Prelude for War

1

There was a stir of excitement in the press seats as Simon Templar walked up on to the platform and took the oath. Even if the party from Whiteways had failed to recognize his name, there was no such obtuseness among the reporters. The Saint had provided them with too many good stories in the past for them to forget him, and their air of professional boredom gave way to a sudden and unexpected alertness. A subdued hum of speculation swept over them and spread to one or two other parts of the room where the name had also revived recollections. The black-bearded little juryman sat forward and stared.

While Simon was taking the oath, he noticed that the coroner was poring intently over a scrap of paper which had somehow come into his hands. When he raised his eyes from it, they came to rest on the Saint with a new wariness. He folded the note and tucked it away in his breast pocket without shifting his gaze; and his manner became very brisk again.

"I understand, Mr Templar, that you arrived on the scene of the fire some time after it had started."

"I have no idea," said the Saint carefully. "I only saw it a very short time before I got there. And I was there in time to hear Lady Valerie say that Kennet was missing."

The coroner rubbed his chin. He seemed to be weighing his words with particular circumspection.

"Then you went into the house to try to get him out."

"Yes."

"In what condition was the house when you entered it? I mean, how far had the fire progressed?"

"The whole place was blazing," Simon answered. "It was worst in the part which I now gather was called the west wing. There was fire in the hall, and the stairs had begun to burn. Part of the passage I had to go down to reach Kennet's room was also alight."

"I take it that with all that fire there would be a great deal of smoke and fumes."

"There was quite a bit."

"I understand that you were quite — er — groggy when you came out."

"Only for a moment. It passed off very quickly."

"But I take it that if you had stayed in the house any longer than you did, you would inevitably have been overcome by the smoke and fumes and lost consciousness."

"I suppose so, eventually."

"To look at you, Mr Templar, one would certainly get the impression that your physical condition was exceptionally good."

"I've always got around all right."

There was a pause. The coroner turned to the jury.

"Mr Templar modestly tells us that he gets around all right," he stated. "You can see for yourselves that he has the build and bearing of an unusually strong and athletic man. You will therefore agree that his powers of resistance to such things as smoke and fumes are probably higher than the average, and certainly immeasurably greater than those of a slightly built sedentary type such as the late Mr Kennet, whose constitution, I am told, was always somewhat delicate. I want you to bear this in mind a little later on."

He turned back to the Saint.

"You appear to have acted with singular courage, Mr Templar," he said. "I'm sure that that is quite obvious to all of us here in spite of the modest way in which you have told your story. I should like to compliment you on your extremely gallant attempt to save this unfortunate young man's life. Next witness, please."

A glint of steel came into the Saint's eyes. He knew that the coroner had had a good talk with the party from Whiteways, and it had been evident from the start of the proceedings that everything was laid out to lead up to a verdict of accidental death with as little fuss as possible. That was all very well; and the Saint had quite enjoyed himself while he was waiting for his turn. But now he realized that he was not intended to have a turn. His own evidence had been adroitly manoeuvred towards bolstering up the desired verdict; and the coroner, warned about him in time, was getting rid of him with a pontifical pat on the back before he had a chance to derange the well-oiled machinery. Which was not by any means the Saint's idea.

"Haven't the jury any questions?" he asked breezily.

He turned towards them and looked hard at the black-bearded little man, who was sitting slumped disconsolately in his chair. There was something compelling about his direct gaze.

The black-bearded little man's figure straightened and an eager light came into his eyes. He rose.

"Yus," he said defiantly. "I've got some questions."

The coroner's hands tightened together.

"Very well," he snapped. "Go on and ask your questions."

The way in which he spoke explained to the entire audience that the questions could only be a pointless waste of their time as much as his own.

The little man turned to Simon.

"You're the chap they call the Saint, ain't you?" he said. "You've 'ad a lot of experience of crime — murders, and that sort o' thing."

Before Simon could answer the coroner intervened.

"Mr Templar's past life.and any nickname by which he may be known to the public are not subjects which we have to consider at this inquiry. Kindly confine your questions to facts relevant to the case."

There was an awkward pause. The little juryman's attitude was still undaunted, but he didn't seem to know what to say next. He looked about him desperately, as if searching the room for inspiration. Finally he spoke.

"Do you think there was something fishy about this fire?" he demanded.

"Mr Templar's personal opinions are not matters which concern this court," interrupted the coroner sternly.

The Saint smiled. He looked at the little juryman, and spoke very clearly and distinctly.

"Yes," he said. "I think there were a lot of very fishy things about it."

There was a moment of silence so heavy that it seemed almost solid. And then it broke in a babble of twittering speculation that surged over the room as if a swarm of bees had been turned loose. There was a craning of necks all over the court, a quick rustling of notebooks among the reporters.

Simon stood at his ease, absorbing the pleasant radiations of the sensation he had created. Well, he reflected, he had certainly done it now. He glanced at the rows of seats where the party from Whiteways was sitting. Luker's expression had not changed: he wore his usual cold stony mask. Fairweather looked acutely unhappy: he could not meet the Saint's gaze. The General and Lady Sangore had adopted an indignant pose of having nothing to do with what was going on: they sat as if red-hot pokers had been inserted into their backs and they were pretending not to notice it.

Simon's glance travelled on and found the faces of Peter and Patricia among the scatter of pink blobs that were turned up to him. He held their eyes for a moment with a message of impenitent devilry.

The jury were goggling at him openmouthed, with the sole exception of the small black-bearded man, who had taken up a Napoleonic posture with his arms proudly folded and a radiance of anarchistic joy on his face. The coroner had gone slightly purple; he banged on the table in front of him.

"Silence!" he shouted. "Silence, or I'll have the court cleared!"

He turned angrily on Simon.

"We are not interested in your theories, Mr Templar, and you had no right to make such a statement. You will please remember that this is a court of law."

"I'm trying to," said the Saint unflinchingly. "I thought I was summoned here to give evidence. I haven't had the chance to give any yet. I'm not offering theories. I'm trying to draw attention to one or two very curious and even fishy facts which I have not been allowed to mention."

"What are they?" chirped the little juryman exultantly, before the coroner could speak again.

"For instance," said the Saint, "there is the fact which I noticed, which the lady who was with me noticed, and which even the police who were on the scene must have noticed, that every ground-floor window in sight was open, producing a draught which must have materially helped the growth of the fire."

Fairweather stood up.

