The Saint In Action

I

Simon Templar folded his newspaper with a sigh and laid it reverently to rest in the wastebasket.

"We live in a wonderful country," he observed. "Did you read how two policemen and one policewoman practically lived in a night club in Brighton for about three weeks, drawing their wages from the ratepayers all the time and drinking gallons of champagne at the ratepayers' expense, until they finally managed to lure some poor fathead into the place and get him to buy them a drink after time? And that's what we pay taxes for. Our precious politicians can go to Geneva and swindle the Abyssinians with all the dignity of a gang of bucket-shop promoters and slap the poor deluded Spaniard on the back and tell him he's just dreaming about Italians and Germans helping the rebels in his so-called civil war; but the honour of England has been vindicated. A bloke is fined fifty quid for selling a whisky and soda at half past eleven and another bloke is fined a fiver for drinking it; two policemen and one policewoman have had a wonderful free jag and helped themselves towards promotion, and the world has been shown that England respects the Law. Rule Britannia."

Patricia Holm smiled tolerantly.

"I love you when your gorge rises," she said; and the Saint chuckled.

"It's a beautiful gorge, darling," he answered. "And talking about the Law, it seems a long time since we saw anything of dear old Chief Inspector Teal."

"He doesn't go abroad very much," Patricia pointed out. "If you stayed at home for a bit I expect you'd see plenty of him."

Simon nodded.

"There's plenty of him to see," he agreed, "and I suppose we'll be seeing it. I can't go on being respectable indefinitely."

He got up from the breakfast table and stretched himself lazily by the open windows. The spring sunshine lay in pools between the trees of the park and twinkled on the delicate green of the young leaves that were still too freshly budded for the London air to have dulled their colour; and the same sunshine twinkled in the smile with which the Saint looked back at Patricia. It was a smile that made any disclaimer of respectability seem almost superfluous. Respectability was a disease that could never have attacked a man with a smile in which there was so much unconquerable devilment; it couldn't have found a foothold anywhere in any one of the seventy-two inches of slimly muscular length that separated his crisp black hair from the soles of his polished shoes. And with that smile laughing its Irresistible way into her eyes Patricia felt again as fresh and ageless as if she were only meeting it then for the first time, the gay, disreputable magic of that incomparable buccaneer whom the newspapers had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime and whom the police and the underworld alike had called by many worse names.

"I suppose you can't," she said resignedly and knew that she was stating one of the few immutable certainties of this unsettled world.

Simon lighted a cigarette with an impenitent grin and turned to the door as Orace's walrus face poked itself into the room.

"Someone wantin' to see yer," said Orace; and the Saint raised his eyebrows.

"Does he look like a detective?" he asked hopefully.

Orace shook his head.

"Nossir. 'E looks like a gentleman."

Simon went through into the living room and found his visitor standing by the table flicking over the pages of the New Yorker. He dropped the magazine and turned quickly as the Saint came in. He was a youngish man with brown curly hair and a lantern jaw and rimless glasses. The Saint, whose life had depended more than once on his gift for measuring up strangers with a casual glance, guessed that Orace's diagnosis was probably correct and also that his visitor was slightly agitated.

"Mr Templar? I've never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I've seen your picture and read about you in the papers. I've really got no business to come and take up your time, but—"

The Saint nodded. He was used to people who really had no business to come and take up his time — it was one of the penalties of fame, but it had often turned out to be a profitable penalty. He held out his cigarette case.

"Sit down and let's hear what's on your mind," he said soothingly. "I've never met you either, so anyway we start square."

"My name's Graham — Geoffrey Graham," The young man took a cigarette and sat on the arm of a chair as if he expected to bounce off at any moment.

"I don't know how much you want to know about me — I'm an articled pupil in an architect's office, and I live in Bloomsbury — my family live in Yorkshire, and they aren't very well off—"

"Have you murdered somebody?" asked the Saint gravely.

"No. No, I haven't done that—"

"Or burgled a bank?"

"No, but—"

"It might have been quite exciting if you had," said the Saint calmly. "But as things are, suppose you tell me what the trouble is first, and then we'll decide how far back to go into the story of your life."

"Well—"

The expectation was justified. The young man did bounce off the chair. He pulled a bundle of large folded papers out of his pocket, disengaged one of them and held it out.

"Well, look," he said. "What d' you think this is?"

Simon unfolded the document. It was printed on crisp heavy paper and very beautifully engraved; it looked as if it might have been valuable, but most men would have studied it for some time before venturing to define it. Simon held it up to the light, rubbed it between his fingers and flipped it back onto the table.

"It seems to be one of the new American government short-term loan thousand-dollar bearer bonds," he said in much the same way as he might have said, "It seems to be a bus ticket to Wimbledon"; but his blue had settled into a quiet and rather watchful interestedness.

Graham pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

"My God," he said. He breathed heavily once or twice. "Well, that's what I'd come to the conclusion it was, only I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd better make sure. You know, I've read about those things in stories, like everybody else, but I'd never seen one before. My God!"

He blinked down at the handful of papers which he was still clutching and threw them down on the table beside the specimen.

"Look," he said in an awe-stricken voice. "There's thirty-four more of 'em. That's thirty-five thousand dollars — seven thousand pounds — isn't it?"

Simon picked up the collection and glanced through them.

"It was when I was at school," he said. "Are you making a collection or something?"

"Well, not exactly. I got them out of a fellow's desk."

"There must be money in architecture," said the Saint encouragingly.

"No, it wasn't at the office. This was a fellow who lived in the same boardinghouse with me when I was living in Bayswater. You see—"

The Saint studied him thoughtfully. His uninvited callers in the past had included more than one optimistic gentleman who had tried to sell him a machine for making diamonds or turning water into lubricating oil, and he was always glad to listen to a new story. But although the opening he had just listened to might well have served as a prelude to one of those flights of misdirected ingenuity which were the Saint's perennial joy and occasional source of income, there seemed to be something genuine about the young man in front of him which didn't quite fit in with the Saint's shrewdly discriminating suspicions.

"Why not start at the beginning and go on to the end?" he suggested.

"It's quite simple, really," explained Graham as if he didn't find it simple at all. "You see, about six months ago I lent this fellow a tenner."

"What fellow?"

"His name's David Ingleston. I knew him quite slightly, the way you know people in a boardinghouse, but he seemed all right, and he said he'd pay me back in a week. He hasn't paid me back yet. He kept promising to pay me back, but when the time came he'd always have some excuse or other. When I moved my digs to Bloomsbury it got worse — if I rang up or went to see him he'd be out or he'd have been sent abroad by his firm or something, and if I wrote to him he didn't answer, and so on. I'm not very well off, as I told you, and a tenner means quite a bit to me. I was getting pretty fed up with it."

The young man stared resentfully at the sheaf of bonds on the table, as if they personified the iniquity of their owner.

"Well, the other day I found out that he was back in England and that he'd moved into a flat in Chelsea. That made it seem worse, because I thought if he could afford to move into a flat he could afford to pay me my ten quid. I rang him up, and I happened to catch him at home for once, so I told him what I thought of him. He was very apologetic, and he asked me to go round and have a drink with him last night and he'd pay me the tenner then. I was there at half past eight, and he was out, but the maid said I could wait. I kicked my heels for half an hour, and then I began to get angry. After I'd waited an hour I was thoroughly furious. I guessed that he'd forgotten the appointment, or he just wasn't going to keep it, and I could see I'd be waiting another ten years before I got my tenner back. The only thing I could think of was to take it out of him some other way. I couldn't see anything worth pinching that was small enough for me to sneak out under my coat, so I pulled open a drawer of the desk, and I saw those things."

"So you borrowed them for security."

"I didn't really stop to think about it. I didn't know what they were, but they looked as if they might be valuable, so I just shoved them into my pocket. Then the maid came in and said she was going home because she didn't sleep in the flat, and she didn't think she'd better leave me there alone. I was just boiling by that time, so I told her she could tell Ingleston I'd have something to say to him later and marched off. When I got home and had another look at what I'd pinched I began to get the wind up. I couldn't very well take the things into a bank and ask about them, but I thought that you… Well, you know, you—"

"You don't have to feel embarrassed," murmured the Saint kindly. "I have heard people say that they thought my principles were fairly broad-minded. Still, I'm not thinking of sending for the police, although for an amateur burglar you do seem to have got off to a pretty good start."

The young man's lantern jaw became even longer and squarer.

"I don't want Ingleston's beastly bonds," he said, "but I do want my tenner."

"I know," said the Saint sympathetically. "But the Law doesn't allow you to pinch things from people just because they owe you money. It may be ridiculous, but there it is. Hasn't Ingleston rung you up or anything since you pushed off with his bonds?"

"No; but perhaps he hasn't missed them yet."

"If he had you'd probably have heard from him — the maid would have told him you'd been waiting an hour for him last night. Let's hope he hasn't missed them, because if he felt nasty you might have had the police looking for you."

Graham looked slightly stunned.

"But I didn't mean to keep the things—"

"You pinched them," Simon pointed out. "And the police don't know anything about what people mean. Do you realize that you've committed larceny on a scale that'd make a lot of professionals jealous and that you could be sent to prison for quite a long time?"

The other's mouth fell open.

"I hadn't thought of it like that," he said feebly. "It was all on the spur of the moment — I hadn't realized — My God, what am I going to do?"

"The best thing you can do, my lad," said the Saint sensibly, "is to put them back before there's any fuss."

"But—"

There was something so comical about the young man's blankly horrified paralysis that Simon couldn't help taking pity on him.

"Come on," he said. "He can't eat you, and the sooner he gets his bonds back the less likely he is to try. Look here — I'll drive over with you if you like and see that he behaves himself, and we'll take a tenner off him at the same time."

"It's awfully good of you," Graham began weakly; and the Saint grinned and stood up.

"We always try to oblige our customers," he said.

He picked up the bundle of bonds and stuffed them into his own pocket. On the way out he looked in at the dining room to wrinkle his nose at Patricia.

"You'll have to button your own boots," he said. "I'm tottering out for an hour or so to do my Boy Scout act. Where's my bugle?"

He thought of it no more seriously than that, as a mildly amusing interlude to pass the morning between a late breakfast and a cocktail before lunch. The last idea in his head was that he might be setting out on an adventure whose brief intensity would rank with the wildest of his many immortal escapades; and perhaps if it had not been for all those other adventures he might have missed this one altogether. But the heritage of those other adventures was an instinct, the habit of a lifetime, a sixth sense too subtle to define, that fell imperceptibly and unconsciously into tune with the swift smoky rhythm of danger; and that queer intuition caught him like an electric current as the long shining Hirondel purred close to the address that Graham had given him. It caught him quicker than his mind could work — so quickly that before he could analyze his thoughts he had smacked the gear lever down into second, whipped the car behind the cover of a crawling taxi and whirled out of sight of the building around the next corner.

II

"That was the house," Graham protested. "You just passed it."

"I know," said the Saint.

He locked the hand brake as the car pulled in to the curb, and turned to look back at the corner they had just taken. The movement was automatic, although he knew that he couldn't see the entrance of the house from where they had stopped; but in his memory he could see it as clearly as if the angle of the building which hid it from his eyes had been made of glass — the whole little tableau that had blazed those high-voltage danger signals into his brain.

Not that there had been anything sensational about it, anything that would have had that instantaneous and dynamic effect on the average man's reactions. Just seven or eight assorted citizens of various but quite ordinary and unexciting shapes and sizes, loafing and gaping inanely about the pavement, with the door of the house which Simon had been making for as a kind of vague focus linking them roughly together. A constable in uniform standing beside the door, and a rotund, pink-faced man in a bowler hat who had emerged from the hall to speak to him at the very moment when the Saint's eye was grasping the general outlines of the scene. Nothing startling or prodigious; but it was enough to keep the Saint sitting there with his eyes keen and intent while he went over the details in his mind. Perhaps it was the memory of that round man with a face like a slightly apoplectic cherub, who had come out to speak to the policeman…

Graham was staring at him perplexedly.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

The Saint looked at him almost without seeing him, and a faint aimless smile touched his lips.

"Nothing," he said. "Can you drive a car?"

"Fairly well."

"Drive this one. She's a bit of a handful, so you'd better take it easy. Don't put your foot down too quickly, or you'll find yourself a mile or two ahead of yourself."

"But—"

"Go back to my place. You'll find a girl there — name of Patricia Holm. I'll phone her and tell her you're on your way. She'll give you a drink and prattle to you till I get back. I'd like to pay this call alone."

"But—"

Simon swung his legs over the side and pushed himself off onto the pavement.

"That seems to be quite a favourite word of yours," he remarked. "On your way, brother. You can tell me all about it presently."

He stood and watched the Hirondel take a leap forward like a goosed antelope and then crawl on up the road with a very mystified young man clinging grimly to the steering wheel; and then he turned into a convenient tobacconist's and put a call through to Patricia.

