The Saint and Mr. Teal

Chapter I

SIMON TEMPLAR landed in England when the news of Brian Quell's murder was on the streets. He read the brief notice of the killing in an evening paper which he bought in Newhaven, but it added scarcely anything to what he already knew.

Brian Quell died in Paris, and died drunk; which would probably have been his own choice if he had been consulted, for the whole of his unprofitable existence had been wrapped up in the pleasures of the Gay City. He was a prophet who was without honour not only in his own country and among his own family, but even among the long-suffering circle of acquaintances who helped him to spend his money when he had any, and endeavoured to lend him as little as possible when he was broke — which was about three hundred days out of the year. He had arrived ten years ago as an art student, but he had long since given up any artistic pretensions that were not included in the scope of studio parties and long hair. Probably there was no real vice in him; but the life of the Left Bank is like an insidious drug, an irresistible spell to such a temperament as his, and it was very easy to slip into the stream in those days before the rapacity of Montmartre patrons drove the tourist pioneers across the river. They knew him, and charmingly declined to cash his checks, at the Dome, the Rotonde, the Select, and all the multitudinous boîtes-de-nuit which spring up around those unassailable institutions for a short season's dizzy popularity, and sink back just as suddenly into oblivion. Brian Quell had his fill of them all. And he died.

The evening paper did not say he was drunk; but Simon Templar knew, for he was the last man to see Brian Quell alive.

He heard the shot just as he had removed his shoes, as he prepared for what was left of a night's rest in the obscure little hotel near the Gare du Montparnasse which he had chosen for his sanctuary in Paris. His room was on the first floor, with a window opening onto a well at the back, and it was through this window that the sharp crack of the report came to him. The instinct of his trade made him leap for the nearest switch and snap out the lights without thinking what he was doing, and he padded back to the window in his stockinged feet. By that time he had realized that the shot could be no immediate concern of his, for the shots that kill you are the ones you don't hear. But if Simon Templar had been given to minding his own business there would never have been any stories to write about him.

He swung his legs over the low balustrade and strolled quietly round the flat square of concrete which surrounded the ground-floor skylight that angled up in the centre of the well. Other windows opened out onto it like his own, but all of them except one were in darkness. The lighted window attracted him as inevitably as it would have drawn a moth; and as he went towards it he observed that it was the only one in the courtyard besides his own which had not been firmly shuttered against any breath of the fresh air which, as all the world knows, is instantly fatal to the sleeping Frenchman. And then the light went out.

Simon reached the dark opening and paused there. He heard a gasping curse; and then a hoarse voice gurgled the most amazing speech that he had ever heard from the lips of a dying man.

"A mos' unfrien'ly thing!"

Without hesitation Simon Templar climbed into the room. He found his way to the door and turned on the lights; and it was only then that he learned that the drunken man was dying.

Brian Quell was sprawled in the middle of the floor, propping himself up unsteadily on one elbow. There was a pool of blood on the carpet beside him, and his grubby shirt was stained red across the chest. He stared at Simon hazily.

"A mos' unfrien'ly thing!" he repeated.

Simon dropped on one knee at the man's side. The first glance told him that Brian Quell had only a few minutes to live, but the astonishing thing was that Quell did not know he was hurt. The shock had not sobered him at all. The liquor that reeked on his breath was playing the part of an anaesthetic, and the fumes in his brain had fuddled his senses beyond all power of comprehending such an issue.

"Do you know who it was?" Simon asked gently.

Quell shook his head.

"I dunno. Never saw him before in my life. Called himself Jones. Silly sora name, isnit? Jones… An' he tole me Binks can make gold!"

"Where did you meet him, old chap? Can you tell me what he looked like?"

"I dunno. Been all over place. Everywhere you could gerra drink. Man with a silly sora face. Never seen him before in my life. Silly ole Jones." The dying man wagged his head solemnly. "An' he did a mos' unfrien'ly thing. Tried to shoot me! A mos' unfrien'ly thing." Quell giggled feebly. "An' he saysh Binks can make gold. Thash funny, isnit?"

Simon looked round the room. There was no trace of the man who had called himself Jones — nothing but an ashtray that had been freshly emptied. Obviously the killer had stayed long enough to obliterate all evidence of his visit; obviously, too, his victim had been temporarily paralyzed, so that the murderer had believed that he was already dead.

There was a telephone by the door, and for a moment Simon Templar gazed at it and wondered if it was his duty to ring for assistance. The last thing on earth that he wanted was an interview even with the most unsuspecting police officer, but that consideration would not have weighed with him for an instant if he had not known that all the doctors in France could have done nothing for the man who was dying in his arms and did not know it.

"Why did Jones try to shoot you?" he asked, and Brian Quell grinned at him vacuously.

"Becaush he said Binksh could—"

The repetition choked off in the man's throat. His eyes wavered over Simon's face stupidly; then they dilated with the first and last stunned realization of the truth, only for one horrible dumb second before the end…

Simon read the dead man's name from the tailor's tab inside the breast pocket of his coat and went softly back to his room. The other windows on the courtyard remained shrouded in darkness. If anyone else had heard the shot it must have been attributed to a passing taxi; but there is a difference between the cough of an engine and the crack of an automatic about which the trained ear can never be mistaken. If it had not been for Simon Templar's familiarity with that subtle distinction, a coup might have been inscribed in the annals of crime which would have shaken Europe from end to end — but Simon could not see so far ahead that night.

He left Paris early the following morning. It was unlikely that the murder would be discovered before the afternoon; for it is an axiom of the Quarter that early rising is a purely bourgeois conceit, and one of the few failings of the French hotel keepers is that they feel none of that divine impulse to dictate the manner of life of their clientele which has from time immemorial made Great Britain the Mecca of holiday makers from every corner of the globe. Simon Templar had rarely witnessed a violent death about which he had so clear a conscience, and yet he knew that it would have been foolish to stay. It was one of the penalties of his fame that he had no more chance of convincing any well-informed policeman that he was a law-abiding citizen than he had of being elected President of the United States. So he went back to England, where he was more unpopular than anywhere else in Europe.

If it is true that there is some occult urge which draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime, it must have been an infinitely more potent force which brought Simon Templar back across the Channel to the scene of more light-hearted misdemeanours than Scotland Yard had ever before endured from the disproportionate sense of humour of any one outlaw. It was not so many years since he had first formulated the idea of making it his life work to register himself in the popular eye as something akin to a public institution; and yet in that short space of time his dossier in the Records Office had swollen to a saga of debonair lawlessness that made Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speechless to contemplate. The absurd little sketch of a skeleton figure graced with a symbolic halo, that impudent signature with which Simon Templar endorsed all his crimes, had spread the terror of the Saint into every outpost of the underworld and crashed rudely into the placid meanderings of all those illustrious members of the Criminal Investigation Department who had hitherto been content to justify their employment as guardians of the law by perfecting themselves in the time-honoured sport of persuading deluded shop assistants to sell them a bar of chocolate one minute later than the lawful hours for such transactions. The Robin Hood of Modern Crime they called him in the headlines, and extolled his virtues in the same paragraph as they reviled the C.I.D. for failing to lay him by the heels; which only shows you what newspapers can do for democracy. He had become an accepted incident in current affairs, like Wheat Quotas and the League of Nations, only much more interesting. He stood for a vengeance that struck swiftly and without mercy, for a gay defiance of all dreary and mechanical things.

"It's not my fault, sir," Chief Inspector Teal stated gloomily, in an interview which he had with the assistant commissioner. "We aren't in the Saint's class, and some day I suppose we shall have to admit it. If this was a republic we should make him dictator and get some sleep."

The commissioner frowned. He was one of the last survivors of the old military school of police chiefs, a distinguished soldier of unimpeachable integrity; but he laboured under the disadvantage of expecting professional law breakers to parade for judgment as meekly as the casual defaulters he had been accustomed to dealing with in Pondicherry.

"About two months ago," he said, "you told me that the Saint's arrest was only a matter of hours. It was something to do with illicit diamonds, wasn't it?"

"It was," Teal said grimly.

He was never likely to forget the incident. Neither, it seemed, were his superiors. Gunner Perrigo was the culprit in that case, and the police had certainly got their man. The only trouble was that Simon Templar had got him first. Perrigo had been duly hanged on the very morning of this conversation, but his illicit diamonds had never been heard of again.

"It should have been possible to form a charge," insisted the commissioner, plucking his iron-grey moustache nervously. He disapproved of Teal's attitude altogether, but the plump detective was an important officer.

"It might be, if there were no lawyers," said Teal. "If I went into a witness box and talked about illicit diamonds I should be bawled out of court. We know the diamonds existed, but who's going to prove it to a jury? Frankie Hormer could have talked about them, but Perrigo gave him the works. Perrigo could have talked, but he didn't — and now he's dead. And the Saint got away with them out of England, and that's the end of it. If I could lay my hands on him tomorrow I'd have no more hope of proving he'd ever possessed any illicit diamonds than I'd have of running the Pope for bigamy. We could charge him with obstructing and assaulting the police in the execution of their duty, but what in heaven's name's the use of running the Saint for a milk-and-water rap like that? It'd be the biggest joke that Fleet Street's had on us for years."

"Did you learn all the facts about his last stunt in Germany?"

"Yes. I did. And it just came through yesterday that the German police aren't in a hurry to prosecute. There's some big name involved, and they've got the wind up. If I was expecting anything else, I was betting the Saint would be hustling back here and getting ready to dare them to try and extradite him from his own country — he's pulled that one on me before."

The commissioner sniffed.

"I suppose if he did come back, you'd want me to head a deputation of welcome," he said scathingly.

"I've done everything that any officer could do in the circumstances, sir," said Teal. "If the Saint came back this afternoon, and I met him on the doorstep of this building, I'd have to pass the time of day with him — and like it. You know the law as well as I do. We couldn't ask him any more embarrassing questions than if he had had a good time abroad, and how was his aunt's rheumatism when he last heard from her. They don't want detectives here any longer — what they need is a staff of hypnotists and faith healers."

The commissioner fidgeted with a pencil.

"If the Saint came back, I should certainly expect to see some change in our methods," he remarked pointedly; and then the telephone on his desk buzzed.

He picked up the receiver, and then passed it across to Teal.

"For you, Inspector," he said curtly.

Teal took over the instrument.

"Saint returns to England," clicked the voice on the wire. "A report from Newhaven states that a man answering to Simon Templar's description landed from the Isle of Sheppey this afternoon. He was subsequently traced to a hotel in the town—"

"Don't talk to me like a fourth-rate newspaper," snarled Teal. "What have they done with him?"

"On the instructions of the chief constable, he is being detained pending advice from London."

Teal put the receiver carefully back on its bracket.

"Well, sir, the Saint has come back," he said glumly,'

Chapter II

THE assistant commissioner did not head a deputation of welcome to Newhaven. Teal went down alone, with mixed feelings. He remembered that the Saint's last action before leaving England had been to present him with a sheaf of information which had enabled him to clean up several cases that had been racking the brains of the C.I.D. for many months. He remembered also that the Saint's penultimate action had been to threaten him with the most vicious form of blackmail that can be applied to any police officer. But Chief Inspector Teal had long since despaired of reconciling the many contradictions of his endless feud with the man who in any other path of life might have been his closest friend.

He found Simon Templar dozing peacefully on the narrow bed of a cell in Newhaven police station. The Saint rolled up to a sitting position as the detective entered, and smiled at him cheerfully.

"Claud Eustace himself, by the tum-tum of Tutankhamen! I thought I'd be seeing you." Simon looked the detective over thoughtfully. "And I believe you've put on weight," he said.

Teal sank his teeth in a well-worn lump of chewing gum.

"What have you come back for?" he asked shortly.

On the way down he had mapped out the course of the interview minutely. He had decided that his attitude would be authoritative, restrained, distant, perfectly polite but definitely warning. He would tolerate no more nonsense. So long as the Saint was prepared to behave himself, no obstacles would be placed in his way; but if he was contemplating any further misdeeds… The official warning would be delivered thus and thus.

And now, within thirty seconds of his entering the cell, in the first sentence he had uttered, the smooth control of the situation which he had intended to usurp from the start was sliding out of his grasp. It had always been like that. Teal proposed, and the Saint disposed. There was something about the insolent self-possession of that scapegrace buccaneer that goaded the detective into faux pas for which he was never afterwards able to account.

"As a matter of fact, old porpoise," said the Saint, "I came back for some cigarettes. You can't buy my favourite brand in France, and if you've ever endured a week of Marylands—"

Teal took a seat on the bunk.

"You left England in rather a hurry two months ago, didn't you?"

"I suppose I did," admitted the Saint reflectively. "You see, I felt like having a good bust, and you know what I am. Impetuous. I just upped and went."

"It's a pity you didn't stay."

The Saint's blue eyes gazed out banteringly from under dark level brows.