"I could have explained that if it had been brought up before," he said. "It is true that most of the windows were probably open. It was a warm evening, and they had been open all day. It has always been the butler's duty to lock up the house before he retires, and it had completely escaped my attention that he was not there to do it that night when we went to bed. He would, of course, have locked up as soon as he came in; but unfortunately the fire started before that."

"Thank you, Mr Fairweather."

The coroner shifted the papers on his desk again with two or three aimless, jerky movements, as if to gain time to re-establish his domination. Then he leaned back again and put his finger tips together and went on in a more trenchant voice.

"This is a regrettable but instructive example of the danger of jumping to rash conclusions. It is one very good reason why the personal opinions of witnesses are not admissible in evidence. There are some people whose warped minds are prone to place a malicious interpretation on anything of which the true explanation is beyond their limited intelligence. There are also persons whose desire for cheap notoriety leads them to distort and exaggerate without restraint when they find themselves temporarily in the public eye, in the hope of attracting more attention to themselves. It is the duty of a court to protect the reputations of other witnesses, and the open-mindedness of the jury, from the harm which may be done by such irresponsible insinuations. In this case, an insignificant fact which is not contested has been brought up with much ado. But so far from supporting the suggestion that there is something 'fishy' involved, to any normal and intelligent person it merely confirms the chain of mischances through which the deceased lost his life."

"All right," said the Saint, through his teeth. "Then why was Kennet's door locked?"

The coroner lost his head for a moment.

"How do you know it was locked?"

"Because I saw it. I got as far as his room, and I could have got him out if I could have got in. But it was locked, and it was too strong to break down. I went back to get an axe, but the floor of the corridor caved in before I could get back."

"Well, supposing his door was locked — what of it?" demanded the coroner in an exasperated voice. "Why shouldn't he lock his door?"

Simon spoke very gently and evenly.

"I imagine he had every reason for locking it," he replied. "When a man goes to stay in a house full of his bitterest enemies, people whom he's fighting with all the resources at his command, people to whom wholesale slaughter is merely a matter of business, he's a fool if he doesn't lock his door. But it hasn't been proved that he did lock it. I simply said that his door was locked; and I might add that the key was not in it."

"Beg pardon, sir." The captain of the fire brigade stood up at the far end of the room. "I found a door key among the daybree in the libry."

There was a hushed pause.

"Exactly," said the coroner, with sarcastic emphasis. "Kennet locked his door and took out the key. I fail to see any sinister implications in that — in fact, I have frequently done it myself."

"And have you frequently held inquests without bringing any evidence to establish the cause of death?" retorted the Saint recklessly.

For an instant he thought that even he had gone too far. When he thought about it afterwards, in cold blood, the consequences that he had invited with it brought him out in a dank sweat. But at that moment he was too furious to care.

The coroner had gone white around the nostrils.

"Mr Templar, you will withdraw that remark at once."

"I apologize," said the Saint immediately. It was the only thing to do. "Of course I withdraw it."

"I have seen the body myself," said the coroner tightly. "And in a straightforward case like this, where there is absolutely no evidence to justify a suspicion of foul play, it is not thought necessary to add to the suffering of the relatives of the deceased by ordering an autopsy."

He moved his hands over his blotter, looking down at them; and then he brought his eyes back to the Saint with grim decisiveness.

"I do not wish to repeat my previous remarks. But I cannot too strongly express the grave view which I take of such wild and unfounded accusations as you have made. I have only refrained from committing you for contempt of court because I prefer not to give you the publicity which you are doubtless seeking. But you had better go back to your seat at once, before I change my mind."

Simon hesitated. Every instinct he had revolted against obedience. But he knew that there was nothing else he could do. He was as helpless as a fly caught in the meshes of a remorseless machine.

He bowed stiffly and walked down from the dais into the midst of a silence in which the fall of a feather would have sounded deafening.

None of the party from Whiteways even looked at him. But he noticed, with one lonely tingle of hope, that Lady Valerie's eyes were narrowed in an expression of intense concentrated thought. She seemed to be considering astounding possibilities.

The coroner consulted inaudibly with the police sergeant, and then he cleared his throat again as he had done when the court opened. His well-scoured face wore a more tranquil expression.

"I don't think that we need to call any more witnesses," he said.

He went on to give his summing up to the jury. He pointed out that fires usually started by accident, and usually from the most trivial and unsuspected causes. He drew their attention to the fact that a number of fortuitous circumstances, for none of which Mr Fairweather or his guests were to blame, such as the heavily timbered construction of the house, and the pardonably forgotten open windows, had contributed to make the fire far more serious than it might otherwise have been. He reminded them that it was by no means unusual for some people to be such sound sleepers that even an earthquake would not waken them, and that in the haste and stress of an emergency a verbal misunderstanding was even less extraordinary than it was in everyday life. And he urged them to dismiss from their minds altogether the fantastic accusations with which the issue had been confused, and to consider the case solely on the very simple and coherent evidence which had been placed before them.

In twenty minutes the seven jurors, including the black-bearded little man, who looked vaguely disappointed, brought back a verdict of death by misadventure.

2

A hungry pack of reporters fell on the Saint as he left the building. They formed a close circle round him.

"Come on, Saint; give us the story!"

"What's the use?" Simon asked grittily. "You couldn't print it."

"Never mind that — tell us about it."

"Well, what do you think?"

One of them pushed his hat on to the back of his head.

"It looks easy enough. Maybe Kennet was dead drunk, but they'd want to keep that dark for the sake of the old man. It doesn't make much difference. It's pretty obvious that the whole lot of them lost their heads and just ran like hares and left him behind; but with a crowd like that it's bound to be hushed up. You couldn't do anything about it. What was the use of asking for trouble?"

For a moment there was sheer homicide in the Saint's eyes. So that was the net result of his desperate fight to block the whitewashing performance that had been put over not only under the very nose of justice but with its vigorous co-operation. That was the entire product of the risks he had taken and the humiliation to which he had exposed himself — so that even a sensation-loving press was inclined to regard him as having for once exhibited a somewhat egregious and unsophisticated stupidity.

And then he realized that that must not only be the press, but the general opinion. Whitewashing was understandable, something to whisper and wink knowingly about; but the truth that Simon Templar was convinced of was too much for them to swallow. Retired generals, great financiers and ex-cabinet ministers couldn't conspire to cover up murder: it was one of those things which simply did not happen.

His flash of rage died into a hopeless weariness.

"Maybe I like trouble," he rasped, and pushed his way out of the group.

