Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 27, No. 3. Whole No. 148, March 1956

The Man Who Explained Miracles by Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr)

A red-carpet, ticker-tape, snowstorm-of-confetti welcome — a 17-gun salute complete with ruffles, flourishes, and appropriate music — to Sir Henry Merrivale (H.M.) and his triumphant return to the pages of EQMM — welcome home!

Yes, a thunderous hip, hip to the irascible, outrageous Old Man, to the bellowin’, glarin’, burn-me, Lord love-a-duck Old Maestro in all his gumshoe glory... and to the author’s famous specialty, but this time in spades — not one locked room but two in the same story!

Here is Carter Dickson s (John Dickson Carr’s) newest novelette — a tale of terror set against the “commonplaces” of London and Hampton Court Palace... and do not, we implore you, beware of the love story: it is — in the classic Dickson-Carr technique — a fully integrated and dovetailed part of the tale.

So again — welcome back to that growlin’, roarin’ old sinner, all sixteen-stone of him — the great H.M., created by one of the genuine Old Pros and New Masters of “the grandest game in the world.”

When Tom Lockwood first saw her, she was running down the stairs in terror. Behind her stretched the great sweep of stairs up to the portico of St. Paul’s; above, Paul’s Dome almost shut out the gray spring sky. A pigeon fluttered its wings. But there were very few people to see what happened.

The girl glanced over her shoulder. She was still so badly frightened that Tom’s first thought was instinctive: she might stumble and pitch headlong. So he ran towards her.

His next thought, born of his journalistic work, was the grotesqueness of this whole scene, as the bell boomed out the stroke of four: a very pretty girl, with dark hair and wide-spaced gray eyes, fleeing in blind panic from the House of God.

Then she did stumble.

Tom caught her before she fell, and lifted her up gently by the elbows.

“Steady does it, you know,” he said, and smiled down at her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, really.”

Instantly she recoiled; then she saw his expression, and hesitated. Tom Lockwood’s own mother could not have called him handsome. But he had such an engaging and easy-going expression, especially in his smile, that almost any woman would have trusted him on sight — and would have been right.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” he repeated.

“Isn’t there?” the girl blurted out. “When last night, by some miracle no one can understand, they try to kill me? And now, just now, a voice speaks where no voice could have spoken? And tells me again I am going to die?”

Taxis hooted up Ludgate Hill. A rather sinister-looking policeman stood at the left-hand side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Tom had a topsy-turvy sense that he did not really hear the words she was speaking.

She spoke with passion, in a beautiful voice with — was it? — some very faint tinge accent. Her hair really was black and shining, worn in a long bob; the gray eyes, their pupils dilated with fear, had long black lashes. Tom was so conscious of her physical presence that he hastily let go her elbows.

“You don’t believe me!” she cried. “Very well! I must go.”

“No! Wait!”

The girl hesitated, looking at the pavement.

And Tom Lockwood was inspired almost to eloquence.

“You’re alone,” he said. “Oh, there may have been people with you in the Cathedral! But you’re alone in yourself; you feel lost; you don’t trust anybody. Will you trust a perfect stranger, if I tell you I only want to help you?”

To his intense embarrassment, tears came into her eyes.

“What you need—” he began. It was on the tip of his tongue to say “a couple of whiskies,” but, in his present exalted mood, he decided this was unromantic. “Across the road,” he said, “there’s a tea shop of sorts. What you need is to drink tea and tell me your troubles. After all, hang it, I’m a reasonably respectable bloke! You see that policeman over there?”

“Yes?”

“He knows me,” said Tom. “No, no, not because I’m an old lag just out of jail! As a matter of fact, I’m a crime reporter for the Daily Record. Here’s my press-card.”

“You are journalist?”

Her eyes flashed up; she pronounced the word almost as journaliste.

“Not where you are concerned. Please believe that! And you — are you by any chance French?”

“I am English,” she retorted proudly, and drew herself up to her full height of five feet one. “Ah, bah! I am named Jenny. Jenny Holden. That is English enough, surely?”

“Of course. And I’m Tom Lockwood.”

“But, you see,” Jenny continued, “I have lived most of my life in France. When they brought me here for a visit, things seemed all funny but very nice, until—”

Jenny glanced back over her shoulder. Fear struck again, as though some terrifying presence lurked inside the Cathedral.

“Mr. Lockwood,” she said, “of course I will go with you. And we need not be introduced by a policeman.” Then her passionate voice rose. “But let us hurry, hurry, hurry!”

They dodged across through the skittish traffic to the tea shop at the corner of Paternoster Row. They passed the policeman in question, who seemed to fascinate Jenny. He was one of the Old Brigade: bulky and almost seven feet tall, just what any foreign visitor would expect to see.

Tom waved at him by way of greeting. The law saluted gravely but, when Jenny’s head turned away, gave her companion a wink of such outrageous knowingness that Tom’s ears went red.

At the door of the tea shop, however, Tom hesitated and turned round.

“Stop a bit! Was there somebody with you at St. Paul’s?”

“Yes, yes! My Aunt Hester and my Cousin Margot.”

“They didn’t frighten you?”

“No, of course not!” Jenny’s lips became mutinous. “I do not like my Aunt Hester. She behaves like a duchess, with a lorgnette, and you can hear her talking all over a restaurant. You know what I mean?”

“Bitterly well.”

“My Cousin Margot, she is young and I like her. But I wish to get away from them. Please!”

“Right,” said Tom, opening the door. “In you go.”

He allowed the door to close very briefly behind her so that she should not hear him when his voice carried clearly across to the policeman.

“Dawson! You haven’t seen us. Understand?”

The law did. His wink was more portentous than ever.

In the tea shop, more properly a tea bar, two girls chattered and banged tins behind the counter. But the place was deserted, including the two booths at the back. When the newcomers sat opposite each other in the farther booth, over thick mugs of a beverage which was at least hot, Jenny’s terror was decreasing. She accepted a cigarette, had it lighted for her, and hesitated. Then she burst out: “You see, it is so difficult to say! I don’t wish you to think I am silly, or have fancies, or am off my head. That is what they think.”

“ ‘They’?”

“Aunt Hester. And others.”

“Aunt Hester,” said Tom, “shall be hung out on the clothes-line, preferably upside down, at the first opportunity. Meanwhile...”

He broke off, because Jenny bubbled with that laughter he came to know so well.

“You are nice!” she declared, like a magistrate imposing sentence. “Oh, how it is pleasant to meet people who make you laugh! Instead of—”

Jenny stopped, and disquiet settled on her again.

“It is silly,” she insisted, “but I must say it. Can you explain miracles?”

“No. But I know a man who can. Did you ever hear of Sir Henry Merrivale?”

“Sir Henry Merrivale?”

“Yes.”

“But he is awful!” cried Jenny. “He is fat and bald, and he swear and carry on and throw people out of windows.”

“He is not, perhaps,” Tom admitted, “quite the ladies’ man he thinks he is. But he can explain miracles, Jenny. That’s his purpose in life nowadays.”

“You mean this?”

“Yes, I mean it.”

“Then I had better explain from the beginning. My name—”

“I know your name,” said Tom, looking at the table. “I am likely to remember it for a very long time.” There was a pause, while both of them hastily swallowed tea.

“Well!” said Jenny. “My father and mother went to live in France, at Cannes, before I was born. What with the war, and everything else, I had never been to England. My mother died during the war. My father died two years ago. My guardian is my father’s old friend Général de Senneville. And I am now 25: in France, I am what you would call in England an old maid.”

“Are you, now?” breathed Tom, almost with awe. “Oh, crikey! Have you ever seen yourself in a mirror?”

Jenny looked at him, and then went on very quickly.

“It was always my father’s wish I should come to England. I should see all the sights like any tourist: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s—”

“Steady, now!”

“Yes, I am steady. Général de Senneville, my guardian, said this plan was a good one, and did much honor to everyone. So he sent me, in charge of my Aunt Hester, just before I get married.”

“Before you—!” Tom blurted out, and then stopped.

Jenny’s face went pink. Tom, in the act of lighting a cigarette for himself, held the match for so long that it burned his fingers. He cursed, dropped both match and cigarette into the mug of tea; then, to hide his expression, he shoved the mug of tea down on the floor under the seat.

“But what else could I do?” Jenny asked defensively. “It was arranged many years ago, between my father and the general. At twenty-five, and an old maid, surely that was best?”

The damage had been done. They could not look at each other’s eyes.

“And who’s the bloke you’re marrying?” he asked casually.

“Armand de Senneville. The general’s son.”

“Do you love him?”

All Jenny’s English feelings warred with her strict French upbringing.

“But you are not practical!” she exclaimed, the more vehemently because her feelings won every time. “An arranged marriage always turns out best, as the general says. It is understood that I do not love Armand, and Armand does not love me. I marry him because — well! it must be done, at 25. He marries me because he wishes to obtain my dowry, which is very large.”

“Does he, by God!”

“How dare you!”

“These old French customs.” Tom folded his arms moodily. “You hear about ’em, you know they exist, but they’re still hard to believe. What about this Armand de Senneville? He has oily black hair, I suppose, and sidewhiskers down his cheeks?”

“You must not speak so of my fiancé, and you know it!”

“All right, all right!”

“He has dark hair, yes, but none of the rest of it. He is charming. Also, he is one of the best businessmen in France. Armand is only thirty-five, but already he owns three newspapers, two in Paris and one in Bordeaux.”

“Whereas I...”

“You said?”

“Nothing. He’s with you, I suppose?”

“No, no! He was bitterly opposed to this holiday. He could not get away from business; he speaks no English and does not like the English. He has to consent, because his father wishes it. But he warns Aunt Hester to keep a sharp eye on me, in case I should be silly and fall in love with some dull, stupid Englishman—”

Abruptly Jenny paused. Her own cigarette, unnoticed, was burning her fingers; she threw it on the floor.

Tom looked straight at her.

“Which you might do, mightn’t you?”

“No! Never! Besides, Aunt Hester and the de Sennevilles would never let me.”

While Stella and Dolly clattered tins and banged cups behind the counter of a prosaic tea bar, Tom Lockwood took a great and secret and mighty resolve. But he did not show it in his brisk tone.

“Now, then! Let’s get down to cases. What has frightened you so much?”

“Last night,” answered Jenny, “someone tried to kill me. Someone turned on the tap of the gas heater in my bedroom. It was impossible for this to be done, because all the doors and windows were locked on the inside. But it was done. Already I had a note saying I was going to die.”

Jenny’s eyes seemed to turn inwards.

“By good luck, they save me. But I don’t wish to speak of last night! This morning I am very — sick is not a nice word, is it? — no! I am ill. But Aunt Hester said this was nonsense, and it would revive me to go sightseeing again. That is why we went to St. Paul’s. Do you know St. Paul’s?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t even been inside the place for a long time.”