"I'm sending my Boy Scout material back for you to look after," he said. "Feed him some ginger ale and keep him happy till I get back. I wouldn't flirt with him too much, because I think he's a rather earnest soul. And if there should be any inquiries tell Orace to hide him in the oven and don't let anybody know we've got him."

"Does this mean you're getting into trouble again?" she demanded ominously. "Because if you are—"

"Darling, I am about to have a conference with the vicar about the patterns for the next sewing bee," said the Saint and hung up the receiver.

He lighted a cigarette as he sauntered down to the corner and across the street towards the house which he had been meaning to visit. The scene was still more or less the same, one or two new idle citizens having joined the small accumulation of inquisitive loafers, and one or two of the old congregation having grown tired of gaping at nothing and moved off. The policeman still stood majestically by the door, although the man in the bowler hat no longer obstructed the opening. The policeman moved a little to do some obstructing of his own as the Saint ambled up the steps.

"Do you live here, sir?"

"No," said the Saint amiably. "Do you?"

The constable gazed at him woodenly.

"Who do you want to see?"

"I should like to see Chief Inspector Teal," Simon told him impressively. "He's expecting me."

The policeman studied him suspiciously for a moment; but the Saint was very impressive. He looked like a man whom a chief inspector might have been expecting. He might equally well have been expected by a prime minister, a film actress or a man who trained budgereegahs to play the trombone; but the constable was not a sufficiently profound thinker to take this universal view. He turned and led the way into the house, and Simon followed him. They went through the hall, which had the empty and sanitary and freshly painted air common to all houses which have been recently converted into flats, and through the half-open door of a ground-floor flat a strip of curl-papered female goggled at them morbidly as they went by. At the top of the empty and sanitary and freshly painted stairs the door of another flat was ajar, with another policeman standing beside it.

"Someone to see the inspector," said the first policeman and, having discharged his duty, went downstairs again to resume his vigil.

The second policeman opened the door, and they went into the hall of the flat. Almost opposite the entrance was the open door of the living room; and as the Saint reached it he saw four men moving about. There was a man fiddling with a camera on a tripod near the door, and across the room another man was poring over the furniture with a bottle of grey powder and a camel-hair brush and a magnifying glass. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking man with a large notebook stood a little way apart, sucking the end of a pencil; and the man with the bowler hat and the figure like an inverted egg whom Simon had seen from his car was peering over his shoulder at what had been written down.

It was on the last of these men that the Saint's eyes rested as he entered the room. He remained indifferent to the other stares that swivelled round to greet him with bovine curiosity, waiting until the bowler hat tilted towards him. And as it did so a warm and friendly smile established itself on the Saint's face.

"What ho, Claud Eustace," he said affably.

The china-blue eyes under the brim of the bowler hat grew larger and rounder as they assimilated the shock of identification. In them even a man with the firmest intentions of believing nothing but good of his fellow men would have found it hard to discern any of that spontaneous cordiality and cheer with which a well-mannered wanderer in the great wilderness of life should have returned the greeting of a brother voyager. To be precise they looked as if their owner had just discovered that he was in the act of absentmindedly swallowing a live toad.

A rich tint of sun-kissed plum mantled the face below the eyes; and the man seemed to quiver a little, like a volcano seeking for some means of self-expression. After one or two awful seconds he found it.

"What the hell are you doing here?" blared Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

III

It must be admitted in Mr Teal's defence that he was not normally a man who blared or whose eyes tended to perform strange antics. Left to himself he would have been a placid and even-tempered soul, with all the sluggish equanimity appropriate to his girth; and as a matter of fact he had, during his earlier years with the Criminal Investigation Department, developed a pose of exaggerated sleepiness and perpetual boredom of which he was extremely proud. It was the advent of the Saint on Mr Teal's halcyon horizon which had changed all that and made the detective an embittered and an apoplectic man.

Not that there was one single crime on the record, one microscopic molecule of a misdemeanour, for which Chief Inspector Teal could have taken official action against the Saint. That was a great deal of the trouble, and the realization of it did nothing to brighten the skies above the detective's well-worn and carefully laundered bowler. But it sometimes seemed to Mr Teal that all the griefs and misfortunes that had afflicted him in recent years could be directly traced to the exploits of that incredible outlaw who had danced so long and so derisively just beyond Mr Teal's legal reach — who had mocked him, baffled him, cheated him, eluded him, brought down upon him the not entirely justified censure of his superiors and set him more insoluble problems than any other man alive. Perhaps it was some of these acid memories that welled up into the detective's weary brain and stimulated that spontaneous outburst of feeling. For wherever the Saint went there was trouble, and trouble of a kind with which Mr Teal had grown miserably familiar.

"Claud!" said the Saint reprovingly. "Is that nice? Is it kind? Is that the way your dear old mother would like to hear you speak?"

"Never mind my mother—"

"How could I, Claud? I never met her. How's she getting on?"

Mr Teal swallowed and turned towards the policeman who had brought Simon in.

"What did you let him in for?" he demanded in a voice of fearful menace.

The policeman swayed slightly before the blast.

"Richards brought him up, sir. I understood you were expecting him—"

"And so you are, Claud," said the Saint. "Why be so bashful about it?"

Teal stared at him malevolently.

"Why should I be expecting you?"

"Because you always are. It's a habit. Whenever anybody does anything you come and unbosom yourself to me. Whenever any crime's been committed I did it. So just for once I thought I'd come and see you and save you the trouble of coming to see me. Pretty decent of me, I call it."

"How did you know a crime had been committed?"

"It was deduction," said the Saint. "You see, I happened to be ambling along by here when I saw a policeman at the door and a small crowd outside and your intellectual features leering out of the door to say something to the said cop; so I went into a teashop and had a small cup of cocoa while I thought it over. I admit that the first idea that crossed my mind was that you'd been thrown out — I mean that you'd retired from the force and gone in for art, and that you were holding an exhibition of your works, and that the crowd outside was waiting for the doors to open, and that you were telling the cop to keep them in order for a bit because you couldn't find your false beard. It was only after some remarkable brain work that I avoided falling into this error. Gradually the real solution dawned on me—"

"Now you mention it," Teal said ominously, "why did you happen to be ambling along here?"

"Why shouldn't I, Claud? I have to amble somewhere, and they say this is a free country. There are several thousands of other people ambling around Chelsea, but do you rush out into the streets and grab them and ask them why?"

Mr Teal's pudgy fists clenched inside his pockets. It was happening again — the same as it always had. He set out to be a detective, and some evil spirit turned him into a clown. It wasn't his fault. It was the fault of that debonair, mocking, lazily smiling Mephistopheles who was misnamed the Saint, who seemed to have been born with the uncanny gift of paralyzing the detective's trained and native caution and luring him into howling gaucheries that made Mr Teal go hot and cold when he thought about them. And the more often it happened, the more easily it happened next time. There was an awful fatefulness about it that made Mr Teal want to burst into tears.

He took hold of himself doggedly, glowering up at the Saint with a concentrated uncharitableness that would have made a lion think twice before biting him.

"Well," he said with a restraint that made the veins stand out on his forehead, "what do you want here?"

"I just thought I'd drop in and see how you were getting on with your detecting. Quite a jolly little murder it looks, too, if I may say so."

For the first time since the casual glance he had taken round the room when he came in his cool gaze went back to the crumpled shape on the floor.

It lay on the floor, close to the fireplace and a side table on which stood a bottle of whisky and a siphon — the body of what seemed to have been a man of medium size and build, wearing an ordinary dark suit. His hair looked as if it might have been a pale gingery colour; but it was difficult to be sure about that, because there was not much of it that was not clotted with the blood that had flowed from his smashed skull and spread in a pool over the carpet. There was not much of the back of his head left at all, as a matter of fact, for the smashing had been carried out very methodically and with the obvious intention of making sure that there would never be any need to repeat the dose. A little distance away lay the instrument with which the smashing had been done: it looked like an ordinary cheap hammer, and the wooden handle was so clean that it might well have been bought new for the purpose.

The rest of the room was in disorder. Books had been pulled out of their shelves, the carpet was wrinkled as if it had been pulled up to examine the floor underneath, cushions had been taken out of the chairs, and there were gashes in the upholstery. All the drawers of the desk were open; one of them had been pulled right out and left on the floor, and another was upturned on the table. A mass of papers was scattered around like a stage snowfall. A yard from the dead man's right hand a tumbler lay on its side at the edge of a pool of moisture where its contents had soaked into the carpet.

"Quite a jolly little murder," Simon repeated.

Teal went on watching him suspiciously.

"Do you know anything about it?"

"Not a thing," said the Saint honestly. "Do you?"

Chief Inspector Teal dug into his waistcoat pocket and extracted from it a small pink rectangular packet. From this he drew a small pink envelope, unwrapped it and fed the contents into his mouth. There was a short interval of silence, while his salivary glands responded exquisitely to the stimulus and his teeth mashed the strip of gum into a conveniently malleable wodge.

The delay, coupled with the previous pause while the Saint had been studying the scenery, gave him a chance to complete the recovery of his self-possession; and Mr Teal had been making the most of his respite. Some of the rich purple had faded out of his face, and his eyelids had started to droop. His brain was reviving from its first shock and beginning to function again.

"It looks like an ordinary murder and robbery to me," he answered with a gruff straightforwardness which he hoped was convincing. "Hardly in your line, I should say."

"Anything is in my line if it helps you," said the Saint generously, "Mmrn… robbery. The place does look as if it had been taken apart, doesn't it?" He drifted about the room, taking in details. "Couple of nice silver cups on the mantelpiece. Gold cigarette case. Burglars certainly are getting choosey these days, aren't they, Claud? Why, I can remember a time when none of 'em would have turned up their noses at a few odds and ends like that."

"They may have been looking for something more valuable," Teal said temptingly.

The Saint nodded.

"Yes, that's possible. You must have been reading a book or something."

"Have you any idea what that could have been?"

Simon thought for a moment.

"I know," he said suddenly. "It was the plans for the new death ray which the master spy with, the hare lip stole from the War Office in chapter three."

Mr Teal felt the arteries in his neck throbbing, but with a superhuman effort he clung to his precariously rescued sangfroid, chewing fiercely on his blob of spearmint.

"Oh yes," he said with desperate moderation. "But we don't really believe in things like that. They must have thought he had something here that they could get money for—"

" 'They'?" said the Saint as if the point had just occurred to him. "I see — you've already found that there were several blokes involved in it."

"I was saying that to be on the safe side. Of course we haven't found any evidence yet—"

"Nobody would expect you to," Simon encouraged him liberally. "After all, you're only detectives, and that isn't your job. If this had been a night club where the deceased was serving drinks after hours it would have been quite a different matter. But making allowances for that—"

"What would you see?"

Simon pointed.

"There's whisky and a siphon on that small table. And one glass with what looks like whisky in it. Just one. On the floor there's another glass, surrounded by a certain amount of dampness. What happens when a bloke's dishing up a round of drinks? Normally he pours out the whisky into however many glasses he's using. Then he squirts the soda into the glass of the first victim, tells him to say when, hands him his dose of medicine and goes on to the next. And so on."

"So you think there was only one other man here, and the murderer hit him while he was filling the first glass?"

"I didn't say so," responded the Saint airily. "I didn't say 'man', in the first place. It might have been some of these hairy Olympic female champions — some of 'em sling a pretty hefty hammer, I believe. And all the rest of them may have been teetotallers, so they wouldn't be getting a drink."

Teal wedged his gum into a hollow tooth and held it there heroically.

"All the same," he persisted, "you do think it looks as if he, or she, or they, were on fairly friendly terms with…" He hesitated.

"With Comrade Ingleston?" Simon prompted him kindly.

"How did you know that?"

The brassy note was creeping back into Teal's voice, and he tried to strangle the symptom with a gulp that almost ruptured his larynx. The ensuing silence made him feel as self-conscious as if he had blared out like a bugle; but the Saint was only smiling with unaltered affability.

"How did I know they were friendly? Well, after all, when you start pouring out drinks—"

"How did you know his name was Ingleston?"

"I was just guessing," said the Saint apologetically. "I took it that the motive was robbery, going on what you said. Therefore the robberee was the murderee, so to speak. Therefore the corpse was the owner of this flat and all that therein is. Therefore he was the owner of that photo."

The detective blinked at him distrustfully for a second or two and then went back to the mantelpiece and peered at the picture he had indicated. It was a framed photograph of a plump, swarthy man in hornrimmed spectacles, and across the lower part of it was scrawled:

Mr Teal was no linguist, but he scarcely needed to be.

"Just another spot of this deduction business," Simon explained modestly. "Of course these tricks must seem frightfully easy to you professionals, but to an amateur like myself—"

"I was only wondering how you knew," Teal said shortly.

The brassy note was still jangling in his vocal cords, but the texture of it was different. He seemed disappointed. He was disappointed. He bit on his chewing gum with the ferocious energy of a hungry cannibal tasting a mouthful of tough missionary.

