John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

Hilary went over to the bed and spoke in a tone of quiet reasonableness. 'You see, I have got to hear Pennik speaking, poor lamb. He is going to announce your death, and I want to know when to kill you. Teleforce isn't much good unless I give it a little help unknown to him. As the dear chief inspector once truly said, Pennik couldn't kill an ant with a fly-swatter - though he quite sincerely thinks he can; and it's gone to his head.'

She bent closer.

'You would be surprised at the trouble I had persuading him to kill you. He was so set on making an example of Jack Sanders instead; and how he ranted and swaggered and threw his weight about! I had it all nicely arranged, too, before Dr Sanders butted in and challenged him. Then 1 had to go to work all over again. But I managed to persuade him (if you know what I mean, Cynthia? And of course you do) to choose you instead. He keeps telling me that he would give me the sun and moon to wear, if he were king; so he could hardly fail to agree to a modest little request like killing you.'

Hilary laughed a little. Her enormous vitality, her warm and living aliveness of personality, flooded up into it. But that mood changed very quickly. Her feet planted wide apart, her hands on her hips, she again bent forward like a mother over a cradle.

'So you wanted to hear all about it, Cynthia? You wanted to hear all about Pennik, and what he does, and who he is? You shall hear it: I promised you. To put it vulgarly, you thought I had picked a nice soft spot for myself, didn't you? You shall hear how soft it is. Do you know who Pennik is? Do you know what he is?'

She reached into the darkness of the bed. There was a tearing sound; she plucked away several strips of sucking-plaster, and extricated the handkerchief from Cynthia Keen's mouth. She threw the handkerchief on the floor.

'Do you, Cynthia?'

The whimper from the bed was still unintelligible.

'He is an East African mulatto,' said Hilary. 'His father was a white hunter of good family, or so he says. His mother was a Matabele savage. His grandfather was a Bantu fetish-man, or witch-doctor; and he was brought up in a Matabele hut until he was eight years old.'

Outside the window, several persons looked at each other.

As an arrow strikes dead to the centre of the target, as by the sound of the bat the cleanness of the hit can be told, so the essendal rightness of those words came back. They stirred dozens of memories. They made dozens of pictures. They created an image of Pennik, fitting together all the contradictions at once.

'You've seen him in public,' said Hilary. 'Look at his mouth, and his nose, and his jaw. Look at the shape of his head and body. Above everything look at the little blue half-moons at the base of his fingernails. You can't be mistaken, even when you see how he acts. He keeps a dreadful restraint on himself. He doesn't even drink. And yet he's a misfit. In his soul he's three-quarters cultured gentleman and one part superstitious savage; but watch, over and over and over again, the tail wagging the dog. That's the nice soft spot I've picked for myself. Cynthia darling: the black boy.'

Hilary was never still. She moved away from the bed. Now her cheeks were more deeply flushed; and she shivered. Back and forth she went, with little short steps.

'Anyway he was, and is, very intelligent. You can't deny that. They saw that when he was a boy; and an English priest and a German doctor took over his education. They took him away from the fetish-man, and sold the fetish-man's ivory so that he wasn't swindled, and got enough money to keep the boy-wonder for life. But I wish the fetish-man grandfather hadn't got into his skin so much. He did; and I have to stand it - for a little while, at least. The fetish-man taught him too much. I wish he hadn't seen the fetish-man mumbling spells in a hut, and striking down somebody a hundred miles away. He believes in it. He saw it work. All the rest of his life he's been trying to explain it scientifically. He's been at the science of the mind, the science of the mind, the science of the mind: thinking there was a great power somewhere; thinking he could put a scientific net round it and define its terms and mark it out and use it. He's got a power. I don't deny it, in its way. But it's not that.

'And then something snaps in his head sometimes, and he reverts to type. I don't mind that in the least, because it's given little Hilary what she wants; or it will, when I've watched you die. He reverted to type last Friday night, at the Constables', when we couldn't keep the conversation off a certain subject.

'You must hear about that. We were sitting in the conservatory, Sam Constable and Mina Constable and Dr Sanders and Larry Chase and myself, and not understanding what was under the surface. I wish I had understood it then. But I didn't. Nobody did. That smoothed-faced gentleman, perfect gentleman, Samuel Hobart Constable, had already been baiting Pennik until he couldn't stand much more of it. Then dear Dr Sanders set the real ball rolling by saying, "We will pass over the question of whether you could kill a man by thinking about him, like a Bantu witch-doctor."

