The Reader Is Warned

'No, son.'

'What do you mean, " no"?'

'It was the water runnin' out of the tub,' answered H. M. 'Y'see, it's easy to fill a bath practically in silence, as the murderer wanted to do. Just fill it slowly. It isn't likely that through those thick walls you would have heard the bath bein' filled. But what can't be stopped, what does produce that vibratin' noise you heard,, is the water goin' with an unchecked rush down the drain-pipe when it's emptied. And that's why you heard it at all. The water was goin' down; down a pipe past the dining-room, to drain away. And so you heard it. And so it seemed pretty plain that Hilary Keen was the murderer.'

Chief Inspector Masters sat up. 'Hold on, sir! I don't follow that.'

'No ?' said H. M. 'Look at the other evidence. What does Sanders tell us about Sunday night at Fourways? He gave Mrs Constable her morphia tablet, tucked her into bed, and came downstairs from her room at about twenty minutes past ten. At shortly before half-past eleven he heard that sound of runnin’ water, and he looked round, and he saw Pennik's "astral projection" (hoi) looking at him from the conservatory. He searched the conservatory - without result -and then tore upstairs to make sure Mrs Constable was: all right She was apparently right as rain, sleepin' peacefully.

'But in that case when did she die? For fifteen minutes after that, Sanders sat down on the steps not eight feet away from the door in a dead quiet house. If you're goin' to tell me that durin' those fifteen minutes the murderer went through all the motions: draggin' an only half-drugged! woman, who'd be certain to wake up partially: splashin' her into the bath: droppin' the heater, which makes a very loud flash and crackle: dressin' her, draggin' her back, putting her to bed again with all the trimmings: if you're goin' to tell me all that happened then, and a man eight feet away from the door didn't hear a single solitary sound ... Masters, I'll just make an impolite noise like this. Likewise if you tell me it all happened durin' the two minutes Sanders was downstairs answering the phone. No. Allied with the fact that water was running out of the bathtub shortly before eleven-thirty, it means only one thing.

'Mina Constable was dead before eleven-thirty. But Sanders found a livin', breathin' woman tucked into that bed at eleven-thirty. It's true, as he told us, that he didn't turn on the light when he went in. It's true he left Mina Constable with her head buried under a pillow. It's true he left her wearin' a heavy padded dressing-gown too big; for her. But that living woman in the dark couldn't have been Mina Constable. And if it wasn't Mina Constable, just focus your wits for half a second and ask yourself who it must have been.'

It was the creepiest part of the business Sanders remembered. He and Masters looked at each other, and H. M, nodded.

'Sure, son. Joe Keen's daughter. She only pretended she was goin' to take that train when we dropped her off at the station. She knew as early as Saturday that sooner or later

Mrs Constable was goin' to challenge Pennik; she knew when it would happen; and she had it impressed on Pennik's gullible brain just when he should fire the next bolt of Tele-force. She walked quietly back to Fourways: she had all the time in the world. She knew Sanders was alone in the house; and if by any chance he caught her, she firmly believed in her somewhat conceited soul that she could persuade him to cover her up.

'She got into the house by way of that outside staircase leadin' up to Sam Constable's room. All she had to do was snaffle another of the omnipresent electric fires from that unused top floor of the house, hide there, and wait for the proper time. It wasn't likely Sanders would sit up all night with Mrs Constable; and he didn't.

'Mrs Constable was only half drugged, and put up some-thin' of a struggle. But Joe Keen's daughter knew how to deal with that: you saw what she was goin' to do with her stepmother. Everything went slick as goose-grease until just after the murder. She'd got her victim out of the tub; dried her. and put on her nightgown; when all of a sudden she realized something. Up to then she hadn't made a sound to betray herself - but what about that water runnin' out, in a downstairs pipe that somebody on the floor below was almost certain to hear?

'She had to know. She went down the main staircase, into the kitchen by the hall door without touching the dining-room, through the kitchen door to the conservatory, and looked into the dining-room as Pennik's astral projection. Never mind that astral bit now I' said H. M., raising his hand. 'She didn't mean the picture of Pennik to be seen -not then.

'But it was seen; Sanders didn't pay much attention to the runnin' water, but he did jump when he caught a flash of Pennik's face. And she knew she .had to act quick. It was certain Sanders would go up straightaway to see whether Mrs Constable was all right If he found Mrs Constable dead then, the whole game was up. It wasn't a question of explaining her own presence in the house, for which she

might have found some coy excuse. But she'd left her properties all over the place: the candles in the bathroom, the extra electric fire hooked in to do the dirty; the tub still damp and the fuse still blown. If the body were discovered before she could dispose of the evidence, die whole myth of Teleforce would be exploded then and there.

