The Saint Goes On

THE SAINT GOES ON LESLIE CHARTERIS .

CONTENTS Part I THE HIGH FENCE 9 Part II THE ELUSIVE ELLSHAW 75 Part III THE CASE OF THE FRIGHTENED INNKEEPER 181

THE SAINT GOES ON

Part I THE HIGH FENCE

APART from the fact that neither of them was a productive or useful member of the community, Johnny Anworth and Sunny Jim Fasson had very little in common. They did not own allegiance to the same Dear Old School; they had no meeting-ground in a passion for the poems of William Wordsworth, no shared devotion to collecting birds' eggs or the rarer kinds of cheese. But the circumstances in which they ceased to adorn their usual places in the files of Records Office at New Scotland Yard had a connecting link which must be the chronicler's excuse for reciting them in quick succession.

Johnny Anworth entered a jeweler's shop in Bond Street during the Easter holidays of that year, and omitted to pay for what he took out. He entered through the ceiling, from an apartment on the floor above which he had rented temporarily. It was a pretty neat job, for Johnny was a sound worker in his line; but it had his personality written all over it, and Headquarters put out the routine dragnet and in twenty-four hours duly brought him in.

He was taken to Market Street police station, where he was seen by the Divisional Inspector. The awkward part of it from Johnny's point of view was that he had most of the proceeds of his burglary on him when he was caught-at any rate he had all the precious stones, which had been prised out of their settings, carefully packed in a small cardboard box, and done up with brown paper and string. What he had not had time to do was to write an address on the package, and for this reason the D. I. was very gentle with him.

"You were going to send that stuff to the High Fence, weren't you, Johnny?" he said.

"I dunno wot yer talkin' abaht, guv'nor," answered Johnny mechanically. "I fahnd the stuff lyin' in the gutter in Leicester Square, an' I did it up to send it to the Lost Property Office."

The Divisional Inspector continued to be gentle.

"You've been in stir six times already," he said, consulting a memorandum on his desk. "If we wanted to be hard on you now, we could have you sent to the Awful Place. You could go to the Moor for seven years, and then have three years' preventive detention waiting for you. On the other hand, if you told us who you were going to send this parcel to, we might forget about those previous convictions and put in a word for you."

Johnny considered this. There is honour among thieves, but it is not designed to resist bad weather.

"Orl right, guv'nor," he said philosophically. "I'll squeal."

This story might have ended there if the station short-hand writer had been available. But he had already gone out to lunch; and the Divisional Inspector was also hungry.

They put Johnny Anworth back in his cell with instructions to order anything he wanted to eat at the D. I.'s expense, and an appointment to make his statement at two o'clock. His lunch, which consisted of roast beef and cabbage, was delivered from a nearby restaurant by an errand-girl who deposited it in the chargeroom. Almost as soon as she had gone, after some flirtatious exchanges with the charge-sergeant, it was picked up by the gaoler, who carried it in to Johnny. He was the last man who saw the talented Mr. Anworth alive.

The girl had taken the tray from the chef in the kitchen, and no one had stopped her or spoken to her on the way. The chef had had no unusual visitors. The only people in the charge-room when the girl delivered the tray were the gaoler, the charge-sergeant, and Inspector Pryke. And yet, somehow, somewhere on the short journey which Johnny Anworth's last meal had taken, someone had contrived to dope the horseradish sauce with which his plate of roast beef was garnished with enough cyanide to kill a regiment.

The murder was a nine days' wonder which provoked its inevitable quota of headlines, newspaper criticisms, and questions in Parliament. Every inquiry seemed to lead to a dead end. But the Criminal Investigation Department has become phlegmatically accustomed to dead ends; and Chief Inspector Teal was still working methodically on the case, six weeks later, when Mr. James Fasson clicked to the tune of five thousand pounds' worth of gems to which he had no legal right whatsoever.

The assets of Sunny Jim Fasson were a smile which made children and hard-boiled business men trust him instinctively, a wardrobe of prosperous-looking clothes, some high-class American luggage plastered with a wonderful collection of expensive cosmopolitan labels, enough ready cash to create an impression of affluence at any hotel where he stayed, and a girl friend who posed as his wife, sister, niece, or old widowed mother with equal success and distinction.

On this occasion he stayed at the Magnificent, a hotel which he had not previously honoured with his presence. He was a wealthy American on his honeymoon; and for a few days he and his charming wife were quite happy seeing the sights and making a round of the theatres. One day, however, a small rift appeared in their marital bliss.

"I guess she's feelin' kinda homesick, or something," Sunny Jim confided to a clerk at the inquiry desk. "Whaddaya do when your wife gets moody, son?"

"I don't really know, sir," confessed the clerk, who was not employed to answer that kind of inquiry.

"Y'know, I always think a woman wants some kinda kick outa life when she feels that way," mused Sunny Jim. "Some lil thing that makes her feel good with herself. A noo hat, or a fur coat, or-or a diamond bracelet. . . . That's what she wants!" he cried, recognising divine inspiration when it breathed on him. "A diamond bracelet! Say, what's the best store in this town to buy a diamond bracelet?"

"Peabody's, in Regent Street, are very good, sir," said the clerk, after a moment's thought.

Sunny Jim beamed.

"Ring 'em up and tell 'em to send some of their best diamond bracelets around," he said. "I'll have the man take 'em right up to her room, and she can pick what she likes. Say, I bet that'll put everything right."

Whether it put everything right or not is a question that the various parties concerned might have answered differently. The hotel was glad enough to oblige such a lavish guest; and Mr. Peabody, the jeweler, was so impressed with their brief account of Mr. James Fasson that he hurried round in person with six diamond bracelets in his bag. After a short discussion, Mrs. Fasson chose the most expensive, a mere trifle valued at a thousand pounds; and Mr. Fasson rang for a page-boy to take his cheque for that amount round to the bank to be cashed.

"You must have a drink while you're waitin' for your money," said Sunny Jim, turning to a bottle and a siphon which stood on a side table.

Mr. Peabody had a very small drink; and remembered nothing more for another hour, at the end of which time Mr. and Mrs. Fasson had left the Magnificent for ever, taking all his six diamond bracelets with them. Nor did Mr. Peabody's afternoon look any brighter when the bank on which Mr. Fasson's cheque had been drawn rang up the hotel to mention that they had never carried an account for anybody of that name.

This episode was the subject of a hurriedly assembled conference in the Assistant Commissioner's room at New Scotland Yard.

The other two men present were Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal and Junior Inspector Pryke. Mr. Teal, who was responsible for the conference, explained his point of view very briefly.

"Anworth and Fasson used to be fairly well acquainted, and if Anworth was using the High Fence there's a good chance that Fasson will be using him too. I know exactly where I can lay my hands on Sunny Jim, and I want permission to try and get a squeal out of him unofficially."

"What is your objection to having him arrested and questioned in the ordinary way?" asked the Commissioner.

"He'd have to be taken to Market Street, wouldn't he?" meditated Teal aloud. His baby blue eyes hid themselves under studiously sleepy lids. "Well," he said dryly, "because I don't want him murdered."

Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke flushed. He was one of the first graduates of Lord Trenchard's famous Police College, and he usually gave the impression of being very well satisfied with his degree. He was dark, slim, and well-manicured; and the inventor of that classic experiment for turning gentlemen into detectives could certainly have pointed to him as a product who looked nothing like the traditional idea of a policeman. Mr. Teal had been heard to thank God that there was no possibility of confusing them, but there were obvious reasons why Mr. Teal was irrevocably prejudiced in favour of the old order.

"It's in your manor, Pryke," said the Assistant Commissioner. "What do you think?"

"I don't see what there is to be gained by it," said the other. "If Fasson hasn't been too frightened by the murder of Anworth to talk anyhow"

"What does Fasson know about the murder of Anworth?" demanded Teal quickly, for the official statements to the Press had contained certain deliberate gaps.

Pryke looked at him.

"I don't suppose he definitely knows any more than any other outsider, but it's common gossip in the underworld that Anworth was murdered because he was going to turn informer."

"You look as if you spent a lot of your time picking up gossip from the underworld," retorted Teal sarcastically. He caught the Assistant Commissioner's chilly eye on him, and went on more politely: "In any case, sir, that's only another reason why I don't want to take him to a police station. I want to try and prevent him thinking that any squeal could be traced back to him."

There was some further discussion, through which Teal sat stolidly chewing a worn-out lump of spearmint, with his round pink face set in its habitual mask of weary patience, and eventually gained his point.

"Perhaps you had better take Inspector Pryke with you," suggested the Commissioner, when he gave his permission.

"I should like to, sir," said Mr. Teal, with great geniality, "but I don't know whether this can wait long enough for him to go home and change."

Pryke adjusted the set of his coat delicately as he rose. It was undoubtedly part of a resplendent suit, being of a light fawn colour with a mauve over-check; a very different proposition from Teal's shiny blue serge.

"I didn't know that Police Regulations required you to look like an out-of-work rag and bone man," he said; and Chief Inspector Teal's complexion was tinged with purple all the way to Hyde Park Corner.

He resented having Inspector Pryke thrust upon him, partly because he resented Inspector Pryke, and partly because the High Fence had been his own individual assignment ever since Johnny Anworth put his knife and fork into that fatal plate of roast beef six weeks ago. For a lieutenant, when necessity called for one, Mr. Teal preferred the morose and angular Sergeant Barrow, who had never been known to speak unless he was spoken to, and who then spoke only to utter some cow-like comment to which nobody with anything better to do need have listened. Chief Inspector Teal had none of the theoretical scientific training in criminology with which the new graduates of the Police College were pumped to offensive overflowing, but he had a background of thirty years' hard-won experience which took the intrusion of manicured theorists uneasily; and at the entrance of the small apartment building in which Sunny Jim Fasson had been located he said so.

"I want you to keep quiet and let me do the talking," was his instruction. "I know how I'm going to tackle Fasson, and I know how to get what I want out of him."

Pryke fingered his M.C.C. tie.

"Like you've always known how to get what you want out of the Saint?" he drawled.

Mr. Teal's lips were tightly compressed as he stumped up the narrow stairway. His seemingly interminable failure to get anything that he really wanted out of that cool smiling devil who passed so incongruously under the name of the Saint was a thorn in his side which Inspector Pryke had twisted dextrously before. Whenever Chief Inspector Teal attempted to impress the rising generation of detectives with his superior craftsmanship, that gibe could always be brought up against him, openly or surreptitiously; and Mr. Teal was getting so tired of it that it hurt. He wished, viciously, that some of the smart infants who were being pushed up under him could have as much to cope with as he had had in his time.

But Sunny Jim Fasson was quite a different problem from the blue-eyed bantering outlaw who had occupied so much of Mr. Teal's time in other days; and he felt a renewal of confidence when he saw Sunny Jim's startled face through the slit of the opening door and wedged his foot expertly in the aperture.

"Don't make a fuss, and nobody's going to hurt you, Sunny," he said.

Sunny Jim, like Johnny Anworth, was also a philosopher, in his way. He retreated into the tiny bed-sitting-room without dropping the ash from his cigar.

"What's it about this time, Mr. Teal?" he inquired, with the sang-froid of old experience.

He did not even bother to put on his cultivated American accent; which saved him considerable trouble, for he had been born in the Old Kent Road and had learnt all that he knew of America from the movies.

"It needn't be about some diamond bracelets that were stolen from Peabody's-unless you want it to be," said Teal, with equal cold-bloodedness.

Sunny Jim raised his eyebrows. The gesture was mechanical.

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Teal."

"Would you know what I meant," replied the detective, with impregnable drowsiness, "if I told you that Peabody has identified your photograph and is quite sure he can identify you; and half the Magnificent Hotel staff are ready to back him up?"

Sunny Jim had no answer to that.

"Mind you," said Teal, carefully unwrapping a fresh slice of chewing gum, "I said that we needn't go into that unless you want to. If you had a little talk with me now, for instance- why, we could settle it all here in this room, and you needn't even come with us to the station. It'd be all over and forgotten -just between ourselves."

When Sunny Jim Fasson was not wearing the well-trained smile from which he had earned his nickname, his face fell into a system of hard-bitten lines which drew an illuminating picture of shrewd and sharp intelligence. Those lines be came visible now. So far as Sunny Jim was concerned, Teal's speech needed no amplification; and Sunny Jim was a man who believed in the comfort and security of Mr. James Fasson first, last, and in the middle. If Teal had arrived half an hour later he would have been on his way to Ostend, but as things were he recognised his best alternative health resort.

"I'm not too particular what I talk about with an old friend, Mr. Teal," he said at length.

"Do you sell your stuff to the High Fence, Sunny?"

Fasson held his cigar under his nose and sniffed the aroma.

"I believe I did hear of him once," he admitted cautiously.

The appearance of bored sleepiness in Chief Inspector Teal's eyes was always deceptive. In the last few seconds they had made a detailed inventory of the contents of the room, and had observed a torn strip of brown paper beside the waste-basket and a three-inch end of string on the carpet under the table.

"You've already got rid of Peabody's diamond bracelets, haven't you?" he said persuasively; and his somnolent eyes went back to Sunny Jim's face and did not shift from it. "All I want to know from you is what address you put on the parcel."

Sunny Jim put his cigar back in his mouth till the end glowed red.

"I did send off a parcel not long ago," he confessed reminiscently. "It was addressed to"

He never said who it was addressed to.

Mr. Teal heard the shot behind him, and saw Sunny Jim's hand jerk to his chest and his body jar with the shock of the bullet. The slam of the door followed, as Teal turned round to it in a blank stupor of incredulity. Pryke, who was nearest, had it open again when his superior reached it; and Teal barged after him in a kind of incandescent daze, out on to the landing. The sheer fantastic unexpectedness of what had happened had knocked his brain momentarily out of the rhythm of conscious functioning, but he clattered down the stairs on Pryke's heels, and actually overtook him at the door which let them out on to the street.

And having got there, he stopped, with his brain starting work again, overwhelmed by the utter futility of what he was doing.

There was nothing sensational to be seen outside. The road presented the ordinary aspect of a minor thoroughfare in the Shepherd Market area at that time of day. There was an empty car parked on the other side of the road, a man walking by with a brief-bag, two women laden down with parcels puttering in the opposite direction, an errand-boy delivering goods from a tricycle. The commonplace affairs of the district were proceeding uninterrupted, the peace of the neighbourhood was unbroken by so much as a glimpse of any sinister figure with a smoking gun scooting off on the conventional getaway. Teal's dizzy gaze turned back to his subordinate. "Did you see him?" he rasped.

"Only his back," said Pryke helplessly. "But I haven't the faintest idea which way he went." Teal strode across to the errand-boy.

"Did you see a man come rushing out of that building just now?" he barked: and the lad looked at him blankly. "Wot sort of man, mister?"

"I don't know," said Teal, with a feeling that he was introducing himself as the most majestic lunatic in creation. "He'd have been running hell for leather-you must have noticed him"

The boy shook his head.

"I ain't seen nobody running abaht, not till you come aht yerself, mister. Wot's the matter-'as 'e pinched something?"

Mr. Teal did not enlighten him. Breathing heavily, he rejoined Junior Inspector Pryke.

"We'd better get back upstairs and see what's happened," he said shortly.

But he knew only too well what had happened. The murder of Johnny Anworth had been repeated, in a different guise, under his very nose-and that after he had pleaded so energetically for a chance to guard against it. He did not like to think what ecstatic sarabands of derision must have been dancing themselves silly under the smug exterior of Desmond Pryke. He clumped up the stairs and across the landing again in a dumb paroxysm of futile wrath, and went back into the flat.

And there he halted again, one step inside the room, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and the last tattered remnants of his traditional pose of sleepiness falling off him like autumn leaves from a tree, staring at what he saw as if he felt that the final vestiges of sanity were reeling away from his overheated mind.

II the body of Sunny Jim Fasson was no longer there. That was the brain-staggering fact which Chief Inspector Teal had to assimilate. It had simply ceased to exist. For all the immediate evidence which Teal's reddening gaze could pick up to the contrary, Sunny Jim Fasson might never have lived there, might never have been interviewed there, and might never have been shot there. The ultimate abysses of interplanetary space could not have been more innocent of any part of Sunny Jim Fasson than that shabby one-room flatlet as Teal saw it then. There could hardly have been much less trace of Sunny Jim if he had never been born.

And instead of that, there was someone else sitting in the chair where the bullet had hit Sunny Jim-a man whose mere recollection was enough to raise Chief Inspector Teal's blood-pressure to apoplectic heights, a man whose appearance on that spot, at that precise catastrophic moment, turned what might have been an ordinary baffling mystery into something that made Mr. Teal's voice fail him absolutely for several seconds.

"Stand up, Saint," he got out at last, in a choking gurgle. "I want you!"

The man peeled himself nonchalantly up from the armchair, and managed to convey the impression that he was merely following a course which he had chosen for himself long ago, rather than that he was obeying an order. And Mr. Teal glowered at him unblinkingly over every inch of that leisured rise.

To anyone unfamiliar with the dim beginnings and cumulative ramifications of the feud between those two (if anyone so benighted can be imagined to exist in the civilised world) Mr. Teal's glower might justifiably have seemed to lack much of the god-like impartiality which ought to smooth the features of a conscientious detective. It was a glower that had no connection with any detached survey of a situation, any abstract weighing of clues and conundrums. It was, to describe it economically, the kind of glower on which eggs can be fried. It was as calorifically biased and unfriendly as a glower can be.

The Saint didn't seem to notice it. He came upright, a lean wide-shouldered figure in a light grey suit which had a swashbuckling elegance that nothing Inspector Pryke wore would ever have, and met the detective's torrid glare with cool and quizzical blue eyes.

"Hullo, Claud," he murmured. "What are you doing here?"

The detective looked up at him dourly-Teal was not nearly so short as his increasing middle-aged girth made him appear, but he had to look up when the Saint stood beside him.

"I want to know what you're doing here," he retorted.

"I came to pay a call on Sunny Jim," said the Saint calmly.

"But he doesn't seem to be here-or did you get here first and knock him off?"

There were times when Mr. Teal could exercise an almost superhuman restraint.

"I'm hoping to find out who got here first," he said grimly. "Sunny Jim has been murdered."

The Saint raised one eyebrow.

"It sounds awfully exciting," he remarked; and his bantering eyes wandered over to Pryke. "Is this the bloke who did it?"

"This is Junior Inspector Pryke, of C Division," said Mr. Teal formally; and the Saint registered ingenuous surprise.

"Is it really?" he murmured. "I didn't know they'd put trousers on the Women Police."

Chief Inspector Teal swallowed hastily; and it is a regrettable fact that a fraction of the inclement ferocity faded momentarily out of his glare. There was no lawful or official reason whatsoever for this tempering of his displeasure, but it was the very first time in his life that he had seen any excuse for the Saint's peculiar sense of humour. He masticated his gum silently for a couple of seconds that gave him time to recover the attitude of mountainous boredom which he was always praying for strength to maintain in the Saint's presence. But his relief was only temporary.

"I suppose you're going to tell me you came to see Fasson just to ask him what he thought about the weather," he said.

"Certainly not," said the Saint blandly. "I wouldn't try to deceive you, Claud. I blew in to see if he knew anything about some diamond bracelets that a bird called Peabody lost this afternoon. I might have pointed out to him that Peabody is very upset about losing those jools. I might have tried to show him the error of his ways, and done my best to persuade him that they ought to be sent back. Or something. But I can't say that I thought of shooting him."

"How did you know he was shot?" Teal cut in.

"My dear fathead, I don't. I merely said that I didn't think of shooting him. Was he shot?"

Teal hesitated for a moment, studying him with that deceptively bovine gaze.

"Yes, he was shot."

"When?"

"Just now."

The bantering blue eyes had an impish twinkle.

"You must have been doing some fast detecting," said the Saint. "Or did somebody tell you?"

