John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

It was not the glare of lightning through the glass roof which made them all jump, though it turned the whole conservatory to a blaze of deathly daylight and put the same pallor on their faces. It was, instead, the enormous crash of thunder which began in a long splitting noise as though the glass roof were crumpling, and then exploded close over their heads to the end of the peal. The dome vibrated to it; one of the small panes in the roof did, in fact, fall and smash on the tiles; and the rain poured through. But all sights or sounds were entangled with each other and happened at once. They saw each other's faces in such pallor because, in the instant of the lightning-flash, every light in the house went out.

'That's torn it,' said H. M.'s voice out of the dark.

Superintendent Belcher's voice spoke cheerfully. 'It's all right. I've got an electric lantern here. What was it, do you think? Wires down outside, or a fuse blown?'

Masters was not so easy. The shock of that assault still made the room tremble, and the darkness was dense. He spoke loudly above the rain.

'Wires down outside, I should think. They've got so many extra fittings that they're on distributing fuses, one to two or three rooms; and you wouldn't blow out the whole lot at one go unless -'

'Fuse-box,' said H. M. suddenly.

‘What's that, sir?'

'I said fuse-box. Masters, when you went over this house so thoroughly, did you look inside the fuse-box?'

'No; why should I? I'll swear it wasn't touched before or after Mrs Constable's death -'

'I wasn't thinkin' about it in connexion with anybody's death. I was thinking about it,' answered H. M.'s voice in the dark, 'as the one perfect hiding-place for a flat book eighteen inches high by ten inches broad.'

After a pause he added:

'Where is the box?'

'As a matter of fact, it's at the back of the cupboard in Mrs Constable's bedroom,' said Masters. 'And we're going up there now.'

The beam of the superintendent's lantern went ahead of them. In the forlorn bedroom upstairs, and in the side of the room furthest from the bed, was a large wardrobe cupboard with folding doors. Just above the shelf inside was the black-painted iron cover of the box, held upright by two light screws: a large box, some two feet high by a foot and half broad. Standing on a chair, Masters carefully undid the screws. As the cover fell, a tall thin book in colours of black and gilt flopped out into bis face, and dropped with a thud into the cover again.

'So that's it,' snarled Masters.

'That's it, son. Serene and untouched where Mina Constable shoved it away as long ago as the night her husband died. Also, the perfect hidin'-place. You look at a fuse-box; and it never enters your head that there could be anything inside it except fuses; it's all too snug and close. But the cover don't fit in close against the contents: it can't. And if you want a place to hide your money where no burglar will look for it, take a tip from Mina Constable. It was one of her -more ingenious ideas.'

Masters jumped down from the chair.

'Ingenious ideas, eh?' he said, and shook the book in the air. 'Just so. Got the bounder, anyway!' He shook it more savagely. 'You think this is what we want?'

'Yes. Maybe. If it contains what I hope it does - Masters, we've got Pennik. Put it down on the table and let's have a dekko at it.'

The light was held for them. While the rain splashed the windows, Masters put New Ways of Committing Murder on the dressing-table, and the others bent over his shoulder when he opened the book.

It was a grisly exhibit, in its way. It contained, neatly pasted in, a long series of press-cuttings all dealing with violent death in one form or another. They seemed to have been collected over a period of seven or eight years. Some were so old as to have had the paper turn dingy; others were frayed or ragged as though they had lain long in a drawer before their owner decided to make the collection; still others looked fresh. Though in a few cases the date and the name of the paper had been written above the article, as a rule they bore a question-mark or were left blank. Some were from popular magazines; one or two from a medical journal. Not even any chronology in dates had been kept; 1937 came before 1935, and 1932 turned up between both. Over everything you could see the clever, untidy mind of Mina Constable.

H. M. had already uttered a groan. But he uttered a deeper one when they found, on die last page but one, an oblong piece of the page - article, name of paper, and date, if any - jaggedly cut out with a pair of scissors.

'She was takin' no chances,' said H. M. 'And she could burn that much of it, anyway. Masters, we're licked.'

'Did you hope for as much as that from the book?'

'I don't mean it does us down entirely. Humph, maybe not. But I sort of had a feeling that I could prove I was right to myself, and prove it to other people too. If there'd been one little thing in this book, just one little thing...'

He tapped it with his finger. Afterwards he blundered across in the dark and sat down in a big chair. Faint lightning showed against the streaming windows behind him.

Masters shook his head.

'Afraid it's not much good, sir. If we had any ghost of a line to work on at all, I could have put the organization to work and it's ten to one we'd have run down the press-cutting you want. But there's not a ruddy thing to go by! We don't know what paper it might have been in: not even the country, because there are American and French here too. We don't know the day or the month or even the year. We don't even know what kind of an article we're looking for. If,' - the chief inspector's voice yelped out with exasperation - 'if you could just give me some idea what line you're working on, and what it is you want to prove?'

H. M. put his head in his hands. Dimly they could see that he was ruffling the two tufts of hair at either side of his temples.

'Uh-huh. Sure. I know all the difficulties. Mina Shields didn't have a secretary. She didn't even subscribe to a press-cutting bureau; I took mighty good care to look into that. As to what I want to prove, I can tell you short and sweet.'

