter of the facts. He had remained cryptic.

On that ride not one of us, I think, was tired. Stone sat in front with the constable, and Evelyn and I in the back. We were fretted and disturbed, but not tired. Possibly to divert our minds, possibly because it was the natural thing, we did what people usually do on night rides: we sang. Stone proved to be an enthusiastic amateur tenor, with a strong preference for sentimental Scottish songs. The things he did to Annie Laurie, upturning his face to the moon, exposing nearly all his teeth on the top-notes, would have wrung tears from a Highlander. The constable also proved to be musical. He never turned round or lifted his eyes from the road as though it would be a dereliction of duty to do so; but he stolidly joined a tuneless bass to everything Stone started.

We fell silent when we reached the top of the lane. Charters's house was illuminated. So, some distance over to the left, was Antrim's. And, as we turned into the driveway, a figure moved out and gestured us to stop. It was Charters. He was as stiff-backed as ever, but he looked even more fretful and worried and tired, as of a man who wishes to get this nonsense over with and go to bed. He laid a large knuckled hand on the door of the car.

"Glad you're back," he said briefly. "Don't go to my place. Drive on over to Antrim's. They're all there."

"All?"

"All," said Charters. "Dr. and Mrs. Antrim. Even Bowers. They've also brought Serpos back from Moreton Abbot — the blasted young pup. They're holding high inquisition; or, rather, Merrivale is. He's taken over Antrim's consulting-room, as coolly as though he owned it."

"How long have they been there?" I asked quickly. That telephone-call from `L.' had come through, we had ascertained, at just one-thirty.

"How long? Why? — some time, anyhow; ever since about midnight, when Mrs. Antrim got back from Moreton Abbot. She's a pretty strong-headed girl, but for once I thought we should have a case of hysterics on our hands." Charters paused. Peering in the darkness, he had caught sight of Stone, and he instantly assumed his stiff official manner. "Mr. Stone? I hardly thought "

"All the same, colonel," Stone told him without abashment, "I think you'll be glad to see me. Even if I did get thrown out on the seat of the pants"

"Sorry," said Charters perfunctorily. "We seem to have made a number of mistakes to-night. But I do not think it will be long before they are rectified. Shall we move on?"

He stood on the running-board of the car while we moved on. Antrim's house was a neat little box with a red-tiled hall, in which another of the ubiquitous police-officers stood stolidly: this time a sergeant whom Charters addressed as Davis. There was nobody else in sight, although you sensed movement in the house. Stone wished to be taken immediately to H.M.; but foreseeing the explosive possibilities of this, I whispered discreet words to Charters. Stone was shut up squawking in a front room, where, as the door opened, I saw the startled face of Bowers. Then Charters led us to the rear of the hall.

Antrim's consulting-room was a small, neat, shiny room, with a couple of framed diplomas on the wall, a bookcase, and (at the rear, overlooking the sea) two French windows screened outside by laurels. The only untidy object in it was the object that sat at the desk under a green-shaded lamp. This was H.M. He sat piled out of a tolerably large chair, and he still obstinately wore his hat with the brim turned down. His feet were on the desk, displaying the inevitable white socks, and entangled with the telephone in so natural a fashion that it was as though he were back in his lair in Whitehall. The glasses were pulled down on his broad nose, and with a sour expression he was examining a skull — evidently a medical exhibit-which he turned over in his fingers.

He spoke hopefully.

"Mrs. Charters is getting you two some grub," volunteered H.M., like an urchin from the back of a classroom. "I expect you need it. Burn me, you've been leaving things behind in a way that's scandalous. All anybody's got to do to follow your trail across England is just to walk behind and pick up the pieces, like a paper-chase. First you leave a car, and a coat, and a burglar's kit. Then you leave a sackful of money and a book of sermons. Then-"

"Is that the best you can think of to throw in our teeth?" I said coldly. "One thing ought to be settled right here and now. When you sent me out on two frantic wild-goose chases to-night, first to Hogenauer's and then to Keppel's, did you have any idea of what I was likely to find? `You've got to pose as Robert T. Butler.' `That's our second line of defence.' Was that all eyewash? And if so, why?"

"Well… now," said H.M. He put the skull down in his lap. He spread out his stubby fingers and examined them disconsolately. "I've still got to ask you to trust the old man a little farther. I can't tell you — yet. But if it'll ease your soul any, I can tell you that at the moment I sent you out in that Butler — burglar role I was perfectly serious. Oh, yes, as serious as I ever been in my life."

"Then" said Evelyn.

"Now, now. I want the whole story, with every furbelow and trimmin'," Interposed H.M. inexorably. "Telephones are no good. Hop to it, you two. Talk."

Sitting back at our ease, Evelyn and I contrived to spin the story between us. There was no comment. Throughout it H.M.'s face remained as impassive as that of the skull he was turning over in his fingers. Though he had heard the gist of it in my call from Bristol, some of the details were so new that Charters several times tried to interrupt; but H.M. remained staring fishily, and sometimes he twiddled his thumbs. Only at mention of the telephone-message from 'L.' did he show any sign of animation.

"Uh-huh, he growled softly. "Now that's interestin'. That's very interestin'. Especially as-" He reached out one foot and prodded the phone on Antrim's desk. "I say, Charters: if this feller rang up, where did he ring up from? You and I have been sittin' here all night, and nobody used this phone. Is there another one in the house?"

Charters's curt gesture dimissed this as of little importance.

"Yes. Two, I think. There's one out in the hall, under the stairs. And I believe there's an extension up in Antrim's bedroom, in case someone rings him up in the night-'

"I know. Who'd be a country G.P.?"