He had seen Peter and Patricia coming out. He took their arms, one on each side of him, and led them silently across the road into the pub opposite.

They took their drinks at the bar and carried them over to a quiet corner by the window. The room was deserted, and for a while nobody broke the silence. Patricia's face was struggling between thunder and tears.

"You were magnificent, boy," she said at last. "I could have murdered that coroner."

"But what good could you do?" Peter asked helplessly.

Simon took out a cigarette and lighted it with tense, deliberate fingers. The bitterness had sunk deeper into him, condensing and coalescing into one white-hot drop of searing energy from which the savage power of its combustion was driving with transmuted fierceness through every inch of his being. Perhaps he had failed disastrously in the first round; but he was still on his feet, and the marrow of his bones had turned to iron. His first pull of smoke came back between lips that had settled into a relentless fighting line.

"None," he said curtly. "No good at all. But it had to be tried. And that lets us out. The rest of the argument is a free-for-all with no holds barred."

"What did you tell the reporters?" asked Peter.

"Nothing. They didn't want telling. They told me. As far as they're concerned, it was all just a routine set up to gloss over the fact that the Whiteways gang were all too busy saving their own skins to worry about anybody else. It was instructive, too, now I come to think about it. I was wondering how they'd managed to fix that coroner — dumb as he was. I think I can see it now. They let him think he was doing just what the reporters thought he was doing, and of course he was obviously the type who could be counted on to stand by the old school. Not that it matters now, anyway. They got their verdict, and the case is officially closed."

"The fireman said that he found the key," Peter observed.

Simon nodded.

"That was the worst mistake I've made so far — I told Luker the key wasn't in the door when I was trying to get a reaction out of him on the night of the fire. If he'd overlooked that, he'd 've had plenty of chances to sling it in through a window afterwards. But I don't think even that really made much difference."

Peter raised his tankard again and drank moodily.

Patricia emptied her glass.

She said presently: "I saw you get hold of your girl friend, but I didn't see you take my clothes off her."

"It was rather a public place," said the Saint. "But she's a nice girl and never goes out with the same man twice unless he's a millionaire. Or unless a millionaire asks her to. Which is why she was running around with young Kennet. Fairweather was the philanthropist who wanted him led back into the fold, and he was ready to buy a thousand-guinea fur coat to see it done. And Fairweather was the guy who arranged for him to come down for the week end. I got that much — and more."

The first taut-strung intensity of his manner was passing off, giving way before the slow return of the old exhilarant zest of battle which the other two knew so well. What was past was past; but the fight went on. And he was still in it. He began to feel the familiar tingle of impetuous vitality creeping again along his nerves; and the smoke came again through the first tentative glimmer of a Saintly smile.

"We were right, boys and girls," he said. "Our old friends the arms racketeers are on the warpath again: Luker, Fairweather and Sangore, just as we sorted them out, with Luker pulling the strings and Fairweather and Sangore playing ball. The Sons of France are in it, too, though I don't know how. But there's something big blowing up; and you can bet that whatever it is the arms manufacturers are going to end up in the money, even if a few million suckers do get killed in the process. Kennet had a bee about the arms racket; he'd been scratching around after them, and somehow or other he'd got on to something."

"What was it?" asked Patricia.

"I wish I knew. But we'll find out. It was something to do with papers and photographs. Lady Valerie didn't remember. She never paid any attention. The whole thing bored her. But it provides the one thing we didn't have before — the motive. Whatever it was, it was dynamite. It was big enough to mean that Kennet was too dangerous to be allowed to go on living. And he just wasn't smart enough or tough enough. They got him."

"Somehow," said Peter, "I can't see Fairweather doing a job like that."

"Maybe he didn't. Maybe Sangore didn't, either. But Kennet died — very conveniently. They knew about it. Probably Luker did it himself. I can just see him telling them — 'Leave it to me.' "

"He was taking a big risk."

"What risk? It would have been a cinch; except for the pure fluke that I happened to come along. You saw how the inquest went. There were a dozen ways he could have done it. Kennet could have been poisoned, or strangled, or had his throat cut or his skull cracked: almost anything short of chopping him up would have left damned little evidence on a body that had been through a fire like that. He could even have been just knocked out and locked in his room and left there for the fire to do the rest. We'll never know exactly how it was done, and we'll never be able to prove anything now; but I know that they murdered him. And I'm going to carry on from where Kennet left off. You can take your own choice, but I'm in this now — up to the neck."

They sat looking at him, and in their ears echoed the faint trumpets of the forlorn ventures in which they had followed him without question so many times before.

Patricia smiled.

"All right, boy," she said. "I'm with you."

"If he's made up his mind to get murdered, I suppose you can't stop him," Peter said resignedly. "Anyway, if they put him in another fire we shan't have to pay for a cremation. But what does he think he's going to do?"

Simon stood up and looked at the clock on the wall.

"I'm going to London," he said. "I found out from the girl friend that Kennet lived with another Bolshevik named Windlay, who was in on the party with him. So I'm going to try and get hold of him before anyone else has the same idea. And I've wasted enough time already. If you two want to be useful, you can try and keep tabs on the Whiteways outfit while I'm away. Be good, and I'll call you later."

He waved to them and was gone, in a sudden irresistible urge of action, and the room seemed curiously drab and lifeless after he had gone. They had one more glimpse of him, at the wheel of the Hirondel, as the great car snaked past the window with a spluttering roar of power; and then there was only the fading thunder of his departure.

The Saint drove quickly. When he was in a hurry, speed limits were merely a trivial technicality to him; and he was in a hurry now. He did not like to dwell too much on the thought of how desperate his hurry might really be. His effortless touch threaded the car through winding roads and obstructing traffic with the deftness of an engraver etching an intricate pattern; the rush of the wind beating at his face and shoulders assuaged some of his hunger for primitive violence; the deep-throated drone of the exhaust was an elemental music that matched his mood. The clean-cut activity of driving, the concentration of judgment and the ceaseless play of fine nerve responses absorbed the forefront of mechanical consciousness, so that another part of his mind seemed to be set free, untrammelled by dimension, outside of time, to roam over the situation as he knew it and to try to probe into the future where it was leading. It was ninety-five miles from Anford to Notting Hill, and the clock on the dashboard told him that he made the distance in one hour and twenty-five minutes; but the ground that his mind covered in the same time would have taken much longer to account for.