‘Well?'

'I want to prove that a person may be dead, and yet at the same time be alive.'

There was nobody in that room who liked the surroundings any better for this remark. Nor was the situation improved by H.M.'s ghostly chuckle.

'Ho, ho. So you're convinced I'm off my onion at last, are you? Ruin of noble intellect. No, my lad. I mean exactly what I say. You're also overlookin' the motive in this case.’* You wouldn't believe me when I told you there was such a thing as a Judas Window; but I showed you one, didn't I?'

'Maybe you did and maybe you didn't. But you're blooming well not going to show me a living corpse, and neither is anybody eke. Not while I keep my own sanity you won't. I'm fed up, Sir Henry, and that's a fact. I thought you'd gone the limit before, but this beats anything I ever heard of. You can take your astral projections and your

*‘ A very just remark, I can see now. The motive for murder, though fully indicated in the text, is not obvious on the surface; and it involves indeed, a legal point. Anyone interested in solving the problem may be advised to look carefully below the surface. The reader is warned. - J. S.

green candles and your Gamage fountains and your living corpses, and you can -' 'Oho? Scared, are you?'

'May I ask, Sir Henry, who you're calling scared?'

'You, Masters. You've really got the wind up at last. You're beginning to be scared of this house and everything in it. Now aren't you?'

'No, sir, I am not. I deny -'

'Look at you jump, then, over a little bit of thunder! Ain't you ashamed of yourself: honestly, now?'

'Steady on!' advised Dr Sanders, in genuine concern. 'You'll have him chewing the carpet in a minute.'

'Listen to me,' said H. M. suddenly, in such a sharp, quiet voice that they all fell silent. Sanders almost imagined that he could see a wicked eye gleam from the chair. 'Ah, that's better. Now then: do you want to catch the murderer?'

'Of course I want to catch the murderer.'

'Right! Then if you won't listen to scientific facts, I'll give you somethin' more practical to chew on than the carpet. Listen to our line of attack. Our attack begins to-morrow. It may take a lot of moves and a long time, but we got a chance and that's all I want. We start at the inquest. Now Pennik thinks he's goin' to make an unholy spectacle of himself at that inquest. He's not; or at least we make him think he's not. We've got to get permission for this, but I think I can wangle it. We issue a statement that -'

PART IV

MORNING

Concerning the End of It

press

Daily Non-Stop: Wednesday, May 4th, 1938 (banner headline)

PENNIK BARRED FROM INQUEST ON ALLEGED VICTIM: TRIES TELEFORCE TONIGHT

Daily Trumpeter

CONSTABLE INQUEST 'NOT OPEN TO PUBLIC'

government muddle

TELEFORCE—PARIS TO-NIGHT

News-Record

PENNIK PROMISES NEW VICTIM; ANSWERS CHALLENGE TO-NIGHT

but self-styled killer cannot attend inquest on his victim

Daily Wireless

SIR HENRY MERRIVALE:

Exclusive Interview TELEFORCE TELEFORCE TELEFORCE

... yet smile as we may over certain statements which have been forced upon our attention, the thoughtful man cannot but view with concern a more serious consideration which has to-day arisen: a threat to those individual liberties which we justly hold so dear. An inquest held behind locked doors, an inquest to which the general public are denied entrance, is a bold step for which some explanation is surely due. The Government have acted wisely and well; now let them inquire into the identity of, and deal suitably with, the author of this remarkable measure, the responsibility for which cannot rest entirely upon the shoulders of Mr Freedyce the coroner.

Go in' out to see what 'appens, Mrs Topham? Cor lumme, not 'arf I

CHAPTER XVII

The town hall at Grovetop, where the inquest was held, was a more pretentious example of Victorian stone scrollwork than the town seemed to deserve. But there was nothing pretentious about the part of it where the inquest took place. This was a long, low, semi-underground room, through whose barred windows you could see the legs of passers-by on the green outside. It smelt like a schoolroom. It was dark and nearly always chilly, despite the dingy asbestos-covered furnace-pipes across the ceiling; and echoes went up from the stone floor.

A white-shaded lamp hung down over the coroner's table, with the witness-chair beside it. A sort of dais held the jury, who breathed hard. The rest of that dim room was taken up with rows of naked chairs; for only a few people sat in the front row. But if business here seemed cold and formal, it was counteracted by the jovial roar of sound outside. You could see many legs (and faces) beyond the windows.

'I will have silence in this court,' said the coroner, flinging his notes all over the table. This is really intolerable. Sergeant!'

‘Yes, sir?'

'Be good enough to close that window. We cannot even hear what the witness is saying.' 'Very good, sir.'

'I cannot endure this. What are all those people doing there? Why don't you disperse them?'

'Well, sir, it's a pretty big crowd. They're piled up twenty deep from Gross's end of the High Street to the main road. I never saw such a jam hereabouts since they brought down a zep on Heidegger's farm during the war.'

'Sergeant, I am not concerned if the entire population of London has chosen to honour us. I have my instructions and I mean to abide by them. Go and send them away. Is the arm of the law entirely powerless? - Good God, what is that?'