Mr. Teal frowned at him, shifting his gum from tooth to tooth till he got it lodged behind his wisdoms. His sluggish glance travelled once again over that keen sunburned face, handsome as Lucifer and lighted with an indescribable glimmer of devil-may-care mockery; and he wondered if there would ever be any peace for him so long as he was in the employment of the Law and that amazing buccaneer was on the other side.

For Simon Templar was the incalculable outlaw for whom the routines of criminal investigation had no precedents. He belonged to no water-tight classification, followed no rules but his own, fitted into no definite category in the official scheme of things. He was the Saint: a creation of his own, comparable to nothing but himself. From time to time, desperate creatures of that nebulously frontiered stratosphere commonly called "the Underworld" had gone forth vowing unprintable revenge, and had come back empty-handed-when they came back at all. Many times, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had thought that all his ambitions would be fulfilled if he could see the Saint safely locked away behind the bars of Larkstone Prison-and yet some of his most spectacular coups could never have been made without the Saint's assistance. And in spite of all the wrath that had been directed on him from these diametrically antagonistic quarters, the Saint had still gone on, a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress who returned from his lawless raids with more booty than any adventurer had ever found before him.

And with all these memories freshened in his mind during that slothful survey, almost against his will, Chief Inspector Teal found himself impotent to believe that the High Fence could be merely another alias of the man before him. It was not psychologically possible. Whatever else could be said about him, the Saint was not a man who sat spinning webs and weaving complex but static mysteries. Everything that he did was active: he would go out to break up the web and take his illicit plunder from the man who wove it, but he wouldn't spin. . . . And yet there was the evidence of Teal's own flabbergasted senses, there in that room, to be explained away; and Mr. Teal had suffered too much at the Saint's hands to feel that there could ever be any comfortable certainty in the wide world when that incorrigible free-booter was around.

He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and said: "Sunny Jim was shot in this room less than five minutes ago. Somebody opened the door and shot him while I was talking to him. He was shot just in time to stop him telling me something I very much wanted to hear. And I want to know what you were doing at that time."

The Saint smiled rather mildly.

"Is that an invitation or a threat?" he inquired.

"It's whichever you like to make it," Teal answered grimly. "Sunny Jim didn't shoot himself, and I'm going to find out who did it."

"I'm sure you are, Claud," said the Saint cordially. "You always do find out these things, with that marvellous brain of yours. . . . Have you thought of the High Fence?"

Teal nodded.

"I have."

"What do you know about the High Fence?" demanded Pryke suspiciously.

Simon took out a cigarette-case and looked at him equably.

"This and that. I've been looking for him for some time, you know."

"What do you want with the High Fence, Saint?" asked Mr. Teal.

Simon Templar glanced with unwontedly passionless eyes at the chair where Sunny Jim had stopped talking, and smiled with his lips. He lighted a cigarette.

"The High Fence has killed two men," he said. "Wouldn't you like a chance to see him in the dock at the Old Bailey?"

"That isn't all of it," answered the detective stubbornly. "You know as well as I do that the High Fence is supposed to keep a lot of the stuff he buys together, and ship it out of the country in big loads. And they say he keeps a lot of cash in hand as well-for buying,"

The glimmer of mockery in the Saint's eyes crisped up into an instant of undiluted wickedness.

"Teal, this is all news to me!"

"You're a liar," said the detective flatly.

He stared at the Saint with all the necessary symptoms of a return of his unfriendly glower, and added: "I know what your game is. You know the High Fence; but you don't know what he does with the stuff he's bought, or where he keeps his money. That's all you want to find out before you do anything about putting him in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of murder. And when that time comes, you'll buy a new car and pay some more cash into your bank balance. That's all the interest you have in these two men who've been killed."

"I can't get around to feeling that either of them is an irreparable loss," Simon admitted candidly. "But what's all this dramatic lecture leading to?"

"It's leading to this," said Teal relentlessly. "There's a law about what you're doing, and it's called being an accessory after the fact."

Simon aligned both eyebrows. The sheer unblushing impudence of his ingenuousness brought a premonitory tinge of violet into the detective's complexion even before he spoke.

"I suppose you know what you're talking about, Claud," he drawled. "But I don't. And if you want to make that speech again in a court of law, they'll want you to produce a certain amount of proof. It's an old legal custom." Only for the second time in that interview, Simon looked straight at him instead of smiling right through him. "There's a lot of laws about what you're doing; and they're called slander, and defamation of character, and"

"I don't care what they're called!"

"But you've got to care," said the Saint reasonably. "After all, you're telling me that a bloke's been shot, and that I did it, or I know something about it. Well, let's begin at the beginning. Let's be sure the bloke's dead. Where's his body?"

In spite of certain superficial resemblances, it can be fairly positively stated that Chief Inspector Teal had never, even in some distant incarnation, been a balloon. But if he had been, and the point of a pin had been strategically applied to the most delicate part of his rotundity, it would have had practically the same effect as the Saint's innocently mooted question. Something that had been holding out his chest seemed to deflate, leaving behind it an expanding and exasperating void. He felt as if someone had unscrewed his navel and his stomach had fallen out.

The cigar which had slipped stupidly out of Sunny Jim's mouth when the bullet hit him was lying on the carpet in front of him, tainting the room with an acrid smell of singeing wool. Teal put his foot on it. It was his only concrete assurance that the whole fantastic affair hadn't been a grotesque hallucination-that the overworked brain which had struggled through so many of the Saint's shattering surprises hadn't finally weighed its anchor and gone wallowing off into senile monsoons of delirious delusion. His lips thinned out in an effort of self-control which touched the borders of homicidal fever.

"That's what I want to know," he said. "The body was here when I went out. When I came in again it had disappeared- and you were here instead. And I think you know something about it."

"My dear Claud," Simon protested, "what d'you think I am-a sort of amateur body-snatcher?"

"I think you're a"

Simon raised his hand.

"Hush," he said, with a nervous glance at Inspector Pryke. "Not before the lady."

Teal gulped.

"I think"

"The trouble is," said the Saint, "that you don't. Here you are shooting off your mouth about a body, and nobody knows whether it exists. You wonder whether I could have shot Sunny Jim, when you don't even know whether he's dead. You hint at pinching me for being an accessory after the fact, and you can't produce the fact that I'm supposed to be an accessory to."

"I can prove"

"You can't. You can't prove anything, except your own daftness. You're doing that now. You ask me what's happened to Sunny Jim's body, with the idea that I must have done some thing with it. But if you can't produce this body, how d'you know it ever was a body? How d'you know it didn't get up and walk out while you were away? How d'you know any crime's been committed at all?" The Saint's lean forefinger shot out and tapped the detective peremptorily on the waistcoat, just above his watch-chain. "You're going to make a prize idiot of yourself again, Claud, if you aren't very careful; and one of these days I shall be very angry with you. I put up with the hell of a lot of persecution from you----"

"Will you stop that?" barked Mr. Teal, jerking his tummy hysterically back from the prodding finger.

The Saint smiled.

"I am stopping it, dear old pumpkin," he pointed out. "I've just told you that my patience is all wore out. I'm not taking any more. Now you go ahead and think out your move. Do you take a chance on running me in for murdering a bloke that nobody can prove was murdered, and stealing a corpse that nobody can prove is a corpse-or do you 'phone for your photographers and finger-print fakers and leave me out of it?"

Glowering at him in a supercharged silence that strained against his ribs, Mr. Teal thought of all the things he would have liked to do, and realised that he could do none of them. He was tied up in a knot which there was no visible way of unravelling. He had seen similar knots wound round him too often to cherish any illusions on that score-had gorged his spleen too often on the maddeningly confident challenges of that debonair picaroon to hope that any amount of thought could make this one more digestible.

It was air-tight and water-tight. It was as smooth as the Saint's languid tantalising voice. It located the one unanswerable loophole in the situation and strolled through it with as much room to spare as an ant going through the Arc de Triomphe. It was exactly the sort of thing that the Saint could always be relied upon to do.

The knowledge soaked down into Mr. Teal's interior like a dose of molten lead. The ancient duel was embarking upon the umpteenth round of a series which seemed capable of going on into eternity; and the prospect seemed as hopeless as it had always seemed. If Mr. Teal had any formulated idea of hell, it was something exactly like that-an endless succession of insoluble riddles that he had to try to solve, while the Saint's impudent forefinger and the Assistant Commissioner's disparaging sniff worked in alternate relays to goad his thoughts away from the last relics of coherence. And there were moments when he wondered if he had already died without knowing it, and was already paying for his long-forgotten sins.

"You can go, for the present," he said smoulderingly. "I'll find you again when I want you."

"I'm afraid you will," said the Saint sadly, and adjusted the brim of his hat to the correct piratical angle. "Well, I'll be seein' ya, Claud Eustace. . . ." He turned his vague, unspeakably mischievous smile on to Junior Inspector Pryke, who had been standing sulkily mute since he was last noticed. "And you too, Sweet Pea," he said hopefully.

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal watched his departure with malignant gloom. It was discouragingly reminiscent of too many other Saintly exits that Mr. Teal had witnessed, and he had a very apathetic interest in the flashlight photography and finger-print dusting which he had to superintend during the next hour or two.

For those records were made only at the dictation of a system in which Mr. Teal was too congenitally rut-sunk to question. There was a fire escape within easy reach of the bathroom window which had more to tell than any number of photographs of an empty chair from which an unproven corpse had disappeared.

Sunny Jim Fasson had been shot at by somebody who had opened the door of the flatlet while Mr. Teal was interrogating him, the same somebody who had found means of silencing Johnny Anworth on the verge of an identically similar squeak; after which Fasson had vanished off the face of the earth. And Teal had a seething conviction that the only living man who knew every secret of what had happened was walking free in the Saint's custom-built shoes.

The Assistant Commissioner was very polite. "But it has possibly failed to occur to you," he commented, "that this is the sort of thing news editors pray for."

"If you remember, sir," Pryke put in smugly, "I was against the idea from the first."

"Quite," said the Commissioner. "Quite." He was a man who had won his appointment largely on the qualification of a distinguished career of pig-sticking and polo-playing with the Indian Army, and he was inclined to sympathise with the officer whom he regarded as a pukka sahib, like himself. "But you went with Mr. Teal, and you may know why Templar was not at least arrested on suspicion."

"On suspicion of what?" demanded Teal wildly. "The worst you could prove is that he abetted Fasson's escape; and that means nothing, because Fasson hadn't even been arrested."

Pryke nibbled his thumb-nail.

"I believe that if we could account for the Saint, the rest of the mystery would be settled," he said.

"Mr. Teal has been trying to account for the Saint for several years," the Assistant Commissioner reminded him acrimoniously.

What Mr. Teal wanted to say would have reduced Scotland Yard to a small pool of steaming lava.

III SIMON TEMPLAR sauntered around the corners of a couple of blocks, and presently waited by the kerb while a big grey saloon cruised slowly up towards him. As it came level, he stepped neatly on to the running-board, opened the nearest door, and sank into the seat beside the driver. As if the upholstery on which he deposited his weight had had some direct connection with the accelerator, the car picked up speed again and shot away into the traffic with its engine purring so smoothly that the leap of the speedometer needle seemed an absurd exaggeration.

With her small deft hands on the steering wheel nosing a way through the traffic stream where no one else but the Saint himself would have seen a way visible, Patricia Holm took her eyes momentarily from the road to glance at him helplessly.

"What on earth," she inquired, "are we playing at?"

The Saint chuckled.

"Is the game puzzling you, old darling?"

"It's doing its best." She took his cigarette away from be tween his fingers while she thrust the murmuring grey car under the snout of a speeding lorry with the other hand. "You come down this way to see Fasson about some diamonds. You and Hoppy go in to see him. After a while Hoppy comes out with a body; and a long time after that you come out yourself, looking as if you'd just heard the funniest story of your life. Naturally I'm beginning to wonder what we're playing at."

Simon took out his cigarette-case and replaced his stolen smoke.

"I suppose you aren't so wide of the mark, with the funny story angle," he admitted. "But I thought Hoppy would have put you on the trail."

He slewed round to cock an eyebrow at the passenger who rode in the back seat; but the passenger only gazed back at him with troubled blankness and said: "I dunno what de game is, neider, boss."

Hoppy Uniatz had never been really beautiful, even as a child, and the various contacts which his face had had with blunt instruments since then had not improved it. But it has sometimes been known for such faces to be lighted with a radiance of spirituality and intellect in which their battered irregularity of contour is easily forgotten.

The physiognomy of Mr. Uniatz was illuminated by no such light. Reluctant as Simon Templar always was to disparage such a faithful friend, he could never honestly claim for Mr. Uniatz any of those intellectual qualities which might have redeemed his other failings. A man of almost miraculous agility on the draw, of simple and unquestioning loyalties, of heroic appetite, and of a tank-like capacity for absorbing incredible quantities of every conceivable blend of alcohol- yes, Mr. Uniatz possessed all those virtues. But a strenuous pursuit of most of the minor rackets of the Bowery had never left him time to develop the higher faculties of that curious organisation of reactions which can only apologetically be called his brain. Simon Templar perceived that Mr. Uniatz could not have enlightened anybody. He was in painful search of enlightenment himself.

Simon dropped an arm over the back of the seat and hauled up another hitherto invisible passenger, on whom Mr. Uniatz had been thoughtlessly resting his feet.

"This is Sunny Jim, Pat," he explained.

"Hoppy did manage to tell me that much," said Patricia Holm with great patience. "But did you really have to bring him away?"

"Not really," said the Saint candidly, allowing the passenger to drop back again on to the floor. "But it struck me as being quite a good idea. You see, Sunny Jim is supposed to be dead."

"How do you know he isn't?"

Simon grinned.

"There might be some argument about it," he conceded. "At any rate, he's among the Saints."

"But what was it all about?"

The Saint lighted his cigarette and stretched himself out.

"Well, it was this way. Hoppy and I blew up the fire-escape, as arranged, and went in through the bathroom window. When we got inside, what should we hear but the voice of good old Claud Eustace Teal, holding converse with Sunny Jim. Apparently Claud was just on the point of getting a squeak out of him, and I was just getting down to the keyhole to take a look at the seance and hear what Sunny had to say, when a gun went off and broke up the party. As far as I've been able to make out, somebody opened the front door and took a pot at Sunny Jim at the crucial moment, and Teal went chasing the assassin down the stairs, along with a perfectly twee little policebody from Eton that he had with him."

Simon drew at his cigarette with a reminiscent smile, while the grey car whirled around Piccadilly Circus and plunged down the Haymarket.

"Anyway, Hoppy and I beetled in while they were away, and took a gander at Sunny Jim. And as a matter of fact, he isn't dead; though he's had the narrowest shave that any man ever had, and his head's going to ring carillons when he wakes up. He's been creased as neatly as I've ever seen it done-the bullet just parted his hair in a new place and knocked him out, but his skull hasn't any holes in it. That's when I had my brilliant idea."

"I was hoping we'd get to that," said the girl.

"But haven't you seen it already?" Simon demanded. "Look at what I've told you! Here's Sunny Jim preparing to squeal, and somebody tries to rub him out. Why? Squealers don't get bumped off, not in this country, just because they may have a little tit-bit to give away. Sunny Jim must have known something worth knowing; and there he was, sitting in his chair, out to the world, and nobody to get in our way. The bumper-offer can't be sure what's happened to him, and Claud Eustace is probably quite sure he's dead. But nobody knows. . . . Isn't it all pretty obvious?"

"It's getting clearer."

"Of course it is! I tell Hoppy to grab the body and hustle it down the fire-escape, out to this car, and pick me up later. And I wait for Claud Eustace and his boy friend. We exchange the compliments of the season, and have lots of fun and games together. And then I walk out. As soon as the next editions are on the streets, the bumper-offer is going to know that his body disappeared while I was around, and he's going to work himself into seven different kinds of cold sweat wondering whether it is a body. He may guess that it isn't, and itch to bump me off for what I may have found out from it; but he can't do that because if I got killed he'd never know what had happened to the body and where it might turn up next. Doesn't that make you see the joke?"

Patricia nodded slowly.

"But who," she said, "was the bumper-offer?"

"Who else could it be," asked the Saint, "but our old friend that all the excitement and bubble is about-the High Fence?"

There were adequate grounds for the outbreak of official excitement and bubble which had been provoked by the man who was known only by that unusual name.

A fence, in the argot, is nothing to do with steeple-chasing or an enclosure containing sheep. He is the receiver of stolen goods, the capitalist of crime, and incidentally the middleman but for whose functioning larceny in most of its forms would soon die a natural death. He runs less risk than any of the actual stealers, and makes much bigger profits. And very often he takes his cut both ways, making his profit on the receipt of stolen goods and betraying the stealers to a friendly detective at the same time.

The fence is a member of an unchartered union, the only code of which is to pay as little for a purchase as the vendor can be persuaded to accept.

Seven or eight months ago, the invisible tentacles of the C.I.D., which spread wider and more delicately than many of its critics would believe, touched on the rumour of a man who violated that rule. He bought nothing but metals and precious stones, and paid twice as much for them as any other receiver in London was offering. By contenting himself with a hundred per cent, profit instead of three hundred per cent. He could well afford to do it; but it is a curious fact that no other receiver before him had thought of such a scandalously unethical expedient. And through the strange subterranean channels in which such gossip circulates, the word went round that he was "good."

Because of the prices he paid, they called him the High Fence; but nobody knew anything more about him. He had no shop where he conducted his business. Anything that was offered to him for sale had to be sent through the post, to an accommodation address which was changed every week. The address was passed round the limited circle of his clients by word of mouth, and it was impossible to find out who first put it into circulation. Every client had always "heard about it" from another-the trail turned inevitably into a hopeless merry-go-round. Nor was the circle of initiates unrestricted. It was a jealously closed ring of talent which the High Fence picked for himself; and queer things were rumoured to have happened to those who had ventured to spread the good news among their friends without permission. To those who were tempted by circumstances to talk to the C.I.D., even queerer things could happen-as we have shown.

The High Fence might never have encountered a serious setback, if there had not been one outlaw in England for whom queer happenings had no terrors, and to whom the scent of booty was the supreme perfume in the breath of life.

"I'm afraid Claud Eustace has a depressingly cynical idea of what I'm up to," said the Saint. "He thinks I know who the High Fence is-in which he's flattering me too much, and I wish he wasn't. And he thinks that all I'm wanting is to find out where this bird keeps his boodle and his cash, so that I can take it off him before he gets pinched."

"In which he's perfectly right."

The Saint sighed.

"I don't know where you get these ideas from," he said in a pained voice. "By the way, are you going anywhere in particular, or are we just sight-seeing?"

"I'm waiting for you to tell me."

"Let's go to Abbot's Yard-it's about the only hide-out we have left that isn't in Teal's address-book. And I don't think Sunny Jim is going to be too keen on seeing callers for a while."

He relaxed at full length, with his eyes half closed against the smoke curling past them from his cigarette, while she circled Sloane Square and headed west along the King's Road. The soft waves of her fair golden head rippled in the gentle stir of air that came through the windows; her face was as calmly beautiful as if she had been driving them on nothing less innocuous than the commonplace sightseeing tour which he had mentioned. Perhaps she was only calm because even the most adventurous girl, after some years of partnership with such a man, must achieve permanent nonchalance or perish of nervous exhaustion; but one never knew. . . . And in the back of the car, Mr. Uniatz and Mr. Fasson were both, in their respective ways, silently unconscious.

The car threaded its way more slowly through the clotted congestion of trucks, omnibuses, vans, and drays with which the King's Road is permanently constipated, and turned off abruptly into a narrow side street composed of cottage hovels with freshly painted and utterly dilapidated fronts in approximately equal proportions. It was one of those Chelsea backwaters which are undergoing a gloomy degradation from honest slumdom to synthetic Bohemianism, and the external symptoms of its decay gave it an air of almost pathetic indecision, like a suburban bank manager on a spree in the high spots, who is trying to make up his mind whether to be thoroughly folksy or very dignified, but who is quite certain that he is as sober and important as any of his co-revellers. But in spite of this uninviting aspect, it contained a comfortable studio which the Saint had found useful before; and Simon roused himself cheerfully to open the door beside him as the car stopped.

