The Saint In England

I

One day some literary faker with more time to waste than I have may write a precious monograph about Doors. He will point out that Doors are both entrances and exits, and draw pseudo-philosophical conclusions about Life and Death. He will drag in the Door which American diplomats always insist on keeping Open, except when they are inside. He may turn aside to toy fancifully with the Door-consciousness of Wolves. He will inevitably mention some famous Doors; such as the Great Door of the cathedral of Poillissy-sur-Loire, on which Voltaire scribbled a rude epigram addressed to the Pope; the Golden Door of the temple of Pashka in Allahabad, on which are engraved 777 sacred cows; the Door of Cesare Borgia's guest house, which drove daggers into the backs of everyone who passed through it; and so forth. Probably he will unscrupulously invent all this part out of his own imagination, exactly as I have done, but nobody will be any the wiser.

It is difficult, however, to see how the Door of the Barnyard Club, in London, could find a place in any such catalogue, being made of gimcrack deal and having no history or peculiarities. And yet, when it opened in the small hours of a certain morning to let Simon Templar out into Bond Street, it was for that brief moment the Door of Adventure.

Simon Templar stood at the edge of the sidewalk and put a thin cigarette between his lips, letting the cool air of the night play on his forehead and freshen his lungs; but there was no indication that freshening was his vital need. His dark rakish face seemed to have walked straight out of the open windswept places of the earth rather than out of the strained stuffy atmosphere of a night club, and his gay blue eyes could not have been clearer and keener at any other hour of the day. His strong lawless mouth had a curve of half-amused expectancy, as if his day were just beginning and he had a long list of diverting things to do; but there was nothing on his mind. It was only that Simon Templar's days were always ready to begin, at any hour, whenever adventure offered.

At his side Mr. Hoppy Uniatz, resplendent in a tight-waisted tuxedo and a shirtfront pinned together with a diamond stud, yawned cavernously and trod on the butt of his cigar. His was a less resiliently romantic soul, and he felt healthily depressed.

"Say, boss," he remarked querulously, "is dat what dey calls a big night in dis city?"

"I'm afraid it is," said the Saint.

Mr. Uniatz had none of that ascetic nobility of character which enables the Englishman to suffer his legislators gladly. He spat mournfully into the road.

"Chees," he said, with a gloomy emulsion of awe and disgust, "it ain't human. De last joint we're in, dey snatch off all de glasses becos it's twelve-toity. We pay two bucks each to get into dis joint, an' then we gotta pay five bucks fer a jug of lemonade wit' a spoonful of gin in it; an' all they got is a t'ree-piece band an' no floor show. An' de guys sits an' takes it! Why, if any joint had tried to gyp guys like dat in New York, even when we had prohibition, dey'd of wrecked it in two minutes." Mr. Uniatz sighed and reached for. the only apparent conclusion, unaware that other philosophers had reached it long before him: "Well, maybe dem Limeys ain't human, at dat."

"You forget that this is a free country, Hoppy," murmured the Saint gently.

He lighted his cigarette and blew out a wreath of smoke at the stars. A few spots of rain were beginning to fall from a bank of cloud that was climbing up from the west, and he scanned the street for a taxi to take them home. As if it had been conjured up in answer to his wish, a cab swung round the corner of Burlington Gardens and chugged towards them; and the Saint watched its approach hopefully. It was fifteen yards away when he saw that the flag was down, and shrugged ruefully. The setback was only an apt epilogue to a consistently inauspicious evening.

"We'd better walk," he said.

They turned down towards Piccadilly; and then, as they fell into step, he heard the rattle of the taxi die down and looked back over his shoulder. It had stopped outside the entrance of the Barnyard Club.

The Saint caught Hoppy's arm.

"Hold on," he said. "The luck's changed. We stay dry after all."

They strolled back towards the spot where this minor miracle stood panting metallically while its passenger alighted. It was a girl, he saw as she stood, fumbling with her bag.

"I'm afraid I haven't anything smaller," she was saying; and he heard that her voice was low and pleasant.

The driver grunted and climbed down laboriously from his box. Standing in the gutter, he unbuttoned his overcoat, his coat, his waistcoat, his cardigan, and part of his shirt, and began a slow and painful search through the various strange and inaccessible places where London taxi drivers secrete their small change. From scattered areas of his anatomy he collected over a period of time an assortment of coins and looked at them under the light.

"Sorry, miss, I can't do it," he said at length and began phlegmatically to dress himself again.

"I'll get change inside," said the girl.

But Simon Templar had other ideas. They had been growing on him while the driver disrobed, and the Saint had always been an opportunist. He liked the girl's voice and her slim figure and the way she wore her clothes; and that was enough for a beginning.

"Excuse me," he said. "Can I help?" She looked up with a start, and for the first time he saw her face clearly. It was small and oval, with a fascinatingly tip-tilted nose and a mouth that would smile easily; her deep brown hair, smooth and straight to the curled ends, framed her face in a soft halo of darkness. But even while he saw her brown eyes regarding him hesitantly he wondered if the dim light had deceived him — or if he had really seen, as he had thought he saw, a leap of sudden fear in them when she first looked up.

"We're only trying to change a pound," she said.

He took the note from her fingers and spread out a line of silver coins on her palm in return. She paid off the driver, who proceeded to bury the money in the outlying regions of his clothing; and she would have thanked him and gone on, but the Saint's other ideas had scarcely been tapped.

"Are you determined to go in there?" he asked, waving his pound note disparagingly in the direction of the Barnyard Club. "Hoppy and I didn't think much of it. Besides, you haven't got your pillow."

"Why should I want a pillow?"

"For comfort. Everybody else in there is asleep," he explained, "but the management doesn't provide pillows. They just create the demand."

The brown eyes searched his face doubtfully, with a glimpse of hunted suspicion that need not have been there. And once again he saw what he had seen before, the glimmering light of fear that went across her gaze — or was it across his own imagination?

"Thanks so much for helping me — good-night," she said in a breath and left the Saint staring after her with a puzzled smile till the door of the club closed behind her.

Simon tilted back his hat and turned resignedly to take possession of the asthmatic cab which was left as his only consolation; and as he turned, a hand fell on his shoulder.

"Do you know that girl?" asked a sleepy voice.

"Apparently not, Claud," answered the Saint sorrowfully. "I tried to, but she didn't seem to be sold on the idea. Life has these mysteries."

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal studied him with half-closed eyes whose drowsiness was nothing but an affectation. His pudgy hand came down from the Saint's shoulder and took away the pound note which he was still holding; and the Saint's brows suddenly came down an invisible fraction of an inch.

"You don't mind if I have a look at this?" he said.

It was not so much a question as an authoritative demand; and a queer tingle of supernatural expectation touched Simon Templar's spine for an instant and was gone. For the first time since the hand fell on his shoulder he looked beyond the detective's broad and portly form and saw another solid bowler-hatted figure, equally broad but a shade less portly, kicking its regulation rubber heels a few paces away, as if waiting for the conversation to conclude. The Saint's suddenly quiet and watchful eyes swerved along the sidewalk in the other direction, and saw two other men of the same unmistakable pattern engrossed in inaudible discussion in the shadow of a shop doorway on his right. All at once, without a sound that his unguarded ears had noticed, the deserted street had acquired a population…

A tiny pulse began to beat in the Saint's brain, a pulse that was little more than the echo of his own heart working steadily through a moment of utter physical stillness; and then he drew a deep lungful of air through his cigarette and let the smoke trickle out in a slow feather through the sparse twinkling beads of rain. After all, the night had not failed him. It had merely been teasing. What it would have to offer eventually he still did not know; but he knew that three men out of the mould which he saw do not abruptly assemble in Bond Street, materializing like genii out of the damp paving stones at two o'clock in the morning, and bringing Chief Inspector Teal with them, for no other reason than that they have been simultaneously smitten with an urge to discover at first hand whether the night life of London is as dull as it is universally reputed to be. And wherever and whenever such a deputation of official talent was gathered together, Simon Templar had a potential interest in the proceedings.

"What's the matter with it?" he inquired thoughtfully.

Mr. Teal straightened up slowly from his examination of the banknote under one of the taxi's feeble lights. He took out his wallet and folded the bill in deliberately.

"You won't mind if I look after it for you?" he said, with the same authoritative decision.

"Help yourself," murmured the Saint lavishly. "Are you starting a collection, or something? I've got a few more of those if you'd like 'em."

The detective buttoned his coat and glanced towards the two men who were conversing in the adjacent doorway. Without appearing to interrupt their conversation, they moved out onto the pavement and came nearer.

"I'm surprised at you, Saint," he said, with what in anyone else would have been a tinge of malicious humour, "being taken in with a thing like that at your age. Is this the first time you've seen a bit of slush?"

"I like 'em that way," said the Saint slowly. "You know me, Claud. I never cared for this mass-production stuff. I've always believed in encouraging individual enterprise—"

"It's a good job I watched you encouraging it," said the detective grimly. "With your reputation, you wouldn't have stood much chance if you'd been caught trying to pass a counterfeit note." A wrinkle of belated regret for a lost opportunity creased his forehead as that last poignant thought entrenched itself in his mind. "Perhaps I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to take it away from you if I'd remembered that before," he added candidly.

The Saint smiled; but the smile was only on his lips.

"You have the friendliest inspirations, dear old bird," he remarked amiably. "Why not give it back? There's still time; and I see you've got lots of your old school pals around."

"I've got something else to do," said Mr. Teal. He squared his shoulders, and his mouth set in a line along which many things might have been read. "If I want to ask you anything more about this, I'll know where to find you," he said and turned brusquely away towards the door of the club.

As he did so, the other man who had been kicking his heels in the middle background roused out of his vague detachment and went after him. The second pair of detectives who had been strolling closer drifted unobtrusively into the same route. There was nothing dramatic, nothing outwardly sensational about it; but it had the mechanical precision of a manoeuvre by a well-drilled squad of soldiers. For one or two brief seconds the three men who had appeared so surprisingly out of the empty night were clustered at the doorway like bees alighting at the entrance of a hive; and then they had filtered through, without fuss or ostentation, as if they had never been there. The door was closed again, and the broken lights and shadows of the street were so still that the patter of swelling raindrops on the parched pavements could be heard like a rustle of leaves in the absence of any other sound.

Simon put his cigarette to his lips, with his eyes fixed on the blank door, and drained it of the last slow inhalation. He dropped it between his fingers and shifted the toe of a polished patent-leather shoe, blotting it out. The evening had done its stuff. It had provided the wherewithal… He put his hands in his trouser pockets and felt the lightness which had been left there by the twenty shillings' worth of good silver which he had paid out in exchange for that confiscated scrap of forged Bank of England paper; and he remembered a bewitching face and the shadow of fear which had come and gone in its brown eyes. But at that moment he was at a loss to know what he could do.