"It does look as if the murderer or murderers were on friendly terms with Ingleston," he said presently. "Apart from the glasses, none of the windows seem to have been tampered with, and the front door hasn't been touched."

"How was the murder discovered?"

"When the maid came in this morning. She has her own key."

"You've checked up on Ingleston's friends?"

"We haven't had time to do much in that line yet. But the maid says that a friend of his waited over an hour for him here last night, until she sent him away because she wanted to go home. She says that this fellow seemed to be in a rage about something, and when he went off he said he'd have something to say to Ingleston later, so he may have waited in the street until Ingleston came home and followed him upstairs."

The Saint nodded interestedly.

"Did she know who he was?"

"Oh yes, we know who he was," said Mr Teal confidently. "It won't take long to find him."

His drowsy eyes were fastened unwinkingly on the Saint's face, watching for the slightest betrayal of emotion; but Simon only nodded again with benevolent approval.

"Then there really doesn't seem to be anything for me to do," he drawled. "With that Sherlock Holmes brain of yours and the great organization behind you, I shall expect to read about the arrest in tomorrow morning's paper. And a good job too. These ruffians must be taught that crime will not be allowed to go unpunished so long as there is one honest bowler hat in Scotland Yard. Farewell, old faithful."

He buttoned his coat and held out his hand.

"Is that all you've got to say?" barked the detective; and Simon raised his eyebrows.

"What more can I add? You've got a gorgeous collection of clues, and I know you'll make the most of them. What poor words of mine could compete with the peals of praise that will echo down the corridors from the chief commissioner's office—"

"All right," said Teal blackly. "I'll know where to find you if I want you."

He stood and watched the Saint's broad elegantly tailored back pass out through the door, with a feeling as if he had recently been embalmed in glue. It was Hot the first time that Mr Teal had had that sensation after an interview with the Saint, but many repetitions had never inured him to it. All the peace and comfort had been taken out of his day. He had set out to attend to a nice, ordinary, straightforward, routine murder; and now he had to resign himself to the expectation that nothing about it would turn out to be nice or ordinary or straightforward or routine. Nothing that brought him in contact with the Saint ever did.

He turned wearily round, as if a great load had been placed on his shoulders, to find his subordinates watching him with a kind of smirking perplexity. Mr Teal's eyes glittered balefully.

"Get on with your work!" he snarled. "What d' you think this is — an old maids' home?" He strode across to the telephone and switched his incandescent glare onto the fingerprint expert. "Have you finished with this?"

"Y-yes sir," stammered the man hastily. "There's nothing on it except the deceased's own prints—"

Mr Teal was not interested in that. He grabbed off the microphone and dialled Scotland Yard.

"I want somebody to tail Simon Templar, of Cornwall House, Piccadilly," he snapped when he was through to his department. "Put a couple of good men on the job and tell 'em to keep their eyes open. He's a slippery customer, and he'll lose them if they give him the chance. I want to know everything he does for twenty-four hours a day until further notice… Yes, I do mean the Saint — and if he gives them the slip they'll need some saints to pray for them!"

At that moment Simon Templar was not thinking about the possible consequences of being followed night and day by the heavy-footed minions of the C.I.D. His mind was entirely occupied with other consequences which struck him as being far less commonplace.

He had hailed a taxi outside the house, and as he was climbing in he heard a curious sharp crack of sound in front of him. He felt a quick stinging pain like the jab of a needle in his chin, and something like an angry wasp zoomed past his ear. As his head jerked up he saw a new spidery pattern of cracks in the window a couple of feet from his eyes — an irregular star-shaped spangle of lines radiating from a neat hole perforated in the glass, about the size of a 38-calibre bullet.

IV

A split second later the Saint's glinting gaze was raking the street and surrounding pavements instinctively, before he realized the futility of the effort. He realized a moment afterwards that the shot could only have come from another car, which had crept up alongside the taxi so that some philanthropist could fire at him through the offside window as he boarded the cab from the pavement. As he started to search the scenery for the offending vehicle a bus crashed past, shutting off his field of vision like a moving curtain; and as it went on its bulk effectively obliterated any glimpse he might have had of a car making off in the same direction.

Fortunately the gun must have been silenced; and the taxi driver must have taken the accompanying sound effects for a combination of the cough of a passing exhaust and the clumsiness of his passenger, for he had not even looked round. As the Saint settled onto the seat and closed the door through which he had entered he grated the gears together and chugged away without any apparent awareness of the sensational episode that had taken place a few inches behind his unromantic back.

Simon took out a handkerchief and dabbed his chin where it had been nicked by a flying splinter of glass. Then he reached forward, unlatched the damaged door and slammed it again with all his strength. The glass with the bullet hole in it shattered with the impact and tinkled down Into the road.

This time the driver did look round, jamming on his brakes at the same time.

" 'Ere," he protested plaintively, "wot's all this?"

"I'm sorry," said the Saint in distress. "The door wasn't fastened properly, and I must have banged it a bit too hard. I'll have to pay you for it."

"That you will," said the driver. "Free pounds each, them winders cost."

"Okay," said the Saint. "You'll get your three pounds."

"Ar," said the driver.

He ground the gears again and sent the cab spluttering on, slightly mollified by the prospect of collecting double the cost of the repair; and the Saint sat back and took out a cigarette.

As far as he was concerned it was worth the bonus to dispose of a witness who might have inconvenient recollections of a fare who allowed himself to be shot at fru winders; but there were other points less easy to dispose of, and he was still considering them when he opened the door of his flat in Cornwall House.

He found Patricia with her feet up on the settee, smoking a cigarette, while Geoffrey Graham, balanced on springs on the edge of a chair as usual, appeared to be expounding the principles of architecture.

"… You see, it isn't only functional, but the rhythmic balance of mass has to have a definite harmonic correlation—"

"Yippee," said the Saint gravely. "But what about the uncoordinated finials?"

The young man jumped up, turned pink and spilt some beer from the tankard he was clutching. Patricia looked up with a rather wan smile.

"You haven't been very long," she said. "Mr Graham and I were only just getting to know each other."

"I should have said you were getting pretty intimate, myself," murmured the Saint. "When you decide that it isn't only functional and start to get a spot of harmonic correlation into your rhythmic masses—"

"That's enough," said Patricia.

"That's what I thought," said the Saint. "However…"

He grinned and sat down beside her. Even under the mask of irrepressible flippancy which rarely left him she could feel the keyed alertness vibrating within him like a charge of electricity.

"What's been happening?" she asked.

"I've been on a party."

Graham's eyes beamed behind his glasses.

"Did you see Ingleston?"

"Oh yes. And very handsome he looked. You did a lovely job on the back of his head."

"I did a—"

"No, I don't really believe that. But I just wanted to see how you'd take it, to make sure." Simon reached for the cigarette box. "Somebody else did, though. In the course of a long and wide experience I've rarely seen a head bashed in with so much thoroughness. I shouldn't be surprised if they found his brains coming out through his eyes when they turned him over."

The young man's mouth fell slowly open as if his chin was being lowered like a drawbridge.

"You don't say he's — dead?"

"If you're sensitive about it we'll say he has awoken to life immortal. But the one certain thing is that he'll never pay you your tenner now unless he's left it to you in his will. I had an idea something had gone screwy — that's why I sent you back here. It was sheer luck that I happened to see Chief Inspector Teal's tummy bulging out of the front door as we were driving up; otherwise the party might have been even breezier than it was."

Graham seemed to wobble a little as the full meaning of the Saint's words worked into his brain. His face went paler, and he steadied himself against the back of a chair.

"Do you mean he was murdered?"

"That was the idea I was trying to put over," Simon admitted. "Directly I saw Claud Eustace floating around I knew something had blown up — he doesn't go chasing out with his magnifying glass and pedigree bloodhounds because somebody's lost a collar stud. And there he was with his photographers and finger-printers and the body in the library, just like the best detective stories. So we had a cheery little chat."

"I think I need a drink," said Patricia faintly.

She got up and fetched a bottle of sherry and some glasses; and the Saint blew a smoke ring and spoilt it with a chuckle.

"Are you out on bail, or did you just run away?" she enquired. "I mean, I don't want to interfere with you, but it'd be sort of helpful to know."

"Not a bit of it, darling. It wasn't that sort of chat. He puffed and trumpeted to some extent at the start, but that was only natural. I soothed him with my well-known charm; and then he got awfully cunning. If you've ever seen Claud Eustace being cunning you won't want to go to the circus any more. He opened his heart to me and talked about the case and asked me all kinds of innocent questions, and he was working so hard at being affable that the perspiration was fairly streaming down his face; and every time I gave him an innocent answer his eyes got smaller and brighter and I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. Of course in order to keep the conversation going and bait his traps for me he had to give me a certain amount of information, and I was supposed to drop a few bricks in reply; but it didn't exactly work out that way, and eventually I thought I'd better push off before he had a seizure." The Saint's eyes danced behind the veils of smoke drifting across his face. "However, I didn't do too badly out of the exchange myself; and one of the useful bits of gossip I picked up was the name of the chief current suspect."

"Who's that?" asked Graham feverishly.

"You!"

The word hit Graham in the midriff and almost doubled him up. He gaped at the Saint with his Adam's apple jigging up and down like a yo-yo for some seconds before his voice came back.

"Me?" he croaked.

"Who else? You were the last person in the flat. You were very steamed up about seeing Ingleston. You were fuming when the maid slung you out. The last thing you told her was that you'd have something to say to Ingleston later. It's the sort of clue that even a policeman couldn't miss. They're looking for you now… Which reminds me."

He reached out for the telephone and called the porter's desk downstairs.

"That you, Sam?… Simon Templar speaking. You know that bloke who came to see me earlier this morning, who went out with me?… No, you're wrong. He didn't come back. In fact he never came here at all. You never saw him in your life. Nobody's been to see me today. Have you got that?… Good man."

Graham was still breathing heavily.

"But — but—"

"I know," said the Saint patiently. "But let's take things one at a time. Teal's sure to make enquiries here — in fact I wouldn't mind betting that he's already got a team of flatfeet galumphing along here to pick up my trail. So long as they can't definitely hook you up with me it'll be something in your favour, my reputation being what it is. They'll draw your digs and your office, of course, but that doesn't matter. It's a good job you didn't leave those bonds at home, though, or they'd have had a warrant out for you by this time."

"Wouldn't it be better for him to get back as quickly as possible?" suggested Patricia. "If they think he's trying to dodge them it'll only make it look worse."

"The trouble is there may be people looking for him who'd be a lot more dangerous than poor old Teal," said the Saint.

He spoke quite casually; but there was a shade of meaning in his voice that cut a tiny crease between Patricia's eyebrows and made Graham stiffen up.

Simon opened out his blood-spotted handkerchief and touched the cut in his chin.

"Hadn't any of you noticed the damage to my beauty?" he enquired. "Or did you think I'd been having a shave while I was out?"

They looked at him in perplexity merging into a groping fragment of comprehension. And the Saint smiled.

"I collected that on my way home — just after I left Ingleston's, to be accurate. I was getting into a taxi when some sportsman came by and turned on the tap. All I got hit by was a bit of broken glass, but that wasn't his fault. If he'd been a better shot it would have been the last time I made the headlines."

Complete understanding left them still silent, absorbing the implications according to their different temperaments and backgrounds. The frown smoothed out of Patricia's forehead, to be replaced by an expression of martyred resignation. Graham put down his tankard and mopped his brow with an unsteady hand.

"But who—"

"It's pretty obvious, I think," said the Saint. "Somebody knocked Ingleston off — we know that. For the sake of simplicity let us call him Pongo. Pongo was hanging around last night, waiting for Ingleston to come home, and he saw you come out. He'd have been watching the place pretty closely, so he wouldn't have forgotten your face, even if it didn't mean much to him at the time. Later on Ingleston arrives, Pongo accosts him and goes in with him — the evidence shows that he was somebody Ingleston knew — and while Ingleston is pouring out some drinks Pongo gets to work on him with a hammer he's brought along for the purpose. Then after Ingleston has been removed Pongo gets on with the real business of the evening and starts looking for whatever he came to find. He tears the whole place apart — it looked as if a tribe of monkeys had been through it — but my guess is that he doesn't find what he's looking for because it's already gone."

"You mean those bonds I took?"

"Exactly. So after a while Pongo gives it up and amscrays, muttering curses in his beard. But he isn't ready to quit altogether, so this morning he's back on watch, waiting to see if he can get a line on the lost boodle. And what does he see but a car containing yourself, the bloke who came out of the place last night, and me. We look as if we were going to pull up at the door, and then we suddenly whizz on and stop around the next corner. All very suspicious. Pongo curls his mustachios and lurks like anything. I hop out of the car, and you go on with it. Pongo has one awful moment while he wonders which way he ought to go and whether he can split himself in half, and then he decides to stick to me — (a) because I'm a new factor that might be worth investigating, (b) because I'm obviously going back to the scene of the crime and you aren't, and possibly (c) because he knows who you are and knows he can pick you up again if he wants to. Pongo sees me speak to the cop at the door and go in; presently I come out again, so he takes his chance and lets fry."