"Teal, is that kind? If you want to know, I was expecting a better reception than this. I was only thinking just now how upset my solicitor would be when he heard about it. Poor old chap — he's awfully sensitive about these things. When one of his respectable and valued clients comes home to his native land, and he isn't allowed to move two hundred yards into the interior before some flat-footed hick cop is lugging him off to the hoosegow for no earthly reason—"

"Now you listen to me for a minute," Teal cut in bluntly. "I didn't come here to swap any funny talk of that sort with you. I came down to tell you how the Yard thinks you'd better behave now you're home. You're going loose as soon as I've finished with you, but if you want to stay loose you'll take a word of advice."

"Shall I?"

"That's up to you." The detective was plunging into his big speech half an hour before it was due, but he was going to get it through intact if it was the last thing he ever did. It was an amazing thing that even after the two months of comparative calm which he had enjoyed since the Saint left England, the gall of many defeats was as bitter on his tongue as it had ever been before. Perhaps he had a clairvoyant glimpse of the future, born out of the deepest darkness of his subconscious mind, which told him that he might as well have lectured a sun spot about its pernicious influence on the weather. The bland smiling composure of that lean figure opposite him was fraying the edges of his nerves with all the accumulated armoury of old associations. "I'm not suggesting," Teal said tersely. "I'm prophesying."

The Saint acknowledged his authority with the faintest possible flicker of one eyebrow — and yet the sardonic mockery of that minute gesture was indescribable.

"Yeah?"

"I'm telling you to watch your step. We've put up with a good deal from you in the past. You've been lucky. You even earned a free pardon, once. Anyone would have thought you'd have been content to retire gracefully after that. You had your own ideas. But a piece of luck like that doesn't come twice in any man's lifetime. You'd made things hot enough for yourself when you went away, and you needn't think they've cooled off just because you took a short holiday. I'm not saying they mightn't cool off a bit if you took a long one. We aren't out for any more trouble."

"Happy days," drawled the Saint, "are here again. Teal, in another minute you'll have me crying."

"You shouldn't have much to cry about," said the detective aggressively. "There's some excuse for the sneak thief who goes on pulling five-pound jobs. He hasn't a chance to retire. You ought to have made a pretty good pile by this time—"

"About a quarter of a million," said the Saint modestly. "I admit it sounds a lot, but look at Rockefeller. He could spend that much every day."

"You've had a good run. I won't complain about it. You've done me some good turns on your way, and the commissioner is willing to set that in your favour. Why not give the game a rest?"

The bantering blue eyes were surveying Teal steadily all the time he was speaking. Their expression was almost seraphic in its innocence — only the most captious critic, or the most overwrought inferiority complex, could have found anything to complain about in their elaborate sobriety. The Saint's face wore the register of a rapt student of theology absorbing wisdom from an archbishop.

And yet Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal felt his mouth drying up in spite of the soothing stimulus of spearmint. He had the numbing sensation of fatuity of a man who has embarked on a funny story in the hope of salvaging an extempore after-dinner speech that has been falling progressively flatter with every sentence, and who realizes in the middle of it that it is not going to get a laugh. His own ears began to wince painfully at the awful dampness of the platitudes that were drooling inexplicably out of his own mouth. His voice sounded like the bleat of a lost sheep crying in the wilderness. He wished he had sent someone else to Newhaven.

"Let me know the worst," said the Saint. "What are you leading up to? Is the government proposing to offer me a pension and a seat in the House of Lords if I'll retire?"

"It isn't. It's offering you ten years' free board and lodging at Parkhurst if you don't. I shouldn't want you to make any mistake about it. If you think you're—"

Simon waved his hand.

"If you're not careful you'll be repeating yourself, Claud," he murmured. "Let me make the point for you. So long as I carry on like a little gentleman and go to Sunday school every week, your lordships will leave me alone. But if I should get back any of my naughty old ideas — if anyone sort of died suddenly while I was around, or some half-witted policeman lost sight of a packet of illicit diamonds and wanted to blame it on me — then it'll be the ambition of every dick in England to lead me straight to the Old Bailey. The long-suffering police of this great country are on their mettle. Britain has awoken. The Great Empire on which the sun never sets—"

"That's enough of that," yapped the detective.

He had not intended to yap. He should have spoken in a trenchant and paralyzing baritone, a voice ringing with power and determination. Something went wrong with his larynx at the crucial moment.

He glared savagely at the Saint.

"I'd like to know your views," he said.

Simon Templar stood up. There were seventy-four steel inches of him, a long, lazy uncoiling of easy strength and fighting vitality tapering down from wide, square shoulders. The keen, tanned face of a cavalier smiled down at Teal.

"Do you really want them, Claud?"

"That's what I'm here for."

"Then if you want the news straight from the stable, I think that speech of yours would be a knockout at the Mothers' Union." The Saint spread out his arms. "I can just see those kindly, wrinkled faces lighting up with the radiant dawn of a new hope — the tired souls wakening again to beauty—"

"Is that all you've got to say?"

"Very nearly, Claud. You see, your proposition doesn't tempt me. Even if it had included the pension and the peerage, I don't think I should have succumbed. It would make life so dull. I can't expect you to see my point, but there it is."

Teal also got to his feet, under the raking twinkle of those very clear blue eyes. There was something in their mockery which he had never understood, which perhaps he would never understand. And against that something which he could not understand, his jaw tightened up in grim belligerence.

"Very well," he said. "You'll be sorry."

"I doubt it," said the Saint.

On the way back to London, Teal thought of many more brilliant speeches which he could have made, but he had not made any of them. He returned to Scotland Yard in a mood of undiluted acid, which the sarcastic comments of the assistant commissioner did nothing to mellow.

"To tell you the truth, sir, I never expected anything else," Teal said seriously. "The Saint's outside our province, and he always has been. I never imagined anyone could make me believe in the sort of story-book Raffles who goes in for crime for the fun of the thing, but in this case it's true. I've had it out with Templar before — privately. The plain fact is that he's in the game with a few highfalutin' ideas about a justice above the law, and a lot of superfluous energy that he's got to get rid of somehow. If we put a psychologist on to him," expounded the detective, who had been reading Freud, "we should be told he'd got an Oedipus Complex. He has to break take law just because it if the law. If we made it illegal to go to church, he'd be heading a revivalist movement inside the week."

The commissioner accepted the exposition with his characteristic sniff.

"I don't anticipate that the Home Secretary will approve of that method of curtailing the Saint's activities," he said. "Failing the adoption of your interesting scheme, I shall hold you personally responsible for Templar's behaviour."

It was an unsatisfactory day for Mr. Teal from every conceivable angle, for he was in the act of putting on his hat preparatory to leaving Scotland House that night when a report was brought to him which made his baby-blue eyes open wide with sheer incredulous disgust.

He read the typewritten sheet three times before he had fully absorbed all the implications of it, and then he grabbed the telephone and put through a sulphurous call to the department responsible.

"Why the devil didn't you send me this report before?" he demanded.

"We only received it half an hour ago, sir," explained the offending clerk. "You know what these country police are."

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal slammed back the receiver and kept his opinion of those country police to himself. He knew very well what they were. The jealousy that exists between the provincial C.I.D.'s and Scotland Yard is familiar to anyone even remotely connected with matters of criminal investigation: on the whole, Teal could have considered himself fortunate in that the provincial office concerned had condescended to communicate with him at all on its own initiative, instead of leaving him to learn the news from a late evening paper.

He sat on in his tiny office for another hour, staring at the message which had filtered the last ray of sunshine out of his day. It informed him that a certain Mr. Wolseley Lormer had been held up in broad daylight in his office at Southend that afternoon and robbed of close on two thousand pounds by an intruder whom he never even saw. It would not have been a particularly remarkable crime by any standards if the caretaker who discovered the outrage had not also discovered a crude haloed figure chalked on the outer door of Mr. Lormer's suite. And the one immutable fact which Chief Inspector Teal could add to the information given him was that at the very time when the robbery was committed the Saint was safely locked up in Newhaven police station — and Mr. Teal was talking to him.

Chapter III

ONE of the charms of London, as against those of more up-to-date and scientific cities, is the multitude of queer little unscientific dwellings which may be found by the experienced explorer who wanders a mere hundred yards out of the broad regular thoroughfares and pries into the secrets of dilapidated alleys and unpromising courtyards. At some time in the more recent history of the city there must have been many adventurous souls who felt the urge to escape from the creeping development of modern steam-heated apartments planned with Euclidean exactitude and geometrically barren of all individuality. Wherever a few rooms with an eccentric entrance could be linked up and made comfortable, a home was established which in the days when there came a boom in such places was to repay a staggering percentage to the originality of its creators.

With his infallible instinct for these things, Simon Templar had unearthed this very type of ideal home within a matter of hours after he returned to London.

His old stronghold in Upper Berkeley Mews, which he had fitted up years ago with all the expensive gadgets essential to a twentieth-century robber baron, had been the centre of an undue amount of official curiosity just before he embarked on his last hurried trip abroad. It no longer had any ingenious secrets to conceal from the inquisitive hostility of Scotland Yard; and the Saint felt in the mood for a change of scene. He found a suitable change in a quiet cul-de-sac off the lower end of Queen's Gate, that broad tree-lined avenue which would be a perfect counterpart of the most Parisian boulevard if its taxis and inhabitants were less antique and moth-eaten. The home of his choice was actually situated in a mews which ran across the end of the cul-de-sac like the cross-bar of a T, but some earlier tenant had arranged to combine respectability with a garage on the premises, and had cut a street door and windows through the blank wall that closed the cul-de-sac, so that the Saint's new home was actually an attractive little two-storied cottage that faced squarely down between the houses, while the garage and mews aspect was discreetly hidden at the rear. It was almost perfectly adapted to the Saint's eccentric circumstances and strategic requirements; and it is a notable fact that he was able to shift so much lead out of the pants of the estate agents concerned that he was fully installed in his new premises within forty-eight hours of finding that they were to let, which anyone who has ever had anything to do with London estate agents will agree was no mean piece of lead-shifting.

Simon was personally supervising the unpacking of some complicated electrical apparatus when Mr. Teal found him at home on the third day. He had not notified his change of address, and it had taken Mr. Teal some time to locate him; but the Saint's welcome was ingenuous cordiality itself.

"Make yourself at home, Claud," he murmured. "There's a new packet of gum in the sitting room, and I'll be with you in two minutes."

He joined the detective punctually to a second, dusting some wood shavings from his trousers, and there was nothing whatever in his manner to indicate that he could anticipate any unpleasantness. He found Teal clasping his bowler hat across his stomach and gazing morosely at an unopened package of Wrigley's Three Star which sat up sedately in the middle of the table.

"I just came in," said the detective, "to tell you I liked your alibi."

"That was friendly of you," said the Saint calmly.

"What do you know about Lormer?"

Simon lighted a cigarette.

"Nothing except that he's a receiver of stolen goods, an occasional blackmailer, and a generally septic specimen of humanity. He's quite a small fish, but he's very nasty. Why?"

Teal ignored the question. He shifted a wad of gum meditatively round his mouth, and then swept the Saint's face with unexpectedly searching eyes. "Your alibi is good enough," he said, "but I'm still hoping to learn some more about your friends. You used work with four of 'em, didn't you? I've often wondered how they all managed to reform so quickly."

The Saint smiled gently.

"Still the same old gang theory?" he drawled. "If I didn't know your playful ways so well, Claud, I'd be offended. It's not complimentary. You must find it hard to believe that so many remarkable qualities can be concentrated under one birth certificate, but as time goes on you may get used to the idea. I was quite a prodigy as a child. From the day when I stole the corsets off my old nannie—"

"If you're getting another gang together, or raking up the old lot," Teal said decisively, "we'll soon know all about it. What about that girl who used to be with you — Miss Holm, wasn't it? What's her alibi?"

"Does she want one? I expect it could be arranged."

"I expect it could. She landed at Croydon the day before we found you at Newhaven. I've only just learned that. Lormer never saw the man who knocked him out and emptied his safe, so just in case it wasn't a man at all—"

"I think you're on the wrong line," said the Saint genially. "After all, even a defective — detective — has got to consider probabilities. In the old days, before all this vulgar publicity, I could put my trade mark on every genuine article; but you must admit that times have changed. Now that every half-wit in the British Isles knows who I am, is it likely that if I contemplated any crimes I'd be such a fool as to draw Saints all over 'em? D'you think you could make any jury believe it? I've got a reputation, Claud. I may be wicked, but I'm not waffy. It's obvious that some low crook is trying to push his stuff onto me."

Teal hitched himself ponderously out of his chair.

"I had thought of that argument," he said; and then, abruptly: "What's your next job going to be?"

"I haven't decided yet," said the Saint coolly."Whatever it is, it'll be a corker. I feel that I could do with some good headlines."

"Do you think you're playing the game?"

Simon looked at the detective thoughtfully.

