The lights were switched off, all except one sixteen-candle-power lamp in the farthest corner, shaded by a deep-red globe.  It was just light enough to see to read very, large print with difficulty.

Mrs. Popper began immediately with the table.  Kennedy and I sat on her right and left respectively, in the circle, and held her hands and feet.  I confess to a real thrill when I felt the light table rise first on two legs, then on one, and finally remain suspended in the air, whence it dropped with a thud, as if someone had suddenly withdrawn his support.

The medium sat with her back to the curtain of the cabinet, and several times I could have sworn that a hand reached out and passed close to my head.  At least it seemed so.  The curtain bulged at times, and a breeze seemed to sweep out from the cabinet.

After some time of this sort of work Craig led gradually up to a request for a materialisation of the control of Vandam, but Mrs. Popper refused.  She said she did not feel strong enough, and Farrington put in a hasty word that he, too, could feel that “there was something working against them.”  But Kennedy was importunate and at last she consented to see if “John” would do some rapping, even if he could not materialise.

Kennedy asked to be permitted to put the questions.

“Are you the ‘John’ who appears to Mr. Vandam every night at twelve-thirty?”

Rap! rap! rap! came the faint reply from the cabinet.  Or rather it seemed to me to come from the floor near the cabinet, and perhaps to be a trifle muffled by the black carpet.

“Are you in communication with Mrs. Vandam?”

Rap! rap! rap!

“Can she be made to rap for us?”

Rap! rap!

“Will you ask her a question and spell out her answer?”

Rap! rap! rap!

Craig paused a moment to frame the question, then shot it out point-blank:  “Does Mrs. Vandam know now in the other world whether anyone in this room substituted a morphine capsule for one of those ordered by her three days before she died?  Does she know whether the same person has done the same thing with those later ordered by Mr. Vandam?”

“John” seemed considerably perturbed at the mention of capsules.  It was a long time before any answer was forthcoming.  Kennedy was about to repeat the question when a faint sound was heard.

Rap! —

Suddenly came a wild scream.  It was such a scream as I had never heard before in my life.  It came as though a dagger had been thrust into the heart of Mrs. Popper.  The lights flashed up as Kennedy turned the switch.

A man was lying flat on the floor—­it was Inspector O’Connor.  He had succeeded in slipping noiselessly, like a snake, below the curtain into the cabinet.  Craig had told him to look out for wires or threads stretched from Mrs. Popper’s clothing to the bulging curtain of the cabinet.  Imagine his surprise when he saw that she had simply freed her foot from the shoe, which I was carefully holding down, and with a backward movement of the leg was reaching out into the cabinet behind her chair and was doing the rapping with her toes.