Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery
    The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery
    The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery
    Ebook288 pages5 hours

    The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery

    By John Dickson Carr and Martin Edwards

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    John Dickson Carr lays on the macabre atmosphere again in this follow up to It Walks by Night in which Inspector Bencolin attempts to piece together a puzzle involving a disappearing street, a set of gallows which mysteriously reveals itself to a number of figures traipsing through the London fog, and the bizarre suggestion that a kind of fictional bogeyman, Jack Ketch, may be afoot and in the business of wanton execution. An early gem from one of the great writers of the genre. Also includes the rare Bencolin short story "The Ends of Justice."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateApr 6, 2021
    ISBN9781728219899
    The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery
    Author

    John Dickson Carr

    John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.

    Read more from John Dickson Carr

    Related to The Lost Gallows

    Titles in the series (58)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Historical Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      SAPPHIRE & STEEL

      Aug 14, 2019

      SAPPHIRE & STEEL
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mysterious World

      Aug 27, 2020

      Mysterious World
      1 min read

    • Article

      Edward Wilson

      Dec 3, 2020

      Edward Wilson immigrated to the UK from America after serving in the Vietnam War. After his teaching career ended, he became the author of eight highly acclaimed books, including the Catesby spy thrillers as well as standalones. ‘Portrait of the Spy

      6 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Sacks, Zambreno, Lawlor, McEwan, and More

      Apr 23, 2019

      Out this week: new Ian McEwan, a fascinating study of the American heartland, and the final collection from the late, great Oliver Sacks. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Sacks, Zambreno, Lawlor, McEwan, and More appeared first on The Milli

      4 min read

    • Article

      Welcome Returns For Three Irish Writers

      Apr 1, 2022

      These Days Lucy Caldwell (Faber, £12.99) Homesickness Colin Barrett (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) The Geometer Lobachevsky Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock, £14.99) THE STUFFY OLD WORLD of publishing is no more immune to neophilia than the rest of our society an

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Simply Phenomenal!

      Jul 14, 2022

      Hunt Emerson Knockabout Press 2022 Pb, 224pp, £22.99, ISBN 9780861662906 Even after working on FT for well over two decades, some things never, as they say, get old. One of those things is the arrival, every four weeks, of a new “Phenomenomix” strip

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Great Divide

      Apr 22, 2022

      It’s easy to imagine a conversation about Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, Trespasses, that goes something like this: “What’s it about?” “Well, it’s about a young Catholic woman in Belfast in the 70s, at the height of the Troubles.” “Punishment beatings

      2 min read

    • Article

      Best Of The Year That Was

      Dec 23, 2020

      Best Of The Year That Was
      5 min read

    • Article

      The World Of Writing

      Jan 7, 2021

      The World Of Writing
      4 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Dec 2, 2021

      Shelf Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      'A Column of Fire' Is Half Historic Epic, Half Thriller – All of It Engaging

      Sep 12, 2017

      Ken Follett returns with the final (we think) Kingsbridge story, now skipping ahead a couple of centuries to the Elizabethan era.

      3 min read

    • Article

      As Everybody Knows…

      Nov 4, 2021

      From Mozart’s Murder to Cleopatra’s Asp Graeme Donald Michael O’Mara 2021 Pb, 256pp, £7.99, ISBN 9781789293623 Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World Otto English Wellbeck 2021 Hb, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781787396395 You wait all day for a scepti

      4 min read

    • Article

      SAM LEITH Discovers A Growing Appetite For Books About Books And Rounds Up The Latest Reviews

      Jun 26, 2024

      The vigorous academic specialism of book history is having a bit of a moment in trade publishing. Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the became an unlikely bestseller a couple of years ago, and now Duncan’s sometime collaborator, the Balliol academi

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Craving for Crime

      Jan 19, 2024

      A Craving for Crime
      13 min read

    • Article

      Declassified

      Dec 1, 2022

      Declassified
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      May 4, 2022