“It happened,” said Jenny, “in the whispering gallery.”

Whispering gallery.

The eerie sibilance tapped against the nerves even in this commonplace tea bar, with traffic rushing outside.

“You climb up stairs,” said Jenny. “Spiral stairs. Stairs and stairs, until you are breathless and think you will never get to the top. Then there is a tiny little door, and you go out into the gallery.”

Then Tom remembered — how vividly this whispering gallery had impressed him. It was dizzily high up, just under the curve of the dome: circular, some two hundred feet across, and with only an iron railing to keep you from pitching down interminably to the acres of folding chairs on the ground floor below.

Noises struck in with brittle sharpness. Gray light filtered in on the tall marble statues of saints round the vast circle. It was solemn, and it was lonely. Only one verger, black-clad, stood guard there.

More than ever Tom was conscious of Jenny’s presence, of her parted lips and quick breathing.

“I am not a coward,” she insisted. “But I did not like this place. If you sit on the stone bench round the wall, and someone — even two hundred feet away — whispers near the wall, that whisper comes round in a soft little gurgly voice out of nowhere.

“Please attend to me!” Jenny added, with deep sincerity. “I was not well — I admit it. But I was not unbalanced either. Ever since I have received that first note saying I would die, I have watch everyone. I trust nobody — you were right. But I trust you. And, on my oath, this happened as I tell it.

“There were only five persons in all that dusky gallery. You could see. My Aunt Hester and my Cousin Margot. A fat red-faced countryman who is come to see the sights with a packet of sandwiches and a thermos flask of tea. The verger, in a dark robe, who tells you about the gallery.

“That is all!

“First the verger showed us how the whispering gallery is worked. He leans against the wall to the left — you do not even have to be against the wall. He says something that we, on the right of the door, hardly hear at all. But it goes slipping and sliding and horrible round the dome. Something about ‘This Cathedral, begun by Sir Christopher Wren—’ and it jumps up in your ear from the other side.

“After that we separated, but only a little. I was nervous — yes, I admit that too! I sat down on the stone bench, all prim. Aunt Hester and Margot went to the railing round the open space, and looked over. Margot giggles and says, ‘Mama, would it not be dreadful if I jumped over?’

“Meanwhile, the fat countryman has sat down fifty feet away from me. Calmly he opens the grease-proof paper and takes out a sandwich. He pours out tea from the thermos into the cup; he is taking a deep drink when the verger, who is outraged at sandwiches in St. Paul’s, rushes towards him from ten feet away.

“Mr. Lockwood, I know what I saw! The countryman could not have spoken; he is really and truly gulping down tea. The verger could not have spoken — I could see his mouth — and anyway he is too far away from the wall. As for Aunt Hester or Margot, that is nonsense! And, anyway, they are much too far away from the wall, and leaning over the railing.

“But someone spoke in my ear just then.

“It was in English, and horrible. It said: ‘I failed the first time, Jennifer. But I shall not fail the second time.’ And it gloated. And there was nobody there!”

Jenny paused.

With all the nervousness of the past days, there were shadows under her eyes, and she was more than pale. But a passion of appeal met Tom across the table.

“No, I did not say anything!” she told him. “If I had, Aunt Hester would only say I was imagining things. Just as she said I was imagining things last night, and must have turned on the gas-tap myself, because the room was all locked up inside.

“No, no, no! I jumped up and ran out. I ran down those stairs so fast no one could have caught me. I did not know where I was going or what I should do. If I prayed anything, I think I prayed to meet...”

“To meet whom?” prompted Tom.

“Well! To meet someone like you.”

After saying this, defiantly, Jenny drank stone-cold tea.

“But what am I to do?” she demanded, with tears on her eyelashes. “I know Aunt Hester means me no harm — how could she? But I can’t face her — I won’t! Where am I to go?”

“I will tell you exactly,” said Tom, reaching across and taking her hands. “You are going with me to see old H.M., otherwise Sir Henry Merrivale, at an office which nowadays is humorously called The Ministry of Miracles. Afterwards—”

Bang!

The door of the tea bar flew open with a crash which half shattered its glass panel. Tom, sitting with his back to the door, first craned round and then leaped to his feet.

Outside the door, but not yet looking into the tea bar, stood an imperious and stately lady who was addressing someone beyond her.

“I am well acquainted, constable,” she was saying, “with Sir Richard Tringham, the Commissioner of Police. Your deliberate falsehoods will not help you when I report you to him personally. You have denied you saw any young lady run down the steps of the Cathedral. You have denied she met a young man in sports coat and gray flannels. Finally, you have denied they went into any of the shops or other disgusting places along here. Is this so, or is it not?”

“ ’S right, marm,” stolidly answered Police-Constable Dawson.

Whereupon Aunt Hester made her entrance like Lady Macbeth.

“I am Mrs. Hester Harpenden,” she announced to the walls at large. “And I have distinctly different information from a newspaper seller. I have—”

Here she saw Tom, who was standing in the middle of the floor.

“That’s the man,” she said.

Up to this time Stella (rather buck-toothed) and Dolly (distinctly pretty) had remained stupefied and silent behind the counter. Now both of them gave tongue.

“Disgusting place, eh?” cried Dolly. “I like that!”

“Busted the door, officer,” screamed Stella. “Busted the door, that’s what she done!”

“Busted the door, did she?” repeated Police-Constable Dawson, in a sinister voice. “Oh, ah. I see.” And he reached for his notebook.

Meanwhile, as Aunt Hester calmly advanced, Tom glanced back towards Jenny.

But Jenny was not there. She was gone; she was not anywhere in the place.

The sharp pang this gave him was not his only feeling. For an instant he believed he had strayed from St. Paul’s churchyard into a world of monsters and twilight, where anything might happen; and, in a sense, he was not far wrong.

“Young man,” Aunt Hester asked quietly, “where is my niece?”

“Do you see her here, madam?”

“No. But that does not mean... A back entrance! Ah, yes! Where is the back entrance here?”

“Just a moment,” said Tom, stepping in front of her. “Have you a warrant to search these premises?”

“Do I need a warrant to find my own niece?”

“Yes, yer do and all!” screamed Stella. “Either yer orders tea and cakes, which is wot we’re ’ere for, or out yer go straightaway. ’S right, officer?”

“ ’S right, miss,” agreed the law.

Aunt Hester was not fooled for a moment.

Seen close at hand, she was — or seemed — less formidable than bitter and bony, with a high-bridged nose and washed-out blue eyes, as though she had suffered some disappointment in youth and never forgotten it. Tom could tell her clothes were fashionable, as Jenny’s were fashionable, without knowing why he knew.

“Then you are all against me, it seems,” she smiled. “Well! This will indeed make a budget of news for my friend the Commissioner of Police!”

“By the way,” Tom said casually, “who did you say is the Commissioner of Police?”

“But Sir Richard Tringham, of course!”

“Oh, put a sock in it,” said Tom. “Sir Richard Tringham has been dead for seven years. The present Commissioner is Colonel Thomas Lockwood. And I ought to know — he’s my father.”

“Cor!” whispered Dolly.

“ ’S right, marm,” agreed Police-Constable Dawson.

Aunt Hester, not in the least impressed, merely raised her shoulders.

“Ah, well!” she smiled. “If police officers are bribed to tell untruths, then I had better be off.”

Majestically she strolled towards the front of the shop. With a gesture of contempt she opened her purse, took out a couple of pound-notes, and murmured something about paying for the glass door as she tossed the notes towards Stella.

Then, when she was within a step of the door, she whirled round and screamed at Tom like a harpy.

“Where is my niece?”

And Tom’s temper crashed over too, like the glass platform of cakes which Dolly had been nervously handling.

“In a place where you’ll never find her,” he yelled back, only hoping he was telling the truth.

“If I prefer charges of abduction—”

“When she goes away of her own free will? Don’t talk rot! And shall I tell you something else, Mrs. Harpenden?”

“By all means. If you can.”

“That girl is of age,” said Tom, advancing towards her. “Even under French law, her guardian no longer has any authority over her. But she doesn’t seem to know that. She’s being pushed and bullied and hounded into a marriage she doesn’t want, by a lot of ghouls who are only interested in her money. And I tell you straight: I mean to stop it.”

“Ah, I see. You want her money.”

The steamy room was dead quiet, with fragments of shattered glass and colored cakes all over the counter and floor. Both Stella and Dolly had cowered back.

“Yes, that hurt,” said Tom. “You knew it would hurt. All right: if you want open war, it’s war from this time on. Agreed?”

“Oh, agreed,” replied Aunt Hester, her head high. “And I have a feeling, dear Mr. Lockwood, that you are not going to win. Good day.”

With all the honors she marched out, closed the door, and turned right toward Paternoster Row. They had time to see a brown-haired girl of seventeen or eighteen, with slanting eyes and a mischievous look, run after her. It could only have been Jenny’s cousin Margot.

Tom, exasperated to see those two pound-notes lying on the counter, flung down another two to match them.

“That’s for the smashed container and the cakes,” he said.

“But, reolly, now!” protested Dolly, in an ultra-refined voice. “This is too much money. And is the Commissioner of Police reolly your father?”

“ ’S right, miss,” said Police-Constable Dawson, and stolidly marched out.

“Ducks, ducks, ducks!” cried Stella, addressing Tom. Being not very pretty, she was more inclined to sympathize with his bedevilments. “You needn’t worry about your young lady. ’Course there’s another way out of ’ere!”

“There is?”

“ ’Course there is. At the back, and turn sideways. I saw your young lady run out as soon as we heard the old witch’s voice outside. Either the young lady’s still hiding in the passage past the washroom, or she’s gorn out into Paternoster Row.”

“My deepest thanks!” said Tom.

He turned and plunged towards the back — only to be stopped short by another figure materializing in this extraordinary tea shop.

This was a shortish, wiry man with his light-brown hair cropped close to the head after a prevailing American fashion. He was perhaps in his middle thirties; he wore loose-fitting clothes, and his tie could be seen at sixty paces in any crowd.

“Now hold it, brother!” he urged. “Don’t go busting out of there or you’ll louse up the whole deal.”

Tom blinked at him.

“The old lady,” continued the stranger, evidently referring to Aunt Hester, “left her car — it would be a limousine — parked in Paternoster Row. It’s not there now. She’ll be screaming for the cops again, and you’ll run smack into her. Besides, the kid is safe now.”

“The kid? You mean Jenny? Where is she?”

Something like a self-satisfied smile crept across the newcomer’s face.

“I told the chauffeur,” he said, “to drive her straight to a guy named Sir Henry Merrivale, at an address he seemed to know. Sit down for a minute, until the old dame stops yelling about her stolen car.”

Tom Lockwood extended his hand.

“Maybe you won’t want to shake hands,” retorted the newcomer almost evilly, and put his hands behind his back, “when you hear what I am.”