'Pennik himself had already made a slip by using a "savage" as an illustration in an argument, and correcting himself quickly. But after that we couldn't keep off the subject. Chefs' caps came into the talk; and Mr Constable said, with that oh-so-nice-sneer of his, that Pennik would look well in a chef's cap. Mina Constable asked whether Dumas didn't once cook a dinner for the gourmets of France; and Dumas, as you probably don't know, was an octoroon. Samuel Hobart finished it by saying, "If I can dress for dinner among a lot of damned niggers, I can dress for dinner in my own house." And the light went out in my little mulatto's brain. He said Samuel Hobart would die. '

'And he would have died, if a Bantu spell could have killed him. That's what Pennik put on him over the salad-bowl. That's what scared that woman-servant and her son so much that they ran away from the house. That's why Pennik gets to a state of frothing at the mouth. That's why he came to me first, and attempted that highly inartistic seduction before dinner - really, Cynthia, dear, I hope most of your own clients are better - and told me hp would kill Samuel Hobart as a sacrifice to me, and said he would strew rubies at my feet; and, in short, my dear, for the moment at least, he really did frighten little Hilary out of her wits. I was terribly impressed. For Samuel Hobart did die, just as Pennik said he would. But the amusing part of the whole thing is that Pennik had nothing to do with it. The little Matabele boy is quite harmless, if you know how to manage him. All the same, he was a nice cover for me when I killed Mina Constable. I killed Mina so that she shouldn't blab the real truth about Sam's death, and then I could go on and do the real work - that is, attending to you - still under cover of Pennik's mysterious powers. Pennik's mysterious rubbish 1

'I know exactly what I'm doing, angel. I know that I'm in for some awkward suspicions and some awkward questions. But I'm used to that. I rather like dealing with men in that way. The point is that, no matter how much they suspect or think they suspect, they'll never be able to prove anything. Even if they do burst Pennik's bubble they'll still suspect him, and I shall be sitting most dainty and pretty (as usual) because I've got a really noble alibi for the death of Samuel Hobart Constable.'

Whereupon Hilary Keen made the mistake she could perhaps not help making. She lost her head. She had started talking, and she could not stop.

Her face was pink; she went so far as to do a small dance-step on the carpet, very gracefully and rather grotesquely; yet it revealed the inside of a mind as much as her words.

'I'm tired of playing things safe and sound, when people like you can get all they want just for the whistling. I made up my mind I was going to see you in your grave just as soon as I heard the real truth about how Samuel Hobart Constable died.

'I didn't kill him, Cynthia - did I tell you that? No, no. Up to the day after he died my thoughts were as innocent and pure as they ever have been. Otherwise I shouldn't have been so free about admitting to Dr Sanders that I wanted to see you dead. I heard the truth about Samuel Hobart's death because for two nights afterwards I slept in the same room with Mina; and Mina, as everybody knows, talks in her sleep. First I fitted together one bit of it; and then I fitted together another bit of it; and then I saw how I could use Pennik to cover me like a sheet in getting at you.

'In law, you could say that Samuel Hobart's death was an accident. It was, in mechanics; but it wasn't really an accident. Pennik was responsible for it. If Pennik hadn't said what he did, and done what he did, and prophesied death at Fourways before eight o'clock, Samuel Hobart would be alive and strutting at this time. It was bound to happen. If I had only listened to that conversation beforehand I could have seen it coming at us like an express-train. People 'all acted according to their natures, each as he had to; and Samuel Hobart's fat little carcase got the benefit of it. I got the benefit of the rest of it. Now you'll see how he died, because you're going to die like that too.'

Hilary made a little curtsey - as Sanders remembered, he had seen her do once before, on the stairway at Fourways. He also knew the expression of her face - he saw it under die mosaic dome in the dining-room, her colour up and her eyes glittering, when she took leave of him a few hours before the death of Mina Constable.

She ran over to the mantelpiece, taking a skip or two like a schoolgirl. She put her hand into the cardboard box.

'If the radio won't work,' she said practically, 'it won't work. And that's that. I've got oceans of time, anyway, before the announcement. I want you to pay close attention, ; Cynthia. It's the loveliest little way of killing people I've heard of. And needs no knowledge, or heaven knows I couldn't have managed it. Chief Inspector Masters said another thing that was as true as gospel. I sneaked up to listen to what they were saying at the door, before they put me on the train I didn't take; and he said, "Something as wild as wind and yet as domestic as cheese. Something you could do in your own home with two thimbles and a tablet of soap." And that was quite right. Soap! Soap! That reminds me. You'll have to wait a minute!'