      * With the Platinum Jubilee upon us, it’s time to look forward to the 70th anniversary of the Young Elizabethan, too. Founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, it was renamed the Young Elizabethan to celebrate the Queen’s Coronation. In 1

      6 min read

    • Article

      History

      Jun 30, 2021

      A NEW HISTORY OF VIKINGS FROM SCANDINAVIA TO THE SILK ROADS CAT JARMAN Wm Collins, 336pp, £25 As a 17-year-old, Financial Times reviewer William Dalrymple was one of ten diggers who made an important archaeological discovery in a vicar’s garden near

      11 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 16, 2023

      What a thing of joy is a new Francis Spufford novel. Golden Hill, his debut, was a transporting piece of historical fiction that captured life in early New York in all its quirk and contingence, and deservedly won a bag of awards. His second, Light P

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 8, 2024

      Books
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Lost Gallows

    3.5/5

    27 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      In general, I like the Bencolin series better than mot of Carr's work, but this is not my favorite Bencolin, perhaps in part because it is set in London rather than Paris, and perhaps also because there seems to be a racist attitude towards the unpleasant Egyptian character Nezam al Moulk (whose name seems to be borrowed from Nizam al Mulk, the great vizier of the Seljuks).

    Book preview

    The Lost Gallows - John Dickson Carr

    Introduction © 2020, 2021 by Martin Edwards

    The Lost Gallows © 1931 by The Estate of Clarice M. Carr

    The Ends of Justice © 1927 by The Estate of Clarice M. Carr

    Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

    Cover © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library

    Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

    The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

    Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the British Library

    P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

    (630) 961-3900

    sourcebooks.com

    The Lost Gallows was originally published in 1931 in New York, U.S., and London, UK, by Harper & Brothers.

    The Ends of Justice was originally published in May 1927 in Haverford, Pennsylvania, U.S., in The Haverfordian, Haverford College.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Carr, John Dickson, author. | Edwards, Martin, writer of introduction.

    Title: The lost gallows : including the short story The ends of justice /

    John Dickson Carr ; introduction by Martin Edwards.

    Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:

    British Library crime classics | "The Lost Gallows was originally

    published in 1931 in New York, U.S., and London, UK by Harper & Brothers

    The Ends of Justice was originally published in May 1927 in Haverford,

    Pennsylvania, U.S. in The Haverfordian, Haverford College"

    Identifiers: LCCN 2020040138 (trade paperback) | (epub)

    Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | LCGFT: Novels. | Short stories.

    Classification: LCC PS3505.A763 L67 2021 (print) | LCC PS3505.A763

    (ebook) | DDC 813/.52--dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040138

    Contents

    Front Cover

    Title Page

    Copyright

    Introduction

    The Lost Gallows

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Chapter VIII

    Chapter IX

    Chapter X

    Chapter XI

    Chapter XII

    Chapter XIII

    Chapter XIV

    Chapter XV

    Chapter XVI

    Chapter XVII

    Chapter XVIII

    Chapter XIX

    The Ends of Justice

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Back Cover

    Introduction

    The Lost Gallows, John Dickson Carr’s second novel, saw the return of the Parisian detective Henri Bencolin, who had solved the mystery in Carr’s first book, It Walks by Night. This time, however, Carr set his story in England, in foggy London.

    One need only glance at the chapter titles to get a flavour of the story. The first chapter is called The Shadow of the Noose and others include How We Played Hare and Hounds with a Corpse, The Street of Strangled Men, and The Trap Falls at Last. This was a young man’s book (Carr was a stripling of twenty-four when the novel first appeared in 1931), and it’s full of youthful swagger and zest.