There was about him something distinctly foreign, in a way that no American is ever foreign. Though Tom could not analyze it, his companion enlightened him.

“Get it?” he asked. “I’m a Canadian. Lamoreux’s the name — Steve Lamoreux. I was born in Montreal; I can speak French as well as I speak English. In Paris they say my accent is terrible; but they understand me. I’m a newsman for L’Oeil, Been in France for six months. Don’t you get it now?”

“Well! I...”

Steve Lamoreux’s shrewd brown eyes, in the hard yet sympathetic face, were almost glaring at him. And Lamoreux spoke bitterly.

“I’m the stooge,” he said. “I’m the tail. In other words, I’m Armand de Senneville’s hired spy to keep out of the way, never let the girl see me, but make sure she doesn’t meet any boy friends. If she does...”

Tom, aware that both Stella and Dolly were listening with all their ears raised his voice.

“Could we have two more teas, please?” he called. Then, to Lamoreux: “Into the booth here. And keep your voice low.”

They sat down opposite each other.

“What the hell?” said Lamoreux. “I’m only human. That girl’s too innocent; I won’t see her pushed around. What’s more, I can’t take this miracle stuff any longer — not for a hundred bucks a week or anything else. Do you realize that, but for a thousand-to-one chance, she’d be lying dead at the mortuary this very minute?”

It was a cold and ugly statement, just as the great bell of St. Paul’s boomed out the hour of five.

“She didn’t tell you how bad it was last night, did she?” asked Lamoreux.

“Not the details, no.”

“No, you bet she didn’t! The girl has guts — I’ll say that for her.”

“But how do you know she didn’t tell me?”

“Because I overheard every word you two said in here! Look!” persisted Lamoreux, tapping a finger into his palm. “When they started out today, in their grand limousine, I followed in a taxi. Aunt Hester knows me, and knows all about me. Her husband, Uncle Fred, and young Margot — well, they’ve seen me once, here in England. I couldn’t help that, but they’d never seen me before, and it doesn’t matter. Jenny doesn’t, and mustn’t, even suspect.

“Those were my orders from young de Senneville. He didn’t dare send a Frenchman as a tail — it might be too conspicuous. But Jenny’s seen this map of mine more than once at the newspaper office; if she spotted me, it might shake her faith in good old Armand.”

“Quiet!” Tom warned softly.

It was Dolly who appeared, demurely, setting down two mugs of tea already sugared. Though she seemed inclined to linger, Lamoreux’s glance sent her away miffed.

“Armand de Senneville,” Tom said between his teeth. “What I should like to do to that...!”

“Easy, now, brother! You’re talking about my boss.”

“He may not be your boss much longer. You may get a better one.”

“How’s that? Say it again.”

“Never mind; get on with the story.”

“Well! Aunt Hester and Margot and Jenny had the car parked in Paternoster Row. They told the chauffeur to wait there. I ditched my taxi, and sat in the car with the chauffeur. We could see the whole front of St. Paul’s. We knew we could see ’em come out.”

“And then?”

“You know what happened. About thirty-five minutes later, she comes tearing down the steps. You grab her. I think to myself, ‘Steve, this is your job; this is where the balloon goes up.’ Over you come to this place. I sneak in the back way, and I’m practically against a matchboard partition behind you. When I heard about a voice speaking in the whispering gallery, when no voice could have spoken, I damn near fainted. And there’s another thing.”

“Yes?”

Uneasily Lamoreux drew out a packet of Yellow French cigarettes. He struck an old-fashioned sulphur match; he brooded while holding the match until the sulphur burned away. Then, still lost in thought, he lit the cigarette and flicked away the match.

“When I first got a gander at you, see—” Lamoreux stopped.

“Well? What is it?”

“I thought it was an ordinary pick-up. Then, when I heard you two talking, I thought you were a right guy. And I still think so.”

They glared at each other, because no man pays a compliment to another’s face. Then, after an embarrassed pause:

“That’s why I stuck my neck out. I could see Aunt Hester charging for this joint before either of you two did. I knew Jenny would duck for a way out. And she knew the car was parked just beside here. So I rushed out and told Pearson — that’s the chauffeur — to drive her straight to this guy H.M. I’d heard of the old — the old gentleman; and I knew he was all right.”

Lamoreux pointed his cigarette at Tom with grimacing emphasis.

“But get this!” he added. “I’m no guardian angel or preux chevalier. The hell with that stuff. Somebody in dead earnest tried to bump off that kid. Somebody’ll try again, and I want no part of it. All I’d like to know, for the sweet suffering Moses’s sake, is who’s doing this and why?”

Lamoreux’s voice rose up piercingly until he remembered they were in public.

Then it sank to a whisper. They sat and thought and worried.

“Armand de Senneville—” Tom began.

“Look,” the other said wearily. “You’ve got that guy on the brain. De Senneville wants to marry her for her money. What good is it to him if she’s knocked off here in England?”

“Yes. I suppose that’s true.”

“But take it the other way round!” argued Lamoreux. “Take that gang in their country house near Hampton Court. I don’t doubt Aunt Hester, at least, will get a large slice of dough when this marriage comes off. She’s been in France dozens of times — she’s cheering for matrimony like nobody’s business. All right! Then what motive has she, or any of ’em, to kill Jenny and lose the money themselves?”

Steve Lamoreux at last took a sip of tea, which so disgusted him he did not speak for thirty seconds.

“It’s nuts!” he said. “It makes no sense however you look at it.”

“On the contrary,” said Tom, “it’s got to make sense! That’s why you and I are going to see H.M. as fast as a taxi can take us.”

“But I can’t go there!”

“Why not?”

“Because Jenny’s there, and she might spot me. All the same, if you want to reach me at any time before seven this evening, call me up at this number. If you want me any time after that, here’s the number of my hotel near their house.”

With a little gold pencil he scribbled two telephone numbers on a sheet torn from a notebook, and handed it to Tom.

“Locked rooms!” said Lamoreux. “Whispering voices! No motives! Brother, I’d give my last dime to go with you! What’s the old — what’s Sir Henry going to say about this one?”

In little more than twenty minutes, Tom Lockwood found out.

“Y’see,” said Sir Henry Merrivale, with surprising meekness, “I’m sort of in trouble with the government.”

“How do you mean?” asked Tom.

“Well, sort of,” said H.M.

The old sinner, all sixteen stone of him, sat behind the desk in the familiar office, twiddling his thumbs over his corporation. His shell-rimmed spectacles were pulled down on his broad nose, and light from the windows behind him glistened on his bald head. On his face was a look of such martyrdom that it had won Jenny’s complete sympathy and only enraged Tom.

“Well, y’see,” H.M. pursued, “I’ve been abroad for maybe two or three years...”

“Ah, yes!” said Tom. “It was in New York, wasn’t it, that you wrecked the subway at Grand Central Station and nabbed the right murderer on the wrong evidence?”

“Oh, son! I dunno what you’re talkin’ about,” said H.M., giving him an austere look.

“And in Tangier, I think, you blew up a ship and let the real criminal escape just because you happened to like him?”

“Y’see how they treat me?” H.M. demanded, his powerful voice rising as he addressed Jenny. “They’ve got no respect for me, not a bit.”

“Poor man!” Jenny said warmly.

“Oh, Lord,” moaned Tom. Like most people, he could never resist the temptation to make fun of the great man; and then, to his astonishment, he found women sympathizing with H.M.’s most outrageous exploits.

“But why,” he persisted, “are you in trouble with the government?”

“It seems I spent more money than I should have, or burn me, than I can account for. It also seems — would you believe it? — I shouldn’t have had banking accounts in New York, Paris, Tangier, and Milan.”

“You didn’t know, of course, you weren’t allowed to have those banking accounts?”

“Me?”

“Never mind,” said Tom, smiting his forehead. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, Lord love a duck!” said H.M. “When I got back to England, you’d have thought I was Guy Fawkes and the Cato Street conspirators all rolled into one. They hoicked me up on the carpet before an old friend of mine. I won’t say who this louse is, except to tell you he’s the Attorney-General.”

“No,” said Tom. “By all means don’t breathe a word.”

“ ‘Henry,’ he says to me, ‘I’ve got you over a barrel.’ ”

“Did the Attorney-General actually use those words?”

“Well... now!” said the great man, making a broad gesture and giving Tom a withering look. “I’m tellin’ you the gist of it, that’s all. ‘Henry,’ he says, ‘on the evidence I have here I could have you fined a hundred thousand pounds or stuck in jail for practically a century.’ ” Here H.M. broke off and appealed to Jenny. “Was this just?” he demanded.

“Of course it wasn’t!” cried Jenny.

“ ‘However,’ he says, ‘you pay up in full, with a fine, and we’ll forget it. Provided,’ he says—”

“Provided what?”

“I’m to go back to my own office here, d’ye see? It used to be part of the War Office, before they messed everything about in the war. And I’m to be in charge of Central Office Eight of the Metropolitan Police.”

“Please,” said Jenny in her soft voice, “but what is Central Office Eight?”

“It’s me,” H.M. replied simply. “Anybody who calls it The Ministry of Miracles is going to get a thick ear. They had enough fun, curse ’em, with the late Ministry of Information. If anything rummy turns up at Scotland Yard — any loony case that doesn’t make sense — they chuck it at my head.”

Here H.M.’s expression changed.

“Y’know,” he said, “strictly among ourselves, I don’t mind so much. I’m gettin’ old and mellow now—”

“I’ll bet you are,” Tom muttered sardonically under his breath.

“— and it’s comfortable here, sort of. Well!” said H.M., sitting up briskly and rubbing his hands together. “The old man’s in business again. You got any miracles you want explained?”

“Have we!” said Tom. “Jenny! Haven’t you told him?”

He himself had just arrived, hurrying in to find H.M. pouring out his woes and tribulations. In the old dusty office, high above Whitehall, Tom and Jenny looked at each other.

That office, as H.M. had said, was comfortable. Above the fireplace still hung the Satanic portrait of Fouché, Minister of Police under Napoleon. There was a very impressive-looking safe, inscribed IMPORTANT STATE DOCUMENTS: DO NOT TOUCH! — but containing only a bottle of whiskey. The office had seen many strange things happen — it would see many more.

“I told him about what happened in the whispering gallery, yes!” said Jenny. “But I do not even know how I have come here at all! I hated to leave you in the tea shop, but Aunt Hester was so furious I could only run. Then, at the car, the chauffeur says that some Canadian gentleman—”

“That’s all right. I can explain later.”

“Some Canadian gentleman, who has been sitting with him in the car when we went into St. Paul’s, told him to drive me straight to this H.M. of yours. You have said so too, so I go.” Jenny’s brow wrinkled. “And I was so, so wrong about your H.M.!”

“Oh?” enquired Tom.

“Yes, yes! He does not swear or carry on or throw people out of windows. He is what you call a poppet.”