'Well, she managed it. She made no sound: you've seen how light on her feet she is, and it's ducats to an old shoe she was in her stocking feet then. When Sanders saw her through the conservatory door, she nipped across the room, opened the conservatory window from inside, got out, and went back upstairs again by the outside balcony - while he was searching the conservatory. She pushed Mina Constable's body under the bed, put on the dressing-gown, and crawled into bed with her head under a pillow in the way Mina always slept.

'He couldn't have turned on the light if he'd wanted to, because the fuse was blown. In the very huge relief of findin' a woman alive, he wouldn't be likely to investigate close; and he wouldn't be likely to look past the closed door of the bathroom. He didn't.

'The interval while he was on the stairs she spent quietly playin' possum. She enjoyed all this, y'know: it was excitin': it stimulated her excess of thyroid. When she heard him go downstairs she put Mina Constable asprawl on the bed, and repaired the lights with one of the extra fuses: a matter of a couple of minutes. She opened the bathroom door, which he'd locked on the inside, slipped into the bathroom, closed the door as though it were still locked, and gathered up her properties.

'Afterwards was the real audacity of the business. I didn't work this out for myself: you'll have gathered it from the screamin’ she did at us when we walked in on her at her stepmother's-'

'Never mind,' said Sanders quickly.

'Go on, sir,’ grunted Masters. 'I think I know what you mean.'

'The wench actually stayed in that house all night. In the

general confusion after findin' Mrs Constable dead, Sanders couldn't be everywhere at once. He was only one man. He had to telephone. He had to get the police; and it was unlikely the police would get there before morning. He even had to sleep at one time or another. So she repaired all her little omissions. At one point she nipped back into the now-open room and locked the bathroom door again on the bedroom side. At another she returned the burnt-out heater to an unused room on the top floor. It was a game of hide-and-seek; and she liked it. At half-past five in the cool dawn she slipped out of the house carryin' her trim little suitcase, walked along the road, caught the early bus to Guildford and the early train to town; after which she appeared fresh-, eyed and dignified at the office, a cat back from the tiles and a saint in its niche again. That's all.

'So that was my dawnin' conviction about her and her character on Tuesday. But Pennik was still in the background, elusive and perplexin'. Was she working with Pennik? There seemed to be evidence for it. And yet I couldn't believe it. Havin' seen Pennik on Monday night, I was gatherin' a few cloudy ideas about him while I sat at the Corinthian grill room. There's such a thing as psychological truth, gents; and, burn me, I could not see him as anything but a feller who believed in what he said. You've felt that, Masters. So have you, son. I defy anybody to talk to Pennik for five minutes and still think he's party to any plot. I told you over and over he was the lone wolf. I told you that, within his limits, he was a perfectly honest man.

'Before I'd even met him, I'd got a bit of a notion about the African ancestry, from makin' an excuse to get a look at those little blue half-moons at the base of his finger-nails. Which was all the more reason for wantin' to find out what made him tick. I had to break him down. There was only one way to do that: Mrs Constable suggested it to me on Sunday. If I could get him locked up for a month or two? Yes. And the only way to do that was to start such a roar of publicity that the plain Briton would arise in all his majesty, saying: "To hell with common sense; stick him in clink." So the old wangler,' explained H. M., suddenly rubbing his hands together with a ghoulish expression of pleasure; 'started' wanglin' again. I wasn't really loopy, Masters. Honest I wasn't.

'For the truth of everything shone out at that lunch-table on Tuesday, when we three sat there with Hilary Keen and Pennik. I'd just gone through a spiritual abyss of wantin' to know why. I was sure Joe Keen's daughter was up to games. I was sure Pennik wasn't up to games in the practical sense. But whether they worked together or whether they didn't, why, why should Joe Keen's daughter kill Mrs Constable?" Surely not just to bolster up a belief in Teleforce?

'You know the answer. Mrs Constable could have exposed Pennik. What's more, she would have. Several times ‘ she'd already been within an ace of breakin' down and blurtin' out everything; you saw that. If it had happened again, if someone else died and Pennik claimed the, credit for the second time, Mina Constable would have blown the whole sham higher than Boney's kite. So Hilary had to kill her before Pennik's triumphal progress could go on. The name of the real victim, the intended victim, Mrs. Cynthia Keen, was as plain as though somebody had said it aloud over the table. Do you remember how curtly and finally Hilary cut off the conversation when Masters started asking questions about the possible victim and Pennik, in expansive mood, was within two steps and a whisde of telling ,him? I had got it. I had found Frau Frankenstein.

'And glorious was the thought, We've got 'em both now. D'ye see? Let Pennik go to Paris and give his speech. Let the : gal try to make Teleforce work again; when she does, we'll nail her flat with all the evidence we couldn't get otherwise. At the same time, keep Pennik away from that inquest;, let the honest jury return a verdict against him; arrest him as soon as he makes his speech, break him down and make him admit the real truth; and with one double-barrelled shot we bring 'em both down at once.

