The Saint In Action

I

Somewhere among the black hills to the southwest dawned a faint patch of light. It moved and grew, pulsing and brightening, like a palely luminous cloud drifting down from the horizon; and Simon Templar, with his eyes fixed on it, slid his cigarette case gently out of his pocket.

"Here it comes, Hoppy," he remarked.

Beside him Hoppy Uniatz followed his gaze and inhaled deeply from his cigar, illuminating a set of features which would probably have caused any imaginative passer-by, seeing them spring suddenly out of the darkness, to mistake them for the dial of a particularly malevolent banshee.

"Maybe dey got some liquor on board dis time, boss," he said hopefully. "I could just do wit' a drink now."

Simon frowned at him in the gloom.

"You've got a drink," he said severely. "What happened to that bottle I gave you when we came out?"

Mr Uniatz wriggled uneasily in his seat.

"I dunno, boss. I just tried it, an' it was empty. It's de queerest t'ing…" An idea struck him. "Could it of been leakin', woujja t'ink, boss?"

"Either it was, or you will be," said the Saint resignedly.

His eyes were still fixed on the distance, where the nimbus of light was growing still brighter. By this time his expectant ears could hear the noise that came with it, a faraway rattle and rumble that was at first hardly more than a vibration in the air, growing steadily louder in the silence of the night.

He felt for a button on the dashboard, and the momentary whirr of the starter died into the smooth sibilant whisper of a perfectly tuned engine as the great car came to life. They were parked on the heath, just off the edge of the road, in the shadow of a clump of bushes, facing the ghostly aurora that was approaching them from where the hills rose towards the sea. Simon trod on the clutch and pushed the gear lever into first and heard a subdued click beside him as Mr Uniatz released the safety catch of his automatic.

"Howja know dis is it?" Mr Uniatz said hoarsely, the point having just occurred to him.

"They're just on time." Simon was looking down at the phosphorescent hands of his wrist watch. "Pargo said they'd be leaving at two o'clock. Anyway, we'll be sure of it when Peter gives us the flash."

"Is dat why you send him down de road?"

"Yes, Hoppy. That was the idea."

"To see de truck when it passes him?"

"Exactly."

Mr Uniatz scratched his head, making a noise like wood being sandpapered.

"How does he know it's de right truck?" he asked anxiously.

"By the number plate," Simon explained. "You know — that bit of tin with figures on it."

Mr Uniatz digested this thought for a moment and relaxed audibly.

"Chees, boss," he said admiringly. "De way you t'ink of everything!"

A warm glow of relief emanated from him, an almost tangible radiation of good cheer and fortified faith, rather like the fervour which must exude from a true follower of the Prophet when he arrives in paradise and finds that Allah has indeed placed a number of supremely voluptuous houris at his disposal, exactly as promised in the Quran. It was a feeling which had become perennially new to Mr Uniatz, ever since the day when he had first discovered the sublime infallibility of the Saint and clutched at it like a straw in the turbulent oceans of Thought in which he had been floundering painfully all his life. That Simon Templar, on one of those odd quixotic impulses which were an essential part of his character, should have encouraged the attachment was a miracle that Mr Uniatz had never stopped to contemplate: he asked nothing more than to be allowed to stay on as an unquestioning Sancho Panza to this dazzling demigod who could Think of Things with such supernatural ease.

"Dis is like de good old days," Hoppy said contentedly; and the Saint smiled in sympathy.

"It is, isn't it? But I never thought I'd be doing it in England."

Suddenly the haze of light down the road flared up, blazed into blinding clarity as the headlights of the lorry swung round a bend like searchlights. It was still some distance away, but the road ran practically straight for a mile in either direction, and they were parked in the lee of almost the only scrap of cover on the open moor.

Simon held up one hand to shield his eyes against the direct glare. He was not looking at the headlights themselves but at a point in the darkness a little to the right of them, waiting for the signal that would identify the lorry beyond any doubt. And while he watched the signal came — four long equal flashes from a powerful electric torch, strong enough for him to see the twinkle of them even with the lorry's headlights shining towards him.

The Saint drew a deep breath.

"Okay," he said. "You know your stuff, Hoppy. And don't use that Betsy of yours unless you have to."

He flicked his lighter and touched it to the end of the cigarette clipped between his lips. The light thrown upwards by his cupped hands brought out his face for an instant in vivid sculpture — the crisp sweep of black hair, the rakehell lines of cheekbone and jaw, the half smile on the clean-cut reckless mouth, the glimmer of scapegrace humour in the clear and mocking blue eyes. It was a face that fitted with an almost startling perfection, as faces so seldom do, not only into the mission that had brought him there that night but also into all the legends about him. It was a face that made it seem easy to understand why he should be called the Saint and why some people should think of him almost literally like that, while others called him by the same name and thought of him as a devil incarnate. It might have been the face of a highwayman in another age, waiting by the roadside on his black horse for some unsuspecting traveller — only that the power of a hundred horses purred under the bonnet waiting for the touch of his foot and the travellers he was waiting for were not innocent even if they were unsuspecting.

The flame went out, dropping his face back into the darkness; and as he slipped the lighter back into his pocket he sent the car whirling forward in a short rush, spinning the wheel to swing it at right angles across the road, and stopped it there, with the front wheels a foot from the grass verge on the other side.

"Let's go," said the Saint.

Hoppy Uniatz was already halfway out of the door on his side. This at least was something he understood. To him the higher flights of philosophy and intellectual attainment might be forever barred; but in the field of pure action, once the objects of it had been clearly and carefully explained to him in short sentences employing only the four or five hundred words which made up his vocabulary, he had few equals. And the Saint grinned as he disembarked on to the macadam and melted soundlessly into the night on the opposite side of the road from the one Mr Uniatz had taken.

The driver of the lorry knew nothing of these preparations until his headlights flooded the Saint's car strongly enough to make it plain that the roadway was completely blocked. Instinctively he muttered a curse and trod and hauled on the brakes; and the lorry had groaned to a standstill only a yard from the obstacle before he realized that he might have been unwise.

Even so, there was nothing much else that he could have done unless he had driven blindly on off the road onto the open heath, with the chance of landing himself in a ditch. Belatedly it dawned on him that even that risk might have been preferable to the risk of stopping behind such a suspicious-looking barricade, and he groped quickly for a pocket in his overalls. But before he could get his gun out the door beside him was open, and another gun levelled at his middle was dimly visible in the reflected light of the head lamps.

"Would you mind stepping outside?" said a pleasant voice; and the driver set his teeth.

"Not on your mucking life—"

He had got that far when a hand grasped him by the front of his clothing. What followed was something that puzzled him intermittently for the rest of his life, and he would brood over it in his leisure hours, trying to reconcile his own personal impressions with the logical possibilities of the world as he had previously known it. But if it had not been so manifestly impossible he would have said that he seemed to be lifted bodily out of his seat and drawn through the door with such force that he sailed through the air almost to the edge of the road in a graceful parabola comparable to the flight of the cruising flamingo before a large portion of the county of Dorset rose up and hit him very hard in several places at once.

As he crawled painfully up onto his hands and knees he saw the performer of this miracle standing over him.

" 'Ere," he protested dazedly, "wot's the idear?"

"The idea is that you ought to be a good boy and do what you're told."

The voice was still cool and genial, but there was an undertone of silky earnestness in it which the driver had overlooked before. Staring up in an effort to make out the details of the face from which it came, the driver realized that the reason why it seemed so curiously featureless was that a dark cloth mask covered it from brow to chin, and something inside his chest seemed to turn cold.

Simon took hold of him again and lifted him to his feet; and as he did so a shrill yelp and a thud came from the other side of the lorry.

"That will be your mate going to sleep," said the Saint cheerfully. "Will you have one of our special bedtime stories, or will you just take things quietly?"

His left hand had been sliding imperceptibly over the man's clothing while he spoke, and before the driver knew what was happening the automatic which he carried in his overalls had been whisked away from him. All he saw of it was the glint of metal as it vanished into one of the Saint's pockets, but he clutched at the place where it had been and found nothing there. The Saint's soft laugh purled on his eardrums.

"Come along, sonny boy — let's see what you've got in that beautiful covered wagon."

With that stifling lump of ice swelling under his ribs the driver felt himself being propelled firmly towards the rear of the van. Simon slipped a tiny flashlight out of his pocket as they went; and as they reached the back of the lorry the masked face of Mr Uniatz swam round from the other side into the bright beam.

"I heard music," said the Saint.

Hoppy nodded.

"Dat was de udder guy. He tries to make a grab at my mask, so I bop him on de spire wit' my Betsy, an' he dives."

"That's what I love about you," murmured Simon. "You're so thoughtful. Suppose he'd got your mask off. He might have died of heart failure, and that would have been bloody awkward. You ought to keep that face-curtain on all the time — it suits you."

He gave the driver a last gentle push that almost impaled him on the muzzle of Mr Uniatz's ever-ready Betsy and turned his attention to the rear doors of the van. While he was fumbling with them footsteps sounded on the road behind him, and another flashlight split the darkness and focussed on the lock from over his shoulder.

"What ho," said Peter Quentin.

"Ho kay," said the Saint. "The operation went off without a hitch, and one of the patients has a bent spire. Keep that light steady a minute, will you?"

Actually it was not a minute but only a few seconds before the lock surrendered its share of the unequal contest with a set of deft fingers that could have disposed of the latest type of burglar-proof safe in rather less time than an amateur would have taken to empty a can of asparagus with a patent tin opener. Simon pocketed the instrument he had been using, swung the doors wide and hauled himself nimbly up into the interior of the van.

"What have we won this time?" Peter asked interestedly.

The Saint's torch was sweeping over the rows of cases stacked up inside.

"Looks like a good night's work, soaks," he answered. "There's quite a load of Bisquit Dubouche, and a spot of Otard… a whole raft of Clicquof Veuve… Romanee-Conti… Chambertin… Here's a case of Chateau Yquem—"

"Is dey any scotch?" inquired Mr Uniatz practically.

"No, I don't think so… Oh yes, there are a few cases in the corner. We don't seem to have done too badly."

He switched off his flashlight and returned to spring lightly down to the road and shut the doors again. For a moment he stood gleefully rubbing his hands.

"Bisquit Dubouche," he said. "Clicquot Veuve. Chambertin. Romanee-Conti. Chateau Yquem. Even Hoppy's scotch. Think of it, my perishing pirates. Cases and cases of 'em. Hundreds of quids worth of bee-yutiful drinks. And not one blinkin' bottle of it has paid a penny of duty. Smuggled in under the noses of the blear-eyed coastguards and potbellied excise men. Yoicks! And all for our benefit. Do we smuggle? Do we defraud the revenue? No, no — a thousand times no. We just step in and grab the loot. Have a drink with me, you thugs."

"That's all very well," Peter Quentin objected seriously. "But we went into this hijacking game to try and find out who was the big bug who was running it—"

"And so we shall, Peter. So we shall. And we'll have a drink with him. And a cigar and a set of silk underwear, like we got last time. How are those lace panties wearing, Hoppy?"

Mr Uniatz made a plaintive noise in his throat, and the Saint pulled himself together.

"All right," he said. "Let's be on our way. Peter, you can carry on with the lorry. Park it in the usual place, and we'll be over in the morning and help you unload. Hoppy and I will take this team along and see if we can find out anything from them."

He turned away and led off along the roadside to move his car out of the way. In the blackness beside the truck he almost stumbled over something lying on the ground and recalled Hoppy's account of his interview with the driver's mate. As he recovered his balance he switched his torch on again and turned it downwards.

The sprawled figure in grimy overalls lay with its face turned upwards, quite motionless, the mouth slightly open. The upper part of the face was hard to distinguish under the brim of a tweed cap pulled well down over the eyes, but the chin was smooth and white. He could only have been a youngster, Simon realized, and felt a fleeting twinge of pity. He bent down and shook the lad's shoulder.

"How hard did you bop him, Hoppy?" he said thoughtfully.

"I just give him a little pat on de bean, boss—"

"The trouble is, everybody hasn't got a skull like yours," said the Saint.

He dropped on one knee and pulled down the zipper from the neck of the overalls, feeling inside the youngster's shirt for the reassurance of a heartbeat. And the others heard him let out a soft exclamation.

"What's the matter?" Peter Quentin demanded sharply.

"Well, we certainly won something," said, the Saint. "Look."

He took hold of the shabby tweed cap and jerked it off; and the ray of the torch in Peter's hand jumped wildly as a flood of golden hair broke loose to curl around the face of a girl whose sheer loveliness took his breath away.

II

Mr Uniatz sucked in his breath with a sound like an expiring soda siphon; and Peter Quentin sighed.

"Nunc dimittis," he said weakly. "I can't stand any more. The rest of my life would be an anticlimax. I always knew you were the luckiest man on earth, but there are limits. I believe if you trod on a toad it'd turn out to be a fairy princess."

"You ought to see what happens when I tread on a fairy," said the Saint.

Actually his thoughts were chasing far ahead of his words. The miracle had happened — if it was a miracle — and the story went on from there. He was too hardened a traveller in the strange country of adventure to be dumbfounded by any of the unpredictable twists in its trails. But he was wondering, with a tingle of inward exhilaration, where this particular twist was destined to lead.