And then an awful noise broke the silence behind him. It was a frightful clattering consumptive hiccough which turned into a continuous sobbing rattle in which all the primeval anguish of ancient iron and steel was orchestrated into one grinding medley of discords. The taxi which had brought Adventure's offering had started up again.

Simon Templar turned. He had been mad for years, and it was much too late in life to begin striving after sanity. His face was dazzlingly seraphic as he looked up at the rehabilimented driver, who was settling stoically into his seat.

"Does this happen to be your own cab, brother?" he asked.

"Yes, guv'nor," said the man. "Jer wanter buy it?"

"That's exactly what I do want," said the Saint.

II

The driver gaped down at him with a feeble fish-like grin — handsomer men than he had been smitten in the same way when their facetious witticisms were taken literally.

"Wot?" he said weakly, expressing the ultimate essence of cosmic doubt in the one irreducible monosyllable which philosophers have sought in vain for centuries.

"I want to buy your cab," said the Saint. "I'm collecting specimens for a museum. What's the price?"

"Five 'undred quid, guv'nor, an' it's yours,"

stated the proud owner, clinging hysterically to his joke.

Simon took out his billfold and counted out five crackling banknotes. The driver crawled down from his box with glazed eyes and clutched at one rusty mudguard for support.

"You ain't arf pulling me leg, are yer?" he said.

Simon folded the notes and pushed them into his hand.

"Take those round to a bank in the morning and see how your leg feels," he advised and took out another note as an afterthought. "Will a fiver buy your coat and cap as well?"

"Blimey, guv'nor," replied the driver, unbuttoning again with sudden vigour, "you could 'ave me shirt an' trousers as well for arf that."

The Saint stood for a moment and watched the happily bereaved driver veering somewhat light-headedly out of view; and then, beside him, Hoppy Uniatz groped audibly for comprehension.

"What kinda joke is dis, boss?" he asked; and the Saint pulled himself together.

"It'll grow on you as the years go by, Hoppy,"; he said kindly.

He was pulling on the driver's big grubby overcoat and winding the nondescript muffler round his neck with the speed and efficiency of a quick-change artist between scenes. In the emptiness of the street there was no one to see him. His black felt hat came off and was dumped into Hoppy's hands; the driver's peaked cap took its place. For a moment Hoppy saw the dark clean-cut face blithe and buccaneering under the shade of the cap, the white teeth glinting in a smile that had no respect for any impossibilities.

"You won't be able to stay here and share it with me," said the Saint. "I've got another job for you. Get hold of this address: 26 Abbot's Yard, Chelsea. You'd better take a taxi — but not this one. Go straight there and make yourself at home. There's a bottle of Scotch in the pantry; and here's the key. We're going to throw a party!"

"Okay, boss," said Mr. Uniatz dimly.

He took the key, stowed it away in his pocket, and without another word hoofed phlegmatically away in the direction of Piccadilly. It would be untrue to say that he had grasped the point with inspired intuition; but certain nouns and verbs had conglomerated in his mind to indicate a course of action, and therefore he was taking it. His brain, which was a small and loosely knit organization of nerve endings accustomed to directing such simple activities as eating, sleeping, and shooting off guns, was not adapted to the higher mysteries of inductive speculation; but it had a protective affinity for the line of least resistance. If the Saint required him to go to Chelsea and look for a bottle of Scotch, that was jake with him…

And, heading on his way with that plodding single-mindedness in which Lot's wife was so unfortunately lacking, he did not see the Saint climb into the driver's seat and steer his museum specimen up the road; nor did he see any of the other enlightening things which happened in that district shortly afterwards.

Chief Inspector Teal came out of the Barnyard Club and looked up and down the street.

"You and Henderson can go home," he said to one of the men with him. "I shan't need you any more tonight."

He put up a hand to stop the ancient taxi which came crawling hopefully towards them at that moment, and as it stopped he turned to the two people who had been added to his party since he entered the club.

"Get in," he ordered briefly.

He watched his prisoners embark with stolid vigilance — the raid had not by any means been as successful as he had hoped, and he would not know how much he had got out of it until the two arrests had been questioned. The other detective followed them in, and Teal paused to direct the driver to Cannon Row police station. Then he also got in and settled his bulk on the other folding seat, facing his captives.

The taxi jolted away with a hideous clanking of gears, and Mr. Teal pulled out a large silver watch and calculated his expectation of sleep. The other detective inspected his fingernails and nibbled a peeling scrap of cuticle on his thumb. The two prisoners sat in silence — the girl whose pound note Simon Templar had changed, and a dark florid man whose shirtfront sported a large square emerald which no arbiter of fashion could have approved. Mr. Teal did not even look at them. His hands lay primly on his knees, and his plump face was torpid, inscrutable, unworried. The case might be solved that night, or it might wait a year for solution. It made no difference to him. The relentless dogged routine which he represented took little account of time, and it had very few of the sensational brilliancies and hectic pursuits beloved of writers of fiction: it was a matter of taking up one trivial clue, following it with mechanical logic until it led no further, dropping it and patiently picking up the next; and usually the net was completed some day, and a man was prosaically caught. Except when the man for whom the net was woven happened to be the Saint… A slight frown crossed Teal's round red face as that unwelcome reflection obtruded itself in his train of thought; and then the taxi, which for some minutes past had been puffing more and more wearily, finally expired with a last senile wheeze and would travel no farther.

Teal looked round with a scowl of more immediate irritation; and the driver climbed down and opened the bonnet of the machine. They were in a dingy narrow street which Teal did not recognize, for he had not been paying any attention to the route. He put his head out of the window.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Dunno yet," grunted the driver, still groping in the bowels of his antediluvian engine.

Teal fidgeted through a few minutes of silence and then turned to his subordinate.

"See if you can find out where we are, Durham," he said. "We can't sit here all night."

The other detective opened the door on his side and got down. Seen in fuller perspective, the road in which they had stopped was even more unprepossessing than it had looked through the windows. One thing about it at least was certain — no other taxi was likely to come cruising along it in the hope of picking up a fare.

Durham walked up to the driver, who was still half buried in his machinery and seemed ready to remain in that position indefinitely, like a modern Indian fakir trying out a novel method of mortifying the flesh.

"Where's the nearest taxi rank?" he asked.

"Nearest one I know is at Victoria Station — that's abaht ten minnits' walk," said the man. "Arf a sec, guv'nor — I think p'raps she'll go now."

He went round to the front and swung the handle. The taxi did go. It went better than Sergeant Durham had ever expected.

Confronting the seething wrath of Chief Inspector Teal later, he was unable to give any satisfactory explanation of what happened to him. He knew that the driver straightened up and walked round to resume his post at the wheel; but he did not notice that the man reached his seat quicker than any other taxi driver in Durham's experience had ever known to complete such a manoeuvre. And in any case, Sergeant Durham was not expecting to be left behind.

But that was what indubitably happened to him. At one moment, a practical hard-headed detective, secure in his faith in the commonplace facts of life, he was putting out his hand to open the door of the cab; in the next moment, the handle had been whisked away from under his very fingertips, and he was staring open-mouthed at the retreating stern of the vehicle as it faded noisily away down the road. The only other fact he had presence of mind enough to grasp was that its tail light was out so that he could not read the number — which, as Mr. Teal later pointed out to him, was not useful.

Chief Inspector Teal, however, had not yet got down to that unprofitable post-mortem. The jerk with which the taxi started off flung him forward into the arms of his captives and some distance was travelled before he could disentangle himself. He rapped violently on the partition window, without securing any response. More distance was covered before he got it open and unleashed his voice into the din of the thumping engine.

"You fool!" he shouted. "You've left the other man behind!"

"Wot?" said the driver, without turning his head or slackening speed.

"You've left the other man behind, you damned Idiot!" Mr. Teal bawled furiously.

"Behind wot?" yelled the driver, taking a corner on two wheels.

Mr. Teal hauled himself up from the corner into which the sudden lurch had thrown him, and thrust his face through the opening.

"Stop the cab, will you?" he bellowed at the top of his voice.

The driver shook his head and reeled round another corner.

"You'll 'ave to talk lahder, guv'nor," he said. "I'm a bit 'ard of 'earing."

Teal clung savagely to the strap, and his rubicund complexion took on a tinge of heliotrope. He put a hand through the window, grasped the man's collar, and shook him viciously.

"Stop, I said!" he roared past the driver's ea "Stop, or I'll break your bloody neck!"

"Wot did you say abaht my neck?" demanded the driver.

Thousands of things which he had not said, but which he had a sudden yearning to say, combined with multitudinous other observations on the anatomy of the man and his ancestors, flooded into the detective's overheated mind; but at that moment he felt rather than heard a movement behind him and turned round quickly. The florid man had seen heaven-sent opportunity in the accident, and Teal was just in time to dodge the savage blow that was aimed at his head.

The struggle that followed was short and one-sided. Mr. Teal's temper had been considerably shortened in the last few minutes, and he had a good deal of experience in handling refractory prisoners. In about six seconds he had the man securely handcuffed to one of the hand grips inside the cab, and as an added precaution he manacled the girl in the same way. Then, with his wrath in no way relieved by those six seconds of violent exercise, he turned again to resume his vendetta with the driver.

But the taxi was already slowing down. Filling his lungs, Teal devoted one delicious instant to a rapid selection of the words in which he would blast the chauffeur off the face of the earth; and then the cab stopped, and his vocabulary stuck in his gullet. For without a word the driver bowed over the wheel and buried his face in his arms. His shoulders heaved. Mr. Teal could scarcely believe what he heard. It sounded like a sob.

"Hey," said Mr. Teal, tentatively.

The driver did not move.

Mr. Teal began to feel uncomfortable. He reviewed the things he had said during his moment of exasperation. Had he been unduly harsh? Perhaps the driver really was hard of hearing. Perhaps he had some kind of sensitive complex about his neck. Mr. Teal did not wish to be unkind.

"Hey," he said, more loudly. "What's the matter?"

Another sob answered him. Mr. Teal ran a finger round the inside of his collar. A demonstration like that was beyond the scope of his training in first aid. He wondered what he ought to do. Hysterical women, he seemed to remember having read somewhere, were best brought to their senses by judicious firmness.

"Hey," shouted Teal suddenly. "Sit up!"

The driver did not sit up.

Mr. Teal cleared his throat awkwardly. He glanced at his two prisoners. They were safely held. The grief-stricken driver's need seemed to be greater than theirs and Mr. Teal wanted to get on to Cannon Row and finish his night's work.

He opened the door and got down into the road.

And it was then, exactly at the moment when Chief Inspector Teal's heavy boots grounded on the tarmac, that the second remarkable incident in that ride occurred. It was a thing which handicapped Mr. Teal rather unfairly in his subsequent interview with Sergeant Durham. For as soon as he had got down, the driver, obeying his last command as belatedly as he had obeyed the former ones, did sit up. He did more than that. He lifted his foot off the clutch and simultaneously trod on the accelerator; and the taxi went rattling away and left Mr. Teal gaping foolishly after it.