    The opening scene is set at the Brimstone Club—a wonderful name, typical of Carr—where Bencolin and his friend, the American Jeff Marle, are staying. They are in conversation with Sir John Landervorne, who lives at the Brimstone. Sir John is one of Bencolin’s oldest friends, with a genius for organization and a former assistant police commissioner at Scotland Yard. Sir John had previously appeared in a handful of Carr’s early short stories, one of which, The Ends of Justice, is included in this volume. It may be that Carr originally conceived Bencolin and Landervorne as a cosmopolitan updating of the Holmes–Watson type of detective partnership popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle, but by this time, he had created Jeff Marle to act as a narrator as well as loyal sidekick, much more in the Watson vein than Sir John. And indeed this book marked Sir John’s last appearance in Carr’s work.

    Sir John tells his colleagues a strange story about a young man called Dallings; they talk about the discovery in Paris of the murdered corpse of a man dressed in the sandals and gold robes of a nobleman from ancient Egypt and the subsequent suicide of an Englishman in a prison cell; and they chance upon a model, a toy gibbet, which someone has left in the lounge of the Brimstone.

    Carr describes the club with his customary brio. The Brimstone is said to be the most disreputable in the West End, and its membership subscriptions are the highest of any in London: it collects the wealthy and drifting scum of the world. For the past thirty years it has been the club of the wanderer… Through it float English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian faces; the soldier, the pawned title, the castaway, the game-hunter, the seeker of far places; the bored, the aimless, the foot-loose, the damned… One is hushed by the massive dreariness of its luxury, its sombre lamps, its thick, muffled carpets, its hint of suicide.

    Lashings of atmosphere of this kind help to create the ideal environment for the mysterious impossibilities that were Carr’s stock-in-trade. Here there are three intriguing riddles. The first concerns a limousine, which seems to have been driven through the London streets by a murdered chauffeur. The second concerns the mysterious appearance and disappearance of a number of items within a locked room. The third is: how was a man hanged on a lost gallows in a lost street—Ruination Street?

    The main puzzle concerns the identity of the culprit who hides behind the name of Jack Ketch, the legendary hangman. After the discovery of a body, Bencolin accepts a wager from Sir John, to identify the killer within forty-eight hours. Bencolin, a man who is as diabolic as his secret adversary, is one of those Great Detectives who likes to play God. He keeps his cards close to his chest and asks Jeff to obey his orders even if they involve as deadly danger as you are ever likely to encounter. This is a big ask, and not surprisingly, Jeff is put out: I should at least like to know what this is all about. You make all these mysterious remarks…

    Predictably, his plea for enlightenment falls on deaf ears. Bencolin refuses to show his hand, despite piling the pressure on himself as he ruminates: if I have misread the signs, if I have made the slightest error in all my calculations, then there are unutterable horrors in store for all of us. A theory, nothing more!

    The original American first edition of this book was a Harper Sealed Mystery, and the publishers, Harper, interrupt at an appropriate cliffhanging moment (the end of Chapter Fifteen) to demand of the reader: Do you know Jack Ketch?… If you can resist the desire to read what lies within this seal, to discover how this ghastly vigil terminates and end the fearful uncertainty and harrowing suspense of this tale, return this book to your bookseller with the seal unbroken and your money will be refunded.

    All is finally revealed in what Carr’s biographer, Douglas G. Greene, has described as a powerful conclusion, and one that fits this inhuman, mad world Carr has created. The American bibliophile, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler is among those who have named The Lost Gallows as one of their favourite Carr novels.

    John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) proceeded to become one of the most popular and influential authors of Golden Age detective fiction. Bencolin appeared in five novels in the 1930s, having previously appeared in four short stories printed in The Haverfordian, a college magazine. The Ends of Justice, a baroque tale with a distinct anticlerical flavour, was published in the May 1927 issue. Carr established a reputation as a master of the locked room mystery, and Agatha Christie, in her essay Detective Writers in England, described him as a master magician… He is a male Scheherazade. His work continues to be admired around the world; on a recent trip to a festival in Shanghai, I discovered that his ingenious stories are warmly regarded by a large number of young Chinese fans, and in recent years more than twenty of his books have been published in Chinese translation. To write fiction of such enduring and widespread appeal is no mean feat. The Lost Gallows is an enjoyable mystery in itself, as well as a milestone in the literary apprenticeship of one of the genre’s great entertainers.

