The Reader Is Warned

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

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

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

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

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

‘What's that, sir?'

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

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

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

After a pause he added:

'Where is the box?'

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

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

'So that's it,' snarled Masters.

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

Masters jumped down from the chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masters shook his head.

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

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

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

‘Well?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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