"I think it's a case for the wheel-chair and blanket," he said, after a judicial survey of Sunny Jim.

The transportation of an unconscious captive across a London pavement is not quite such an easy and automatic affair as the credulous reader of fiction may have been deluded to believe; but Simon Templar had had such problems to solve before. On one of the rare occasions on which Mr. Uniatz did not find it necessary to delay the proceedings with unnecessary questions, he hopped intelligently out of the car and opened the door of the studio with a key which the Saint threw at him. After a brief absence, he returned with an invalid chair. Simon took the folded blanket from the seat, and between them they wrapped the limp figure of Sunny Jim Fasson tenderly up in it-so tenderly that there was not enough of him left protruding for any stray passer-by to recognise. In this woolly cocoon they carried him to the chair, and in the chair wheeled him up the steps and into the house, with all the hushed solicitude of two expectant nephews handling a rich and moribund uncle. And, really, that was all about it.

"There is beer in the pantry," said the Saint, subsiding into a chair in the studio. "But don't let Hoppy see it, or I never shall. Hoppy, you get a sponge of cold water and see if you can bring the patient round."

"He does wake up, once," said Mr. Uniatz reminiscently. "In de car. But I club him wit' de end of my Betsy and he goes to sleep again."

Simon gazed after him resignedly, and sipped the glass of Carlsberg which Patricia brought to him. A sense of tact and diplomacy could well be added to the other virtues in which Mr. Uniatz was so unfortunately deficient. Hoping to extract information from a man by presenting oneself to him as his saviour and honorary guardian angel, one endeavours to calm the aching brain. One tends the wounds. One murmurs consolation and soothing comfort. One does not, intelligently, greet him on his first return to consciousness by clubbing him with the blunt end of a Betsy. It rather ruled out the potentialities of guile and cunning; but the Saint was equally prepared for the alternative.

He finished his cigarette at leisure while Mr. Uniatz applied his belated ministrations; and presently an inaugural groan from the invalid chair brought him up to take over the management of the interview.

"Welcome, stranger," he said genially.

IV SUNNY JIM FASSON did not seem happy. It is not overstimulating for any man with less solid bone in his head than a Mr. Uniatz to first have his skull grazed by a bullet, and then at the first sign of recovery from that ordeal to be slugged over the ear with a gun-butt; and certainly much of the sunshine from which Sunny Jim had once taken his nickname was missing from his countenance. With the damp traces of Hoppy's first-aid practice trickling down his nose and chin, he looked more like a picture of November Day than one of Hail, Smiling Morn.

It was perhaps discouraging that the first person he saw when he blinked open his eyes was Hoppy Uniatz. He stared at him hazily for a moment, while his memory worked painfully back to its last association with that homely face; and then, remembering all, he half rose from the chair and lashed out with his fist. That also was discouraging, for Mr. Uniatz had won his scars in a vocation where the various arts of violence are systematised to the ultimate degree: he hopped aside from the blow with an agility that gave an unexpected meaning to his name, and in another split second he had caught Sunny Jim's wrist and twisted it firmly up behind his back.

He looked round at the Saint with a beam of justifiable pride, like a puppy that has performed its latest trick. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.

"Okay, boss?" he queried. "Or do I give him de heat?"

"That remains to be seen," said the Saint imperturbably. He picked up the sponge and weighed it meditatively in his hand. "Is your brain working again, Sunny, or would you like another refresher?"

Fasson glowered at him sullenly, with a hint of fear in his eyes.

"What do you want?" he snarled.

"Personally, I only want a little talk." Simon weighed the sponge again, and dropped it back in the basin. "But Hoppy seems to have other ideas. By the way, have you met Hoppy? This is Mr. Uniatz, Jim-a one hundred per cent. American from Poland."

"I know him," said Fasson viciously. "He hit me over the head with his gun."

"So he tells me," agreed the Saint, with some regret. "Otherwise this little chat of ours might have been much more amicable. But he's quite a tough guy in his way, is Hoppy; and he's got a kind of natural habit of hitting people with his gun -either with one end or the other. Do you know what he means when he talks about giving you the heat?"

Sunny Jim did not answer. Studying that suspicious surly face from which all the artificial sunshine had been removed, Simon realised that the friendly conversation which he had had in mind at the beginning would have wanted a lot of organising, even without Hoppy's intervening indiscretion.

"Well, he might mean one of two things, Sunny. He might mean taking you for a ride-ferrying you out to some nice secluded spot and dropping you in a ditch with a tummy-full of liver pills. Or he might mean just making himself sort of unpleasant-twisting your arm off, or burning your feet, or some jolly little romp like that. I never know, with Hoppy. He gets such fascinating ideas. Only the other day, he got hold of a fellow he didn't care for and tied him out on an iron bedstead and burnt candles under the springs-the bloke was awfully annoyed about it."

"Who are you?" rasped Fasson shakily.

The Saint smiled.

"Templar is the name, dear old bird. Simon Templar. Of course, there are all sorts of funny rumours about my having another name-people seem to think I'm some sort of desperado called ... let me see, what is it?"

The fear in Sunny Jim's eyes brightened into a sudden spark of panic.

"I know who you are," he said. "You're the Saint!"

Simon raised his eyebrows innocently.

"The very name I was trying to remember. People think"

"You're the High Fence!"

Simon shook his head.

"Oh, no. You're wrong about that."

"You're the swine who tried to shoot me just now."

"Wrong again, brother. When I try to shoot people, they don't usually have a chance to be rude to me afterwards. But don't let's talk about unpleasant things like that." The Saint flipped out his cigarette-case and put a smoke between his lips. "Let's be friendly as long as we can. I didn't shoot you, but I happened into your place just after the shooting. I sort of felt that you couldn't be feeling too happy about the way things were going, so I shifted you out of there. But I still think we ought to have a talk."

Fasson's shifty eyes travelled round the room, and came back to the Saint's face. He answered through his teeth.

"I can't tell you anything."

"Perhaps you haven't quite recovered yet," said the Saint persuasively. "After all, you were going to tell Chief Inspector Teal something. By the way, have you met Mr.

Uniatz? Only the other day"

"I don't know anything!"

Hoppy Uniatz shuffled his feet. It is improbable that more than two consecutive words of the conversation which has just been recorded had percolated through the protective layers of ivory that encased his brain; but he had a nebulous idea that time was being wasted, and he could not see why.

"Do I give him de heat, boss?" he inquired hopefully.

Simon inhaled thoughtfully; and Mr. Uniatz, taking silence for an answer, strengthened his grip. Fasson's face twisted and turned pale.

"Wait a minute!" he gasped shrilly. "You're breaking my arm!"

"That's too bad," said the Saint concernedly. "What does it feel like?"

"You can't do this to me!" shrieked Sunny Jim. "He'd kill me! You know what happened just now"

"I know," said the Saint coolly. "But there are lots of different ways of dying. Hoppy knows no end of exciting ones, and I've tried to warn you about him. I don't really want to have to let him go ahead with what he's wanting to do, instead of just playing at it as he is now; but if you've absolutely made up your mind. . . ."

Sunny Jim gulped. The sharp agony in his shoulder, where Hoppy Uniatz's powerful leverage was exerting itself, made the other unpleasant possibilities which the Saint had hinted at seem frightfully close at hand; but he could not find a shadow of pity or remorse in the clear blue eyes that were studying him with the dispassionate curiosity of an entomologist watching the wriggling of a captured insect.

"Do you want me to be murdered?" he sobbed.

"I shouldn't weep at your funeral," Simon confessed coldbloodedly. "But I shouldn't look at things so pessimistically, if I were you. We could probably look after you for a bit, if you told us anything worth knowing-we might even get you out of the country and send you away for a holiday in the South of France until the excitement's all over. But you've got to spill what you know first, and I'm waiting for it to dawn on you that you'll either talk voluntarily or else we'll put you through the mangle and wring it out of you."

His voice was casual and almost kindly; but there was something so tireless and inflexible behind it that Sunny Jim shivered. He was no hot-house flower himself, but in the circles where he moved there were stories about the Saint, brought in by men who had met that amazing buccaneer to their misfortune-legends that told of a slim bantering outlaw whose smile was more deadly than any other man's anger, who faced death with a jest and sent men into eternity with his flippant farewell ringing in their ears. . . . The pain in his shoulder sharpened under Hoppy's impatient hands, and he saw that the Saint's dark lawless face was quite impassive, with the trace of an old smile lingering absent-mindedly on the reckless lips. . . .

"Damn you!" he whimpered. "I'll talk. . . . But you've got to let me go."

"Tell me something first."

Fasson's breath came in a grating sigh.

"The Kosy Korner-in Holborn"

Simon blew a couple of smoke-rings, and nodded to Mr. Uniatz.

"Okay, Hoppy," he said. "Give him a rest."

Hoppy Uniatz released his grip, and wiped his palms down his trousers. In so far as his gargoyle features were capable of expressing such an emotion, he looked shocked. As one who had himself kept an iron jaw under everything that could be handed to him in the back rooms of more than one station house in his own country, the spectacle of a guy who came apart under a mere preliminary treatment filled him with the same half-incredulous disgust that an English gentleman feels on meeting a cad who is not interested in cricket.

"I guess dese Limeys can't take it, boss," he said, groping through genuine puzzlement to the only possible conclusion.

Sunny Jim glared at him in vengeful silence. His face was white with pain, and his shoulder really felt as if it had been dislocated. He rubbed it tenderly, while Simon recovered his beer and sat on the edge of the table.

"Well?" Simon prompted him gently.

"I don't know anything much. I've told you- "Have you traded with the High Fence before?"

"Yes." Sunny Jim sat hunched in his chair, shrugging his shoulders gingerly in an occasional effort to reassure himself that the joints were still articulating. The words dragged reluctantly through his mouth. "That's how I know. I wanted to know who the High Fence was. I sent him some stuff once, and waited outside the address to see who picked it up. I saw who took it. I started to tail him, but then I got picked up by a split, and I lost him while we were talking."

"But?"

"I saw him again the next day, by accident. In this restaurant."

"The Kosy Korner?"

Fasson nodded, and licked his lips.

"Can I have a drink?" he asked hoarsely.

The Saint made a sign to Hoppy, who abandoned his futile attempt to drain non-existent dregs out of the bottle from which Simon had refilled his glass and left the room. The Saint's cool blue eyes did not leave Sunny Jim's face.

"And what happened there?"

Fasson got out of his chair and limped around the table, rubbing his head dazedly.

"This fellow shoved the packet in the pocket of an over coat that was hanging on the rail"

At that moment he was beside the empty bottle which Mr. Uniatz had put down; and for once Simon Templar's understanding was a fraction of a second slow. He did not clearly comprehend what was happening until the neck of the bottle was clutched in Sunny Jim's fist, swinging up and spinning away from the hand with vicious speed.

With an instinct that was swifter than any reasoned understanding, he ducked his head and felt the cold graze of the glass stroking past his ear before it splintered on the wall behind him with an explosive smash; but that automatic movement of self-preservation lost him a vital second of time. He rolled off the table and leapt for the door, only to have it slammed in his face; and when he had wrenched it open again Sunny Jim's footsteps were clattering wildly down the second flight of stairs.

Sunny Jim Fasson tore out into the narrow street and started to run down towards the bright lights of the main thoroughfare. He didn't know exactly where he was going, but he knew that his one broad object was to remove himself as quickly as possible from the city where so many deadly things had begun to happen in one evening. Chance had given him one infinitesimal spark of knowledge that he should not have possessed, normal psychology had tempted him to use it in the purchase of his freedom when Chief Inspector Teal had called; but he had not thought of the retribution. Of what had happened since that brain-dulling bullet graze across his head he preferred not to think; but he had a foggy idea that whichever way he turned in that perilous tangle would lead him into new dangers. He had had one warning that day. To be killed for squealing, to be tortured and perhaps killed for not squealing-he saw nothing but trouble in every prospect that was offered to him. except the one primitive remedy of frantic flight. He stumbled into the King's Road with his chest heaving, and hesitated on the corner in a moment's ghastly indecision. ... A motor-cycle with a particularly noisy exhaust had started up behind him, but he did not think to look round. It seemed to back-fire twice in quick succession; and a tearing shattering agony beside which Hoppy Uniatz's third degree was a fleabite crashed into his back and sent him sprawling blindly forward into the gutter. . . .

Simon Templar stood in the half-open doorway and saw the motor-cycle whip round the corner and vanish with its engine roaring. He was aware that Hoppy Uniatz was breathing heavily down his neck, making strange grunting noises in an ecstasy of impatience to get past him.

"Lemme go after him an' give him de woiks, boss," he was pleading. "I'll get him, sure."

The Saint's fingers were still curled over the butt of his own gun, which he had not had time to draw.

"You're too late, Hoppy," he said quietly. "He's got the works."

He stepped back into the hall and moved aside to let Mr. Uniatz look out. A small crowd was gathering round the spread-eagled shape on the corner, and the wail of a police whistle drifted faintly over the rumble of untroubled traffic. Simon closed the door again.

"So ya had him on de spot," said Mr. Uniatz, with proper admiration. "Chees, boss, you got it all on de top storey. Howja know he was gonna take a powder?"

"I didn't," said the Saint evenly, and went back up the stairs to Patricia.

He knew of nobody who would mourn the passing of Sunny Jim for long, and his own regret for the untimely accident was as sincere as anyone's.

"We'll be moving, kid," he said. "Sunny Jim has clocked out."

"Did you shoot him?"

He shook his head.

"That was the mistake Hoppy made. But I hadn't any reason to. There was a bloke waiting outside on a motor-bike, and he got him-it may have been the High Fence himself. I thought this address was our own secret, but somebody else seems to have got on to it. So we'll move on." He lighted another cigarette and trickled an airy feather of smoke through his lips, while Hoppy came plodding up to join them; and she saw that his blue eyes were as bright and cold as steel. "We've lost our insurance policy, old dear. But there may be something better than an insurance policy at the Kosy Korner; and I'm going to find out what it is if I eat there till I'm poisoned!"

V Of the millions of people who read of the vanishing and double murder of Sunny Jim Fasson at their breakfast-tables the next morning-the ingredients of the case were sensational enough to give it a place on the front page of every newspaper that had a front page-a certain Mr. Clive Enderby was not the least perturbed.

Nobody who saw him going to his office that morning would have thought it. Nobody who looked at him with a cynical eye would have suspected him of ever being perturbed about anything. Nobody would have suspected him of thinking about anything. Pottering down the steps of his old-fashioned apartment in Ladbroke Grove, he looked like a typical middle-aged British business man.

He was rather thin and long-faced, a little stooped about the shoulders, a little flat about the feet, a little under-exercised about the stomach. These things were not positive characteristics, but rather vague and diffident tendencies: to have been positive about anything would have been bad form, a vulgar demonstration in which only temperamental foreigners (a sub-human species) indulged. He wore a respectable bowler hat, and, although it was clear and warm, a dark overcoat and brown kid gloves, because the calendar had not yet announced the official advent of summer. He rode to Holborn Circus on a bus, ingesting his current opinions on every subject under the sun from the Morning Post. No one would have believed that under the crown of that respectable and unemphatic derby he held the key to a riddle that was working Scotland Yard into a lather of exasperation.

From Holborn Circus he walked to Hatton Garden. His office was on the third floor of a sombre building just off that most unhorticultural preserve, where the greatest jewel business in the world is conducted by nondescript men at street corners and over the tables of adjacent cafes and public houses. It consisted of no more than a couple of shabby unpretentious rooms, but a surprising volume of trade in precious stones passed through it. For three hours Mr. Enderby was fully occupied, in his slow-moving way, poring over an accumulation of letters and cables from all parts of the world, and dictating stodgy replies to his unattractive secretary, who could have coped efficiently with two hundred and fifty words a minute but in Mr. Enderby's employment had never been strained to a higher average than ten.

At a quarter past twelve he had a telephone call.

"Where are you lunching?" asked the voice.

Mr. Enderby showed no surprise or puzzlement at being bluntly addressed with such a question by a caller who did not even announce his identity.

"I thought of going to the Kosy Korner again," he said primly.

He had a voice rather like an apologetic frog.

"That'll do," said the receiver, after a moment's thought; and a click terminated the conversation without further ceremony.

Mr. Enderby put down the telephone and ponderously finished dictating the letter in which he had been interrupted. He got up, put on his bowler hat and his superfluous overcoat, and went out. On his way through Hatton Garden he stopped and bought two stones from an acquaintance on the pavement, wrapping them in bits of tissue paper and tucking them away in his waistcoat pocket.

The Kosy Korner is one of those glorified tearooms run by impoverished dowagers of stupendous refinement with which the central areas of London are infested. At the time when Mr. Enderby arrived there, it was already well filled with an assortment of business men, clerks, stenographers, and shop assistants, all apparently yearning after a spot of Kosiness to stimulate their digestion of that exquisite roast beef and boiled cabbage which has made English cooking famous among gourmets the world over. Mr. Enderby filtered through the mob to a groaning coat-rack already laden with the outer garments of other customers, where he parked his bowler hat and overcoat. He sat in a vacant chair and ate his meal as if it were a necessary evil, a dull routine business of stoking his interior with the essential fuel for continued functioning, reading the Morning Post between mouthfuls and paying no attention to anyone else in the place. He washed the repast down with a cup of tea, folded his paper, paid his bill, pushed two coppers under the plate, and got up. He took down his hat from the rack and sorted out his overcoat. There was a small parcel in one side pocket, as he felt when he fished out his gloves, which had not been there when he hung up the coat; but even this did not make him register any surprise. He did not even take it out to see what it was.

Back in his office, Mr. Enderby spoke to his secretary.

"I had a large order at lunch for some stones to go to America," he said. "They will have to catch the Oceanic tomorrow. Will you ring up the insurance company and make the usual arrangements?"

While she was at the telephone, he broke open the parcel from his overcoat pocket and spilled a small handful of diamonds on to his blotter. He looked at them for a moment, and then turned to the safe behind his desk. It was a comparatively new one of the very latest design, a huge gleaming hulk of steel which would have seemed more at home in a bank Vault than in that dingy room. He set the two combinations, turned a key in the lock, and swung back the massive door. There was nothing on the shelves but a couple of cheap cardboard boxes. He took them out and tipped their contents on to the blotter also, submerging the first sprinkle of diamonds which he had put down. A solid heaped cone of glittering wealth, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies, iridescent with all the colours of the rainbow, winked up at him.

"That will be all right, Mr. Enderby," said his secretary. "They're sending a man round right away."

Mr. Enderby nodded, and dragged his eyes away from the pile of jewels to glance at the cheap tin clock on the mantelpiece. He was not, as we have seen, very interested in food; but for more years than he could remember he had had a passionate interest in drink. And the hour had not yet struck when such satanic temptations are officially removed from a nation which would otherwise be certain to spend all its afternoons in drunken debauchery.

"I must leave you to pack them up and attend to the formalities, Miss Weagle," he said. "I have-er-another appointment."

Miss Weagle's stoat-like face did not move a single, impolite muscle, although she had listened to a similar ritual every working day for the past five years, and knew perfectly well where Mr. Enderby's appointment would be kept. She was not even surprised that he should leave such a collection of gems in her care, for the casualness with which diamond traders handle huge fortunes in stones is only incredible to the layman.

"Very well, Mr. Enderby. What is the value of the shipment?"

"Twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds," replied Mr. Enderby, after an almost imperceptible deliberation; and he knew his business so well that the most expert and laborious valuation could not have disputed his snap assessment by more than a five-pound note.