“Hem!” said the great man modestly.

“Frankly,” said Tom, eyeing the stuffed owl across the desk, “I shouldn’t call it a well-chosen word to apply to him. You’ll find out. However! When I’d chucked out Aunt Hester, with the aid of two counter-girls and a friendly cop, I thought I’d never get here. I was afraid some infernal thing or other had happened to you, and I might never see you again.”

“You may see me,” said Jenny, and stretched out her hands, “whenever you wish.”

“Oi!” interposed a thunderous voice.

The alleged poppet was now glaring at them with a malignancy which raised Jenny’s hair.

“There’s not goin’ to be any canoodling in this office, is there?” he demanded. “All my life I’ve tripped over young people with no idea except to canoodle. — Now listen to me, my dolly.”

His big voice altered and sharpened. The whole atmosphere of the office changed as his small eyes narrowed behind the spectacles. He might be irascible, unreasonable, and childish, but he was still the Old Maestro — and you trifled with him at your own risk.

So H.M. spoke gently.

“You understand, my dolly, what I’ve already told you? That neither Général de Senneville nor Armand de Senneville has any hold over you? And neither have Aunt Hester and Company? That you’re a perfectly free woman?”

Jenny pressed her hands against her cheeks.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I always knew that, really. But...”

“But what?”

“People are so determined. They don’t yield a bit. And it’s always gone on like that. So you say to yourself, ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ ”

“Yes, I know,” nodded H.M. “But that’s what causes so much unhappiness in this world, especially for gals. Well, what’s your feeling now? Do you want to fight ’em and beat ’em hands down?”

“Yes!”

“Do you still want to go on staying at your Aunt Hester’s house? What’s-its-name? Near Hampton Court?”

“It’s called Broadacres, on the river. Tomorrow, they tell me, they will save the best of the sights for last — they say they will take me to see Hampton Court Palace in the afternoon.”

“They say that, hey?” H.M. muttered thoughtfully. Something flickered behind his glasses and was gone. “Never mind! Do you still want to stay at your Aunt Hester’s?”

“No. But what else can I do, except return to Paris?”

“Well,” glowered H.M. scratching the back of his neck, “I’ve got a house, and a wife, and two daughters, and two good-for-nothing sons-in-law I’ve had to support for eighteen years. So I expect you’d better move in too.”

“You mean this?” cried Jenny, and sprang to her feet. “You would really want me?” she asked incredulously.

“Bah,” said H.M.

“Sir H.M.! How to thank you I do not know...!”

“Shut up,” said the great man austerely.

Jenny sat down again.

“Then there’s your clothes,” he mused. “That’s a very fetchin’ outfit you’ve got on now, and I expect you brought a whole trunkful?”

“Yes, my clothes! I forget!”

“Don’t worry,” said H.M. with a suggestion of ghoulish mirth. “I’ll send a police-officer to fetch ’em. If that doesn’t put the breeze up Aunt Hester to a howlin’ gale, I don’t know her kind. But understand this, my dolly!”

Again his tone sharpened and struck.

“Aunt Hester’ll hit back. Don’t think she won’t. Also, you’re likely to have the whole de Senneville tribe here and on your neck.” H.M. blinked at Tom. “I say, son. Shall you and I handle ’em?”

“With pleasure!” said Tom. “And definitely without gloves.”

“In the meantime,” H.M. went on, looking very hard at Jenny, “I’ve heard about this rummy business in the whispering gallery, yes. But there’s something else you’ve got to tell me, and very clearly, before I can help you at all.”

“Just a minute!” interrupted Tom.

“Oh, for the love of Esau,” howled H.M. “What’s wrong now?”

“A voice spoke where no voice could possibly have spoken,” said Tom. “Do you believe that?”

“Certainly.”

“Then how was it done?”

“Oh, my son!” groaned H.M., with a pitying glance. “You don’t mean to say that trick fooled you?”

“Do you know how it was done?”

“Sure I do.”

“Then what’s the explanation?”

“I’m not goin’ to tell you.”

Tom got up and did a little dance round his chair. H.M. sternly ordered him back into it.

“I’m not goin’ to tell you,” he went on with dignity, “because very shortly I’m goin’ to show you. You can see with your own eyes. That’s fair enough, hey?”

Whereupon his own eyes narrowed as he looked at Jenny.

“Stop a bit! We don’t want Aunt Hester to pick up the trail too soon. You said you came here in a car, with a chauffeur. Is the car still waiting? Or did you send it back?”

“I have sent it back,” retorted Jenny. “But I know I can trust Pearson — he is the chauffeur. I have told him to say I have gone off on my own, alone, to have tea at Lyons’.”

“Which Lyons’?”

Jenny’s gray eyes opened wide.

“I am English, I keep telling you!” she insisted. “But how can I know much of England if I am never here? Is there more than one Lyons’? The only London restaurants of which I have heard are Lyons and the Caprice and the Ivy.”

“Those three grand old restaurants!” exclaimed Tom, and resisted an impulse to put his arms round her. “H.M., Aunt Hester will think Jenny is giving her the raspberry, which is exactly what you’d do yourself.”

“Uh-huh. That’ll do. Now then: about this first miracle — of a gas-tap being turned on in a locked room.”

When H.M. produced his ancient black pipe, and began to load it with tobacco looking (and tasting) like the steel wool used on kitchen sinks, Tom knew he must brace himself for more trouble.

“My dolly,” said H.M., “a lot of bits and pieces have come flyin’ out of your story. I can see this aunt of yours. I can see her daughter, Margot, who’s eighteen years old and up to mischief. I can see your Uncle Fred, who’s tall and red-faced and looks like a retired major. I can see this white Georgian house, with long windows, set back from the river. But burn me if I can see the details!”

“How do you mean?”

“For instance. D’ye usually sleep with the windows closed, to say nothin’ of being locked? Is that an old French custom?”

“No, no, of course not!”

“Well, then?”

“It is the details,” said Jenny, biting her lip, “I have not wished to talk about. They are — bad. I feel the gas strangle me again. But never mind! First, Aunt Hester put me into a bedroom on the ground floor.”

“Why?”

“And why not?” Jenny exclaimed reasonably. “It is a very nice room. But it has two windows stretching to the ground. Aunt Hester is frightened of burglars, and asks me please to keep the windows tight-locked. By the time I am ready for bed, I am so scared that I put both bolts on the door as well — on the inside. You see, it was at dinner I received the note.”

“What note?”

“It was a little note, folded up in my napkin at the table. I thought—”

“Yes, my dolly?”

“At first,” Jenny explained, peeping sideways at Tom, “I thought it was from a young man I met at a tea party they gave. He has made what you call the eyes at me. So—”

“That’s an old French custom, if you like,” Tom said politely. “You thought the note was from him, and you didn’t want anybody else to know?”

Jenny turned on him flaming.

“I do not like this young man at the tea party! I do not wish to see him again! But if he has written a note to me, can I give the poor man away?”

“No. Sorry, Jenny. Shouldn’t have said that.”

“But it is not from him at all, or anything like that. I read it under the table. It was only one line, in a handwriting I never saw before. It said, ‘You will die tonight, Jennifer.’ ”

Jenny moistened her lips: H.M. had lighted the pipe, and an oily cloud of smoke crept over the desk.

“At first I thought it was a joke. What else can I think? Then I looked at the rest of them, all so normal, with the candles burning on the dinner table. And I know I am alone. I am a stranger, even if I am in my our country — and I am frightened!

“I did not even dare ask if the note was a joke. So I hid it, and afterwards I lost it. At ii o’clock, when it was time to go to bed...”

“Yes, my dolly? Go on!”

“I sleep badly,” said Jenny. “Always I have. No matter how late I go to bed, I always wake up at 5 or 5:30 in the morning. There was a custom I had in France, first when I lived with my parents and afterwards at the house of Général de Senneville. A maid brought me a cup of chocolate at 6 in the morning.

“When Aunt Hester asked if she could do anything more, I asked if I might have the chocolate, or else tea, at that time. I had been there several days, but it was the first time I venture to ask. Aunt Hester lifts her eyebrows and says, ‘Do you think, Jennifer my dear, that is quite fair to the servants?’

“I said no, no, please to forget it. But Margot, who has green eyes and is nice, she is always up before six, she says, and will be glad to bring me a cup of tea then. Very well! I go to my room. I turn on the light. I fasten the bolts both at the top and bottom of the door. Then I turn round. And one of the windows, which I have left locked, is wide open.”

Jenny paused.

H.M., wrapped in his cloud of nauseous smoke, was as expressionless as an idol.

“I rush across,” continued Jenny, her voice rising. “I close and lock the window again. Then I think, ‘Suppose someone is hiding in the room?’ But I must not be stupid and rouse the whole house. And so — well! I search the room myself. Nobody is hiding there. I think perhaps some servant has opened the window to air the room, and I feel better.

“It is a warm night — very warm, they tell me, for an English spring. So I do not need to turn on the gas heater in the fireplace when I undress. I close the window curtains almost shut. But I smoke a cigarette or two, you can bet, before I have the nerve to turn out the light. But I do turn out the light, finally. And soon I am asleep. Then—”

“Hold on!” interposed H.M. softly, and took the pipe out of his mouth.

“Y-yes?”

“What time did you turn in? Do you remember?”

“Yes. I see my wrist watch. It is ten minutes past twelve.”

“Did any of this family know beforehand about your habit of takin’ chocolate at six in the morning?”

“N-no, I do not think so. How could they? I—”

Again Jenny was trembling; and, worst sign of all, she was again glancing over her shoulder. Tom got up and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Hadn’t we better stop this, H.M.?” he demanded.

“We can’t stop it, son, and you know we can’t. That gal really was in a locked room. It’s practically impossible to tamper with bolts when they’re at the top and bottom of the door. Those Georgian window-locks are dead sure for safety. Unless I can get a hint about this, the old man’s dished.”

“I am very well, thank you,” said Jenny. “I can go on, if you wish.”

“Well?” said H.M., putting the pipe back in his mouth.

“First there was a dream. It was horrible, but I don’t remember it now. Then I knew I was awake, and being strangled so I could not breathe. This part is hard to describe. But — when you are dying, or even losing consciousness, you can still hear sounds clearly even though you can barely see?”

“Yes, my dolly. That’s right.”

“I could tell it was just growing daylight, no more. But somebody was pounding on the outside of the door. And I hear Margot’s voice crying my name. I tried to scream back, but there is no breath, and already — this is not pretty — I had been sick.

“Next, which is all confused, I heard a man’s voice outside with Margot. It was an American voice I have never heard before. It said, ‘What’s wrong, kid? Isn’t she okay?’ Margot screams that the room is full of gas, and can’t he smell it from under the door? He says, ‘You won’t break down that door. Where’s the window?’