III

Simon Templar drove to Lower Sloane Street before he stopped again, and then he got down and opened the door of the passenger compartment. The dark florid man glowered at him uncertainly; and Simon decided that fifty per cent of his freight had no further romantic possibilities.

"I don't think you're going any farther with us, brother," he said.

He produced a key from his ring, unlocked one of the handcuffs, and hauled the passenger out. The man made a lunge at him, and Simon calmly tripped him across the sidewalk and clipped the loose bracelet onto a bar of the nearest area railings. Then he went back to the cab and smiled at the girl.

"I expect you'd be more comfortable without that jewelry, wouldn't you?" he murmured.

He detached her handcuffs with the same key and used them to pinion the florid man's other wrist to a second rail.

"I'm afraid you'll have to be the consolation prize, Theobald," he remarked and stooped to remove the square emerald from the cursing consolation's shirtfront. "You won't mind if I borrow this, will you? I've got a friend who likes this sort of thing."

With only one other stop, which he made in Sloane Square to rekindle the rear light from which he had thoughtfully removed the bulb some time before, he drove the creaking taxi to Abbot's Yard. The tears were rolling down his cheeks, and from time to time his body was shaken by one of those racking sobs which Mr. Teal had so grievously misunderstood. It is given to every man to enjoy just so many immortal memories and no more; and the Saint liked to enjoy them when they came.

Ten minutes later he stopped the palpitating cab in Abbot's Yard, outside the door of No. 26. Anyone else would have driven it twenty miles out of London and buried it in a field before going home, in his frantic desire to eliminate all trace of his association with it; but Simon Templar's was an inspired simplicity which amounted to genius. He knew that if the cab was found in Abbot's Yard by any prowling sleuth who could identify it, then Abbot's Yard was the last place on earth where the same sleuth would look for him and he was still smiling as he climbed down and opened the door.

"Will you come out, fair lady?" he said.

She got out, staring at him uncertainly; and he indicated the door of the house.

"This is where I live — sometimes," he explained. "Don't look so surprised. Even cab drivers can be artists. I draw voluptuous nudes with engine oil on old cylinder blocks — it's supposed to be frightfully modern."

Abbot's Yard, Chelsea, is one of those multitudinous little lanes which open off the King's Road. To say that not twenty years ago it had been a row of slum cottages would be practising a bourgeois suppressio veri: it had certainly been a slum, but it still was. If anything, Simon was inclined to think that the near-artists and synthetic Bohemians who now populated it had lowered the tone of the neighbourhood; but the studio which he rented in No. 26 had often served him well as an emergency address, and in his irregular life it was sometimes an advantage to have quarters in a district where eccentric goings-on attracted far less attention than they would have in South Kensington.

He steered the girl up the dark narrow stairs with a hand on her arm and felt that she was trembling — he was not surprised. From the studio, as they drew near, came the sounds of a melancholy voice raised in inharmonious song; and the Saint grinned. He opened the door, passing the girl in and closing it again behind them, and surveyed Mr. Uniatz reprovingly.

"I see you found the whisky," he said.

"Sure," said Mr. Uniatz, rising a trifle unsteadily, but beaming an honest welcome none the less. "It was in de pantry, jus' like ya tole me, boss."

The Saint sighed.

"It'll never be there again," he said, "unless you lose your way." He was stripping off his taxi driver's overcoat and peaked cap; and as he did so, in the full light, the girl recognized him, and he saw her eyes widen. "This bloke with the skinful is Mr. Hoppy Uniatz, old dear — a handy man with a Roscoe but not so hot on the Higher Thought. If I knew your name I'd introduce you."

"I'm Annette Vickery," said the girl. "But I don't even know who you are."

"I'm Simon Templar," he said. "They call me the Saint."

She caught her breath for an instant; and suddenly she seemed to see him again for the first time, and the flicker of fear came and went in her brown eyes. He stood with his hands in his pockets, lean and dark and dangerous and debonair, smiling at her with a cigarette between his lips and a wisp of smoke curling past his eyes; and it is only fair to say that he enjoyed his moment. But still he smiled, at himself and her.

"Well, I'm not a cannibal," he murmured, "although you may have heard rumours. Why don't you sit down and let's finish our talk?" She sat down slowly.

"About — pillows?" she said, with the ghost of a smile; and he began to laugh. "Or something."

He sent Hoppy Uniatz out to the kitchen to brew coffee and gave her a cigarette. She might have been twenty-two or twenty-three, he saw — the indifferent lighting of Bond Street had had no need to be kind to her. He was more sure than ever that her red mouth would smile easily and there would be mischief in the brown eyes; but he would have to lift more than a corner of the shadow to see those things.

"I told you the Barnyard Club was no place to go," he said, drawing up a chair. "Why wouldn't you take my advice?"

"I didn't understand."

All at once he realized that she was crediting him with having known that the raid was going to take place; but he showed nothing in his face.

"You've got hold of it now?"

She shrugged helplessly.

"Some of it. But I still don't know why you should have — bothered to get me out of the mess."

"That's a long story," he said cheerfully. "You ought to ask Chief Inspector Teal about it some day — he'll be able to tell you more. Somehow, we just seem to get in each other's way. But if you're thinking that you owe me something for it, I'm afraid you're right."

He saw the glimmer of fear in her eyes again; and yet he knew that she was not afraid of him. She had no reason to be. But she was afraid.

"You — kill people — don't you?" she said after a long silence.

The question sounded so startlingly naive that he wanted to laugh; but something told him not to. He drew at his cigarette with a perfectly straight face.

"Sometimes even fatally," he admitted, with only the veiled mockery in his eyes to show for that glint of humour. "Why — is there anyone you'd like to see taken off? Hoppy Uniatz will do it for you if I haven't time."

"What do you kill them for?"

"Our scale is rather elastic,'' he said, endeavouring to maintain his gravity. "Sometimes we have done it for nothing. Mostly we charge by the yard—"

"I don't mean that." She was smoking her cigarette in short nervous puffs, and her hands were still unsteady. "I mean, if a man wasn't really bad — if he'd just made a mistake and got into bad company—"

Simon nodded and stood up.

"You're rather sweet," he said humorously. "But I know what you mean. You're frightened by some of the stories you've heard about me. Well, kid — how about giving your own common sense a chance? I've just lifted you straight out of the hands of the police. They're looking for you now, and before tomorrow morning every flat-footed dick in London will be joining in the search. If I wanted to get tough with you I wouldn't need any third degree — I'd just have to promise to turn you right out into the street if you didn't come through. I haven't said a word about that, have I?" The Saint smiled; and in the quick flash of that particular smile the armour of worldlier women than she had melted like wax. "But I do want you to talk. Come on, now — what's it all about?"

She was silent for a moment, tapping her cigarette over the ashtray long after all the loose ash had flaked away; and then her hands moved in a helpless gesture.

"I don't know."

Her eyes turned to meet his when she spoke, and he knew she was not merely stalling. He waited with genuine seriousness; and presently she said: "The boy who got into bad company was my brother. Honestly, he isn't really bad. I don't know what happened to him. He didn't need to be dishonest — he was so clever. Even when he was a kid at school he could draw and paint like a professional. Everyone said he had a marvellous future. When he was nineteen he went to an art school. Even the professors said he was a genius. He used to drink a bit too much, and he was a bit wild; but that was only because he was young. I'm eighteen months older than he is, you see. I didn't like some of his friends. That man who was — arrested with me — was one of them."

"And what's his name?"

"Jarving — Kenneth Jarving… I think he used to flatter Tim — make him feel he was being a man of the world. I didn't like him. He tried to make love to me. But he became Tim's best friend… And then — Tim was arrested. For forgery. And it turned out that Jarving knew about it all the time. He was the head of the gang that Tim was forging the notes for. But the police didn't get him."

"Charming fellow," said the Saint thoughtfully.

Hoppy Uniatz came in with the coffee, opened his mouth to utter some cheery conversation, sensed the subtle quietness of the atmosphere, and did not utter it. He stood on one foot, leaving his mouth open for future employment, and scratched his head, frowning vaguely. Annette Vickery went on, without paying any attention to him:

"Of course, Tim went to prison. I suppose they really meant to be kind to him. They only gave him eighteen months. They said he was obviously the victim of somebody much older and more experienced. I believe he might have got off altogether if he'd put them onto Jarving, who was the man they really wanted. But Tim wouldn't do it. And he swore he'd never forgive me if I said anything. I suppose — I shouldn't have taken any notice. But he was so emphatic. I was afraid. I didn't know what the others might have done to him if he'd given them away. I–I didn't say anything. So Tim went to prison."

"How long ago was that?"

"He came out three weeks ago. He was let off some of his sentence for good conduct. I was the only one who knew when he was coming out. Jarving tried to make me tell him, but I wouldn't. I wanted to try and keep Tim out of his way. And Tim said he wouldn't go back. He got a job in a printing works at Dulwich, through the Prisoners' Aid Society; and he was going to take up drawing again in his spare time and try to make a decent living at it. I believed he would. I still believe it.

But — that pound note you changed… it was part of some money he gave me only yesterday, to pay back some that I'd lent him. He said he'd sold some cartoons to a magazine."

The Saint put down his cigarette and picked up the coffee pot. He nodded.

"I see. But that still doesn't tell me why you had to go to the Barnyard Club and get pinched."

"That's what I still don't understand. I'm only trying to tell you everything that happened. Jarving rang me up this evening and asked if he could see me. I made excuses — I didn't want to see him. Then he said there'd be trouble for Tim if I didn't. He told me to meet him at the Barnyard Club. I had to go."

"And what was the trouble?"

"He'd only started to tell me when the police came in. He wanted to know where he could get hold of Tim. I wouldn't tell him. He said, 'Look here, I'm not trying to get your brother in trouble again. This isn't anything to do with me. It's somebody else who wants to see him.' I still didn't believe him. Then he said he'd give me this man's name and address himself, and I could give it to Tim myself, and Tim could go there on his own. But he said Tim had got to go, somehow."

"Did he give you the name and address?"

"Yes. He wrote it down on a piece of paper, just before—"

"Have you got it?"

She opened her bag and took out a scrap of paper torn from a wine list. Simon took it and glanced over the writing.

And in that instant all his lazy good humour, all the relaxed and patient quiet with which he had listened to her story, were swept away as if a silent bomb had annihilated them.

"Is this it?" he said aimlessly; and she found his clear blue eyes on her, for that moment absolutely without mockery, raking her face with a blaze of azure light that was the most dynamic thing she had ever seen.

"That's it," she said hesitantly. "I've never heard the name before—"

"I have."