He put on his bowler hat and overcoat again, and paddled thirstily out to the streets, mumbling an apology to the red-faced walrus-moustached man whom he had to squeeze past at the top of the narrow stairs; and the walrus-moustached man gazed after him with thoughtful blue eyes which would have seemed incongruously keen and clear if Mr. Enderby had noticed them.

The Saint went back across the landing as Mr. Enderby's footsteps died away, and knocked on the door of the office.

"I'm from the insurance company," he said, when Miss Weagle had let him in.

"About the jewels?"

"Yes."

With his walrus moustache and air of disillusioned melancholy, he reminded Miss Weagle of her mother.

"You've been quick," she said, making conversation when she ought to have been making love.

"I was out on a job, and I had to ring up the office from just round the corner, so they told me to come along," Simon explained, wiping his whiskers on his sleeve. He had spent three hours putting on that ragged growth, and every hair was so carefully planted that its falsehood could not have been detected at much closer quarters than he was ever likely to get to with Miss Weagle. He glanced at the little heap of gems, which Miss Weagle had been packing into another cardboard box lined with cotton-wool. "Are these them?" he asked.

Miss Weagle admitted coyly that those were them. Simon surveyed them disinterestedly, scratching his chin.

"If you'll just finish packing them up, miss," he said, "I'll take 'em along now."

"Take them along?" she repeated in surprise.

"Yes, miss. It's a new rule. Everything of this kind that we cover has to be examined and sealed in our office, and sent off from there. It's on account of all these insurance frauds they've been having lately."

The illicit passion which Miss Weagle seemed to have been conceiving for him appeared to wane.

"Mr. Enderby has been dealing with your firm for a long time," she began with some asperity.

"I know, miss; but the firm can't make one rule for one customer and another for another. It's just a formality as far as you're concerned, but them's my orders. I'm a new man in this district, and I can't afford to take a chance on my own responsibility. I'll give you a receipt for 'em, and they're covered from the moment they leave your hands."

He sat down at the desk and wrote out the receipt on a blank sheet of paper, licking his pencil between every word. The Saint was an incomparable artist in characterisation at any time, but he had rarely practised his art under such a steady tension as he did then, for he had no means of knowing how soon the real insurance company's agent would arrive, or how long Mr. Enderby's appointment would keep him. But he completed the performance without a trace of hurry, and watched Miss Weagle tucking a layer of tissue over the last row of jewels.

"The value is twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds," she said coldly.

"I'll make a note of it, miss," said the Saint, and did so.

She finished packing the box, and he picked it up. He still had to get away with it.

"You doing anything particular next Saturday?" he asked, gazing at her with a hint of wistfulness.

"The idea!" said Miss Weagle haughtily "Do you like Greta Garbo?"

This was different.

"Oh," said Miss Weagle.

She wriggled. Simon had rarely witnessed such a revolting spectacle.

"Meet me at Piccadilly Circus at half-past one," he said.

"All right."

Simon stuffed the box into one of the pockets of his sober and unimaginative black suit, and went to the door. From the door, he blew a juicy kiss through the fringe of fungus which overhung his mouth, and departed with a wink that left her giggling kittenishly-and he was out of the building before she even looked at the receipt he had left behind, and discovered that his signature was undecipherable and there was no insurance company whatever mentioned on it. ...

It was not by any means the most brilliant and dashing robbery that the Saint had ever committed, but it had a pure outrageous perfection of coincidence that atoned for all its shortcomings in the way of gore. And he knew, without the slightest diminution of the scapegrace beatitude that was performing a hilarious massage over his insides, that nothing on earth could have been more scientifically calculated to fan up the flames of vengeance on every side of him than what he had just done.

What he may not have foreseen was the speed with which the inevitable vengeance would move towards him.

Still wearing his deep-sea moustache and melancholy exterior, he walked west to New Oxford Street and entered a business stationer's. He bought a roll of gummed paper tape, with which he made a secure parcel of Mr. Enderby's brown cardboard box, and a penny label which he addressed to Joshua Pond, Esq., Poste Restante, Harwich. Then he went to the nearest post-office and entrusted twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds to the care of His Majesty's mails.

Two hours later he crossed Piccadilly from the Green Park underground station, and a vision of slim fair-haired loveliness turned round from a shop window as he swung in towards her.

"Were you waiting for somebody?" he asked gravely.

Her eyes, as blue as his own, smiled at him uncertainly.

"I was waiting for a bold bad brigand called the Saint, who doesn't know how to keep out of trouble. Have you seen him?"

"I believe I saw somebody like him sipping a glass of warm milk at a meeting of the World Federation for Encouraging Kindness to Cockroaches," he said solemnly. "Good-looking fellow with a halo. Is that the guy?"

"What else was he doing?"

The Saint laughed.

"He was risking the ruin of his digestion with some of Ye Fine Olde Englishe Cookinge which is more deadly than bullets even if it doesn't taste much different," he said. "But it may have been worth it. There was a parcel shoved into a bloke's overcoat pocket some time when I was sweating through my second pound of waterlogged cabbage, just like Sunny Jim said it would be, and I trailed the happy recipient to his lair. I suppose I was rather lucky to be listening outside his door just when he was telling his secretary to get an insurance hound over to inspect the boodle----- By the way, have you ever seen a woman with a face like a stoat and George-Robey eyebrows wriggling seductively? This secretary----"

"Do you mean you- "That's just what I do mean, old darling. I toddled straight into the office when this bloke went out, and introduced my self as the insurance hound summoned as aforesaid in Chapter One. And I got out of Hatton Garden with a packet of boodle valued at twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty quid, which ought to keep the wolf from the door for another day or two." The glint of changeless mischief in his eyes was its own infinite elaboration of the theme. "But it'll bring a lot of other wolves around that'll want rather more getting rid of; and I expect we can look forward to fun and games."

She nodded.

"They've started," she said soberly. "There's a reception committee waiting for you."

He was quite still for a moment; but the edge of humour in his gaze was altered only to become keener and more subtly dangerous.

"How many?"

"One."

His brows sloped up in a hair-line of devil-may-care delight that she knew only too well-a contour of impenitent Saintliness that had made trouble-hunting its profession too long to be disturbed when the trouble came unasked.

"Not poor old Claud Eustace again?" he said.

"No. It's that new fellow-the Trenchard product. I've been waiting here three quarters of an hour to catch you as you came along and tell you. Sam Outrell gave me the wire."

VI The Saint was unperturbed. He had removed the walrus moustache which had whiffled so realistically before Miss Weagle, and with it the roseate complexion and melancholy aspect on which it had bloomed with such lifelike aptness. The costume which he had worn on that occasion had also been put away, in the well-stocked wardrobe of another pied-a-terre which he rented under another of his multitudinous aliases for precisely those skilful changes of identity. He had left the plodding inconspicuous gait of his character in the same place. In a light grey suit which looked as if it had only that morning been unpacked from the tailor's box, and a soft hat canted impudently over one eye, he had a debonair and disreputable elegance which made the deputation of welcome settle into clammily hostile attention.

"I was waiting for you," said Junior Inspector Pryke damply.

"No one would have thought it," said the Saint, with a casual smile. "Do I look like your fairy godmother?"

Pryke was not amused.

"Shall we go up to your rooms?" he suggested; and Simon's gaze rested on him blandly.

"What for, Desmond?" He leaned one elbow on the desk at his side, and brought the wooden-faced janitor into the party with a shift of his lazy smile. "You can't shock Sam Outrell-he knew me before you ever did. And Miss Holm is quite broad-minded, too. By the way, have you met Miss Holm? Pat, this is Miss Desdemona Pryke, the Pride of the Y.W.C.A.-----"

"I'd rather see you alone, if you don't mind," said the detective.

He was beginning to go a trifle white about the mouth; and Simon's eyes marked the symptom with a wicked glitter of unhallowed mischief. It was a glitter that Mr. Teal would have recognised only too easily, if he had been there to see it; but for once that long-suffering waist-line of the Law was not its victim.

"What for?" Simon repeated, with a puzzled politeness that was about as cosy and reliable as a tent on the edge of a drifting iceberg. "If you've got anything to say to me that this audience can't hear, I'm afraid you're shinning up the wrong leg. I'm not that sort of a girl."

"I know perfectly well what I want to say," retorted Pryke chalkily.

"Then I hope you'll say it," murmured the Saint properly. "Come along, now, Desmond-let's get it over with. Make a clean breast of it-as the bishop said to the actress. Unmask the Public School Soul. What's the matter?"

Pryke's hands clenched spasmodically at his sides. "Do you know a man called Enderby?" "Never heard of him," said the Saint unblushingly. "What does he do-bore the holes in spaghetti, or something?"

"At about ten minutes to three this afternoon," said Pryke, with his studiously smooth University accent burring jaggedly at the edges, "a man entered his office, falsely representing himself to be an agent of the Southshire Insurance Company, and took away about twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth of precious stones."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"It sounds like a tough afternoon for Comrade Enderby," he remarked. "But why come and tell me? D'you mean you want me to try and help you recover these jools?"

The antarctic effrontery of his innocence would have left nothing visible in a thermometer but a shrunken globule of congealed quicksilver. It was a demonstration of absolute vacuum in the space used by the normal citizen for storing his conscience that left its audience momentarily speechless. Taking his first ration of that brass-necked Saintliness which had greyed so many of the hairs in Chief Inspector Teal's dwindling crop, Desmond Pryke turned from white to pink, and then back to white again.

"I want to know what you were doing at the time," he said.

"Me?" Simon took out his cigarette-case. "I was at the Plaza, watching a Mickey Mouse. But what on earth has that got to do with poor old Enderby and his jools?"

Suddenly the detective's hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.

"That's what you've got to do with it. That scar on your forearm. Miss Weagle-Mr. Enderby's secretary-saw it on this fake insurance agent's arm when he picked up the parcel of stones. It was part of the description she gave us!"

Simon looked down at his wrist in silence for a moment, the cigarette he had chosen poised forgotten in mid-air, gazing at the tail of the furrowed scar that showed beyond the edge of his cuff. It was a souvenir he carried from quite a different adventure, and he had usually remembered to keep it covered when he was disguised. He realised that he had underestimated both the eyesight of Miss Weagle and the resourcefulness of Junior Inspector Pryke; but when he raised his eyes again they were still bantering and untroubled.

"Yes, I've got a scar there-but I expect lots of other people have, too. What else did this Weagle dame say in her description?"

"Nothing that couldn't be covered by a good disguise," said Pryke, with a new note of triumph in his voice. "Now are you coming along quietly?"

"Certainly not," said the Saint.

The detective's eyes narrowed.

"Do you know what happens if you resist a police officer?"

"Surely," said the Saint, supple and lazy. "The police officer gets a thick ear."

Pryke let go his wrist, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"Do you want me to have you taken away by force?" he asked.

"I shouldn't want you to try anything so silly, Desmond," said the Saint. He put the cigarette between his lips and struck a match with a flick of his thumbnail, without looking at it. "The squad hasn't been hatched yet that could take me away by force without a good deal of commotion; and you know it. You'd get more publicity than a Hollywood divorce- or is that what you're wanting?"

"I'm simply carrying out my orders-------"

"Whose orders?"

46

"That's none of your business," Pryke got out through his teeth.

"I think it is," said the Saint mildly. "After all, I'm the blushing victim of this persecution. Besides, Desmond, I don't believe you. I think you're misguided. You're behind the times. How long have you been here waiting for me?"

"I'm not here to be cross-examined by you," spluttered the detective furiously.

"I'm not cross-examining you, Desmond. I'm trying to lead you into the paths of reason. But you don't have to answer that one if it hurts. How long has this petunia-blossom been here, Sam?"

The janitor glanced mechanically at the clock.

"Since about four o'clock, sir."

"Has it received any message-a telephone call, or anything like that?"

"No, sir."

"Nobody's come in and spoken to it?"

"No, sir."

"In fact, it's just been sitting around here all on its own-some, like the last rose of summer"

Junior Inspector Pryke thrust himself up between them, along the desk, till his chest was almost touching the Saint's. His hands were thrust into his pockets so savagely that the coat was stretched down in long creases from his shoulders.

"Will you be quiet?" he blazed quiveringly. "I've stood asmuch as I can"

"As the bishop said to the actress."

"Are you coming along with me," fumed the detective, "or am I going to have you dragged out?"

Simon shook his head.

"You miss the idea, Desmond." He tapped the other firmly on the lower chest with his forefinger, and raised his eyebrows. "Hullo," he remarked, "your stomach hasn't got nearly so much bounce in it as dear old Teal's."

"Never mind my stomach!" Pryke almost screamed.

"I don't mind it," said the Saint generously. "I admit I haven't seen it in all its naked loveliness; but in its veiled state, at this distance, there seems to be nothing offensive about it."

The noise that Pryke made can only be likened to that of a kettle coming to the boil.

"I'll hear that another time," he said. "Simon Templar, I am taking you into custody------"

"But I'm trying to show you that that's exactly what you mustn't do, Desmond," said the Saint patiently. "It would be fatal. Here you are, a rising young officer on the threshold of your career, trying to pull a flivver that'll set you back four years' seniority. I can't let you do it. Why don't you curb the excessive zeal, Rosebud, and listen to reason? I can tell you exactly what's happened."

"I can tell you exactly what's going to happen--------"

"It was like this," continued the Saint, as if the interruption not merely fell on deaf ears, but had failed miserably in its effort to occur at all. "This guy Enderby was robbed, as you say. Or he thought he was. Or, still more exactly, his secretary thought he was. A bloke calling himself an insurance agent blew into the office, and breezed out again with a parcel of jools. On account of various complications, the secretary was led to believe that this insurance agent was a fake, and the jools had been pinched. Filled with the same misguided zeal that's pulling the buttons of that horrible waistcoat of yours, Desmond, she called the police. Hearing of this, you come puffing round to see me, with your waistcoat bursting with pride and your brain addled with all the uncomplimentary fairy-tales that Claud Eustace Teal has told you about me."

"Who said so?"

"I did. It's a sort of clairvoyant gift of mine. But you must listen to the rest of it. You come blowing round here, and wait for me from four o'clock onwards. Pepped up with the idea of scoring a solo triumph, you haven't said anything to anyone about your scheme. Consequently, you don't know what's happened since you left Headquarters. Which is this. Shortly after the secretary female called for the police, Comrade Enderby himself returned to the office, the shemozzle was explained to him, he explained the shemozzle, and the long and the short of it was that the insurance agent was found to be perfectly genuine, the whole misunderstanding was cleared up, the whole false alarm exposed; and it was discovered that there was nothing to arrest anybody for-least of all me."

"What makes you think that?"

Simon took in a lungful of tobacco smoke, and inhaled through his nose with a slight smile. What made him think that? It was obvious. It was the fundamental formula on which fifty per cent, of his reputation had been built up.

A man was robbed. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, the fact was never published at all. But if ever, through some misguided agent, or during a spasm of temporary but understandable insanity on the part of the victim himself, the fact happened to be published, that same victim, as soon as he discovered the accident or came to his senses, was the first and most energetic on the field to explain away the problem with which Scotland Yard had been faced-for the simple reason that there would be things much harder to explain away if the robber were ever detected.

And the bereavement of Mr. Enderby was so perfectly on all fours with the formula that, with the horns of the dilemma touched in, it would have looked like a purple cow. There was no answer to it. So Mr. Enderby had been robbed of some jewels? Well, could he give a description of the jewels, so that if they were recovered . . . How did the Saint know? He smiled, with unusual tolerance.

"Just the same old clairvoyant gift-working overtime for your special benefit, Desmond. But I'll back it for anything you like to bet-even including that perfectly repulsive shirt you're wearing. If you only got wise to yourself, you'd find that nobody wanted me arrested any more; and it'd save both of us no end of trouble. Now, why don't you get on the 'phone to Headquarters, and bring yourself up to date? Let me do it for you; and then you can save your twopence to buy yourself a bar of milk chocolate on the way home. . . ."

He picked up the telephone on the porter's desk, and pushed his forefinger persuasively into the initial V of the Victoria exchange. It was all ancient history to the Saint, an old game which had become almost stereotyped from many playings, even if with this new victim it had the semblance of a new twist to it. It hadn't seriously occurred to him that the routine could be very different.

And then something hard and compact jabbed into his chest, and his eyes shifted over with genuine surprise from the telephone dial. There was a nickel-plated little automatic in Junior Inspector Pryke's hand-the sort of footling ladylike weapon, Simon couldn't help reflecting, which a man with that taste in clothes must inevitably have affected, but none the less capable of unpleasant damage at contact range. His gaze roamed up to the detective's flaming eyes with a flicker of pained protest that for once was wholly spontaneous and tinged with a glitter of urgent curiosity.

"Put that telephone down," said Pryke sizzlingly.

Simon put the telephone down. There was something in the other's rabid glare which told him that disobedience might easily make Pryke do something foolish-of which the Saint had no desire to suffer the physical effects.

"My dear old daffodil," he murmured, "have you stopped to think that that dinky little pop-gun---------"

"Never mind what I think," rasped the detective, whose range of repartee seemed to make up in venom what it lacked in variety. "If there's any truth in what you're saying, we can verify it when we get you to the station. But you aren't going to run away until it has been verified. Come along!"

His finger was twitching over the trigger; and the Saint sighed.

He felt rather sorry for Junior Inspector Pryke. While he disliked the man's face, and his voice, and his clothes, and almost everything else about him, he had not actually plumbed such implacable depths of hatred as to wish him to turn himself into a horrible example which would be held up for the disgusted inspection of students of the Police College for the next decade. But it seemed as if this was the only ambition Desmond Pryke had to fulfil, and he had left no stone unturned in his efforts to achieve it. From permitting himself to be lured into an argument on comparative gastrometry to that final howler of pulling a gun to enforce an ordinary arrest, Junior Inspector Pryke had run doggedly through the complete catalogue of Things A Young Policeman Should Not Do; but it was not Simon Templar's fault.

The Saint shrugged.

"Okay, Desmond," he murmured. "If that's the way you feel about it, I can't stop you. I've done my best. But don't come around asking me for a pension when they drum you out of the Force."

He put on his hat, and pulled the brim out to the perfect piratical tilt. There was not a shadow of misgiving in the smile that he gave Patricia, and he saw no reason for there to be a shadow.

"Be seein' ya, keed," he said. "Don't worry-I'll be back for dinner. But I'm afraid Desdemona is going to have a pain in her little turn-turn before then."

He sauntered out unhurriedly into Stratton Street, and himself hailed the nearest taxi. Pryke put away his gun and climbed in after him. The cab turned into Piccadilly with a burden of internal silence that was almost broken by the exuberance of its own one-sided rancour.

Simon's nostrils detected a curious sweet scent in the air he was breathing. Ever the genial optimist, he tried to thaw out the polar obmutescence with a fresh turn of pleasant gossip.

"That perfume you're using, Desmond," he said. "I don't think I've come across it before. What's it called-Pansy's Promise? Or is it Quelques Tantes?"

"You wait till we get to the station," said the detective, with sweltering monotony. "Perhaps you won't feel so funny then."

"Perhaps I won't," Simon agreed languidly. "And perhaps you won't look so funny."

He yawned. The cab, with all its windows tightly closed, was warm and stuffy; and the conversational limitations of Inspector Pryke were also conducive to slumber.

The Saint closed his eyes. He felt limp and bored, and his brain was starting to wander in a most remarkable and disjointed manner. It was all rather voluptuous and dreamy, like sinking away in some Elysian hop-joint. . . . Suddenly he felt faintly sick.