“Still I am just conscious. I can hear everything, though it must be like being hanged. I hear them run away, and someone else join them. Then I see — all blurry, because my eyes have nearly gone — I see someone’s fist, wrapped in a coat, punch through the glass of the far window.

“This is my Uncle Fred, who has been roused too. He unlocks the window and pushes it all the way up. Someone runs to turn off the gas-tap at the heater. I think this is the American. I cannot see, but I hear him say a wicked word, and say, ‘So-and-so, but it’s turned full on!’ He turns it off. Margot rushes towards me, spilling a tea tray on the carpet. That is all I remember, until the doctor is there.”

Jenny lifted her hands, and let them fall on the handbag in her lap. As the oily smoke from H.M.’s pipe reached her at last, she began to cough.

H.M. put down the pipe and knocked it out.

“The doctor, hey?” he repeated. “And what did the doctor say?”

“It was not the doctor who spoke to me. It was Aunt Hester. She said, ‘This is not very considerate of you, Jennifer. To try to kill yourself because you are not happy about your future husband.’ ”

Tom Lockwood’s grip tightened on her shoulders. “Your Aunt Hester said that?”

“Yes! And it is not true! But they ask how anyone could have tried to kill me, when the room is all locked up inside?”

“Anything else, Jenny?”

“I say, ‘Where is the American?’ They say, ‘What American?’ and claim he is a delusion of mine. They stand round my bed, all big-eyed — Aunt Hester and Cousin Margot and even poor old Uncle Fred — and look down at me. They say it is a mercy the doctor is their family doctor, and will not report this to the police. Dear God, do you wonder I am afraid of them?”

“H.M.!” Tom said sharply, after a pause.

“Well?”

“You may have been wondering about this mysterious American...”

“Frankly, son, I have. I don’t see where he fits in.”

“He isn’t an American,” said Tom, “but he isn’t a delusion either. That gang made a bad slip when they claimed he was. I’ll tell you all about him at the proper time. Meanwhile, do you see any clue at all?”

H.M., who had been sitting with his eyes closed and a very mulish look on his face, now opened his eyes slowly and inspected Jenny.

“My dolly,” he said, “I’ve got only one more question to ask now. But I want you to be awful careful how you answer it. You could hear all these voices clearly when you were nearly unconscious. You could hear the pounding on the door, the footsteps running away, and the rest of it. Did you hear any other sound besides that?”

“What — what kind of sound?”

“Any kind!”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You’re sure of that, now?”

“Yes, positive!”

“Oh, Lord love a duck,” observed Sir Henry Merrivale, with his mouth falling open. “So that’s how the locked room was worked!”

“How?” shouted Tom.

“I’m the old man,” said H.M., tapping himself impressively on the chest. “You let me deal with this in my own way. I’m goin’ into action at once.”

H.M. reached for the telephone at his elbow. He dialed for an outside exchange, and then dialed the number. During a long pause, while they could hear the ringing tone go on interminably, Tom Lockwood listened to an air-vent which hummed and hummed in the ceiling, and at intervals he studied H.M.’s face, now as malignant as the Evil One’s.

The ringing tone broke off. There ensued, from H.M.’s side, the following weird and wonderful conversation.

“Looky here, my wench. I want to speak to Sam... Oh, yes, I can! This is the old man. You just tell him I squared it when he was givin’ a beautiful party for sixteen beautiful gals without any clothes on, and the silly-ass coppers broke in. Yes, the old man!...”

A gratified note crept into H.M.’s big voice.

“That you, Sam? How are you...? Never better, Sam! There’s a question I want to ask you.... Thank’ee Sam. How many vents are working now?...”

Tom Look wood looked up wildly at the air-ventilator humming and whacking above his head. He looked at an equally bewildered Jenny.

“Only three? You’re sure of that? Right, Sam. Gimme their names and descriptions. Yes, I said descriptions! Uh-huh... No, the first one’s no good. Try the second... Lord love a duck, that sounds like the one we want! But try the third, just for luck... No, he’s no good either. It’s Charley Johnson. Gimme the address. It’s nearly six o’clock — he’s bound to be at home now... Thanks a million, Sam. And try to keep to one woman next time, hey? — All right, all right!”

Ringing off with the handsome air of one who has made all things clear, Sir Henry Merrivale spun the dial once again.

“Sergeant? I want a squad car, to hold three people and a driver, as quick as kiss-your-hand. Two minutes? Outside the Horse Guards Avenue entrance? Right!”

Lumbering to his feet, H.M. took down from a rack an ancient Panama hat and thrust it on. This hat, which had a band of startling colors and whose brim was turned down all round like a bowl, gave an even more sinister look to the great man’s unmentionable face.

“Sir!” protested Tom. “What in the name of sense is all this business of air-vents, and how can it help us?”

“You wanted a miracle explained, didn’t you?” demanded the great man. “All right. Are you comin’ with me, or not?”

Within the promised two minutes, and in the police car — Jenny and Tom sitting in the back seat, H.M. piled in front with the chauffeur — they whipped out of Horse Guards Avenue, turned left, and shot down Whitehall. H.M. who himself has never driven a car without landing through a shop window or against a lamp-post, made caustic comments about driving skill to a red-eared police driver.

Far beyond the towers of Westminster, behind its stately terraces and flats, lies a region of dingy, almost unknown, streets. The red-brick houses in these streets, by a show of brass knobs and letter-slots, try to keep up a brave pretense that they are private homes and not lodging houses.

But gritty winds make discarded newspapers dance along their gutters; children scream; there is an overriding clatter of dustbins. Before one such dingy house, which did look like a private home and really was, the car stopped.

“Come on, you two,” grunted H.M.

He impelled Jenny and Tom out of the car, and up a flight of stone steps to the front door. There he jabbed his finger at the bell.

“For the last time,” said the desperate Tom, “will you tell what an air-vent—” H.M. pulled down the brim of his hat even harder.

“Who said anything about an air-vent?” he howled. “I didn’t. I said ‘vent.’ That’s the theatrical and professional term for a ventriloquist. — Didn’t you ever hear a ventriloquist?”

Jenny’s hands flew to her open mouth.

“According to your story,” pursued H.M., “there were only four persons in the whispering gallery with you. This time we can acquit both your Aunt Hester and your Cousin Margot — they were leaning over the railing, much too far away from the wall.

“We can acquit the outraged verger in charge of the place. But who else was there? According to you, a fat and red-faced countryman — a little too thoroughly dressed up as a countryman, wasn’t he? — who carried a packet of sandwiches and a thermos flask.

“When you heard the words, he was sitting against the walls and plainly drinking tea. All right, my fatheads! Who’s the only man alive who can make his dummy speak clearly while he himself is walloping down a full glass of water? You know the answer.

“I rang up the king of all impresarios and found out the names and descriptions of the only three vents working in London. This Charley Johnson won’t know much about the case. Somebody handed him a fiver to play what he thought, and probably still thinks, was a joke. But he, when we see him, can tell us who bribed him to—”

The front door was hurled open.

There is no other word for it — the door crashed against the wall and all but rebounded.

In the doorway there stood, swaying slightly, that same fat man Jenny recognized from the whispering gallery. His face was now less professionally red; he was bald, and wore no wig. Instead of his countryman’s clothes, he was wrapped round in a somewhat grubby dressing gown of black and orange stripes. In one hand he held a whiskey-and-soda, in the other a half-eaten sandwich.

But what held them was the expression of his face. His eyes were so horribly wide open that a ring of white showed all the way round the iris.

“Look out, you two!” snapped H.M.

Tom dragged Jenny back just in time.

Charles Johnson, making a bubbling noise, took one step forward. Then he pitched headlong down the stone steps, turning over twice before he lay face down on the pavement.

The smashed glass, the half-eaten sandwich, had flown wide and fallen. Because of the man’s tiger-striped dressing gown, it was a moment or two before any of them saw the black handle of the knife driven into his back just under the left shoulder-blade.

Nobody moved until the police driver sprang out of the car. It did not need the driver’s nod, looking up, to tell them Johnson was dead.

Children’s roller skates crashed past on the opposite side of the street, amid shouting. A few windows banged up; a few women’s heads were thrust out. That was all.

H.M.’s face was white.

“Easy, my dolly,” he said, putting his hand on Jenny’s arm and speaking with surprising gentleness. “Is that the man you saw at the whispering gallery?”

The shock was too great. Jenny could only nod.

“Then that means,” said H.M., “this is no straight business of frightening a gal out of her wits. It means there’s somebody who’s dead-determined, crazy-mad, to get what he or she wants. Somebody got here before us and shut Johnson’s mouth. Murder with a knife is all in the day’s work. And that means...”

He brooded so long, ruffling his fingers at his temples, that Tom could not remain quiet.

“H.M.!” he said. “What is it?”

“It means there’s been a slight change of plans,” he answered.

“How?”

“You, my dolly,” said H.M., “aren’t going to spend the night at my house after all. If you’ve got the nerve, you’re goin’ straight back to spend the night at Aunt Hester’s.”

A golden sky was becoming tinged with purple over the thin Tudor chimneys of Hampton Court Palace.

Sir Henry Merrivale, in his most maddening mood, sat on an upended wheelbarrow, in one of the few remaining Tudor quadrangles: of dark red brick, with its white stone lions uprearing from the walls beside sly little windows. H.M. was again smoking his black pipe, and looked up at Tom without favor.

“Well,” he asked querulously, “where’s the whole party now?”

“As far as I know, they’re still tramping through miles and miles of picture galleries.”

“But looky here, son!” protested the great man. “According to my watch, and the notices posted up, this place should have been closed for a long time. Shouldn’t they all have been flung out of here hours ago?”

“Yes. But it seems Uncle Fred has a lot of influence with the director or the curator or whatever they call him. They’re being taken over the whole show at their leisure, particularly since Jenny’s keen to see the maze; and that’s a long way from here.”

“Maze, hey?” H.M. repeated thoughtfully.

“Now listen to me!” roared Tom, assuming an oratorical posture. “Since a few minutes past six yesterday afternoon, when you got rid of us all, until half an hour ago, when I set eyes on your ugly dial again, you’ve asked questions by the bucket. But you won’t answer a single question yourself. Why?”

“ ’Cause I’m the old man.”

“And you think that’s a good enough reason?”

“Sure it is. I say, son. How is... I mean, how is...?”

Tom regarded him bitterly.

“How is Jenny taking this?” he asked. “What the devil do you expect, after that asinine order she was to go back to Aunt Hester’s last night? She’s taking it badly, of course! But she won’t let any of ’em see for a minute she’s afraid.”

Here the old sinner had at least the grace to look discomfited.