She flew into the bathroom, and a moment later two taps were turned on with a roaring rush of water.

'I don't have to be careful about the noise here,' she explained, reappearing in the door, 'the way I had to be careful at Fourways when I got rid of Mina. Poor old thick-witted nice Dr Sanders heard the water running out; but he thought it was the fountain in the conservatory.

'I rather failed with that boy, Cynthia. I nagged and nagged at him to make violent love to me; I even sat down with him in the dark so he'd do it. But hewouldn't. He's still violently in love with some silly wench like you, on a cruise now; he thinks she's been deceiving him, as she probably has; but he simply can't get over it and the rebound wasn't enough. I nearly managed it, though. He said I was like "the heroine of a thriller"; and I thought that was much the best way to play my part. Don't you think so?

'It was rather a good bit of business, because he's awfully easy to lie to and I knew if he caught me at Fourways on Sunday night I could make him swear to protect me. He could be lots of help. He has been. But I had rather to snub and slight poor Larry Chase, after giving Larry some encouragement to take me there.

' 'Do you know, Cynthia, I'm beginning positively to like you. You don't know the relief it is not to be Miss-Dignified-on - your - Poise - Little - Dog - Dingo - Fetch - and - Carry -for-Everybody, just for a little while anyway. I think I got all my best tricks and ideas from you. I've studied you ever since you married my father. Only, worse luck, the at least tolerable number of men who fall for me never seem to have any money. You always were lucky like that ... Naughty!

No, you don't!'

The woman on the bed, thrashing under the coverlet, screamed. Hilary was at her side, quiet and poised and cool again.

'Like Pennik, I'm talking too much,' said Hilary coldly and easily. 'Don't shout like that again. Do you know, I had thought of putting lighted matches to your feet before I did what I'm going to do. I don't suppose they would bother about a little burn or two like that afterwards, and it would so please me. Anyhow, get ready; I've got to carry you now.'

Cynthia Keen's voice, coughing but unexpectedly clear, spoke out.

'No, you don't,' she said.

'Why don't I, my dear ?’'

'Because of all those people out on the balcony,' said Cynthia. 'I've got some modesty left, in spite of what you say. I've got most of these damned knots loose, and I can reach this negligé now; but I think they might have told me what you were going to do.'

'All right, boys,' said H. M., in an ordinary tone.

He threw the window wide open, pushed draperies and curtains to one side, and stepped into the room.

CHAPTER XX

'Yes,' said H. M., holding up a tall glass to the light and stirring the sugar in it, 'I'll tell you all about it, son. Masters and I couldn't tell you before, because we were afraid you would blow the gaff to the gal, even if you didn't mean to. But you deserve to know., It's a very simple story, son.'

'Including,' asked Dr Sanders, 'the method of murder that's "something you could do at home with two thimbles and a tablet of soap"? '

H. M. nodded. And Chief Inspector Masters grinned.

They were sitting, towards dawn on that same morning, in H. M.'s office up all the flights of stairs at the back of Whitehall. For some hours the telephone had been ringing, and H. M. had been giving the same gleeful instructions over and over again. The same broad desk, the same flexible-necked lamp, the same iron safe that contained bottles and glasses: these were familiar as well.

'H'm!' said H. M., sniffing, sipping the tall glass, and blowing down the stem of a black pipe in rapid and successive movements. 'It requires very little sittin' and thinkin' once you've got the central fact. Which is this: That a man may be dead, and yet at the same time alive; and that there's only one medical or physiological cause which can put him in a state like that. Masters here carried on something awful when I first said it, but it's sober fact.'

He reflected.

"The best way of approach is by simply tellin' you the story just as it happened, from the start of the whole mess last Friday night. Hilary Keen - well,' he peered over his spectacles, 'we won't talk too much about her; but she said a true thing. She said it was practically inevitable, because all the people there acted accordin' to their characters. And they did.

'Now I want you to imagine you're back at Fourways, beside the fountain in that conservatory, at round about seven-thirty on Friday night. A clean sheet is before you; the dead are alive; and the whole thing is about to happen all over again. Pennik has just exploded a mine by announcin' that Sam Constable will probably die before eight o'clock.