The Saint smiled. He had been marking time since the last gorgeous climax which his reckless impetuosity had given him, feeling his way towards the next move almost like an artist waiting for renewed inspiration; but he knew now where he was going on. He looked again at the scrap of paper on which outrageous fortune had jotted down his cue. On it was written:

"I want to know why one of the richest men in Europe is so anxious to meet your brother," he said. "And I think your brother will have to keep the appointment to find out."

He saw the fear struggling back into her eyes.

"But—"

The Saint laughed and shook his head. He indicated Hoppy Uniatz, who had transferred his balance to the other foot and his scratching operations to his left ear.

"There's your brother, darling. He may not have all the artistic gifts of the real Timothy, but he's a handy man in trouble, as I told you. I'll lend him to you free of charge. What d'you say?"

"Hot diggety," said Mr. Uniatz.

IV

When Annette Vickery woke up, the sun was streaming into her bedroom window, and she looked out into a wide glade of pine trees and silver birches lifting from rolling banks of heather and bracken. It was hard to believe that this was less than twenty miles from London, where so many strange things had happened in the darkness a few hours ago, and where all the forces of Scotland Yard would still be searching for her. They had driven down over the dark glistening roads in the Saint's Hirondel — a very different proposition from the spavined taxi which he had driven before — after a telephone call which he put through to a Weybridge number; and when they arrived there were lights in the house, and a gruff-voiced man who walked with a curious strutting limp waiting to put the car away without any indication that he was at all surprised at his master arriving at four o'clock in the morning with two guests. Whisky, sandwiches, and a steaming pot of coffee were set out on a table in the living room; and the Saint grinned.

"Orace is used to me," he explained, "If I rang up and told him I was arriving with three hungry lions and a kidnapped bishop, he wouldn't even blink."

It was the same man with the limp who came in with a cup of tea in the morning.

"Nice day, miss," he said.

He put the cup down on the table beside the bed and looked at her pugnaciously — he had a heavy walrus moustache which made it permanently impossible for anyone to tell when he was smiling.

"Yer barfs ready," he said, as if he were addressing a dumb recruit on a parade ground, "an' brekfuss'll be ready narf a minnit."

It was only another curiosity in the stream of fantastic happenings that had carried her beyond all the horizons of ordinary life.

She was down to breakfast in twenty minutes; but even so she found the Saint drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, while Hoppy Uniatz finished up the toast. Simon served her with eggs and bacon from the chafing dish.

"You'll probably find the egg a bit tough," he remarked, "but we have to toe the line at meal times. When Orace says 'Brekfuss narf a minnit' he means breakfast in exactly thirty seconds, and you can check your stop watch by him. I hid a piece of toast for you, too; or else Hoppy would have had it. How d'you feel?"

"Fine," she told him; and, tackling succulent rashers and eggs that were not too tough to make the mouth water, she was surprised to find that a fugitive from justice could still eat breakfast with a good appetite.

She looked out of the French doors that opened from the dining room onto the same view as she had seen from her bedroom when she awoke, the sunlit glade striped with the shadows of the trees, and said: "Where am I? — isn't that what everyone's supposed to say when they wake up?"

The Saint smiled.

"Or else they call for Mother." He pushed back his chair and tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail. "This is Mr. George's hill itself, though you mightn't believe I can drive you from here to Piccadilly Circus without hurrying in half an hour. I bought this place because I don't know anywhere else like it where you can forget London so easily and get there so quickly if you have to; but it seems as if it has other uses. By the way, there's some news in the paper that may appeal to your sense of humour."

He passed her the folded sheet and marked a place with his forefinger. It was a brief paragraph in a minor position which simply recorded that Scotland Yard detectives had entered the Barnyard Club in Bond Street and taken away a man and a young woman "for questioning."

"Of course, the part where I butted in may have been too late for this edition," said the Saint. "But I still don't think the public will hear any more about it just now. If there's anything in the history of England which Claud Eustace Teal would perjure his immortal soul to keep out of the news, I'm willing to bet it's that little game we played last night. But it still wouldn't be fatal if the story did leak out — you've only got to see Nordsten long enough to introduce your brother, and then you push off. If he did get inquisitive afterwards, Tim wouldn't know anything — would you, Hoppy?"

"No, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, shaking his head vigorously. "I don't know nut'n about nut'n."

"But what about Jarving?" put in the girl.

"Jarving is safe in clink," said the Saint with conviction. "If the first person who found him wasn't a policeman, which it probably was at that hour of the morning, I don't think anyone who found him could get those handcuffs off without a policeman happening along. So the coast seems to be as clear as we're ever likely to have it."

She finished her breakfast and drank the coffee which he poured out for her; and then he gave her a cigarette.

"Get hold of yourself, kid," he said. "I want you to be starting soon."

For an instant her stomach felt empty as she realized that, once outside the shelter of that house, she was a fugitive again, even if the very idea of policemen seemed absurd in that peaceful place. And then she felt his blue eyes resting on her appraisingly and managed a smile.

"All right, Don Q," she said. "What is it?"

"Your share is easy. You've only got to walk up to Hawk Lodge and introduce Hoppy as your brother. I don't expect you'll be asked to stay, and I'll be waiting right round the corner to drive you back. The rest is Hoppy's funeral — or it may be if he doesn't get the lead out of his sleeve on the draw."

Looking towards Mr. Uniatz, she saw his hand move with the speed of a bullet, and stared into the muzzle of an automatic which had somehow appeared in his grasp.

"Was dat fast," he asked indignantly, "or was dat fast?"

"I think it was fast," said the girl gravely.

"Say, an' can I shoot wit' it?" proclaimed Mr. Uniatz, rewarding her with a beam that displayed all his gold fillings. "Say, I betcha never see a guy t'row two cups in de air an' bean 'em wit' one shot."

"Yes, she has," said the Saint, moving Hoppy's cup rapidly away from under his eager fingers. "And she doesn't like it. Now for heaven's sake put that Betsy away and listen. Your name's Tim Vickery — have you got that?"

"Sure. Tim Vickery — dat's my name."

"You're an artist."

"What, me?" protested Mr. Uniatz plaintively. "Say, boss, you know I can't do dat pansy stuff."

"You don't have to," said the Saint patiently. "That's just your profession. You were brought up in America — that'll account for your accent — but you're really English. About fifteen months ago you were—"

"Say, boss," suggested Mr. Uniatz pleadingly, "why can't I be a bootlegger? You know, one of de big shots. Wit' dat emerald ya gimme last night, I could do it poifect."

Simon breathed deeply.

"I tell you, you're an artist," he said relentlessly. "There aren't any bootleggers in this story. About fifteen months ago you were arrested for forgery—"

"Say, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, with his homely brow deeply wrinkled in the effort of following a train of thought that was incapable of being hurried, "what was dat crack about de pansy stuff bein' my perfession?"

The Saint sighed and got up. For a minute or two he paced up and down the room, smoking his cigarette and staring at the carpet; and then he turned abruptly.

"The hell with it," he said. "I'm going to be Tim Vickery."

"But dat's my name," complained Hoppy.

"I'll borrow it," Simon said bluntly. "I don't think it suits you." He looked at the girl. "I was going to put Hoppy in because I thought the most important part of the job would be outside, but now I'm not so sure. I don't think there's much difference — and I'm afraid the inside stand is a bit out of Hoppy's distance. Are you all set to go? I want to show you something, and I've got to make a phone call."

He led her across the hall to the study which adjoined the living room, and picked up the telephone on the desk. In a few moments he was through to London.

"Hullo, Pat," he said. "I thought you'd be back. Did you have a swell time?… Grand. I'm down at Weybridge. Now listen, keed — can you catch the next train down?… Well, we've had a certain amount of song and skylarking while you've been away, and I've got a damsel in distress down here, and now I've got to push off again. That only leaves Hoppy and Orace, so you'll have to do your celebrated chaperoning act… No, nothing desperate; but Claud Eustace may be puffing and blowing a bit in the near future… Good girl. Then the damsel in distress will tell you all about it when you arrive. So long, darling. Be seein' ya."

He hung up the instrument and turned back with a smile.

"You're going to meet Patricia Holm," he said.

"Which is rather a privilege. When she gets here, tell her everything — from the beginning right down to where I take up your brother's name. Do you understand? If there's any trouble — whether it's from Act of God or Chief Inspector Teal — Pat will be able to handle it better than anyone else I know."

She nodded.

"I'll be all right."

"If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be leaving you," he said and went to a bookcase beside the desk. "Now here's the next thing: If there's any trouble — and if Pat isn't here, Grace will know — this is your way out."

The entire bookcase opened like a door on well-oiled hinges, giving her a glimpse of what appeared to be a passage.

"It isn't a passage," he explained, closing the bookcase again. "It's just a space between two walls. I built it myself. But they're both solid, so it can't be found by tapping around to see if anything sounds hollow. There's an armchair and some magazines, and it's ventilated; but you'd better not smoke. This is how it works: If the door's closed, and you open this drawer of the desk till it clicks, and then pull out the second shelf…"

He showed her how to manipulate the series of locks which he had devised.

"There's just one other thing," he said. "I want you to ring me up tonight — or get Pat to do it and say she's you. Just talk as if you were talking to Tim, because somebody may listen on the line. But listen very carefully to what I say at the other end. If there's anything I want, I'll be able to let you know."

Mr. Uniatz, who had been nibbling the end of a black cigar and watching all these proceedings with a vacant expression, cleared his throat and gave utterance to a problem which had been puzzling him ever since he left the breakfast table. "Boss," he interrupted diffidently, "what's wrong wit' my accent?"

"Nothing at all," said the Saint. "It reminds me of a nightjar calling to its mate." He put a hand on the girl's shoulder. "If you're ready now, we'll go."

They walked down a leafy avenue over the hill. There were starlings cheeping in the undergrowth, and the air was hazy with the promise of a fine day. The world was so still, without even a whisper of distant traffic, that her adventure seemed yet more unbelievable.

"Why are you taking so much trouble?" she had to ask; and he laughed.

"You've heard that I'm an outlaw, haven't you? And an outlaw lives by the supply of boodle. I know we still haven't very much to go on; but when a bird like Ivar Nordsten is falling over himself to get in touch with a convicted forger, I kind of get inquisitive. Besides, there's another thing. If I could dump the evidence of some really full-grown ungodliness into Teal's lap, he mightn't feel quite so upset about losing you."

A quarter of an hour's walk brought them to the gates of Hawk Lodge. They went up the broad gravelled drive and came upon the house suddenly round a bend that skirted a clump of trees — a big neo-Jacobean mansion that looked out over terraced gardens to the haze that hid another range of hills far to the south.

A grey-haired saturnine butler with a slight foreign accent took their names.

"Miss Vickery and Mr. Vickery? Will you wait?"

He left them in the great bare hall and passed through a door which opened off it. In a few moments he came back.