He turned up the edge of his mask to light another cigarette, and his mind went back over the events that had brought him out that night, not for the first time, to make the raid that had culminated in this surprise… The laden trucks thundering northwards from the coast, filled to capacity with those easily marketable goods on which the English duties were highest — wines and spirits, cigars and cigarettes, silks and embroideries and Paris models… The rumours in the press, that leaked out in spite of the efforts of the police, of a supersmuggler whose cunning and audacity and efficient organization were cheating the revenue of thousands of pounds a week and driving baffled detectives to the verge of nervous breakdowns… The gossip in pubs along the coast and the whispers in certain exclusive circles to which no law-abiding citizen had access… The first realization that he had enough threads in his hands to be irrevocably committed to the adventure — that the grand old days of his outlawry had come back, as they must always go on coming back so long as he lived, when his name could be a holy terror to the police and the ungodly alike and golden galleons of boodle waited for his joyous buccaneering forays…

And now he was wondering whether he dared to hope that the clue he had been seeking for many weeks had fallen into his hands at last, in the shape of that slim golden beauty in the oil-stained overalls who lay unconscious under his hands.

He went on thinking without interrupting his examination. She was alive anyway — her pulse was quick but regular, and she was breathing evenly. There was no blood on her head, and her skull seemed to be intact.

"That cap probably helped," he said. "But it only shows you how careful you have to be when you're patting people on the bean, Hoppy."

Mr Uniatz swallowed.

"Chees, boss—"

"It's all right," Peter consoled him. "You wouldn't have missed anything if you had brained her. If there's going to be any more fun he'll have it."

The Saint straightened up and turned to the driver of the lorry, who was standing woodenly behind him with his ribs aching from the steady pressure of a Betsy which in spite of Mr Uniatz's chivalrous distress had never shifted its position.

"Who is she?" Simon asked.

The driver glowered at him sullenly.

"I don't know."

"What happened — did you find her growing on a tree?"

"I was just givin' 'er a lift."

"Where to?"

"That's none o' your muckin' business."

"Oh no?" The Saint's voice was amiable and unruffled. "Pretty lucky she was all dressed up ready to go riding in a lorry, wasn't it?"

The man tightened his jaw and stood silent, scowling at the Saint with grim intensity. He was, as a matter of fact, just starting to experience that incredulity of his own recollections of his recent flight through the air which has been referred to before; he was a big man, and he was thinking that he would like to see an attempt to repeat the performance.

The jar of Hoppy's gun grinding roughly into his side made him half turn with a darkening glare.

"Dijja hear de boss ask you a question?" enquired Mr Uniatz with all the dulcet persuasiveness of a foghorn.

"You ruddy barstard—"

"That '11 do," Simon intervened crisply. "And I wouldn't take any chances with my health if I were you, brother. That Betsy of Hoppy's would just about blow you in half, and he's rather sensitive about his family. We'll go on talking to you presently."

He turned to the others.

"I don't know how it strikes any of you bat-eyed brigands," he said, "but I've got a feeling that this is the best break we've had yet. After all, a lot of weird things happen in this world of sin, but you don't usually find girls in overalls riding on smugglers' trucks with a cargo of contraband stagger soup."

"You do when you hold 'em up," said Peter stoically.

"She didn't know I was going to hold it up, you fathead. So she's here for some other reason. Well, she might be just a girl friend of the Menace here, but I don't think it's likely. Take a look at her, and then look at him. Of course if she turned out to be blind and deaf and half-witted—"

The driver growled viciously, and received another painful prod from Hoppy Uniatz's gun for his trouble.

"Well, if she isn't?" said Peter.

"Then she's something a hell of a lot more important. She's one of nobs — or she knows 'em pretty well. It'd fit in, wouldn't it? Remember that last consignment we hijacked? All silk dresses and lace and crepe-de-Chine underwhatsits. I always thought there might be a woman in it; and if this is her—"

"She," said Peter helpfully.

The Saint laughed.

"The hell with your grammar," he said. "Let's get going — it'd spoil everything if somebody else came scooting over this blasted heath just now."

He turned away and picked the girl up in his arms like a baby — her body was still limp and lifeless, and it would save a certain amount of trouble if she remained in that state for a little while. So long as Hoppy hadn't struck hard enough for her to be unconscious too long…

He put her down in the car, in the seat beside his own, and closed the door. He had left the engine running in case of the need for a quick getaway, and he knew that in waiting so long he had already tempted the Providence that had sent him such a windfall. He straightened up briskly and strolled to meet the others who were following him.

"This means that we change our plans a bit," he said. "I like my beauty sleep as much as any of you, even if I don't need it so much; but I've got to know where this is getting us before we go to bed. You can follow along with the lorry to the Old Barn, Peter, and Hoppy can take it up to town from there while we see if the fairy princess knows any new fairy tales."

Mr Uniatz cleared his throat. It sounded like the waste pipe of a bath regurgitating, but it was meant to be a discreet and tactful noise. Almost the whole of the intervening conversation had been as obscure to him as a recitation from Euripides in the original Greek, but one minor omission stood out in front of him with pellucid clarity. Mr Uniatz was no genius, but he had an unswerving capacity for detail which many more brightly coruscating brains might have envied.

"Boss," he said, compressing philosophical volumes into their one irreducible nutshell, "dis mug."

"I know," said the Saint hurriedly. "I was exaggerating a bit, I'm afraid. It isn't as bad as all that, really. I don't believe anyone would actually die of heart failure if they saw it. I've looked at it myself several times—"

"I mean," said Mr Uniatz shyly, emphasizing his objective with another rib-splitting thrust of his Betsy, "dis mug here."

"Oh, him. Well—"

"Do I give him de woiks?" asked Mr Uniatz, condensing into six crystalline monosyllables the problem which dictators of every age and clime have taken thousands of words to propound.

Simon shrugged tolerantly.

"If he gets obstreperous I should say yes," he murmured. "But if he behaves himself you can put it off for a while. We will have words with him first. If he can put us wise about whether the sleeping beauty is one of the first strings in this racket—"

"Or even the first string," said Peter Quentin thoughtfully.

The Saint put his cigarette to his mouth and drew it to a bright spark of light. For a few moments he was silent. It was a thought that had already occurred to him, long before; but he had been content to let the answer produce itself in its own good time. Even stranger things than that had happened in the cockeyed world of which Simon Templar had made himself the uncrowned king, and when they did occur they were usually the forerunners of even more trouble than he had set out to ask for, which was plenty. But complications like that had to take care of themselves.

"Who knows?" said the Saint vaguely. "It might just as well have been the secretary of the Women's Temperance League, who isn't nearly so good looking. On your way, Peter—"

"Hey!" bawled Mr Uniatz.

His voice, which could never at any time have rivalled the musical accents of a radio announcer, blared into the middle of the Saint's words with a bloodcurdling intensity of feeling that made even Simon Templar's iron nerves wince. For a moment the Saint was paralyzed, while he searched for some sign of the stimulus that was capable of drawing such a response from Mr Uniatz's phlegmatic throat.

And then he became aware that Hoppy was staring straight ahead with a frozen rigidity that was not even conscious of the sensation it had caused. A little to the Saint's left the driver of the lorry was looking in the same direction with a glitter of evil satisfaction in his small eyes.

Simon swung round the other way and saw that Peter Quentin also was gazing past him with the same petrified immobility. And as the Saint turned round further he had a feeling of dizzy unreality that made his scalp creep.

As he remembered it he had only taken a couple of steps away from his car when Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and the driver of the lorry had met him. But as he turned he couldn't see the car at all where it should have been. The road all around him looked empty in the dull gleam of their torches, apart from the black bulk of the van which overshadowed them. It was another second before he saw where his car was. It had swung off onto the heath in a wide arc in order to straighten up; and while he watched it, it bumped back onto the macadam and went skimming away up the road to the northeast with no more than a soft flutter of gas from the exhaust to announce its departure.

III

"One of the things I envy about you," said Peter Quentin with a certain relish, "is that magnetic power which makes you irresistible to women. Even if they've just been knocked unconscious the moment they open their eyes and see what's found them—"

"It's a handicap, really," said the Saint good-humouredly. "Their instinct tells them that if they saw much of me they'd do something their mothers wouldn't like, so as often as not they tear themselves reluctantly away."

"I noticed she looked reluctant," said Peter. "She took your car, too — that must have been a wrench."

The Saint grinned philosophically and tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail. His spirits were too elastic to know the meaning of depression, and the setback had intriguing angles to it which he was broad minded enough to appreciate as an artist.

The lorry, with Peter at the wheel, churned on through West Holme onto the Wareham road; and Simon Templar lounged back on the hard seat beside him with his feet propped up where the dashboard would have been if the lorry had boasted any such refinements and considered the situation without malice. In the interior of the van, behind him, Hoppy Uniatz was keeping the original driver under control; and Simon hoped that he wouldn't do too much damage to the cargo. But even allowing for Mr Uniatz's phenomenal capacity, there was enough bottled kale there to save the night's work from being a total loss.

They were clattering through the sleeping streets of Ringwood before Peter Quentin said: "What are you going to do about the car?"

"Report it stolen sometime tomorrow. She'll have ditched it by then — it's too hot to hold on to."

"And suppose she reports the lorry first?"

Simon shook his head.

"She won't do that. It'd be too embarrassing if the police happened to catch us. We come out best on the deal, Peter. And on top of that, we've had a good look at her, and we'd know her again."

"It ought to be easy," said Peter cheerlessly. "After all, there are only about ten million girls in England, and if we divide the country up between us—"

"We shan't have to go that far. Look at it on the balance of probabilities. If she stays in this game and we stay in it, it's ten to one that our trails '11 cross again."

Peter thought for a moment.

"Now you come to mention it," he said, "the odds are bigger than that. If she's got any sense she'll find out who you are from the insurance certificate in the car. And then she'll be calling on you with a team of gunmen to ask for her lorry back."

"I had thought of that," said the Saint soberly. "And maybe that's the biggest advantage of all."

"It would save us the trouble of having to find someone to give it to," Peter agreed sympathetically.

But the Saint blew a cloud of smoke at the low roof of the tiny compartment and said dreamily: "Just look at it strategically, old lad. All the time we've known that there was some big nob or bunch of nobs organizing this racket — some guy or guys who keep themselves so exclusive that not even their own mob knows who's at the top. They're the boys we're after, for the simple reason that because they've got the brains to run the show in a way that the saps who do the dirty work, like our pal in the back here, haven't got the intelligence to run it, they've also got the brains to see that they get the fattest dividend. We've been messing about for some time, annoying them in small ways like this and trying to get a lead, and all the time we've been trying to keep ourselves under cover. Now I'm just beginning to wonder if that was the smartest game we could have played. In any case the game's been changed now whether we like it or not; and I don't know that I'm brokenhearted. Now we're on the range to be shot at, and while that's going on we may get a look at the shooters."

"Who'll still be just the saps who do the dirty work."

"I'm not so sure."

For once Peter restrained the flippant retort which came automatically to his mind. He knew as well as any man that the Saint had been proved big enough game to bring the shyest and most cautious hunters out of hiding. There was something about the almost fabulous stories which had been built up around the character of the Saint that tended to make otherwise careful leaders feel that he was a problem of which the solution could not be safely deputed to less talented underlings.

"All the same," he said, "we were getting along pretty well with Pargo."

"He was still only one of the rank and file — or maybe you might call him a sergeant. It was a bit of luck that we found him driving the first lorry we hijacked, with what I knew about his earlier career of crime;* and he had sense enough to see that it was safer for him to take his chance with us than have himself parked in a sack outside Scotland Yard; but I don't know that he could ever have got a line on the nobs… I made a date to meet him later tonight, by the way — when he rang me up about this lorryload he said he'd be driving down from town in the small hours and might have some more tips, so I thought we'd better get together."

*See The Misfortunes of Mr Teal.

"Tell him to give us a ring when we're going to be bumped off," said Peter. "I'd like to know about it, so I can pay my insurance premium."

The Saint looked at his watch.

"We've got an hour and a half to go before that," he said. "And we may get a squeal out of Hoppy's protege before then."

His earlier relaxation, in which he had been not so much recovering from a blow as waiting for the inspiration for a fresh attack, had vanished altogether. Peter Quentin could feel the atmosphere about him, more than through anything he said, in the gay surge of vitality that seemed to gather around him like an invisible aura, binding everyone within range in a spell of absurd magic which was beyond reason and was yet humanly impossible to resist; and once again Peter found himself surrendering blindly to that scapegrace wizardry.

"All right," he said ridiculously. "Let's squeeze the juice out of him and see what we get."

Near Stoney Cross they had swung off the main road into a narrow track that seemed to plunge into the cloistered depths of the New Forest as if it would drift away into the heart of an ancient and forgotten England where huntsmen in green jerkins might still leap up to draw their bows at a stag springing from covert; actually it was a meandering and unkempt road that wandered eventually into the busy highways that converged on Lyndhurst. Somewhere along this road Peter Quentin hauled the wheel round and sent them jolting along an even narrower and deeper-rutted track that looked like nothing but an enlarged footpath. They lurched round a couple of sharp turns, groaned up a forbidding incline and jarred to a sudden stop.

Peter switched out the lights, and the Saint put his feet down and stretched his cramped limbs.

"We all know about housemaid's knee," he remarked, "but did you ever hear about truckdriver's pelvis? That's what I've got. If I were a union man I should go on strike."

He opened the door and lowered himself tenderly to the ground, massaging the kinks out of his bones.