"I suppose my exploits don't improve your standing with the commissioner. Isn't that it?"

The detective nodded.

"You make it very difficult for us," he said.

He could have said a lot more. Pride kept it back stubbornly behind his official detachment, but the sober glance which he gave the Saint was as near to a confession as he dared to go. It was not in his nature to ask favours of any man.

"I'll have to see what I can do," said the Saint.

He ushered Teal courteously to the door, and opened it to see a slim, fair-haired vision of a girl walking up the road towards them. Teal watched her approach with narrowed and expressionless eyes.

The girl reached the door and smiled at him sweetly.

"Good-morning," she said.

"Good-morning," said Teal acridly.

He settled his hat and stepped brusquely past her; and Simon Templar closed the front door and caught the girl in his arms.

"Pat, old darling," he said, "I feel that life has begun all over again. With you around, and Claud Eustace dropping in every other day to have words… If we could only find someone to murder it'd just be perfect!"

Patricia Holm walked into the sitting room and pulled off her hat. She helped herself to a cigarette from his case and surveyed him with a little smile.

"Don't you think there might be a closed season for Teals? I'll never forget how it was when we left England. I hated you, boy — the way you baited him."

"It's a rough game," said the Saint quietly. "But I haven't baited him this time — not yet. The trouble is that the assistant commissioner holds poor old Claud personally responsible for our brilliance. It was a brain wave of yours to raid Lormer directly you found I was in clink, but that alibi won't work twice. And Teal's just building up a real case. We'll have to be very careful. Anyway, we won't murder anyone in public…"

When the Saint went out that afternoon he carried a conspicuously large white envelope in his hand. At the corner of the cul-de-sac there was a big man patiently manicuring his nails with a pocketknife. Simon posted his envelope in full view of the watcher, and afterwards suffered himself to be painstakingly shadowed through a harmless shopping expedition in the West End.

Late that night a certain Mr. Ronald Nilder, whose agency for vaudeville artistes was not above suspicion, received a brief letter in a large white envelope. It stated quite simply that unless he made a five-figure donation to the Actors' Orphanage within the week his relatives might easily suffer an irreparable bereavement; and it was signed with the Saint's trade mark. Mr. Nilder, a public-spirited citizen, immediately rang up the police. Chief Inspector Teal saw him, and later had another interview with the assistant commissioner.

"Templar posted a large white envelope yesterday," he said, "but we can't prove it was the one Nilder received. If I know anything about the Saint, Nilder will get a follow-up message in a day or two, and we may be able to catch Templar red-handed."

His diagnosis of Saintly psychology proved to be even shrewder than he knew.

For the next couple of days Simon was busy with the work of adding to the comfortable furnishings of his house a selection of electrical devices of his own invention. They were of a type that he had never expected to find included in the fixtures and fittings of any ordinary domicile, but he considered them eminently necessary to his safety and peace of mind. He employed no workmen, for workmen are no less inclined to gossip than anyone else, and the kind of installations which were the Saint's specialty would have been a fruitful source of conversation to anyone. Wherefore the Saint worked energetically alone, and considered his job well done when at the end of it there were no signs of his activity to be found without a very close investigation. The watcher at the end of the cul-de-sac manicured his ceaselessly, and had many enjoyable walks at the

Saint's heels whenever Simon went out. Simon christened him Fido, and became resigned to him as a permanent feature of the landscape. It was near the end of the week when Simon emerged from his front door with another conspicuously large white envelope similar to the first tucked under his arm; and the plain-clothes man, who had definite instructions, closed his penknife with a snap and stepped forward as the Saint came abreast of him.

"Excuse me, sir," he said punctiliously. "May I have a look at your letter?"

The Saint stared at him.

"And who might you be?"

"I'm a police officer," said the man firmly.

"Then why are you wearing an Old Etonian tie?" asked the Saint.

He allowed the envelope to be taken out of his hand. It was addressed to Mr. Ronald Nilder, and the detective ripped it open. Inside he found a flexible gramophone disk, and somewhat to his amazement the label in the centre bore the name of Chief Inspector Teal.

"You'd better come along with me," said the detective.

They went in a taxi to Walton Street police station; and there, after some delay, a gramophone was produced and the record solemnly mounted on the turntable.

The plain-clothes man, the divisional inspector, the sergeant on duty, and two constables gathered round to listen. Chief Inspector Teal had already been called on the telephone, and the transmitter was placed close to the gramophone for a limited broadcast. Someone set the needle in its groove and started it off.

"Hullo, everybody," said the disk, in a cracked voice. "This is Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speaking from Scotland Yard. The subject of my lecture today is 'How to Catch Criminals Red-Handed' — a subject on which my experience must be almost unique. From the day when I captured Jack the Ripper to the day when I arrested the Saint, my career has been nothing but a series of historic triumphs. Armed with a bottle of red ink and my three faithful red herrings, Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer, I have never failed to reduce my hands to the requisite colour. Although for many years I suffered from bad legs, eczema, boils, halitosis, superfluous hair, and bunions—"

Simon gave Patricia a graphic account of the incident when he met her at lunchtime.

"It was not Teal-baiting," he insisted. "It was a little deed of kindness — a little act of love. After all, is it right that Claud should be encouraged to prod his nose into my private correspondence? If we let him run amok like that, one day he might go too far. We have warned him off for his own good."

They celebrated suitably; and it was late that night when they returned home for a final plate of bacon and eggs before calling it a day. Simon paid off the taxi in Queen's Gate, and they walked up to the house together. The watcher at the corner of the road had gone — the Saint had not expected that Teal would urge him to stay on after that home-made gramophone record had been played.

It was so soon after he had finished installing his electric safety devices that Simon had not even started to anticipate results from them — they were provided for the more strenuous days which he hoped to enjoy before very long — when his return became more widely known and many more guilty consciences began to ask themselves whether their subterranean industries might prosper better if Simon Templar were removed from the catalogue of risks which no insurance company would cover. He had the front-door key in his hand before he remembered that the latest product of his defense genius was now in full working order. Quite casually he slid up a small metal panel under the knocker; and then his face went keen and hard. A tiny bulb set in the woodwork under the panel was glowing red.

Simon dropped the shutter over it again and drew Patricia aside.

"We've had a visitor," he said. "I didn't think the fun would begin quite so soon."

There was nothing to show whether the visitor had taken his departure. Only one thing was certain — that someone or something had passed across the barrage of invisible alarms that Simon had arranged to cover every door and window in the place. The visitor might have left, but Simon was not disposed to bet on it.

He stood well to the side of the doorway, sheltered by the solid brickwork of the wall, while he reached round and slipped his key soundlessly into the lock at arm's length. Still keeping out of sight, he pushed the door softly back and felt under the jamb for the electric light switch. There was a flicker of fire and a deafening report; and then the light came on and Simon leapt through into the hall. He heard a patter of feet and the slam of a door, and raced through the kitchen to the back entrance on the mews. He got the door open in time to see a running figure fling itself into the back of an open car which was already speeding towards the street, and a second shot came from it before it turned out of the mews. The bullet flew wide and smacked into the wall; and Simon grinned gently and went back to Patricia Holm.

"There's one gunman in London who loses his nerve rather easily, which is just as well for us," he remarked. "But I wonder who it was?"

Curiously enough, he had almost forgotten the man named Jones, who had done such an unfriendly thing to Brian Quell that night in Paris.

Chapter IV

THERE were no further demonstrations of disapproval that night, although the Saint paid particular attention to the setting of his gadgets before he went to bed, and slept with one ear cocked. He came down to breakfast late the next morning, and was confronted by a shining little cylinder of brass in the middle of his plate. For a moment he stared at it puzzledly, and then he laughed.

"A souvenir?" he murmured, and Patricia nodded.

"I found it in the hall, and I thought you might like to put it in your museum."

Simon spread his napkin cheerfully.

"More 'Weapons I Have Not Been Killed With'?" he suggested. "There must be quite a trunkful of them." He reached out a hand towards the cartridge case, and then drew it back. "Wait a minute — just how did you pick this thing up?"

"Why — I don't know. I—"

"Surely you can remember. Think for a minute. I want you to show me exactly how you took hold of it, how you handled it, everything that happened to it between the time when you saw it on the carpet and the time when it reached this plate… No — don't touch it again. Use a cigarette."

The girl took up the cigarette endways between her thumb and forefinger.

"That's all I did," she said. "I had the plate in my other hand, and I brought it straight in. Why do you want to know?"

"Because all clever criminals wear gloves when they open safes, but very few of them wear gloves when they're loading a gun." Simon picked up the shell delicately in his handkerchief, rubbed the base carefully where the girl's thumb had touched it, and dropped it into an empty matchbox. "Thanks to your fastidious handling, we probably have here some excellent finger-prints of a rotten marksman — and one never knows when they might come in handy."

He turned to a plate of sizzling bacon and eggs with the profound gusto of a man who has slept like a child and woken up like a lion. Patricia allowed him to eat and skim through his morning paper in peace. Whatever schemes and theories were floating through his mercurial imagination, he would never have expounded them before his own chosen time; and she knew better than to try and drag them out of him before he had dealt satisfactorily with his fast.

He was stirring his second cup of coffee when the telephone bell roused him from a fascinating description of the latest woman Atlantic flier's underwear. He reached out a long arm, lifted the receiver, and admitted fearlessly that he was Mr. Simon Templar. "I trust you are well," said the telephone. The Saint raised his eyebrows and felt around for a cigarette.

"I'm very fit, thanks," he said. "How are you? And if it comes to that, who are you?"

A deep chuckle reached him from the other end of the line.

"So long as you don't interfere with me, that need not concern you. I'm sorry that you should have had such an unpleasant shock last night, but if my envoy had kept his head you would have felt nothing at all. On the other hand, his foolishness might still encourage you to accept a friendly warning."

"That's very kind of you," said the Saint thoughtfully. "But I've already got someone to see that my socks are aired, and I always take care not to get my feet wet—"

"I'm talking about more dangerous things than colds, Mr. Templar."

Simon's gaze fell on the sheet of newspaper which he had been reading. Two columns away from the inventory of the lady aviator's wardrobe he saw a headline that he had not noticed before; and the germ of an inspiration suddenly flashed through his mind. "ANOTHER 'SAINT' THREAT," ran the heading of the column, in large black letters; and below it was an account of the letter that had been received by Mr. Ronald Nilder… Patricia was watching him anxiously, but he waved her to silence.

"Dear me! Are you such a dangerous man — Mr. Jones?"

There was a long pause; and the Saint's lips twitched in a faint smile. It had been a shot clear into the dark; but his mind worked like that — flashing on beyond the ordinarily obvious to the fantastically far-fetched that was always so gloriously right.

"My congratulations." The voice on the line was scarcely strained. "How much did Quell tell you?"

"Plenty," said the Saint softly. "I'm sorry you should have had such an unpleasant shock, but if you had kept your head…"

He heard the receiver click down at the other end and pushed the telephone away from him.

"Who was that?" asked Patricia.

"Someone who can think nearly as fast as I can," said the Saint, with a certain artistic admiration. "We know him only as Mr. Jones — the man who shot Brian Quell. And it was one of his pals who disturbed the peace last night." The gay blue eyes levelled themselves on her with the sword-steel intentness that she knew of old. "Shall I tell you about him? He's a rather clever man. He discovered that I was staying in the hotel that night — on Quell's floor, with my window almost opposite his across the well. But he didn't know that before he did his stuff — otherwise he might have thought up something even cleverer. How he found out is more than we know. He may have accidentally seen my name in the register, or he may even have come back for something and listened outside Quell's door — then he'd 've made inquiries to find out who it could have been. But when he got back to England he heard more about me—"

"How?"

"From the story of your noble assault on Wolseley Lormer. Brother Jones decided to take no chances — hence last night. Also this morning there was another dose for him."

Simon pointed to the headlines that he had seen. It was while Patricia was glancing over them that a name in an adjoining paragraph caught his eye, and he half rose from his chair.

"And that!" His finger stabbed at the news item. "Pat — he can certainly think fast!"

He read the paragraph again.

Simon sprang out of his chair and began to pace up and down the room.

"Think it out from the angle of Comrade Jones. He knows I was in a position to know something — he knows my reputation — and he knows I'm just the man to pry into his business without saying a word to the police. Therefore he figures I'd be better out of the way. He's a wise guy, Pat — but just a little too wise. A real professional would have bumped me off and said nothing about it. If he failed the first time he'd 've just tried again — and still said nothing. But instead of that he had to phone me and tell me about it. Believe it or not, Pat, the professional only does that sort of thing in story books. Unless—"

"Unless what?" prompted the girl.

The Saint picked up his cigarette from the edge of the ashtray and fell into his chair again with a slow laugh.

"I wonder! If there's anything more dangerous than being just that little bit too clever, it's being in too much of a hurry to say that very thing of the other man. There's certainly some energetic vendetta going on against the Quell family, and since I've been warned to keep out I shall just naturally have to be there."

