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.
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....
I walked on down to Birmingham and took a room in an obscure house in a slum district, run by a blowzy slattern who answered to "Old Mag." The parlor was equipped with a weary wireless set and an assortment of highly-flavored gentlemen in the last stages of disrepair. One of them looked like a racetrack tout fallen on evil days, another I could have sworn was a professional mugger. A fitting den for the Manchester Slasher!
I was careful not to touch anything at all until I had gone out and bought a pair of thin silk gloves, which I wore at all times thereafter. The proprietor of the pawnshop gave me a knowing wink as he handed them to me. I'm sure he thought I was a cat-burglar or a safe-cracker. No one in my new home deigned to notice them. I must mention that, quite by accident and not through any searching on my part, I had happened to strike a place where none of the other-world brutes lived; I had been prepared to see a number of them here, but only found the lowly humans I have spoken of.