"But why?"

The Saint shrugged.

"Maybe he didn't like my face. Maybe he knew who I was and was scared things might get too hot if I was butting in. Maybe he'd already trailed you here and he'd only just made up his mind what to do about both of us, which would mean you're next on his list.

Maybe a lot of things. That's one of the questions we've got to find the answer to."

"But what's it all about?"

"It appears to be about seven thousand quid's worth of bearer bonds, which is enough reason for a good many things to happen. What I'd like to know is how a man who couldn't pay you a tenner collected all that mazuma. What sort of a job was he in?"

"He was with a firm of sherry importers in the City."

"Sherry!"

The Saint was motionless for a moment, and then he took another cigarette. He couldn't have explained himself what it was that had struck that sudden new crispness into his nerves — it was as if he was trying to make his conscious mind catch up with a spurt of intuition that had outdistanced it.

"You told me that Ingleston had been abroad recently," he said. "Would he have been likely to go to Spain?"

"I expect so. He'd been sent there several times before. He spoke Spanish very well, you see—"

"Did he have a lot of Spanish friends?"

"I don't know."

"He had one anyway — there was a signed photograph inscribed in Spanish on his mantelpiece. Did you ever hear of Luis Quintana?"

"No."

"He's a representative that the Spanish Rebels sent over a few weeks ago…"

Simon jumped up and moved restlessly across the room. There was a fierce drive of energy in the restrained movements of his limbs that had to reach some hidden objective quickly or burn itself to exhaustion.

"Sherry," he said. "Spain. Spanish Rebels. American bearer bonds. And mysterious Pongos cutting loose with hammers and popguns. There must be something to mix them together and make soup."

He took the bundle of bonds out of his pocket and studied one of them again more closely. And then he was wrapped in stillness for so long that the others felt as if they were gripped in the same trance, without knowing why.

At last he spoke.

"They look genuine," he said softly. "Engraving, ink, paper, everything. They look all right. You couldn't say they were fakes without some special tests. And yet they might be… "But there's only been one man in our time who could do a forgery like this — if it is a forgery."

"Who was that?" said Patricia.

The Saint met her gaze with blue eyes glinting with lights that held the essence of the mystery which he himself had just been trying to fathom.

"He was a Pole called Ladek Urivetzky — and I read in the paper that he was executed by a firing squad in Oviedo about a month ago."

V

And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.

"It doesn't seem to make sense," Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.

"It sings songs to me," said the Saint.

But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.

At this particular time, however, neither his eyes nor his smile could have given any information to anyone who might have been watching him, for they were completely hidden by the white beard and moustache and dark glasses which left very little of his face uncovered. He had put on those useful pieces of scenery with some care before he let himself through a panel in the back of a built-in wardrobe in his bedroom which brought him into a similar built-in wardrobe in the bedroom of the adjoining flat, which was occupied by an incurable invalid of great age who rejoiced in the name of Joshua Pond, as any inquisitive person might have discovered from the head porter, Sam Outrell, or the register of tenants. What it would not have been so easy for the inquisitive person to discover was that Mr Pond's existence was entirely imaginary and took concrete form only when it suited the Saint's purposes. Mr Pond rarely went out at all, a fact which was easily explained by his antiquity and failing health.

Securely screened behind his smoked glasses and masses of snowy facial shrubbery, with a white muffler wound round his neck and a black homburg planted squarely on his head, Mr Pond sat in his wheeled chair and was tenderly propelled down the passage by Sam Outrell and a smart young chauffeur in livery. Two men in overalls working on some telephone wiring with a mass of tools spread round them looked up as the door of the flat opened and ignored him as he went by. The chair was pushed into the lift and passed out of their ken. In the lobby downstairs a man reading a newspaper looked up as the lift doors opened and returned automatically to his reading. The chair passed him and was wheeled out into the street, where a sedate black limousine stood waiting. Sam Outrell and the chauffeur each took one of the invalid's elbows and helped him to totter through the door of the car. The chauffeur wrapped a rug round his knees, Sam Outrell closed the door and saluted, the chauffeur took the wheel, and the car whisked away into the night, followed by the disinterested eyes of another large man who stood making a half-hearted attempt to sell newspapers on the opposite side of the street.

"And what exactly," asked the chauffeur as the car streaked westwards along Piccadilly, "are we out for tonight?"

The Saint laughed.

"I'm sorry I had to drag you away from that cocktail party, Peter, old lad, but Claud Eustace is having one of his spasms. Did you see 'em all? Four of 'em — about three square yards of feet all told. That is, if there weren't any more."

He was looking back through the rear window, deciding whether they were being followed. Presently he was satisfied and turned round again.

"Take a cruise through the park, Peter, while I peel off my whiskers."

He stowed the outfit carefully away in a concealed locker in front of him, ready to be put on again when it was required. The venerable black homburg joined it, along with the grey suede gloves; and he took off the lightweight black overcoat and laid it folded on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he was smoothing down his own dark hair and lighting a cigarette.

"What's Teal having a spasm about this time?" demanded Peter Quentin. "And why didn't you let me in on it before?"

"It's only just begun," said the Saint.

He told the story from the beginning, in a synoptic rapid-fire outline which omitted no important details except the connecting links which his own imagination was still working on.

"Sherry, Spain, Spanish Rebels, American bearer bonds, mysterious Pongos with hammers and artillery and a Polish forger who was stood up against a wall in Oviedo," he repeated at the end of it. "And a Spanish civil war still going on and getting bloodier and messier every day, in case you've forgotten it. I've seen a lot of odd things mixed up together in my time, but I think this is in the running for a prize."

"But who's doing what?" said Peter.

"That's what I'm still trying to get straight," said the Saint frankly. "Oviedo's changed hands about half a dozen times, and I don't remember who was holding it when Urivetzky was wiped up. I don't know which side Urivetzky was on or why he should have been mixed up in it at all — except that there seem to be amateurs from half the countries in Europe taking sides in the picnic anyway. But I have got an idea what's in the wind, and I'm going to know some more before I go to bed."

The car slowed up, and Peter said: "Shall I go round again while you're thinking?"

Simon flicked the stub of his cigarette through the window.

"I did all my thinking before I sent for you," he said. "You can cut out here — we're going to Cambridge Square."

"I have heard of it," said Peter with heavy irony. "But not from you. What's it got to do with this party? I thought you said Graham's digs were in Bloomsbury."

"So they are," said the Saint equably. "And Quintana's digs are in Cambridge Square."

There was a certain pregnant interval of silence while Peter brought the car out of the park and squeezed it through the tide of traffic swirling around Hyde Park Corner.

"I always thought you were daft," he said as they floated out of the maelstrom into the calmer waters of Grosvenor Place. "And now I know it."

"But why?" asked the Saint reasonably. "Comrade Quintana seems to have been quite a pal of Ingleston's, so he ought to be interested in the news about his boy friend. Or if he's already heard it he'll want someone to condole with him in his bereavement. But if he has heard it I should be interested to know how — I sent for all the evening papers, and there wasn't a line about the murder in any of them."

"Why shouldn't he have heard about it from the police?"

"He might have. And yet somehow I don't think so. I stuck that photograph right under Teal's bloodhound nose, and he was too busy boiling with thwarted rage because I'd accounted for knowing the name of the corpse to be able to smell a clue when he'd got one. Of course he may have done some more sniffing since then, but even then it may take him some time to realize who Luis Quintana is. And anyway we've got to chance it, because Quintana's our own best clue… You can stop the car here, Peter — I won't drive up to the door."

"What's making you so modest all of a sudden?" Peter enquired innocently as he applied the brakes.

The Saint smiled and stepped out onto the pavement.

"It comes natural to me," he said. "And this isn't going to be an official visit."

"I'll bet you don't even know what sort of a visit it is going to be," said Peter accusingly; and Simon grinned at him without shame.

"I don't — which only makes it more interesting. Wait for me here, old lad, and I'll tell you all about it later."

He was only confessing the simple truth, but in the way he looked at it there was nothing about it to depress the spirits. The Saint had always been like that — daft, as Peter had called him, but daft with a magnificent insolence of daftness that had driven more than one of his adversaries to desperation as they essayed the hopeless task of predicting his unpredictable impulses. Having nothing to make plans for, the Saint had seen no reason to expend his energy on making them, particularly when so much of it would have been spent on meeting hypothetical difficulties while the real ones were probably never thought of. He had obtained Quintana's address from a friend on a newspaper, and all he knew about it was that it was number 319 in the square. He had no idea what type of house it was; and on that depended the development of his campaign. On that and on whatever other schemes crossed his mind on the way.

He sauntered along the south side of the square, assimilating numbers and opening his mind impartially to the free influx of inspiration. Number 319, he discovered, stood in the very southeast corner of the square at the right-angle junction of the two streets that entered the square at that point. It was a broad two-storied house of vaguely Georgian architecture, flanked by the wings of wall common to that type of facade which apparently screened a small surrounding garden. Across the front an entrance driveway ran in past the front door under a pillared portico. And as the Saint stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette and taking in every detail of the building with the trained eye of a veteran, a taxi turned into the drive and coughed itself to a standstill under the porch. Simon moved a little so that he could see between the pillars, and for one moment only he saw the passenger who got out of the cab, as he paid off the driver before he turned and went up the steps through the front door, which had been opened for him as soon as the taxi pulled up.

For one moment only — but that was enough to make the Saint catch his breath so quickly that the lighter in his hand went out. For the man who had gone in, the man whose face he had seen for that paralyzing instant, was Ladek Urivetzky, the supreme forger of the twentieth century, the man who was reported to have been eliminated by a firing squad in Oviedo four weeks ago.

VI

Simon had no doubt of it. He had never met Urivetzky in person, but his memory for faces was as accurate as a card index, and his private collection of photographs and descriptions of outstanding members of the international underworld contained items that would have been envied by more than one official bureau of records. And that sallow, thick-lipped, skull-like face with the curved scar under the left eye was as unmistakable as any face could be without previous firsthand examination.

For some seconds the Saint stood motionless, while the door closed and the empty taxi rattled on out of the driveway and departed into the night. Then he moved on with a tremor of exquisite excitement tugging at his nerves.

He made a complete circuit of the block in which the house stood. It was quite a small block, and the rest of the buildings in it consisted of the ordinary, monotonously identical, tall narrow houses common to that part of London. Built in an unbroken row one against the other, they formed a solid three-sided wall with no openings other than a couple of narrow alleys in one side which led into little courtyards of mews garages buried in the heart of the block. Nowhere did the place seem less effectively protected than it did at the front.

Standing once more on the corner from which he had started off, the Saint drew his cigarette to brightness and studied the fagade again with that tingle of reckless ecstasy working its way deep into the pro-foundest recesses of his being.

Somehow or other he had to get into Quintana's house, and if the only way to get in was at the front then he would get in at the front. Not that the front door entered into his plans. Any vague idea he might have set out with of brazenly bluffing his way into the owner's presence had been annihilated beyond resurrection by that one breath-stopping glimpse of Urivetzky's arrival. The brazenness and the bluff might come later, and probably would; but before that the Saint wanted to know what a man who was supposed to be dead was doing at the house of a man whose friend really was dead, and why a man who was admitted to have been the greatest forger of his time was visiting the friend of a man who had had an unaccountable collection of bonds which might have been forged, and why one thread in the lives of all these strangely assorted people linked them together when that thread had its roots in a country where death had lately become a commonplace — and the Saint wanted to know all these things without announcing his intrusion. Wherefore he stood and dissected the possibilities with that stir of lawless delight roaming through his insides. On each side of the house the ground floor was wider than the upper part of the building, so that its flat roof formed a kind of terrace onto which upstairs windows opened. And beyond the garden wall there were two tall trees, growing so close to the side of the house that it looked as if one could step off one of their branches onto the terrace as easily as stepping across a garden path…

The Saint crossed the road.

He had no qualms about the enormity of what he proposed to do. What occupied his mind much more were the chances of being allowed to commit his crime. There seemed to be an entirely unnecessary number of street lamps clustered around that corner; and while they could never have competed with the noonday sun, they were bright enough to illumine the scene for the eyes of any passer-by who might tend to regard the sight of a man climbing over a wall as a spectacle to which the attention of the neighbourhood might justifiably be directed. But Cambridge Square is a quiet place, and at that hour it was sunk in its regular postprandial coma. The Saint slowed his steps to allow a lone prowling taxi to drag itself past him, and at the same time he measured the wall with his eye. It was not more than seven feet high, and the top was protected with curved iron spikes set in the brickwork — but they were spikes of an old-fashioned pattern which had been clearly designed for a day when burglarious agility was still an undeveloped art. To a wall-climber of the Saint's experience they were not much more of an obstacle than a row of feathers…

The prowling taxi had hauled itself wearily on, and the nearest other car was the limousine in which Peter Quentin was waiting. For the moment there was no other human being nearer than that. Simon Templar's glance swept once over the panorama, and he knew that it was no use waiting for a better opportunity. The rest was on the lap of the gods.