The arrival in Notting Hill brought him back to reality. He stopped beside a postman who directed him to Balaclava Mansions, and when he caught sight of the building he was obliged to admit to himself that he might have been unduly harsh with Lady Valerie. It actually did look like an Awful Place, being one of those gloomy and architecturally arid concoctions of sooty stucco to which the London landlord is so congenially prone to attach the title of "Mansions," presumably in the hope of persuading the miserable tenant that luxury is being poured into his humble lap. Just inside the front door a number of grubby and almost indecipherable scraps of paper pinned and pasted to the peeling wall gave instructions for locating those of the inhabitants who were still sufficiently optimistic to believe that anyone might have any interest in finding them. From one of those pathetically neglected emblems of stubborn survival Simon ascertained that John Kennet and Ralph Windlay had been the joint occupants of the rear ground-floor flat on the right.

He went through the cheerless dilapidated hall and raised his hand to knock on the indicated door. And in that position he stopped, with his knuckles poised, for the door was already ajar.

The Saint scarcely paused before he pushed it open with his foot and went in.

"Hullo there," he called; but there was no answer. It did not take him any time to discover why. He had come through into the one all-purpose room of which the habitable part of the flat was composed; and when he saw what was in it he knew that his fear had been justified, that he had indeed wasted too much time. Ralph Windlay was already dead.

3

A bullet fired at close range had helped to shorten his life, and had done it without making a great deal of mess. He lay flat on his back hardly a yard inside the doorway, with his arms spread wide and his mouth stupidly open. Lady Valerie's description of him was quite recognizable. He still wore his glasses. He couldn't have been much more than twenty-five, and his pale thin face looked as if it might once have been intellectual. The only mark on it was a black-rimmed hole between the eyes; but his head lay in the middle of a sticky dark red mess on the threadbare carpet, and Simon knew that the back of his skull would not be nice for a squeamish person to look at.

The room had been ransacked. The two divans had been ripped to pieces and the upholstery of the chairs had been cut open. Cupboards were open and drawers had been pulled out and left where they fell. A shabby old rolltop desk in one corner looked as if a crowbar had been used on it. The table and the floor were strewn with papers.

Simon saw that much; and then there was a sound of tramping footsteps in the hall. Automatically he pushed the door to behind him, subconsciously thinking that it would only be some other occupants of the building passing through; his brain was too busy with what he was looking at to think very hard. Before he realized his mistake the footsteps were right behind him and he was seized roughly from behind.

He whirled round with his muscles instantly awake and one fist driving out instinctively as he turned. And then, with some superhuman effort, he checked the blow in mid-flight.

In that delirious instant his brain reversed itself with such fantastic speed that everything else seemed to have a nightmare slowness by comparison. He watched the trajectory of his hand as if from a vast distance; and it was exactly like sitting in a car with catastrophe leaping up ahead, with the brakes already jammed on to the limit and nothing left to do but to hold on and hope that they would do their work in time. And with a kind of hysterical relief he saw his zooming fist slow up and stop a bare inch from the round red face of the man who had grabbed him. For another split second he simply stood blankly staring; and then suddenly he went weak with laughter.

"You shouldn't give me these shocks, Claud," he said. "My nerves aren't what they used to be."

The man on the other side of his fist went on gaping at him, with his baby-blue eyes dilating with a ferment of emotions which whole volumes might be written to describe. And a tinge of royal purple crept into his plump, cherubic visage.

The reasons for that regal hue were only distantly connected with the onrush of that piledriving fist which had been so miraculously held back from its mark. To Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, a man who had never set any exaggerated value on his beauty, a punch on the nose would only have been a more or less unpleasant incident to be endured with fortitude in the execution of his duty, and in that stoical spirit he had in his younger days suffered more drastic forms of assault and battery than that. A punch on the nose, indeed, would have been almost a joyous and desirable experience compared with the spasm of unmitigated woe that speared through Mr Teal's cosmogony when he saw the face of the Saint. It was a pang that summed up, in one poignant instant, all the years through which Chief Inspector Teal had fought his hopelessly losing battle with that elusive buccaneer, all the disappointments and disasters and infuriating bafflements, all the wrath and sarcasm that his efforts had brought down upon him from his superiors, all the impudent mockeries of the Saint himself, the Saint's disrespectful forefinger prodding the rotundity of his stomach and the assistant commissioner's acidulated sniff. It was a sharp stab of memory that brought back all the occasions when Mr Teal had seen triumph dangling in front of his nose only to have it jerked away by invisible strings at the very moment when he thought his hands were closing round it; and with it came a revival of the barren desolation that had followed so many of those episodes, when Mr Teal had felt that he was merely the dumb quarry of an unjust destiny, doomed to be harried through eternity with the stars themselves conspiring against him. And at the same time it was pervaded with the realization that the identical story was starting all over again.

All these accumulated indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal's intestines in one corrosive moment of appalling stillness before he finally wrenched a response out of his vocal cords.

"How the hell did you get here?" he glurked.

It was not, perhaps, the most fluent and comprehensive speech that Mr Teal had ever made. But it conveyed, with a succinctness which more rounded oratory might well have failed to achieve, the distilled essence of what was seething through the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much of that flute-like clarity which is favoured by the cognoscenti of the science of elocution. It sounded in fact, as if his throat were full of hot porridge.

Simon smiled at him rather thoughtfully. He also had his memories; and the prime deduction which they offered him was that the unexpected intrusion of Chief Inspector Teal, at that particular moment of all moments, was definitely an added complication in an affair that was already complicated enough. But the sublimely bantering slant of his brows never wavered.

"I might ask you the same," he murmured. "But I see that your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose you're still wearing them down."

The detective's face under his staid bowler hat remained a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue eyes were receding fractionally.

"I noticed your car outside," he said.

He was a liar. He had seen it, but not noticed it. That shining cream-and-red monster was something that it would have been almost impossible to overlook in any landscape; but Mr Teal's thoughts had been far away from any subject so disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving in a fool's paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard were allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes committed by ordinary criminals without even a hint of such fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity of their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and recover the majestic dominance from which in the agony of the moment he had so ruinously lapsed.

The Saint dissected his effort with a sardonically generous tolerance that made the detective's collar feel as if it were shrinking into his neck like a garrote.

"Of course, Claud," he said mildly. "Of course you did. I was forgetting what a sleuth you were. And while we're on the subject of sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I don't know whether you've noticed it yet, but there's a dead man on the floor behind me. Without pretending to your encyclopedic knowledge of crime I should say that he appears to have been murdered."

"That's right," Teal said raspingly. "And I should say that I knew who did it."