    —Martin Edwards

    www.martinedwardsbooks.com

    The Lost Gallows

    JACK KETCH: A familiar hobgoblin of nursery tales, appearing also in the showbox history of Punch and Judy. A hangman, an executioner, applied in general to all hangmen. The first Jack Ketch officiated at Tyburn in the latter part of the seventeenth century…

    —Lore for the Curious

    Chapter I

    The Shadow of the Noose

    It stood on the table before us, among the teacups, a small and perfectly constructed model of a gibbet. Standing no more than eight inches high, it was made of cedar wood painted black. Thirteen steps led up to the platform, to a trap held in place by tiny hinges and a rod. From the crossbeam dangled a small noose of twine.

    I can see it yet, brought into grisly relief by the white cloth, the cups, and the plate of sandwiches, in the yellow lamplight of late afternoon. Beyond the bay window where we sat, dingy fog was strangling out the street lamps along Pall Mall. It curled and billowed past in thick yellow-brown, smearing every light. A muffled rumble of traffic shook against the windows, pierced by the siren-hoot of a bus. The faces of Bencolin and Sir John Landervorne were reflected in the glass as they studied this ugly toy.

    The two man-hunters were a contrast.

    Sir John’s face was sallow and austere. He had a high, narrow forehead, with shining grey hair. But the eyebrows were very thin and black, pinched over a sombre gaze from behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses on his thin nose. His eyelids moved slowly up and down as he fondled his grey moustache and close-clipped grey beard. He stared intently at the little gallows. On the other side of the table, Bencolin watched him behind cigarette smoke. Sir John Landervorne had been formerly assistant commissioner of the metropolitan police.

    The Frenchman opposite him was a tall and lazy Mephisto—Mephisto with a lifted eyebrow. His black hair was parted in the middle and twirled up like horns. Thin lines ran from his nostrils down past a small moustache and black pointed beard, past a mouth which showed now the glittering edge of a smile. His cheek-bones were high, and his eyes unfathomable. The face was brilliant, moody, capricious, and cruel. There were rings on the drooping fingers which held his cigarette. He was M. Henri Bencolin, juge d’instruction of the Seine, the head of the Paris police and the most dangerous man in Europe.

    The time was five-thirty in the afternoon of November 16th; the place was the lounge of the Brimstone Club in London. With the finding of that model we were introduced into the celebrated murder case of the Lost Gallows on the Lost Street, and it had come about in this fashion:

    Bencolin and I had come over from Paris to witness the opening performance, at the Haymarket Theatre, of The Silver Mask. This, it may be remembered, was the play which Edouard Vautrelle had written, and which furnished so terrible a clue in the Saligny case the previous April. We had arranged for rooms at the Brimstone, where Sir John lived, and he was to meet us on our arrival. Sir John was one of Bencolin’s oldest friends, with a genius for organization which had done much at Scotland Yard. Before the war he had been assistant police commissioner under the Honourable Ronald Devisham. I had met him in Paris, where he came occasionally to visit Bencolin. He was a tall stooped man, courteous but austere, with little humour, and with the air of one brooding perpetually over a puzzling position on a chessboard—the sort of person whom the old romances would have described as a man with a secret. Bencolin said that he had never quite recovered from the loss of his son during the war. Since his retirement in 1919 he had become a recluse, living in Hampshire until he had taken up lodgings in London the previous year.

    He met us that afternoon at Victoria; he was the first person we saw standing on the sooty, foggy platform when the train coughed into the dimness of the shed. He greeted us with a sort of embarrassed jollity, but nobody felt in a particularly gay mood. The chill of the weather, the iron gloom, and the hollow roar of the Channel in a gale, had depressed us no less than our mission. When our talk did begin, after we had been installed at the Brimstone, it turned inevitably to crime.