He sat up, with a tremendous effort. A message was trying to get through to his brain, but it seemed to be muffled in layer after layer of cotton-wool. His chest was labouring, and he could feel his heart pounding at a crazy speed. The face of Junior Inspector Pryke stared back at him through a kind of violet haze. Pryke's chest was heaving also, and his mouth was open: it crossed the Saint's mind that he looked like an agitated fish. . . . Then everything within his blurring vision whirled round like a top, and the blood roared in his ears like a thousand waterfalls. The message that had been trying to break through to him flashed in at last, and he made a convulsive lunge towards the window behind the driver's impassive back; but he never reached it. It seemed as if the bottom fell out of the world, and he went plunging down through fold after fold of numbing silence, down and down through cold green clouds of that curious perfume into an infinity of utter nothingness. . . .

VII There was a decanter and three sherry-glasses on the table-and one of the glasses was untouched. They had been set out there more than an hour ago; and the decanter was nearly empty.

Patricia Holm wandered restlessly about the living-room. Her face was quiet and untroubled, but she couldn't relax and sit down. The dark had come down; and the view of the Green Park from the tall windows was hidden by a grey-blue veil in which the yellow specks of the street lamps shone brighter than the stars, and the lights of cars travelling up and down the Mall gleamed like flocks of dawdling comets. She drew the curtains, for something to do, and stole her thirty-seventh glance at the clock. It was a couple of minutes after nine.

"What's happened to him?" she said.

Mr. Uniatz shook his head. He stretched out a spade-shaped hand for the decanter, and completed his solo conquest of its contents.

"I dunno," he said feebly. "Maybe he couldn't shake de diddo. Dey come dat way, sometimes."

"He's been arrested before," she said. "It's never kept him as long as this. If anything had gone wrong, he ought to have got word through to us somehow."

Mr. Uniatz chewed desperately at his poisonous cigar. He wanted to be helpful. As we have already explained, he was not naturally hot on the higher flights of the intellect; but on such an occasion as this he was not the man to shirk his obligations. The deep creases in his rudimentary forehead bore their own witness to the torture he was enduring from these unaccustomed stresses on his brain.

"Maybe he's on his way, right now," he hazarded encouragingly.

Patricia threw herself into a chair. It was another restless movement, rather than an attempt to rest.

"That's not enough, Hoppy." She was thinking aloud, mechanically, more for the anaesthetic effect of actual speech than with any hope of coaxing something useful out of her companion. "If anything's gone wrong, we've got to be ready for it. We've got to pick up our own cue. He'd expect us to find the answer. Suppose he isn't on his way-what has he done?"

"He's got de ice," said Mr. Uniatz, vaguely.

"I don't know whether he's got it now. Probably he parked it somewhere on his way here. That's what he'd have done if he was expecting trouble. Sometimes he simply puts things in the mail-sends them to a hotel or a poste restante somewhere, and picks them up later on when it's all clear. Usually they aren't even addressed to his own name."

Hoppy frowned.

"But if dey ain't addressed to his own name," he said, "how does he pick dem up?"

"Well, when he goes to pick them up, he gives the name that they were addressed to," explained Patricia kindly.

Mr. Uniatz nodded. He had always been lost in admiration of the Saint's intellectual gifts, and this solution was only one more justification of his faith. Obviously a guy who could work out things like that in his own head had got what it takes.

"But this time we don't know where he's sent them, or what name he addressed them to," she said.

The tentative expression of pleased complacency faded away from Hoppy's face, and the flutings of honest effort crowded themselves once more into the restricted space between his eyebrows and his hair. He was too loyal to give way to the feeling that this was an unnecessary complication, invented simply to make things more difficult for him; but he wished people wouldn't ask him to tackle problems like that. Reaching again for the decanter and finding it empty, he glowered at it plaintively, like a trusted friend who had done him a gratuitous injury.

"So what?" he said, passing the buck with an air of profound reluctance.

"I must know what's happened to him," said Patricia steadily.

She got up and lighted a cigarette. Twice more she paced out the length of the room with her supple boyish stride; and then with a sudden resolution she slipped into the chair by the telephone, and dialled Teal's private number.

He was at home. In a few moments his drowsy voice came over the wire.

"Who's that?"

"This is Patricia Holm." Her voice was as cool and careless as the Saint's own. "Haven't you finished with Simon yet? We're waiting for him to join us for dinner, and I'm getting hungry and Hoppy is getting away with all the sherry."

"I don't know what you mean," he answered suspiciously.

"You ought to know, Claud."

He didn't seem to know. She explained. He was silent for so long that she thought she had been cut off; and then his suspicious perplexity came through again in the same lethargic monotone.

"I'll ring you again in a few minutes," he said.

She sat on at the table, smoking her cigarette without enjoyment, playing a noiseless tattoo with her fingertips on the smooth green bakelite of the instrument. Over on the other side of the room, Hoppy Uniatz discovered the untouched glass which had been reserved for the Saint, and drew it cautiously towards him.

In five minutes the telephone bell rang.

"They don't know anything about it at Scotland Yard or Market Street," Teal informed her. "And it's the first I've heard of it myself. Is this another of your family jokes, or what?"

"I'm not joking," said Patricia, and there was a sudden chill in her eyes which would have made the statement superfluous if Teal could have seen her. "Pryke took him away about half-past five. It was a perfectly ridiculous charge, but he wouldn't listen to reason. It couldn't possibly have kept the Saint as long as this."

The wire was silent again for a second or two. She could visualise the detective sucking his chewing gum more plainly than television could have shown him.

"I'll come round and see you," he said.

He was there inside the quarter-hour, with his round harvest-moon face stodgy and disinterested under his shabby pot hat, chewing the same tasteless cud of chicle and listening to the story again. The repetition added nothing to the sum of his knowledge, except that there was no joke involved. When he had heard it through and asked his questions, he called Scotland Yard and Market Street police station again, only to have his inquiries answered by the same blank negatives. Junior Inspector Pryke, apparently, had left Market Street at about a quarter to four, without saying where he was going; and nothing had been heard of him since. Certainly he had not reported in with an arrest anywhere in the Metropolitan area.

Only one thing required no explanation; and he knew that Patricia Holm knew it, by this time, as well as he knew it himself-although her recital had carefully told him nothing more than Simon Templar himself would have done.

"The Saint was after the High Fence," he said bluntly. "He robbed Enderby this afternoon. I know it, and you know it, even if it is quite true that Enderby got on to us shortly after the alarm and swore it was all a mistake. Therefore it's obvious that Enderby is something to do with the High Fence. Maybe we can't prove it; but the High Fence knows his own men. It doesn't take much more to work out what happened."

"I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions," said Patricia, with Saintly sweetness, and did not deceive him for an instant.

"Perhaps I am," he said stolidly. "But I know what I'd have done if I'd been the High Fence. I'd have heard what had happened as soon as Scotland Yard did; and I'd have watched this place. I'd have seen Pryke come in; and even that mightn't have stopped me. . . . They left here in a taxi, did they? Well, you ought to be able to work it out as well as I can."

"You mean de High Fence puts de arm on him?" asked Mr. Uniatz, translating innuendo into an idiom that he could understand.

Teal looked round at him with heavy-lidded eyes in which the perpetual boredom was as flimsy a sham as anyone was likely to see it.

"If you know the answers, I expect you'll go to work on them," he said, with a stony significance of which he would have been the first to disclaim all knowledge. "I've got my own job to do. If one of you keeps in touch with this address, I'll let you know if I find out anything."

He left a roomful of equally stony silence behind him, and went out to take a taxi to Scotland Yard.

The High Fence had got the Saint and Junior Inspector Pryke-he had no doubts about that. He knew, although he could never prove it, that his analysis of the situation had been as mathematically accurate as any jig-saw he would ever put together could hope to be. And it was easier to put together than most problems. He would have been happier if his own course of action had been no less clearly indicated; and it disturbed him more than he could have cared to admit to realise that he was far more concerned about the fate of the Saint than he was about the fate of his own smug subordinate.

This secondary concern, however, was settled shortly after ten o'clock, when a police constable observed a pair of feet protruding from a bush on the edge of Wimbledon Common, and used the feet to haul out the body of a man. In the first flush of instinctive optimism, the policeman thought that the body was dead, and pictured himself (with photograph and biographical note) in the headlines of a sensational murder mystery; but closer investigation showed it to be alive, and with medical assistance it was quite easily resuscitated into a healthy profane Junior Inspector of unmistakable Trenchard parentage.

"So the High Fence didn't kill you," said Mr. Teal malignantly, when a police car had brought the salvage to Scotland Yard.

"I thought you'd be pleased," retorted Pryke pettishly.

He had a sick headache from the gas which had been pumped into the cab, and he was on the defensive for trouble. Mr. Teal did not disappoint him.

"Who told you to arrest the Saint?" he inquired mucilaginously, when Pryke had given his account of the affair.

"I didn't know I had to be told. I heard of the robbery at Enderby's, and there were grounds for believing that the Saint had a hand in it"

"You know that Enderby has denied that there ever was a robbery, and said it was entirely a misunderstanding?"

"Has he? That's what the Saint told me, but I didn't believe him. I knew nothing about it. I went out as soon as I received the first information, and waited for him at his flat."

"And you had to use a gun to arrest him."

Pryke flushed. He had thought it wiser to say nothing about that.

"He refused to come with me," he said sulkily. "I had to do something, and I didn't want to make a scene."

"It would have made the biggest scene you're ever likely to be in, if you had got him to the station and that gun had been mentioned in the police court," Teal said caustically. "As it is, you'll be on the carpet first thing in the morning. Or will you tell the Assistant Commissioner that all this was my idea, too?"

Pryke scowled, and said nothing.

"Anyhow," Teal wound up, "the Saint has got to be found now. After your performance, he's technically an escaped prisoner. Since it was your arrest, you'd better do something about it."

"What do you suggest?" asked Pryke, with treacherous humility.

Teal, having no answer, glared at him. Everything that could be prescribed for such an emergency had been done already--every alarm issued, every feeler put out, every net spread. If he could have thought of anything more, Chief Inspector Teal would have done it himself. But there was nothing to guide him: even what had been done was a mere firing of routine shots in the dark. The taxi had disappeared, and no one had even noticed its number. Beyond any doubt, the man who had ordered its movements was the same man who had killed Johnny Anworth and Sunny Jim Fasson- who, unless something were done quickly, would be just as likely to kill Simon Templar. A man knew too much, and he died: the logical sequence was quite clearly established, but Teal found no pleasure in following it to its conclusion.

"Since you're so damned independent of orders and regulations," he said, with excessive violence, "you might pay some attention to this man Enderby. I know he swears that the whole thing was a mistake, but I've heard of plenty of those mistakes before. There's no evidence and nothing we can charge him with, but if those stones that were stolen weren't stolen property already, I'll eat my hat. And if Enderby isn't hand in glove with the High Fence, even if he isn't the High Fence himself, I'll eat yours as well."

Pryke shook his head.

"I don't know that I agree. Fasson was shot as he was running out of Abbot's Yard, and when we made a house-to-house inquiry we found out that Templar had a place there under one of his aliases--------"

"Well, what about it? I've never believed that the Saint didn't have something to do with it. I don't believe he killed Fasson; but I do believe that he got the body away from the flat where Fasson was shot, and that Fasson wasn't dead. I believe that he made Fasson talk; and that Fasson wasn't really killed until either the Saint let him go, or he ran away. I think Fasson told him something that made him go after Enderby, and"

Pryke shook his head again, with an increase of confidence and patronising self-satisfaction that made Teal stop short with his gorge rising under the leaven of undutiful thoughts of murder.

"I think you're wrong," he said.

"Oh, I am, am I?" said Mr. Teal malevolently. "Well, what's the right answer?"

The smug shaking of Junior Inspector Pryke's head continued until Teal could have kicked him.

"I have a theory of my own," he said, "which I'd like to work on-unless you've got something definite that you want me to do."

"You go ahead and work on it," replied Teal blisteringly. "When I want something definite done, I shan't ask you. In another minute you'll be telling me that the Assistant Commissioner is the High Fence."

The other stood up, smoothing down the points of his waistcoat. In spite of the situation for which he was responsible, his uncrushable superciliousness was reviving outwardly untouched; but Teal saw that underneath it he was hot and simmering.

"That wouldn't be so wild as some of your guesses," he said mysteriously. "I'd like to get the Saint-if anyone can be made a Chief Inspector for failing to catch him, they'd have to make a Superintendent of anyone who did it."

"Make you a Superintendent?" jeered Teal. "With a name like yours?"

"It's a very good name," said his junior tartly. "There was a Pryke at the Battle of Hastings."

"I'll bet he was a damn good cook," snarled Mr. Teal.

VIII For Simon Templar there was an indefinite period of trackless oblivion, from which he was roused now and again to dream curious dim dreams. Once the movement of the cab stopped, and he heard voices; then a door slammed, and he sunk back into the dark before his impression had more than touched the fringe of consciousness. Once he seemed to be carried over a gravel path: he heard the scrunch of stones, and felt the grip of the hands that were holding him up, but there was no power of movement in his limbs. It was too much trouble to open his eyes, and he fell asleep again almost immediately. Between those momentary stirrings of awareness, which were so dull and nebulous that they did not even stimulate a desire to amplify them, stretched a colourless void of languorous insensibility in which time had no landmarks.

Then there was the feeling of a hard chair under him, a constriction of cords about his wrists and ankles, and a needle that stabbed his forearm. His eyelids felt weighted down almost beyond his power to lift, but when he dragged them up once he could see nothing. He wondered vaguely whether the room was in darkness, or whether he was blind; but he was too apathetic to dwell earnestly on a choice between the alternatives. There was a man who talked softly out of the blackness, in a voice that sounded hazily familiar, asking him a lot of questions. He had an idea that he answered them, without conscious volition and equally without opposition from his will. Afterwards, he could never remember what he said.

Presently the interval of half-consciousness seemed to merge back without a borderline into the limitless background of sleep.

When he woke up again his head ached slightly with a kind of empty dizziness, and his stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out and spun round on a fly-wheel till it was raw and tender. It was an effort to open his eyes, but not such a hopeless and unimportant feat as it had seemed before. Once open, he had more difficulty at first in focusing them. He had an impression of bare grey boards, and his own feet tied together with strands of new rope. The atmosphere was warm and close, and smelt nauseatingly of paint and oil. There was a thrumming vibration under him, coupled with a separate and distinct swaying movement: after a while he picked an irregular splash and gurgle of water out of the background of sound, and induced his eyes to coordinate on a dark circular window framed in tarnished brass.

"So you're waking up for a last look round, are you?" growled a voice somewhere to his left.

Simon nodded. Shifting his gaze gingerly about, he made out more details. There was an unshaded electric bulb socketed into the low ceiling which gave a harsh but sufficient light. He was in the cabin of a boat-a small craft, by the look and motion of it, either a canal tug or a scrap-heap motor cruiser. From the rows of orderly lights that drifted past the portholes on both sides of the cabin, he deduced that they were running down the Thames.

The man who had spoken sat on an old canvas sack spread out on the bare springs of a bunk. He was a thickset prognathous individual with thin reddish hair and a twisted mouth, most unnautically clad in a striped suit, a check cap, and canary-yellow shoes.

"Where are we off to?" Simon asked.

The man chuckled.

"You're going to have a look at some fishes. I don't know whether they'll like you, but they'll be able to go on lookin' at you till they get used to it."

"Is that the High Fence's joke?" inquired Simon sardonically.

"It's the High Fence you're talkin' to."

The Saint regarded him contemptuously.

"Your name is Quincey. I believe I could give you a list of all your convictions. Let me see. Two for robbery with violence, one for carrying firearms without a licence, one for attempted"

"All right," said Quincey good-humouredly. "I know 'em all myself. But the High Fence and me are like that." He locked his thick fingers together symbolically. "We're more or less the same thing. He wouldn't be able to do much without me."

"He mightn't have been able to get Sunny Jim murdered," Simon agreed thoughtfully.

"Yes, I did that. It was pretty neat. I was supposed to be waitin' for both of you, but when Fasson came out an' ran down to King's Road, I was frightened of losin' him, so I had to go without you. Yes, I was ridin' the motor-bike. They can't prove it, but I don't mind tellin' you, because you'll never tell anyone else. I killed Sunny Jim-the rat! An' now I'm goin' to feed the great Simon Templar to the fishes. I know a lot of fellers who'd give their right hands to be in my place."

Simon acknowledged the truth of that. The list of men who would have paid drastically for the privilege of using him for ground-bait in the deepest and hungriest stretch of water at their disposal could have been conveniently added up in round dozens. But his brain was still far from clear, and for the moment he could not see the High Fence's object in sending him to that attractive fate so quickly.

"If you feed me to the fishes, you feed them twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds' worth of stones as well -did you know that, brother?" he asked.

Quincey grinned.

"Oh, no, we don't. We know where those are. They're at the Harwich Post Office, addressed to Mr. Joshua Pond. You told us all about that. The High Fence has gone to Harwich to be Mr. Pond."

The Saint's eyes hardened into chips of flint. For an instant of actual physical paralysis, he felt exactly as if he had been kicked in the middle. The terse, accurate, effortless, unhesitating throwing back at him of an arrangement which he had not even told Patricia, as if his brain had been flung open and the very words read out of it, had a staggering calamitousness like nothing he had ever experienced before. It had an unearthly, inescapable completeness that blasted the foundations from under any thought of bluff, and left him staring at something that looked like a supernatural intervention of Doom itself.

His memory struggled muzzily back over the features of his broken dream. The taxi-he had taken it off the kerb right outside his door, without a thought. Ordinarily he would never have done such a thing; but the very positive presence of trouble in the shape of Junior Inspector Pryke had given him a temporary blind spot to the fact that trouble in another shape could still be waiting for him-and might logically be expected to wait in much the same place.

The sickly sweet perfume which he had accused Pryke of using. Pryke's agitated face, gulping like a fish; and the labour of his own breathing. Gas, of course-pumped into the closed cab by some mechanism under the control of the driver, and quick enough in its action to put them out before they were sufficiently alarmed to break a window. Then the scrunch of gravel, and the grip of hands carrying him. He had been taken somewhere. Probably Pryke had been dumped out somewhere on the route. Unlike Mr. Teal, Simon hoped he had not been killed-he would have looked forward to experimenting with further variations on that form of badinage to which Desmond was so alluringly sensitive.

The prick of the needle, and the soft voice that asked him questions out of the darkness. Questions that he couldn't remember, that dragged equally forgotten answers out of a drugged subconsciousness that was too stupefied to lie. . . . Understanding came to him out of that fuddled recollection with stunning clarity. There was nothing supernatural about it- only unexpected erudition and refinement. So much neater and surer than the old-fashioned and conventional systems of torture, which, even when they unlocked a man's mouth, gave no guarantee that he spoke the truth. ... He could even identify the drug that must have been used.

"Scopolamine?" he said, without any indication on his face of the shocks he had taken to reach that conclusion.

Quincey scratched the back of his ear.

"I think that's the name. The High Fence thought of it. That's what we are-scientific."

Simon glanced steadily at the opposite port-hole. Something like a solid black screen cut off the procession of embankment lights, briefly, and slid by. It told him that they had not yet passed under all the bridges; but he found it impossible to identify their whereabouts any more particularly. Seen from the unfamiliar viewpoint of the water, the passing lights formed themselves into no patterns which he could positively recognise; and an occasional glimpse of a neon sign, high up on a building, was no more illuminating, except on the superlative merits of Bovril or Guinness. Somewhere below London Bridge, down past the Pool, probably, he would be dropped quietly over the side. There was a queer quiet inevitability about it, a dispassionate scientific precision, which seemed an incongruous end for such a stormy and impetuous life.

"May I have a cigarette?" he asked.

Quincey hesitated for a moment, and then took out a packet of Players. He put one between the Saint's lips and lighted it for him, and then returned watchfully to his seat on the bunk.

"Thanks," said the Saint.

His wrists were bound together in front of him, so that he was able to use one hand on the cigarette. He was also able to make an inconspicuous test of the efficiency of the knotting. It was well done; and the new cord would swell up tighter as soon as it got wet.