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"I don't want to seem unduly sensitive," he remarked, "but there's something about your tone of voice that makes me feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting—"

"We'll see about that," Teal retorted. He stepped aside out of the doorway. "Search him!" he barked.

Behind him a lanky uniformed sergeant unfolded himself into full view. Somewhat apprehensively he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat pockets. He took out a platinum cigarette case, a wallet, an automatic lighter and a fountain pen; and an expression of outraged astonishment came over his face.

" 'Ere," he said suspiciously. "What 've you done with that gun?"

"What gun?" asked the Saint puzzledly. "You don't think I'd carry a gun in a suit like this, do you? I've got too much respect for my tailor. Anderson would be horrified and Sheppard would probably throw a fit."

"Search his hip pockets, you fool," snarled Mr Teal. "And under his armpits. That's where he's most likely to have it."

"And don't tickle," said the Saint severely, "It makes me go all girlish."

Breathing heavily, the sergeant searched as instructed and continued to find nothing.

Simon lowered his arms.

"After which little formality," he said amiably, "let us get back to business. As I was tactfully trying to mention, Claud, there seems to be a sort of corpse lying about on the floor. Do you think we ought to do something about it, or shall we shove it into the bathroom and pretend we haven't seen it?"

Chief Inspector Teal's lower jaw moved in a ponderous surge like the first lurch of the pistons of a locomotive getting under way as he dislodged a forgotten bolus of chewing gum from behind his wisdom teeth. The purple tinge was dying out of his face, allowing it to revert a little closer to its normal chubby pink. The negative results of the sergeant's search had almost thrown him back on his heels, but the shock had something homeopathic in its effect. It had jarred him into taking one wild superhuman clutch at the vanishing tail of his self-control; and now he found himself clinging on to it with the frenzied fervour of a man who has inadvertently taken hold of the steering end of a starving alligator.

Behind him, while the search was proceeding, a number of other persons had sidled cautiously into the room — a melancholy plain-clothes sergeant, a bald-headed man with a camera, a small sandy man with a black bag, a constable in uniform. To the experienced eye, they identified themselves as the members of a C.I.D. murder squad as unmistakably as if they had been labelled.

Simon had watched their entrance with interest. He was doing some rapid reconstruction of his own. Mr Teal's advent had been far too flabbergastingly apt to be pure coincidence; and the presence of that compact covey of supporters was extra confirmation of the fact. Even chief inspectors didn't go forth with a retinue of that kind unless they were on a particular and major assignment. And Simon located the origin of the assignment a moment later in the shape of a fat blowzy woman with stringy gray hair who was hovering nervously in the least-exposed part of the background.

Teal turned and looked for her.

"Have you seen this man before?" he demanded.

She gulped.

"N-no. But I bet 'e done it, just the sime. 'E looks just like one o' them narsty capitalists as pore Mr Windlay was always talkin' abaht."

Simon's gaze rested on her.

"Do you live in these parts?" he inquired politely.

She bridled.

"This 'ere is my property, young man, so you mind yer tongue. I come 'ere every week to collect the rent, not that I 'aven't wasted me time coming 'ere the larst two weeks."

"You came here today and found the body?"

"Yes, I did."

"How long ago was that?"

"Not 'arf an hour ago, it wasn't. You oughter know."

"And then you went straight out for the police, I suppose."

"I went an' phoned Scotland Yard, that's wot I done, knowing as it's their business to catch murderers, an' a good thing, too. They got you, all right."

"You didn't scream or anything?" Simon asked interestedly.

The woman snorted.

"Wot, me? Me scream an' 'ave all the neighbours in, an' get me 'ouse a bad nime? Not likely. This is a respectable place, this is, or it was before you come to it." A twinge of grief shot through her suety frame and made it quiver. "An' now ooze going ter pie me rent, that's wot I wanter know."

The Saint extracted a cigarette from his case. The minor details of the situation were satisfactorily cleared up — the remarkably prompt arrival of the C.I.D. combined with the absence of a crowd outside. The fact that that exceptional conjunction of circumstances had resulted in his present predicament unfortunately remained unaltered; but it was some consolation to know that his first wild surmise was wrong and that Teal hadn't been led there in some fantastic way on a definite search for him. It made the odds look rather more encouraging.

"Madam," he said helpfully, "I should think you might do rather well for a while by inviting the public to drop in and charging them sixpence admission. X marks the spot where the body was found, and they can see the original pool of blood on the mat. With Inspector Teal's bowler hat on the mantelpiece in a glass case and a plaster cast of his tummy in the hall—"

Mr Teal thrust himself sizzlingly forward. He signed to his plain-clothes sergeant.

"Take her outside and get her statement," he gritted.

Then he turned back to the Saint. His eyelids drooped as he fought frantically to maintain some vestige of the pose of somnolent boredom which had been his lifelong defence against all calamities.

"And while that's being done, I'd like to hear what you've got to say."

"Say?" repeated the Saint vaguely. He searched for his lighter. "Why, Claud, I can only say that it all looks most mysterious. But I'm sure it'll all turn out all right. With that brilliant detective genius of yours—"

"Never mind that," Teal said pungently. "I want to hear what you've got to say for yourself. I came here and found you standing over the body."

The Saint shrugged.

"Exactly," he said.

"What do you mean — 'exactly'?"

Mr Teal's voice was not quite so monotonous as he wanted it to be. It tended to slide off its note into a kind of squawk. But that was something that the Saint's ineffable sangfroid always did to him. It was something that always brought Mr Teal to the verge of an apoplectic seizure.

"What do you mean?" he squawked.

"My dear ass," said the Saint patiently, in the manner of one who explains a simple point to a small and dull-witted child, "you said it yourself. You came in and found me standing over the body. You know perfectly well that when I murder people you never come in and find me standing over the body. Now, do you?"

Mr Teal's eyes boggled in spite of the effort he made to control them. The hot porridge came back into his larynx.

"Are you trying to tell me you're in the clear because I came in and found you bending over the body?" he yawped. "Well, this is once when you're wrong! Perhaps I haven't done it before. But I've done it now. I've got you, Saint." The superb, delirious conviction grew upon him. "This is the one time you've made a mistake, and I've got you." Chief Inspector Teal drew himself up in the full pride of his magnificent climactic moment. "Simon Templar, I shall take you into custody on a charge of—"

"Wait a minute," said the Saint quietly.

The porridge bubbled underneath Teal's collar stud.

"What for?" he exploded.