    We ordered tea in the lounge, a brown-panelled room of bay windows and those grotesque carvings which are associated with the club’s history. A wood fire lighted the immense stone fireplace, that monstrosity of gargoyles, above which hangs the portrait of the founder, by De Suérif. I think he would have relished our conversation. Rake, duellist, horseman, drunkard was Sir George Falconer, in that galaxy of Georges round the Prince Regent. He stands there rich-coloured in his bottle-green coat, his Brummel cravat, and his skin-tight tan trousers. His hair is curled, and his insolent eye stares down in the low light of the amber lamps. From high up in the tall room he looked now at the back of Sir John Landervorne, who was sitting in a deep chair facing Bencolin across the tea table.

    Sir John spoke with a hesitant air, as though he frowned at each word before he uttered it.

    You know, Bencolin, he said, what has always amazed me is the picturesque quality of crime on the Continent. I’ve been dipping into your records. Amazing, some of them! Gruesome imagination—it’s devilish.

    He adjusted his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose and blinked through them at his cup. He continued:

    It may be the Gallic mind; yes, I fancy it is. People killed with scorpions, and cords made of women’s hair, and spiked cradles like the Iron Maiden—

    Bencolin turned from the window, where he had been studying the fog-swirls with his chin in his hand.

    What do you mean by the Gallic mind? he asked.

    Well… emotionalism. Flighty lot, as a rule.

    Staring past him into the fire, Bencolin smiled obscurely.

    ‘Emotionalism,’ he repeated. "When you say that you think of some wild-eyed Frenchman flying into a rage, seizing a dagger and stabbing his sweetheart. That, Sir John, is a product of sentimentalism, pure and simple. Such things are done by the sentimental Anglo-Saxon, who insanely stabs his sweetheart and then weeps over a crushed flower she left in a book. Your Anglo-Saxon is simple and direct. A blind passion, a desire to kill; ergo, somebody is killed, without further fuss. He goes straight to the point—a process at which the Gallic soul revolts, in anything from committing a crime to bargaining with the grocer."

    Sir John said, H’m, noncommittally. He cast a dubious eye across the table.

    The Gallic type, said Bencolin, loves devious ways. He would never enter your house through the street door when he could enter by a secret passage. But he is cold, hard, and cunning. If he kills, he kills with logical care. Where he expresses himself is in the theatrical gesture, the flourish, the purple-cloak drama—which is the surest evidence of coldness at heart. True and spontaneous emotion is always incoherent. A man really in love can only gurgle foolishly to his lady; it is your unmoved Don Juan who writes her the fine, elaborate, theatrical love-verses.

    He paused.

    I am not trying to distinguish between English and French, of course. I merely point out two types of mind, of whatever nationality. But of all things I delight in, this latter sort—

    I have observed that tendency in you, Sir John said, dryly.

    —because it makes for the super-criminal. Bencolin’s eyes were half shut, and they glittered. "The blind, mad little brain which buzzes forever round in its own conceit. That is why it is mad, in its own way, because it thinks about itself all the time. One of the strangest crimes I ever knew…"

    After a long silence he went on:

    Once, some years ago, the Paris police found in the woods at dawn the body of a man dressed in the sandals and gold robes of an Egyptian noble of four thousand years ago. He had been shot through the head. Yes, it was an odd murder. Its sequel was that an Englishman hanged himself in his cell at the Santé prison. He had made a rope of bed-sheets—

    A flush had risen under Sir John’s sallow cheek-bones. He sat curiously rigid.

    May I ask, he said, what put that into your head?

    It seems to startle you. Do you know the case?

    Why, as a matter of fact, I was thinking along the same lines. Different business, but it concerned hanging…

    The rigidity left him. He tapped with his fingers on the chair arm, and the eyes behind his glasses seemed to be watching something weighed in a scales.

    Bencolin asked, What was it?

