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Germania
    in Köln, but I—”
    “Stop!” shrieked Reck. “I can’t stand it—who the devil are you?”
    “I think you know,” said Tommy Hambledon. “I think you knew yesterday when you
    tapped out T-L-T on the table. What sent your mind back to that if you did not recognize me?
    Incidentally, that’s what gave you away, for I certainly didn’t recognize you. It’s true we have
    both changed a good deal in fifteen years, but—who am I?”
    “I thought you were Tommy Hambledon,” said Reck, with the empty glass shaking in his
    hand, “but you can’t be, because he’s dead. If you are Hambledon, you’re dead and I’m mad
    again, that’s all. I was mad at one time, you know, they shut me up in one of those places where
    they keep them, at Mainz, that was. Not a bad place, though some of the other people were a
    little uncomfortable to live with. I was all right, of course,” went on Reck, talking faster and
    faster. “It was only the things one saw at night sometimes, but they weren’t so bad, one knew
    they weren’t real, only tiresome, but you look so horribly real and ordinary, and how can you
    when you’ve been in the sea for fifteen years? Perhaps you don’t really look ordinary at all, it’s
    only my fancy, and if I look again,” said Reck, scrabbling round in his chair, “I shall see you as
    you really are and I can’t bear it, I tell you! Go away and get somebody to bury you—”
    “Reck, old chap,” said Hambledon, seriously distressed, “don’t be a fool. I wasn’t
    drowned, of course I wasn’t. I got a clout on the head which made me lose my memory, but I got
    ashore all right. Here, give me your glass and have another drink. I’m sorry I upset you like that,
    I never meant to, look at me and see, I’m perfectly wholesome. Drink this up, there’s a good
    fellow.”
    Reck drank and a little colour returned to his ghastly face. After a moment a fresh
    thought came to alarm him and he struggled to his feet.
    “Here, let’s go,” he said, “before he comes back and finds us in his office. I don’t want to
    face a firing-squad.”
    “He? Who d’you mean?”
    “The Deputy Chief of Police,” said Reck. “They told me I was to be taken to him.”
    “I am the Deputy Chief of the German Police,” said the British Intelligence agent.
    “Don’t be absurd,” said Reck testily. “The thing is simply impossible.”
    “It isn’t impossible, because it’s happened. Here I am.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “Why not? There was one of our fellows on the German General Staff all through the last
    war, you know. This is comparatively simple.”
    “Let me go back to the asylum,” pleaded Reck. “Life is simpler in there. More
    reasonable, if you see what I mean.”

6
    “I’m afraid I can’t let you go back to the asylum yet,” said Tommy Hambledon. “I want
    you to help me. I don’t yet quite know how, but some scheme will doubtless present itself. You
    see, I have to get in touch with London, and—”
    “Not through me,” said Reck with unexpected firmness.
    “Eh? Oh, you’ll be all right, I’ll look after you. I think I had better find you a post in my
    house—can you clean knives and boots? You shall have a bedroom to yourself, and food and
    wages. Isn’t that better than wandering about the streets selling papers and sleeping rough?”
    “No. Not if I’ve got to be mixed up in espionage again at my age.”
    “Don’t be a fool,” said Hambledon. “Anyone would think I wanted you to run along and
    fire the President’s palace.”
    “From what I remember of you,” said Reck acidly, “that is precisely the sort of thing you
    would suggest.”
    “Listen,” said Hambledon patiently. “D’Artagnan is not the character which naturally
    rises to my mind when I look at you. Definitely no. If I wanted someone to go leaping in and out
    of first-floor windows with an automatic in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, I shouldn’t
    offer the job to