"Because," said the Saint kindly, "in spite of all the rude ideas you've got about me, Claud, I like you. And it hurts me to see you going off like a damp squib. Didn't you hear the landlady say that she found the body about half an hour ago?"

"Well?"

"Well, I should think we could safely give her the full half-hour — she could hardly have got to a telephone and got you here with all your stooges in much less than that. And we've been talking for some minutes already. And if I murdered this body, you must give me a few minutes to spare at the other end. Let's be very conservative and say that I could have murdered him forty minutes ago." Simon consulted his watch. "Well, it's now exactly a quarter to three."

"Are you starting to give me another of your alibis?"

"I am," said the Saint. "Because at twelve minutes past one I left the Golden Fleece in Anford, which is ninety-five miles from here. Quite a number of the natives and several disinterested visitors can vouch for that — including a member of the local police whose name, believe it or not, is Reginald. And I know I'm the hell of a driver, but even I can't drive ninety-five miles in fifty-three minutes over the antediluvian cart tracks that pass for roads in this country."

Over Chief Inspector Teal's ruddy features smeared the same expression that must have passed over the face of Sisyphus when, having at last heaved his rock nearly to the top of the hill, it turned round and rolled back again to the bottom. In it was the same chaotic blend of dismay, despair, agonized weariness and sickening incredulity.

He knew that the Saint must be telling the truth. He didn't have to take a step to verify it although that would be done later as a matter of strict routine. But the Saint had never wasted time on an alibi that couldn't be checked to the last comma. How it was done, Teal never knew; if he had been a superstitious man he would have suspected witchcraft. But it was done, and had been done, too often for him not to recognize every brush stroke of the technique. And once again he knew that his insane triumph had been premature — that the Saint was slipping through his fingers for what seemed like the ten thousandth time…

He bent his pathetically weary eyes on the body again, as if that at least might take pity on him and provide him with the inspiration for a comeback. And a sudden dull flare of breathless realization went through him.

"Look!" he almost yelped.

The Saint looked.

"Messy sort of business, isn't it?" he said chattily. "Some of these hoodlums have no respect for the furniture. There ought to be a correspondence course in Good Manners for Murderers."

"That blood," Teal said incoherently. "It's drying…"

He went down clumsily on his knees beside the body, fumbled over it, and peered at the stain on the carpet. Then he got slowly to his feet, and his hot, resentful eyes burned on the Saint with a feverish light.

"This man has been dead for from three, to six hours," he said. "You could have gone to Anford and come back in that time!"

"I'm sorry," said the Saint regretfully.

"What for?"

Teal's voice was a hoarse bark.

Simon smiled.

"Because I spent all the morning in Anford."

"What were you doing there?"

"I was at an inquest."

"Whose inquest?"

"Some poor blighter by the name of John Kennet."

"Do you mean the foreign secretary's son — the man who was killed in that country-house fire?" Teal asked sharply.

Simon regarded him benevolently.

"How you do keep up with the news, Claud," he murmured admiringly. "Sometimes I feel quite hopeful about you. It's not often, but it's so cheering when it happens. A kind of warm glow comes over me—"

"What were you doing at that inquest?" Teal said torridly.

The Saint moved his hands.

"Giving evidence. I was the hero of the proceedings, so I got nicely chewed up by the coroner for a reward. You'll read all about it in the evening papers. I hate to disappoint you, dear old weasel, but I'm afraid I've been pretty well in the public eye since about half-past ten."

Simon struck his lighter and made the delayed kindling of his cigarette.

"So what with one thing and another, Claud," he said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to let me go."

Chief Inspector Teal barred his way. The leaden bitterness of defeat was curdling in his stomach, but there was a sultry smoulder in his eyes that was more relentless and dangerous than his first unimpeded blaze of wrath. He might have suffered ten thousand failures, but he had never given up. And now there was a grim determination in him that tightened his teeth crushingly on his battered scrap of spearmint.

"You still haven't told me what you're doing here," he said stolidly.

Simon Templar trickled smoke through momentarily sober lips.

"I came to see Windlay," he said. "I wanted to see him before somebody else did. Only I was too late. You can believe that or not as you like. But the late John Kennet shared this place with him."

The detective's eyes went curiously opaque. He stood with a wooden stillness.

"What was the verdict at this inquest?"

"Accidental death."

"Do you think there was anything wrong with that?"

Simon's glance travelled again over the disordered room.

"Someone seems to have been looking for something," he said aimlessly. "I wonder if he found what he was after?"

Casually, as if performing some quite idle action, he leaned forward and picked up a crumpled sheet of newspaper from the litter scattered over the floor. It was a French newspaper five days old, and a passage in it had been heavily marked out in blue pencil.

"Well, well, well," he said. "Listen, Claud. What do you make of this? 'We should like your readers to ask themselves where this criminal association calling itself the Sons of France obtains its funds and the store of arms which Colonel Marteau has so often boasted that he has hidden away for the day when they will be needed. And we ask our readers, how long will they tolerate the existence of this terrorist organization in their midst?' "

He picked up a second scrap of paper from the floor. Again there was a blue-pencilled paragraph.

" 'M. Roquambert, in a vitriolic speech to the Chamber of Deputies last night, urged on the government the necessity for a greatly increased expenditure on armaments. "Are we," he demanded, "to suffer the Boche to batter once more on the gates of Paris?" ' " Simon let the cuttings flutter out of his fingers. "I seem to remember that Comrade Roquambert is one of the heads of the Sons of France," he said. "Doesn't that interest you?"

"What was wrong with that verdict?" Teal repeated.

The Saint looked at him, and for once there was no mockery in his eyes.

"I think it would be a good idea if you started investigating two murders instead of one," he said.

4

Which was undoubtedly a highly effective and dramatic exit line, Simon reflected, as the Hirondel roared westwards again towards Anford; but how wise it had been was another matter. It had been rather a case of meeting trouble halfway and taking the first smack at it. In the course of his inquiries Teal would inevitably have discovered that Kennet had shared the flat with Windlay, and Simon knew only too well how the detective's mind would have worked on from there directly the inquest headlines hit the stands. The Saint had had no option about taking the bull by the horns, but he wondered now whether he might have achieved the same result without saying quite so much. Chief Inspector Teal's officially hidebound intelligence might sift slowly, but it sifted with a dour and dogged thoroughness. Simon realized at the same time that if he had an adequate alibi for the period during which Windlay might have been killed, Luker and his satellites had an alibi that was absolutely identical — it gave him an insight into the efficiency of the machinery that he had tampered with which was distinctly sobering, and he had plenty to think about on the return journey.