"Not today, if you don't mind," said the girl calmly. "I met Marion Lestrange in Bond Street yesterday, and I promised to drop in for a cocktail this evening."

Simon looked at her.

"I think it might happen about then," he said. "Don't be surprised if you hear my melodious voice on the telephone."

"What are you going to do?" she asked; and the a Saint smiled.

"Almost nothing," he said.

He kept her in suspense for the rest of the afternoon, while he smoked innumerable cigarettes and tried to build up a logical story out of the snatches of incoherent explanation that Brian Quell had babbled before he died. It was something about a man called Binks, who could make gold… But no consecutive sense seemed to emerge from it. Dr. Sylvester Quell might have been interested — and he had disappeared. The Saint could get no further than his original idea.

He told Patricia Holm about it at teatime. It will be remembered that in those days the British government was still pompously deliberating whether it should take the reckless step of repealing an Act of 1677 which no one obeyed anyhow, and the Saint's feelings on the matter had been finding their outlet in verse when the train of his criminal inspiration faltered. He produced the more enduring fruits of his afternoon's cogitation with some pride.

"Has that got anything to do with your Mr. Jones?" asked Patricia patiently.

"Nothing at all," said the Saint. "It's probably far more important. Posterity will remember Wilberforce Gupp long after Comrade Jones is forgotten. Listen to some more:

"I seem to have heard something in the same strain before," the girl remarked.

"You probably have," said the Saint. "And you'll probably hear it again. So long as there's ink in my pen, and I can make two words rhyme, and this country is governed by the largest collection of soft-bellied halfwits and doddering grandmothers on earth, I shall continue to castigate its imbecilities — whenever I have time to let go tankard of old ale. I have not finished with Wilberforce."

"Shall I be seeing you after I leave Marion's?" she asked; and the Saint was persuaded to put away the sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling and tell her something which amazed her.

He expounded a theory which anyone else would have advanced hesitantly as a wild and delirious guess with such vivid conviction that her incredulity wavered and broke in the first five minutes. And after that she listened to him with her heart beating a little faster, helplessly caught up in the simple audacity of his idea. When he put it to her as a question she knew that there was only one answer.

"Wouldn't you say it was worth trying, old Pat? We can only be wrong — and if we are it doesn't cost a cent. If we're right—"

"I'll be there."

She went out at six o'clock with the knowledge that if his theory was right they were on the brink of an adventure that would have startled the menagerie of filleted young men and sophisticated young women whom she had promised to help to entertain. It might even have startled a much less precious audience, if she had felt disposed to talk about it; but Patricia Holm was oblivious of audiences — in which attitude she was the most drastic possible antithesis of Simon Templar. Certainly hone of the celebrated or nearly celebrated prodigies with whom it pleased Marion Lestrange to crowd her drawing room once a month would have believed that the girl who listened so sympathetically to their tedious autobiographies was the partner in crime of the most notorious buccaneer of modern times.

The cocktail party ploughed on through a syrupy flood of mixed alcohols, mechanical compliments, second-hand scandal, vapid criticism, lisps, beards, adolescent philosophy, and personal pronouns. Patricia attended with half her mind, while the other half wondered why the egotism which was so delightful and spell-binding in the Saint should be so nauseatingly flatulent in the assorted hominoids around her. She watched the hands of her wrist watch creep round to seven and seven-thirty, and wondered if the Saint could have been wrong.

It was ten minutes to eight when her hostess came and told her that she was wanted on the telephone.

"Is that you, Pat?" said the Saint's voice. "Listen — I've had the most amazing luck. I can't tell you about it now. Can you get away?"

The girl felt a cold tingle run up her spine.

"Yes — I can come now. Where are you?"

"I'm at the May Fair. Hop into a taxi and hurry along — I'll wait for you in the lounge."

She pulled on her hat and coat with a feeling somewhere between fear and elation. The interruption had come so exactly as the Saint had predicted it that it seemed almost uncanny. And the half-dozen bare and uninformative sentences that had come through the receiver proved beyond doubt that the mystery was boiling up for an explosion that only Simon Templar would have gone out of his way to interview at close quarters. As she ran down the stairs, the fingers of her right hand ran over the invisible outlines of a hard squat shape that was braced securely under her left arm, and the grim contact gave her back the old confidence of other dangerous days.

A taxi came crawling along the curb as she stepped out into Cavendish Square, and she waved to it and climbed in. The cab pulled out again with a jerk; and it was then that she noticed that the glass in the windows was blackened, and protected against damage from the inside by a closely woven mesh of steel wire.

She leaned forward and felt around in the darkness for a door handle. Her fingers encountered only a smooth metal plate secured over the place where the handle should have been; and she knew that the man who called himself Jones was no less fast a thinker, and not one whit less efficient, than Simon Templar had diagnosed him to be.

Chapter V

SIMON TEMPLAR refuelled his duofold and continued with the biography of the coming politician:

Simon glanced at his watch, meditated for a few moments, and continued:

It was nearly seven o'clock when the Saint started his car and cruised leisurely eastwards through the Park. He had a sublime faith in his assessment of time limits, and his estimate of Mr. Jones's schedule was almost uncannily exact. He pulled up in the southwest corner of Cavendish Square, from which he could just see the doorway of the Lestranges' house, and prepared himself for a reasonable wait.

He was finishing his third cigarette when a brand-new taxi turned into the square and snailed past the doorway he was watching. It reached the northeast corner, accelerated down the east side and along the south, and resumed its dawdling pace as it turned north again. The Saint bent over a newspaper as it passed him; and when he looked up again the blue in his eyes had the hard glitter of sapphires. Patricia was standing in the doorway; and he knew that Mr. Jones was beyond all doubt a fast mover.

Simon sat and watched the girl hail the taxi and climb in. The cab picked up speed rapidly; and Simon touched his self-starter and hurled the great silver Hirondel smoothly after it.

The taxi swung away to the north and plunged into the streaming traffic of the Marylebone Road. It had a surprising turn of speed for a vehicle of its type; and the Saint was glad that his car could claim to have the legs of almost anything on the road. More than once it was only the explosive acceleration of its silent hundred horsepower that saved him from being jammed in a tangle of slow-moving traffic which would have wrecked his scheme irretrievably. He clung to the taxi's rear number plate like a hungry leech, snaking after it past buses, drays, lorries, private cars of every size and shape under the sun, westwards along the main road and then to the right around the Baker Street crossing, following every twist of his unconscious quarry as faithfully as if he had been merely steering a trailer linked to it by an invisible steel coupling. It was the only possible method of making certain that no minor accident of the route could leave him sandwiched behind while the taxi slipped round a corner and vanished forever; and the Saint concentrated on it with an ice-cold singleness of purpose that shut every other thought out of! his head, driving with every trick of the road that he knew and an inexorable determination to keep his radiator nailed to a point in space precisely nine inches aft of the taxi's hind quarters.

There was always the risk that his limpet-like attachment would attract the attention of the driver of the taxi, but it was a risk that had to be ignored. Fortunately it was growing dark rapidly after a dull and rainy afternoon; they raced up the Finchley Road in a swiftly deepening dusk, and as they passed Swiss Cottage Underground the Saint took the first chance of the chase — fell far behind the taxi, switched on his lights, tore after it again, and picked up the red glowworm eye of its tail light after thirty breathless seconds. That device might have done something to allay any possible suspicions; and the lights of one car look very much like the lights of any other when the distinctive features of its coachwork are hidden behind the diffused rays of a few statutory candlepower.

So far the procession had led him through familiar highways; but a little while after switching on his lights he was practically lost. His bump of locality told him that they were somewhere to the east of the Finchley Road and heading roughly north; but the taxi in front of him whizzed round one corner after another until his bearings were boxed all round the compass, and the names of streets which occasionally flashed past the tail of his eye were unknown to him.

Presently they were running down a broad avenue of large houses set well back from the road, and the taxi ahead was slowing up. In a moment of intuitive understanding, the Saint held his own speed and shot past it: keeping the cab in his driving mirror, he saw it turning in through a pair of gates set in a high garden wall twenty yards behind him.

Simon locked his wheels round the next corner and pulled up dead. In a second he was out of the car and walking quickly back towards the driveway into which the taxi had disappeared.

He strolled quietly past the gates and took in as much of the lie of the land as he could in one searching survey under the slanted brim of his hat. The house was a massively gloomy three-storied edifice in the most pompous Georgian style, reminiscent of a fat archdeacon suffering an attack of liver with rhinocerine fortitude; and the only light visible on that side of it was a pale pink bulb that hung in the drab portico like a forlorn plum in an orchard that the pickers have finished with. The neglected front garden was dappled with the shadows of a few laurel bushes and unkempt flower beds. Of the taxi there was no sign; but a dim nimbus of light was discernible beyond the shrubbery on the right.

The Saint's leisured step eased up gradually and reached a standstill. After all, Mr. Jones was the man he wanted to meet: this appeared to be Mr. Jones's headquarters: and there were no counter-attractions in the way of night life to be seen in that part of Hampstead. The main idea suffered no competition; and a shrewd glance up and down the road revealed no other evening prowlers to notice what happened.

Simon dropped his hands into his pockets and grinned gently at the stars.

"Here goes," he murmured.

The dense shadows inside the garden swallowed him up like a ghost. A faint scraping of gears came to him as he skirted a clump of laurels and padded warily along the grass border of a part of the drive which circled round towards the regions where he had seen the light; and he rounded the corner of the house in time to see the taxi's stern gliding through the doors of a garage that was built onto the side of Mr. Jones's manor. Simon halted again, and stood like a statue while he watched a vague figure scrunch out of the darkness and pull the doors shut behind the cab — from the inside. He surmised that there was a direct communication from the garage through into the house, but he heard a heavy bolt grating into its socket as he drew nearer to investigate.

The Saint sidled on past the garage to the back of the house and waited. After a time he saw two parallel slits of subdued radiance blink out around the edges of a drawn blind in a first-floor window: they were no more than hairlines of almost imperceptible luminance etched in the blackness of the wall, but they were enough to give him the information he needed.

Down on the ground level, almost opposite, where he stood, he made out another door — obviously a kitchen entrance for the convenience of servants, tradesmen, and policemen with ten minutes to spare and a sheik-like style with cooks. He moved forward and ran his fingers over it cautiously. A gentle pressure here and there told him that it was not bolted, and he felt in his pocket for a slim pack of skeleton keys. At the third attempt the heavy wards turned solidly over; and Simon replaced the keys in his pocket and pushed the door inwards by fractions of an inch, with the blade of his penknife pressing against the point where it would first be able to slip through. He checked the movement of the door at the instant when his knife slid into the gap, and ran the blade delicately up and down the minute opening. At the very base of the door it encountered an obstruction; and the Saint flicked the burglar alarm aside with a neat twist and an inaudible sigh of satisfaction, and stepped in.

Standing on the mat, with his back to the closed door, he put away the knife and snapped a tiny electric flashlight from its clip in his breast pocket. It was no longer than a fountain pen, and a scrap of tinfoil with a two-millimetre puncture in it was gummed over the bulb so that the beam it sent out was as fine as a needle. A three-inch ellipse of concentrated light whisked along the wall beside him and rounded itself off into a perfect circle as it came to rest on another door facing the one by which he had entered.

Simon Templar's experience as a burglar was strictly limited. On the rare occasions when he had unlawfully introduced himself into the houses of his victims, it had nearly always been in quest of information rather than booty. And he set out to explore the abode of the man called Jones with the untainted zest of a man to whom the crime was still an adventure.

With one hand still resting lightly in the side pocket of his coat, he opened the opposite door soundlessly and admitted himself to a large, dimly illuminated central hall. A broad marble staircase wound up and around the sides of the hall, climbing from gallery to gallery up the three floors of the house until it was indistinguishable against the great shrouded emptiness of what was probably an ornate stained-glass skylight in the roof. Everything around was wrapped in the silence of death, and the atmosphere had the damply naked feel of air that has not been breathed for many months. A thin smear of dust came off on his fingers from everything he touched; and when he flashed his torch over the interior of one of the ground-floor rooms he found it bare and dilapidated, with the paint peeling off the walls and cobwebs festooning an enormous dingy gilt chandelier.

"Rented for the job," he diagnosed. "They wouldn't bother about the ground floor at all — not with kid-napped prisoners."

He flitted up the staircase without so much as a tap from his feather-weight crepe-soled shoes. A strip of cheap carpet had been roughly laid around the gallery which admitted to the first-floor rooms; and the Saint walked softly over it, listening at door after door.

Then he heard, with startling clarity, a voice that he recognized.

"You have nothing to be afraid of, Miss Holm, so long as you behave yourself. I'm sorry to have had to take the liberty of abducting you, but you doubtless know one or two reasons why I must discourage your friend's curiosity."