He got a view of his wrist-watch, and saw that it was a quarter-past ten.

"What day is this?" he said.

"The same day as it's been all the time," answered Quincey. "You didn't think we'd keep you under for a week, did you? The sooner you're out of the way, the better. You've given us too much trouble already."

So it was less than five hours since he had gone to sleep in the taxi. Simon got a perspective on his dream. At that rate, there was a sound chance that the High Fence couldn't have got him to wherever he had been taken, drugged and questioned him, and caught a train out of London in time to reach Harwich before the post-office closed. Therefore he might not be able to collect the package from the Poste Restante before morning. And if the Saint escaped . . .

Simon realised that he was building some beautiful castles in the air. A dog thrown into the river with a brick tied round its neck would have more or less the same chance of escape as he was offered.

And yet . . . there was a dim preposterous hope struggling in his mind that a miracle might happen-or had happened. Where had he felt the stab of that hypnotic needle? He felt sure that it had been in his right forearm; and there was a vague sort of ache in the same place to confirm the uncertain memory. In that case, was there any reason why his left forearm must have been touched? It was a wildly fantastic hope, an improbable possibility. And yet . . . such unlikely things had happened before, and their not wholly improbable possibility was part of the inspiration behind the more unconventional items of his armoury. It might seem incredible that anyone who knew anything of him could fail to credit him with having something up his sleeve in any emergency; and yet . . . Smoking his cigarette in long tranquil inhalations, he contrived to press his left forearm unobtrusively against his thigh; and what he felt put the dawn of a grim and far-fetched buoyancy into his heart.

Quincey got up and pressed his face against one of the port-holes.

"It's about time for you to be goin'," he said unemotionally.

He hauled out a heavy iron weight from under the bunk, and bent a short length of rope to a ring set in it. The other end of the rope he knotted to the cords that bound the Saint's ankles. Then he tore a strip of canvas from the sack which he had been sitting on, and stood waiting with it.

"Finish that cigarette," he said.

Simon drew a last leisured puff, and dropped it on the floor. He looked Quincey in the eyes.

"I hope you'll ask for your last breakfast, on the day they hang you for this," he said.

"I'll do that for you," said Quincey, knotting the canvas across his mouth in a rough but effective gag. "When they hang me. Stand up."

He pulled the Saint across his shoulder in a fireman's lift, picking up the weight in his left hand, and moved slowly across to the narrow steep companion which led up from the cabin. Mounting the steps awkwardly under his burden, he lifted the hatch with his head and climbed up till he could roll the Saint off on to the deck.

The craft was a small and shabby single-cabin motor boat.

A man muffled up in a dark overcoat, with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes until it almost met the top of his turned-up collar, who was apparently the only other member of the crew, stood at the wheel beside the hatch; but he did not look round. Simon wondered if it was Mr. Enderby. The numbers of the gang who actually worked in direct contact with the High Fence would certainly be kept down to the irreducible minimum consistent with adequate functioning, and it might well be that by this time he knew all of them. It was not a racket which called for a large staff, given the original idea and the ingenious leader. His one regret was that he had not been able to make the acquaintance of that elusive quantity: it seemed a ridiculously commonplace problem to take out unanswered into eternity, after solving so many mysteries.

Quincey stepped out over him, picked up the weight again, and rolled him like a barrel towards the stern. As he turned over, the Saint saw the rusty counter of a tramp moored in midstream swing by over his head, punctured with an occasional yellow-lighted port. Over on the Surrey side, a freighter was discharging cargo in a floodlit splash of garish flarelight. He heard the rattle and clank of the tackle, the chuffing of steam winches, the intermittent rise of voices across the water. A tug hooted mournfully, feeling its way across the stream.

He lay on the very edge of the counter, with the wake churning and hissing under his side. Quincey bent over him.

"So long, Saint," he said, without vindictiveness; and pushed outwards.

IX Simon stocked his lungs to the last cubic millimeter of their capacity, and tensed his muscles involuntarily as he went down. He had a last flash of Quincey's tough freckled face peering after him; and then the black waters closed over his head. The iron weight jerked at his ankles, and he went rolling over and upright into the cold crushing darkness.

Even as he struck the water he was wrenching his wrists round to seize the uttermost fraction of slack from the cords that bound them. The horror of that helpless plunging down to death, roped hand and foot and ballasted with fifty pounds of iron, was a nightmare that he remembered for the rest of his life; but it is a curious fact that while it lasted his mind was uncannily insulated from it. Perhaps he knew that to have let himself realise it fully, to have allowed his thoughts to dwell for any length of time on the stark hopelessness of his position, would have led inevitably to panic.

His mind held with a terrible intensity of concentration on nothing but the essentials of what he had to do. With his hand twisted round till the cords cut into his flesh, he could get the fingers of his right hand a little way up his left sleeve; and under their tips he could feel the carved shape of something that lay just above his left wrist. That was the one slender link that he had with life, the unconventional item of his armoury which the search that must have been made of his clothes had miraculously overlooked: the thin sharp ivory-hilted knife which he carried in a sheath strapped to his forearm, which had saved him from certain death before and might save him again. Somehow, slowly, clumsily, with infinite patience and agonising caution, he had to work it out and get it in his hand-moving it in split shavings of an inch, lest it should come loose too quickly and slip out of his grasp to lose itself in the black mud of the river bed, and yet not taking so long to shift it that his fingers would go numb and out of control from the cutting off of the circulation by the tightening ropes. His flesh crawled in the grip of that frightful restraint, and his forehead prickled as if the sweat was trying to break out on it even under the cold clutch of the water that was pressing in at his eardrums. He could feel his heart thudding hollowly in the aching tension of his chest, and a deadly blackness seemed to be swelling up in his brain and trying to overwhelm him in a burst of merciful unconsciousness: every nerve in his body shrieked its protest against the inhuman discipline, cried out for release, for action, for the frantic futile struggle that would anaesthetise the anguish just as surely as it would hasten on the end-for any relief and outlet, however suicidal, that would liberate them from the frightful tyranny of his will.

Perhaps it lasted for three minutes, from beginning to end, that nightmare eternity in which he was anchored to the bottom of the Thames, juggling finickily for life itself. If he had not been a trained underwater swimmer, he could never have survived it at all. There was a time when the impulse to let out his precious breath in a sob of sheer despair was almost more than flesh and blood could resist; but his self-control was like iron.

He won out, somehow. Trickling the air from his lungs in jealously niggard rations that were just sufficient to ease the strain on his chest, he worked the hilt of the knife up with his finger and thumb until he could get another finger on it ... and another . . . and another . . . until the full haft was clutched in a hand which by that time had practically gone dead. But he was just able to hold it. He forced himself down, bending his knees and reaching forward, until his numbed fingers could feel the taut roughness of the rope by which he was held down to the weight. And then, giving way for the first time in that ghastly ordeal, he slashed at it wildly- slashed again and again, even when his knife met no resistance and he felt himself leaping up through the reluctant waters to the blessed air above....

For a long while he lay floating on the stream, with only his face above the surface, balancing himself with slight movements of his legs and arms, sawing in an ecstasy of leisure through the other ropes on his wrists and ankles, and drinking in the unforgettable glory of the night. Afterwards, he could never remember those moments clearly: they were a space out of his life that was cut off from everything in the past and everything in the future, when he thought of inconsequential things with an incomparably vivid rapture, and saw commonplace things with an exquisite sensuous delight that could not have been put into words. He couldn't even recollect how long it lasted, that voluptuous realisation of the act of living; he only knew that at the end of it he saw the black bulk of a ship looming up towards him with a tiny white crest at her bows, and had to start swimming to save himself from being run down. Somehow the swim brought him close to the north bank of the river, and he cruised idly upstream until he found a flight of stone steps leading up into a narrow alley between two buildings. The alley led into a narrow dingy street, and somewhere along the street he found a taxi which, in an unlikely spot like that, could only have been planted there for his especial service by a guardian angel with a most commendable sense of responsibility.

The driver peered at him keenly in the light of the melancholy street lamp under which the cab was parked.

"You're wet," he said at last, with the same pride of discovery that must have throbbed in Charles Darwin's breast when he gave the fruit of his researches to the world.

"You know, George, I believe you've hit it," said the Saint, in a whisper of admiring awe in which the old unconquerable mockery was beginning to lift itself again. "I thought something was wrong, but I couldn't make out what it was. Do you think I can have been in some water?"

The driver frowned at him suspiciously.

"Are you drunk?" he asked, with disarming frankness; and the Saint shook his head.

"Not yet-but I have a feeling that with very little encouragement I could be. I want to go to Cornwall House, Piccadilly; and I'll pay for any damage I do to your lovely cushions."

Probably it was the tone and manner of what the chauffeur would have described as a toff which dissolved suspicion away into a tolerant appreciation of aristocratic eccentricity, and induced him to accept the fare. At any rate, he accepted it, and even went so far as to oblige Simon with a cigarette.

Lounging back in a corner with the smoke sinking luxuriously into his lungs, the Saint felt his spirits rising with the speed of an irresponsible rocket. The ordeal he had been through, the shadow of death and the strange supreme joy of life after it, slipped back into the annals of memory. To the High Fence, he was dead: he had been dropped off a boat into the lower waters of the Thames with a lump of iron tied to his feet-swallowed up in the bottom ooze and slime of the river, where any secret might well be safe. Both as a proven interferer and a potentially greater menace, he had been removed. But before being drowned, he had given up his secret. He had told exactly what he had done with the parcel of precious stones of which Mr. Clive Enderby had been bereaved-and the High Fence was going to Harwich to take the name of Joshua Pond in vain. . . . And Simon Templar had an increasingly blissful idea that he was going to be there to witness the performance.

As the cab drew up before Cornwall House he saw a girl and a man coming out, and decanted himself on to the pavement before the taxi had properly reached a standstill.

"Are you looking for some fun, souls?" he murmured. "Because if so, I could use you."

Patricia Holm stared at him for a moment in breathless silence; and then, with an incoherent little cry, she threw herself into his arms. . . .

Mr. Uniatz swallowed, and touched the Saint with stubby fingers, as if he were something fragile.

"Howja get wet, boss?" he asked.

Simon grinned, and indicated the interested taxi driver with a movement of his head.

"George here thinks I must have been in some water," he said. "Give him a quid for the inspiration, will you?-I only had a fiver on me when I went out, but they pinched it."

He led Patricia back into the building with a damp arm round her shoulders, while Hoppy paid off the taxi and rejoined them in the foyer. They rode up in the elevator in an enforced silence; but Patricia was shaking him by the arm as soon as the door of the apartment had closed behind them.

"Where have you been, boy? What's happened?"

"Were you worried?"

"You know that."

He kissed her.

"I guess you must have been. Where were you off to?"

"We were going to call on Enderby." She was still holding herself in the curve of his arm, wet as he was. "It was the only line we had-what you told me outside here, before Pryke took you off."

"I could of made him talk, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, in a tone of pardonable disappointment. "After I'd got t'ru wit' him---------"

The Saint smiled.

"I suppose he'd 've been lucky to be able to talk. Well, the scheme might still be a good one. . . ." He toyed with the idea for a thoughtful moment; and then he shook his head. "But no-we don't need it now. And there may be something much more useful for you to do. Get me a drink, Pat, if Hoppy's left anything, and I'll tell you."

Half an hour in his sodden clothes had left him chilled and shivery, but a steep tot of whisky would soon put that right. He lay submerged in a hot bath, with the glass balanced on the edge, and told them the story of his adventures through the open door. It was a tale that made Patricia bite her lips towards the end; but for him it was all in the past. When he came through into the living room again, cheerful and glowing from the massage of a rough towel, with his hair sleekly brushed again and a woolly bath-robe slung round him, lighting a cigarette with steady hands and the old irrepressible laughter on his lips, it was difficult to imagine that barely an hour ago he had fought one of his most terrific fights with death.

"So here we are," he said, with the blue lights crisp and dancing in his eyes. "We don't know who the High Fence is; but we know where he's going, and we know the password he's going to give. It's rather quiet and logical; but we've got him. Just because he's made that one natural mistake. If I were swinging at the bottom of the Pool, as he thinks I am, there wouldn't be a snag in his life. He'd just go to Harwich and recover his boodle; and that would be the end of a spot of very satisfactorily settled bother. But he's going to have a surprise."

"Can we come with you?" said Patricia.

The Saint shook his head.

"I'd like you to. But I can't be everywhere at once, and I shall want someone in London. You mayn't have realised it, but we still have our own bills to pay. The swine knocked a fiver off me when they took me for that ride, and I want it back. Teal's going to achieve his ambition and lag the High Fence, and that parcel of jools that's going to give the High Fence away is evidence now; but we've got our Old Age Pensions to think about. Anyone who wants to amuse himself by pumping me up with gas and dope and heaving me into the river has got to pay for his fun. And that's where you two come in."

He told them more of what was in his mind, in terse sparkling sentences, while he dressed. His brain was working at high pressure by that time, throwing ideas together with his own incomparable audacity, building a plan out of a situation that had not yet come to pass, leaving them almost out of breath behind the whirlwind pace of his imagination. And yet, despite the breakneck pace at which he had swept his strategy together, he had no misgivings about it afterwards-not even while he drove his great thundering car recklessly through the night to Harwich, or when he stood outside the post-office in the early morning waiting for the doors to open.

It should be all right.... About some things he had a feeling of sublime confidence, a sense of joyous inevitability, that amounted to actual foreknowledge; and he had the same feeling that morning. These things were ordained: they were the rewards of adventure, the deserved corollaries of battle, murder, and-a slight smile touched his lips-the shadow of sudden death. But with all this assurance of foreknowledge, there was still a ghostly pulse of nervous excitement flickering through his spinal cells when the doors opened to let him in- a tingle of deep delight in the infinitely varied twists of the game which he loved beyond anything else in life.

He went up to the counter and propped his elbows on the flat of the telegraph section. He wanted to send a cable to Umpopo in British Bechuanaland; but before he sent it he wanted to know all about the comparative merits of the various word rates. He was prepared, according to the inducements offered, to consider the relative attractions of Night Letters, Weed-end Letters, or Deferreds; and he wanted to know everything there was to know about each. Naturally, this took time. The official behind the grille, although he claimed a sketchy familiarity with the whereabouts of British Bechuanaland, had never heard of Umpopo; which is not surprising, because the Saint had never heard of it either before he set out to invent a difficult place to want to send a cable to. But with that indomitable zeal which is the most striking characteristic of post-office officials, he applied himself diligently to the necessary research, while Simon Templar lighted another cigarette and waited patiently for results.

He was wearing a brown tweed cap of a pattern which would never ordinarily have appealed to him, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a black military moustache completed the job of disguising him sufficiently to be overlooked on a casual glance even by anyone who knew him. As the last man on earth whom the High Fence would be expecting to meet, he was as well hidden as if he had been buried under the floor. . . . The official behind the counter, meanwhile, was getting buried deeper and deeper under a growing mound of reference books.

"I can't seem to find anything about Umpopo," he complained peevishly, from behind his unhelpful barricade. "Are you sure there is a telegraph office there?"

"Oh, yes," said the Saint blandly. "At least," he added, "there's one at Mbungi, which is only half a mile away."

The clerk went back through his books in a silence too frightful to describe; and the Saint put his cigarette back between his lips, and then suddenly remained very still.

Another early customer had entered the office. Simon heard his footsteps crossing the floor and passing behind him, but he did not look round at once. The footsteps travelled along to the Poste Restante section, a couple of yards away, and stopped there.

"Have you anything for Pond?"

The soft voice came clearly to Simon's ears, and he lifted his eyes sidelong. The man was leaning on the counter, like himself, so that his back was half turned; but the Saint's heart stopped beating for a moment.

"What is the first name?" asked the clerk, clearing out the contents of one of the pigeon-holes behind him.

"Joshua."

Rather slowly and dreamily, the Saint hitched himself up off his elbow and straightened up. Behind his heaped breakwater of reference books, the steaming telegraph official was muttering something profane and plaintive; but the Saint never heard it. He saw the cardboard box which he had posted pushed over to its claimant, and moved along the counter without a sound. His hand fell on the man's shoulder.

"Would you like to see a good-looking ghost?" he drawled, with a throb of uncontrollable beatitude in his voice.

The man spun round with a kind of gasp that was almost a sob. It was Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke.

X

THE writer, whose positively Spartan economy of verbiage must often have been noted and admired by every cultured student, recoils instinctively from the temptation to embellish the scene with a well-chosen anthology of those apt descriptive adjectives with which his vocabulary is so richly stocked. The pallor of flabbergasted faces, the glinting of wild eyes, the beading of cold perspirations, the trembling of hands, the tingling of spines, the sinking of stomachs, the coming and going of breath in little short pants-all those facile cliches which might lure less ruggedly disciplined scribes into the pitfall of endeavouring to make every facet of the situation transparent to the most nit-witted reader-none of these things, on this occasion at least, have sufficient enticement to seduce him. His readers, he assures himself, are not nit-wits: they are highly gifted and intelligent citizens, of phenomenal perspicacity and acceleration on the uptake. The situation, he feels, stated even in the baldest terms, could hide none of its facets from them.

It hid none of them from Simon Templar, or from Junior Inspector Pryke. But Simon Templar was the first to speak again.

"What are you doing here, Desmond?" he asked gently.

Pryke licked his lips, without answering. And then the question was repeated, but Simon Templar did not repeat it.

Chief Inspector Teal stepped out from behind a screen which cut off the Savings Bank section of the counter, and repeated it. His hands were in the pockets of his unnecessary raincoat, and his movement had the same suggestion of weary and reluctant effort that his movements always had; but there was something in the set of his round plump jaw and the narrowness of his sleepy-lidded eyes which explained beyond any need of words that he had watched the whole brief incident from beginning to end, and had missed none of the reactions which a police officer on legitimate business need not have shown.

"Yes-what are you doing?" he said.

Pryke's head jerked round again, and his face went another shade greyer. For a further interval of thrumming seconds he seemed to be struggling to find his voice; and the Saint smiled.

"I told you the High Fence would be here to collect his boodle, Claud," he said; and looked at Pryke again. "Qnincey told me," he said.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Pryke had got some kind of control over his throat, but there was a quiver in his breathing which made odd little breaks in the sentence. "I heard that there were some stolen jewels here-----"

"Who from?" Teal asked quietly.

"From a man I found on the theory I was working on. You told me I could------"

"What was his name?"

"That's a long story," said Pryke hoarsely. "I met him . . ."

Probably he knew that the game was over-that the bluff was hopeless except as a play for time. The attack was too overwhelming. Watching him with smiling lips and bleak blue eyes, the Saint knew that there wasn't a man living who could have warded it off-whose brain, under the shock, could yet have moved fast enough to concoct a story, instantaneously and without reflection, that would have stood the light of remorseless investigation which must have been directed into it.

"I met him last night," said Pryke. "I suppose you have some reason-"

Simon nodded.

"We have," he said gently. "We came here to play the grand old parliamentary game of Sitting on the Fence; and it looks as if you are what might be called the sittee."

"You're crazy," said Pryke harshly.

His hand was sliding towards his hip, in a casual movement that should have been merely the conventional search for a cigarette-case; and Simon saw it a fraction of a second late.

He saw the flash of the nickel-plated gun, and the shot blasted his eardrums as he flung himself aside. Pryke swerved frantically, hesitated an instant, and turned his automatic on the broad target of Chief Inspector Teal; but before he could touch the trigger again the Saint's legs had swung round in a flailing scissor-sweep that found its marks faultlessly on knee-joint and ankle-bone. Pryke cursed and went down, clean and flat as a dead fish, with a smack that squeezed half the breath out of his body; and the Saint rolled over and held him in an ankle lock while the local men who had been posted outside poured in through the doors.

And that was approximately that.