In front of him, a broad squat mass loomed blackly against the starlight — the Old Barn, which really had been a derelict thatched Tudor barn before Peter Quentin found it and transformed its interior into a cosy rural retreat with enough modern conveniences to compete with any West End apartment. It had the advantage of being far from any listening and peeping neighbours; and the Saint had found those assets adequate reason for borrowing it before. In that secluded bivouac things could be done and noises could be made which would set a whole suburb chattering if they happened in it…

There was an inexorable assurance of those facts implicit in the resilience of the Saint's stride as he rambled towards the rear of the van. And as he approached it, in the silence which had followed the shutting off of the scrangling engine, he heard a hoarse voice raised in wailing melody.

Simon unfastened the doors while the discordant dirge continued to reverberate from the interior.

The Saint's torch splashed its beam into the van, framing the tableau in its circle of brilliance.

Mr Uniatz sat on a pile of cases, leaning back with his legs dangling and looking rather like a great ape on a jungle bough. In his left hand he held his Betsy, and the flashlight gripped between his knees was focused steadily on the lorry driver, who stood scowling on the opposite side of the van. One of the cases was open, and a couple of bottles rolled hollowly on the floor. A third bottle was clutched firmly in Mr Uniatz's hand, and he appeared to have been using it to beat time.

His face expanded in a smile as he screwed up his eyes against the light.

"Hi, boss," he said winningly.

"Come on out," said the Saint. "Both of you."

The lorry driver shuffled out first, and as he descended Simon caught him deftly by the wrist, twisted his arm up behind his back and waited a moment for Peter to take over the hold.

He turned round as Hoppy Uniatz lowered himself clumsily to the ground.

"How much have you soaked up?" he enquired patiently.

"I just had two-t'ree sips, boss, I t'ought I'd make sure de booze was jake. Say, dijja know I could yodel? I just loin de trick comin' along here—"

The Saint turned to Peter with a shrug.

"I'm sorry, old son," he said. "It looks as if you'll have to take the truck on, after all. I've never seen Hoppy break down yet, but all the same it might be awkward if he met a policeman."

"Couldn't that wait till tomorrow?"

"I'd rather not risk it. The sooner the truck's cleared and out of the way, the better."

"Okay, chief."

"Hoppy," said the Saint restrainedly, "stop that god-awful noise and take your boy friend inside."

Peter handed over the prisoner, and they walked back towards the front of the van. A last plaintive layee-O, like the sob of a lovesick cat, squealed through the stilly night before Peter climbed back into the driving seat and restarted the engine. Simon helped him to turn the truck round, and then Peter leaned out of the window.

"What happens next?"

"I'll call you in the morning when I know something," Simon answered. "Happy landings!"

He watched the lorry start on its clattering descent of the hill, and then he turned and went towards the house. In the bright spacious living room the lorry driver was lolling in a chair under Hoppy's watchful eye. Simon went straight up to him.

"Get up," he said. "I haven't told you to make yourself at home yet. You're here to answer some questions."

IV

The man looked up from under his heavy brows without moving. His mouth was clinched up so that his underlip was the only one visible, and his big frame looked lumpy, as if all the muscles in it were knotted. He went on sitting there stolidly and didn't answer.

"Get up," said the Saint quietly.

The man crossed his legs and turned away to gaze into a far corner of the room.

Simon's hand moved quicker than a striking snake. It took hold of the driver and yanked him up onto his feet as if the chair had exploded under him. The man must have been expecting something to happen, but the response he had produced was so swift and unanswerable that for a moment his eyes were blank with stupefaction. Then he drew back his fist.

The Saint didn't stir or flinch. He didn't even seem to take any steps to meet that crudely telegraphed blow. From the slight tilt of his head and the infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow he might almost have been vaguely amused. But his eyes held mockery rather than amusement — a curious cold glitter of devilish derision that had a bite like steel sword points. There was something about it that matched the easy and untroubled and yet perfectly balanced way he was standing, something that seemed an essential offshoot of the supple width of his shoulders and the sardonic curve of his lips and the driver's disturbing memory of an apparently incredible incident only a short time before; something that belonged unarguably to the whiplash quality that had crackled under the quietness of his voice when he spoke… And somehow, for no other reasons, the blow didn't materialize. The driver's fist sank stiffly down to his side.

The Saint smiled.

"Have a cigarette," he said genially.

The driver stared at the packet suspiciously.

"Wot's this all abaht?" he demanded.

"Nothing, Algernon. Nothing at all. Hoppy and I are just a couple of humble philosophers looking for pearls of knowledge. By the way, is your name Algernon?"

"Wot's my name got to do with you?"

"It would help us to talk about you, Algernon. We can't just point at you all the time — it looks so rude. And then there's the blonde you didn't introduce us to. We want to know who she was, so we can give the vicar her phone number. What's her name?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" snarled the driver belligerently.

Simon nodded with unaltered cordiality.

"You're asking as many questions as I am, Algernon," he remarked. "Which isn't what I brought you here for. But I don't mind letting you into the secret. I would like to know all these things. Go on — have a cigarette."

As the man's mouth opened for another retort the Saint flipped a cigarette neatly into it. The driver choked and snatched it out furiously. The Saint kindled his lighter. He held it out, and his cool blue eyes met the driver's reddening gaze over the flame. There was no hint of a threat in them, no offer of a challenge, nothing but the same lazy glimmer of half-humorous expectancy as they had held before, and yet once again they baffled the driver's wrath with a nonchalance that his brain was not capable of understanding. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and bent his head sulkily to accept the light.

Mr Uniatz, reclining in an abandoned attitude on the settee, had been taking advantage of being temporarily relieved of his duties to sluice his parched throat with the contents of the bottle he had brought in with him. Now after having remained for some minutes with his head tilted back and the bottle upended towards the ceiling he came reluctantly to the conclusion that no more liquid was flowing into the desert and simultaneously returned to a sense of his responsibilities.

"Lemme give him a rubdown, boss," he suggested. "He'll come t'ru fast enough."

Simon glanced at him thoughtfully.

"Do you think you could make him talk, Hoppy?"

"Sure I could, boss. I know dese tough guys. All ya gotta do is boin deir feet wit' a candle, an' dey melt. Lookit, I see a box of candles in de kitchen last night—"

Mr Uniatz struggled up from the couch, fired with ambition and a lingering recollection of having seen a case of whisky in the kitchen at the same time, but the Saint put out an arm and checked him.

"Wait a minute, Hoppy."

He turned back to the driver.

"Hoppy's so impulsive," he explained apologetically,

"and I don' really want to turn him loose on you. But I've got an appointment in an hour or so, and if we can't get together before then I'll have to leave Hoppy to carry on.And Hoppy has such dreadfully primitive ideas. The last time I had to leave him to ask a fellow a few questions, when I came back I found that he'd got the mincingmachine screwed on to our best table and he was feeding this guy's fingers into it. He got the right answers, of course, but it made such a mess of the table."

"I'm not afraid o' you—"

"Of course you aren't, Algernon. And we don't want you to be. But you've got to change your mind about answering questions, because it's getting late."

The man watched him stubbornly, but his fists were tightening and relaxing nervously, and there was a shining dampness of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. His eyes switched around the room and returned to the Saint's; face in a desperate search for escape. But there was no hope there of the kind he was looking for. The Saint's manner was light and genial, almost brotherly; it passed over unpleasant alternatives as remote and improbable contingencies that were hardly worth mentioning at all, and yet the idea of unpleasantness didn't seem to disturb it in any way. A blusterer himself, the driver would have answered bluster in its own language, but that dispassionate imperturbability chilled him with an unfamiliar sensation of fear…

And at that moment, with his uncanny genius for keeping his opponents in suspense, the Saint left the last word unsaid and strolled over to sit on the table, leaving the driver nothing but the threat of his own imagination.

"What's your name, Algernon?" he asked mildly.

"Jopley."

The word fell out after a tense pause, as if the man was fighting battles with himself.

"Been driving these trucks for long?"

"Wot's that got—"

"Been driving these trucks for long?"

"I bin drivin' 'em for a bit."

"Do pretty well out of it?"

The driver was silent again for a space, but this time his silence was not due to obstinacy. His frown probed at the Saint distrustfully; but Simon was blowing wisps of smoke at the ceiling.

"I don't do too bad."

"How much is that?"

"Ten quid a week."

"You know, you're quite a character, aren't you?" said the Saint. "There aren't many people who'd let Hoppy singe their tootsies for ten quid a week. How d'you work it out — a pound a toe?"

The man dragged jerkily at his cigarette without answering. The question was hardly answerable anyway — it was more of a gentle twitch at the driver's already overstrung nerves, a reminder of those unpleasant possibilities which were really so unthinkable.

"If I were you," said the Saint with an air of kindly interest, "I'd be looking for another job."

"Wot sort of job?"

"I think it'd be a kind of sideline," said the Saint meditatively. "I'd look round for some nice generous bloke who wouldn't let people toast my feet or anything like that but who'd just pay me an extra twenty quid a week for answering a few questions now and again. He might even put up fifty quid when I had anything special to tell him, and it wouldn't hurt me a bit."

"It's a waste of money, boss," said Mr Uniatz with conviction. "If de candles don't woik I got a new one I see in de movies de udder day. You mash de guy's shins wit' a hammer—"

"You won't pay too much attention to him, will you, Algernon?" said the Saint. "He gets a lot of these ideas, you know — it's the way he was brought up. It's not my idea of a spare-time job, though."

The driver shifted himself from one foot to the other. It wasn't his idea of a spare-time job either — or even a legitimate part of the job he had. He didn't need to have the balance of the alternatives emphasized to him. They were so clean cut that they made the palms of his hands feel clammy. But that lazily, frighteningly impersonal voice went on:

"Anyway, you don't have to make up your mind in a hurry if you don't want to. Hoppy '11 keep you company if you don't mind waiting till I come back, so you won't be lonely. It's rather a lonely place otherwise, you know. We were only saying the other day that a bloke could sit here and scream the skies down, and nobody would hear him. Not that you'd have anything to scream about of course…"

"Wot is this job?" asked the man hoarsely.

Simon flicked the ash from his cigarette and hid the sparkle of excitement in his eyes.

"Just telling us some of these odd things we want to know."

The man's lips clamped and relaxed spasmodically, and his broad chest moved with the strain of his breathing. He stood with his chin drawn in, and his eyes peered up from under a ledge of sullen shadow.

"Well," he said. "Go on."

"Who was the girl friend?"

"Why don't you ask her?"

The voice was soft and musical, startlingly unlike the harsh growl that Simon's ears had been attuned to, and it came from behind him.

The Saint spun round.

She stood in the open doorway, her feet astride with a hint of boyish swagger, still in her soiled overalls, one hand in the trouser pocket, with the yellow curls turn-Ming around her exquisitely moulded face, a slight smile on her red lips. Her eyes, he discovered, now that he saw them open for the first time, were a dark midnight grey — almost the same shade as the automatic he held steadily levelled at his chest.

For three seconds the Saint stood rigidly spellbound. And then a slow smile touched the corners of his mouth in response.

"Well, darling," he murmured, "what is your name?"

V

"You ought to be a detective, Mr Templar," she said. "I don't have to ask you yours."

"But you have an advantage. We've tried checking up on your lorries, but you always send them out with fake number plates and no other identification, so it's rather difficult. I have to suffer for being honest."

"Or for not being so careful," she said. "By the way, will you tell your friend to do something about his hands?"

Simon looked round. Mr Uniatz was still frozen as the interruption had caught him, with his mouth hanging open and his right hand arrested halfway to the armpit holster where his Betsy nestled close to his heart. His eyes welcomed the Saint with an agonized plea for guidance, and Simon took his wrist and put his hand gently down.

"Leave it alone for a minute, Hoppy," he said. "We don't want the lady to start shooting…" His gaze turned back to the girl. "That is, if she can shoot," he added thoughtfully.

"Don't worry," she said calmly. "I can shoot."

The Saint's glance measured the distance.

"It's about six yards," he observed. "And a lot of people have mistaken ideas about how easy it is to pot a moving target with an automatic at six yards."

"Would you like to try me?"

Simon poised his cigarette end between his forefinger and thumb and flipped it sideways. It struck Hoppy's discarded bottle, over by the settee, with a faint plunk! and sent up a tiny fountain of sparks.

"Hit that," he said.

The muzzle of the gun swung away from his body, but it was only for an instant. She fired without seeming to aim, and the automatic was aligned on the Saint's breastbone again before the crash of the explosion had stopped rattling in his ears, but the bottle was spattered in fragments over the carpet.

The Saint nodded to Hoppy.

"She can shoot," he remarked. "She's been practising."

"It's not much use having a gun if you don't."

"You've been reading some good books," said the Saint, and his smile was serene but watchful. "It looks as if you have what is known as the Bulge — for the time being anyway. So where do we go from here? Would you like us to sing and dance for you? Hoppy's just discovered that he can yodel, and he's dying for an audience."

"I'm afraid we haven't time for that. Jopley—"

The driver came out of his temporary stupor. He thrust himself forward and retrieved his gun from the Saint's pocket and shuffled crabwise around the room in the direction of the door, keeping well clear of the girl's line of fire. Remembering the stage at which their conversation had been interrupted, the Saint could understand why he had not been so quick to seize his opportunity as might have been expected, and a malicious twinkle came into his gaze.

"What — you don't want him, do you?" he said. "We thought we'd do you a good turn and take him off your hands."

"I came back for him," she said, "so I suppose I do want him."

Simon acknowledged the argument with a slight movement of his head.

"You didn't waste much time about it either," he said appreciatively. "How did you track him down — by smell?"