Patricia was waiting for him when he stopped the car on Peter's drive. He picked her up and kissed her.

"You look good enough to eat," he said. "And that reminds me, I haven't had any lunch. Where are the troops?"

"Peter's keeping an eye on your menagerie," she told him. "I came back and sent Hoppy over to keep him company. They're all at the Golden Fleece, and when Peter last phoned Hoppy was just starting on his second bottle of whiskey. Did you find Windlay?"

"I found him," said the Saint stonily. "But not soon enough."

In the kitchen, over a plate of cold beef and a tankard of ale, he told her the story in curt dispassionate sentences that brought it all into her mind as vividly as though she had been there herself.

"It only means that we were right, darling," he concluded. "Kennet had something that was big enough to commit murder for. There wasn't any accidental-death hokum about Windlay. Somebody knocked on the door and gave him the works the minute he opened it. And the whole flat was torn into small pieces. It must have gone on while we were all footling about at that inquest acquiring beautiful alibis — these ungodly are professionals!"

"But did they find what they were looking for?"

"I wish I knew. Bur there's a hell of a good chance that they didn't, since they made a mess like that. I wish I knew exactly what the prize was. It seems to me that it must have been a fair-sized dossier — something that wouldn't be too easy to hide. And unless Kennet was a certifiable lunatic he wouldn't have brought that to Whiteways without leaving a duplicate somewhere. Hence the battle of Balaclava Mansions." He pushed his plate away and scowled at it. "If only that damned girl could remember a bit more of the things Kennet told her! He must have spouted like a fountain, and she simply didn't listen."

"Why don't you see her again?" suggested Patricia. "You might be able to jog her memory or something. Anyway, you'd have a good time trying."

Simon looked up at her from under impenitently slanting brows.

"Are you insinuating that a man of my unparalleled purity—"

"You'll have to hurry if you want to catch her today," Patricia said practically. "Peter found out from one of the chauffeurs that they're starting back to London at five-thirty."

The Saint stood up restlessly.

"I think I'd better amble over," he said.

Again the Hirondel roared over the Anford road, and a few minutes later it swung to a grinding stop in the small courtyard in front of the Golden Fleece. As Simon stopped the engine and hitched his long legs over the side he glanced around for a glimpse of his confederates. The maternal laws of England being what they were, Hoppy must have been torn away from his second bottle about three hours ago, and it would be another half-hour before he would be allowed to return to it. Simon scanned the landscape for some likely place where the thirsty vigil might have been spent, and he became totteringly transfixed as his eyes settled on the window of an establishment on the opposite side of the road, next to the Assembly Rooms, over which ran the legend; Ye Village Goodie Shoppe.

Peter Quentin was stoically reading a magazine; but on the other side of the table, bulging over the top of a chocolate eclair, the frog-like eyes of Mr Uniatz ogled Simon through the plate glass with an indescribable expression of anguish and reproach that made the Saint turn hastily into the hotel entrance with his bones melting with helpless laughter.

The first person he saw was Valerie Woodchester herself. She was sitting alone on the arm of a chair in the lounge, smoking a cigarette and swinging one shapely leg disconsolately, but at the sight of him her face brightened.

"Oh, hullo," she said. "What's the matter?"

"Some things are too holy to talk about," said the Saint, sinking on to the chair opposite. "Never mind. Perhaps you can bring me back to earth. Are you always being left alone?"

"The others are upstairs having a business conference or something." She studied him with fresh and candid interest. "Where have you been all the afternoon? You simply seemed to vanish off the face of the globe. I was afraid I should have to go back to town without seeing you again."

"Then why go back to town?" he asked. "You could come over and join us at Peter Quentin's. There's a spare bed and a dart board and plenty to drink, and we could see lots more of each other."

For a moment she looked a little hesitant. Then she shook her head quite decidedly.

"I couldn't do that. After all, two's company and all that sort of thing, you know, and anyhow I don't think it would be good for you to see much more of me than you did when we first met." A little smile touched her lips and gleamed in her dark eyes. "Besides, I'm quite sure Algy Fairweather wouldn't like it. He's been warning me against you. For some reason or other he doesn't seem to approve of you an awful lot."

"You amaze me," said the Saint solemnly. "But does it matter whether Comrade Fairweather approves or not?"

"Well," she said, "a girl has to struggle along somehow, and Comrade Fairweather is a great help. I mean, if he has a man coming to dinner, for instance, and he doesn't want him to concentrate too hard on business, he asks me along and pays me for it. And then I probably have to have a new dress as well, because of course you can't stop a businessman concentrating in an old piece of sackcloth, and I never seem to have any new clothes when I need them."

"In other words, you're his tame vamp, I take it."

She opened her eyes wide at him.

"Do you think I'm tame?"

The Saint surveyed her appraisingly. Again he experienced the bafflement of trying to probe beyond that pert childish beauty.

"Maybe not so tame," he corrected himself. "And what would your fee be for dining with a gent if it meant earning Comrade Fairweather's disapproval? For instance, what about having dinner with me on Thursday?"

She didn't answer for a moment. She sat looking downwards, swinging her leg idly, apparently absorbed in the movement of her foot.

Then she looked up at him and smiled.

"You've fallen for me in quite a big way, haven't you?" she said a little ironically. "I mean, inviting me to dinner and offering to pay me for it."

"I fell passionately in love with you the moment I saw you," Simon declared shamelessly.

She nodded.

"I know. I couldn't help noticing the eager way you dashed off this morning when you thought you'd got all the information you could out of me. I mean, it was all too terribly romantic for anything."

"The audience made me bashful," said the Saint. "Now if we'd only been alone—"

Her dark eyes were mocking.

"Well," she said, "I don't mean that I couldn't put up with having dinner with you if you paid me for it. After all, I've got to have dinner somewhere, and I've been out with a lot of people who weren't nearly so good looking as you are even if they weren't nearly so bashful either. Algy used to pay me twenty guineas for entertaining his important clients."

"That must have helped to make things bearable," said the Saint in some awe.

"Of course," she went on innocently, "I should expect you to pay a bit more than that, because after all I'm only a defenceless girl, and I know you must have some horrible motive for wanting me to have dinner with you."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"You shock me," he said. "What horrible motive could I have for asking you out to dinner? I promise that you'll be as safe with me as you would be with your old Aunt Agatha."

She sighed.