He made a leap for the top of the wall, caught the base of one spike with his right hand and the curve of another with his left and was over like a flash of dark lightning. A roving cat could hardly have cleared the obstacle with more silent speed.

His feet padded down with the same catlike softness on a paved path on the other side; and for a second he crouched there without movement, exactly as he had landed, listening for any trace of a disturbing sound in the world outside. But his straining ears caught nothing that stood out from the vague normal background of London noise, and in another moment he was darting across an open patch of grass like a fleeting shadow to the foot of one of the trees he had marked down in his survey.

Its branches grew so low down that his hands could reach the lowest of them with the help of an easy jump, and with only a moment's pause he was working himself up into the short young foliage with the swift suppleness of a trained gymnast. In less than a minute from the time when he had surmounted the wall he was poising himself for the short leap onto the terrace that was his first objective.

Until then he had been screened by the wall and the new leaves that partly clothed the tree; but now he was in the open again, plainly visible to anyone who looked up or looked out, even when he had crossed the terrace to the partial shelter of one of the dark window-doorways that opened onto it. He tried the handle cautiously, but it was fastened on the inside. For some time, which was probably a minute or two but which seemed like a week, he had to work on it with a slender tool which he took from his pocket, before the window opened and let him into the dark room beyond.

He closed the window after him and stood looking out through it, scanning the square below. Beside the limousine near the corner he saw a dark shape pacing to and fro and saw also the erratically fluctuating pin point of a lighted cigarette end; and the sketch of a smile touched his lips. Peter was doubtless collecting enough material to give a heart specialist a year's course of study, but there was the consoling thought that a few more repetitions of the same stimulus would probably give him a lifelong immunity of incalculable value… Otherwise there were no visible signs of commotion. If any stray wanderers in the vicinity had witnessed any excerpts from the recent unrolling of events they had apparently decided that such affairs were none of their dull and respectable business and had proceeded untroubled on their prosaic ways.

The Saint turned away from the window and undipped the pencil flashlight from his breast pocket. Its thin subdued beam swivelled once round the room — and snapped out again suddenly.

He was in some kind of formal reception room, a gaunt bare chamber with gilt-edged mirrors and velvet drapes and stuffy, uninviting chairs ranged around the walls to leave most of the floor clear. There was nothing remarkable about it except its monumental ugliness, which would have impressed the spiritual descendants of Queen Victoria as being delightfully respectable and dignified. Facing the Saint, as he stood by the window, was a door which presumably led out to a landing or corridor; and on his right was another door communicating with an adjoining room. It was through this communicating door that he had heard the sound of voices which had made him extinguish his torch with involuntary abruptness.

He had heard the answer to a muffled question quite distinctly, spoken in good English but with a strong foreign accent:

"I met him in Sevilla when he was visiting Jerez for his company."

A slow smile of deep contentment touched the Saint's lips, and he put his torch away with an inaudible sigh. If he had known all the inside geography of the house and had moreover been gifted with second sight he couldn't have organized his entrance more accurately and appropriately. It was one of those moments when his guardian angel seemed to have hooked him bodily onto the assembly line of adventure and launched him onto an unerringly triumphant sequence of developments like the routine of some supernal mass-production factory.

In a few swift noiseless steps he was at the door with his ear close to the panels, in time to hear the first thin grumbling voice say: "In a case like this you should have more sense. You say you work for what you think is good for your country, but you are as stupid as a little child. I am only working for money for myself, but even I am more careful. Or is that the reason why I cannot afford to be stupid?"

"My dear Urivetzky!" The second voice was conciliatory. "It was not so easy as you think. We had to find agents quickly, and at a time when we could take no risks, when everything had to be done in secret, when, if we made a mistake, we could have been imprisoned or even executed. Ingleston had many friends in Sevilla, expropriated aristocrats, and they assured me that he was in sympathy with our cause. I heard the highest recommendations of him before I spoke to him, and we wished to use foreigners whenever possible because they would arouse no suspicion. But every man can be tempted—"

"It is the business of a leader to choose men who are difficult to tempt," Urivetzky retorted sourly. "Anyone who was not stupid would know that when you entrust a man with bearer bonds which are not traceable, which can be used for any purpose by the man who possesses them, that you must take care how you choose him."

"I am not so experienced in these matters as yourself." The other's voice had an edge to it. "Unfortunately all the gold of Spain is held by the Banco de Espana, in Madrid, which is held by the Reds, and we shall never know what they have done with it. I regret the necessity for these tricks, but we have no choice."

"Pah! You have choice enough. How many thousand Germans and Italians are fighting on your side?"

"They are in sympathy with us, but even they would not help us for nothing."

Urivetzky grunted.

"I also regret your necessities, if they are necessities," he said. "And I shall regret them more if your other agents have been as badly chosen."

"They have not been badly chosen. At this moment I have nearly forty thousand pounds in American and English money in my safe, all of it paid over to me by our other agents. Ingleston was the only mistake we have made."

"And he won't trouble us any more," said a third voice, speaking for the first time.

It was a moment after the Saint had decided that it was time for him to locate the keyhole and add another dimension to the drama which was being unfolded for his benefit. He found the hole just as the third voice reached his ears, and scanned the scene through it with some interest.

The room beyond was smaller than the one which he was in, and from the more habitable furnishings and the lines of bookshelves along the walls it appeared to be a small private study.

Urivetzky sat in an armchair with his back to the keyhole — the hairless cranium which showed over the back of the chair could only have belonged to him. In a swivel chair beyond the desk sat another man whom the Saint recognized at once from the photograph he had seen as Luis Quintana himself; he was smiling at the time, exposing the characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime, like rocks left naked at low tide, which ought to be exhibited in museums for the education of Anglo-Saxon maidens who have been misled by ceaseless propaganda into believing in the dentifricial glamour of the Latin grin.

Simon observed those details with his first perfunctory glance. From a curiosity point of view he was more immediately interested in the third member of the party, who sat puffing a cigar in the chair directly facing him. He was a man with a square-looking body and a close-cropped, square-looking grey head; the expression of his mouth was hidden by a thick straggling moustache, but his black eyes were flat and vicious. And the Saint knew intuitively that he must be the unidentified assassin whom for the purposes of convenient reference he had christened Pongo.

"The other bonds have not yet been found," Urivetzky said acidly.

"They will be found," Quintana reassured him.

"They had better be found. Otherwise this will be the finish. I am not interested in your country, but I am interested in my living."

The Rebels' representative raised his eyebrows.

"Perhaps you exaggerate. If these forgeries are so perfect—"

"Of course they are perfect. No man in the world could have done better. But they are forgeries. Why are you so stupid? A bond is a work of art. To those who have eyes it has the signature of the creator in every line. So is a forgery a work of art. Look at a connoisseur in an art gallery. Without any catalogue he will study the pictures and he will say, 'That is a Velasquez, that is a Rembrandt, that is an El Greco.' So there are men in the world who will look at forgeries of bonds and say, 'That is a So-and-so, that is a Somebody, that is a Urivetzky.' It makes no difference if the Urivetzky is most like the original. There are still men who will recognize it."

"It is hardly likely to fall into their hands. And it was to disarm their suspicion that we had the story sent out that you had been killed."

"And so perhaps you make more suspicion. This man Templar is not a fool — I have heard too much of him."

"He will be taken care of also," said the man known as Pongo. "I have been working all day—"

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. A servant came in as Quintana answered and turned towards the eliminator of problems.

"There is someone to speak to you on the telephone, senior," he said.

The square man gestured smugly at Urivetzky.

"You see?" he said. "Perhaps this is the report I've been waiting for."

He got up and went out; and the Saint straightened the kinks out of his neck and spine. He had done as good a job of eavesdropping as he could have hoped to do, and he had no complaints. Nearly all the questions in his mind had been answered.

But on Quintana's own statement there were nearly forty thousand pounds in ready cash in the safe, and they were forty thousand reasons for some deep and sober cogitation before he retired from the scene into which he had so seasonably introduced himself. After all, there was still the outstanding matter of a tenner which the late Mr Ingleston had owed; and in the light of what Simon had learned he could see even less reason than before why it should not be repaid with interest… And there was also the telephone conversation to which Senor Pongo had hastened away, which might be worth listening to.

The voices went on coming through the door while he stood for a while undecided.

"Even you take risks," Quintana was saying. "If I had known that you would drive here—"

"That was no risk. There are no policemen looking for me, and taxi drivers are not detectives."

This might be the best chance he would have to do something about the safe, while the odds in the study were reduced from three to two. But Pongo might return at any moment — and by the same token his telephone conversation wouldn't last forever. Whereas the safe and its contents would probably manage to keep a jump ahead of disintegration for a few minutes more.

Simon made his choice with a shrug. He tiptoed back across the room towards the door that opened onto the landing. He had no idea what was on the other side of it, but that was only an incidental gamble among many others.

Even so, he was still destined to be surprised.

The carpet outside must have been very thick or the door very solid, for he heard nothing until he was a couple of yards from it. And then the door was flung open and Pongo rushed in.

The light from the landing caught the Saint squarely and centrally as it streamed in; but Pongo was entering so hastily that he was well inside the room before he could check himself.

Simon leapt at him. His left hand caught the man by the lapels of_#his coat, and at the same time he sidestepped towards the door, pushing it shut with his own shoulder and turning the key with his right hand. But the shock had slowed up his reaction by a fatal fraction, and the other recovered himself enough to let out a sharp choking yelp before the Saint shifted his grip to his throat.

The Saint smiled at him benevolently and reached for his gun. But his fingers had only just touched his pocket when light flooded the room from another direction, and a voice spoke behind him.

"Keep still," rasped Luis Quintana.

VII

The saint let his hand drop slowly and turned round. Quintana and Urivetzky stood in the communicating doorway, and Quintana held a gun.

"Good evening, girls," said the Saint winsomely.

Urivetzky let out an exclamation as he saw his face.

"The Saint!"

"In person," Simon admitted pleasantly. "But you don't have to stand on ceremony. Just treat me like an old friend of the family."

Released from the numbing grip on his windpipe, the square man retreated to a safe distance, massaging his throat tenderly.

"I mistook the door," he exploded hoarsely. "I opened this one — and he was inside. He must have been listening. How much he has heard—"

"Yes," said Quintana with slow significance.

The Saint continued to stand still while Pongo stepped up to him again and took away his gun. The man's exploring hands also found the cigarette case in his breast pocket and took it out; and Simon took it gently back from him and helped himself to a cigarette before returning it with a deprecating bow.

He felt for his lighter in a bland and genial silence which invited the others to make themselves at home while they selected the next way of breaking it; and his self-possession was so unshaken that it looked as if his stillness was dictated less by the steady aim of Quintana's gun than by a wholly urbane and altruistic desire to avoid embarrassing the company by seeming to rush them into a decision. What was going on in his own mind was his own secret, and he kept it decorously to himself.

But it seemed as if he had been somewhat rash in crediting his guardian angel with the organizing ability of Henry Ford. Certainly a good deal of the system was there, but somewhere along the moving belt something seemed to have gone haywire. Simon experienced some of the emotions that a Ford executive would have experienced if, watching a chassis travelling down the assembly line, at the point where it should have had its taillight screwed on, he had seen it being rapidly outfitted with a thatched roof and stained-glass windows. Perhaps it was really an improvement, but its advantages were not immediately apparent. Perhaps the fact that Pongo should have chosen to charge through the wrong door in his excitement was really a blessing in disguise, but to the Saint it seemed to have created a situation from which a tactful and prudent man would extract himself with all possible speed. The only question it left was exactly how the withdrawal should be organized.

It was the square man who first reasserted himself.

"How long has he been here?" he demanded grimly.

The Saint smiled at him.

"My dear Senior Pongo—"

The square man drew himself up.

"My name is not Pongo," he said with dignity. "I am Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Perez, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots."

"Arriba Espana," murmured the Saint solemnly. "But you won't mind if I call you Pongo, will you? I can't remember all your other names at once. And the point, my dear Senor Pongo, is not exactly how long I've been here but how long you've been here."

There was a moment's startled silence, and then Quintana said coldly: "Will you be good enough to explain?"

Simon gestured slightly with his cigarette.

"You see," he said, "unless you have a very good alibi, Pongo, I shall naturally have to include you with the rest of the menagerie. And that will cost you money."

Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Perez's flat vicious eyes stared at him with a rather stupid blankness. The other two men seemed to have been similarly afflicted with a temporary paralysis of incomprehension. But the Saint's paternal geniality held them all together with the unobtrusive dominance of a perfect host. With the same natural charm he tried to relieve them of some of their perplexity.

"We have here," he explained, "Comrade Ladek Urivetzky, once of Warsaw and subsequently of various other places. A bloke with quite a reputation in certain circles, if I remember rightly. I think the last time I heard of him was in connection with the celebrated City and Continental Bank case, when he got away with about fifty thousand quid after depositing a bundle of Danish premium bonds for security. All the boys at Scotland Yard were looking for him all over the place, and I expect they were still looking for him until they heard that he'd been mopped up in Oviedo. Now it seems that he isn't dead at all. He's right here in London, playing happy families with the representative of the Spanish Rebels and" — Simon bowed faintly in the direction of the square man — "Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Pongo, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Whatnots. So I have a feeling that Chief Inspector Teal would be interested to know why two such illustrious gentlemen are entertaining a notorious criminal."

There was another short strained stillness before Quintana broke it with a brittle laugh.

"If you think that we are here to be bluffed by a common burglar—"

"Not common," Simon protested mildly. "Whatever else I may be I've never been called that. Ask Comrade Urivetzky. But in any case there are worse crimes in this country than burglary."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean — murder."

Major Perez kept still, watching him with evil intentness.

"What murder?"

"Pongo," said the Saint kindly, "I may have a face like an innocent little child, which is more than you have, but appearances are deceptive. I was not born yesterday. I've been listening in this room for some time, and I'd done a good deal of thinking before that, and I think I know nearly as much about this racket of yours as is worth knowing."

"What racket?"

The Saint sighed.

"All right," he said. "Let's have it in words of one syllable. A good many things have been done in Spain to get funds for your precious revolution, and since nearly all the official Spanish dough is in Madrid a good many of your tricks have had to sail pretty close to the wind. Well, your contribution was to think up this idea of pledging forged bonds around the place to get money to pay the Germans and Italians for their guns and airplanes and tanks and bombs and poison gas and other contributions to the cause of civilization. Somebody thought of hiring Comrade Urivetzky to do the forging, and you were all set."

He leaned back against the mantelpiece and blew a smoke ring at a particularly hideous ormolu clock.

"The next thing was to get stooges to pledge the bonds, because if any of them were spotted you didn't want all your credit to be shot to hell at once. Among others you collected Comrade Ingleston. You met him on one of his trips to Spain — he spoke Spanish very well, and he had plenty of friends among your crowd, Sevilla being a red-hot monarchist and Fascist stronghold, unless it's changed since I was last there. You made him a proposition, and he took it on. Unfortunately he wasn't such an idealist as you may have thought, and when he began to find himself with pocketfuls of bearer bonds he heard the call of easy money. He started to go short on his returns. You got suspicious and started to keep tabs on him, and before long there wasn't much doubt left about it. Ingleston was playing you for suckers, and something had to be done about it. Pongo did it."

There was no doubt now that he was holding his audience. They were drinking up every word with a thirsty concentration that would have made some men hesitate to go on; but the Saint knew what he was doing.

"Last night," he proceeded with easy confidence, "Pongo was waiting for Ingleston in the street when he came home. He hailed him like a brother and was invited upstairs. While Ingleston was pouring out a drink Pongo jumped on him from behind with a hammer. Then after Ingleston was dead he had a look round for the last consignment of forged bonds. He was unlucky there, of course, because I'd already got them."

"That is very interesting," Quintana said deliberately.

"You've no idea how interesting it is," answered the Saint earnestly. "Suppose you just look at it all at once. Here's Ladek Urivetzky, a well-known forger and a wanted man, taking shelter here and being like a brother with the pair of you. Here's Ingleston murdered by a major of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots, also among those present. Well, boys, I'm well known to be a broad-minded bloke, and I can't say that any of it worries me much. Forgers and Fascists are more or less in the same class to me; and Ingleston seems to have been the kind of guy that anyone might bump off in an absent-minded moment. I don't feel a bit virtuous about either side, so I haven't got any sermons for you. But what I don't like is you boys thinking you can make yourselves at home and raise hell in this town without my permission. London is the greatest city in the world, and our policemen are wonderful, so I'm told," said the Saint proudly, "and I don't like to have them bothered. So if you want to have your fun I'm afraid you've got to pay for it."

"Pay for it?" repeated Major Perez as if the phrase was strange to him.

The Saint nodded.

"If you want to go on amusing yourselves you have to pay your entertainment tax," he said. "That's what I meant when we started talking. If you're well in this with the others you'll have to be assessed along with them."

They went on watching him with their mouths partly open and their eyes dark with pitiless malignance; but the Saint's trick of carrying the battle right back into the enemy's camp held them frozen into inactivity by its sheer unblushing impudence.

"And how much," asked Quintana with an effort of irony that somehow lacked the clear ring of unshaken self-assurance, "would this assessment be?"

"It would be about forty thousand pounds," said the Saint calmly. "That will be a donation of twenty thousand pounds for the International Red Cross, which seems a very suitable cause for you to contribute to, and twenty thousand pounds for me for collecting it. If I heard you correctly you've got that much cash in your safe, so you wouldn't even have the bother of writing a cheque. It makes everything so beautifully simple."

Quintana's ironic smile tightened.

"I think it would be simpler to hand you over to the police," he said.

"Imbecile!" Urivetzky spoke, breaking his own long silence. "What could you tell the police—"

"Exactly," agreed the Saint. "And what could I tell them? No, boys, it won't do. That's what I was trying to show you. I suppose they couldn't hurt you much, on account of your position and what not, but they could make it pretty difficult for you. And there certainly wouldn't be anything left of your beautiful finance scheme. And then I don't suppose you'd be so popular with the Spanish Patriots when you went home. Probably you'd find yourselves leaning against a wall, watching the firing squad line up." The Saint shook his head. "No — I think forty thousand quid is a bargain price for the good turn I'm doing you."

Major Perez grinned at him like an ape.

"And suppose you didn't have a chance to use your information?" he said.

The Saint smiled with unruffled tranquillity.

"My dear Pongo — do you really think I'd have come here without thinking of that? Of course you can use your artillery any time you want to; and at this range, with a bit of luck, you might even hit me. But it wouldn't do you any good. I told some friends of mine that I'd be back with them in ten minutes from now, and if I don't arrive punctually they'll phone Scotland Yard and tell Chief Inspector Teal exactly where I went and why. You can think it over till your brains boil, children, but your only way out will still cost you forty thousand quid."

VIII

The silence that followed lasted longer than any of its predecessors. It was made up of enough diverse ingredients to fill a psychological catalogue, and their conflicting effects combined to produce a state of explosive inertia in which the dropping of a pin would have sounded like a steel girder decanting itself into a stack of cymbals.

The Saint's cigarette expired, and he pressed it quietly out on the mantelpiece. For a few moments at least he was the only man in the room who was immune to the atmosphere of the petrified earthquake which had invaded it, and he was clinging to his immunity as if it was the most precious possession he had — which in fact it was. Whether the hoary old bluff he had built up with such unblinking effrontery could be carried through to a flawless conclusion was another question; but he had done his best for it, and no man could have done more. And if he had achieved nothing else he had at least made the opposition stop and think. If he had left them to their immediate and natural impulses from the time when they found him there he would probably have been nothing but a name in history by this time: they might still plan to let him end the adventure in the same way, but now they would proceed with considerable caution. And the Saint knew that when the ungodly began to proceed with caution instead of simply leaning on the trigger and asking questions afterwards as common sense would dictate was when an honest man might begin to look for loopholes. If there was anything that Simon Templar needed then it was loopholes; and he was watching for them with a languid and untroubled smile on his lips and his muscles poised and tingling like a sprinter at the start of a race.

Perez spoke again after that momentous silence in a babble of rapid-fire Spanish.

"He means his friends at his apartment."

"How many of them are there?" asked Quintana in the same language.

"There is a girl and a manservant. Those are the only ones who live there — I made enquiries. No one else has been there today except Graham."

Quintana glanced at the Saint again; but the Saint, who understood every word as easily as if it had been spoken in English, frowned back at him with the worried expression of a man who is trying hard to understand and failing in the attempt.

"You are sure there is no mistake?" Quintana insisted.

"That would be impossible. I heard about Graham from Ingleston, and he is not the type of man who would be an associate of the Saint. I followed him to the Saint's apartment this morning, and Fernandez followed him back there when the Saint went in to Ingleston's. Fernandez and Nayder have been watching there ever since, pretending to repair telephone wires."

"But your telephone call—"

"That was Fernandez, to know how much longer he should stay there. Also he was suspicious because an old man muffled up so that he could not be recognized had been brought out of the next apartment, and Fernandez had been thinking about it and wondering if it was one of the Saint's gang. Now we know that it must have been the Saint himself."

"No one else has gone out the same way?"

"No."

Quintana gazed at the Saint thoughtfully, stroking the barrel of his automatic with his left hand.

"You will excuse us not speaking English, Mr Templar," he said at length. "Naturally it is easier for us to speak our own language. But I was just trying to find out how good your case was. Major Perez assures me that we are more or less in your hands."

The Saint, who knew that Major Perez had done no such thing, returned his gaze with a bland and gullible smile. "That was what I was trying to make you see, dear old bird," he said, but his pulses were beating a little faster.

"If you will come into the next room," said Quintana, "we had better see if we can settle this matter like gentlemen."

Urivetzky's brow blackened incredulously, and he made an abrupt movement.

"Fools I" he snarled. "Would you let this man—"

"Please," said Quintana, turning towards him. "Would you allow me to handle this affair in my own way? We are not criminals — we are supposed to be diplomats."

As he had turned the Saint could only see him in profile; but Simon knew as certainly as if he could have seen it that the side of his face which only Urivetzky could see moved in a significant wink. He knew it if from nothing else from the way Urivetzky's scowl smoothed out into inscrutability.

"Perhaps you are right," Urivetzky said presently with a shrug. "But these ways are not my ways."

"Sometimes they are necessary," said Quintana and turned to Perez. "You agree, Major?"

The Spanish Patriot, with his eyes still fixed on the Saint, brought his features into perfunctory and calculating repose.

"Of course."

Quintana bowed.

"Will you come this way, Mr Templar?"

Simon hitched himself off the mantelpiece and strolled across to the communicating door. Quintana moved aside to let him pass and immediately fell in behind him and followed him into the study. Urivetzky came after him, and Perez completed the procession and closed the door. It was rather like a special committee going into conference or an ark taking in its crew.

No one who watched the Saint dissolve into the most comfortable armchair would have imagined that there was a single shadow of anxiety in his mind. But behind that one and only shield which he had he was wondering with a cold prickle in his nerves where the next shot was coming from.

He knew that there was something coming. He had put over his own bluff, but even he couldn't convince himself that it had gone over quite so triumphantly. Except in storybooks things simply didn't happen that way. Men like Quintana and Urivetzky and Perez didn't crumple up and stop fighting directly they met an obstacle. And in the very way they had so suddenly seemed to crumple up there was enough to tell him that he would need every mental and physical gift that he had to keep ahead of them through the next couple of moves.

With nothing but an air of lazy good humour he stretched out his hand towards Perez.

"Could I have my cigarette case back now?" he drawled. "Or were you thinking of giving it to somebody for a birthday present?"

"By all means," said Quintana. "Give it back to him, Perez."

Simon took back the case and opened it with a certain feeling of relief which he kept strictly to himself. At least, with that in his hands, he had something on his side, little as it was.

"And now," he said through a veil of smoke, "what about this forty thousand quid?"

"That can be arranged fairly quickly."

Quintana had sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. He leaned back in it, turning his gun between his hands as if he had ceased to regard it as a useful weapon; but Simon knew that he could bring it back to usefulness quicker than the distance between them could be covered.

"Mr Templar, you are a bold man. Let me point out that you are now inside the residence of the representative of the Spanish Nationalist party. If I shot you now and the fact was ever discovered I doubt whether anything very serious could ever happen to me."

"Except some of the things I was telling you about," murmured the Saint.

The other nodded.

"Yes, it would be very inconvenient. But it would not be fatal. I am only mentioning that to show my appreciation of your — nerve. And for some other reasons. Now the alternative to killing you is to pay you your price of forty thousand pounds. But we could not do that without satisfactory guarantees that your own side of the bargain would be kept."

"And what would they be?"

"Very simple. We have all heard of your reputation, and in your own way you are said to be a man of honour. I expect your associates are of the same type. Well, in diplomatic circles when such situations arise, as they sometimes do, it is customary to bind the agreement with a solemn written undertaking that it will be kept. I shall therefore have to require that undertaking not only from yourself but also from these other persons who you say are in your confidence. They will come here personally and sign it in my presence."

The Saint moved very little.

"When?"

"I should prefer it to be done tonight."

"And the money?"