"Mr. Nordsten does not need to see Miss Vickery today," he said. "Will Mr. Vickery come in?"

Simon nodded, and smiled at the girl.

"Okay, sister," he murmured. "Thanks for bringing me — and take care of yourself."

Quite naturally he kissed her; and she went back down the broad drive again feeling very much alone.

"Sit down, Mr. Vickery," said Nordsten cordially. "I'm glad we were able to find you. Would you like a cigar?"

He sat behind a wide mahogany desk in a library that was panelled out from floor to ceiling with bookcases, more like the study of a university professor than of an internationally famous financier. The illusion was heightened by his physique, which was broad-shouldered and tall in spite of a scholarly stoop, and his bald dome-like skull ringed round at the level of his ears with a horseshoe of sandy grey hair. Only a trace of overemphasis on his guttural consonants betrayed his Scandinavian upbringing; and only a certain unblinking rigidity in his pale blue eyes, a certain tense restraint in the movements of his large white hands, marked the man whose business instincts commanded millions where others played with hundreds.

"Thanks."

Simon took a cigar, sniffed it with an affectation of wisdom, and stuck it between his teeth with the band on. It was an inferior cigar; but Tim Vickery would know no better.

"You look older than I heard you were," said Nordsten, holding out a match.

The Saint shrugged sullenly.

"Prison life doesn't help you to look young," he said.

"Does it teach you any lessons?" asked Nordsten.

"I don't know what you mean," Simon answered defensively.

The financier's mouth made a fractional movement that might have been intended for a smile, but his hard unblinking gaze remained on the Saint's face.

"Only a short while ago," he explained, "you were a young man with a brilliant future. Everyone thought well of you. You might have continued your training and become a very successful artist. But you didn't. You devoted your exceptional talents to forging banknotes — doubtless, not to mince matters, because you thought the rewards would be quicker and bigger than legitimate art would pay. But they weren't. You were arrested and sent to prison. You had leisure to reflect that quick profits are not always so quick as they first appear — that is, as I was trying to find out, if you learnt your lesson."

Simon grimaced.

"Well, is that why you sent for me?"

"I take it that my diagnosis is correct," said Nordsten blandly.

"How do you know?"

"My dear boy, your conviction was mentioned quite prominently in the newspapers. I remember that it was considered remarkable that a youth" of your age should have produced the cleverest forgeries that the police witness could remember. The rest is merely a matter of deduction and elementary psychology." Nordsten leaned back and rolled his match between the finger and thumb of one hand. "But I remember thinking at the time what a pity it was that so much talent should have been employed in a comparatively poor field of effort. If only you had had proper guidance — if you'd had someone behind you who could dispose of your products without the slightest possibility of detection — wouldn't it have been quite a different story?"

Simon did not answer; and Nordsten went on, as if addressing the match: "If you had another chance to use your gifts in the same way, for even greater profits, but without any risk, wouldn't you see what a marvellous opportunity it was?"

The Saint sighed quite noiselessly — a deep slow inhalation of breath that took all the rich air of adventure into his lungs.

"I don't understand," he said stubbornly; and Nordsten's hard faded stare turned to him with a sudden resolution.

"Then I'll put it more plainly. You could do some work for me, Vickery. I'll pay you magnificently. I can make you richer than you've ever been even in your dreams. Do you want the chance or not?"

Simon shook his head. It was an effort.

"It's too risky," he said; but he spoke in a way that carried no conviction.

"I've promised to eliminate the risk," said Nordsten impatiently. "Listen — would you like a hundred thousand pounds?"

The Saint was silent for a longer time. His mouth opened, and he gaped at the financier more or less as he would have expected the real Tim Vickery to gape, in startlement and incredulity and a swelling hunger of greed; and not all of that was an effort. The same queer tingle of supernatural expectation touched his spine as had touched it when he discovered that quartet of detectives gathering in Bond Street eight hours ago; the same tiny pulse beat in his brain, but those were things that Ivar Nordsten could not see.

"What do I have to do?" he asked at last; and that humourless twitch moved the corners of the financier's thin mouth again.

"I'll show you."

Nordsten got up and opened the door. Following him out into the hall and up the broad oak staircase, the Saint's face relaxed in a fleeting smile that hardly reached beyond the corners of his eyes. It was, he reflected, only in keeping with the rest of his madcap existence that he should have been in such a situation at that moment — it was the only logical sequel to the crazy impulse which had put him into the driving seat of that prehistoric taxi such a short while ago. Adventures were still to the adventurous. One-saw the tail of a wild goose whisk by in the arid deserts of the commonplace and grabbed it; and the chase led inevitably to a land flowing with ungodliness and boodle. And he would not have had his life ordered on any other lines…

They went down a long corridor carpeted ins rich purple; and Nordsten opened a door at the end. It gave onto a kind of small lobby, from which other doors opened on three sides. Nordsten opened the one on the left and led him in.

It was a fairly large room with windows opening onto the falling view which the Saint had seen when he approached the house. There was a good rug on the floor, and a couple of armchairs; but it was the rest of the furnishings which were unusual. Looking them over slowly, Simon grasped their purpose. The room was fitted up as a complete engraving and printing plant in miniature. There was a drawing board with a green-shaded light, a workbench at one end of which were set out orderly rows of tools and a neat stack of steel plates, an electric warming plate, bottles of printing ink of every conceivable colour, and larger containers of acid and etching ground. In one corner was a new hand press of the most modern design, and in another corner were boxes of paper of various sizes.

"I think you'll find everything you could want," Nordsten said suavely; "but if you should require anything else, it will be procured as soon as you ask for it."

Simon moistened his lips.

"What do you want me to copy?" he asked.

Nordsten went to the drawing board and picked up a small sheaf of papers which had been placed at one side of it.

"As many of these as you can manage," he said. Some will be more difficult than others — perhaps you would do better to start on the easiest ones, You will have to work hard, but not so fast that you cannot do your best work. I will pay you one hundred thousand pounds as an indefinite retainer, and fifty thousand pounds for every plate you complete to my satisfaction. Do I take it that the proposition appeals to you?"

The Saint nodded. He held in his hands the sheaf of papers which Nordsten had given him — Italian national bonds, Norwegian national bonds, Argentine conversion bonds — a complete sample packet of international gilt-edge securities.

"All right," he said. "I'll start on Monday."

The financier shook his head.

"If you intend to accept my offer you must start at once. I have arranged your accommodation so that you can always be near your work. This is a small self-contained suite — there is a bedroom next door and a bathroom opposite. Anything you need to make yourself comfortable can be obtained in an hour or two."

"But my sister—"

"You can write to her, or telephone whenever you like — there is an extension in your bedroom. Naturally you will not tell her what you are doing; but you will doubtless be able to explain your stay easily enough."

"I shall have to match the paper."

"It is already matched." Nordsten indicated the piles of boxes in the corner. "In fact, you have here sheets of the original papers. Many of the inks, also, are those which were used in the original printings. The only things I have been unable to obtain are the original plates; but those, of course, were destroyed. That is why I sent for you. Are you ready to start?"

There was something in his voice which made Simon look at him quietly for a moment; and then he remembered again that he was supposed to be Tim Vickery and swallowed.

"Yes," he said. "I'm ready."

Ivar Nordsten smiled; Hut there was no more softening behind the smile than there had been behind any of the previous infinitesimal movements of his lips.

"Really, it's the only sensible decision," he said genially. "Well, Vickery, I'll leave you to make your preparations. There is a bell beside the fire-place, and it will be answered as soon as you ring. Perhaps you will have dinner with me?"

"Thank you," said the Saint.

When his host had gone, he threw his cigar into the fireplace and lighted a cigarette. Later on he lighted another. For half an hour he wandered about the workshop, stopping sometimes to examine the implements that had been provided for. his use, stopping often to look at the sheaf of specimen bonds which he was asked to copy, with his brows knitted in a straight line of intense thought. And once his hand went to his hip for a reassuring feel of the weight of the automatic which he had not forgotten to put on when he dressed for the occasion; for there had been something in Ivar Nordsten's persuasive voice which told him that no Tim Vickery who refused the offer would have been allowed to take his knowledge of that strange proposition back into the open world.

Nordsten required forgeries of a round dozen government bonds of as many nationalities. Why? Not for any ordinary purpose to which such counterfeits might have been put — the very idea was absurd. What for, then?

He ran over everything he could recall about Nordsten. The name was not on the tip of every tongue, like the names of Rockefeller, or Morgan, but it was a name that was no less famous in other fields of finance; and it was part of Simon Templar's business to have at least a passing knowledge of those fields where millions are dealt with which are outside the limited ken of the average man in the street. Ivar Nordsten reaped in those fields; and the Saint had heard of him.

To the few people whose interests brought them in contact with the less publicized kingdoms of industry, he was known as the Paper King. Starting from one small factory in Sweden, he had built up a chain of production units which controlled practically the whole output of Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Holland, until more than half the paper which was consumed in Europe was manufactured under his management. Not long ago he had taken over the most important mills in Austria and Denmark, and penetrated the British industry with an amount of capital which completed a virtual financial monopoly of the most considerable manufacturing and consuming countries in Europe. Not even content with that, he was rumoured to be negotiating for a series of loans and amalgamations which would link up the major concerns of Canada and the United States in the gigantic organization of which he was dictator — an invulnerable world trust that would practically be able to write its own checks on every industry in which paper was used, and which would in a few years lift his already fabulous fortune into astronomical figures. This was the Ivar Nordsten of whom Annette Vickery had never heard; but it is a curious commentary on this civilization that the average man and woman hears of comparatively few of the great financial wizards until those wizards are trying to conjure themselves out of the dock in a criminal court. And this was the Ivar Nordsten who required a convicted forger to counterfeit twelve different series of foreign government bonds.

Simon Templar sat in the armchair and turned the specimen bonds over on his knee; and his second cigarette smouldered down till it scorched his fingers. There was only one possible explanation that he could see, and it made him feel giddy to think of it.

At one o'clock the saturnine butler brought him an excellent cold lunch on a tray and asked him what he would like to drink. Simon suggested a bottle of Liebfraumilch, and it was brought at once.

"Mr. Nordsten told me to ask if you would like a letter posting to your sister," said the man when he returned with the wine.

Simon thought quickly. He would be expected to communicate with his "sister" in some way, but there were obvious reasons why he could not ring up his own house.

"I'll give you a note right away, if you'll wait a sec," he said.

He scribbled a few conventional phrases on a sheet of notepaper that was produced for him, and addressed it to Miss Annette Vickery at an entirely fictitious address in north London.

At half-past two the butler came for the tray, asked him if there was anything else he wanted, and went out again. After a while the Saint strolled over to the drawing board, pinned out one of the certificates on it, covered it with a sheet of tracing paper, and began to pick out a series of lines in the engraving. Beyond that point the mechanics of counterfeiting would stump him, but he thought it wise to produce something to show that he had made a start on his commission. The future would have to take care of itself.