“Well... now!” he growled. “I had my reasons, hadn’t I? Burn me,” and H.M.’s voice rose up passionately, “people are always sayin’, ‘What an old cloth-head he is; stick him upside down in the dustbin.’ Then they see what I mean. And they yell, ‘Why, Henry; pull him out and dust him off; we should never have guessed it.’ And of course they wouldn’t have guessed it, the star-gazin’ goops! Only—”

H.M.’s eloquence was interrupted only by a back-wash taste from his own black pipe. Then he simply sat and looked evil.

“All right, all right!” he said. “What did you do last night?”

“Steve Lamoreux and I stood guard outside Jenny’s windows all night—”

“Stop a bit, son. Does the gal know who Lamoreux is?”

“She doesn’t know he’s Armand de Senneville’s spy, naturally! And she can’t meet him. But, for all practical purposes, he isn’t a spy. He won’t stand for violence—”

“Uh-huh. I know. I talked to him in my office today. You were sayin’?”

“Well, while the rest of ’em were at dinner, Steve and I sneaked into her bedroom and dismantled the gas heater...”

Tom paused in even more exasperation. H.M., with a silent and ghoulish mirth, was rocking in ecstasy.

“Oh, son! You didn’t think the murderer would try that simple little trick again?”

“Simple little trick?”

“Easy as shellin’ peas.”

“Will you acknowledge to me,” demanded Tom, after a hard-breathing pause, “that the door of the room really was tightly bolted on the inside and couldn’t have been tampered with?”

“Sure.”

“Will you acknowledge that both windows were securely locked on the inside and that they weren’t tampered with in any way?”

“Agreed without a struggle.”

“Will you finally acknowledge that, with no funny business about outside gas meters or the like, somebody — somebody actually in that room — turned on the gas-tap?”

“That’s right, son.”

“Then how in hell did the murderer get in and out of that room?”

“I’m not goin’ to tell you. Now wait!” said H.M., and pointed with the stem of his pipe. “Yesterday you raved and danced about the ‘miracle’ of the ventriloquist, didn’t you? But that was easy. And this is just as easy, maybe easier, if you think about it. I want you to think about it. Meanwhile, you’d better think of something and somebody you’ve rather neglected.”

“Oh? Who’s that?”

“Armand de Senneville himself. You hated him from instinct and from jealousy. But maybe your instincts were right. I had him investigated today.”

“Well?”

“He’s tough, son,” H.M. said somberly. “He’s tougher than you think. He’s an outstanding businessman, a first-class journalist, a mechanical expert, and he was liaison officer with the Yanks for four years during the war. Finally, he’s as conceited as the devil; he swears, in private, there’s nothing he ever wanted that he hasn’t got.”

“But Armand de Senneville’s in Paris!”

“He doesn’t have to be here, don’t you see?” H.M. asked patiently. “Now listen. You, and the gal Jenny, and even Steve Lamoreux, have all thought there was a whole conspiracy of the Harpenden family — Uncle Fred, young Margot, and Aunt Hester — against Jenny Holden.”

“And isn’t there?”

“No! Coincidence has mixed you up. There’s only one, one of those three, who has any knowledge of it. One of them, bribed by Armand de Senneville, would pay any price to have Jenny Holden frightened out of her wits. I give you three: which one?”

It was growing darker in the ancient quadrangle. Tom paced up and down the paving stones, his footfalls stirring back ghostly echoes from the walls.

H.M. knocked out his pipe and replaced it.

“Burn me,” he said in a worried voice, “where’s that whole family now? You were supposed to be keepin’ track of ’em, weren’t you?”

“I couldn’t! Aunt Hester knows me too well, from that bang-up row in the tea shop! But Steve is trailing ’em, and giving me signals from windows whenever he can.”

“But they can’t stay in there forever! It’ll be pitch dark! I’d give my ears to know where they’ve gone!”

It was unnecessary to sacrifice H.M.’s ears.

From under the archway to a second quadrangle the sound of “S-s-t!” hissed at them in a way which made H.M. leap up from the overturned wheelbarrow.

Steve Lamoreux approached as warily as a red Indian. Tom, not without difficulty, had persuaded him to put on a dark suit and an inconspicuous necktie. But his short brown hair stood up as wirily as ever, and he infuriated H.M. by addressing the great man as Pop.

“They’re outside,” he said, “at the back of the joint. They’re going along that broad path, at the back of the palace, that runs a long way to the left between the palace and the gardens. They’ve got the oldest guide here, who’s deaf and practically blind. — And for the love of Pete, Pop, get a wiggle on or they’ll close the inner gates and well be locked in!”

H.M., not without much ruffling of his dignity, was hauled and impelled through the archway, across another quadrangle, and then through a very long archway at whose end they could see the last gleam of daylight.

They stopped at the outer edge of the arch. Just ahead lay the immense gardens, their straight-ruled lines of flower beds draining of color in twilight. Peering round the edge of the arch to the left, Tom saw the very broad, sanded path beside ancient walls.

Five persons, their backs to the conspirators in the archway, strolled along this path about a hundred yards ahead. Though it was too dark to discern faces at that distance, Tom knew who they were as they walked abreast.

First, on the extreme left, doddered an old guide in uniform. Next, marching briskly, strode Aunt Hester. Jenny walked nervously between the giggling Margot, who danced with short steps, and the firm military stride of Uncle Fred on the extreme right.

“All right,” whispered Tom. “What do we do now?”

“I know what we could, do,” said Lamoreux.

“You do, hey?” sneered H.M.

“Yes! They can’t recognize us in this light. If we just strolled after ’em, three abreast but keeping back, they’d take us for another privileged tourist party like themselves. That is, if somebody could do a little spiel like a guide.”

The role of guide caught Sir Henry Merrivale’s fancy at once.

“Hem!” he said, tapping himself on the chest. “Me.”

Lamoreux looked doubtful.

“Okay, Pop, you’re the boss. But are you sure you know enough about the history of this joint?”

“Me?” said the outraged H.M. “The palace of Hampton Court,” he bellowed, “begun by Cardinal Wolsey in the year 1515, was in 1526 pinched from this worthy prelate by that howlin’ old ram King Henry the Eighth, whose wives I shall now proceed to—”

“Pop! Quiet!”

“Am I a guide,” H.M. asked loftily, “or ain’t I?”

“You are,” snapped Tom. “And if the balloon goes up, it goes up. Anyway, I can see Jenny. They can’t hurt her now. Let’s go.”

Out they marched, trying to tread softly, with Lamoreux on the inner side, Tom in the middle, and H.M. on the outer side.

It was quiet, so intense that they could hear the footsteps of these far ahead of them as well as their own. Peace lay in the hollow of a warm spring night, with the fragrance of grass and trees. You would never have guessed that death was walking with them along the broad white path — and moving closer at every pace.

Tom Lockwood did not know this, of course. But he sensed danger-fangs everywhere. He kept his eyes fixed on Jenny as though she might disappear, and his nerves were twitching like a landed fish.

So he quite literally jumped as a mighty voice smote through his thoughts.

“On our right,” it thundered, “we got the famous Hampton Court gardens, forty-four acres of elegant spinach, first laid out by King William the Third and completed in 1734.”

“For God’s sake be careful,” whispered Tom. “William the Third died in 1702.”

H.M. swung round, fists on hips.

“And d’ye think I don’t know that?” he bellowed. “I didn’t say the old sour-puss finished ’em, did I? I just said he laid ’em out — which is what I’m goin’ to do to you, young man, if you don’t shut up and stop interruptin’ my lecture.”

“Pop! The soft pedal! Give it the old soft pedal! Holy cats, they’ll hear you as far as Thames Ditton!”

But, whatever devilment H.M. had meditated — and Tom knew he had planned it in advance — the damage was done. Five persons, mere shapes in the twilight, turned round and looked back.

Out from the group, head high, marched Aunt Hester. She strode along the full distance that separated them, and looked straight at H.M.

“You, I fancy,” she said coolly, “must be the man Merrivale?”

“On our left,” bellowed H.M., “we see the celebrated tennis court. The game of tennis, originally played with a wooden ball, was designed with the laudable purpose of knockin’ somebody’s eye out — which it generally did. One famous match—”

“Answer me, please!” said Aunt Hester. “On whose authority, may I ask, are you in these grounds after official visiting hours.”

H.M. gave her a wicked look.

“On Sir Hugh Rossiter’s,” he said. “The same as yours. Want to ring him and find out?”

Since H.M. knew everybody, this might possibly be true. Aunt Hester did not dare risk the challenge. Besides, she was more interested in someone else.

“One of you, I believe,” she stated crisply, “I have already met. Indeed, Mr. Lockwood, I wish to have a word with you.”

“Fire away,” said Tom.

“Ever since you abducted my niece yesterday, and afterwards returned her in — I hope — a condition suitable to a bride, poor Jennifer has been talking nonsense which I propose to stamp out here and now.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Absurdly enough, the girl believes she is in love with you...”

“Is she, by God!” exclaimed Tom.

Whereupon he completely lost his head. Raising his voice, he shouted clearly and loudly through the twilight.

“Jenny!” he called. “Jenny! Do you love me?”

Jenny spun round in the broad white path.

“Yes!” she shouted back.

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes!”

Dead silence.

“Well... now!” observed Sir Henry Merrivale, with much complacence. “Since that’s all settled and finished—”

“Oh, cripes!” breathed Steve Lamoreux, in a voice Tom had never heard him use. “If that’s how people propose to each other in England, maybe it’s true you’re kind of casual. Do you just get married on the telephone, or what?”

But Aunt Hester was not amused. The paint stood out against her pale face; she was alert, smiling — and dangerous.

“How interesting!” she laughed. “It surely will interest her dear guardian and,” Aunt Hester’s eyes slid sideways, “the fiancé to whom she is pledged. Tell me, Mr. Lockwood, what is your yearly income?”

Tom stared at the ground.

“Well! I didn’t want to...”

“Come, Mr. Lockwood!” said Aunt Hester, with honeyed sweetness. “You are a reporter on the Record, we know. Just what is your yearly income?”

“Tell her, son,” growled H. M.

“All right!” said Tom, raising his head. “When death duties are subtracted, it’ll be about twelve thousand pounds a year.”

“Twelve — thou—”

“I didn’t earn it,” snapped Tom. “My mother left it to me. I’ve published just one unsuccessful novel. When I walked up Ludgate Hill yesterday, I was thinking about chucking my job and trying full-time writing. That’s what I’ll do, when Jenny marries me. It’s why I told you, Steve, you might get a better boss; you can have my job, and they’ll hand it to you on a plate. But I’ve never given two hoots about Jenny’s money, and I’d rather prefer it if she didn’t have a penny to her name.”

“This is the most fantastic—” Aunt Hester was beginning, when she stopped dead.

H.M. slowly extended his neck, and gave her such a look as could not have been matched by Satan himself.

“Madam,” he said, “you’ve got no business with us. Sling your hook.”

“I absolutely refuse—”

H.M. extended his finger until it almost touched Aunt Hester’s nose.