"That will be yours as soon as the undertaking is signed." Quintana stopped playing with his gun at a moment which left its muzzle conveniently but inconspicuously turned in the Saint's direction. "I suggest that you should telephone them at once, since the time limit you left them was so short. You will say nothing to them except that you require them to come here at once. Provided that there are no — accidents, the whole thing can be settled within half an hour."

The Saint's deep breath took in a long drift of smoke. So that was the move. It was something to know, even if the knowledge made nothing any easier.

He said without a trace of perturbation: "How do I know that you've really got the cash to do your share?"

Quintana looked at him with the raised eyebrows of faintly contemptuous reproach, and then he got up from the desk and went to the safe and unlocked it. He came back with a heavy sheaf of bank notes bound together with an elastic band and threw it down on the blotter in front of him as he sat down again.

"There is the money. You can take it away with you as soon as the formalities are complete. And for your own sake it would be better to complete them quickly. That is a condition I cannot argue about. Either you will accept your price on my terms, or you will be shot before your friends communicate with Scotland Yard. In that case the trouble we shall be caused will be of no benefit to you. Choose for yourself."

He spread out his arms in a suave diplomatist's bow, gargled his tonsils and spat gracefully at the porcelain cuspidor beside the desk.

The Saint trimmed his cigarette end in an ash tray.

An immense calm had suddenly come over him, in strange contrast to the tension he had been under before. Now that his questions had been answered, everything had been smoothed out into a simplicity in which tension had no place. His bluff had gone over — up to a point. But Quintana's answer was complete and unarguable. Simon knew that it was a lie, that Quintana had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain, that he never meant to hand over the money in front of him, that to telephone the others to come over and sign fabulous undertakings would only be leading them into the same trap that he himself was in. But he also knew equally well that if he rejected the condition he would be shot without mercy — and that Quintana might get away with it. It was a trap that he was expected to walk into like the greenest of greenhorns; and yet to stand back and announce that he had heard better fairy tales at his nurse's knee would merely be making the preliminary arrangements for his own funeral service.

"You are lucky to get your price so easily," whined Urivetzky.

"The conditions are only reasonable," said Perez.

Simon looked from one to the other. They had grasped the trend of Quintana's strategy as quickly as he had himself, and they were hunched forward, taut with eagerness to see how he would respond. And the Saint knew that this was one occasion when his fluent tongue would take him no further — when the only response that would save his life would be the response they wanted. How long even that would save his life for was another matter, but the alternatives were instant and inexorable. They could be read like a book in the hollow-eyed intentness of Urivetzky's skull-life face and the savage vindictiveness of Perez's stare.

The Saint smiled.

"Why, yes," he agreed sappily. "That seems fair enough."

It was as if an actual physical pressure had been released from the room. The others drew back imperceptibly, and the air seemed to lighten, although the claws were still there.

Quintana opened a drawer of the desk and took out a telephone.

"This is a private line which cannot be traced," he said. "I am telling you that in case you should have any idea of going back on your bargain."

"Why should I?" Simon enquired guilelessly. "I want that money too much."

"I am only warning you. If in the course of this conversation you should say anything which might make us suspect that you were trying to evade our agreement you will be killed at once. If you have no intention of double-crossing us the warning can do you no harm."

He pushed the telephone across the desk, and Simon picked up the receiver.

Without a shadow of hesitation he dialled the private number of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

IX

The only thing left was to pray that Teal would be there. Simon glanced at his watch while he waited for the connection. Mr Teal was not a man who had many diversions outside his job, and at that hour he should have been peacefully installed beside his hearth, chewing spearmint and doing whatever homely things chief inspectors did when they were off duty. And while the Saint was holding his breath the answer, in a familiar sleepy voice, came on the line.

"Hullo."

"Hullo," said Simon. "This is the Saint."

There was a moment's pause.

"Well, what do you want?" Teal asked nastily.

"I'm okay," said the Saint. "Can I speak to Patricia?"

"She's not here."

Simon took a pull at his cigarette.

"Oh, hullo, Pat," he said. "How are you?"

"I tell you she isn't here," yowled the detective. "Why should she be? I've got enough to do—"

"I'm fine, darling," said the Saint. "I'm with Quintana now."

"Who?"

"Luis Quintana… at 319 Cambridge Square."

"Look here," Teal said cholerically, "if this is another of your ideas of a joke—"

"I've talked things over with him," said the Saint, "and he's ready to do business. I've told him that we'll keep everything quiet — about Urivetzky being alive, and about those forged American short-term loan bearer bonds, and about Perez murdering Ingleston — all for forty thousand pounds cash. It seems fair enough to me if it's all right with the rest of you."

There was another silence for a second or two, and then Teal said in a different voice: "Are you talking to me?"

"Yes, darling," said the Saint. "I'm in his study now, and he's ready to hand over the money at once. There's only one condition. He knows that you know all about these things, and he wants you all to come over and sign an undertaking to keep your mouths shut as well as mine. I guess we'll have to agree to that."

"You want me to come over to 319 Cambridge Square?" said Teal slowly.

"Yes, Pat. At once. Quintana insists on it, and I can't argue with him."

"Shall I bring some help?"

"Yes, bring the others. He wants you all to sign. You needn't send your names in — they'll be expecting you. Will you come on over?"

"They've got a gun on you, I suppose," Teal said intelligently.

"That's the idea," said the Saint. "As quick as you can, darling. Bye."

He dropped the microphone back and pushed the telephone away with a smile of satisfaction.

"They'll be here in a few minutes," he announced.

Urivetzky unlocked his fingers and leaned back; and Perez, who had sat down on the arm of the same chair, crossed his legs and took out a cigarette. Quintana nodded and put his gun down on the desk where it was still within easy reach. Every one of their individual reactions held an unspoken triumph that would have shrieked aloud its confirmation of the Saint's deductions — if he had wanted any confirmation. They were like three spiders waiting for the entrance of the flies.

None of them spoke. An atmosphere of guarded relaxation settled upon the scene, in which they waited in savoury anticipation for the logical outcome of their own ingenuity.

The Saint himself was not reluctant to be spared the trouble of making conversation. At ease in his chair, with an outward confidence and equanimity that was even more convincing than theirs, with his head thrown back so that he could build intermittent smoke-ring patterns towards the ceiling, he watched in his imagination the machinery that his telephone call had set in motion.

Now Teal was hanging up the receiver after another telephone call. Now he would be kicking off his carpet slippers and going quietly frantic over the obstinacy of his boot laces. And over in the gloomy soot-grimed building on the Embankment that was called Scotland Yard there would be a suppressed crescendo of traffic ir certain bare echoing corridors, and big heavy-footed men would be buttoning their prosaic and respectable coats and reaching down their prosaic and respectable hats; and a car or two would start up and swing round in the courtyard and stand there unexcitedly ticking over; and a man would hurriedly finish his beer in the canteen and stump up the stairs. Perhaps in his study in Hampstead an assistant commissioner would be frowning over the telephone and fiddling with his moustache and giving counsel in a worried Oxonian bleat. "Well, I don't know… Yes, but… ticklish business, you know… international complications… Home Secretary… Foreign Office… Yes, I know, got to do something, but… Bonds? Forgery? Murder?… I don't know… discretion… unofficial… tact… Well, for God's sake be careful…" And Teal would be waiting, fidgeting on his doorstep, till the cars drove up and he stepped in with a curt businesslike greeting and they went on, threading rapidly through the traffic, filled with stolid, unromantic, uncommunicative men. "Your policemen are wonderful." Now they would be well on their way — it wouldn't take them long to get to Cambridge Square via the modest lodgings in Victoria where Teal had his home. All these things happening in London between the drab narrow streets under the pulse of the city while seekers after excitement crowded into movie theatres and sleek men and shrill women danced on overcrowded floors and smug or frustrated nonentities paced under the bright lights or hurried through quiet squares. All this happening under the deep monotonous murmur of London which penetrated even through closed windows and solid walls, a continuous thrum of life of which one would be unaware unless it stopped, out of which an isolated squeal of brakes or the toot of a passing horn close by came sometimes like an abrupt reminder of its far-spread reality…

The time passed so quickly, Simon thought, and stole another glance at his watch. At any moment now they would be here. And then there would be trouble for himself, whoever else was in it. He had still been guilty of burglary, and there were several items of information which he had condoned or concealed. And on the desk in front of him there were still forty thousand pounds in ready cash, which any efficiently organized buccaneering concern could have used.

He had done the only thing he could have done, in the circumstances. And Chief Inspector Teal, not being completely solid ivory above the bowler hatbrim, had grasped enough of the idea to save the situation, as the Saint had known he would. But it didn't end there.

Even at that moment, probably, Teal was gloating over the fact that for the first time in his life the Saint had had to appeal to him and the majesty of the Law for help; and he was doubtless elaborating in his mind the various sarcastic comments with which he would rub home the unpleasantness that could be visited on the Saint impartially with any other malefactors who might be collected at the same time. On that visitation at least the assistant commissioner must have been insistent — if Mr Teal needed any encouragement.

But the Saint had done what Quintana wanted. And after he had done it the certainty of success had had its own demoralizing effect on the opposition. The' sharp edge of vigilance on which Simon had felt his life balancing had been dulled — little enough, he knew, but with a subtle definiteness.

Quintana was rocking his swivel chair backwards and forwards, his hands supporting him on the edge of the desk. Urivetzky was lounging back as the Saint was, his hands folded and his deep-set eyes lost in thought. Perez was sprawling, his cigarette drooping limply from the corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets. But in one of those same pockets, Simon knew, was a loaded automatic.

And at that moment in a complete silence the Saint heard the soft pad of footsteps outside that suddenly broke into the sharp rap of knuckles on the door.

It was one of the servants who looked in in answer to Quintana's summons.

"There are some people downstairs," he said in Spanish. "They will give no names, but they say you are expecting them."

"How many?" asked Quintana without ceasing his measured rocking in his chair.

"Four."

"Let them come up."

The tension was back in the room, under the surface, evident in the slight motions which Urivetzky and Perez made. Only the Saint did not stir from his reclining position; but his left hand, on the arm of the chair, imperceptibly tested the effort that would be necessary to raise him quickly out of it.

There was only one light in the room, he noted — a single bulb hung from the ceiling under a painted parchment shade. As he was lying back he could see under the shade straight to the bulb beneath.

Quintana turned to Perez.

"Search them before they come in," he said.

Perez's flat eyes hid a gleam of approval. He got up and slouched through the door as other footsteps approached along the passage.

Quintana looked at the Saint.

"A formality," he said, "but we must be careful. There are only three of us."

There were only two of them now, to be exact; and Quintana was still balanced with his fingers against the edge of the desk, in a position where it would take him a fraction of a second longer to recover himself than if he had been sitting up. The last vital difference in the odds had been adjusted when Perez left the room…

The Saint seemed to lounge even more lazily, while his left hand took a firmer grip of the arm of his chair. He waved his cigarette case back aimlessly, so that it was near his ear.

"Of course," he said very clearly, "I'm not worried about that. The only thing I'm bothered about is this bloke Graham. You know, the police might think he murdered Ingleston. We know that Perez did it—"

"I should hardly call it murder," answered Quintana, and although he was taking no pains to clarify his voice, it must have been lucidly audible through the open door. "Ingleston was a traitor, and traitors are executed. Perez was simply carrying out the sentence of the Fascist government as I interpreted it."

"That's all I wanted to know," said the Saint; and with a crisp jerk of his wrist he sent his cigarette case spinning diagonally upwards like a whirling shaft of silver, straight at the single light over the desk.

The plop of the exploding bulb thudded like a gunshot into the silence, and after it there was a flash of darkness, complete and blinding, before the dim quantity of light filtering through from the corridor outside could take effect on unadjusted eyes. And in that interval of darkness the Saint hurled himself out of his chair like a living thunderbolt.

He reached the bundle of bank notes on the desk as his cigarette case went on to crash against the far wall, and they were in his pocket before it clattered to the floor. Quintana went first for his gun, but he was off balance, he had to take weight off his hands before they could grab, and that lost him a fraction of a second in which everything was lost. As Quintana raised the automatic Simon went on with the same continuous hurtling movement that had swept the sheaf of money into his pocket, but at this stage all the power and impetus of the movement was gathered to a focal point in his left fist. The fist took Quintana squarely and centrally on the end of his nose, with every ounce of the Saint's flying bone and muscle behind it; something seemed to crumple like an eggshell, and Simon felt his knuckles sog into warm sticky pulp.

Quintana went over backwards, smashingly, his legs flying in the air, taking the whole chair with him. The Saint's own momentum carried him halfway across the desk; he wriggled over, pushed his feet off onto the ground and dived for the communicating door.

Urivetzky clawed at him as he went by, and Simon whipped round, sent him reeling with a right to the jaw and was on his way with hardly a pause. An instant later, with the door slammed again behind him, he was scooting across the reception room to let himself out through the tall windows onto the terrace. A faint muffled shout, scarcely audible in the deep interior of the house, was the only sound that followed him.