'Only-'

'I interfered,' muttered Sanders. 'And I challenged Pennik.'

'Son, I could have murdered you myself,' said H. M. 'You made Hilary as sick as you made me. For it wouldn't be any good to her if Pennik reared up and said, "Sanders dies." As I told you, she was workin' her head off to keep him from turnin' on you. She was prayin' for that. The atmosphere at the lunch-table was impregnated with it. .

'She had to stop it somehow. I only hoped she would. We might break the Teleforce bogey if Pennik said, "Sanders dies," and Sanders didn't die; but that wouldn't help us catch the real murderer. While my hopes shrank, I had to go after another line of attack. First, now I was convinced electric heaters had been used for die dirty work, to find some evidence of it. The heaters themselves were no good. I couldn't very well wave a burnt-out fire and say, "Hoy! This heater won't work; and that proves it was used to kill people with." The scrap-book was a better lead. I could 'a' sworn. Mrs Constable had hidden it, and that Joe Keen's daughter didn't know anything about it: she had pieced together the game, as you heard her say, by hearin' Mina Constable talk in her sleep. Thinkm' about electricity in general, it suddenly occurred to me what an uncommon fine place to hide a book a fuse-box would be. But in that case Hilary Keen would have known about the book. She did: and she left it behind because it was no betrayal of her-and, 1 groan to say, no good to us.

"That left my second line of attack: to get Pennik snaffled by the jury at the inquest. But to get the verdict in his absence, so he wouldn't be arrested until after he'd made his Paris speech.

'What we had to guard against was that Pennik might show up at the inquest, as he swore he would. He might try to do it in spite of knowin' he wouldn't be admitted. In that case we'd have to arrest him on the spot, and that would be bad. For the whole point of the secret inquest behind locked doors was that, in case we got the-verdict we hoped for, no word should get back to Hilary Keen that Pennik had been arrested or was goin' to be arrested. We could keep it from the press; we could even detain the jury until it was too late to make any difference.

'Well, Pennik did attend the inquest. And we did get the verdict we hoped for. Pennik first went berserk and then broke down. Masters and I took him into that little room-'

'To which,' Sanders interposed bitterly, ‘I was not admitted.'

'No, son. You were too dangerous to be let in on it. You wouldn't believe anything about the gal until you saw her at her games. It was touch and go, but we got the truth out of Pennik. I told him I had wangled this; and, if he would tell me the truth, I'd wangle him out of clink again. He believed me. He gave us a case-history of himself, and his Teleforce was only the Bantu fetishism of his grandfather.

'Now here's the delicate point I want to ram into your head. Judged scientifically, even his mind-reading was a fake. It was based oh information received beforehand, or obtained painlessly from the patient himself. He learned a whole lot about Masters, for instance, from the superintendent at Grovetop, who knows Masters. But Pennik doesn't regard it as a fake. That's the whole point. He really has got a remarkable brain,, a stunnin' penetration, an ability to read thoughts in the sense of reading people and judging (by their features, like the Muscle-Readers) exactly where their thoughts are likely to go. Whether they're thinkin' of serious things or trivialities. What sort of serious things or what sort of trivialities. He'll read you to an almost alarmin' extent in that respect; and give him a little information to work on and he's got you. He told us he made you jump - yes, you; son - by correctly sayin' you were thinkin' about a bust of Lister at the Harm Institute. Yet you once told Chase, who passed it on, that when you wanted to make your mind a blank you always concentrated on that bust.

'You've probably forgotten all about it. Pennik's ability was this: he decided you were tryin' to make your mind a blank (one up to him); he took a shot at what he thought might be it; and he was right. Unsubtle persons he'll scare out of their trousers.

'The trouble is, that he's gradually hypnotized himself into a different belief. He's hypnotized himself into thinkin' that this gift, which even children and idiots have sometimes had, is a great scientific power. He thinks that Bantu spells can be allied with it, and that they've got the same root. When he lost his head, reverted to type, and threw the Bantu spell which killed a man - well, that tore it. He thought the last barrier was surmounted.

'That was the feller I had to break down. That was the feller whose secret I had to get. I slowly and carefully explained to him exactly how Sam and Mina Constable had died. He didn't believe me, and for a while we were dealin' with a lunatic: particularly when I explained what Hilary Keen really was. Obviously, d'ye see, his native intelligence was no good as far as readin' her was concerned; he was blind gone on her; blind, deaf, dumb, and stymied. He admitted that he was goin' to try out his "power" on Cynthia Keen that night. And, having got to the root of a secret which was about as dangerous as an insect spray, I was pleased like billy-o; for the game was ours.