“Madam,” he said, “are you goin’ to hop it? Or do you prefer to find yourself, sittin’ down, in the middle of King William’s spinach?”

Aunt Hester hopped it. Before that glare, which would have caused the Angels of Light themselves to retire to prepared positions, she could have done nothing else.

She ran hard towards the group ahead, and appeared to be talking rapidly. The whole group faced round and began hurrying, at a faster pace, in their original direction. Jenny seemed violently to object, but Margot gripped her arm and hastened her on.

Tom Lockwood, a powerfully built young man, was all for charging forward and starting a fight at once. His companions held him back.

“Easy, son!” said H.M. “Not just yet, I tell you! We’ve got ’em in sight. They can’t get away.”

“Pop,” declared Lamoreux, whose face was pale and pinched, “you’re a so-and-so. You’re a so-and-so and a this-and-that. You deliberately yelled all that guff about spinach and tennis balls, just so the old dame would come tearing back here. Why did you do it?”

“Well... now!” said H.M. with a modest look. “I rather wanted to know, d’ye see, if some person would meet some other person. Am I making myself clear?”

“No. You’re not.”

“Never mind, son,” soothed H.M. “I haven’t been so much worried about that gal as about another person. Besides, I repeat, they can’t get away. We’ve got ’em in sight.”

Lamoreux stopped in his tracks.

“Oh, no, we haven’t!” he said in a high voice. “Where are they now? They’ve disappeared!”

It was true.

Once past the gardens and the long line of the palace, the road was closed in by tall trees, dusky and spectral against a windless night, with an occasional bench on either side. Five persons had vanished from the road.

“H.M.,” said Tom, seizing his companion’s arm, “you seem to be the expert on Hampton Court. Where does this road lead?”

“Steady, son! It leads to one of the main entrances — the Lion Gate. But, if you turn to the left before you reach the gate, you’ll soon get to the open space where they’ve got the maze—”

“The maze!” said Tom, and every nameless fear boiled up inside him. “Run, you blighters! Run!”

That H.M. himself did run, despite his large corporation and his dislike of any pedestrian exercise, can only be stated as a fact. Lifting his chin so as to cleave the air, he belted along that road as fast as his younger companions.

Some hundred and twenty yards farther on, they saw the dim gleam of a light past an avenue of trees branching to the left. Into this they flew abreast, found themselves in a large open space, and stopped.

For the first time they heard the wheezing, rusty voice of the old guide.

“Now, miss,” he was pleading, “you don’t really want to go into the maze, do you? ’Tisn’t very difficult, not what we like to pretend it is. But that’s in the daytime. You don’t want to go in at night, miss.”

“But I do!” Jenny insisted firmly. “All my life I’ve been reading about the Hampton Court maze, and I’ll die if I don’t explore it. Won’t you lend me your electric torch?”

In the clearing, a hut or small pavilion had been set well back, evidently used as somebody’s living quarters; on a pole against the side of the hut burned a sickly electric bulb.

The famous maze was set well out from the hut. It was roughly oval in shape, a little higher than a man’s head, of green hedge raggedly trimmed. Illumined in bright green and dead shadow by the sickly fight, it loomed up less as a place of comedy than as a secret, malicious trap.

The entrance must be at the far side, because the entire party was assembled there. Slant-eyed Margot was jumping up and down with joy.

“May I go in too, Mama?” she shrilled. “May I go?”

“No, you may not,” said Aunt Hester sharply. “Afterwards, perhaps, if dear Jennifer—”

“Lot of nonsense, I call it,” grumbled Uncle Fred from under his gray military mustache.

“Please may I have the electric torch?” said Jenny in a voice no man could resist.

“Ah, well,” mumbled the guide. “ ’Ere’s the torch. I s’pose I can always climb up on top of the step-ladder by the entrance, and give you directions if you get lost. Be nippy, now.”

“I will! I will!”

“Jenny!” called Tom. “Jenny, wait! I’m going with you!”

His words did not carry to her. Faintly he heard the creak of a small gate, and the brushing of Jenny’s body against the narrow sides of the maze.

Tom sprang forward, Instantly Sir Henry Merrivale locked both his arms from behind, and held him back.

“No, son,” said H.M., in so soft and deadly a voice that Tom was startled. “You’re not goin’ into that maze.”

“Why not?”

“Whose life,” asked H.M., glancing round him, “d’ye think I’ve been worried about, as much or more than the little gal’s herself? Yours.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No. But you’re not goin’ inside that maze.”

Tom, with one sudden heave and jerk, tore loose even from H.M.’s powerful grip.

“I’m sorry, sir. But that’s where I’m going, and neither you nor anybody else is going to stop me.”

He ran across the sanded space, and round the side to the entrance. He saw the startled face of Uncle Fred, who was swinging a heavy yellow cane. He saw Aunt Hester, with rigid mouth. He saw the pretty, mischievous face of Margot, who was slipping away in another direction.

The guide had already shakily mounted to the top of the stepladder beside the entrance. Tom swung open the little gate, twisted sideways as he plunged into the maze, and attempted to run.

It was impossible.

The hedge-walls were so narrow that tendrils stung his face. Though it was not pitch-dark, just enough light filtered down from the dim bulb outside to distort the eyesight and turn dark shapes into illusions. He might run slap into a hedge-wall at any second, and just saved himself from doing so.

Gently, now!

Stopping at a turn, Tom felt down on his left and found the thin wall, of hard and curved wire, built a little below waist height. In this maze, he remembered it had been said, you must always turn to the left. He did so, and presently turned left again.

That was when he saw, deeper inside these thinnish walls, the firefly glimmer of Jenny’s torch. It vanished again — but it was there.

“Jenny!” he called. “Wait for me! It’s Tom!”

“Tom! Darling!” Her voice slipped through the walls rather than above them. “Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Where are you?”

“Very near the center of the maze, I think.”

“Then stop where you are! Wait until I catch up with you!”

“Oh, no!” Jenny retorted demurely. “I’ll get to the center and turn off the torch. Then you can find me and tell me how much you love me.”

“Jenny, wait!”

But the firefly glimmer danced away. He could hear her brushing and hurrying on. In a moment or two there was a cry of pleasure, as evidently she found the center of the maze. The light of her torch went out.

Tom moved forward, more slowly and carefully. The electric bulb at the hut was now so distant and so dim that it gave scarcely any light. Tom didn’t know where he was. Walls loomed up and closed round him. It wasn’t pleasant, being shut into a twisting maze where...

Then he stopped, listening.

Somebody was following him stealthily through the maze.

Somebody, not much lighter than his own weight, was stalking him — with what intent? Tom ran forward and stopped. The footsteps behind him ran forward and stopped. Tom ran again. But he was not left in doubt long.

A closer footfall, a looming of a shape in near-darkness, made him glance over his shoulder. He saw the upsurge of someone’s silhouette. A distant gleam flashed on the blade of the knife as if lifted high — and struck.

All that saved Tom from being stabbed in the back, as Johnson the ventriloquist had been stabbed, was the dim light and the attacker’s mis-judgment. The blade of the knife ripped through the cloth of the coat over Tom’s shoulder. The attacker, plunging forward so hard that he collided with Tom, sent his victim sprawling one way and drove his own head and shoulders, grotesquely, straight into the hedge on the other side.

Somebody screamed one word, nothing more.

With a crackling of branches, the attacker wrenched out his left arm and then withdrew his head. Before he could disengage his knife-hand, Tom landed a vicious right-hander that opened his assailant’s cheekbone and drew first blood.

Then they faced each other, two dim shapes, between the narrow walls.

There were no Queensbury Rules here. Neither man was a boxer. But both were enraged and both meant murder.

The attacker held his knife blade out, to leap forward and rip up. Just as he lunged, Tom kicked him in the groin. The attacker, in intense agony, began to double up; his knife fell and tinkled. Tom hit him again.

The attacker, straightening up, flew in with both fists. Tom hit him twice, left and right, in the belly. Then he put all his strength into a right cross to the man’s jaw — which, if it had landed, would have broken Tom’s hand.

But it did not land on the jaw. Instead it landed, with just as murderous effect, in the soft flesh under the man’s left ear. The attacker, brain paralyzed and legs suddenly gone to water, reeled backwards and fell.

“Now where the devil,” Tom was thinking, “did we get so much space?”

Then he realized they had been fighting very near the entrance to the center of the maze. For the first time he heard voices, and bodies thrashing about in the maze.

Behind him loomed up the blaze of an electric torch. Above it showed the malignant countenance of Sir Henry Merrivale. Next, cowering away in one side of the maze’s center, Jenny switched on her own torch.

Both beams converged on the man who lay on his back in the center of the maze. His eyes were closed; he breathed stertorously; sluggish blood flowed from a cut in his cheek.

Jenny’s face grew so white, and she turned her head away so abruptly, that Tom thought she was going to be sick.

But his own feelings were swallowed up in incredulity.

“This is impossible!” he said, pointing to the man on the ground. “That’s Steve Lamoreux, the reporter!”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” said Sir Henry Merrivale. “That’s Armand de Senneville himself.”

“Explanations?” demanded H.M., in a tone of dismal surprise. “You don’t mean to tell me you need explanations?”

Jenny and Tom, both seated beside the desk in H.M.’s office at the end of the following day, instantly and vehemently said they did need explanations.

H.M. sighed.

“Y’know, my dolly,” he said, “you ought to have seen through your fiancé, Armand de Senneville, sooner than you did. He tried to prevent your trip to England. He couldn’t prevent it — his father’s word was law. But he knew how much you’d been repressed and kept under the thumb in France. He knew, as he casually warned Aunt Hester, you’d probably fall bang for the first presentable, easy-going Englishman who made you laugh and didn’t think correct behavior was everything in life. Which is what you did.”

“I did not!” Jenny cried indignantly. “I have fall bang for Tom, yes. But that is a different thing!” Tom hastily intervened in order to evade the devastating question, “How is it different?”

“Then de Senneville,” he said, “had only to crop his hair, have it dyed brown, wear very loud clothes, and pose as a French Canadian reporter from one of his own papers?”

“But Armand,” insisted Jenny, “speaks no English!”

“No?” said H.M. “That’s what he told you, my dolly. But as I explained to Tom here, the bloke was attached for four years to the American Army as a liaison officer. So surely he could speak English. In fact, his ear was perfect; his American was perfect. But he had to play the part of a French Canadian to explain how he spoke both languages.”

“And yet,” exclaimed Jenny, her eyes clouding, “I still do not understand this Armand! If he wished to keep men away from me, why did he not say he spoke English and go with the whole party of us?”

“You don’t understand that, my dolly? Though it’s the key to his whole character?”

“No! Why is it the key?”

“Because he was too proud,” said H.M., “and he was far too conceited. He wouldn’t demean himself in public by showin’ he was concerned. He wouldn’t admit that any man alive could take you away from the great Armand.