He worked for two hours, and then the saturnine butler brought him tea. The Saint poured out a cup and carried it to the window with a cigarette. He had something else to think of; and that something was the sweltering spleen of Chief Inspector Teal, which by that time could scarcely be very far below the temperature at which its possessor would burst into flame if he scratched himself incautiously. Certainly the rear number plate of the taxi had been unreadable, and no one could have positively identified the eccentric driver with the Saint; but Claud Eustace Teal had seen him and spoken with him in Bond Street only a few minutes before the disastrous events which had followed, and Simon was only too familiar with the suspicious and uncharitable grooves in which Mr. Teal's mind locomoted along its orbit. That would provide an additional complication which had been ordained from the beginning, but the Saint could see no way of avoiding it.

It was rather stuffy in the workshop, and the panorama of cool greenery which he could see from the window was immensely inviting. The Saint felt an overpowering desire to stretch his legs and take his problems out for a saunter in the fresh air; and he did not see how Ivar Nordsten could object. He went to the outer door of the suite; and then, as he turned the handle, his heart stopped beating for an instant.

The door was locked; and he appreciated for the first time some of the qualities which made Ivar Nordsten such a successful man.

VI

"Curiouser and curiouser," said the Saint mildly and went back to the armchair to do some more thinking.

He realized that when he had surmised that Nordsten would not have let him depart easily with his knowledge if he had refused his commission, he hadn't guessed the half of it. Nordsten would not let him depart easily with His knowledge anyhow. Simon had a sudden grim foreboding that there could be only one end, in Nordsten's mind, to that strange employment. He saw the financier's point of view very clearly, but it didn't help him far with his own plans.

He lighted another cigarette in the chain that had already filled two ashtrays, and strolled back to the window. The casements were only half opened, and he flipped one of the props off its peg and flung the window wide. Leaning out with his forearms folded on the sill to admire the view and take in his fresh air as best he could, he saw a black-haired man with a scarred face walk round the corner of the house and look up. Simon restrained a prompt impulse to wave cheerily to him and watched the man saunter up underneath the window and stop there seemingly wrapped in intense contemplation of a cluster of antirrhinums. Even then he did not quite grasp the significance of the scarred stroller until the door behind him opened and he looked round to see the saturnine features of the butler.

"Did you require anything, Mr. Vickery?" he said.

Simon completed his turn and rested his elbows on the ledge behind him.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"I thought I heard you moving about, sir."

Simon nodded.

"I went to the door," he said, "and it was locked."

The butler's sallow features were expressionless.

"It was locked by Mr. Nordsten's instructions, sir. He wished to make certain that none of the staff except myself should enter these rooms. What is it you were requiring, sir?"

"I ran out of cigarettes," said the Saint casually. "Can you get me some?"

After the butler had gone, Simon examined the window again, and found the tiny electric con-facts in the upper hinge which had doubtless sounded a warning somewhere in the house when he moved the casement; and he realized that no estimate he had formed of Ivar Nordsten's thoroughness was too high.

At six o'clock the butler came in again with a complete outfit of evening clothes. Simon had a bath and changed — the suit fitted him very well — and at a quarter to seven the butler returned and ushered him down to the library with all the ceremony that might have been accorded to a particularly honoured guest. Nordsten was already there, with the broad ribbon of some foreign order across his white shirtfront. He rose with a smile.

"I'm glad Trusaneff was able to judge your size," he said, glancing at the set of the Saint's coat. "Will you have a Martini, or would you prefer sherry?"

To Simon Templar it was one of the most quietly macabre evenings in his experience. In the vast panelled dining room, lighted only by clusters of candles, they sat at one end of a table which could have seated twenty without crowding. A periwigged footman stood behind each of their chairs like a guardian statue which only came to life in the act of forestalling any trivial need and returned immediately afterwards to immobility. The butler stood at the end of the room, supervising nothing but the perfection of service: sometimes he would look up and move a finger, and one of the statues would respond in silent obedience. There were six courses, each served with a different wine, each taken with the solemn ritual of a formal banquet. Without seeming to be conscious that every word which was spoken thrummed eerily through the shadowy emptiness of the room, Nordsten talked as naturally as if all the vacant places at the long table were filled; and Simon had to admit that he was a charming conversationalist. But he said nothing that gave the Saint any more information than he had already.

"I have always believed in the survival of the fittest," was his only illuminating remark. "Business men are often criticized for using 'sharp' methods; but after all, high finance is a kind of war, and in war you use the most effective weapons you can find, without considering the feelings of the enemy."

Nevertheless, when the Saint was back in his bedroom — the butler escorted him there on the pretext of finding out whether he desired to order anything special for breakfast — he felt that he had learned something, even if that something was only a confirmation of what he had already deduced from quite a different angle. And this was that a man who was capable of putting on such a show of state for one insignificant guest, and who believed so clearly and logically in the survival of the fittest, would not find it hard to rationalize any expedient which helped him towards his unmistakable goal of power.

Abstractedly the Saint took off his shoes, his collar and tie, his stiff shirt. Whatever benefits he might have derived from it, that dinner had put the finishing touch to his feeling of being a passive calf in process of fattening for the slaughter; and it was not a feeling that fitted very easily on his temperament. He pulled off his socks, because the night was sultry, and drifted about the room in his singlet and trousers, smoking a cigarette. As if he had never thought of it before, it came to him, as he paced up and down, that his bare feet were absolutely soundless on the carpet. Almost absentmindedly he picked up the white waistcoat which he had discarded. In one pocket of it was a burglarious instrument with which he had taken the precaution of providing himself before he left his own home, with a nebulous eye to possible voyages of exploration on the Nordsten premises, and which he had thoughtfully transferred from his day suit when he changed…

He watched, with the lights out, until the strip of light under the outer door of his suite turned black as the corridor lights were switched off; and then he waited half an hour longer before he set to work on the lock. He realized that it was not outside the realms of probability that the same thoroughness which had caused those minute electric contacts to be fitted to the windows might have provided some similar system of alarms on the door; but that was a risk which had to be taken, and possibly several glasses of Ivar Nordsten's excellent port on top of twelve hours' enforced passivity had made him a trifle light-headed. Every now and then he stopped, motionless, without even breathing, and listened for any whisper of sound that might betray a guard prowling around the passages; but he could hear nothing. And at last he was able to turn the handle noiselessly and slip out into the silent darkness of the house.

A tentative needle of light skimmed away from the Saint's hand, dabbed at the floor and walls, and vanished again. It came from the masked bulb of a tiny pocket torch which was another semi-burglarious instrument that he had brought with him. And thereafter, with only that one brief glimpse of the route ahead to refresh his memory, he disappeared into the blackness like a roving ghost.

His objective, in so far as he had an objective at all, was the library where cocktails had been served before dinner. If there were any intriguing developments to be unearthed in that house, the library seemed the obvious place to begin a search for them; and he had always been a sublime optimist.

He reached the head of the staircase and stopped there to listen. A pale blue glimmer of light came through the studio window on the stairway and achieved little more than taking the harsh deadness off the dark for half a flight. A faint musty smell touched the Saint's sensitive nostrils; and he stood for a moment breathing it silently, like a wild animal, with an invisible frown creasing his forehead. But the associations of it eluded him, and with a slight shrug he set one foot stealthily on the first downward step.

As he did so he heard the scratching.

It was a queer soft noise, like some very light-footed thing with nailed shoes pacing across a parquet floor. It seemed to take one or two steps, while he listened with his heart beating a shade faster; then it stopped; then it came again. And then the silence came down once more.

Simon remained motionless, a mere patch of shadow in the dark, so still that he could feel the blood pounding steadily in his veins. It came to him, with great clarity, that there were healthier places for him to be abroad at midnight than the house of Ivar Nordsten. He had a momentary vision of the very comfortable bed that was already turned down for him in the very comfortable bedroom to which he had been assigned, and wondered what on earth could have made him impervious to its very obvious enticement. But the scratching sound was not repeated; and at length, with a wry grin, he went on. He wouldn't stand much chance of completing his tour of investigation, he reflected ruefully, if a mouse could scare him so easily…

At last he stepped down on the floor of the hall. An infinitesimal glimmer of the light from the stairway window still reached there — enough to take him to the library door without the use of his torch. Very gently he turned the handle; and as he did so he heard the scratching again.

In a flash he had whipped round and shot the pencil beam of his torch towards it. Even as he did so, he realized that his nerves had got the better of him, but the impulse was too strong for reason. And as he turned, his right hand leapt to the automatic at his hip with a grim feeling that if by any chance the scratching had a human origin it would relieve him considerably to discover it.

The dimmed beam gave too feeble a light to show him any details. He saw nothing but a black shadow which filled one far corner, and a pair of eyes that caught the light and held it in two steady yellowish reflections as large as walnuts; and one of the happiest moments of his life began when he had got through the library door and shut it behind him.

Breathing a trifle deeply, he fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it, keeping his flashlight switched on. If complete disaster had been the price, he couldn't have denied his nerves that time-honoured consolation. Whatever the black shadow with the yellow eyes might be, he felt that his system could stand a snifter of tobacco and an interval of thoughtful repose before looking at it again. Meanwhile he was on the sanctuary side of the library door, and he was stubbornly resolved to make the most of it. His torch showed him that the curtains were drawn, and with a reckless movement of his hand he switched on the lights and turned to a survey of the room.

Only the immutable law of averages can account for what followed. If a man looks for things often enough, it is reasonable to assume that at some time or other he must stumble on the right hiding place at the first attempt; and the Saint had searched for things often enough in his life, even if on that occasion he didn't know what he was looking for.

The toe of one bare foot was kicking meditatively at the edge of the carpet. The corner rolled over. His thoughts ran, more or less: "Nothing important would be left out for any inquisitive servant to get hold of. There isn't a safe. It might be a dummy bookcase, like I've got. But excavations are also possible…"

Somehow he found himself looking down at a trapdoor cut in the oak planking of the floor.

It lifted easily. Underneath was a hinged stone slab with an iron ringbolt, smooth and unrusted. Without hesitation he took hold of it and lifted. It required all his strength to raise the slab, but he managed it.

He looked down into black darkness; but from the bottom of the darkness came a faint sound of shuffling movement. With a creepy tingle working across his scalp, he picked up his torch again and sent the beam down the shaft.

Ten feet below him, a face looked up with dull staring eyes that blinked painfully even in the faint ray of his flashlight. There was something hideously familiar about it, as if it were the blanched wreck of a face which he ought to know. And in another second his blood ran cold as he realized that it was the face of Ivar Nordsten.

VII

The face was not quite the same. The nose was less dominant, the complexion had a yellow tinge which the financier's did not have, the eyes lacked the faded brightness which Nordsten's possessed; but it was recognizable. It had given the Saint such a shock that he found it difficult to speak naturally.

