The Reader Is Warned

H. M. drew a deep breath.

'Y'see, son, here in town the London County Council have quite rightly got almost morbid rules about electric fittings in bathrooms. They won't even allow an electric-light switch inside the door. But to pick up a two-bar heater and move it about near bath-water b just plain suicidal lunacy.

'If it falls into the water, the thing short-circuits with a bang. The full weight of the house current goes through the best conductor of electricity known: water: and through the body of a victim sittin' in it up to his shoulders. It won't leave a mark or burn on the body, because the area's top distributed. It won't leave any sign at all, except dilated eye-pupils. There were two cases of it recently, at Bristol; and poor old Mina Constable knew it only too well, because she had the press-cutting in her scrap-book. And the voltage don't matter; 210 kills.

'She was the death of him, dropping things. And the very thing she was most awful cussed scared of was the thing that really happened.

'Well, what next? She stood there in the dark, with a wet-splashed bathroom and a dead husband. (No, don't interrupt me!) She had to find out if it was so. The lights had been put out when the fuse blew. But, as we found out, Fourways is on a system of what they call distributing fuses, two or three rooms to each fuse. The only lights that had gone out in the house were the lights in her room, in the bathroom, and in Samuel Hobart's room.

'There were a couple of candles standing on a chest-of-drawers in her husband's bedroom. She ran in, lit the candles, and brought 'em tearin' back to the bathroom to see what was what. But, in addition to droppin' wax on her sleeve, she also dropped two blobs of grease on the carpet. One was by the leg of the bed, and the other was by the door of the bathroom. - Remember, son? We were talkin' to her on Sunday afternoon, and she was standing in' the doorway of the bathroom ? I told you to look at the wax-stains, one by the bed and one beside where she was standing? Uh-huh. We gave her a bad time then, and I'm sorry as blazes; but that's how it happened.

'Well, her husband was dead.

'And they'd hang her now.

'You know what that woman's character was. She saw in her mind, in blazin' colours on vellum, the judge and the scaffold and herself on it. Pennik's hocus-pocus got hold of her imagination and swept it away. Nobody would believe it was an accident now. Samuel Hobart had practically said in front of witnesses that she'd kill him: 'and make it look like an accident, like that case in the papers.' She's even thought of it herself as a method of murder for a book; she was guilty. Oh, my eye!

'Standin' there in that bathroom with the candle held up, you know what she thought about. Little devil whistled to her and says, 'Couldn't you pretend you didn't do it?' She says, 'No, no, I loved him and I won't.' 'But you didn't mean to do it.' 'Never mind that.' 'You could,'' little devil says, 'if you could get him out of that bath and not let on the bath had anything to do with it.'

'It's simple enough. She was no-end fond of him; but she couldn't stand the thought of bein' arrested and hanged. She never thought faster or in more of a fever. Mina Shields, professionally, worked it out in two minutes. She once wrote a detective story (here, I say! Didn't young Chase comment on this?) where the murderer killed his victim in one place and then moved the body somewhere else and pretended the victim died there.' Sanders nodded gloomily.

'Yes,' he agreed. 'Chase did comment on it. It was my introduction to Mina Constable: he said he refused to believe it could be done.'

'I see. Ideas bein' in the air, hey? Well, her mind worked exactly along the same lines again: Move the body.

'It was easy enough to put the lights on again, unknown to anybody else. The fuse-box was in the cupboard in her bedroom. She shoved in a spare fuse, and put the candles back on the chest-of-drawers in the other room. The next part was pretty horrible for her, because she had to dress him. Gents, I saw her on Sunday - and I tell you that only the thought of the hangman kept her goin'. Keep in mind her later actions and you'll understand. It was easy enough to move him; he wasn't a heavy-weight and you noticed her strong wrists. I've seen little women handle dead-drunk men and undress 'em and put 'em to bed without trouble. What she did was the reverse. She had a good ten minutes to work in. The clothes were laid out, and the studs and links were in the shirt.

'What she thought would be the worst part was gettin' him out in the hall. She pulled him out there and propped him over that hand-rail, as though he'd fallen across it. The hand-rail held up his body with the weight supported on each side.

'But it wasn't the worst part of it.

'Not by a jugful!

'Gents,' said H. M., with a long, reflective, evil look at his two companions, 'next came those screams! Everybody who heard 'em was just about paralysed. I've heard they hardly sounded human. She stood in the door of her room and went on screamin' as though she'd gone mad; and she very nearly had. She wasn't acting. Oh no. After superhuman labour to avoid the hangman, she'd got a dead lump of clay out and poised over the rail. And, just as she was lookin' back at him before she closed the door, she saw him move.

Just note very carefully, young feller, that no independent witness ever saw Sam Constable actually standin' on his feet. You didn't; and you were out in that hall almost as soon as the woman started to scream. There was no sign of this 'dancing and staggering' she invented to protect herself. You saw him saggin' across the rail, just as she had left him, with one of his hands on the newel-post. But you did see him move. - 'You saw his body twitch; and one of his hands go up in a little jerk - so - and the fingers start to twitch. He was inert across that rail, yet he managed to move his back and hand. The symptoms are pretty characteristic, hey? Yes.'

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