Outside the sombre peace of Cambridge Square was as untroubled as it had always been, but Simon knew that it would not remain untroubled for long. He ignored the tree by which he had climbed up, placed one hand on the balustrade and vaulted out into space. He dropped twenty feet, landed with feet braced and knees bent to absorb the shock, straightened lithely up and dashed for the wall. Again he went over it with the swift sureness of a cat, and by the good grace of Providence the street on the other side was deserted. Simon turned to the left, instead of to the right where Peter Quentin was waiting further off with the car, in order to avoid passing the front of the house; and before the first sounds of the hue and cry arose behind him he was strolling sedately round the next corner like any righteous citizen on his way home.

He walked around two blocks so as to approach the car from behind, and as he re-entered Cambridge Square from the southeast corner he kept the car between him and the front of the house until the last moment when he stepped round it to open the door and get in.

"I was just getting ready to go home," Peter said as he steered the limousine out from the curb. "A couple of cars drove up a few minutes ago with what looked like policemen in them, so I thought they'd look after you."

"Maybe they were looking for a burglar," said the Saint and passed his bundle of currency over Peter's shoulder. "Take care of this for me, will you? There's forty thousand quid there, so don't lose it. You'd better park it somewhere as soon as you can — I'd better not keep it myself tonight, because Claud Eustace will probably be looking for it."

The limousine swerved in a slightly hysterical arc as Peter felt the bundle and stuffed it into his pocket.

"Did they give you this to get rid of you?" he asked feebly.

"More or less." The Saint was slipping into his sober black overcoat and taking his patriarchal white whiskers out of the locker. "Now step on the gas and let's get home. And before you even start ladling me out of here tell Sam Outrell to phone his father and rush him over to Cornwall House by the service entrance while Orace and I get rid of those phony phone repairers — because I have a hunch there's going to be some argument about Joshua Pond!"

X

Chief inspector claud eustace teal fastened his chewing gum well back in his mouth and prayed that his collar would stand the strain of the swelling which he could feel creeping up his neck.

"Are you trying to tell me that I'm raving mad?" he squawked.

He had not meant to squawk. But those same infuriating convulsions with which he was only too bitterly familiar were taking hold of his vocal cords again, robbing his voice of the rich commanding resonance which for some reason he could never achieve when he faced that lazy, derisive buccaneer who had long ago taken all the joy out of his life. And the sound of his own squawking filled him with such flabbergasted fury that it only increased his internal feeling of inflation till his collar creaked perilously on its studs.

"What — me?" protested the Saint in shocked accents. "Claud, have I ever been rude to you? Have I ever hurt your feelings? I may think things, but I keep them to myself—"

"Listen." The detective took hold of himself with both pudgy hands. "I've spent two hours at Quintana's house—"

"Did you have fun?"

"I've spent most of that time talking to Quintana. I took Urivetzky away with me — he's in a cell at Cannon Row now—"

"You took who?"

"Urivetzky."

"What are Urivetzky?" asked the Saint. "They sound like a remedy for rheumatism. Have you been having some more trouble with that gouty toe of yours?"

"You know damn well who I mean!"

Simon scratched his head.

"Now I think of it the name does sort of sound familiar," he admitted. "Was he the guy who pulled off that big forgery some time ago?"

"You know that as well as I do," Teal said grimly, "and you know we were looking for him until we heard he'd been shot in Spain. Well, it's all very well for you to hand him over—"

"Me?" repeated the Saint. "I never touched him."

"He had a cracked jaw when I picked him up. And where did you skin your knuckles?"

"Trying to do a bit of amateur repair work on the car. I don't know if you've ever noticed what a lot of nobbly bits there are in these new-fangled engines."

"You—"

"I'm not, Claud, really I'm not. And you mustn't say things like that. They're slanderous." The Saint took out a cigarette. "You know, the trouble with you is that you're too modest. After you've done a brilliant piece of detective work running down this crook that everybody's been looking for for years you come over all coy and try to pass the credit on to someone else. It won't do, Claud. Modesty is all very well, but in these days you have to advertise even if it hurts."

"Besides that," Teal proceeded, "I took a man called Perez, and he's charged with murdering Ingles-ton last night."

The Saint frowned slightly.

"Ingleston?" he repeated. "I've heard of him too… Oh yes — he was the bloke with the bent skull that we were looking at this morning. And you've got his murderer too?" The Saint's smile acquired a spontaneous warmth that would have thawed anyone less obstinately prejudiced. "Claud, this has been a great day for you! And you came straight over to tell me before you told anyone else. Well, I think we ought to have a drink on it."

"Quintana told the whole story," Teal ploughed on doggedly. "There wasn't much else he could do unless he'd tried to stand on 'diplomatic rights,' and he was too shaken by what you'd done to his nose to think about that. He was howling for a doctor and cursing his friends in Spanish and answering most of my questions at the same time. I may get into trouble later for taking advantage of him, but I've got his signed statement, and I've got Perez. I don't know how much Quintana's immunity is good for, since he's the representative of the Rebel government, but we'll see about that. I heard what he said to you just before you smashed the light and so did three other officers. And his statement brings you in on three other charges of burglary, demanding money with menaces—"

"There's only one thing about this story that worries me, as I told you before," said the Saint mildly, "and that is why I keep coming into it."

Mr Teal moved his gum over to the other side of his jaw, and his round cherubic pink face became pinker and more desperately cherubic.

"You know why you come into it," he said. "You were prowling around at Ingleston's this morning, trying to get in my way. You knew that we were looking for Graham and didn't say anything about him."

"You didn't ask me, Claud. You know how sensitive you are about outsiders trying to show you how to do your job, so it wasn't my business to butt into your case without any invitation."

"You've been hiding him here all day—"

"I certainly haven't. Just because you didn't find him doesn't mean that I was hiding him. It was all perfectly open. You only had to come to the door and say 'Knock, knock, is Graham there?' and we'd have said 'Graham who?' and you'd have said 'Graham the dawn,' and we'd have said 'Peepbo, here he is,' and everything would have been all right."

"We made enquiries here, and the porter said no one had been to see you."

"He must have been mistaken. To err is human—"

Teal moved his gum again and almost swallowed it.

"You've been harbouring a suspected person—"

"But what on earth," asked the Saint puzzledly, "is the poor boy suspected of? Buying a sweepstake ticket or something dreadful like that? I thought you'd got a bloke called Perez who was supposed to have murdered Ingleston."

"Graham was suspected at the time, and you'd no business to be harbouring him. And now he's still believed to be in possession of seven thousand pounds worth of American bearer bonds—"

"Bonds?"

"Yes, bonds. Forged bonds. And there's also forty thousand pounds in cash that you stole from Quintana's house tonight!"

"My dear Claud!" The Saint was earnestly sympathetic. "If you've been thinking things like that I don't wonder that you're upset. Seven thousand pounds worth of forged bonds and forty thousand quid in cash — that would be something to make a song about. But you're all wrong this time. We haven't got any bonds, and we haven't got anything like forty thousand pounds."

"No?" Teal's voice was savage. "Well—"

"Of course you can," said the Saint clairvoyantly. "Go ahead and search us. Search the place. I won't even ask you to show a warrant. If it'll set your mind at rest…"

Teal glared around the room as if he was ready to start in and tear it apart without further parley, but even in his glare there was the beginning of a kind of hopeless doubt. The very way that the Saint had so readily told him to go ahead was almost a guarantee that there would be nothing to find, that he would only be laying himself open to more derision from that maddeningly bantering tongue. He had to brace himself to keep plunging on before he thought too much about it and lost steerageway.

"We'll search the room all right while you're in the cell next to Urivetzky," he retorted venomously.

"And what's going to put me there?"

"I am! I know what you were doing at that house tonight—"

"How could I have been doing anything," Simon protested, "when I wasn't there?"

"I know you were there all right—"

Simon shook his head.

"Somebody must have been playing tricks on you. We've all been sitting quietly here, telling stories and talking about architecture."

Teal swallowed, choked and got his voice back.

"Are you trying to tell me that I'm raving mad?" he bugled again. "After I spoke to you myself on the telephone?"

"Telephones are deceptive things," said the Saint sadly. "If someone was pretending to be me naturally they'd imitate my voice—"

"I've got more than that. I've got statements from Quintana and Urivetzky and Perez that you were there all the time."

Simon shrugged deprecatingly.

"After all," he said, "their reputations don't seem to be too good, and I suppose people like that will say anything if they think it'll take trouble away from themselves."

"Would they telephone me and ask me to come over and arrest them?" hooted Teal.

"I don't say they did, although people do lots of queer things. But somebody did it. Why, I don't know. But that's not my job. I'm not a detective, and this isn't my case. it'll be quite a little problem for you, Claud, and I'll be glad to let you know if I think of any theories. But did you see me there?"

"I heard your voice inside the room and so did three other officers—"

"But that must have been my impersonator, Claud — the bloke who did all the tough stuff, cracking jaws and bopping people on the nose and so forth. I'm sure your officers think they were right, the same as you do — but what about your other officers?"

"What other officers?"

"I mean," said the Saint deliberately, "all those great flat-footed morons who've been plastering the scenery around this building ever since I saw you this morning. You've had them watching me like a flea under a microscope, and I suppose they're as sane as anyone else at Scotland Yard. And unless every one of them is a perjurer, I'll bet you can't bring on one of them who won't swear that I haven't put my nose outside all evening. Now suppose you laugh that off!"

His voice crisped to a subtle sting on the last words; but it was nothing to the tightening that crawled over Chief Inspector Teal. It was as if the detective suddenly soared out of all his gnawing hesitations on a great expansion of sublime triumph. He seemed to grow bigger as his chest swelled, and his round face was red with ecstasy.

"Now I'll tell you why I'm laughing!" he blazed back. "I know how you got out of here without my men seeing you! That was something else I got from Quintana, because his men were watching this flat too. I know how you were wheeled out in a false beard before these things happened and how you were wheeled back just a little while ago! I know all about this precious Mr Joshua Pond, who's supposed to live in the flat next door. And I know that he doesn't exist! I know that the only Joshua Pond in this building is you! And that's what's going to put you where you belong!"

The detective's crescendo of exclamation marks ended in a falsetto squeak like a stabbed canary, but Teal was past caring. The exultation of conquest was singing in his head like strong drink. For once, at last, he had in his hands the final proof that would wreck the Saint's last fatal alibi. And Teal was glad of it. It was the moment for which he had lived more years than he wanted to remember, but it would atone for all of them.

"How's that going to do anything to me?" Simon asked abruptly.

"Because this Joshua Pond hasn't been out again since my men saw him come in. And I'm going right next door to ring his bell and see if he's there. And if he isn't there I'll have all the evidence I want!"

"But suppose he is?" said the Saint anxiously. "I don't know anything about him, but he might object to being disturbed—"

"If he's there," Teal answered recklessly, "I'll admit that I'm raving mad. I'll admit that I've been dreaming all night. But I shan't have to 1"

"Give Joshua my love," said the Saint softly. "Show him your tummy — he might like it."

He picked up another cigarette and glanced around at Patricia Holm and Geoffrey Graham as Teal flung himself out of the room. And his smile had the superb inimitable madness on which all his life was based.

Teal was already thumbing the bell of the next apartment. And the door opened.

A very old man, in his shirt and trousers, with a voluminous growth of white whisker almost covering his face, looked out at him.

Something insane and unprecedented took possession of Mr Teal — something which, if he had stopped to think about it, had already seized him on two previous similar occasions during his long feud with the Saint. But Mr Teal was not stopping to think. He was not really responsible for his actions. He was no longer the cold remorseless Nemesis that he liked to picture himself as he lurched forward with one wild movement, grasped a section of the old man's beard with one hand and pulled to tear it off.

The only trouble was that the beard did not come off; and the next thing that Mr Teal was aware of was that his face was stinging from a powerful smack.

"Well, dang me!" squalled the ancient. "I never did heeear of such a thing in all my liiife. Haven't you got nothing better to do, young man, than come around pulling respectable folks' beeeards? You wait till I fetch a policeman to ye. I'll see that you learn some manners, danged if I doan't!"

Mr Teal stood there, hardly conscious of his tingling cheek, hardly hearing the old man on the telephone inside the apartment as he upbraided the porter for letting in "danged young fules to come and pull my beeeard." The exultant delirium of a few seconds ago seemed to have curdled to a leaden mass in his stomach. He knew without stirring another muscle that the supreme moment he had dreamed of had not yet come. He knew that he was doomed to leave the Saint free once again to organize more tragedies for him. He didn't know how this one had been organized, but he knew that it had been done, and he knew that his very own watchdogs were the best evidence against him. And Mr Teal knew with the utter deadness of despair that it had always been fated to be the same.