"Hullo, sunshine," he said at length. "And who are you?"

The man's mouth worked hungrily, like an animal's.

"All right," he said, in a curiously stiff hoarse whisper, as if he had half forgotten how to use his voice. "I'm used to it now. You can't make me suffer any more."

"Who are you?" Simon repeated.

"I'm you," said the man huskily. "I know now. I've thought it all out. I'm you — Nordsten!"

The Saint's nerves were steady enough now. Somehow, that last shock had been a homoeopathic dose, wiping out everything else; he was left with the dizzy certainty that the trail had turned into a stranger course than anything he had dreamed of, and with a grim curiosity to find out where it led.

"I'm here to help you, you fathead," he said. "Tell uncle what it's all about."

The man below him laughed, a horrible quivering dry cackle which sent an uncanny chill down the Saint's spine, as if a spider had crawled there, in spite of the recovered steadiness of his nerves.

"Help me! Ha-ha! That's funny. Help me like you've been helping me for two years. Help me to keep alive so that I can die at the right time! I know. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Then the wild voice fell to a whisper. "Help," it breathed, with a fearful intensity. "How long? How long?"

"Listen," said the Saint urgently. "I—"

An then, as if his command had turned back on himself, he broke off and listened. He could hear the scratching again. It was outside the library door — on the door itself… There was a faint thud; and then an instant's electric silence, while he strained his ears for he knew not what… And then, shattering the stillness of the house, came a frightful coughing scream that rang up and down the scale in an eldritch howl of vocal savagery that stopped the breath in his throat.

Looking down stupidly through the trapdoor, Simon saw the parchment face of the man who looked like Nordsten turn whiter. The dull eyes dilated, and the stiff unnatural voice rose in a sobbing cry.

"No, no, no, no," it shrieked. "Not now! Not now! I didn't mean it. I'm not ready yet! I'm not—"

The hairs prickled on the nape of Simon's neck; and then, with an effort that hardened his eyes to mere slits of arctic blue, he got up from his knees and lifted the heavy stone trapdoor again.

"I'll see you later," he said shortly and lowered the trap much quicker than he had raised it.

In another second he had fitted the square of dummy parquet over it, and he was rolling out the carpet again to cover up the traces of his inspection. Whatever else his curiosity might demand to know, there was the screeching shadow with the yellow eyes to be accounted for first — everyone in the house must have been awakened by that unearthly yell, and he would achieve nothing by being discovered where he was. Whatever it might be, the Thing in the hall had to be dealt with first, and he preferred to take it on the run rather than let his nerves get the better of him again. With his automatic in his hand, he went back to the door and switched out the lights. No one would ever know what it cost him to turn the handle of the door with that screaming horror waiting for him on the other side, but he did it; and his nerves were like ice as he drew the door sharply back and waited for whatever his fate might be.

Something soft and yet heavy hissed past him and landed on the parquet beside the central rug with the same scratching noise as he had heard before, and once again his nostrils twitched to the queer musty odour which they had detected on the stairs. In the pitch darkness he heard the claws of the beast scrabbling for a turning hold on the polished oak, and kicked out instinctively with his bare foot. His toes bedded into something furry and muscular, and for the second time that fiendish worrying yell wailed through the blackness.

Simon whipped up his gun; but something like a hot iron ripped down his forearm before he could fire, and the automatic was brushed effortlessly out of his hand. He felt hot fetid breath on his face and smashed his fist into something soft and damp; and then he went down under the clawing spitting weight of the brute with its shrill snarl of fury ringing in his ears.

More by luck than judgment he found the animal's throat with his hands; and probably it was that fluke, and the reprieve of a second or two it gave him, which saved him from serious injury, "Sheba!"

The lights had gone up in the hall, and he heard running footsteps. He had never been so breathlessly thankful to hear anything in his life. A whip lashed, and the huge black panther on top of him roared again and stepped back, turning its head with bared fangs. Simon took his chance and rolled clear — it was the fastest roll he had ever performed in his acrobatic career.

"Back!" shouted Nordsten furiously and lashed at the panther again.

It was one of the most amazing demonstrations of brutal fearlessness which Simon had ever witnessed. Nordsten simply advanced step by step, swinging the wire-tipped rawhide back and forth in a steady rhythm of flailing punishment; and as he went forward, the panther went back. Quite obviously it had never been tame, and no attempt had ever been made to tame it. Nordsten dominated it by nothing but his own savage courage. Its yellow eyes blazed with the most horrible intelligent hatred which the Saint had ever dreamed of seeing in the eyes of an animal; it clawed and bit at the slashing whip with deep growls of murderous rage; but it went back. Nordsten's face was black with anger, and he had no more pity than fear. He drove the brute right across the hall into a corner, lashed it half a dozen times more when it could retreat no farther — and then turned his back on it. It crouched there, staring after him, with a steady rumbling of frightful viciousness burring in its throat.

"You're lucky to be alive, Vickery," Nordsten said harshly, curling his whip in his big white hands.

He was in his pyjamas and dressing gown — Simon had known very few financiers who could be impressive in that costume, but Nordsten was.

The Saint nodded, dabbing his handkerchief over the deep claw-groove in his bare forearm.

"I was just coming to the same conclusion," he remarked lightly. "Have you got any more docile pets like that around the place?"

"What were you doing down here?" answered Nordsten sharply; and Simon remembered that he was still supposed to be Tim Vickery.

"I wanted a drink," he explained. "I thought all the servants would have been in bed by this time, so I didn't like to ring for it. I just came down to see if I could find anything. I was halfway down the stairs when that thing started chasing me—"

Nordsten's faded bright eyes looked away to the left, and Simon saw that the saturnine butler was standing on the stairs at a safe distance, with a revolver clutched in his hand.

"You forgot to lock the door, Trusaneff?" Nordsten said coldly.

The man licked his lips.

"No, sir—"

"It wasn't locked, anyway," said the Saint blankly.

Nordsten looked at the butler for a moment longer; then at the Saint. Simon met his gaze with an expression of honest perplexity, and Nordsten turned away abruptly and went past him into the library, switching on the lights. He saw the automatic lying in the middle of the carpet and picked it up.

"Is this yours?"

"Yes." Simon blinked and shifted his eyes with an air of mild consternation. "I–I always carry it now, and— Well, when that animal started—"

"I see." Nordsten's genial nod of understanding was very quick. He glanced at the Saint's gashed arm. "You'll need a bandage on that. Trusaneff will attend to it. Excuse me."

He spoke those few words as if with their utterance the episode was finally concluded. Somehow the Saint found himself outside the library door while Nordsten closed it from the outside.

"This way, please, Mr. Vickery," said the butler, without moving from his safe position on the lower flight of stairs.

Simon felt for his cigarette case and walked thoughtfully across the hall. Through another half-open door he caught a glimpse of the scared features of the battle-scarred warrior who had paraded under his window, peering out from an equally safe position. The black panther crouched in the corner where Nordsten had left it, lashing its tail in sullen silence…

Altogether a very exciting wind-up to a pleasant social evening, reflected the Saint; if it was the wind-up… He remembered that Nordsten had carelessly omitted to give him back his automatic when ushering him so smoothly out of the library, and realized that he would have felt a lot happier if the financier had been less pointedly forgetful. He also remembered that either Annette or Patricia should have telephoned him that night, and wondered why there had been no message. Teal might have been responsible — so far as Simon knew, that persistent detective had not been aware of his latest acquisition in the way of real estate; but there had been no secrecy about the transaction, and it would have been perfectly simple for Mr. Teal to discover it after a certain amount of time. Or else they might have tried to telephone, and Nordsten or one of his servants might have been the barrier. That also was possible, since he had already been allowed to write a letter which had doubtless been read before it was posted. He was developing a profound respect for Ivar Nordsten's thoroughness—

"Vickery."

It was Nordsten's voice; and the Saint stopped, and saw the financier standing at the foot of the stairs.

"I'd like to see you again for a moment, if your arm can wait."

There was no real question of whether his arm could wait; and Simon turned with a smile.

"Of course."

He went down the stairs again. Trusaneff halted on the last flight, and Simon crossed the hall alone.

Nordsten was standing by the desk when the Saint entered the library, and the panther was crouching at his feet. Simon saw that the carpet was rolled back from the trapdoor, and the financier was holding his gun in his hand. He realized that he had been exceedingly careless; but he allowed nothing but a natural puzzlement to appear on his face.

"You tell me that Sheba started chasing you when you were on the stairs, and you tried to get in here to escape," Nordsten said, with a curious flat timbre in his voice.

"That's right," Simon answered.

"Then can you explain this?"

Nordsten pointed his whip at the floor; and Simon looked down and saw the stub of a cigarette lying beside the trapdoor — that same cigarette which his tingling nerves had forced him to light when he got inside the room, and which he had unconsciously trodden out when the demoniac snarl of the panther disturbed him in his investigations — and a few little splashes of grey ash around it.

"I don't understand," he said, with a frown of perfect bewilderment.

The financier's faded bright eyes were fixed on him steadily.

"None of my servants smoke, and I smoke only cigars."

"I still don't know why you should ask me," Simon said.

"Is your name Vickery?"

"Of course it is."

Nordsten stared at him for a few seconds longer.

"You're a liar," he said at length, with absolute calm.

Simon did not answer, and knew that there was no answer to make. He admitted nothing, continuing to gape at Nordsten with the same expression of helpress perplexity which the real Tim Vickery would have worn; but he knew that he was only carrying on mechanically with a bluff that had long since been called. It made no difference.

The thing which surprised him a little was Nordsten's complete restraint. He would have expected some show of emotion, some manifestation of nerves, fear, anger, even insensate viciousness; but there was none of those. The financier was as rock-still as if he had been contemplating an ordinary obstacle which had arisen in the course of a normal and respectable business campaign — almost as if he had already envisaged the obstacle and sketched out a rough plan of remedy, and was simply considering the remedy again in detail, to make sure that it contained no flaws. And Simon Templar, remembering the poor half-crazy wretch under the trap, had an eerie presentiment that perhaps this was only the barest truth.

Nordsten spoke only one revealing sentence.

"I didn't think it would come so soon," he said, speaking aloud but only to himself; and his voice was quiet and almost childlike.

Then he looked at the Saint again with his dispassionate and empty eyes, and the gun in his hand moved slightly.

"Lift up the trap, please… Vickery," he said.

Simon hesitated momentarily; but the gun was aimed on him quite adequately, and Nordsten was too far away for a surprise attack. With a slight shrug he moved the square of parquet aside and locked his hands in the ring bolt of the heavy stone door. He lifted it with a strong quiet heave and laid it back on the floor.

"This is lots of fun," he murmured. "What do we do now — wiggle our ears and pretend to be rabbits?"