"I followed you. I pulled into a side turning in West Holme and waited to see if you'd go that way. Then I just kept behind you. It wasn't difficult."

It didn't sound very difficult when the trick was explained. The Saint sighed ruefully at the reflection of his own thoughtlessness.

"That's the worst of lorries," he complained. "It's so hard to notice what's behind you. Something ought to be done about it… But I hope you'll take care of Algernon if you're borrowing him. We were just starting to get matey."

"I heard you," she said.

"Yus." Jopley's voice was loud and grating. "Goin' ter burn me feet, that's 'ow they were goin' ter get matey. I've a good mind—"

"You haven't," said the girl evenly. "We'll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar."

The Saint smiled at her.

"We've got a secondhand rack and some thumbscrews in the cellar too," he said. "But I prefer boiling people down with onions and a dash of white wine. It makes quite a good clear soup, rather like madrilene."

She really did look like something out of a fairy tale, he thought, or like a moment of musical comedy dropped miraculously into the comfortable masculine furnishings of the Old Barn, with the perfect proportions of her slender body triumphing even over that shabby suit of dungarees and her face framed in its setting of spun gold; but there was nothing illusory about the unfaltering alertness of those dark grey eyes or the experienced handling of the gun she held. The only uncertain thing about her was the smile that lingered about her lips.

She said: "I'm glad you didn't get me here."

"But you're here now," said the Saint. "So couldn't we make up for lost time?"

His hand moved towards his breast pocket, but the two guns that covered him moved more quickly. Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Can't I have a cigarette?"

"Take them out slowly."

Simon took out his case slowly, as he was ordered, and opened it.

"Can I offer you one?"

"We haven't got time."

"You're not going?"

"I'm afraid we've got to." Her acting was as light and polished as his own. "But you're coming with us."

The Saint was still for a moment, with the flame of his lighter burning without a quiver under the end of his cigarette. He drew the end of the cigarette to a bright red and extinguished the flame with a measured jet of smoke.

"But what about Algernon?" he said. "Are you sure he won't be jealous?"

"You're not coming as far as that. We've got to get back to your car, and we don't want any trouble. As long as your friend stays here and doesn't interfere we shan't have any trouble. I just want you to come down and see us off."

"You hear that, Hoppy?" said the Saint. "Any fancy work from you, and I get bumped off."

"That," said the girl grimly, "is the idea."

Simon weighed his prospects realistically. He hadn't exaggerated the solitude of their surroundings: a pitched battle with machine guns at the Old Barn would have caused less local commotion than letting off a handful of squibs in the deepest wastes of the Sahara. There was nothing to neutralize the value of those two automatics by the door if the fingers on their triggers chose to become dictatorial — and the experience of a lifetime had taught the Saint to be highly conservative about the chances he took in calling a bluff from the wrong side of a gun. Apart from which, he was wondering whether he wanted to make any change in the arrangements…

As if he were trying to find arguments for accepting the bitterness of defeat his eyes turned a little away from the girl to a point in space where they would include a glimpse of the face of the lorry driver. He had sown good seed there, he knew, even if he had been ' balked of the quick harvest he had hoped for… And on the outskirts of his vision, removing all doubt, he saw Jopley's sullen features screwed up in a grotesque wink…

"We always see our visitors off the premises," said the Saint virtuously. "Are you sure you won't have one for the road?"

"Not tonight."

Either he was setting new records in immortal imbecility, Simon realized as he led the way down the steep winding lane, or the threads that had baffled him for the past three weeks were on the point of coming into his reach; and some irrational instinct seemed to tell him that it was not the former. He had no inkling then of how gruesomely and from what an unexpected angle his hunch was to be vindicated.

The beam of his own torch, held in the girl's hand, shone steadily on his back as he walked and cast his elongated shadow in a long oval of light down the track. The decision was taken now — whatever he might have done to turn the tables back in the Old Barn, out there in the empty night with the torchlight against him and two guns at his back there was no trick he could play that would fall far short of attempted suicide.

They came down to the road, and he saw the lights of his car parked a little way past the turning. Jopley got in first and took the wheel; and then the girl slipped into the seat beside him, still holding the Saint in the centre of the flashlight's ring of luminance. Simon stood by the side of the car and smiled into the light.

"You still haven't told me your name, darling," he said.

"Perhaps that's because I don't want you to know it."

"But how shall I know who it is when you call me up? You are going to call me up, aren't you? I'm in the London telephone directory, and the number here is Lyndhurst 9965." He lingered imperceptibly over the figures — but that was for Jopley's benefit. "Sometime when you're not so busy I'd like to take you out in the moonlight and tell you how beautiful you are."

"There's no moon tonight," she said, "so you'll want the torch to get home with."

The light spun towards him, and he grabbed for it automatically. By the time he had fumbled it into his hands the lights of the car were vanishing round the next bend in the road.

The Saint made his way slowly back up the hill. So that was that, and his wisdom or folly would be proved one way or the other before long. He grinned faintly at the thought of the expression that would come over Peter Quentin's face when he heard the news. She really would be worth a stroll in the moonlight, too, if they weren't so busy…

There was someone in the porch by the front door.

The Saint stopped motionless, with a flitter of impalpable hailstones sweeping up his spine. As he walked with the torch swinging loosely in his hand, its arc of light had passed over a pair of feet, cutting them out of the darkness at the ankles. The glimpse had only been instantaneous, before the moving splash of light lost it again; but Simon knew that he had not been mistaken. He had switched out the torch instinctively before he grasped the full significance of what he had seen.

After a moment he took three soundless steps to the side and switched the light on again, holding it well away from his body. And for a second time he experienced that ghostly tingle of nerves.

For the man was sitting, not standing, on a low bench in the alcove beside the door, with his hands hanging down by his sides and his body hunched forward so that his face was buried in his knees. But although his features were hidden, there was something about the general appearance of the man that struck Simon with a sudden shock of recognition.

"Pargo!" said the Saint sharply.

The figure did not move, and Simon stepped quickly forward and raised its head. One look was enough to tell him that Ernie Pargo was dead.

VI

About the manner of his dying Simon preferred not to speculate too profoundly. He had actually been strangled by the cord that was still knotted around his throat so tightly that it was almost buried in the flesh of his neck, but other things had happened to him before that.

"I see anudder guy like dis once," said Mr Uniatz chattily. "He is one of Dutch Kuhlmann's mob, an' de Brooklyn mob takes him over to Bensenhoist one night to ask him who squealed on Ike Izolsky. Well, when dey get t'ru wit' him he is like hamboiger wit'out de onions—"

"You have such fascinating reminiscences, Hoppy," said the Saint.

He was laying Pargo's limp body on the settee and arranging the relaxed limbs for the rough examination which he felt had to be made. It was not a pleasant task, and for all the Saint's hardened cynicism it made his mouth set in a stony line as he went on.

In the brightness of the living room the dead man looked even more ghastly than he had looked outside — and that had been enough to make the darkness around the house suddenly seem to be peopled with ugly shadows and to make the soft stir of the leaves sound like cackles of ghoulish laughter. The Brooklyn mob could have learnt very little from whoever had worked on Pargo — Simon did not have to ask himself how they had known where to leave his body.

But when had it been done? There was no sign of rigor mortis, and Simon thought that he could still detect some warmth under the man's clothes. The body certainly hadn't been in the porch when they first arrived at the Old Barn. It might have been there when he went out only a few minutes ago, but it would have been easy not to notice it when going out of the door and moving away from the house. It seemed impossible that it could have been placed there during the short time he had been away; but he had circled around the building for some minutes to make sure, like a prowling cat, with every nerve and sense pricked for the slightest vestige of any lurking intruder, until he had to admit that it was a hopeless quest. If it had not been done then it could only have been done while he was talking to Jopley — or while the girl was there talking to him.

Whatever the answers were to those riddles, the happy-go-lucky irrelevance of the adventure had been brought crashing down to earth as if some vital support in it had been knocked away. There was no longer any question of coming in for the fun of the game: Simon Templar was in it now, up to the neck, and as he went further with his investigation of Pargo's mangled body the steel chilled colder in his eyes.

Hoppy Uniatz, however, having possessed himself of a bottle from the kitchen during the Saint's absence, was prepared to enjoy himself.

"Dat's a funny t'ing now, boss," he resumed brightly. "Dey is a dame wit' de Brooklyn mob what is Izolsky's moll, an' she helps de boys woik on dis guy. She tells him funny stories while dey go over him wit' an electric iron. She had class, too, just like dis dame tonight."

The Saint straightened up involuntarily as Hoppy's grisly memoirs hit a mark which he himself had been unconsciously avoiding. Now that the point was brought home to him, his first impulse was to shut it out again; and yet nagging little needle points of incontrovertible logic went on fretting at the opening that had been made.

The timetable made it impossible for her to have deliberately co-operated from the start in dumping the body where he had found it. But she might have met the dumping party on their way to the house and come in to hold him up while they were doing their job. She might have known from the beginning that the dumping was to be done. She might have had the information that had been tortured out of Pargo to lead her there, without the necessity of following the lorry as she said she had done. She might have seen the body in the porch before she let herself in through the unlocked door and come in unperturbed by it. In any case, as a confessed member of the gang that had done the job, was there any logical reason to presume that she knew nothing about their methods? Unsentimentally the Saint acknowledged that golden hair and a face like a truant princess were no proof of a sensitive and lovable character. It was a pity, but the world was like that… The expression on his face did not change.

"She must have been a beauty," he murmured absently.

"Sure, boss, she wuz de nuts. She wuz like a real lady. But I never could make de grade wit' dese ritzy dames." Mr Uniatz sighed lugubriously in contemplation of the unappreciativeness of the female sex, and then his gaze reverted to the figure on the couch. "Dis guy," he said, gesturing with his bottle, "is he de guy we're waitin' for tonight?"

The Saint lighted a cigarette and turned away.

"That's right," he said. "Only we don't have to wait any longer."

"De guy from de goil's mob?"

"Yes."

"De guy who drives de foist truck we hijack?"

"Yes."

"De guy who gives us de wire about dat truck tonight?"

"Yes."

"De guy," said Mr Uniatz, making sure of his identification, "what is goin' to find out who is de big shot in dis racket?"

"That was the idea," said the Saint curtly. "But I suppose he found out too much. He won't tell us anything now, I'm afraid."

Mr Uniatz wagged his head.

"Chees," he said sympathetically, "dat's too bad."

For the first time he seemed to visualize the passing of Mr Pargo as a subject for serious regret. He studied the body with a personal interest which had been lacking in him before and reached for his bottle again to console himself.

Simon drew smoke monotonously into his lungs and breathed it out in slow trailing streamers. Pargo's death was something that was passing into his own background by then. Anger and pity would do nothing now: his troubles were over, whatever they had been. There remained revenge — and that would be taken in due time, inexorably. The Saint was grimly resolved about that… But that was another part of the background, an item in the unalterable facts of existence like the rising of the sun the next morning, too obvious to require dwelling on in the abstract.

Nor was he thinking of the chance that the same rising sun might find him taking no more active share in the proceedings than Pargo was. Certainly the dumping of the body was a proof that his anonymity was gone forever; but he had taken that risk voluntarily, before he knew about Pargo, when he let the girl and Jopley go. With his almost clairvoyantly accurate understanding of the criminal mind, he wasn't expecting any further demonstrations that night: the body had been left there for an effect, and nothing more would be done until the effect had had time to sink in.

What he was thinking, with a different kind of coldbloodedness from that of Mr Uniatz, was that the passing of Mr Pargo was a setback which it wouldn't be easy to make good. He had now the possible cooperation of Jopley, but that would be suspect for some time even if it materialized. The one proved spy he had had in the enemy's camp had been hideously eliminated.

The Saint sat on the edge of the table and stared abstractedly at the body on the settee. If only Pargo could have got through to him before that happened with the information which he had paid for at such a price…

Pargo's left arm slid off the edge of the sofa, and his hand flopped onto the carpet so that his limp wrist turned over at a horribly unnatural angle.

Simon went on looking at it, with his face as impassive as a mask of bronze.

"Some guy tells me once," went on Mr Uniatz, seeking a solution, "dat if you look in a guy's eyes what's been moidered…"

The Saint seemed suddenly to have become very still, with his cigarette poised half an inch from his lips.

His examination of Pargo had been confined to the body itself and the contents of the pockets. The former had given nothing but confirmation to his first impressions, and the latter had been emptied of everything that might have given him any kind of information. Now with a queer feeling of breathless incredulity he was staring at something so obvious that he could hardly understand how he had overlooked it before, so uncannily like a direct answer from the dead that it made the blood race thunderously in his veins.

As the arm had fallen the sleeve had been dragged back from the grimy shirt cuff. And on the shirt cuff itself there were dark marks too distinct and regularly patterned to be entirely grime.

Simon moved forward and lifted the lifeless hand with a sense of dizzy unreality.

He was barely able to decipher the lines of cramped and twisted writing.

There was no more than that; and even in the way it was written the Saint could feel the agony of the man scrawling those words with broken and shaking fingers, driven by who could tell what delirious impulse of ultimate loneliness.

Simon's voice trailed away as the message trailed away, into a kind of formless silence.

Hoppy Uniatz gaped at him and then put down his bottle. He crowded over to squint at the writing with his own eyes.

"Say, ain't dat a break?" he demanded pachydermatously. "Now if we knew who dis guy Lasser is—"

"There's one Lasser you ought to know," said the Saint acidly. "He keeps you supplied with your favourite food… My God!"