He heard the girl's calm reply:

"I think you could have invented a less roundabout way of committing suicide."

The man's bass chuckle answered her. Perhaps only the Saint's ears could have detected the iron core of ruthless menace that hardened the overtones of its full-throated heartiness.

"I'm glad you're not hysterical." A brief pause. "If there's anything within reason that you want, I hope you'll ask for it. Are you feeling hungry?"

"Thanks," said the girl coolly. "I should like a couple of sausages, some potatoes, and a cup of coffee."

Simon darted along the gallery and whipped open the nearest door. Through the gap which he left open he saw a heavily built, grey-haired man emerge from the next room, lock the door after him, and go down the stairs. As the man bent to the key, the Saint had a photographic impression of a dark, large-featured, smooth-shaven face; then he could only see the broad, well-tailored back passing downwards out of view.

The man's footsteps died away; and Simon returned to the landing. He stood at the door of Patricia's room and tapped softly on the wood with his fingernails.

"Hullo, Pat!"

Her dress rustled inside the room.

"Quick work, boy. How did you do it?"

"Easy. Are you all right?"

"Sure."

"How's the window in there?"

"There's a sort of cage over it — I couldn't reach the glass. The taxi was the same. There's a divan bed and a couple of wicker armchairs. The table's very low — the legs wouldn't reach through the bars. He's thought of everything. Washbasin and jug of water on the floor — some towels — cigarettes—"

"What happened to the taxi driver?"

"That was Mr. Jones."

The Saint drew a thoughtful breath.

"Phew! And what a solo worker!.. Can you hold on for a bit? I'd like to explore the rest of the establishment before I start any trouble."

"Go ahead, old chap. I'm fine."

"Still got your gun?"

"Sure."

"So long, lass."

The Saint tiptoed along the landing and prowled up the second flight of stairs.

Chapter VI

THERE were no lights burning on the tipper gallery, but a dull glimmer of twilight filtered up from the lamps below and relieved the darkness sufficiently for him to be able to move as quickly as he wanted to. With his slim electric flash in his hand he went around the story from room to room, turning the door handles with infinite care and probing the apartments with the dancing beam of his torch. The first one he opened was plainly but comfortably furnished as a bedroom: it was evidently occupied, for the bed had not been made since it was last slept in, and a shaving brush crested with a mound of dried lather stood on the mantelpiece. The second room was another bedroom, tidier than the first, but showing the ends of a suit of silk pyjamas under the pillow as proof that it also was used. The door of the third room was locked; and Simon delved in his pocket again for a skeleton key. The lock was of the same type as that on the back door by which he had entered the house — one of those ponderously useless contraptions which any cracksman can open with a bent pin — and in a second or two it gave way.

Simon pushed the door ajar and saw that the room was in darkness. He stepped boldly in, quartering the room with his weaving pencil of light. The flying disk of luminance danced along the walls and suddenly stopped, splashing itself in an irregular pool over the motionless form of a man who lay quietly on the floor as if asleep. But the Saint knew that he was dead.

He knelt down and made a rapid examination. The man had been dead about forty-eight hours — there was no trace of a wound, but with his face close to the dead man's mouth he detected the unmistakable scent of prussic acid. It was as he was rising to go that he accidentally turned over the lapel of the dead man's coat, and saw the thin silver badge underneath — the silver greyhound of a King's Messenger.

The Saint came to his feet again rather slowly. The waters were running deeper than he had ever expected, and he felt an odd sense of shock. That slight silver badge had transformed the adventure at one glance from a more or less ordinary if still mysterious criminal problem to an intrigue that might lead anywhere.

As he left the room he heard the man called Jones coming up the stairs again. Peeping over the wooden balustrade, he saw that the man carried a tray — the catering arrangements in that house appeared to be highly commendable, even if nothing else was.

Simon slipped along the gallery without a sound. He opened two more rooms and found them both empty; then he paused outside another and saw a narrow line of light under the door.

He stood still for a few seconds, listening. He heard an occasional faint chink of glass or metal, and the shuffling of slippered feet over the carpet; but there were no voices. Almost mechanically he tried the door, and had one of the biggest surprises of his life when he felt it opening.

The Saint froze up motionless, with a dry electric tingle glissading over the surface of his skin. The way the door gave back under his light touch disintegrated the very ground from under his nebulous theory about the occupant of that room. In the space of four seconds his brain set up, surveyed, and bowled over a series of possible explanations that were chiefly notable for their complete uselessness. In the fifth second that ultimate fact impressed itself unanswerably on his consciousness, and he acknowledged it with a wry shrug and the decimal point of a smile. Theories were all very well in their place; but he had come to the house of Mr. Jones on a quest for irrefutable knowledge, and an item of irrefutable knowledge was awaiting his attention inside that room. It remained for him to go in and get introduced — and that was what he had given up a peaceful evening in his own home to do.

He glanced downwards into the hall. There was no sound or movement from below. For a minute or two he might consider he had the field to himself — if he was quick and quiet about taking it over.

The door of the lighted room opened further, inch by inch, against the steady persuasion of his fingers, while his nerves were keyed up to check its swing at the first faint hint of a squeak out of the hinges. Gradually the strip of light at the edge widened until he could see part of the room. A grotesque confusion of metal and glass, tangled up with innumerable strands and coils of wire, was heaped over all the floor space that he could see like the scrap heap of one of those nightmare laboratories of the future which appear in every magazine of pseudo-scientific fiction. The Saint's unscientific mind could grasp nothing but the bare visual impression of it — an apparently aimless conglomeration of burnished steel spheres and shining crystal tubes that climbed in and out of each other like a futurist sculptor's rendering of two all-in wrestlers getting acquainted. Back against the far wall ran a long workbench of wood and porcelain surmounted by racks and shelves of glass vessels and bottles of multicoloured mixtures. It was the most fantastic collection of incomprehensible apparatus that Simon Templar had ever seen; and yet in some ridiculously conventional way it seemed to have its perfect focus and presiding genius in the slender white-haired man in a stained and grimy white overall who stood at the bench with his back to the open door.

Simon Templar walked very quietly into the room and closed the door noiselessly behind him. He stood with his back leaning against it and his right hand circling comfortably round the butt of the automatic in his pocket, and cleared his throat apologetically.

"Hullo," he said.

The figure at the bench turned round sharply. He was a mild-faced man with a pair of thick gold-rimmed pince-nez perched slantwise on the end of a long fleshy nose; and his response was pitched in the last key on earth that the Saint had expected to hear.

"What the devil do you want?" he demanded.

To say that the Saint was taken aback means nothing. The effect on his emotional system was much the same as it would have been if the aged scientist had tittered a shrill war whoop and begun to turn cartwheels over the test tubes. Even in these days of free thought and speech the greeting seemed singularly unusual. When you have been at considerable pains, without appreciable hope of reward, to hunt along the trail of a kidnapped professor — when, in the process, you have been warned off the course with a couple of bullets, and have found it necessary to let yourself in for a charge of vulgar burglary in the good cause — you are definitely entitled to expect a fairly cordial welcome from the object of your rescue expedition, Once before the Saint had been greeted something like that in rather similar circumstances, and the memory of that adventure was still fresh with him. It cut short the involuntary upward jerk of his eye-brows; and when he found an answer his voice was absolutely level and natural. Only an ear that was listening for it would have sensed the rapier points that stroked in and out of its casual syllables. "I just came to see how you were getting on, Dr. Quell"

"Well, why can't you leave me alone? How do you expect me to get any work done while I'm being pestered with your absurd questions every ten minutes?" The old man was gesticulating his disgust with everything from his feet to his forehead, till the glasses on his nose quivered with indignation. "What d'you think I am — a lazy schoolboy? Eh? Dammit, haven't you any work of your own?"

"You see, we don't want you to have a breakdown, Professor," said the Saint soothingly. "If you took a little rest now and then—"

"I had seven hours' rest last night. I'm not an invalid. And how would I get this done in time if I lay in bed all day? Think it would get done by itself? Eh?"

Simon took out his cigarette case and moved over to sit down on a conveniently shaped dome of metal.

"All the same, Professor, if you wouldn't mind—"

The old man leapt towards him with a kind of yelp Simon drew back hurriedly; and the professor glared at him, breathing heavily.

"Dammit, if you want to commit suicide, must you come and do it here?"

"Suicide?" repeated the Saint vaguely. "I hadn't—"

"Pish!" squawked the professor.

He snatched up a loose length of wire and tossed it onto the dome on which Simon had been preparing to rest himself. There was a momentary crackle of hot blue flame — and the wire ceased to resemble anything like wire. It simply trickled down the side of the dome in the shape of a few incandescent drops of molten metal; and Simon Templar mopped his brow.

He retreated towards the clear space around the door with some alacrity.

"Thanks very much, Professor," he remarked. "Have you any more firework effects like that?"

"Bah!" croaked the professor huffily.

He went back to his bench and wiped his hands on a piece of rag, with every symptom of a society welfare worker removing the contamination of an afternoon with the deserving poor.

"Is there anything else you want to know?" he barked; and the Saint braced himself for the shot that had to be taken in the dark.

"When are we going to see some gold?"

The professor seemed on the verge of an outburst beside which his former demonstrations would pale into polite tea-table chatter. And then with a tremendous effort he controlled himself. He addressed the Saint with the dreadfully laboured restraint of a doting mother taking an interest in the precocities of a rival parent's prodigy and thinking what an abominable little beast he is.

"When you can use your eyes. When you can get some glasses powerful enough to show you something smaller than a haystack. Or else when you can improve on my methods and make gold run out of the bathroom tap. That's when." The old man stalked across to a cupboard and flung it open. "There. Look again. Try to see it. Borrow a microscope if you have to. But for heaven's sake, young man" — the quavering voice lost some of its self-control and rose two shrill notes — "for heaven's sake, don't utter any more blithering idiocies like that in my laboratory."

Simon stared into the cupboard.

He had never dreamed of seeing wealth like that concentrated in tangible form under his eyes. From floor to ceiling the cupboard was stacked high with it — great glittering yellow ingots the size of bricks, reflecting the lamplight in one soaring block of tawny sleekness like the realization of a miser's dream. The sight of it dazed him. There must have been over a million pounds' worth of the metal heaped carelessly into that tall rectangular cavity in the wall. And back and forth across his memory flashed the inane repetition of the dying young roué in Paris: "He says Binks can make gold…"

The professor's cracked voice broke in on him through a kind of fog.

"Well? Can you see it? Have you found your eyes at last? Eh? Does it begin to satisfy you?" —

Simon had to fight for the smooth use of his tongue.

"Naturally, that's — er — very satisfactory, Dr. Quell; but—"

"Very satisfactory! I should think so." The professor snorted. "Half a hundred weight every hour. Very satisfactory. Faugh! You're a fool — that's what you are. Dammit, if the rest of the Secret Service are as thick-headed as you, I don't know why the country should bother to have a Secret Service."

The Saint stood very still.

But he felt as if a light bomb had exploded inside him. The mystery was opening out before his eyes with a suddenness that could only be compared with an explosion. The detached items of it whirled around like scattered aircraft in the beam of a searchlight and fell luminously into formation with a precision that was uncanny. Everything fitted in its place: the murder of Brian Quell, the King's Messenger who lay dead in an adjoining room, the man who could make gold… the man called "Binks" — a queer nickname to be given to such a brilliant and irritable old magician by his dissolute young brother! And that last mordant reference to the Secret Service: an idea that was worthy of the genius of Mr. Jones — so much simpler, so much more ingenious and effective than the obvious and hackneyed alternative of threats and torture… Most astounding of all, the proof that the essential pivot of the thing was true. Sylvester Quell — "Binks" could make gold. He had made it — hundredweights of it. He was making more.

Simon heard him grousing on in the same cracked querulous voice.

"I don't know why I came here. I could have done better in my own laboratory. Look after me, eh? With the intelligence you've got, you couldn't look after yourself. What use d'you think you are? Why don't you go away and let me do my work? You're worse than that other man, with his stupid questions and his schoolroom tests. Does he think I don't know real gold when I make it?"

It was all quite clear to the Saint. The only question left was how he should act. He could give very little time now to arguments and discussions — escape from that house had become one of the paramount considerations of his life, a thing more vitally important than he had ever thought it could be.

His hand went back to his pocket, his thumb feeling around for the safety catch of his automatic and pressing it gently out of engagement. Under straight dark brows the blue Saintly eyes centred on Quell like spear points.

"Of course not, Professor. But about the notes of your process—"

He was so intent on the scientist that the movement of the door behind him missed his ears. The crack of an automatic fired at close quarters battered and stung his eardrums, and the bullet plucked at his coat. Somehow he was untouched — it is much easier to miss with an automatic than any inexperienced person would believe, and perhaps Mr. Jones's haste made him snatch at the pull-off. The Saint spun round and fired from his pocket; his nerves were steadier, and he scored where he meant to score — on the gun in the big man's hand. The weapon dropped to the floor, and Simon stepped closer.