“Listen, my dolly, he never wanted to kill you! Neither did Aunt Hester. All they wanted to do was scare you so much that you’d run straight back to France. Don’t you remember what you said yourself, in this office? I asked, ‘Do you still want to stay at your Aunt Hester’s?’ And you cried out, ‘No, but what else can I do except return to Paris?’ — Got it now?”

“Then,” Jenny blurted out, “just to get my dowry, this Armand has...”

“Oh, he wanted your money,” said H.M. somberly. “But, towards the end, I don’t think that was all. That murderous fight in the maze wasn’t done altogether for money. I expect, in his own queer way, he was a little bit in love with you.”

Again, since Jenny’s eyes were clouding worse than ever, Tom intervened.

“But the locked room!” he said. “Where the gas-tap was turned on even while windows and door were both locked on the inside!”

“Well... now,” H.M. sighed wearily. “I’d better tell you about it, because that locked room told me the whole ruddy truth before I even knew who was behind it.

“On the famous Night of Terrors,” he added, pointing at Jenny, “you found, in your napkin at dinner, a note readin’, ‘You will die tonight, Jennifer.’ Eh?”

“But who wrote the note?” interrupted Tom.

“Aunt Hester wrote it,” snapped H.M. “There’s never been much mystery about her. Her words and actions were too plain. She was the dominatin’ character of her family, the only one, as I more than hinted, whom de Senneville bribed and prompted.

“After dinner,” H.M. continued, still pointing at Jenny, “you went to your room at a little past eleven o’clock. One of the long windows, which you’d left closed, was now wide open. Correct?”

“Yes,” said Jenny, and shuddered.

“You closed and locked the window again. You didn’t need to touch or go near the gas fire. At shortly past twelve you went to bed, and soon fell asleep. The next thing you knew, Margot was bangin’ on the door at six o’clock. A mysterious ‘American’ voice is asking what’s wrong. They ran round to the window, pickin’ up Uncle Fred on the way. Uncle Fred smashes the window. The mysterious ‘American,’ whom you can’t see because you’re too far gone, rushes over to the gas fire. He says, ‘So-and-so, but it’s turned full on!’ And, apparently, he turns it off. Correct again?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Not to me it isn’t,” said H.M., shaking his head. “Whoever this mysterious American was, he was the joker behind the trick. He told a flat lie. That gas couldn’t have been turned full on.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d have been dead,” H.M. said simply. “Let’s suppose somebody, in the middle of the night, sneaks in and turns on the gas full-strength. Never mind what time it was. Let’s even say it was as late, as impossibly late, as five o’clock in the morning. But there’s no person in the world, breathing full-strength gas in an unventilated room, who can breathe it for an hour and still live. So I asked you a question to prove it.”

“What question?”

“Oh, my dolly! You could describe every small noise you heard even when you were only half conscious. But you didn’t hear any noise of a gas fire turned on full, which would have roared like a tornado. That’s all.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Jenny, caught up with a jolt. “Then...?”

“Yes! Just before you retired to your room, Armand de Senneville — alias Steve Lamoreux — sneaked in and turned on the gas heater a tiny thread — only a tiny thread, not noticeable at all. He went out, leavin’ the window wide open for good ventilation.

“You came in and closed the window. Well! What does happen, in very big rooms like that one, with such a tiny leak of gas? You can’t hear it, you can’t even smell it, for well over an hour. The bed is too far away. And it’s caused tragedy before this. Meanwhile, for nearly six hours, the room is very slowly fillin’ up with gas. When they found you, you were in just the condition I’d have expected.

“That’s pretty much everything, my dolly. Armand de Senneville was lurkin’ close outside, of course. You bet he was! He’d calculated his times, as he always does, but he was damned near too late to bust in himself, as he intended.

“He had to meet Margot — he couldn’t help it. But that gal’s a silly kind of wench, so excited she never wondered what he was doin’ there. Uncle Fred barely noticed him. Later, it was easy for Aunt Hester to look ’em straight in the eye and tell ’em both they’d been dreaming. She was the only one who knew our Armand by sight. But, as for the ‘miracle’ of the locked room...”

“And that is all?” cried Jenny.

“Sure. What else did you expect?”

“I am disappoint!” suddenly exclaimed Jenny, hammering her fists on her knees. “I think this is a miracle. I think it cannot be solved. And then you show it is easy as eating sweets. Sir H.M., I hate you!”

The subsequent behavior of Sir Henry Merrivale, his martyrdom and his passionate addresses to the ceiling, is best left undescribed.

“So that’s all the thanks I get, hey? They come to me and say, ‘It’s a miracle.’ I say, ‘It ain’t,’ and show ’em how it’s done. Then they say, ‘Oh, is that all? Silly old dummy! Stick him in the dustbin again.’ ”

It was fully half an hour before they smoothed him down.

“Very well!” he said, with a dark look at Jenny. “I’ll not state what I think of some people. I’ll just tell you what happened next and upset the whole apple cart. Aunt Hester had to drag a very sick and scared gal all the way to St. Paul’s, so that Armand’s hired ventriloquist could perform on time.

“But the apple cart was upset with an awful smash. ‘Steve Lamoreux,’ sittin’ in the car just as he said he did, saw you run down the steps of St. Paul’s and literally fall into this young feller’s arms. When you went into the tea shop — well, Bob’s your uncle. You bet he sneaked in and listened behind the partition. What he heard was just what he’d feared. You two were practically failin’ into each others’ arms over the tea.”

“I feel like this,” Jenny confessed.

“I still feel like it,” said Tom.

“Shut up,” said the great man. “There were several courses open to ‘Steve Lamoreux.’ He chose the best, which was winnin’ Tom Lockwood’s confidence and stayin’ close to him. So he deliberately sent this gal to me, supremely and conceitedly thinkin’ the old goop would never see through his scheme.

“After Aunt Hester’s row in the tea shop,” here H.M. looked at Tom, “he went in and told his story. He more than won your confidence, son. He won your friendship.”

“Yes,” admitted Tom, and looked down at a closed fist. “He did.”

“Of course, he couldn’t go with you when you came to my office. He admitted the gal mustn’t meet him. What he did is easy to guess. He followed you, and hung about in Horse Guards Avenue. D’ye know, I think I can see his face when we three piled downstairs and out to a police car, and I gave the address of his own hired ventriloquist.

“He got to the house about fifty seconds before we did, probably by waving a fiver in under a taxi-driver’s nose. He nipped in by the back door, struck faster than a snake, and nipped out the same way while Johnson’s body rolled down the front steps.

“And that tore it. As I said, the whole aspect of the business had changed.

“According to what I could deduce about the gas fire and the whispering gallery, nobody was actually trying to kill this gal. Somebody was trying to frighten her so much that she’d take the first plane back to Paris.

“Now who would be interested in doin’ that, in conjunction with Aunt Hester? Who? You guess. And what about this odd ‘American’ or ‘Canadian’ who kept turning up all over the place without any explanation? Everybody promised to explain him; but nobody did.”

H.M. pulled down his spectacles and glowered at Jenny over them.

“You see, my dolly, why I wanted you to go back to your aunt’s house that night? You weren’t in any real danger. And it wasn’t likely somebody would try any games that night. If anything happened at all, it would happen during the expedition to Hampton Court next day — for one thing, Aunt Hester was far too insistent about takin’ you there.

“And I could be there to stop it. And yet, burn me, I nearly missed it!”

The somber spectacles were now turned towards Tom.

“Son,” observed H.M., “did you see the look on ‘Steve Lamoreux’s’ face when you shouted along the path and asked this gal to marry you? And she said yes?”

“No, but I heard his voice. It was a voice I’d never heard him use before.”

“Well! When it turned out you had tons of money and they couldn’t accuse you of being a fortune hunter, did you notice him at any time after that?”

“Yes! His face was all pinched up and as pale as dough. But I thought—”

“Maybe you did. He had a knife with him, just in case. And that was the time he finally decided you were goin’ to die.”

Jenny pressed her face in her hands, and turned away.

“Oh, I was the villain!” said H.M. “In my role of guide, I wanted to see how Aunt Hester would act when she met Steve Lamoreux face to face. She behaved pretty well, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from slidin’ away when she mentioned the gal’s fiancé.

“It was a silly-ass thing to do. I admit it. ’Cause I’d already made up my mind. That same day, since Armand de Senneville had been attached to the Yanks, I got his record and saw his photograph. To put the tin hat on it, ‘Steve Lamoreux’ had the stargazin’ cheek to walk into my office and spin his yarn.

“Even if I hadn’t known already, the idiot gave himself away. He would smoke Yellow French cigarettes, and use sulphur matches. Even when he was very excited, he automatically held the match away from him until the sulphur had burned off—”

“Yes,” interrupted Tom. “I saw him do that. But what about it?”

“Oh, son! He claimed he’d been in France only six months—”

“Yes, that’s what he told me too!”

“And no foreigner on earth, after only six months in France, can get used to those sulphur matches. You always forget and swallow a lungful of sulphur. Only a Frenchman native-born automatically holds the match away for a few seconds. There, in my own office, was a Frenchman speakin’ the most exquisite Yank.

“But you were the one in real danger, son. If I’d known beforehand you’d spent the night before prowlin’ round this gal’s windows with Armand de Senneville, I’d have had a fit. I repeat: he struck like a snake and killed poor old Johnson. Why? Just because he didn’t want this gal to find out that it was he who was scaring her, or he’d lose her.

“Finally, last night at Hampton Court, I still don’t know what funny business de Senneville, or Aunt Hester, or both of ’em, had planned. There wasn’t time — the fireworks went up with a bang. I tried to keep you from goin’ into that maze. Didn’t you see me look round? Didn’t you notice Lamoreux had slipped away? You dashed into the maze. He must have crawled up on top of it — we didn’t see him enter — and followed you. But sometimes, for chivalrous young fools like you, there is mercy. You met the tough egg with his knife, and you knocked him flat. And that was the end.”

There was a long silence, until Tom cleared his throat.

“H.M. What will they do to him?”

“Oh, they can’t prove yet he killed Johnson. Not yet. In the meantime, he’ll do a long stretch on two counts of attempted murder: with gas and with a knife. Then the coppers will snaffle him for killing Johnson. And he’ll get what he deserves, son — he’ll hang.”

Jenny stood up suddenly, trembling. Tom put his arms around her, and held her tightly.

“It’s all right!” he insisted. “Jenny, dear, it’s all right!”

“Yes,” said Jenny, holding him just as tightly, “but that is why you must not leave me, ever. It is all right — now!”

For once in his life, Sir Henry Merrivale did not roar out about canoodling in his office. Slowly, somberly, he got up from his chair and wandered over to one of the windows. There, his hands folded behind his back, he stood looking out over the river and the mighty curve of London.