The immensity of the idea he had stumbled over almost rocked him on his feet, and a blaze came into his eyes as he recovered himself.

''Lasser — Lasser's Wine Stores — the biggest liquor chain in the country! It'd be perfect!.. Wait a minute — I've just remembered. There's a picture of him somewhere—"

He picked up a copy of the Sporting and Dramatic News from the table and tore through it in search of the correlation of that flash of random memory. It was on a page of photographs headed "The Atlantic Yacht Club Ball at Grosvenor House" — one of those dreary collections of flashlight snapshots so dear to the peculiar snobbery of the British public. One of the pictures showed a group taken at their table, with a fat, bald-headed, jolly-faced man on the left. The caption under it ran:

The Saint had not read any farther. His eyes were frozen on the picture of the girl next to Lasser, for it was also the picture of the girl who had been holding him up half an hour ago.

VII

"Yes, I checked up on her," said Peter Quentin, sipping his whisky and soda. "She lives in Welbeck Street, and she runs one of those ultra dress shops in Bond Street. You know the kind of thing — an enormous window with nothing in it but a chromium-plated whatnot with one evening wrap hanging on it and no price tickets."

"It all fits in," said the Saint soberly. "That load of dresses and whoosits that we knocked off a fortnight ago — that's where they would have gone. She probably took a trip to Paris herself and spent a gorgeous week getting them together. What about Lasser?"

"Nothing that isn't public property anyway. But I found out from Lloyd's that he's the owner of a 300-ton steam yacht called the Valkyrie. He's also the owner of a house on Gad Cliff, and if you look at the map you'll see that it overlooks Brandy Bay. It's supposed to have been unoccupied and left in charge of a caretaker for about a couple of years, but we don't have to take the caretaker too seriously."

Peter Quentin had been a rather serious young man since the Saint had told him the complete story over the telephone that morning, and curiously enough he had refrained from making any of the obvious gibes which Simon had been fully prepared for. He had arrived late in the afternoon after what clearly could not have been an idle morning.

The Saint moved up and down the long living room of the Old Barn for a moment with the silent restlessness and pent-up energy of a caged tiger.

"I've been going over all that we had from Pargo," he said, "and all the things we'd been trying to get sorted out before. And it all seems so simple now that it almost makes you howl."

Peter didn't interrupt him; and the Saint took another turn round the room and went on:

"What we've been up against all the time was that there seemed to be three separate gangs without any connecting link. There was one gang that brought the stuff across the Channel in some sort of ship. The stuff was brought ashore in small boats and handed over to the shore gang, and none of 'em ever saw the ship that brought it in daylight. The ship always had her lights out, and they could never even find out the first thing about her. Pargo was one of the shore gang, and I'm beginning to think now that he ought to have known where the stuff was stored; but probably he was holding out on us to get as much money as he could. Anyway all the rest he knew was that the shore gang drove trucks to London and parked them wherever they'd been told to and went away, and somebody else came along later and picked up the truck and took it wherever it was going. That, presumably, was the third gang — the distributing gang. And none of the three gangs met anywhere except at the top, which we couldn't get near."

"Unless they all met at the same top."

"Of course I had been thinking of that. But there was no actual proof that it was the same top; and in any case we didn't know where the top was. The point is that every lead petered out as soon as it started to get interesting. It was the perfect setup — three separate outfits doing separate shares in the same job, and none of 'em making any contact with the others except in places that were practically leak-proof. And now they all blow up together."

"Off the same fuse," commented Peter economically.

The Saint nodded.

"That's what it means. The top is the same — right the way through. This steamboat of Lasser's — the Valkyrie — brings the stuff over the Channel. That's a cinch. A private yacht can go anywhere and no questions asked. He could keep her in Southampton Water, push off for a week-end cruise, say he was going to Torquay or anywhere, scoot over the Channel and pick up his cargo. There's probably a fourth gang on the other side, which just collects contraband for some smugglers unknown. And it's only about seventy miles straight across from Cherbourg to Brandy Bay. The Valkyrie comes back and sends the stuff ashore and steams back to Southampton Water, and nobody knows where she's been or bothers to ask… There's a coastguard station at Worbarrow Head and another one on the far side of Kimmeridge Bay; but Brandy Bay is hidden from both of 'em, and coast guarding is pretty much of a dead letter these days."

"And the shore gang picks it up—"

"Under the same orders. It wouldn't be too hard for Lasser to organize that. And then it goes out to the great unsuspecting public, nicely mixed up with any amount of genuine duty-paid legitimate liquor through the central warehouses of Lasser's Wine Stores, Limited — who don't know where it came from, any of the guys who handle it, but just take it as part of the day's work. What's that advertising line of theirs? 'Butlers to the Nation.' It's not a bad line either, from the experience I've had of butlers."

Peter lowered the level in his glass an inch further.

"Apart from what goes rustling around the limbs of the aristocracy from the salons of Brenda et Cie," he remarked.

"Apart from that," Simon agreed unemotionally. "But it all works out so beautifully that we ought to have been on to it months ago."

"I should have been," said Peter, "if you hadn't got in the way. And now it's all so simple. You keep on chasing the shore gang and finding bodies on the doorstep while I sit out on Gad Cliff with a telescope every night catching pneumonia and watching for the smuggling gang, and Hoppy puts on some lipstick and ankles up and down Bond Street looking for chiffon brassieres with bottles of whisky in them. I don't know what happens about this fourth gang you've invented on the French side, but I suppose you can always find somebody else to keep track of them." Peter drank deeply and looked around for a refill. "As you said just now it's so childishly simple that it almost makes you howl."

The Saint regarded him pityingly.

"I've always approved of these birds who want to strangle imbecile children at birth," he said. "And now I think I shall send them a donation. You ineffable fathead — what do these assorted gangs amount to? It doesn't matter if there are four of them or forty. They're only stooges, like poor old Pargo. Knock the kingpin out, and they all fall apart. Take one man in, and they all go for the same ride. All we want is Lasser, and we can call it a day."

"Just like poor old Pargo," said Peter, sotto voce. He looked up from manipulating the siphon. "What happened to him, by the way?"

"We took him down to Lymington and borrowed a boat while the tide was going out. If he ever gets washed up again anywhere he'll be another headache for Chief Inspector Teal; but we had to do something with him."

"Probably that's one reason why he was left here," said Peter intelligently.

Simon was kindling the latest cigarette in a chain that had already filled an ash tray. He saw that it was burning evenly and crushed the preceding fag end into the heap of wreckage.

"That was one obvious motive — bodies being troublesome things to get rid of," he said. "The other, of course, was pour encourager les autres. I've been expecting some more direct encouragement all day, but it hasn't materialized yet. I don't suppose it'll be long now, though."

Mr Uniatz, who had been silent for a long time except for intermittent glugging noises produced by the bottle beside him, stirred himself abruptly and consulted his watch with the earnest air of a martyr who realizes that he is next in line for the lions. His intrusion after such a long absence seemed so portentous that both Peter and the Saint turned towards him with what must have been a disconcerting expectancy. Mr Uniatz blinked at them with his nightmare features creased in the grooves of noble self-abnegation.

"Boss," he said, with some embarrassment, "what's de next train to London?"

"Train?" said the Saint blankly.

"Yes, boss. I t'ought you an' Mr Quentin'd be busy, so ya wouldn't wanta drive me dere, an' dey ain't no udder car—"

The Saint studied him anxiously.

"You aren't feeling ill or anything, are you?" he asked. "But you don't have to worry about the ungodly giving us some more encouragement. Peter and I will hold your hand if there's any rough stuff."

"Encouragement?" repeated Mr Uniatz foggily. He shook his head, as one who was suddenly confronted with a hopelessly outlandish twist of thought. "I dunno, boss… But ya said I gotta go to Bond Street an' look for braseers wit' bottles in dem. Dat's okay wit' me," said Mr Uniatz, squaring his shoulders heroically, "but if any a dese dames t'ink I'm gettin' fresh—"

Simon readjusted himself hastily to the pace of a less volatile intellect.

"That's all right, Hoppy," he said reassuringly. "We're putting that idea on the shelf for the moment. You just stick around with us and keep your Betsy ready."

Mr Uniatz's eyes lighted tentatively with the dawn of hope.

"You mean I don't gotta go to London?"

"No."

"Or—"

"No."

Hoppy drew a deep breath.

"Chees, boss," he said, speaking from the heart, "dat's great!"

His bottle glugged again expressively.

"We haven't any other ideas," Peter explained dis-hearteningly, "but that doesn't matter."

The Saint's eyes mocked him with dancing pin points of silent laughter. During that day the Saint's cold anger of the night before seemed to have worn off, although the inexorable pith of it was still perceptible in the fine-drawn core of steel that seemed to underlie his outward languor. But now it was masked by something more vital: the mad gay recklessness that came around him like a mantle of sunlight when the hunt was up and the fanfares of adventure were sounding out in the open.

"You're wrong," he said. "We've got a much better idea. I had a telegram this afternoon — it was phoned through from Lyndhurst just before you arrived. I've been saving it up for you." He picked up the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled the message down. "It says: 'Your car will be at the Broken Sword in Tyneham at nine-fifteen tonight.' It isn't signed, and anyhow it wouldn't have mattered much who signed it. It didn't originate from any of these assorted gangs we've been talking about — otherwise why be so very accurate about the time? It means that the master mind is taking a hand, just as I prophesied last night, and whatever happens he won't be far away. It's bait of course; and we're going to bite!"

VIII

Simon wanted seventy-three to finish, and the babble of chaff and facetious comment died down through sporadic resurrections as he took over the darts and set his toe on the line. His first dart went in the treble nineteen; and the stillness lasted a couple of seconds after that before a roar of delight acknowledged the result of the mental arithmetic that had been working itself out in the heads of the onlookers. His second dart brushed the inside wire of the double eight on the wrong side as it went in; and the hush came down again, more breathless than before. Somebody in a corner bawled a second encouraging calculation, and the Saint smiled. Quite coolly and unhurriedly, as if he had no distracting thought in his mind, he balanced the third dart in his fingers, poised it and launched it at the board. It struck and stayed there — dead in the centre of the double four.

A huge burst of laughter and applause crashed through the silence like a breaking wave as he turned away; and his opponent, who had been pushed forward as the local champion, grinned under his grey moustache and said: "Well, zur, the beer's on me."

The Saint shook his head.

"No, it isn't, George. Let's have a round for everybody on me, because I'm going to have to leave you."

He laid a ten-shilling note on the bar and nodded to the landlord as the patrons of the Broken Sword crowded up to moisten their parched throats. He glanced at his watch as he did so and saw that it showed sixteen minutes after nine. Zero hour had struck while he was taking his stand for those last three darts, but it had made no difference to the steadiness of his hand or the accuracy of his eye.

Even now it made no difference, and while he gathered up his change he was as much a part of the atmosphere of the small low-ceilinged bar as any of the rough, warm-hearted local habitues… But his eyes were on the road outside the narrow leaded windows, where the twilight was folding soft grey veils under the trees; and while he was looking out there she arrived. His ears caught the familiar airy purr of the Hirondel through the clamour around him before it swept into view, and he saw the brightness of her golden hair behind the wheel without surprise as she slowed by. It was curious that he should have been thinking for the last hour in terms of "she"; but he had been expecting nothing else, and in that at least his instinct had been faultless.

The boisterous human fellowship of the Broken Sword was swallowed up in an abyss as he closed the door of the public bar behind him. As if he had been suddenly transported a thousand miles instead of merely over the breadth of a threshold he passed into a different world as he faced the quiet road outside — a world where strange and horrible things happened such as the men he had left behind him to their beer would never believe, a world where a man's life hung on the flicker of an eyelid and the splitting of a second and where there was adventure of a keen, corrosive kind such as the simple heroes of mythology had never lived to see. The Saint's eyes swept left and right before he stepped out of the shadow of the porch, but he saw nothing instantly threatening. Even so, he found some comfort in the knowledge that Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz would be covering him from the ambush where he had posted them behind a clump of trees in the field over the way.

But none of that could have been read in his face or in the loose-limbed ease of his body as he sauntered over to the car. He smiled as he came up and saluted her with the faint mockery that was his fighting armour.

"It's nice of you to bring the old boat back, darling. And she doesn't look as if you'd bent her at all. There aren't many women I'd trust her with, but you can borrow her again any time you want to. Just drop in and help yourself — but of course I don't have to tell you to do that."

The girl was almost as cool as he was. Only a hardened campaigner like the Saint would have detected the sharp edges of strain under the delicate contours of her face. She patted the steering wheel with one white-gloved hand.

"She's nice," she said. "The others wanted to run her over a cliff, but I said that would have been a sin. Besides, I had to see you anyway."

"It's something to know I'm worth saving a car for," he murmured.

She studied him with a kind of speculative aloofness.

"I like you by daylight. I thought I should."

He returned her survey with equal frankness. She wore a white linen skirt and a cobwebby white blouse, and the lines of her figure were as delicious as he had thought they would be. It would have been easy, effortless, to surrender completely to the blood-quickening enchantment of her physical presence. But between them also was the ghostly presence of Pargo; and a chilling recollection of Pargo's livid distorted face passed before the Saint's eyes as he smiled at her.

"You look pretty good yourself, Brenda," he remarked. "Perhaps it's because that outfit looks a lot more like Bond Street than what you had on last night."

Her poise was momentarily shaken.

"How did you—"

"I'm a detective too," said the Saint gravely. "Only I keep it a secret."