"Keep still."

The big man's face was twisted with fury. Behind him, Simon heard Quell's shrill whine.

"What does this mean, sir? Eh? Dammit—"

The Saint smiled.

"I'm afraid you've been taken in, Professor. Our friend no more belongs to the Secret Service—"

"Than you do!" the big man's voice snarled in viciously. His fists were clenched and his eyes murderous — only the Saint's gun held him where he stood. "This is one of the men I warned you about, Professor — he's trying to steal your secret, that's what it means! The damned traitor! — if I could only get my hands on him… For God's sake, why don't you do something? He's probably one of the gang that killed your brother—"

"Stop that!"

The Saint's voice cracked through the room like a blade of lightning; but he saw where the big man's desperate clatter of words was leading to a fraction of a second too late. Quell leapt at him suddenly with a kind of sob, before Simon had time to turn. The professor's skinny hand wrestled with his gun wrist, and late-crazed talons clawed at his throat. Simon stumbled sideways under the berserk fury of the scientist's onslaught, and his aim on the man called Jones was hopelessly lost. They swayed together in the corner. Quell's hysterical breathing hissed and moaned horribly in the Saint's ears; and over the demented man's shoulder he saw Jones stooping with his left hand for the fallen gun.

The Saint saw certain and relentless death blazing across his path like an express train. With a savage gathering of all his muscles he shook the professor off and sent him reeling back like a rag doll. Quell's dreadful shriek rang in his ears as Simon leapt across the dividing space and kicked away the automatic that the big man's fingers were within an inch of touching. The gun clanged heavily into a piece of metal on the far side of the room, and Simon caught the big man by one lapel of his coat and spun him round. The Saint's gun rammed into the big man's ribs with brutal forcefulness that made the other wince. "Don't try that again."

Simon's whisper floated into the other's ears with an arctic gentleness that could not have been driven deeper home by a hundred megaphones. It carried a rasping huskiness of meaning that only a fool could have mistaken. And Mr. Jones was no fool. He stood frozen into stone; but the sweat stood out in glistening beads on his forehead.

The Saint flashed one glance sideways, and saw what Mr. Jones had seen first.

Sylvester Quell was sitting on the floor with his back to the shining dome-like contrivance that Simon had seen in action. One hand still rested on the dome, as if by some kind of spasmic attraction, exactly as it had involuntarily gone out to save himself when the Saint's frantic struggle sent him stumbling back against the machine; but the hand was stiff and curiously blackened. The professor's upturned face was twisted in a hideous grin… While Simon looked, the head slipped sideways and lolled over on one shoulder…

Chapter VII

A TWITCH of expression tensed over the face of the man who called himself Jones. His eyebrows were drawn down at the bridge of his nose and strained upwards at the outside corners; the eyes under them were swollen and bloodshot.

"You killed him," he rasped.

"I'm afraid I did," said the Saint. "An unfortunate result of my efforts at self-defense — for which you were entirely responsible."

"You'll have a job to prove it."

The Saint's gentlest smile plucked for an instant at thin-drawn lips.

"I don't know whether I shall try."

He grasped the big man's shoulder suddenly and whirled him half round again, driving him back towards the door.

"Move on, comrade."

"Where are you going?"

"Downstairs. I've got a friend of mine waiting with claustrophobia, and I guess she's been locked up long enough for one day. And if she couldn't eat all those sausages I might find a home for one."

They went down the stairs step by step, in a kind of tango style that would have been humorous to anyone who was insensitive to the deadly tension of it. But Simon Templar was giving no more chances. His forefinger was curled tightly over the trigger for every foot of the way, and the big man kept pace with him in a silence that prickled with malignant vigilance. They came to the door of the room below, and the Saint stopped."

"Open it."

The big man obeyed, turning the lock with a key which he took from his trouser pocket. Simon kicked the door wider.

"This way, Pat."

He waited on the landing while the girl came out, never shifting his eyes from the big man's venomous stillness. Patricia touched his sleeve, and he smiled. "Simon — then it wasn't you I heard…"

"That scream?" Simon slipped an arm round her and held her for a moment. "Why — did you think my voice was as bad as that, old darling?… No, but it wasn't brother Jones either, which is a pity."

"Then who was it?"

"It was Dr. Quell. Pat, we've struck something a little tougher than I expected, and it hasn't turned out too well. This is just once in our lives that Claud Eustace will be useful. Once upon a time we might have handled it alone, but I think I promised to be careful."

He looked at his prisoner.

"I want your telephone," he said.

The big man hesitated, and Simon's gun screwed in his ribs.

"C'mon. You can have indigestion afterwards." Simon released the girl. "And that reminds me — if you did leave one of those sausages…"

Again they descended step by step towards the hall, with the Saint using his free hand to feed himself in a manner that is rarely practised in the best circles.

The telephone was in the hall, on a small table by the front door; and Simon turned his gun over to Patricia and walked across to it, chewing. He leaned a chair against the door and sat in it. The dial buzzed and clicked.

"Hullo… I want Chief Inspector Teal… Yeah — and nobody else. Simon Templar speaking. And make it snappy!"

The big man took a step towards him, his face yellow and his hands working. And immediately the girl's finger took up the slack of the trigger. It was an almost imperceptible movement; but Mr. Jones saw it, and the steady deliberateness of it was more significant than anything that had entered his imagination since the gun changed hands. He halted abruptly; and the Saint grinned.

"Hullo. Is that you, Claud?… Well, I want you… Yeah — for the first time in my life I'll be glad to see you. Come right over, and bring as many friends as you like… I can't tell you on the phone, but I promise it'll be worth the trip. There's any amount of dead bodies in the house, and… Well, I suppose I can find out for you. Hold on."

He clamped a hand over the mouthpiece and looked across the table.

"What's the address, Jones?"

"You'd better go on finding out," retorted the big man sullenly.

"Sure." The Saint's smile was angelic. "I'll find out. I'll go to the street corner and see. And before I go I'll just kick you once round the hall — just to see my legs are functioning."

He lounged round the table, and their eyes met.

"This is 208, Meadowbrook Road," said the man grimly.

"Thanks a lot." Simon dropped into his chair again and picked up the telephone. "Two-o-eight, Meadow-brook Road, Hampstead — I'll be here when you come… O.K., Eustace."

He rose.

"Let's climb stairs again," he said brightly.

He took over the gun and shepherded the party aloft. The show had to be seen through, and his telephone call to Chief Inspector Teal had set a time limit on the action that could not be altered. It was a far cry from that deserted house to the hotel in Paris where Brian Quell had died, and yet Simon knew that he was watching the end of a coherent chain of circumstances that had moved with the inscrutable remorselessness of a Greek tragedy. Fate had thrust him into the story again and again, as if resolved that there should be no possibility of a failure in the link that bore his name; and it was ordained that he should write the end of the story in his own way.

The laboratory upstairs stood wide open. Simon pushed the big man in and followed closely behind. Patricia Holm came last: she saw the professor huddled back against his machine with his face still distorted the ghastly grimace that the death agony of high-voltage electricity had stamped into his features, and bit her lip. But she said nothing. Her questioning eyes searched the Saint's countenance of carved brown granite; and Simon backed away a little from his captive and locked the door behind him.

"We haven't a lot of time, Jones," he remarked queitly; and the big man's lips snarled.

"That's your fault."

"Doubtless. But there it is. Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal is on his way, and we have one or two things to settle before he comes. Before we start, may I congratulate you?"

"I don't want any congratulations."

"Never mind. You deserve them." The Saint fished out his cigarette case with his left hand. Quite naturally he extracted and lighted a cigarette, and stole a glance at his wrist watch while he did so. His brain worked like a taximeter, weighing out miles and minutes. "I think I've got everything taped, but you can check me up if I go wrong anywhere. Somehow or other — we won't speculate how — you got to know that Dr. Quell had just perfected a perfectly sound commercial method of transmuting metals. It's been done already, on a small scale, but the expense of the process ruled it right out as a get-rich-quick proposition. Quell had worked along a new line, and made it a financial cinch."

"You must have had a long talk with him," said the big man sardonically.

"I did… However — your next move, of course, was to get the process for yourself. You're really interesting, Jones — you work on such original lines. Where the ordinary crook would have tried to capture the professor and torture him, you thought of subtler methods. You heard of Quell's brother, a good-for-nothing idler who was always drunk and usually broke. You went over to Paris and tried to get him in with you, figuring that he could get Sylvester's confidence when no one else could. But Brian Quell had a streak of honesty in him that you hadn't reckoned with. He turned you down — and then he knew too much. You couldn't risk him remembering you when he sobered up. So you shot him. I was there. A rotten shot, Jones — just like the one you took at me this evening, or that other one last night. Gunwork is a gift, brother, and you simply haven't got it."

The big man said nothing.

"You knew I knew something about Brian Quell's murder, so you tried to get me. That talk about an 'envoy' of yours was the bunk — you were playing the hand alone, because you knew there wasn't a crook on earth who could be trusted on a thing as big as this." The Saint never paused in his analysis; but his eyes were riveted to the prisoner's face, and he would have known at once if his shot in the dark went astray. Not the faintest change of expression answered him, and he knew he was right. Jones was alone. "By the way, I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me exactly how you knew something had gone wrong in Paris?"

"If you want to know, I thought I heard someone move in the corridor outside, and I went out to make sure. The door blew shut behind me, on an automatic lock. I had to stand outside and listen. Then someone really did come along the passage—"

"And you had to beat it," Simon nodded. "But I don't think you rang me up this morning just to make out how much I heard. What you wanted was to hear my voice, so that you could imitate it."

"He did it perfectly," said Patricia.

The Saint smiled genially.

"You see, Jones? If you couldn't have made your fortune as a gun artist, you might have had a swell career as a ventriloquist. But you wouldn't have it. You wanted to be a Master Mind, and that's where the sawdust came out. My dear old borzoi, did you think we'd never heard of that taxi joke before? Did you think poor little Patricia, with all her experience of sin, was falling for a gag like that? Jones, that was very silly of you — quite irreparably silly. We let you have your little joke just because it seemed the easiest way to get a close-up of your beautiful whiskers. If you'd left us your address before you rang off this morning we'd have been saved the trouble, but as it was—"

"Well, what are you getting at?" grated the big man.

"Just checking up," said the Saint equably. "So you know how we got here. And I found that King's Messenger in the other room — that's what first confirmed what we were up against. Anyone making gold is one of the things the Secret Service sits and waits for all year round: one day the discovery is going to be genuine, and the first news of it would send the international exchanges crazy. There'd be the most frightful panic in history, and any government has got to be watching for it. That King's Messenger had the news — you were lucky to get him."

The big man was silent again, but his face was pale and pasty.

"Two murders, Jones, that were your very own handiwork," said the Saint. "And then — the professor. Accidental, of course. But very unfortunate. Because it means that you're the only man left alive who knows this tremendous secret."

Simon actually looked away. But he had no idea what he looked at. The whole of his faculties were concentrated on the features which were still pinned in the borders of his field of vision, watching with every sense in his body for the answer to the question that he could not possibly ask. That one thing had to be known before anything else could be done, and there was only one way to know it. He bluffed, as he had bluffed once before, without a tremor of his voice or a flicker of his eyes…

And the most expressive thing about the big man's expression was that it did not change. The big man took the Saint's casual assertion into his store of knowledge without the slightest symptom of surprise. It signified nothing more to him than one more superfluous blow on the head of a nail that was already driven deep enough. He glared at the Saint, and the gun in the Saint's hand, without any movement beyond a mechanical moistening of his lips, intent only on watching for the chance to fight that seemed infinitely improbable… And the Saint tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at the big man again.

"I got nearly everything out of Dr. Quell before you interrupted us," he said, clinching the assertion for utter certainty. "It was clever of you to wheedle Quell's process out of him bit by bit — and very useful that you had enough scientific knowledge to understand it. I suppose Quell's sphere of service was running out about this time, anyway — you'd have got rid of him yourself even if there'd been no accident. A very sound and prudent policy for a Master Mind, Jones, but just a shade too dangerous when the scheme springs a leak like me."

"Cut it short," snarled the big man. "What more d'you want? The gold's there—"

"Yes, the gold's certainly there," said the Saint dispassionately. "And in about ten minutes the police will be here to gape at it. I'm afraid that can't be helped. I'd like to get rich quick myself, but I've realized tonight that there's one way of doing it which is too dangerous for any man to tackle. And you don't realize it, Jones — that's the trouble. So we can't take any risks."

"No?"

"No." Simon gazed at the big man with eyes that were very clear, and hard as polished flints. "You see, that secret's too big a thing to be left with you. There's too much dynamite tied up in it. And yet the police couldn't do anything worth a damn. They're bound by the law, and it's just possible you might beat a murder rap. I don't know how the evidence might look in front of a jury; and of course my reputation's rather shopsoiled, and you may be a member of parliament for all I know… Are you following me, Jones? The police couldn't make you part with your secret—"

"Neither could you."

