John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

'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.