She unlatched the door and swung out her long slender legs. As she was doing so a sleek black sedan swam round the nearest bend, slowing up, and turned in towards the front of the pub. The Saint's right hand stayed in his coat pocket, and his eyes were chips of ice for an instant before the driver got out unconcernedly as the car stopped and walked across to the entrance of the bar. The Saint could almost have laughed at himself but not quite; those reactions were too solidly founded on probabilities to be wholly humorous, and he was still waiting for the purpose of their meeting to be revealed.

The girl didn't seem to have noticed anything. She straightened up as her feet touched the road, flawless as a white statue, with the same impenetrable aloofness. She said: "There's your car. Would you like to take it and drive away? A long way away — to the north of Scotland or Timbuktu or anywhere. At least far enough for you to forget that any of this ever happened."

"The world is so small," Simon pointed out unhappily. "Twelve thousand miles is about the farthest you can get from anything, and that's not very far in these days of high-speed transport. Besides, I don't know that I want to forget. We've still got that date for a stroll in the moonlight—"

"I'm not joking," she said impatiently. "And I haven't got much time. The point is, I found out your name last night, but I didn't know who you were. I suppose I haven't been around enough in that kind of society. But the others knew."

"Look at the advantages of a cosmopolitan education," he observed. "There are more things in this cockeyed world than Bond Street—"

The stony earnestness of her face cut him off.

"This is serious," she said. "Can't you see that? If the others had had their way you wouldn't be here now at all. If you'd been anything else but what you are you wouldn't be here. But they've heard of you, and so it doesn't seem so easy to get rid of you in the obvious way. That's why I'm here to talk to you. If you'll leave us alone it'll be worth a hundred pounds a week to you, and you can draw the first hundred pounds this evening."

"That's interesting," said the Saint thoughtfully. "And where are these hundred travel tickets?"

"There '11 be a man waiting in a car with a GB plate at the crossroads in East Lulworth at half past ten. He'll be able to talk to you if you want to discuss it."

The Saint took her arm.

"Let's discuss it now," he suggested. "There's some very good beer inside—"

"I can't." She glanced a little to his left. "That other car's waiting for me — the one that just arrived. The man who brought it has gone out at the back of the pub, and he's only waiting a little way up the road to see that you don't keep me. It wouldn't be very sensible of you to try because he can see us from where he is, and if I don't pick him up at once there '11 be trouble." Her hand rested on his sleeve for a moment as she disengaged herself. "Why don't you go to Lulworth? It wouldn't hurt you, and it'd be so much easier. After all, what are you doing this for?"

"I might ask what you're doing it for."

"Mostly for fun. And from what they've told me about you, you might just as easily have been on our side. It doesn't do anyone any harm—"

The Saint's smile was as bright as an arctic noon.

"In fact," he said, "you're beginning to make me believe that it really did Pargo a lot of good."

She shrugged.

"You wouldn't have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you?" she asked, and the casual way she said it almost took the Saint's breath away.

"Of course not," he answered after a pause in which his brain whirled stupidly.

The dusk had been deepening very quickly, so that he could not be quite sure of the expression in her eyes as she looked up at him.

"Talk it over with your friends," she said in a quick low voice. "Try to go to Lulworth. I don't want anything else to happen… Good-bye. Here's the key of your car."

Her arm moved, and something tinkled along the road. As his eyes automatically turned to try and follow it she slipped aside and was out of his reach. The door of the black sedan slammed, its lights went on, and it rushed smoothly past him with the wave of a white glove. By the time he had found his own ignition key in the gloom where she had thrown it he knew that it was too late to think of trying to follow her.

The Saint's mind was working under pressure as he waited for Peter and Hoppy to join him at the corner of the inn. There was something screwy about that interview — something that made him feel as if part of the foundations of his grasp of the case were slipping away from under him. But for the present his thoughts were too chaotic and nebulous to share with anyone else.

"We've got a date to be shot up at East Lulworth at half past ten," he said cheerfully and gave them a literal account of the conversation.

"They're making you travel a bit before they kill you," said Peter. "Are you going on with this mad idea of yours?"

"It's the only thing to do if we're sticking to our plan of campaign. We're fish on the rise tonight, and we'll go on rising until we get a line if it—"

He broke off with his hand whipping instinctively to his pocket again as a bicycle whirred out of the shadows towards them at racing speed. The brakes grated as it shot by, and a man almost threw himself off the machine and turned back towards them. A moment later the Saint saw that it was Jopley.

"Thank Gawd I caught yer," he gasped. "I was afride it 'ud be too late. Yer mustn't go ter Lulworth tonight!"

"That's a pity," said the Saint tranquilly. "But I just made a date to go there."

"Yer carn't do it, sir! They'll be wytin' for yer wiv a machine gun. I 'eard 'im givin' the orders an' 'ow the lidy was ter meet yer 'ere an' tell yer the tile an' everythink—"

Simon became suddenly alert.

"You heard who giving the orders?" he shot back.

"The boss 'imself it was — 'e's at Gad Cliff 'Ouse naow!

IX

The Saint's lighter flared in the darkness, catching the exultant glint in his eyes under impudently slanted brows. When the light went out and left only the glowworm point of his cigarette it was as if something vital and commanding had been abruptly snatched away, leaving an irreparable void; but out of the void his voice spoke with the gay lilt of approaching climax.

"That's even better," he said. "Then we don't have to go to Lulworth."

"You must be disappointed," Peter said sympathetically. "After looking forward to being shot up with a machine gun—"

"This is easier," said the Saint. "This is the fish sneaking out of the river a little way downstream and wriggling along the bank to bite the fisherman in the pants. Peter, I have a feeling that this is going to be Comrade Lasser's unlucky day."

"It might just as well have been any other day," Peter objected. "He isn't any unknown quantity. He's in the telephone book. Probably he's in Who's Who as well. You could find out everything about him and all his habits and choose your own time—"

"You couldn't choose any time like this! Just because he is supposed to be such a respectable citizen his pants would be a tough proposition to bite. Can you imagine us trying to hold him up in his own baronial halls or taking him for a ride from the Athenaeum Club? Why, he could call on the whole of Scotland Yard, including Chief Inspector Teal, not to mention the Salvation Army and the Brigade of Guards, to rally round and look after him if we tried anything. But this is different. Now he isn't a pillar of society and industry, surrounded by bishops and barons. He's in bad company, with a machine-gun party waiting for us at East Lul-worth — and while he's waiting for news from them he's sitting up at Gad Cliff House on top of the biggest store of contraband that the revenue never set eyes on. We've got him with the goods on him, and this is where we take our chance!"

Peter Quentin shrugged.

"All right," he said philosophically. "I'd just as soon take my chance at this house as take it with a machine gun. Lead on, damn you."

Mr Uniatz cleared his throat, producing a sound like the eruption of a small volcano. The anxiety that was vexing his system could be felt even if it could not be seen. Ever a stickler for detail once he had assimilated it, Mr Uniatz felt that one important detail was being overlooked in the flood of ideas that had recently been passing over his head.

"Boss," said Mr Uniatz lucidly, "de skoit."

"What about her?" asked the Saint.

"She didn't look to me like she had no bottles in her braseer."

"She hadn't."

"Den why—"

"We're giving her a rest, Hoppy. This is another guy we're going to see."

"Oh, a guy," said Mr Uniatz darkly. "Den how come he's wearin' a—"

"He's funny that way," said the Saint hastily. "Now let's have a look at the lie of the land."

He led the way over to the Hirondel and spread out a large-scale ordnance map under the dashboard light. Gad Cliff House was plainly marked on it, standing in about three acres of ground bordered on one side by the cliff itself and approached by a narrow lane from the road that ran over the high ground parallel with the coast.

"That's plain enough," said the Saint after a brief examination of the plan. "But what arc the snags?"

He looked round and found Jopley's face at his shoulder, seeming even more sullen and evil in the dim greenish glow of the light. The man shook his head.

"It's 'opeless, that's wot the snag is," he said bluntly. "There's alarms orl rahnd the plice — them invisible rye things. A rabbit couldn't get in wivout settin' 'em orf."

"But you were able to get out."

"Yus, I got aht."

"Well, how did you manage it?"

"I said I 'ad ter go aht an' buy some fags."

"I mean," said the Saint with the almost supernatural self-control developed through long association with Hoppy Uniatz, "how did you get out through these alarms?"

Jopley said slowly: "I got aht fru the gates."

"And how will you get back?"

"I'll git back the sime wye. The man ooze watchin' there, 'e knows me, an' 'e phones up to the 'ouse an' ses 'oo it is, an' they ses it's orl right, an' 'e opens the gates an' lets me in."

The Saint folded his map.

"Well," he said deliberately, "suppose when this bird had the gates open to let you in, some other blokes who were waiting outside rushed the pair of you, laid him out and let themselves in — would anyone at the house know what had happened?"

The man thought it out laboriously.

"Not till 'e came to an' told 'em."

"Then—"

"But yer carn't git in that wye," Jopley stated flatly. "Not letting me in for it, yer carn't. Wot 'appens when they find aht I done it? Jer fink I wanter git meself bashed over the 'ead an' frown to the muckin' lobsters?"

Simon smiled.

"You don't have to get thrown to the lobsters, Algernon," he said. "I'm rather fond of lobsters, and I wouldn't have that happen for anything. You don't even have to get bashed over the head except in a friendly way for the sake of appearances. And 'they' don't have to find out anything about it — although I don't think they'll be in a position to do you much damage anyway, when I'm through with them. But if it'll make you any happier you don't have to be compromised at all. You just happened to be there when we rushed in, and nobody could prove anything different. And it'd be worth a hundred pounds to you — on the nail."

Jopley looked from one face to the other while the idea seemed to establish itself in his mind. For a few seconds the Saint was afraid that fear would still make him refuse and wondered what other arguments would carry conviction. In mentioning a hundred pounds he had gone to the limits of bribery, and it was more or less an accident that he had as much money as that in his pockets… He held his breath until Jopley answered.

"When do I get this 'undred quid?"

Simon opened his wallet and took out a folded wad of bank notes. Jopley took them in his thick fingers and glanced through them. His heavy, sulky eyes turned up again to the Saint's face.

"I won't do nothink else, mind. Yer can rush me along o' the other bloke, an' if yer can git inside that's orl right. But I didn't 'ave nothink ter do wiv it, see?"

"We'll take care of that," said the Saint confidently. "All we want is to know when you're going back, so that we can be ready. And it had better be soon because the time's getting on. I want to be in that house before the machine-gun squad gets back from Lulworth."

"I can start back naow," said the other grudgingly. "If you drive there in yer car yer'll 'ave ten minutes before I git there on me bike."

The Saint nodded.

"Okay," he said peacefully. "Then let's go!"

The steady drone of the Hirondel sank through his mind into silence as the long shining car swept up the winding road towards the crest of the downs. Instead of it, as if the words were being spoken again beside his ears, he heard Brenda Marlow's clear unfaltering voice saying, "You wouldn't have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you?" Lasser, Pargo, what had been done to Pargo, and what might be done at Gad Cliff House that night — those other thoughts were a vague jumble that was almost blotted out by the clearness of the words which he was hearing over again in memory. And he could feel again the chill of downright horror that had struck him like an icy wind when he heard them first.

Simon Templar had travelled too far in the iron highways of outlawry to be afflicted with empty sentimentality, and he had been flippant enough about death in his time — even about such ugly death as Pargo's. But about such an utter unrelenting callousness, coming without the flicker of an eyelash from a face like the one he had seen when it was being spoken, there was a quality of epic inhumanity to which even the Saint could not adjust himself. It made her look like something beside which a blend of Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia would have seemed like a playful schoolgirl — and yet he could recall just as clearly the edged contempt in her voice, after she had overheard the lurid bluff he had encouraged Hoppy to put over on Jopley, when she said "We'll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar." The contradiction fretted at the smooth surface of his reasoning with maddening persistence, and yet the one and only apparent way of reconciling it raised another question which it was too late now to track down to its possible conclusions…

A dull kind of tightness settled over the Saint's nerves as he brought the Hirondel to a stop just beyond the opening of the lane that led to the entrance of Gad Cliff House. He switched off the engine and climbed out without any visible sign of it, but his right hand felt instinctively for the hilt of the sharp throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under the sleeve and found it with an odd sense of comfort. At other times when he had made mistakes that hidden and unlooked-for weapon had brought rescue out of defeat, and the touch of it reassured him. He turned to meet the others without a change in his blithe serenity.

"You know what you have to do, boys and girls," he said. "Follow me, and let's make it snappy."

Mr Uniatz coughed, peering at him through the darkness with troubled intensity.

"I dunno, boss," he said anxiously. "I never hoid of dis invisible rye. Is dat what de guy has in de bottles in his—"

"Yes, that's it," said the Saint with magnificent presence of mind. "You go on an invisible jag on it and end up by seeing invisible pink elephants. It saves any amount of trouble. Now get hold of your Betsy and shut up, because there may be invisible ears."

The lane ran between almost vertical grass banks topped by stiff thorn hedges, and it was so narrow that a car driven down it would have had no more than a few inches clearance on either side. The car that came up it from the road must have been driven by someone who knew his margins with the accuracy of long experience, for it swooped out of the night so swiftly and suddenly that the Saint's hearing had scarcely made him aware of its approach when it was almost on top of them, its headlights turning the lane into a trench of blinding light. Simon had an instant of desperate indecision while he reckoned their chance of scaling the steep hedge-topped banks and realized that they could never do it in time; and then he wheeled to face the danger with his hand leaping to his gun, Hoppy's movement was even quicker, but it was still too late. Another light sprang up dazzlingly from behind the gates just ahead of them: they were trapped between the two opposing broadsides of eye-searing brilliance and the two high walls of the lane as if they had been caught in a box, and Simon knew without any possibility of self-deception that they were helplessly at the mercy of the men behind the lights.

