anything. Neither, I learned from askin' while you were present, had the sergeant.
'But at the moment — when you first reported over the 'phone — I was bothered as hell. Here was a direct connection: Charters visitin' Hogenauer secretly, and Hogenauer is a tolerably sound authority on the subject o' counterfeit money. It all seemed to come back to that. Were the two ends convergin'? Had Charters discovered a good part of the Willoughby stuff was real, neatly sandwiched between bogus money; and had he gone to Hogenauer to make sure it was real? Whereupon (thinks I) Hogenauer's conscience makes him squawk out and say Charters had better not try any games; because at the inquest Hobenauer is goin' to go in and tell the truth. And so he's got to be silenced.
'And here enters the cussedness of the business. What threw me off, what set my head buzzin', was that whole weird hocus-pocus of lights and missin' books and changed furniture. It was the setting. It was the Topsy- Turvy House, and for about half an hour it threw me off altogether. If Hogenauer had been found dead of poison, sittin' in his chair in an ordinary fashion, I'd 'a' been sure. But what I ran smack up against was the one set o' clues that didn't mean anything at all — Y'see I had to be careful. Because still the strong possibility was that there might have been international games, there might have been dirty work with Hogenauer mixed up in it, and the few blotted lines of the letter in Hogenauer's study didn't soothe my feelings any. It was just possible I was altogether mistaken in my suspicion of Charters. I hadda be sure. And consequently, Ken, in spite of damnation and foul weather, I had to send you to Bristol.'
At this point H.M. made a somewhat fiendish face under the gay hat.
'But, Ken-oh, love-a-duck, if you'd only made that telephone-call ten minutes later-!'
'Why ten minutes later?' asked Evelyn. 'What difference would that have made?'
'Because I'd have been sure,' said H.M. sourly. 'Follow the course of your adventures, Ken, as I got 'em in your next report from Bristol. You saw the whole story played out in front of you, if you'd known it. After speakin' to me from Moreton Abbott, you walked out of the telephone-box and opened your newspaper bundle to put on your policeman's outfit again — and out. fell a ?100 note. I ask you….
'That tore it. A big slice of money like that was tossed away casually in a four-days' old newspaper chucked into the scullery. That meant it was a part of the real slush; that meant somebody had been conferrin' with Hogenauer about the Willoughby stuff; and, above all, it meant something none of you seem to have realized. It meant that this conference must have taken place some days before. It meant that the only other party to the conference must have been Charters himself, because Charters was the only one who had the money in his possession. It was in his safe.'
Stone held up his hand.
'Hold on there,' he protested. 'Why couldn't it have been Serpos? Why couldn't Serpos have swiped a couple of samples out of the safe-there was a lot of dough, you know, so Charters wouldn't have noticed a few missing — and why couldn't Serpos have taken that to Hogenauer for the verdict?'
H.M. blinked at him.
'Well, now, I ask you,' he said, with moderation. 'If it'd been only the question of a few samples, why should the guilty person (whoever he was) need to blow the gaff to Hogenauer at all, and tell him what money it was? If you only have a few samples, why give away the fact that you're actin' crookedly with Willoughby's money? The point of this business is that the guilty person had to get a verdict on the whole lot, the whole sackful — otherwise it was no good. There was real money and bogus money. If you take a few, samples, where are you? Is this real? No. Is that real? Yes. And you don't know where you stand.
'Am I makin' myself clear?' inquired H.M. laboriously. 'Serpos couldn't have pinched the money, because he couldn't have got it out of the safe without Charters's knowledge. Nobody, nobody in the whole case, could have done it except Charters himself. Nobody else could have taken it to Hogenauer. If money was taken to Hogenauer, it's the one thing that established Charters's guilt. Why burn me — '
'No,' said Stone, with grave thoughtfulness. 'Burn me.
But don't stop; keep on going.'
'H'm. So. All right; follow Ken's adventures from there on. They're illustrations in themselves of the truth. He goes to the railway station in Moreton Abbot — and bumps into Serpos.
