another surprise letter

Two miles away In an office high up among the roofs in kingsway, Valmon Dain removed a contact key from a red-lit dial and mopped his forehead.

"So!" he muttered, and dabbed at his forehead again. "murder, is it? eh? Well that is a word that is guaranteed to put a different colour on anything."

He sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair and lost himself in a teeming intensity of thought.

His mind had gone on ahead of the days and he too was standing in the black darkness of the area by the kingsland mews. He saw the dark figures slinking along from shadow to shadow, elusive as the ghost of flitting bats. saw them mustering in the silence and waiting, waiting for the man who would not be there.

And then the sudden uprising of other shadows from the blackness avenging shadows which advanced with malignant swiftness from nowhere. the quick sharp scuffle, and then the fierce passionate denunciation of Willard Lyall, the traitor, the man who had all too obviously sold them to the police!

Dain saw it all, and heard it all as clearly as though it were happening in his own room.

It was an inevitable fact that seared itself into his brain. The silver Arrow gang would stamp Willard Lyall with the brand of treachery to his own kind.

And when men of the type of silver Arrow gang get an idea like that into their heads, action follows swiftly. It would be known by all the rest of the interlinked criminal world of the city that Lyall's big coup in Park Lane had failed. They would know that the police had got in ahead of them and that Vine Street had housed them overnight.

But there would be no Willard Lyall appearing with his merry men at Bow Street that afternoon. All the rest of them would be there; poor souls who had put their trust in the renegade.

From that moment, Willard Lyall could date his end. The underdogs would be out on the trial like wolves on the track of a lone animal in the wild. And the horror of it all was that Lyall was the father of the sweetest girl Dain had ever known.

Dain stood up and mopped his forehead again. Complications had piled themselves upon him, and all the hard thinking in the world did not seem to help towards an elucidation.

He plugged in again, connecting three wires across from other dials. After a little manipulation, he got results. Voices came into his phones with a jump. It was Tansy and Lyall taking leave of each other.

"Then that's all right, eh?" asked Lyall.

"Yes. I'll see to that part of it all right," assented the jeweller. "But you won't get me mixed up in any any murder game. Not this time this bloke seems a bit too big and too wide awake. I'll make all the inquiries I can without blowing the game up, but that's as far as I'll go".

"Alright, alright." Lyall's voice sounded Pettish, irritable. "That's all I'm asking you to do. And the moment you hear of anything even remotely definite let me know. call me up on the phone if you like--- do long as you talk discreetly and while you're at it, you might sound the others."

"I'll do that, but honestly guv'nor, I don't like the look of this lit at all. That fellow whoever he is, seems to have got a mighty big pull somewhere. He knows too much for my liking. He seems to know what's going to happen even before those who are going to do the job."

"Cold feet?" asked Lyall sarcastically.

Tansy fixed him with a beady eye.

"You never said that when I did that last little coffin job for you," he said. "Good Day Mr. Lyall and don't talk too loud about things like that. You never know when the mighty are booked for a fall."

"Good Day to you" came Lyall's answering voice.

Dain thought it was not quite steady; there was a touch of concern in it at the jeweller's sudden show of front.

Then came the sound of a closing door, and Dain withdrew his key. He shut off his dynamo, put on his hat and coat and went out.

The morning was still young, and Dain made his way quietly along to a restaurant in the strand calling at a post office on the way.

He took a telegraph form and wrote upon it in a neat block capitals:

"Your decision to stay in on Monday night was a wise one from almost every point of view."

He addressed it and passed it casually over the counter and then proceeded leisurely on his way to break his fast.

Willard Lyall at that same time was walking slowly and thoughtfully away from the side street in Notting Hill.

He was do preoccupied in thought that he walked for over an hour striving with every faculty concentrated on his problem, to get to the bottom of it.

It was with something of a start of surprise that he found himself in his own road within a few minutes walk of Greydene. He had started away from Notting Hill with no definite idea in his mind of where he wanted to go except that he felt the need of a walk and a long period in which to think things out. And unconsciously he had turned off towards his own district.

He shrugged his shoulders and headed for his house.

When he got in, the first words were, "oh! that's you dad? there's a telegram for you in your study. only came a couple of minutes ago." It was Mercia calling cheerfully from the music room where with deft fingers twinkling over the keyboard. she was practicing some bewilderingly intricate scales.

Lyall said, "Thank you my dear," and went into the study.

A minute later, he sat with white face and palsied fingers staring in horrified fascination at the faintly pink slip on his knees. for that flimsy coming to him out of the unknown like the malignant sign of some secret society, put the fear of helplessness into his soul. It savoured of black magic, there was some horrible ju-ju working its inexplicable mysteries upon him. Barely an hour had elapsed since he left that locked room in Notting Hill yet already, and awaiting his arrival was a grim congratulations on the decision he had made in that room.

Then the full, sinister horror of it rushed upon him and the room swayed around him. He gasped and pitched over on the floor, the telegram clutched helplessly in his outflung hand.