"I know. That's just what I mean. If your eyes were foaming with unholy desire, or anything like that, I probably shouldn't charge you anything at all. After all, brief life is here our portion, and all that sort of thing, and a spot of unholy desire from the right sort of person and in the right sort of way — well, you see what I mean, don't you? But as things are, I don't think I could possibly let you off with less than fifty guineas."

Simon leaned towards her.

"You know," he said earnestly, "there's something about you — an innocence, a freshness, a sort of girlish appeal that attracts me irresistibly. You're so — so ingenuous and uncalculating. Will a check do, or shall you want it in cash?"

"Damn," she said in dismay. "I believe you'd have paid a hundred if I'd asked for it. Oh well, I suppose a bargain's a bargain. A check will do."

The Saint grinned.

"Thursday, then, at eight o'clock. At the Berkeley. And since this is a business deal I shall expect you to be punctual. The fee will go down one guinea for every minute I'm kept waiting."

She tossed the stub of her cigarette across the room into the empty fireplace.

"Well, now we've finished talking about business can't we enjoy ourselves? I was hoping we'd have a chance after the inquest, but Algy hustled me away before I could even look round. They were all as mad as hornets, and I can't blame them. After all, you did make rather an ass of yourself, didn't you?"

"Do you really think I was just playing the fool?" he asked curiously.

"I mean trying to make out that Johnny had been murdered and Algy set fire to the house and so on. I mean, it was all so ridiculous, wasn't it?"

This time he knew beyond doubt that her artlessness was not so naive as it seemed. Her chatter was just a little too quick; besides, he had seen her face at one stage of the inquest.

He paused to consider his reply for a moment. If she knew what he had seen in London, it might startle something out of her. He felt that the move must be made with a fine hand.

He had no chance to make it in that way.

There was a sound of footsteps descending stairs, reaching the entrance of the lounge. Simon glanced over his shoulder; and then he rose leisurely to his feet.

"It's time you were getting ready, my dear—"

Fairweather's thinly jovial voice broke off sharply as he realized that there was someone else in the room. He stared at the Saint for a long moment, with his mouth slightly open, while his fat face turned into the likeness of a piece of lard. And then, without any acknowledgment of recognition, he turned deliberately back to Lady Valerie.

"We shouldn't have left you so long," he said. "I hope you haven't been annoyed."

"Of course she's been annoyed!" General Sangore's stormy voice burst out without the subtlety of Fairweather's snub. "It's an insult for that feller to speak to any decent person after his behaviour this morning. Damned if I know what he meant by it, anyway."

Simon put his hands in his pockets and relaxed against a cabinet full of hideous porcelain.

"What I meant by it was that I believe Kennet was murdered," he said good-humouredly. "Now have I made myself quite clear?"

The general glared at him from under his bushy eyebrows. He seemed to expect Simon to melt like wax.

"By Gad, sir," he said truculently, "you're — you're a bounder! I've never heard such bad form in my life!"

"You mean that if it was murder you'd rather have it hushed up, don't you?" Simon said gently. "You didn't murder him yourself by any chance, did you?"

Sangore's complexion went a rich mottled puce. He tried to speak, but there seemed to be an obstruction in his throat.

Simon went on talking, and his voice was cool and pitiless.

"Last year, when there was a strike at the Pyrford Aviation Works, which is a subsidiary of the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company, you stated publicly that the ringleaders ought to be put up against a wall and shot. This year, addressing the Easter rally of the Imperial Defence Society, you said: 'A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the horrors of war.' If you would have liked to kill half-a-dozen men for the sake of dividends, and if you think it's a great deal of nonsense to object to people being massacred in millions, I can't help feeling that you qualify as a good suspect. What do you think?"

What General Sangore thought could only be inferred; he was still choking impotently.

Lady Sangore came to his rescue. Her face had gone from white to scarlet, and her small eyes were glittering with vindictive passion.

"The man's a cad," she proclaimed tremblingly. "It's no use wasting words on him. He — he simply isn't a sahib!"

She appeared to be slightly appalled by her temerity, as if she had pronounced the ultimate unspeakable condemnation.

"It's — it's an outrage!" spluttered Fairweather. "The man is a well-known criminal. We're only lowering ourselves—"

The Saint's cold blue eyes picked him up like an insect on a pin.

"Let me see," he said. "I seem to remember that you played a forward part in getting a change made in the workings of the National Defence Contribution a few years ago. The sales talk was that the tax on excess profits would have paralyzed business enterprise; but the truth is that it would have hit hardest against the firms that were booming on the strength of the new rearmament program — of which, I think, Norfelt Chemicals was by no means the smallest. And you recently stated before a royal commission that 'The armament industry is one which provides employment for thousands of workers. The fact that its products are open to misuse can no more be held against the industry per se than can the production of drugs which would be poisonous if taken without medical advice.' If those are samples of your logic, I don't see why we shouldn't have you on the suspected list — do you?"

Luker stepped forward.

"Surely, Mr Templar," he remarked urbanely, "you aren't going to leave me out of your interesting summary."

The Saint looked at him steadily.

"I can give you some news," he said. "That is, if you haven't heard it already. I spent the afternoon going to London to see if I could catch Ralph Windlay, the man Kennet lived with, before an accident happened to him. I'm sure you'll be cheered to know that everything went off without a hitch and he was already dead when I got there."

There was a dead silence.

And then Lady Valerie Woodchester was tugging unconsciously at the Saint's arm. Her full lips were quivering and there was an expression of dazed horror on her face.

"Not Ralph?" she was saying shakily. "No… no, he can't have been murdered, too!"

The Saint's eyes went to her with an instant's brief compassion.

"I'm afraid so," he said. "Even our coroner here couldn't make out it was an accident. He was shot right between the eyebrows, and his brains were all over the carpet."

"The use of the word 'too' is interesting." Luker's impassive voice came levelly through the stillness. "If Kennet was murdered, somebody killed him and then set fire to the house. Within a few minutes Mr Templar arrives on the scene. It is he who suggests foul play. Then Kennet's friend Windlay is murdered, and again Mr Templar is first on the scene; again it is he who discovers that there has been foul play. It certainly appears to be a coincidence to which the attention of the police should be called."

Simon's bleak gaze took him up.

"Or you might mention it to the Sons of France," he said.

It was a shot in the dark, but it hit a target somewhere. For the first time since he had known him, Simon saw Luker's graven mask slip for a fraction of a second. For that fleeting micron of time the Saint saw the stark soul of a man to whom murder meant nothing.