'Now we can see what Serpos did. Serpos didn't consult Hogenauer: he relied on his own knowledge of money that a good two-thirds of that stuff was real. Of course, he could have said to Charters: `Here! You've given out to everybody that it's all counterfeit, and you know better; so let me have my share or I'll blow the gaff.' But this didn't satisfy good old Serpos, it didn't. He wanted it all. And, d'ye see, the beauty of his scheme was that he thought it was perfectly safe. First, he rather doubted whether Charters would have the nerve to set the coppers on him. Second, even if Charters did do it, and in the unlikely event that they caught up to him-well, he was still safe, for he could whisper to Charters: `You don't dare prosecute me, or I'll tell the truth about that money.' So he laid his plans, and he scooted: takin' all the money, good and bad, because it was done into packets of each together, and he didn't have time to separate the sheep from the goats.
'But, wow! Gents, it must have been an awful shock when, on the station platform at Moreton Abbot, he suddenly found a constable (in the person of Ken) bearin' down on him, and voices in the crowd shoutin' out to stop the man who had robbed the Chief Constable. Ken, of course, had built up on the figure of Serpos this dummy-and- phantom to shield himself in his role as the Compleat Constable; but it really was Serpos, the man who had robbed the Chief Constable!
'Serpos is a pretty temperamental feller, y'know. He collapsed. But he didn't collapse for many minutes. They'd caught him: but he saw his chance. He begged in weepin' humility to be carried back and take his medicine; he was penitent, he was goaded by conscience; and all the time there was twistin' about at the back of his eye a shrewd little gleam, 'Charters'll never dare. Let me get a chance to talk to Charters, and he'll never dare. I'll get some of that money yet.' That was Change Number One.
'Change Number Two occurred about two minutes later, when he suddenly discovered Ken was no more a policeman than he himself was a clergyman. And Serpos changed pretty quick then. He changed, and he got nasty, and he wouldn't give up what he had been so ready and eager to yield a minute before. Because, you see, be thought Ken must be-,'
'A member of the Willoughby gang,' supplied Evelyn.
'Uh-huh. That circumstance should also 'a' told you that Serpos hadn't found out he was stealing counterfeit money.' Oooh, no, my lads. He knew jolly well what he was carrying, as he'd known all along.
'Ken very thoughtfully shoved him into a lavatory, and the next stage of the adventures began. Whack! Straightaway Ken meets a feller,' H.M.'s hand appeared past my shoulder and tapped Stone, 'who presents tolerably good credentials and tells you L. is dead. But did you doubt Charters's story even then? No. What proof had there ever been, ask again, that Hogenauer ever made a proposition to betray L.? Charters's statement: that's all. Was it made to anyone else? No. Did it sound inherently probable in itself? No. Was there direct evidence that it couldn't have been made? Yes. But it didn't make you suspicious of Charters; it only made you suspicious of Stone.
'By the time you d had your skylarkin' at the Cabot Hotel, and learned the truth about the light-cuff-links- missing-books affair, I was beginnin' to get more than a glimmering of the truth about it myself. And, by the time Ken 'phoned in his second report, I had the whole thing arranged in reasonable order. So far, I'd taken a devilish lot of whacks. I was the clown in the Punch and Judy show: every time I stuck my head up over the stairs, somebody batted it with a club. And the audience roared with mirth. But, remember, my lads: it's only the Clown that survives the Punch and Judy show. I'm used to that. Nobody appreciates me. Bah.
'Well, this is the way I decided Charters must have gone to work:
'He'd determined to kill Hogenauer to keep Hogenauer's mouth shut. Oh, quite cold-bloodedly. Maybe he thought he was justified in doin' it; I'm never quite sure how these people with a persecution mania, who think nobody appreciates 'em, are likely to act. But here was the snag: He was the Chief Constable. He was bound to investigate the murder he meant to commit himself. And Hogenauer had a small circle of intimates. And Charters didn't want any of 'em blamed for it. He was tryin' to be a weird and wonderful thing, which is exactly like Charters if you see him as I see him: he was tryin' to be a murderer like a gentleman. Do you understand torture? If not, you'll never understand Charters. He wanted nobody blamed. In particular, he didn't want the Antrims blamed-'
'Even though,' put in Evelyn, very thoughtfully, 'he stole poison from them?'
'Even then, I think,' said H.M. 'But listen. What he wanted was a dummy motive and a dummy murderer- somebody against whom a devilish good case could be made out, but who still couldn't be caught. And he