The Saint continued to lie prostrate on the floor after Pryke had been handcuffed and taken away, letting the profound contentment of the day sink into his soul and make itself gorgeously at home. Misunderstanding his stillness, Mr. Teal bent over him with a shadow of alarm on his pink face.

"Are you hurt?" he asked gruffly; and the Saint chuckled.

"Only in my pride." He reached out and retrieved his cigarette, which had parted company with him during the scuffle, and blew the dust off it before replacing it in his mouth. "I'm getting a worm's-eye view of life-you might call it an act of penance. If I'd had to make a list of all the people whom I didn't think would ever turn out to be the High Fence, your Queen of the May would have been first on the roll. Well, I suppose Life has these surprises. . . . But it all fits in. Being on duty at Market Street, he wouldn't have had any trouble in poisoning Johnny Anworth's horse-radish; but I'm not quite sure how he got Sunny Jim"

"I am," said Teal grimly. "He was standing a little behind me when I was talking to Fasson-between me and the door. He could have shot Fasson from his pocket and slammed the door before I could look round, without taking a tremendous risk. After all, there was no reason for anyone to suspect him. He put it over on all of us." Teal fingered a slip of chewing gum out of his pocket and unwrapped it sourly, for he also had his pride. "I suppose it was you who took Sunny Jim away," he said suddenly.

Simon grinned.

'Teal! Will you always think these unkind thoughts about me?"

The detective sighed. He picked up the evidential package from the counter, opened it, glanced at the gleaming layers of gems, and stuffed it firmly into his pocket. No one knew better than himself what unkind thoughts he would always have to think. But in this case at least the Saint had done him a service, and the accounts seemed to be all square-which was an almost epoch-making denouement. "What are you getting out of this?" he inquired suspiciously.

The Saint rose to his feet with a smile, and brushed his clothes.

"Virtue," he said piously, "is its own reward. Shall we go and look for some breakfast, or must you get on with your job?"

Mr. Teal shook his head.

"I must get back to London-there are one or two things to clear up. Pryke's flat will have to be searched. There's still a lot of stolen property to be recovered, and I shouldn't be surprised to find it there-he must have felt so confident of never being suspected that he wouldn't bother about a secret headquarters. Then we shall have to pull in Quincey and Enderby, but I don't expect they'll give us much trouble now." The detective buttoned his coat, and his drowsy eyes went over the Saint's smiling face with the perpetual haze of unassuageable doubt still lingering in them. "I suppose I shall be seeing you again," he said.

"I suppose you will," said the Saint, and watched Teal's stolid portly figure lumbering out into the street before he turned into the nearest telephone booth. He agreed with Mr. Teal that Pryke had probably been confident enough to use his own apartment as his headquarters. But Patricia Holm and Hoppy Uniatz were already in London, whereas Mr. Teal had to get there; and Simon Templar had his own unorthodox interpretation of the rewards of Virtue.

Part I I THE ELUSIVE ELLSHAW

THE visitors who came to see the Saint uninvited were not only members of the C.I.D. In several years of spectacular outlawry, Simon Templar had acquired a reputation which was known wherever newspapers were read.

"There must be something about me that excites the storytelling instinct in people," he complained once to Patricia Holm, who should have known better than anyone how seriously to take his complaint. "Four out of every five have it, and their best friends won't tell 'em."

Most of the legends that circulated about him were fabulously garbled, but the fundamental principles were fairly accurate. As a result, he had an ever-growing public which seemed to regard him as something between a benevolent if slightly weak-minded uncle and a miracle-working odd-job man. They ranged from burglars who thought that his skill might be enlisted in their enterprises for a percentage of the proceeds, to majestic dowagers who thought that he might be instrumental in tracing a long-lost Pekinese; from shop girls in search of romance to confidence men in search of a likely buyer of a gold brick. Sometimes they were interesting, sometimes they were pathetic; mostly they were merely tiresome. But on rare occasions they brought the Saint in touch with those queer happenings and dark corners in other people's lives from which many of his adventures began, and for that reason there were very few of them whom he refused to see.

There was one lady in particular whom he always forced himself to remember whenever he was tempted to dodge one of these callers, for she was quite definitely the least probable herald of adventure who ever crossed his path. He was, as a matter of fact, just ready to go out one morning when Sam Outrell telephoned up to announce her.

"Your Jersey 'as come back from the cleaners, sir," was his cryptic postscript to the information.

Sam Outrell had been raised on a farm, many years before he came to be head porter in the apartment building on Piccadilly where the Saint lived, and incidentally one of Simon's loyalest watch-dogs; and the subterfuges by which he managed to convey a rough description of visitors who were standing at his elbow were often most abstrusely bucolic. Simon could still remember the occasion, when he had been suffering tireless persecution from a stout Society dame who was trying to manufacture divorce evidence against her doddering spouse, on which Sam had told him that "Your silk purse has turned up, sir," and had explained later that he meant to convey that "The old sow's 'ere."

"I'll have a look at it," said the Saint, after a brief hesitation.

Viewing Mrs. Florence Ellshaw for the first time, when he opened the door to her, Simon could not deny that Sam Outrell had an excuse for his veiled vulgarity. She was certainly very bovine in build, with stringy mouse-coloured hair and a remarkable torso-the Saint didn't dislike her, but he did not feel that Life would have been incomplete if she had never discovered his address.

"It's about me 'usband, sir," said Mrs. Ellshaw, putting the matter in what must have looked to her like a nut shell.

"What is about your husband?" asked the Saint politely.

"I seen 'im," declared Mrs. Ellshaw emphatically. "I seen 'im last night, plain as I can see you, I did, Mm wot left me a year ago wivout a word, after all I done for 'im, me that never gave 'im a cross word even when 'e came 'ome late an' left all 'is money at the local, as large as life 'e was, an' me workin' me fingers to the bone to feed 'is children, six of 'em wot wouldn't 'ave a rag to their backs if it weren't for me brother Bert as 'as a job in a garridge, with three of his own to look after and his wife an invalid she often cries all night, it's pitiful-Simon perceived that to let Mrs. Ellshaw tell her story in her own way would have required a lifetime's devotion.

"What do you want me to do?" he interrupted.

"Well, sir, I seen 'im last night, after 'im leaving me wivout a word, 'e might 'ave bin dead for all I was to know, after all I done for 'im, as I says to 'im only the day before 'e went, I says 'Ellshaw,' I says. 'I'm the best wife you're ever likely to 'ave, an' I defy you to say anythink else,' I says, an' me workin' me fingers to the bone, with varicose veins as 'urts me somethink terrible sometimes, I 'as to go an' sit down for an hour, this was in Duchess Place"

"What was in Duchess Place?" asked the Saint weakly.

"Why, where I sore 'im," said Mrs. Ellshaw, " 'im wot left me wivout a word- "After all you done for him----"

"An' me doing for gentlemen around 'ere all these months to feed 'is children, wiv me pore legs achin', an' 'e turns an' runs away when 'e sees me as if I 'adn't bin the best wife a man ever 'ad, an' never a cross word between us all these years."

The Saint had found it hard to believe that Mrs. Ellshaw had reached an intentional full stop, and concluded that she had merely paused for breath. He took a mean advantage of her momentary incapacity.

"Didn't you run after him?" he put in.

"That I did, sir, wiv me pore legs near to bursting after me being on them all day, an' 'e runs into an 'ouse an' slams the door, an' I gets there after 'im an' rings the bell an' nobody answers, though I waits there 'arf an hour if I waited a minnit, ringin' the bell, an' me sufferin' with palpitations wot always come over me if I run, the doctor tole me I mustn't run about, an' nobody answers till I says to meself, 'All right, Ellshaw,' I says, 'I'll be smarter'n you are,' I says, an' I goes back to the 'ouse this morning, not 'arf an hour ago it wasn't, an' rings the bell again like it might be a tradesman delivering somethink, an' 'e opens the door, an' when 'e seen me 'e gets all angry, if I 'adn't bin the best wife ever a man 'ad"

"And never a cross word between you all these years----"

" 'Yer daft cow,' 'e says, 'can't yer see yer spoilin' everythink?' 'Never you mind wot I'm spoiling,' I says, 'even if it is some scarlet 'ussy yer livin' with in that 'ouse, you gigolo,' I says, 'leaving me wivout a word after all I done for you,' I says; and 'e says to me, ' 'Ere's some money, if that's wot yer after, an' you can 'ave some more any time you want it, so now will you be quiet an' get out of 'ere or else you'll lose me me job, that's wot you'll do, if anybody sees you 'ere,' 'e says, an' 'e shoves some money into me 'and an' slams the door again, so I come straight round 'ere to see you, sir."

"What for?" asked the Saint feebly.

He felt that he was only inviting a fresh cataract of unpunctuated confidences, but he could think of no other question that seemed so entirely apt.

Mrs. Ellshaw, however, did not launch out into another long-distance paragraph. She thrust one of her beefy paws into the fleshy canyon that ran down from her breastbone into the kindly concealment of her clothing, and dragged out what looked at first like a crumpled roll of white paper.

"That's wot for," she said, thrusting the catch towards him.

Simon took it and flattened it out. It was three new five-pound notes clumsily crushed together; and for the first time in that interview he was genuinely interested.

"Is that what he gave you?"

"That's wot he gave me, exactly as 'e put it in me 'and, an' there's somethink dirty about it, you mark my words."

"What sort of job was your husband in before he-er- left you?" Simon inquired.

" 'E never 'ad no regular job," said Mrs. Ellshaw candidly. "Sometimes 'e made a book-you know, sir, that street betting wot's supposed to be illegal. Sometimes 'e used to go to race meetings, but I don't know wot 'e did there, but I know 'e never 'ad fifteen pounds in 'is life that 'e came by honestly, that I know, and I wouldn't let 'im be dishonest, it ain't worth it, with so many coppers about, and 'im a married man wiv six children"

"What's the address where you saw him?"

"It's in Duchess Place, sir, wot's more like a mews, and the 'ouse is number six, sir, that's wot it is, it's next door to two young gennelmen as I do for, such nice gennelmen they are too, always askin' about me legs------"

The Saint stood up. He was interested, but he had no intention of resuming a study of Mrs. Ellshaw's varicose veins.

"I don't know whether I can do anything for you, but I'll see what I can find out-you might like to let me change these fivers for you," he added. "Pound notes will be easier for you to manage, and these may help me."

He put the three banknotes away in a drawer, and saw the last of Mrs. Ellshaw with some relief. Her troubles were not so utterly commonplace as he had expected them to turn out when she started talking, and some of the brightest episodes in his career had had the most unpromising beginnings, but there was nothing in the recital he had just listened to which struck him as giving it any special urgency. Even when the whole story was an open book to him, the Saint could not feel that he was to blame for failing to foresee the consequences of Mrs. Ellshaw's visit.

He was occupied at that time with quite a different proposition-the Saint was nearly always occupied with something or other, for his ideas of good living were put together on a shamelessly plutocratic scale, and all his expenses were paid out of the proceeds of his raids on those whom he knew as the Ungodly. In this case it was a man of no permanent importance who claimed to be the owner of a mining concession in Brazil. There were always one or two men of that kind on the Saint's visiting list-they were the providential pot-boilers of his profession, and he would have considered it a crime to let them pass by, but only a very limited number of them have been found worthy of commemoration in these chronicles. He walked home from the conclusion of this casual episode at two o'clock in the morning, and might have died before dawn if Sam Outrell had been less conscientious.

"The men have been to fix your extension telephone," was the message passed on to him by the night porter; and the Saint, who had not ordered an extension telephone at all, was silently thoughtful in the elevator that whisked him up to his floor.

He walked down the corridor, as soundless as a prowling cat on the thick carpet, past the entrance of his own suite to another door at the very end of the passage. There was a key on his chain to unlock it; and he stepped out on to the fire-escape and lighted a cigarette under the stars.

From the handrail of the grating where he stood, it was an easy swing to his bathroom window, which was open. He passed across the sill like a shadow and went from room to room with a gun in his hand, searching the darkness with supersensitive faculties for anything that might be waiting to catch him unawares. Everything was quiet; but he touched pieces of furniture, and knew that they had been moved. The drawers of his desk were open, and his foot rustled against a sheaf of papers carelessly thrown down on the floor. Without touching a light switch he knew that the place had been effectively ransacked; but he came to the hall without finding a trace of any more actively unfriendly welcome.

It was not until he switched on the hall light that he saw what his fate ought to have been.

There was a cheap fibre attache-case standing close to the entrance-if he had moved another step to one side he would have kicked it. Two thin insulated wires ran from it to the door and terminated in a pair of bright metal contacts like a burglar alarm, one of them screwed to the frame and the other to the door itself. If he had entered in the normal way, they would have completed the circuit directly the door began to open; and he had no doubt what the sequel would have been.

An ingenious mixture of an electrical detonator, a couple of pounds of gelignite, and an assortment of old scrap-iron, was indicated inside that shabby case; but the Saint did not attempt to make certain of it, because it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some eccentric entrance as he had made could have been foreseen, and a second detonator provided to act on anyone who opened the valise to investigate it. He disconnected the wires, and drove out to Hammersmith Bridge with the souvenir, very cautiously, as soon as he could fetch his car from the garage, and lowered his potential decease on a string to the bottom of the Thames.

So far as he could tell, only the three five-pound notes which he had put away in his desk had been taken. It was this fact which made him realise that the search of his rooms had not been a merely mechanical preliminary to the planting of a booby-trap by one of the many persons who had reason to desire his funeral. But it was not until the next morning that he realised how very important the disappearance of Mr. Ellshaw must be, when he learned how Mrs. Ellshaw had left her troublesome veins behind her for all time.

II THE body was taken out of the Thames just below London Bridge by the river police. There were no marks of violence beyond a slight bruise on the forehead which might have been caused by contact with the piers of one of the upper bridges. Death was due to drowning.

"It's as obvious as any suicide can be," said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. "Apparently the woman's husband left her about a year ago, and she had to work like a slave to keep the children. Her neighbours say she was very excited the night before, talking incoherently about having seen her husband and him having refused to recognise her. If that was true, it provides a motive; if it wasn't, it covers 'unsound mind.' "

The Saint lounged back in his chair and crossed his feet on a sheaf of reports on Mr. Teal's sacred desk.

"As a matter of fact, it was true," he said. "But it doesn't provide a motive-it destroys it."

If anybody else had made such a statement Mr. Teal would have jeered at him, more or less politely according to the intruder's social standing; but he had been sitting at that desk for too many years to jeer spontaneously at anything the Saint said. He shuffled his chewing gum to the back of his mouth and gazed across the Saint's vandal shoes with soporously clouded eyes.

"How do you know?"

"Because she came to see me yesterday morning with the same story, and I'd promised to see what I could do for her."

"You think it was murder?" asked Teal, with cherubic impassivity.

Simon shrugged.

"I'd promised to look into it," he repeated. "In fact, she had a date to come and see me again on Friday evening and hear if I'd managed to find out anything. If she had enough faith in me to bring me her troubles in the first place, I don't see her diving into the river before she knew the verdict."

Teal brought his spearmint back into action, and worked on it for a few seconds in silence. He looked as if he were on the point of falling asleep.

"Did she say anything to make you think she might be murdered?"

"Nothing that I understood. But I feel kind of responsible. She was killed after she'd been to see me, and it's always on the cards that she was killed because of it. There was something fishy about her story, anyhow, and people in fishy rackets will do plenty to keep me out of 'em. ... I was nearly murdered myself last night."

"Nearly?" said Mr. Teal.

He seemed disappointed.

"I'm afraid so," said the Saint cheerfully. "Give me something to drink and find out for yourself whether I'm a ghost."

"Do you think it was because of something Mrs. Ellshaw told you?"

"I'm damned if I know, Claud. But somebody put down all the makings of a Guy Fawkes picnic in Cornwall House last night, and I shouldn't be talking to you now if I hadn't been born careful as well as lucky-there's something about the way I insist on keeping on living which must be frightfully discouraging to a lot of blokes, but I wouldn't believe for a moment that you were one of them."

Chief Inspector Teal chewed his way through another silence. He knew that the Saint had called on him to extract information, not to give it. Simon Templar gave nothing away, where Scotland Yard was at the receiving end. A Commissioner's post-mortem on the remains of a recent sensational case in which the Saint had played a leading and eventually helpful part had been held not long ago: it had, however, included some unanswerable questions about the fate of a large quantity of stolen property which the police had expected to recover when they laid the High Fence by the heels, and Mr. Teal was still smarting from some of the things which had been said. He had been wielding his unavailing bludgeon in the endless duel between Scotland Yard and that amazing outlaw too long to believe that the Saint would ever consult him with no other motive than a Boy Scout ambition to do him a good turn. Every assistance that Simon Templar had ever given the Metropolitan Police had had its own particular string tied to it, but in Teal's job he had to take the strings with the favours. The favours had helped to put paid to the accounts of many elusive felons; the strings accounted for many of the silver threads among Mr. Teal's dwindling fleece of gold, and seemed likely to account for many more.

"If you think Mrs. Ellshaw was murdered, that's your affair," he said at last. "We haven't any reason to suspect it- yet. Or do you want to give us any?"

Simon thought for a moment, and said: "Do you know anything about the missing husband?"

"As a matter of fact, we did use to know him. He was about the worst card sharp we ever had on our records. He used to work the race trains, usually-he always picked on someone who'd had too much to drink, and even then he was so clumsy that he'd have been lagged a dozen times if the mugs he found hadn't been too drunk to remember what he looked like. Does that fit in with your theory?" Teal asked, with the disarming casualness of a gamboling buffalo.

The Saint smiled.

"I have no theory, Claud. That's what I'm looking for. When I've got one, we might have another chat."

There was nothing more to be got out of him; and the detective saw him go with an exasperated frown creasing down over his sleepy blue eyes.

As a matter of fact, the Saint had been perfectly straightforward-chiefly because he had nothing to conceal. He had no theory, but he was certainly looking for one. The only thing he had kept back was the address where Mrs. Ellshaw had seen her mysterious husband. It was the only information he had from which to start his inquiries; and Mr. Teal remembered that he had forgotten to ask for it five minutes after the Saint had left.

It was not much consolation for him to realise that the Saint would never have given him the information even if he had asked for it. Simon Templar's idea of criminal investigation never included any premature intrusions by the Department provided by London's ratepayers for the purpose, and he had his own methods of which that admirable body had never approved.

He went out of Scotland Yard and walked round to Parliament Square with a strange sensation going through him as if a couple of dozen fleas in hobnailed boots were playing hopscotch up and down his spine. The sensation was purely psychic, for his nerves were as cold as ice, as he knew by the steadiness of his hand when he stopped to light a cigarette at the corner of Whitehall; but he recognised the feeling. It was the supernatural, almost clairvoyant tingle that rippled through his consciousness when intuition leapt ahead of logic-an uncanny positive prescience for which logic could only trump up weak and fumbling reasons. He knew that Adventure had opened her arms to him again-that something had happened, or was happening, that was bound to bring him once more into the perilous twisted trails in which he was most at home -that because a garrulous charwoman had taken it into her head to bring him her troubles, there must be fun and games and boodle waiting for him again under the shadow of sudden death. That was his life, and it seemed as if it always would be.

He had nothing much to go on, but that could be rectified. The Saint had a superb simplicity of outlook in these matters. A taxi came cruising by, and stopped when he put up his hand.

"Take me to Duchess Place," he said. "It's just at the back of Curzon Street. Know it?"

The driver said that he knew it. Simon relaxed in a corner and propped up his feet on the spare seat diagonally opposite, while the cab turned up Birdcage Walk and wriggled through the Green Park towards Hyde Park Corner. Once he roused himself to test the mechanism of the automatic in his hip pocket; once again to loosen the thin-bladed knife in its sheath under his left sleeve. Neither of those weapons were part of the conventional outfit which anyone so impeccably dressed as he was would have been expected to wear, but for many years the Saint had placed caution so far before convention that convention was out of sight.