"Put your hands up," ordered a new voice from the car, and the Saint acknowledged to himself how completely and beautifully he had been had.

X

"I might have known you'd be a great organizer, brother," murmured the Saint as he led the way obediently into the library of Gad Cliff House with his hands held high in the air. "But you were certainly in form tonight."

The compliment was perfectly sincere. When Simon Templar fell into traps he liked them to be good ones for the sake of his own self-esteem; and the one he had just walked into so docilely struck him as being a highly satisfactory specimen from every point of view.

It was all so neat and simple and psychologically watertight, once you were let into the secret. He had kept his first appointment with Brenda Marlow as anyone would have known he would. He had been duly suspicious of the second appointment at the crossroads in East Lulworth as he was meant to be. He had accepted it merely as a confirmation of those suspicions when Jopley arrived with the warning of the machine-gun party — exactly as he was meant to do. And with the memory of the proposition he had made to Jopley the night before still fresh in his mind, the rest of the machinery had run like clockwork. He had been so completely disarmed that even Jopley's well-simulated reluctance to lead him into the very trap he was meant to be led into was almost a superfluous finishing touch. A good trap was something that the Saint could always appreciate with professional interest; but a trap within a trap was a refinement to remember. He had announced himself as being in the market for bait, and verily he had swallowed everything that was offered him.

Simon admitted the fact and went on from there. They were in the soup, but even if it was good soup it was no place to stay in. He reckoned the odds dispassionately. Their guns had been taken away from them, but his knife had escaped the search. That was the only asset he could find on his own side — that, and whatever his own quickness of thought was worth, which on its recent showing didn't seem to be very much. And yet no one who looked at him would have seen a trace of the grim concentration that was driving his brain on a fierce, defiant search for the inspiration that would turn the tables again.

He smiled at Lasser with all the carefree and unruffled ease that only reached its airiest perfection with him when the corner was tightest and the odds were too astronomical to be worth brooding over.

"What does it feel like to be a master mind?" he enquired interestedly.

Lasser beamed back at him, with his rich jolly face shining as if it had been freshly scrubbed.

"I've read a lot about you," he said, "so I knew I should have to make a special effort. In fact I'm not too proud to admit that I've picked up a few tips from the stories I've heard of you. Naturally when I knew who our distinguished opponent was I tried not to disappoint him."

"You haven't," said the Saint cordially. "Except that I may have expected a larger deputation of welcome."

His gaze drifted over the assembly with the mildest and most apologetic hint of criticism. Besides Lasser there was only Jopley and one other man, presumably the gatekeeper — a short, thick-set individual with a cast in one eye and an unshaven chin that gave him a vicious and sinister aspect which was almost too conventional to be true. There was also Brenda Marlow, who came into the room last and sat on the arm of a chair near the door, watching from the background with an expression that the Saint couldn't quite analyze.

"I think there are enough of us," said Lasser blandly. He turned to Jopley. "You searched them all thoroughly?"

The man grunted an affirmative, and Lasser's glance passed fleetingly over Peter Quentin and Hoppy and glowed on the Saint again.

"You can put your hands down," he said. "It will be more comfortable for you. And sit down if you want to." He tugged at the lobe of his ear absentmindedly while the Saint turned a chair round and relaxed in it, crossing his legs. "Ah — about this deputation of welcome. Yes. I had thought of giving you more of a show, but I decided not to. You see, I brought you here to talk over some more or less private business, and I thought that the fewer people who knew about it the better. You have rather a persuasive way with you, Mr Templar, so Jopley tells me, and I shouldn't want you to tempt any more of my employees. Will you have a drink?"

"I'd love one," said the Saint graciously, and Lasser turned to the villainous specimen with the unshaven chin.

"Some drinks, Borieff."

Simon took out his cigarette case while Borieff slouched over to a cupboard under one of the bookshelves and brought out a bottle and a siphon.

"You know, this makes me feel quite guilty," he said. "I've had so many drinks with you before, and yet I've never bought you one."

"Two vanloads, isn't it?" Lasser agreed with his fat bright smile. "And the other van with — um — silks and things in it. Yes. Yes. That's what I brought you here to talk to you about. We shall have to have those vans back, of course, what you haven't actually used of them."

"Hoppy certainly has rather improved the shining hour," Simon admitted. "But there's quite a lot left. What sort of an offer were you thinking of making?"

Lasser shook his head.

"No," he said judiciously. "No, I wasn't thinking of making an offer. I just want them back. I'm afraid you're going to have to tell us where to find them. That's why I arranged for you to come here."

"What's all this," Brenda Marlow asked quietly, "about bringing them here?"

She had been so much in the background that the others seemed to have forgotten her, and when she spoke it was as startling an intrusion as if she had not been there before and had just walked in. Lasser looked round at her, blinking.

"Eh?"

"What's all this," she repeated in exactly the same quiet voice, "about bringing them here?"

Lasser rubbed his chin.

"Oh, of course," he said. "Bringing them here. Yes.

I didn't tell you — I didn't really mean them to meet me at Lulworth. That was just to get them ready for the story Jopley had to tell them. It was all arranged so that they'd be sure to come here, so I suppose I can say we brought them."

"I see," she said innocently. "So you were just using me as a sort of stuffed decoy."

Lasser's broad smile did not waver.

"I shouldn't say that, my dear. No. Not at all. You couldn't have played your part nearly so well if you hadn't believed in it. I was just making it easier for you." He tugged at his ear again for a moment and then pulled out his watch, consulted it, stuffed it back in his pocket and rubbed his hands briskly together with an air of breezy decision. "Now, Brenda, it's time you were off. As a matter of fact I thought you'd have started by this time. Remember you're due in London at one o'clock."

Her shoulders moved slightly.

"I can make it in three hours easily in the new Lagonda," she said slowly. "And since I'm here I'd like to see how you get on."

"But you've got to allow for accidents. If you had a puncture—"

"Do you mean you don't want me to stay?"

The Saint felt an odd thrill of breathlessness. There was a subtle tension in the room that had not been there before even in spite of the display of artillery which was still in evidence. To the Saint's preternaturally sharpened senses it was perceptible in the darkened sullenness of Jopley, in the harsh rigidity of Borieff, even in the frozen fixity of Lasser's expansive smile.

And there could only be one explanation for it. It meant that he must have been right in the one wild theory which had come to him on the way there when it was too late to probe into it, that Brenda Marlow and her contradictions were accounted for and that it was no longer necessary to look to Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia for her prototype. It gave the Saint a curious sense of lightness and relief, even though it did nothing to improve his own position. There were worse things than to be at the mercy of men like Lasser and Jopley and Borieff, and in Simon Templar's own inconsequential philosophy to have to think of a girl as he had been thinking of her was one of them.

"I don't mean that at all," Lasser was saying jovially. "No. Of course not. But that — um — envelope has got to be delivered, and this is rather a private matter—"

"Doesn't it concern all of us?"

The Saint raised his glass and drank with a certain deep satisfaction.

"Comrade Lasser has his own views about who's concerned with one thing and another, darling," he explained. "For instance, there was that business about Pargo. I'll bet he didn't tell you that Pargo was tortured to death and dumped on my—"

Borieff's lunging fist thudded against the side of the Saint's head and sent the glass he was holding spinning away to splinter itself on the edge of a table.

Simon's muscles gathered themselves in spontaneous reaction. And then as he gazed squarely into the muzzle of Borieff's automatic they slowly loosened again. Just as slowly he took out a handkerchief and wiped a few drops of spilt liquid from his coat.

After the sudden crash of shattering glass there was a brief interval of intense silence. And then Lasser spoke with his eyes creased up to slits in his plump jolly face.

"Tie them up," he said; and as Jopley and Borieff moved to obey the order the smile that had been only temporarily shaken came back to his wide elastic mouth. "I'm sorry, Templar, but you must have some respect for the position you're in. I can't have you saying things like that. Now for the rest of this interview you'd better confine yourself to speaking when you're spoken to, or I may have to do something you won't like."

Simon looked at the girl.

"You see how touchy he is?" he drawled recklessly. "I don't know how well you know the signs of a guilty conscience—"

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lasser's forefinger tightening on the trigger of his levelled gun, but there were provocations that could bring the Saint's contempt for such things to the verge of sheer insanity. What might have happened if he had been allowed to go on was something that he could hardly have refused to bow to in cold blood; but before he could say any more the girl stepped forward.

"Leave him alone, Lasser," she said. "I'm interested in this. What did happen to Pargo?"

"We sent him to Canada, of course, as I told you," Lasser replied brusquely. "You surely don't believe any of this fellow's wild accusations?"

Her dark grey eyes went over him with an unexpectedly mature kind of thoughtfulness.

"I believe what I see," she said. "And I saw Borieff hit him. I think that was a better answer than yours."

She was opening her bag as she spoke, and Lasser went to meet her suddenly with a swiftness that was surprising and somehow horrible in a man of his build. His downward-striking fist knocked the bag through her hands, and then he was holding her by the wrists.

"You mustn't interfere in things like this," he said, still smiling. "Of course I don't tell you everything — you wouldn't like it if I did. But we've got to put a stop to Templar's interference, and that isn't your business unless you want to make it so." He looked at the Saint over his shoulder. "You're going to tell me what happened to those three vans — and do you know why you'll tell me the truth? Because I'm going to take each one of you separately into the next room and ask you questions in my own way, and when you all tell me the same thing I'll know you aren't lying!"

XI

There were bands of adhesive tape around the Saint's wrists and ankles, and Peter Quentin had been quickly strapped up in the same way at the same time. Now they were working on Hoppy Uniatz, after first depriving him of the whisky bottle which by some irresistible magnetism had gravitated into his hands.

Lasser held the girl until they had finished, and then he pushed her back into an armchair and signed to Borieff to take charge of her. He straightened his coat and picked up her bag and tossed it into her lap but not before he had transferred a heavy sealed envelope from it to his pocket.

"This is really very tiresome of you, my dear," he said heartily. "Now I shall have to make some other arrangements."

"You certainly will," she retorted. "I wouldn't have any more to do with this business of yours for all the money in the world."

He stood manipulating his ear meditatively for a little while.

"No," he said. "No, of course not. No. But it's your own fault. You didn't have to know any more than was good for you. Naturally you would be — um — sentimental, but you ought to have realized that there are serious things in this business. Well, we'll talk about that presently. Now that you're here you'll have to be quiet and behave yourself, because we can't waste any more time."

"Be quiet and behave myself while you torture them, I suppose," she said with bitter directness.

"No. Not necessarily. But they've got to answer my questions. It'll only be their own fault if they're obstinate." He shrugged. "Anyhow, you've no choice. If you don't behave yourself Borieff will have to keep you quiet."

He beamed at her in his stout avuncular way as if he were insisting on giving her an especially extravagant birthday present.

She looked at Simon with a white face.

"I apologize for what I said to you last night," she said huskily. "If I'd known why you were going to burn Jopley's feet I'd have stayed and helped you."

"The joke is that we didn't really mean to do it," Simon answered regretfully. "But next time—"

"There won't be no muckin' next time," Jopley stated with savage complacency. "Come on."

He grasped the Saint's arm, but Simon was still looking at the girl.

"Maybe you made a mistake about me," he said. "And I'm glad I was wrong about you. Remind me to make up for it when we take that stroll in the moon-light."

His gaze rested on her a moment longer with all the steadying courage he could send her, and then he turned to Peter.

"I ought to have come alone," he said. "But since we're all here we might as well tell Comrade Lasser what he wants to know."

"What for?" Peter demanded indignantly as Simon might have known he would. "If you think we give a damn for that fat slob—"

Lasser pointed at the Saint.

"Take him in, Jopley," he said like a genial host arranging the procession of guests to a dining room.

With an evil grin Jopley pushed the Saint off his balance and half dragged and half carried him through a door at one end of the room. The room that it opened into was almost bare of furniture and smelt strongly of paraffin — even at that moment the Saint's brow wrinkled with puzzlement as he met the rank, powerful odour.

Jopley heaved him up and shoved him roughly into the only chair as Lasser followed them in. The door closed softly behind him — an ancient and massive door of solid oak that settled into place with a faint fuff of perfectly fitting joints, seeming to shut out every sound and contact with the outside world. He stood there smiling benevolently at the Saint, smoothing his large hands one over the other.

"I hope we shan't have to hurt you very much," he said. "If you like to tell me at once what happened to those vans we needn't go any further. But of course I shall take care that your two friends don't have a chance to find out what you've told me, so if they don't tell the same story we shall have to hurt them until they do."

The Saint looked at him and then at Jopley. And as he did so he felt the blood run faster in his veins. For Jopley was sliding his gun away into his pocket.