    Cock-and-bull tale, replied the other, idly. Dallings had got a drink too many in him, I fancy. It was a young friend of mine. He seems to have been involved recently in some queer business, in the course of which he got lost in the fog, and swears he saw on the side of a house the shadow of a gallows and a rope. Says a shadow of Jack Ketch was walking up the steps to adjust the rope. He made quite a ghost story of… Good God! what’s the matter?

    Bencolin had been looking sideways at the darkened window. He whirled round suddenly.

    You know, said the detective, pardon my interruption, old man, but a moment ago I imagined I saw a ghost myself, in that window there.

    Sir John looked at the glass.

    Your poetic way of saying what? he asked, annoyed.

    That I saw a reflection of somebody passing the door of this room—in the hallway out there.

    He nodded across the dim room, at the end of which the door to the passage made a rectangle of bright light. It was empty now. In stillness we could hear the fire crackling and the distant hoot of a cab. Bencolin had risen. He stood tall and rather tense, his shoulders poised as though he were listening.

    I think he was starting into the room here, but he changed his mind when he saw us… It was a man I once knew. An Egyptian named Nezam El Moulk. Do you happen to know him?

    No-o, I don’t believe so. Wait a bit, though… Oh yes! I thought I’d heard the name, Sir John muttered. He has rooms here, I believe. We’re not very—choosy, are we? Why do you ask?

    Bencolin sat down and shrugged.

    A whim, he said. He contemplated the fire. In shadow, the cruel and powerful angles of his face had hardened, with bright unwinking eyes on the blaze. Sir John looked at him curiously, but said nothing. He was addressing some commonplace to me when Bencolin spoke again.

    Do you know, old man, that random ghost story you mentioned interests me very much. The shadow of a gallows! Who is this friend of yours who saw it?

    Oh—that? His name is Dallings; friend of my son during the war. We shall probably meet him at the theatre tonight, by the way.

    And what was the nature of his adventure?

    Sir John’s glance said, What the devil ails you? But he answered:

    Why, I can’t tell you the whole affair—something about a mysterious woman he met and took home in the fog. I didn’t pay particular attention; fellow’d been drinking. The upshot of it was that he found himself without a cab—

    Where?

    "That’s the point—he doesn’t know. When they drove there, the woman gave the address to the driver herself, and Dallings didn’t hear it. Apparently she must have paid the driver, too, and told him to leave directly. Dallings let her out to say good night, and then there wasn’t any cab and the woman had gone.

    The fog was so thick that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. Dallings says he kept groping round and round, down over kerbs and across streets, without the slightest idea where he was going. It was past one in the morning; not a soul abroad, or a light he could locate. In the course of his wanderings he blundered into a brick wall of some sort. Then he lost the last shred of reason. While he was standing there, he says an immense rectangle of yellowish light appeared ahead of him. It was blurred by the fog, but up against it stood a gigantic gallows with a noose hanging from the crossbeam. So Dallings says, mind! Then he says that somebody was mounting the steps to it, and that the figure appeared to be waving its arms in the air…

    The Englishman paused. His lips wore a wintry smile.

    What then? inquired Bencolin.

    "Nothing. It disappeared. Dallings thought he must have been fooled by some trick of light. He was in a beastly mood and didn’t investigate further. Then he resumed his wanderings. Eventually he found a lamp-post, and stopped there until he heard a cab pass. He was in Ryder Street then, not far from Piccadilly. Heaven knows where he’d been."

    Sir John poured himself more tea, dismissing the matter. But he added:

    If you’re curious, ask Dallings about it. He’s full of the story, and he isn’t ordinarily—loquacious. Seems to have been particularly impressed by the lady; she was French, by the way.

    Bencolin stopped suddenly with a match halfway to his cigarette, staring at Sir John. Then he laughed, lit the cigarette, and sat back, amusedly contemplating its tip.

    French! he repeated. Ah well, your infernal fog is doing things to my nerves, I fear. Let’s speak of something else. The fog itself, for instance. He turned to

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1