"Have your own way. As it happens, I'm not trying. But with a reputation like mine it'd be bad business for me to shoot you. On the other hand, there could always be another accident — before the police arrived."

The man called Jones stood with his arms hanging loosely at his sides, staring at the Saint unblinkingly. In those last few minutes he had gone suddenly quiet: the snarl had faded out of his voice and left a more restrained level of grim interrogation. His chin was sunken tensely on his powerful chest, and under the thick black eyebrows his eyes were focussing on the Saint with the stony brightness of brown marbles.

He hunched his muscular shoulders abruptly — it was the only movement he made.

"Is that a threat?" he asked.

"No." Simon was just as quiet. "It's a promise. When the police arrive they're going to find that there's been another accident. And the fact will be that you, Jones, also fell against that machine."

Chapter VIII

THE BIG MAN leapt forward as he finished speaking. Simon knew that that was coming — he was ready and waiting for it. There was no other way about it; and he had been prepared for it ever since one question had been answered. He had never intended to shoot after they returned to the laboratory, whatever happened; but he snatched his gun away out of range of the wild grab that Jones made for it, and tossed it neatly across to Patricia. She caught it at her knees; and the Saint slipped under the big man's arms and jammed him against the door. For an instant they strained against each other face to face; and the Saint drew a deep breath and spoke over his shoulder.

"Don't shoot, Pat," he said. "Get over in the corner and stay out of the way. The gun's for you to get out with if anything goes wrong."

The big man heaved up off the door in a mighty jerk and hurled the Saint back with all the impetus of his superior weight. He shook off the Saint's grip with a writhing effort of his arms — Simon felt the man's biceps cording under his hands before the grip was broken, and knew that he was taking on nothing easy. The force of his opponent's rush drove him to within a yard of the deadly steel dome; then he recovered his balance and stopped the man with a couple of half-arm jolts to the stomach that thudded into their mark like pistons hitting a sandbag. Jones grunted and went back on his heels, dropping his hands to guard; and the Saint shot out a snake-like left for the exposed chin. The big man took it on the side of his jaw, deliberately, and snatched at the flying wrist as the blow landed.

His fingers closed on it like iron clamps, twisting spitefully. He had every ounce of the strength that his build indicated, and he was as hard as teak all over — the Saint had felt that when he landed with those two staggering blows that would have broken most men in the middle. What was more, he had been trained in a school of fighting that knew its stuff: he never gave the Saint a chance to make a boxing match of it. Simon swerved away from the dome and kicked up his knee, but the big man edged back. The Saint's left arm was clamped in an agonizing armlock, and he was wrenched ruthlessly round again towards the dome. The leverage of the hold was bearing him down to his knees; then with a swift terrific kick he straightened his legs under him and swung his right fist over in a smashing blow at the back of the man's neck. The man coughed, and crumpled to his hands and knees; and Simon tore his wrist out of the grip and fell on top of him.

They rolled over together, with the Saint groping for a toehold. One of the big man's insteps came under the palm of his hand, and he hauled it up and bent it over with a brutal efficiency that made his victim gasp. But the big man was wise to that one — the hold only hurt him for a couple of seconds, before he flung it off with a mighty squirm of his body that pitched the Saint over on his face. In an instant the big man's legs were scissoring for a clasp round the Saint's neck and shoulders, and his hands were clamping again on the Saint's wrist. Simon heard his muscles creaking as he strained against the backward pressure that was slowly straightening his arm. Once that arm was locked out straight from the shoulder, with the elbow over the big man's knee joint, he would have to move like a supercharged eel to get away before a bone was snapped like dry wood. He fought it desperately, but it was his one arm against the big man's two; and he knew he was losing inch by inch. His free hand clawed for a nerve centre under one of the thighs that were crushing his chest: he found it, and saw the big man wince, but the remorseless straightening of his arm went on. In the last desperate moment that he had, he struggled to break the nutcracker grip around his upper body. One of the big man's shoes came off in his hand, and with a triumphant laugh he piled all his strength into another toetwist. The man squeaked and kicked, and Simon broke away. As he came up on all fours, the other rolled away. They leapt up simultaneously and circled round each other, breathing heavily.

"Thanks for the fight," said the Saint shortly. "I never cared for cold-blooded killings."

For answer the big man came forward off his toes like a charging bull; but he had not moved six inches before the Saint's swift dash reached him. Again those pile-driving fists jarred on the weak spot just below the other's breastbone. Jones grabbed for a stranglehold, but the drumming of iron knuckles on his solar plexus made him stagger backwards and cover up with his elbows. His mouth opened against the protest of his paralyzed lungs, and his face went white and puffy. Simon drove him to the door and held off warily. He knew that the big man was badly hurt, but perhaps his helplessness looked a little too realistic… The Saint feinted with a left to the head, and in a second the big man was bear-hugging him in a wild rush that almost carried him off his feet.

They went back towards the gleaming dome in a fighting tangle. Simon looked over his shoulder and saw it a yard away, with its brilliant surface shining like silver around the charred blackness of the professor's hand. The strip of wire that he had seen melted on it had left streaky trails of smeared metal down the curved sides, like the slime of a fantastic snail. The Saint saw them in an instant of photographically vivid vision in which the minutest details of that diabolical apparatus were printed forever on his memory. There must have been tens of thousands of volts pulsing invisibly through that section of the secret process, hundreds of amperes of burning annihilation waiting to scorch through the first thing that tapped them with that crackle of blue flame and hiss of intolerable heat which he had seen once and heard again. His shoes slipped over the floor as he wrestled superhumanly against the momentum that was pressing him back towards certain death: the big man's face was cracked in a fiendish grin, and he heard Patricia cry out… Then one of his heels tripped over the professor's outstretched legs, and he was thrown off his balance. He put all his strength into a frantic twist of his body as he fell, and saw the dome leap up beside him, a foot away. The fall knocked half the wind out of his body, and he fought blindly away to one side. Suddenly his hands grasped empty air, and he heard Patricia cry out again.

The splitting detonation of a shot racketed in his ears as he rolled up on one elbow. Patricia had missed, somehow, and the big man was grappling for the gun. Simon crawled up and flung himself forward. As he did so, the big man saw his own gun lying in the corner where the Saint had kicked it, and dived for it. Simon caught him from behind in a circling sweep, locking the big man's arms to his sides at the elbows; but the big man had the gun. The Saint saw it curling round for a backward shot that could not help scoring somewhere: he made a wild grab at the curving wrist and caught it, jerking it up as the trigger tightened, and the shot smashed through the floor. Simon flung his left leg forward, across the big man's stance. The steel dome was a yard away on his left. He heaved sideways, across the leverage of his thigh, and sprang back… The man's scream rang in his ears as he staggered away. Once again that spurt of eye-aching blue flame seared across his eye's and turned suddenly orange. The big man had hit the dome with his shoulder, and his coat was burning; the smell of singeing cloth stung the Saint's nostrils, and the crack of cordite sang through his head as the galvanic current clamped a dead finger convulsively on the trigger and held it there rigidly in one last aimless shot…

"And we still don't know his real name," murmured the Saint.

He pushed a handkerchief across his brow and looked at Patricia with a crooked grin. Patricia was fingering her wrist tenderly, where the big man's crushing grip had fastened on it. She looked back at the Saint with a pale face that was still hopelessly puzzled.

"That's your fault," she said.

"I know." The Saint's eyes had a mocking twist in their inscrutable blue that she couldn't understand. "You see, when you've made up your mind about a thing like Brother Jones's demise, the only way is to get it over quickly. And Claud Eustace will be along soon. But I promise you, Pat, I've never hated killing anyone so much — and there was never anyone who'd 've been so dangerous to my peace of mind if he'd stayed alive. If you want any excuses for it, he'd got two deliberate murders on his own hands and one more for which he was deliberately responsible, so he only got what was coming to him."

She waited alone in the room of death while the Saint vanished along the landing towards one of the bedrooms. It took the Saint a few minutes to repair the damage which the fight had done to his immaculate elegance, but when he had finished there was hardly a trace of it — nothing but a slight disorder that could have been caused by a brief scuffle. He used the dead man's hair-brushes and clothesbrush, and wrapped a handkerchief round his hand before he touched anything. Everything went back on the dressing table exactly as he had found it; and he returned to the girl with a ready smile.

"Let's finish the clean-up, Pat — I don't know that we've a lot of time."

He went over the floor with keen, restless eyes. Two cartridge cases he picked up from odd corners where they had rolled away after the snap action of the recoil had spewed them out of a pistol breech. He identified them as the products of his own gun, for he had marked each of them with a nick in the base. They went into his pocket: the others, which testified to the shots which Jones had fired, he left where they lay, and added to them the souvenir which he had preserved in a match-box from his breakfast table that morning. He searched the room once more for any other clues which he might have overlooked, and was satisfied.

His hand fell on Patricia's shoulder. "Let's go," he said.

They went down to the hall. Simon left her again while he went out into the garden. His automatic, and the shells he had picked up, went deep under the earth of a neglected flower bed; and he uprooted a clump of weeds and pressed them into a new berth where they would hide the marks of freshly turned earth.

"Don't you ever want me to know what you're up to?" asked Patricia, when he came back; and the Saint took her by the arm and led her to a chair.

"Lass, don't you realize I've just committed murder?

And times is not what they was. I've known much bigger things than this that were easy enough to get away with before Claud Eustace had quite such a life-and-death ambition to hang my scalp in his belt; but this is not once upon a time. We might have run away and left the mystery to uncover itself, but I didn't think that was such a hot idea. I'd rather know how we stand from the start. Now sit down and let me write some more about Wilberforce Gupp — this is a great evening for brainwork."

He propelled her gently into the chair and sat himself down in another. An envelope and a pencil came out of his pocket; and with perfect calm and detachment, as if he were sitting in his own room at home with a few minutes to spare, the amazing Saint proceeded to scribble down and read aloud to her the epilogue of his epic.

He had just finished when they both heard a car swing into the drive. Feet crunched over the gravel, and heavy boots grounded on the stone outside the front door. The resonant clatter of a brass knocker curtly applied echoed through the house.

Simon opened the door.

"Claud Eustace himself!" he murmured genially. "It seems years since I last saw you, Claud. And how's the ingrowing toenail?" He glanced past the detective's bulky presence at the four other men who were unloading themselves and their apparatus from the police car and lining up for the entrance. "I rather thought you'd be bringing a party with you, old dear, but I don't know that the caviare will go all the way round."

The detective stepped past him into the hall, and the other men followed. They were of various shapes and sizes, deficient in sex appeal but unconversationally efficient. They clumped themselves together on the mat and waited patiently for orders.

Mr. Teal faced the Saint with a certain grimness. His round pink face was rather more flushed than usual, and his baby-blue eyes were creased up into the merest slits, through which pinpoints of red danger lights glinted like scattering embers. He knew that he had taken a chance in coming to that house at all, and the squad he had brought with him multiplied his potential regrets by more factors than he cared to think about. If this was one of the Saint's practical jokes, Chief Inspector Teal would never hear the last of it. The whole C.I.D. would laugh itself sick — there were still giggles circulating over the gramophone-record incident — and the assistant commissioner's sniff would flay him till he wanted to find a quiet place to die. And yet he had had no choice. If he was told about a murder he had to go out and investigate it, and his private doubts did not count.

"Well?" he barked.

"Fairly," said the Saint. "I see you brought the homicide squad."

Teal nodded briefly.

"I gathered from what you told me that a murder had been committed. Is that the case?"

"There are certainly some dead bodies parked about the house," admitted the Saint candidly. "In fact, the place is making a great start as a morgue. If you're interested—"

"Where are these bodies?"

Simon gestured impressively heavenwards.

"Upstairs — at least, so far as the mortal clay is concerned, Eustace."

"We'll go up and see them."

Curtly Teal gave his orders to the silent squad. One man was left in the hall, and Patricia stayed with him. The others, who included a fingerprint expert with a little black bag, and a photographer burdened with camera and folding tripod, followed behind. They went on a tour that made every member of it stare more incredulously from stage to stage, until the culminating revelation left their eyeballs bulging as if they were watching the finale of a Grand Guignol drama coming true under their noses.

Chapter IX

CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL twiddled his pudgy fingers on his knees and studied the Saint's face soberly, digesting what he had heard.

"So after that you allowed this man Jones to kidnap Miss Holm so that you could follow him and find out his address?" he murmured; and the Saint nodded.

"That's about it. Can you blame me? The guy Jones was obviously a menace to the community that we ought to know more about, and it was the only way. I hadn't the faintest idea at that time what his graft was, but I figured that anything which included wilful murder in its programme must be worth looking into. I was all bubbling over with beans after that bust I told you about — talking of busts, Claud, if you ever go to the Folies Bergère—"

"Yes, yes," interrupted the detective brusquely. "I want you to tell me exactly what happened when you got here."