A flood of strength seemed to surge through the Saint's body like a tidal wave. He could feel the race of it through his muscles, the galvanic awakening of his nerves, the sudden clearing of his brain to crystal brilliance. It was as if his whole being was lifted up in a sublime ecstasy of renewed life. And yet otherwise everything was the same. The corner was just as tight, the prospects just as deadly; but that one action had altered a balance in which the difference between life and death would be weighed. Lasser had already put away his gun. Jopley's gun was going — had gone. It was in his pocket, and his hands were hanging empty at his sides. In that room, with the two of them together against one man bound hand and foot, they had done what any other two men would have done in the confidence of their obvious superiority. And the astronomical hopelessness of the odds had been lessened by the fraction of time that it would take a man to draw a gun from his pocket…

Only the Saint's face betrayed nothing of the fanfares of exultation that were pouring magnificent music through his soul. He moved slightly in his chair, twisting his right hand round as far as he could, and his fingertips touched the hilt of the knife under his sleeve with a thrill that added new harmonies of its own.

"And what happens after we've told you all this?" he asked.

Lasser pursed his lips.

"Well, I'm afraid we shall still have to get rid of you. You know too much, Templar, and we can't risk your being tempted to interfere with us again."

"Do we get sent to Canada too?"

"No, not to Canada. No. I think we shall just leave you here. This place is being burnt down tonight," Lasser explained calmly. "You may have noticed the smell of paraffin. Yes. It's rather antiquated, and I want to rebuild it — something modern, you know. It's quite well insured, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a fire. Yes, we'll just have to leave you here with a lighted candle on the floor and kill two birds with one stone if you known what I mean."

Simon had his knife in his hand, and he was working the point of it under the tapes on his wrists, but for a moment he almost stopped.

"You mean you'd leave us here to be burnt alive?" he said slowly.

"I'm afraid we'd have to. The place is supposed to be unoccupied, you know, and I sent the caretaker away this morning. It'd look as if you were tramps who'd broken in to sleep for the night, and you might have set fire to the house yourselves by accident. So it wouldn't look right if they found bullets in you or anything like that."

Lasser seemed to ponder over his reasoning again and shook his head with refreshed conviction.

"No, that would never do," he said, and then his sunny smile dawned again. "But don't let's meet our troubles halfway. After all, I've heard that in a real fire people are often suffocated by the smoke before they get burnt at all. But we could hurt you a lot first if you didn't tell us what happened to those vans."

The Saint's hands were free — behind his back he could move his wrists apart. But even so, he felt as if his stomach was emptied with a kind of sick revulsion. There was no doubt in his mind that Lasser would have done everything he spoke of with such a genial matter-of-factness — would still do it if the Saint failed in the only gamble he had left. That rich, unchangeably beaming smile was a better guarantee of it even than Jopley's lowering vindictiveness. And now the Saint seemed to read through it for the first time into something that explained it, something monstrous and gloating, something that smoothed Lasser's bald glistening forehead into a horrible vacantness of bland anticipation…

"Where are those vans, Templar?" he asked in a silky whisper.

Simon met his gaze with eyes of frosted sapphire.

"They're where you'll never find them," he said deliberately, "you greasy grinning bladder of lard."

Lasser turned his head as if he was pleased.

"Light the candle, Jopley," he said.

He took three steps forward and squatted down in front of the Saint like a great glossy toad. With leisured care he began to unlace the Saint's shoes.

"You shouldn't say things like that," he muttered protestingly. "You're only making it worse for yourself. Now we shall have to hurt you anyway. But of course you'll tell me about the vans. It's only a question of time, you know. Pargo didn't want to talk to me either, but he had to before Borieff had finished."

The Saint looked sideways. Jopley was at the table, fumbling with a box of matches. He was half turned away, intent on a short length of candle stuck in a saucer. The match he had extracted sizzled and flamed suddenly, and at the same moment Simon felt one of his shoes being pulled off.

If anything was to be done it had to be done now — now while Jopley was concentrating on dabbing the match at the candle wick and while Lasser's head was bent as he tugged at the other shoe.

The Saint breathed a silent prayer to whatever gods he acknowledged and brought his hands from behind him.

His clenched right fist drove down like a hammer at the exposed nape of Lasser's bent neck. On that blow hung the unthinkable issue of the adventure and the fate of more lives than his own, and the Saint stocked it with all the pent-up strength that was in him. For Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and Pargo and the girl whose life might be worth no more than theirs now that she also knew too much, the Saint struck like a blacksmith, knowing that if he failed to connect completely with one punch he would have no chance to throw in a second. He felt his fist plug achingly into the resisting flesh, and Lasser grunted once and lurched limply forward.

Simon caught him with one hand as he slumped onto his knees, and his other hand dived like a striking snake for the pocket that sagged with the weight of Lasser's gun.

Jopley looked round, with the candle burning, as the sudden whirl of movement caught his car. An almost comically incredulous expression transfixed his face as he grasped the import of the scene; but the shock only stopped him for a moment. In the next instant he was grabbing for his own gun and plunging towards the Saint at the same time.

Only for an instant. And then he was brought up again, rocking, as if he had run into an invisible wall, before the round black muzzle of the automatic in the Saint's hand.

The Saint's smile was seraphically gentle.

"If I have to shoot you, Algernon," he said, "I shall be terribly disappointed."

The man stared at him in silence while Lasser's unconscious body, released from the Saint's grasp, slid down and rolled over on the floor.

"You can put your hand in your other pocket," Simon went on in that soft and terrible voice. "I want the rest of that sticking plaster. And then we will talk a little more about this Guy Fawkes party."

XII

Standing in the shadows outside the library windows, the Saint studied the scene within. The chairs where Peter and Hoppy and Brenda Marlow sat were ranged roughly at the three corners of a square; approximately at the fourth corner stood Borieff, leaning against the back of an armchair and watching them, with his gun in his hand and a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. Simon could easily have dropped him where he stood, but that was not what he wanted. He saw that Borieff's back was directly turned to the door through which they had first entered the library and spent a few seconds more printing estimated distances and angles on his memory. Then he returned silently along the path to the room he had just left.

Jopley, taped hand and foot exactly as the Saint had been a little while ago, glared up at him malevolently from the floor; and in another corner Lasser groaned and stirred uneasily as if he was rousing front a troubled sleep; but that was very near the limit of their power of self-expression. The Saint smiled encouragingly at Jopley as he went by.

"I don't mind if you yell, Algernon," he said kindly. "I should say that door was almost soundproof, but in any case it'd be quite good local colour."

The other seemed to consider whether he should accept the invitation, but while he was still making up his mind the Saint crossed the room to the door opposite the french windows and let himself out into the dark bare hall.

His fingers closed on the knob of the library door and turned it slowly without the faintest rattle. His only fear then was that the door itself might creak as it opened, but it swung back with ghostly smoothness as far as he needed to step into the room.

Peter Quentin saw him with an instant's delirious amazement and quickly averted his eyes. The girl saw him, and her face went white with the clutch of wild, half-unbelieving hope before she also looked away. She sat with her head bent and her eyes riveted on the toe of one shoe, her fingers locked together in intolerable suspense. The crudely assembled features of Mr Uniatz contracted in a sudden awful spasm that seemed to squeeze his eyes halfway out of their sockets: if he had been anyone else the observer would have said that he looked as if he had a stomach-ache, but on Mr Uniatz it only looked as if the normal frightfulness of his countenance had been lightly stirred by the ripple of a passing thought. And the Saint moved forward like a stalking leopard until he was so close behind Borieff that he could have bitten him in the neck.

The actual state of Borieff's neck removed the temptation to do this. Instead his right hand whipped around Borieff's gun wrist like a ring of steel, and he spoke into the man's ear.

"Boo," he said.

The man gasped and whirled round convulsively as if he had been touched with a live wire; but the Saint's grip on his wrist controlled the movement and kept the gun twisted harmlessly up towards the ceiling. At the same time Simon's left hand pushed the automatic he had taken from Lasser forward until it met Borieff's ribs.

"I should drop that little toy if I were you," he said. "Otherwise I might get nervous."

He increased the torque on Borieff's wrist to emphasize his point, and the man yelped and let go the gun. Simon kicked it towards the girl.

"Just keep him in order for a minute, will you?" he murmured. "If he does anything foolish mind you hit him in the stomach — it's more painful there."

As she picked up the gun he pushed Borieff away and took out his knife. With a few quick strokes he had Peter free, and then he turned to Hoppy.

Peter stood up, peeling off the remains of the adhesive tape.

"I'm getting discouraged," he said. "All these years we've been trying to get rid of you, and every time we think you're nicely settled you come back. Won't you ever learn when to die a hero's death and give somebody else a chance with the heroine?"

"I will when I find someone else who'd have a chance," Simon assured him generously.

He straightened up from releasing Mr Uniatz's ankles and held out the remains of the roll of plaster.

"Make a parcel of Comrade Borieff, will you, Hoppy?" he said. "We don't want him to get restive and hurt himself."

"Okay, boss," said Mr Uniatz willingly. "All I need is just one drink—"

"I'll have mine first," said Peter Quentin, swooping hastily on the bottle, "or else there mightn't be enough to go round."

Simon took the glass away from him as he filled it, and strolled over to the girl.

"Was that date in London very important?" he said. "Or will you come along with us and make it a party?"

She shook her head.

"I was only going for Lasser — I had to meet the Frenchman who supplies him and give him his money."

"My God," said the Saint. "I'd almost forgotten—"

He left her standing there and disappeared through the communicating door into the next room. In another moment he was back with the sealed envelope that Lasser had taken from her bag.

"Is this it?"

"Yes."

"I thought it was worth something the first time I saw it," said the Saint and slit it open with his thumbnail.

When he had counted the thick wad of bank notes that came out of it, his eyebrows were lifted and his eyes were laughing. He added it to the hundred pounds which he had recovered from Jopley and put it carefully away in his pocket.

"I can see we staged the showdown on the right evening," he said. "This will be some consolation to all of us when we divide it up." His eyes sobered on her again. "Lasser must have trusted you a good deal."

"I suppose he knew I was that sort of fool," she said bitterly.

"How did you get in with him?"

"I met him through some friends I used to go sailing with, and he seemed to be an awfully good egg. I'd known him for quite some time when he told me what he was doing and said that he needed some help. I' knew it was against the law, but I didn't feel as if I was a criminal. You know how it is — we've all smuggled small things through the customs when we've had the chance, and we don't feel as if we'd done anything wicked. I just thought it'd be great fun with a bit of danger to make it more exciting."

"I've wangled things through the customs myself," said the Saint. "But there's a difference between that and making a business of it."

"Oh, I know," she said helplessly, "I was a damn fool, that's all. But I didn't realize… I didn't have anything to do with the organization. I went out in the yacht once or twice, and another boat met us in the Channel, and we took things on board, and then we came back here and unloaded it and went away. I went to Paris and bought those dresses and things, but Lasser gave me the money, and he was to take half the profits. And I used to meet people and take them messages and things when he didn't want them to know who they were dealing with. I'd never been on one of the lorries before last night, but Lasser wanted two people to go for safety because of the lorries that had disappeared, and there was nobody else available. I know why now — because Lasser wanted Borieff to help him, and Pargo was being tortured."

"You didn't happen to think that Jopley and Borieff were retired churchwardens, did you?"

"No — I hated them. But Lasser said you had to employ anyone you could get for jobs like theirs, and I didn't think even they could go so far." She shrugged, and her eyes were dark with pain. "Well, it's my own fault. I suppose you'll be handing them over to the police, and you'd better take me with you. I shan't give you any trouble. Whatever happens, I'm glad you beat them."

He shook his head.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't be any good handing them over to the police," he said. "You see, the Law has such pettifogging rules about evidence."

"But—"

"Oh yes, you could convict them of smuggling, and get them about six months each. But that's all."

"Then—"

He smiled.

"Don't worry about it, darling," he said. "Just stay here for a minute, will you?"

He turned to Peter and Hoppy and indicated Borieff with a faint nod.

"Bring him in," he said and led the way into the next room.

Jopley was cursing and fighting against his bonds, and Lasser had recovered enough to be writhing too. Simon dragged them over to the fireplace and went back to tear down the heavy silk cords that drew the long window hangings. He roped the two men expertly together, and when Borieff arrived he added him to the collection. The other end of the rope he knotted to a bar of the iron grate that was set solidly in the brickwork.

Then he closed the door and looked at Peter and Hoppy, and the smile had gone altogether from his face.

"There's just one thing more which you didn't know," he said quietly. "Comrade Lasser told me about it in here. There's supposed to be a fire here tonight — the place is all prepared for it. And after we'd all been worked over like Pargo was — Borieff was the assistant in that, by the way — whatever else happened, however much we told, the idea was to leave us tied up here with a lighted candle burning down to the floor. We were to be got rid of anyway, and according to Lasser we had to be burnt alive so that it would look like an accident."

The Saint's eyes were as cold and passionless as the eyes of a recording angel.

"We are the only jury here," he said. "What is our justice?"

The Hirondel thundered down into the valley and soared up the slope on the other side. Somewhere near the first crest of the Purbeck Hills Simon stopped the car to take out a cigarette; and through the hushing of the engine his ears caught a familiar gurgling sound that made him look round.

In the back seat Mr Uniatz detached the bottle from his lips and beamed at him ingratiatingly.

"I find it in de cabinet where dey keep de liquor, boss," he explained. "So I t'ought it'd keep us warm on de way home."

"At least you won't freeze to death," said the Saint philosophically.

He turned the other way as he struck his lighter and gazed out into the darkness where the hills rose again at the edge of the sea. Somewhere in the black silhouette of them there was a dull red glow, pulsing and brightening, like a palely luminous cloud. The eyes of the girl beside him turned in the same direction.

"It looks like a fire," she said interestedly.

"So it does," said the Saint and drove on without another backward glance, eastwards, towards Lyndhurst.