We had gone a dozen blocks before I took my right hand off the wheel and unwrapped the handkerchief from it, stowing it away in the side pocket that also contained my hotel key. Mentally I checked over every clue to my true identity; so far as I could think, I had wiped them all out. Now all that remained was to get out of Manchester safely. * * * * * Choosing the darkest streets almost without volition, I had put a couple of miles between me and that by-now-surely-tumultuous deathtrap of a hostelry. I thought of road blocks. One is always reading in American mystery stories of road blocks set up to catch thieves and murderers, but I had no notion as to whether they were used in England. Relying on the thought that at any rate I had never heard of one here, I tore for the outskirts of the city. _They_ would be on my trail. I kept seeing mental pictures of the alien beasts, sniffing me out like so many obscene bloodhounds. My hands grew slippery on the wheel with the sweat of fear. Then I put my panic behind me; _they_, after all would be working in the usual human channels, for surely they had at worst no more than a hazy suspicion that I could see them. True, I had relegated quite a few of them. But it must seem more likely to them that I was a maniac with luck on his side, rather than a seer. I doubted strongly that they would make such a concentrated effort at finding me as they had done last year with poor Jerry Wolfe. So I had only the laws and power of Old England to worry about. Going over the past hour again and again, while driving, now at breakneck speed through deserted streets and now at a snail's pace in traffic, I decided that once I had left the city I had a very good chance of escaping entirely. Therefore I set myself to leave it as soon as possible. Beneath me the Jaguar purred contentedly as my foot caressed her accelerator. And so the notorious Manchester Slasher went into the fastnesses of the Peak District, and laid his course south for Birmingham. CHAPTER X I did not take the Jaguar into Birmingham proper; I put her into a half-smashed, bombed-out old building I found quite by chance some few miles out of the city, and prayed that she would wait there for me till my business was done. It was then about four-thirty in the morning. At a little tea-and-biscuit place in the suburbs I had a hearty breakfast, and read in an early edition the terrifying tale of the Manchester Horrors. It seemed that the infamous Slasher had been tentatively identified when he was tracked by the police to his lair in a well-known hotel; he was thought to be either a certain Irish communist agitator, or else a celebrated American gangster who I happened to know had been killed in 1937....