"Well, naturally I had to break into the house. I went up to the first floor and heard Jones talking to Miss Holm in the room where he'd taken her. I hid in another room when he came out to get her some food; then I went and spoke to Miss Holm through the door — which Brother J. had remembered to lock. We exchanged some bright remarks about the weather and the Test Match prospects, and then I carried on with the exploration. On the way I found that King's Messenger. Then Jones came upstairs again, and I lay low for quite a while, cautious like. After a time I got tired standing about, and I went in search of him. I came up outside this laboratory door and listened. That's when I heard what it was all about. Jones was just wheedling what sounded like the last details of the process out of Quell — the science I know wouldn't cover a pinhead, but Jones seemed quite happy about it."

"Can you remember any part of what you heard?"

"Not a thing that'd make sense — except the outstanding bit about the gold. Quell was making gold, there's not a doubt about it. You can see it for yourself. I gathered that Jones had told the old man some yarn about saving England from going off the gold standard — manufacturing an enormous quantity of the stuff under the auspices of the Secret Service, and unloading it quietly in a way that'd put new life into the Bank of England — and Quell, who probably wasn't so wise to the ways of crime as he was to the habits of electrons and atoms, had fallen for it like a dove. Anyway, Jones was happy."

"And then?"

"There was a frightful yell. I've never heard anything like it. I burst in — the door wasn't locked — and saw the professor doing a last kick beside that machine. Jones must have pushed him onto it in cold blood. The old man had told him everything he wanted to know, and made him a lot of specimen gold as well, and Jones hadn't any further use for him. Jones heard me come in, and spun round, pulling a gun. He tripped over the professor's legs and put out a hand to save himself — then he saw his hand was going on the machine, and he pulled it away. He fell on his shoulder, and it burned him just the same. I suppose the current jiggered his muscles like it does on those electric machines, and he went on shooting all round the place for a second or two."

Teal looked round at the fingerprint expert, who was busy at the bench.

"Have you done those shells?" he asked.

"Just finished, sir."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"What's the idea?" he inquired.

"I don't know whether you've thought of wearing gloves when you're loading a gun," said the detective blandly; and the Saint did not smile.

He allowed the expert to take impressions of his fingertips on a special block, and waited while the man squinted at them through a magnifying glass and checked them against the marks which he had developed on the spent cartridge cases which had been picked up. Teal went over to his side and stood there with a kind of mountainous placidity which was not the most convincing thing Simon Templar had ever seen.

"There's no similarity, sir," pronounced the expert at length, and a glimmer of blank disbelief crossed the detective's round face.

"Are you sure?"

"It's quite obvious, sir. The prints are of totally different types. You can see for yourself. The prints on the shells are spirals, and this gentleman's prints—"

"Don't call him 'this gentleman,'" snapped the detective. "This is Simon Templar, known as the Saint — and you know it too."

"Why not try Jones's fingerprints?" suggested the Saint mildly. "It seems simpler than suspecting me automatically. I've told you — I'm not in this party. That's why I sent for you."

Teal regarded the two contorted bodies thoughtfully. The photographer had finished his work, and he was packing his exposed plates away in a satchel. The detective took a step forward.

"I should take a lot of care, if I were you," murmured the Saint. "I'd hate you to have an accident, and I suppose the juice is still functioning."

They went round the room circumspectly. Someone discovered a collection of switches, and reversed them. A likely-looking terminal was disconnected by a man who donned rubber gloves for the purpose. Finally they approached the dome again, and one of the men tossed bits of wire onto it from various angles. Nothing happened; and eventually Teal knelt down and tried to detach the gun from the dead man's hand. He remained alive, but it took the efforts of two other men to unlock the terrific clutch of the dead man's fingers.

Teal straightened up and clicked out the magazine,

"Two shots here." He jerked the sliding jacket. "One in the breech… We picked up four shells, and four shots have been fired in this room." Teal turned the figures over in his head as if he loathed them. The chagrin showed on his face; and Simon Templar relaxed gently. It was the one risk that he had to take — if Jones's gun had contained more shells it would have been a tougher proposition, but seven was a possible load. "You're lucky," Teal said venomously.

He turned the gun over in his hand, and suddenly he stiffened.

"What's that?"

He displayed a thin silvery scratch on the blue-black steel, and Simon gazed at the mark along with the other detectives.

"It looks as if it had hit something," said one of them.

"I'll say it does," grunted Mr. Teal.

He crawled round the room on his hands and knees, studying the bullet scars that had already been discovered. One of them occupied him for some time, and he called over one of the other men to join him. There was a low-voiced colloquy; and then Teal rose again and dusted the knees of his trousers. He faced the Saint again.

"That shot there was a ricochet," he said, "and it could have come off Jones's gun."

"Shooting round corners and hitting itself?" drawled the Saint mildly. "You know, you're a genius — or rather Jones must have been. That's an invention that's been wanted for years. Damned useful thing in a tight corner, Claud — you aim one way, and the bullet comes back and hits the man standing behind you—"

''I don't think that was it," said the detective short-windedly. "What kind of gun are you carrying these days?"

Simon spread out his hands.

"You know I haven't got a license."

"Never mind. We'll just look you over."

The Saint shrugged resignedly and held out his arms. Teal frisked him twice, efficiently, and found nothing. He turned to the odd man.

"You'd better get busy and dig out all the bullets. We'll be able to tell from the marks of the rifling whether they were all fired from the same gun."

A trickle of something like ice-cold water fluttered down Simon Templar's spine. That was the one possibility that he had overlooked — the one inspiration he had not expected the plump detective to produce. He hadn't even thought that Teal's suspicions would have worked so hard. That gramophone record must have scored a deeper hit than he anticipated — deeper perhaps than he had ever wanted it to be. It must have taken something that had rubbed salt viciously into an old and stubbornly unhealed wound to kindle an animosity that would drive itself so far in the attempt to pin guilt on a quarter where there was so much prima-facie innocence.

But the Saint schooled himself to a careless shrug. The least trace of expression would have been fatal. He had never acted with such intensity in his life as he did at that moment, keeping unruffled his air of rather bored protest. He knew that Teal was watching him with the eyes of a lynx, with his rather soft mouth compressed into a narrow line which symbolized that unlooked-for streak of malice.

"I can't help it if you want to waste time making a damned fool of yourself," he said wearily. "If there's a scratch on that gun it's probably there because Jones did happen to bang it on something. If there's a ricco anywhere, it's probably one that bounced off some of the apparatus — there's any amount of solid metal about, and I told you how Jones was thrashing around when the current got him. Why go trying to fix something on me?"

"Only because I'm curious," said the detective inflexibly. "You've had quite a lot of jokes at our expense, so I'm sure you won't mind us having a little harmless fun at yours."

Simon took out his cigarette case.

"Am I to consider myself under arrest — is that the idea?"

"Not yet," said Teal, with a vague note of menace sticking out of the way he said it.

"No? Well, I'm just interested. This is the first time in my life I ever behaved like a respectable citizen and gave you your break according to the rules, and I'm glad to know how you take it. It'll save me doing anything so damned daft again."

Teal stripped the wrapping from a wafer of spearmint with a sort of hard-strung gusto.

"I hope you'll have the opportunity of doing it again," he said. "But this looks like the kind of case that would have interested you in other ways. and I shouldn't be doing my duty if I took everything for granted."

Simon looked at him.

"You're wrong," he said soberly. "I tell you, Teal, when I saw that guy Jones dying, all that went through my mind in a flash. Before he killed Quell — before I came through the door — I'd heard enough to know what it meant. I knew I could have taken him prisoner, made him work the process for me — had all the wealth I wanted. You know what one can do with a bit of persuasion. I could have taken him away from this house and left everything as it was — Quell and the King's Messenger mightn't have been found for weeks, and there'd have been nothing in the world to show that I'd ever been near the place. I could have done in real earnest what Jones was trying to kid Quell he was doing. I could have manufactured gold until I'd built up a balance in the Bank of England that would have been the sensation of the century. I could have played fairy godmother in a way that would have made me safe forever from your well-meant persecutions, Claud. I could have paid off the national debt with one check — my own free gift to Great Britain. With love and kisses from the Saint. Think of it! I could have named my own price. I might have been dictator — and then there might have been some more sense in the laws of this nit-witted community than there is now. Certainly you'd never have dared to touch me so long as I lived — there'd have been a revolution if you'd tried it. Simon Templar — the man who abolished income tax. My God, Teal, I don't think anyone's ever been able to dream a miracle like that and see it within his reach!"

"Well?"

Teal was chewing steadily, but his eyes were fixed on the Saint's face with a stolid attentiveness that had not been there before. Something in the Saint's speech commanded the respect that he was unwilling to give — it was drawn from him in spite of himself. Simon's sincerity was starkly irresistible.

"You know what happened. I passed up the idea. And I don't mind telling you, Claud, quite honestly, that if Jones hadn't died as he did, I should have killed him. There you are. You can use that as evidence against me if you like, because this time I haven't a thing on my conscience — just for once."

"What made you pass up the idea?" asked Teal.

Simon took the cigarette from his mouth, and answered with an utter frankness that could have been nothing but the truth.

"It would have made life too damned dull!"

Teal scratched his chin and stared at the toecap of one shoe. The odd man had finished digging out bullets: he dropped them into a matchbox and stood by, listening like the others.

"You know me, Claud," said the Saint. "I was just tempted — just in imagination — for that second or two while I watched Jones die and his bullets were crashing round me. And I saw what a deadly frost it would have been. No more danger — no more risk — no more duels with Scotland Yard — no more of your very jolly back-chat and bloody officiousness as per this evening. Claud, I'd have died of boredom. So I gave you your break. I left everything as it was, and phoned you straight away. There was no need to, but that's what I did. Jones was dead of his own accord, and I'd nothing to be afraid of. I haven't even touched an ounce of the gold — it's there for you to take away, and I suppose if the Quell family's extinct the government will get it and I won't even be offered a rebate on my income tax. But naturally, like the poor dumb boobs you are, you have to sweat blood trying to make me a murderer the one time in my life I'm innocent. Why, you sap, if I'd wanted to get away with anything—"

"It's a pity you couldn't have saved Jones and done what you thought of all the same," said Teal; and the change in his manner was so marked that the Saint smiled. "It might have done the country some good."

Simon drew at his cigarette and hunched his shoulders.

"Why the hell should I bother? The country's got its salvation in its own hands. While a nation that's always boasting about its outstanding brilliance can put up with a collection of licensing laws, defense-of-the-realm acts, seaside councillors, Lambeth conventions, sweepstake laws, Sunday-observance acts, and one fatuity after another that's nailed on it by a bunch of blathering maiden aunts and pimply hypocrites, and can't make up its knock-kneed mind to get rid of 'em and let some fresh air and common sense into its life — when they can't do anything but dither over things that an infant in arms would know its own mind about — how the devil can they expect to solve bigger problems? And why the blazes should I take any trouble to save them from the necessity of thinking for themselves…? Now for heaven's sake make up your mind whether you want to arrest me or not, because if you don't I'd like to go home to bed."

"All right," said Teal. "You can go."

The Saint held out his hand.

"Thanks," he said. "I'm sorry about that gramophone record. Maybe we can get on better in the future — if we're both very good."

"I'll believe that of you when I see it," said Teal; but he smiled.

Simon pushed his way through the knot of waiting men to the door.

At the foot of the stairs the detective who had been left with Patricia barred his way. Teal looked over the gallery rail and spoke down.

"It's all right, Peters," he said. "Mr. Templar and Miss Holm can go."

Simon opened the front door and turned to wave the detective a debonair good-bye. They went out to where the Saint had left his car, and Simon lighted another cigarette and waited in silence for the engine to warm. Presently he let in the clutch and they slid away southwards for home.

"Was it all right?" asked Patricia.

"Just," said the Saint. "But I don't want such a narrow squeak again for many years. There was one vital piece of evidence I'd overlooked, and Teal thought of it. I had to think fast — and play for my life. But I collared the evidence as I went out, and they'll never be able to make a case without it. And do you know, Pat? — Claud Eustace ended up by really believing me."

"What did you tell him?"

"Very, very nearly the whole truth," said the Saint, and hummed softly to himself for a long while.

He drove home by a roundabout route that took them over Westminster Bridge. In the middle of the bridge he dipped into his pocket and flung something sideways, far out over the parapet.

It was a small box that weighed heavily and rattled.

Back at Scotland Yard, a puzzled detective sergeant turned his coat inside out for the second time.

"I could have sworn I put the matchbox with those bullets in my pocket, sir," he said. "I must have left it on the bench or something. Shall I go back and fetch it?"

"Never mind," said Mr. Teal. "We shan't be needing it."