He paid off his taxi at the corner of Duchess Place and walked up towards number six. It was one of a row of those dingy unimaginative brick houses, with rusty iron railings and shabbily painted windows, which would be instantly ranked as cheap tenement cottages by any stranger who had not heard of the magic properties of the word "Mayfair." Simon went up the steps and rang the tarnished brass bell without hesitation -he hadn't the faintest notion how he would continue when the door was opened, if it was opened, but he had gone into and emerged from a great deal of trouble with the same blithe willingness to let circumstances provide for him.

The door opened in a few moments; and circumstances proceeded to provide for him so completely and surprisingly that he was ready for some unpleasantness.

The man who looked out of the door was rather small and wiry, with thin grey hair and a sallow bird-like Cockney face on which the reddish tint of his nose stood out so unexpectedly that it looked at first sight like one of those ageless carnival "novelties" which give so much harmless pleasure to adult infants engaged in the laborious business of having a good time. With his threadbare and baggy trousers, and his pink shirt fastened together with a stud at the neck but virginally innocent of collar or tie, he looked like the very last sort of man who ought to be answering a door-bell in that expensive slum.

"I want to see Mr. Ellshaw," said the Saint, with sublime directness; and knew at once that he was talking to the man he wanted.

His first surprise was when this was admitted.

"I'm Ellshaw," said the man at once. "You're Mr. Templar, ain't yer?"

The Saint drew at his cigarette with a certain added thoughtfulness. He never forgot a face; and he was sure that this little bird with the carmine beak could not have slipped out of his mind very easily if their paths had ever crossed before. But he acknowledged the identification with outwardly unaltered amiability.

"How did you know that, Archibald?"

"I was just comin' round to see yer, guv'nor." The little man opened the door wider, and stepped back invitingly. "Would yer like ter step inside fer a minute?-I've got somefink to tell yer."

The Saint stepped inside. He put his hands in his pockets as he crossed the threshold, and one of them rested on the butt of his gun.

Ellshaw led him through the uncarpeted hall to the nearest door, which brought them into the front ground-floor room. There was hardly any furniture in it-a piece of cheap hair carpet, a painted deal table carrying a bottle and glasses and the scars of cigarette-ends, and a couple of ancient armchairs with soiled chintz covers, would have formed a practically complete inventory. There were grimy lace curtains nailed up on the windows at the street end, and a door communicating with the back room at the other. From the oak parquet floor, the tinted ceiling and tasteful electric light fittings, it was obvious that the room had once been lived in by someone of a definite class, but everything in it at that moment spoke loudly of the shoddiest stock of the secondhand sale room.

"Sit down, guv'nor," said Ellshaw, moving over to the chair nearer the window and leaving Simon no choice about the other. " 'Ow abaht a drink?"

"No, thanks," said the Saint, with a faint smile. "What is it you were so anxious to tell me?"

Ellshaw settled himself in his chair and lighted a drooping fag.

"Well, guv'nor, it's abaht me ole woman. I left 'er a year ago. Between you an' I, she 'ad a lot of bad points, not that I want to speak evil of the dead-oh, yush, I know 'ow she committed suicide," he said, answering the slight lift of the Saint's eyebrows. "I sore it in the pypers this mornin'. But she 'ad 'er faults. She couldn't never keep 'er mouf shut. Wot could I do? The rozzers was lookin' for me on account of some bloke that 'ad a grudge against me an' tried ter frame me up, an' I knew if she'd knowed where I'd gorn she couldn't 'ave 'elped blabbin' it all over the plyce."

Simon was beginning to understand that he was listening to a speech in which the little Cockney had been carefully rehearsed-there was an artificial fluency about the way the sentences rattled off the other's tongue which gave him his first subtle warning. But he lay back in his chair and crossed his legs without any sign of the urgent questions that were racing through his mind.

"What was the matter?" he asked.

"Well, guv'nor, between you an' I, seein' as you understands these things, I used ter do a bit of work on the rice trains. Nothink dishonest, see?-just a little gamble wiv the cards sometimes. Well, one dye a toff got narsty an' said I was cheatin', an' we 'ad a sort of mix-up, and my pal wot I was workin' wiv, 'e gets up an' slugs this toff wiv a cosh an' kills 'im. It wasn't my fault, but the flatties think I done it, an' they want me for murder."

"That's interesting," said the Saint gently. "I was talking to Chief Inspector Teal only a little while ago about you, and he didn't tell me you were wanted."

Ellshaw was only disconcerted for a moment.

"I don't spect 'e would've told yer, knowin' wot you are, guv'nor-if you'll ixcuse me syin' so. But that's Gawd's troof as sure as I'm sittin' 'ere; an' I wanted to come an' see yer-"

Simon was watching his eyes, and saw them wavering to some point behind his shoulder. He saw Ellshaw's face twitch into a sudden tension, and remembered the communicating door behind him in the same instant. With a lightning command of perfectly supple muscles he threw himself sideways over the arm of the chair, and felt something swish past his head and thud solidly into the upholstery, beating out a puff of grey dust.

In a flash he was on his feet again, in time to see the back of a man ducking through the door. His gun was out in his hand, and his brain was weighing out pros and cons with cool deliberation even while his finger tightened on the trigger. The cons had it-it was no use shooting unless he aimed to hit his target, and at that embryonic stage of the developments a hospital capture would be more of a liability than an asset. He dropped the automatic back in his pocket and jumped for the door empty-handed. It slammed in his face as he reached it, and a bottle wildly thrown from behind smashed itself on the wall a foot from his head. Calmly ignoring the latter interruption, Simon stepped back and put his heel on the lock with his weight behind it. The door, which had never been built to withstand that kind of treatment, surrendered unconditionally, and he went through into a chamber barely furnished as a bedroom. There was nobody under the bed or in the wardrobe; but there was another door at the side, and this also was locked. Simon treated it exactly as he had treated the first, and found himself back in the hall-just at the moment when the front door banged.

Ellshaw himself had vanished from the front room when he reached it; and the Saint leaned against the wreckage of the communicating door and lighted a fresh cigarette with a slow philosophical grin for his own ridiculous easiness.

As soon as they learned that the bomb had failed to take effect, of course, they were expecting him to follow up the clue which Mrs. Ellshaw must have given him. Probably she had been followed from Duchess Place the previous morning, and it would not have been difficult for them to find out whom she went to see. The rest was inevitable; and the only puzzle in his mind was why the attempt had not been made to do something more conclusive than stunning him with a rubber truncheon while he sat in that chair with his back to the door.

But who were "they"? He searched the house from attic to basement in the hope of finding an answer, but he went through nothing more enlightening than a succession of empty rooms. Inquiries about the property at neighbouring estate agents might lead on to a clue, but there was none on the premises. The two ground-floor rooms were the only ones furnished-apparently Ellshaw had been living there for some time, but there was no evidence to show whether this was with or without the consent and knowledge of the landlord.

Simon went out into the street rather circumspectly, but no second attack was made on him. He walked back to Cornwall House to let Patricia Holm know what was happening, and found a message waiting for him.

"Claud Eustace Teal rang up-he wants you to get in touch with him at once," she said, and gazed at him accusingly. "Are you in trouble again, old idiot?"

He ruffled her fair hair.

"After a fashion I am, darling," he confessed. "But it isn't with Claud-not yet. What the racket is I don't know, but they've tried to get me twice in the last twelve hours, which is good going."

"Who are 'they'?"

"That's the question I've been asking myself all day. They're just 'person or persons unknown' at present; but I feel that we shall get to know each other better before long. And that ought to be amusing. Let's see what Claud Eustace is worrying about."

He picked up the telephone and dialled Scotland House. Instructions must have been left with the switchboard operator, for he had scarcely given his name when he heard Teal's sleepy voice.

"Were you serious about getting a bomb last night, Templar?"

"Mr. Templar to you, Claud," said the Saint genially. "All the same, I was serious."

"Can you describe the bomb again?"

"It was built into a small fibre attache-case-I didn't take it apart to inspect the works, but it was built to fire electrically when the door was opened."

"You haven't got it there, I suppose?"

Simon smiled.

"Sure-I wouldn't feel comfortable without it. I keep it on the stove and practise tap-dancing on it. Where's your imagination?"

Teal did not answer at once.

"A bomb that sounds like exactly the same thing was found in Lord Ripwell's house at Shepperton today," he said at last. "I'd like to come round and see you, if you can wait a few minutes for me."

III THE detective arrived in less than a quarter of an hour, but not before Simon had sent out for a packet of spearmint for him. Teal glanced at the pink oblong of waxed paper sitting up sedately in the middle of the table, and reached out for it with a perfectly straight face.

"Ripwell-isn't he the shipping millionaire?" said the Saint.

Teal nodded.

"It's very nearly a miracle that he isn't 'the late' shipping millionaire," he said.

Simon lighted a cigarette.

"Did you come here to tell me about it or to ask me questions?"

"You might as well know what happened," said the detective, unwrapping a wafer of his only vice with slothful care. "Ripwell intended to go down to his river house this evening for a long week-end, but during the morning he found that he wanted a reference book which he had left down there on his last visit. He sent his chauffeur down for it, but when the man got there he found that he'd forgotten to take the key. Rather than go back, he managed to get in through a window, and when he came to let himself out again he found the bomb. It was fixed just inside the front door, and would have been bound to get the first person who opened it, which would probably have been Ripwell himself-apparently he doesn't care much about servants when he uses the cottage. That's about all there is to tell you, except that the description I have of the bomb from the local constabulary sounded very much like the one you spoke of to me, and there may be some reason to think that they were both planted by the same person."

"And even on the same day," said the Saint.

"That's quite possible. Ripwell's secretary went down to the house the day before for some papers, and everything was quite in order then."

The Saint blew three perfect smoke-rings and let them drift up to the ceiling.

"It all sounds very exciting," he murmured.

"It sounds as if you may have been right about Mrs. Ellshaw, if all you told me was true," said Teal grimly. "By the way, where was it she saw her husband?"

Simon laughed softly.

"Claud, that 'by the way' of yours is almost a classic. But I wouldn't dream of keeping a secret from you. She saw him at number six, Duchess Place, just round a couple of corners from here. I know he was there, because I saw him myself a little while ago. But you won't find him if you go round now."

"How do you know that?"

"Because he's pulled his freight-he and another guy who tried to blip me over the head."

Teal chewed out his gum into a preoccupied assortment of patterns, gazing at him stolidly.

"Is that all you mean to tell me?"

Simon cocked an abstracted eyebrow at him.

"Meaning?"

"If an attempt was made to murder you, there must be a reason for it. You may have made yourself dangerous to this man, or this gang, in some way, and they want to get rid of you. Why not let us give you a hand for once?"

Pride would not let Mr. Teal say any more; but Simon saw the blunt sincerity in the globular pink face, and knew that the detective was not merely putting on a routine blarney.

"Are you getting sentimental in your old age, Claud?" he protested, in a strain of mockery that was kinder than usual.

"I'm only doing my job." Teal made the admission grudgingly, as if he was afraid of betraying an official secret. "I know you sometimes get on to things before we hear of them, and I thought you might like to work in with us for a change."

Simon looked at him soberly. He understood the implications of everything that Teal had left unsaid, the unmentioned vials of acid comment which must have been decanted on that round lethargic head as a result of their last contest; and he sympathised. There had never been any malice behind the ebullitions of Tealbaiting which enlivened so many chapters of his scapegrace career.

He hooked one leg over the arm of his chair.

"I'd like to help you-if you helped me," he said seriously. "But I've damned little to offer."

He hesitated for a moment, and then ran briefly over the events which had made up the entertainment in Duchess Place.

"I don't suppose that's much more use to you than it is to me," he ended up. "My part of it hangs together, but I don't know what it hangs on. Mrs. Ellshaw was killed because she'd seen her husband, and I was offered the pineapple because I knew she'd seen him. The only thing I don't quite understand is why they didn't try to kill me when they had me in Duchess Place; but maybe they didn't want to hurry it. Anyway, one gathers that Ellshaw is a kind of unhealthy guy to see-I wonder if Ripwell saw him?"

"I haven't seen Ripwell myself yet," said Teal. "He's gone down to Shepperton to look at things for himself, and I shall have to go down tonight and have a talk with him. But I thought I'd better see you first."

The Saint fixed him with clear and speculative blue eyes for a few seconds, and then he drawled: "I could run you down in the car."

Somehow or other, that was what happened; Mr. Teal was never quite sure why. He assured himself that he had never contemplated such a possibility when he set out to interview the Saint. In any case on which he was engaged, he insisted to this sympathetic internal Yes-man, the last thing he wanted was to have Simon Templar messing about and getting in his way. He winced to think of the remarks the Assistant Commissioner would make if he knew about it. He told himself that his only reason for accepting the Saint's offer was to have both his witnesses at hand for an easier comparison of clues; and he allowed himself to be hurled down to Shepperton in the Saint's hundred-mile-an-hour road menace with his qualms considerably soothed by the adequacy of his ingenious excuse.

They found his lordship pottering unconcernedly in his garden-a tall spare vigorous man with white hair and a white moustache. He had an unassuming manner and a friendly smile that were leagues apart from the conventional idea of a big business man.

"Chief Inspector Teal? I'm pleased to meet you. About that bomb, I suppose-a ridiculous affair. Some poor devil as mad as a hatter about capitalists or something, I expect. Well, it didn't do me any harm. Is this your assistant?"

His pleasant grey eyes were glancing over the Saint; and Teal performed the necessary introduction with some trepidation.

"This is Mr. Templar, your lordship. I only brought him with me because----"

"Templar?" The grey eyes twinkled. "Not the great Simon Templar, surely?"

"Yes, sir," said Teal uncomfortably. "This is the Saint. But----"

He stopped, with his mouth open and his eyes starting to protrude, blinking speechlessly at one of the most astounding spectacles of his life. Lord Ripwell had got hold of the Saint's hand, and was pumping it up and down and beaming all over his face with a spontaneous warmth that was quite different from the cheerful courtesy with which he had greeted Mr. Teal himself.

"The Saint? Bless my soul! What a coincidence! I think I've read about everything you've ever done, but I never thought I should meet you. So you really do exist. That's splendid. My dear fellow- Mr. Teal cleared his throat hoarsely.

"I was trying to explain to your lordship that- "Remember the way you put it over on Rayt Marius twice running?" chortled his lordship, continuing to pump the Saint's hand. "I think that was about the best thing you've ever done. And the way you got Hugo Campard, with that South American revolution? I never had any use for that man- knew him too well myself."

"I brought him down," said Mr. Teal, somewhat hysterically, "because he had the same"

"And the way you blew up Francis Lemuel?" burbled Lord Ripwell. "Now, that was a really good job of bombing. You'll have to let me into the secret of how you did that before you leave here. I say, I'll bet Chief Inspector Teal would like to know. Wouldn't he? You must have led him a beautiful dance."

Mr. Teal felt that he was gazing at something that Could Not Possibly Happen. The earth was reeling across his eyes like a fantastic roundabout. He would have been incapable of further agonies of dizzy incredulity if Lord Ripwell had suddenly gone down on all fours behind a bush and tried to growl like a bear.

The effort which he had to exert to get a grip on the situation must have cost him two years of life.

"I brought the Saint down, your lordship, because he seemed to have some kind of knowledge of the matter, and I thought -------"

"Quite," drivelled his lordship. "Quite. Quite right. Now I know that everything's in good hands. If anybody knows how to solve the mystery, it's Mr. Templar. He's got more brains than the whole of Scotland Yard put together. I say, Templar, you showed them how to do their own job in that Jill Trelawney case, didn't you? And you had them guessing properly when Renway-that Treasury fellow-you know----------"

Chief Inspector Teal suppressed an almost uncontrollable shudder. Lord Ripwell was actually digging Simon Templar in the ribs.

It was some time before Mr. Teal was able to take command again, and even then it was a much less positive sort of command than he had intended to maintain.

"Have you ever come across a man named Ellshaw?" he asked, when he could persuade Lord Ripwell to pay any attention to him.

"Ellshaw? Ellshaw? Never heard of him. No. What is he?"

"He is a rather bad cardsharper, your lordship."

"I don't play cards. No. I don't know him. Why?"

"There is some reason to believe that he may be connected with these bombing attempts. Did you ever by any chance meet his wife-Mrs. Florence Ellshaw? She was a sort of charwoman."

Ripwell shook his head.

"I don't think I've ever employed any sort of charwoman." He looked up and raised his voice. "Hey, Martin, have we ever had a charwoman called Mrs. Ellshaw?"

"No, sir," answered the youngish man who was coming across the lawn from the house, as he joined them. "At least, not in my time."

Ripwell introduced them.

"This is Mr. Irelock-my secretary. He's been looking after me for five years, and he knows as much as I do."

"I'm sure that we've never employed anyone of that name," said Martin Irelock. To describe him in a sentence, he looked like a grown-up and rather seriousminded Kewpie with hornrimmed glasses fixed across the bridge of his nose as firmly as if they had grown there. "Do you think he has something to do with this business, Inspector?"

"It's just a theory, but it's the only one we have at present," said Mr. Teal, He summarised Simon Templar's knowledge of the mystery for them. Lord Ripwell was interested in this. He slapped the Saint on the back.

"Damn good," he applauded. "But why ever didn't you shoot the man when you had the chance? Then everything would have been cleared up."

"Claud Eustace doesn't like me shooting people," said the Saint mildly, at which Lord Ripwell guffawed in a manner which removed the last shadow of doubt from Teal's mind that at least one member of the peerage was in advanced and malignant stage of senile decay.

Teal almost strangled himself.

"Apparently both the bombs were planted on the same day," he said, trying to lead the conversation back into the correct vein with all the official dignity of which he was capable. "I understand that your secretary----"

"That's right," agreed Irelock. "I had to come down here the day before yesterday, and there was no bomb here then."

"What time did you leave?"

"Just after six-I caught the six-twenty back to town."

"So the bomb must have been placed here at some time between six o'clock on Wednesday and the time the chauffeur found it this morning." Teal's baby-blue eyes, throttled down again to a somewhat strained drowsiness, were scanning the house and garden. The grounds were only about three-quarters of an acre in extent, bordered by the road on one side and the river on another, and separated from its neighbours by well-grown cypress hedges on the other two boundaries. In such a comparatively quiet situation, it might not be difficult to hear of anyone who had been seen loitering about the vicinity. "The local police may have learnt something more by this time, of course," he said.

"We'll get the Inspector to come round after dinner," said Ripwell affably. "You'll stay, of course."

Teal chewed for a while, pursing his lips.

"I'd rather take your lordship hack to London with me," he said; and Ripwell frowned puzzledly.

"What on earth for?"

"Both the bombing attempts failed, but these people seem pretty determined. They made a second attempt to get Templar a few hours after the first. There's every chance that they may make a second attempt to get you; and it's easier to look after a man in London."

If it is possible for a man to snort good-humouredly, Lord Ripwell achieved the feat.

"Stuff and nonsense, Inspector," he said. "I came down here for a rest and some fresh air. and I'm not going to run away just because of a thing like this. I don't expect we'll hear any more about it; but if we do. I'm in good hands. Anybody who tries to kill me while the Saint's here will be biting off a bit more than he can chew-eh? What d'you say, Templar?"

"I was trying to explain to your lordship," said Teal thickly, "that I only brought Templar down to compare his story with yours. He has no official standing whatever, and as far as I am concerned he can go home-----"

"Eh? What? Go home?" said Lord Ripwell, who had suddenly become very obtuse or very determined. "Don't be silly. I'm sure he doesn't want to go home. He likes this sort of thing. It isn't troubling him at all. And I want to talk to him about some of his exploits-I've wanted to for years. I like him. Wish my son was half the man he is." His lordship gurgled with what Mr. Teal, from his prejudiced viewpoint, considered to be positively doddering glee. "You don't want to go home, do you, Templar?"