The Reader Is Warned

with me, Cynthia dear. Only -'

She had nearly reached the chair. By this time, even outside the window they could smell faintly the new odour in that overheated room: the odour of chloroform. Cynthia must have smelled it, too, or must have caught another sort of atmosphere which surrounded Hilary; for she turned in such a way that her face was repeated in several mirrors, and all the faces were white. Nor did Hilary raise her voice in speaking: it was only the contrast between the quiet tones and the meaning of what she said.

'Only I'm going to kill you as I killed Mina Constable,' said Hilary - and flung herself on the other woman.

She spoke almost too soon.

Sanders could have told her that to administer chloroform to a fighting patient is not so easy as the layman supposes. The face-cloth, which she had saturated with it, almost slipped out of her hand; and Cynthia Keen was on the edge of being able to scream, for they saw her teeth before her head was buried in the crook of Hilary's arm. Both were carried over out of sight into the deep chair. Only the flapping, panting noises beat against the back of the chair and shook it partly round. It was a full minute before Cynthia's legs, the feet in white satin mules, ceased to kick and presently fell.

Hilary got up and backed away.

She was bent forward almost double so that the sides of her hair had fallen over her face, and she was breathing hard: Her blue eyes were blank, yet at the same time intensely watchful; they roamed into corners, they were poised as though every nerve were listening, they probed even the silence.

Then she examined herself. One of her stockings had laddered. She automatically put her finger to her lips, moistened it, and ran it along the edge of the stocking before she straightened up. Slowing down her panting breaths, pushing back her hair, she went to look at her now pale face in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Yet she never 'left off that strung-up watchfulness, turning round and round as she moved, round and round, as though wondering if something would surprise her in a corner. The silence felt too heavy; there was not even a clock.

As though remembering, she ran and turned the key in the lock of the door. Then, hastily, she broke the string of the brown-paper parcel on the mantelpiece. It seemed to contain a large box of stiff cardboard, which in turn contained several articles. First she took out several lengths of very heavy but soft-looking black plaited cord, evidently the cord of a dressing-gown cut into pieces. Next she took a pair of rubber gloves, and rolled them expertly on her hands.

Half carrying, half dragging the unconscious woman, her face suddenly snowing red and ugly with a grimace over Cynthia's lace-covered shoulder, Hilary supported her to the bed. She rolled her on to the bed, into the darkness under that muffling fall of brocaded canopy-curtains.

For the first time Hilary spoke aloud.

'I shall have to undress you, Cynthia dear,' she said. 'People have to be undressed before they can die in the way the other two died. After you're undressed, we will just tie you up with these, which are soft and won't leave bruises on you. Then' - she raced back to the mantelpiece, returning with a handkerchief and several strips of sticking-plaster -'we'll put this in your mouth and fasten it with the plaster to finish the gag. I want you to be fully awake when you die.'

Hilary sprang up and round again, her eyes searching,

The fine lightness and grace of her movements, like that of a dancer, was in contrast to the expression of her eyes. Those eyes moved towards the windows, hesitated and moved back. On the bed the other woman uttered a faint moan.

'Yes, you will be coming round in a moment,' said Hilary quickly. 'That must be seen to.'

Two minutes later she pulled up the bed coverlet over the stirring and muttering woman, who now could not move her arms or legs.

'Cynthia. Can you hear me?

'If I dared. I wonder if I dare take that gag out. If I dared.

'Cynthia!'

Inside the canopy showed only a blob of darkness, which Hilary's arm shook. Then Hilary herself seemed to wake up. Across the room there was a fat, squat-legged cabinet of gilt and lacquer-work, its front painted with a pastoral scene of Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses. It held, ingeniously concealed, a radio. Hilary clicked the switch, but no answering light showed against the glass inside. She hurriedly examined the base-plug, which was connected; again she clicked the dead switch back and forth.

'Cynthia, why won't this radio work ?'

There was no reply.

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