John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

He turned to Masters. "The doc'll tell you, son, that there's only one form of death in which a man can be officially pronounced dead, and have his heart stop; and yet can show signs of life minutes afterwards. That's death from electric shock.’*

'It was known to happen in the old days of official execution by electricity in America, before they knew quite as much as they know now. When a feller gets only one shock, and that an accidental one in his own home, you can often get signs of life by givin' him artificial respiration. Mind now, Masters: I said signs of life. No artificial respiration ever invented can keep that heart beatin' for long. The victim's a goner if his heart's stopped to begin with. But you may get the same signs as Sanders here saw Constable make. And why? Because, all unknown to herself, Mina Constable had just been givin' him a very violent kind of artificial respiration by dressing him.

'At the end of that feverish work, when she pressed him forward on the hand-rail, she'd flogged just a flicker of life into him. A stir; a groan; not much more. But, by the blinkin' awful cussedness of things, Sanders here felt that

*‘ See Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence on Electricity, vol. I, pp. 560-573.

flicker of life go out - and naturally thought it was the real time of death.

'Lord, who can blame him? Who'd suspect revival from electric shock in the case of a man who, by all the evidence and testimony, merely falls down and dies in his own hall? It was a kind of second death. It threw everything wrong regardin' the time and place and manner of death. It made us look straight in the wrong direction. I don't trust this young feller as a detective, but I do trust him as a doctor; and there's nobody alive who could have seen what had happened. It was cussedness and it was a part of the same inevitability. Finally, it nearly finished Mrs Constable.'

"Thank you,' said Sanders.

He was remembering Mina in her bedroom just after that death. Her stark bewilderment, and her rapid-beating pulse of physical exertion. Her words, 'But he's not really dead! He's not. I saw -' could be completed in a different way now. 'You would know. You're a doctor. You would know, wouldn't you?'

Yes; he could trace every turn of her feelings, the self-contempt she showed and the hesitation she had on the verge of blurting out everything then and there.

'And you'll also,' pursued H. M. dryly, 'trace without much difficulty the state of her feelings when, coolly and calmly, Pennik announces to everybody that he killed Samuel Hobart by Teleforce. It'll give you just a taint glimmerin' suspicion why she suddenly rounded on Pennik and screamed that he was a fraud and a crook. Here he was, gently savin' he'd eliminated a useless member of society, and bulletin’ up a great reputation on it: while she had only dead clay that she couldn't even nurse. The trouble was, she couldn't speak. She wanted him shown up more than anything in the world. She was so anxious to challenge his Teleforce that we couldn't do anything with her. But she couldn't speak.

'And there we'll leave Mrs Constable. She wasn't a murderer. She was a decent woman tryin' to save her Own skin. After the accident she'd hidden the wet, blown-out electric heater in the wardrobe; and the next day she exchanged it for a good one among the hundred heaters in that house. She hid the scrap-book after she saw Sanders lookin' at it, after the time Sanders didn't see any heater in the bathroom. She passes on. And we consider the not-too-appetizin' figure of the murderer - the real murderer - the only murderer in this case.

'I mean Hilary Keen, whose stepmother had only a life-interest in Joe Keen's fortune, which would have reverted to Hilary at her death.'

Chief Inspector Masters grunted, looking up from his notebook. Behind the broad desk, whose goose-neck lamp was pushed nearly flat down to its surface, H. M. leaned back in his swivel-chair. He shaded his eyes and spectacles with one hand. The corners of his mouth were turned down; and he still drew noisily at the empty pipe. But Sanders had a feeling that a small, sharp eye was being turned towards him from under the shadow of that hand.

H. M. spoke.

'No,' he said, 'I didn't like her. And she was clever enough to see it. I knew her father. And she's bad stock, son; though I couldn't very well have told you that, or you'd have jumped down my throat for persecutin' a poor chivalrous gal. You didn't fall for her, though she tried her damnedest to make you do it, because you could 'a' been useful. I'm a bit glad you didn't fall for her, too, since it's ducats to an old shoe that she's goin' to hang.'

(That was the first word that really hurt.)

'No need to jump, son. It's not pleasant, but then neither was she. If I were you I'd put this down to experience, and not say much about it to Marcia Blystone when she gets home in June. You heard Joe. Keen's daughter talkin' when she was off-guard, so I don't need to say much more about her character: strong practical intelligence plus arrested emotional development. She was on to things fast enough. Here was Herman Pennik ridin' high and wide, utterly convinced he'd killed Sam Constable; utterly convinced he wielded a power so strong that it scared even Pennik. That was Pennik's state of mind. She saw how he could be used.'

H. M.'s face resumed its malevolent scowl.

'Ah! But now lemme tell you about my side of it. You two dragged me into this case on Sunday afternoon. I go down there for a peaceful afternoon, worried as blazes, with the House of Lords gibberin' at me from every bench; and what do I find ? I find a ruddy loony-bin. All you can do is gabble about people killing other people by thought-waves. Mrs Constable begs me, on bended knees and with tears in her eyes, to unmask Pennik - and at the same time she tells me a pack of lies.

'Well, what did I think? What would anybody think? I agreed with Masters that, if there had been any murderin' done, Mrs Constable had done it herself. I said she was in no danger; I said she was as safe as though she was packed in cotton wool in the middle of the Bank of England; and I still maintain I had a right to say it.

'But Pennik worried me. And if Mrs Constable had killed her husband, I couldn't think, for the life of me, how she had done it. All I knew was that that bathroom was mixed up in it somehow. All trails led to the bathroom. The candle-grease spots led there. Mrs Constable had lied about the time her husband took his bath. Sanders had given a careful description of the bathroom just after Constable's death, and said there was ho electric heater in it; but I could see for myself on Sunday afternoon a biggish bronze-painted heater there large as life, and it didn't seem reasonable that a man who felt the cold like that would have failed to keep a heater in the one room where he was most likely to need it.

'I was awful dense, Masters. But then I was worried; and I had to get over that hurdle of a doctor swearin' Constable had died in the hall. It wasn't until late Sunday night, when I was back at home sittin' and thinkin', that it occurred to me somebody needed to burn candles in that bathroom because the ordinary lights, were blown out; and the ordinary lights were blown out because somebody had dropped a (missing) electric fire into the bath. It'd explain the revived corpse. It was the only thing that'd explain the dilated eye-pupils.

'That looked as though Pennik must be in cahoots with Mrs Constable; Pennik to star-gaze with Teleforce, Mrs Constable for the real work. I went to sleep happily dreamin' of what I'd do to 'em - and woke up to find Mrs Constable polished off, and Pennik again with an alibi.

'Then I got mad.

'The Teleforce issue was raisin' blue blazes. I was so tied up with business that I didn't get a full report on Mrs Constable's death until Tuesday at lunch. Then I heard what both of you had to say. That tore it. I knew I was right because (a) the candles had been burnin' again, and (b) Sanders, sittin' in the dining-room almost directly under that bathroom upstairs, had noticed a vibrating, continued sound of running water which didn't come from the fountain in the conservatory.'