'I said, "Right-ho, then. You don't believe me. You don't think this wench is makin' a fool of you. You don't think she'll kill that woman with an ordinary dose of electricity. Very well: help us out and see for yourself. Go to Paris; make your speech. I'll arrange it so you can go. Then watch what happens."

'He agreed to that. He went, with a plain-clothes officer along; and so no word ever leaked out that he'd been arrested, because there he was, pale and free, steppin' into the plane before all the cameras. That was all I wanted. I wanted him away, with no word to the gal. But I knew he'd never make that speech. He couldn't. The hide was off his pride, and he was cryin' like a child.

'We know what happened now. He went to Paris, but he couldn't stand not knowin' about Hilary. He dodged our officer and vanished. Before anybody knew where he was, he wasflyin' back to London in an air-taxi. He was goin' to be in at die death. He was goin' to break down his last doubt.'

Chief Inspector Masters drew a deep breath.

'Oh, ah!' he said. 'You predicted he might do that, sir. I'm bound to admit it didn't surprise me much when I saw him barge in on us just as we were all ready to snaffle the young lady - with,' Masters added with a broad grin, 'considerable help from her stepmother.'

Dr Sanders was bitter. 'Well, it surprised me. When I looked round and saw him coming up the balcony stairs at me, I thought he was there for me. Did you know he had a knife?'

'I did,' returned the chief inspector grimly. ‘I had tight hold of his arms every second we were outside those windows. That knife wasn't for you. It was for Miss Keen. He'd have settled matters all right: blubbering like a baby and yet wanting to get at her all the time I I've not got much pity for that gentleman, Sir Henry, even though you seem to have.'

'Now, now, son!'

"Not me. Trying to lord it over all of us, and yet still going back once in a while to his tribe and lording it over them in a native hut like he told us! Him and his rubber masks!'

'Rubber masks?' demanded Sanders.

H. M. scratched the back of his neck with an air of apology. 'A copy of his own face in dark painted rubber. The fetish-man's mask, son,' he explained. 'It's made a little larger than life, and of rubber so it can be sort of pulled about and made more hideous than it is. D'ye know what that kind of fetishism really is? It's too late at night or early in the mornin' to maunder on about comparative religions; but its principles in the African savages are exactly the same as the witchcraft heresies of the European Middle Ages. Uh-huh. The Vaudois, the Poor Lombards, were an eleventh-century sect from which we get, resplendent and beamin', the word Voodoo. (Mina Constable did tell you, didn't she, that Pennik couldn't stand it when a professor aboard ship once called him M. Vaudois?) Pennik had a couple of those fetish-masks, and one with him. Litde Hilary Keen, a nice gal, begged or stole it. It was always useful if she wanted to be Pennik's astral projection.'

Outside the windows, the sky was growing grey. For some moments Chief Inspector Masters had been contemplating the corner of the desk with a growing twinkle in his eye. He picked up his almost untasted drink, stirred it, and drained it. He chuckled. His chuckle deepened and became a guffaw.

'Lummy,' he said comprehensively, and slapped his thigh.

H. M. peered at him over his spectacles. ‘So? What's so funny, Masters?'

'I was just thinking, sir, about the old gentleman on the tram: the one who wanted to put Pennik in a zinc-lined box like a tube of radium. Teleforce! And a lot of people getting the wind up. And a death-ray that'd knock bombers out of the air. And ... well, and all because an electric heater dropped into a bath.'

'You think that's funny ?'

'Don't you?'

'No,' said H. M. 'Why do you think all this fuss has been allowed?' 'How do you mean?’

'For the salutary moral lesson,' said H. M., 'when on this bright day the1 menace of Teleforce is turned into howlin' nonsense, and pseudo-scientific rubbish gets the kick in the pants it deserves. That's how the campaign has been planned. The long-threatened raspberry bursts forth. The Press tells what Teleforce is, and who had the managin' of it. And the next dme alarmists go scurry in' from house to house, the next dme they tell you about a super-bomb that'll drop from an enemy aeroplane and wipe out a whole county, the next time they picture London as one cloud of poison-gas from Hampstead to Lambeth, then you look at your back-garden and softly murmur, "Teleforce," and be comforted.

'We know what we're doin', son.' He swept his arm towards Whitehall. 'Don't let the outside alarmers scare you.

The trident's still on the coin. They don't speak Esperanto in Billingsgate yet. When you hear about these super-planes, these super-gases, these super-weaknesses on our side, think of Teleforce, too. This tendency to believe anything puts a leerin' face on people. It's a face made a little larger than1 life; but it's still rubber that can be pulled about to look more hideous than it really is. Most of it's Voodoo, son; and,' d'ye know, there never was much room for Voodoo here.'

Pulling himself to his feet, he snorted once, lumbered over to the window and, with the growing daylight on his bald head and square jaw, he stared out across the river and the mighty curve of London.