The financier ignored him. He raised his voice slightly, and called:

"Erik!"

In the silence that followed, Simon listened to the sounds of stumbling movement in the cave under the floor; and presently he saw the head of the man who looked like Nordsten coming up out of the hole. The man was climbing up some sort of ladder which the Saint had not noticed, taking each rung with a shaky effort such as an old man might have made, as if his limbs had grown pitifully feeble from long disuse. As he appeared under the full open light, Simon was even more amazed at the resemblance between the two men. There was minor differences, it was true; but most of them could be accounted for by the unimaginably frightful years of imprisonment which Erik had endured in that lightless pit. Even in stature they were almost identical. Simon had a moment's recollection of the man's stiff husky voice saying: "I'm you. I know now… I'm you — Nordsten!" And he shivered in the sudden chill of understanding.

The man had climbed out at last. His glazed eyes, tensed painfully in the brilliant light, fell on the black panther, and he swayed weakly, clutching the collar of his ragged shift with a trembling hand. And then he mastered himself.

"All right," he said, with a shuddering gasp. "I'm not afraid. I didn't mean you to see me afraid. But when you opened the door just now — and the thing yelled — I forgot. But I'm not afraid any more. I'm not afraid, damn you!"

Nordsten's faded eyes, without pity, glanced at the Saint.

"So — you had opened the trap," he remarked, almost casually.

"Maybe I had," Simon responded calmly. He was not meeting Nordsten's gaze, and he only answered perfunctorily. He was looking at the man Erik; and he went on speaking to him, very clearly and steadily, trying to strike a spark of recognition from that terribly injured brain. "I was the bloke who said hullo to you just now, Erik. It wasn't Brother Ivar. It was me."

The man stared at him sightlessly; and Nordsten moved nearer to the door. The great black panther rose and stretched itself. It padded after him, watching him with its oblique malignant eyes; and Nordsten took the whip in his right hand. His voice rang out suddenly:

"Sheba!"

The whip whistled through the air and curled over the animal's sleek flanks in a terrific blow.

"Kill!"

The whip fell again. Growling, the panther started forward. A third and a fourth lash cracked over its body like the sound of pistol shots, and it stopped and turned its head.

Simon will never forget what followed.

It was not clear to him at the time, though the actual physical fact was as vivid as a nightmare. He knew that he faced certain death, but it had come on him so quickly that he had had no chance to grasp the idea completely. The man Erik was standing beside him, white-faced, his body rigid and quivering, his lips stubbornly compressed and the breath hissing jerkily through his nostrils. He knew. But the Saint, with his eyes narrowed to slits of steel and his muscles flexed for the hopeless combat, only understood the threat of death instinctively. He saw what was happening long before reason and comprehension caught up with it.

The head of the beast turned; and again the cruel whip cut across its back. And then — it could only have been that the deep-sown hate of the beast conquered its fear, and its raging blood-lust burst into the deeper channel. The twist of its magnificent rippling body was too quick for the eye to follow. It sprang, a streak of burnished ebony flying through the air — not towards the Saint or Erik, but away from them. Nordsten's gun banged once; and then the cry that broke from his lips as he went down was drowned in the rolling thunder of the panther's hate.

VIII

"Say," pleaded Mr. Uniatz bashfully, plucking up the courage to seek illumination on a point which had been worrying him for some hours, "is a nightjar de t'ing—"

"No, it isn't," said Patricia Holm hurriedly. "It's a kind of bird."

"Oh, a boid!" Hoppy's mouth stretched horizontally in a broad grin of overwhelming relief. "I t'ought it couldn't of been what I t'ought it was."

Patricia sighed.

"Why on earth did you have to think about nightjars at all, anyway?"

"Well, it was dis way. Before de Saint scrammed, after he made me a pansy bootlegger, he said my accent reminded him of a nightjar callin' to its mate—"

"He must have been thinking of a nightingale, Hoppy," said the girl kindly.

She lighted a cigarette and strolled over to the window, watching the dusk deepening down the glade of bracken and trees. Annette Vickery gazed after her with a feeling that was oddly akin to awe. Annette herself couldn't help knowing, frankly, that she was pretty; but this slim fair girl who seemed to be the Saint's partner in outlawry had an enchanting beauty like nothing that she had ever seen before. That alone might have made her jealous, after the fashion even of the nicest women; but in Patricia Holm it was only an incidental feature. She had a repose, a quiet understanding confidence, which was the only thing that made hours of waiting tolerable.

She had come in towards midday.

"I'm Patricia," she said; and with that she was introduced.

She heard the story of the night before and the morning after, and laughed.

"I expect it seems like the end of the world to you," she said, "but it isn't very new to me. I wondered what had happened to Simon when I blew into the apartment this morning and found he hadn't been in all night. But he always has been daft — I suppose you've had plenty of time to find that out. How about a spot of sherry, kid — d'you think that would do you good?"

"You talk like a man," said Annette.

It was clearly meant for a compliment; and Patricia smiled.

"If I talk like a Saint," she said softly, "it's only natural."

She had a serene faith in the Saint which removed the last excuse for anxiety. If she had doubts, she kept them to herself. Orace served an excellent cold lunch. They bathed in the swimming pool, sunned themselves afterwards in deck chairs, had tea brought out on the terrace. The time passed; until Patricia stood at the window and watched night creeping down over the garden.

"I'll make some Old Fashioneds," she said.

In the glow of that most insidiously potent of all aperitifs, it was not so difficult to keep anxiety at bay for another hour and more. Presently Orace announced dinner. It was quite dark when the left the table and went into the study.

"I suppose we might telephone now," said Patricia at length.

She took up the telephone and gave the number calmly. It was then nearly nine o'clock. In a short while a man's voice answered.

"Can I speak to Mr. Vickery?" she asked.

"Who is that, please?"

"This is his sister speaking."

"I will inquire, madam. Will you hold on?"

She waited, and presently the man came back.

"Mr. Vickery is engaged in a very important conference with Mr. Nordsten, madam, and cannot be disturbed. Can I take a message?"

"When will the conference be over?" asked Patricia steadily.

"I don't know, madam."

"I'll call up again later," said Patricia and replaced the microphone on its bracket.

She tilted herself back in the desk chair and blew smoke at the wall in front of her. It was Hoppy Uniatz, removing his mouth temporarily from a glass of whisky, who crashed in where angels might have feared to tread.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "who's been rubbed out?"

"I can't get him just now," said Patricia evenly "We'll call again before we go to bed. How about a game of poker?"

"I remember," said Mr. Uniatz wistfully, "one time I played strip poker wit' a coupla broads on Toity-Toid Street. De blonde one had just drawn to a bob-tailed straight an' raised me a pair of pants—"

The glances which turned in his direction would have withered any man whose hide had less in common with that of the African rhinoceros; but Hoppy's disreputable reminiscence served to relieve the strain. Somehow, the time went on. The girls smoked and talked idly; and Mr. Uniatz, finding his anecdotes disrespectfully received, relapsed into fluent silence and presently went out of the room. After a while he returned, bearing with him a fresh bottle of whisky which he had discovered somewhere and succeeded in abstracting from under Orace's vigilant eye. At half-past eleven Patricia telephoned Hawk Lodge again.

"Mr. Vickery has gone to bed, madam," said the butler suavely. "He was very tired and left orders that he was not to be awakened. He wrote you a letter which I have just posted, madam. You should receive it in the morning."

"Thank you," said Patricia slowly and rang off.

She turned round serenely to the others.

"We're out of luck," she reported. "Well, there's nothing we can do about it. We'll have some news in the morning — and I'm ready for bed."

"You're very brave," said Annette, seeing more than Hoppy Uniatz would ever be capable of seeing.

Patricia laughed shortly and put an arm round her.

"My dear, if you'd known the Saint as long as I have, you'd have given up worrying. I've seen him get people out of messes that would make yours look like a flea bite. I've seen him get him-self out of far worse trouble than anything I think he's in now. The man's simply made that way—"

She might have been going to say more, but she didn't; for at that moment a bell rang faintly at the back of the house. Annette looked up at her quickly, and for a second even Mr. Uniatz forgot that he was grasping a bottle of Bourbon which was as yet only half empty. But Patricia shook her head with a very tiny smile.

"Simon wouldn't ring," she said.

They listened and heard Orace's dot-and-carry footfalls crossing the hall. The front door opened and there was a sound of other feet treading over the threshold. A voice could be heard inquiring for Mr. Templar.

"Mr. Templar ain't 'ere," Orace said brusquely.

"We'll wait for him," stated the voice imperturbably.

"Like 'ell you will," retorted Orace's most belligerent accents. "You'll wait ahtside on the bleedin' doorstep, that's wot you'll do—"

There were the sounds of a scuffle; and Mr Uniatz, who understood one thing if there was nothing else he understood, gave a surprising demonstration of his right to his nickname. He hopped out of his chair with a leap which an athletic grasshopper might have envied, reaching for his hip. Patricia caught the other girl by the arm.

"Through the bookcase — quick!" she ordered. "Hoppy, leave the door shut, or we can't open this one."

She bundled Annette through the secret panel, saw that it was properly closed, and grabbed Hoppy's wrist as he snatched at the door handle again.

"Put that gun away, you idiot," she said. "That'll only make things worse."

Hoppy's jaw fell open aggrievedly.

"But, say—"

"Don't say," snapped Patricia, in a venomous whisper. "Get the darn thing back in your pocket and leave this to me."

She thrust him aside and opened the door herself. Outside in the hall, Orace was engaging in a heroic but one-sided wrestling match in the arms of Chief Inspector Teal and another detective. As she emerged, one of his boots landed effectively on Mr. Teal's right shin and drew a yelp of anguish in response. Patricia's cool voice cut across the brawl like a blade of honey.

"Good-evening — er — gentlemen," she said.

The struggle abated slightly; and Orace's purple face screwed round out of the tangle with its walrus moustache whiffling.

"Sorl right, miss," he panted valiantly. "You jus' wait till I've kicked these plurry perishers down the thunderin' 'ill—"

"I'm afraid they'd only come back again," said Patricia regretfully. "They're like black beetles — once you've got them in the house, you can't get rid of them. Take a rest, Orace, and let me talk to them. How are you, Mr. Teal?"

Mr. Teal glared pinkly at Orace and shook him off. He picked up his bowler hat, which had been dislodged from his head during the melee and had subsequently been somewhat trampled on, and glared at Orace again. He appeared to have some difficulty in controlling his voice.

"Good-evening, Miss Holm," he said at last, breathing deeply and detaching his eyes from Orace's stormy countenance with obvious difficulty. "I have a search warrant—"

"You must be collecting them," murmured Patricia sweetly. "Come in and tell me what it's all about this time."

She turned and went back into the study, and Mr. Teal and his satellite followed. Mr. Teal' eyes discovered Mr. Uniatz and transferred their smouldering malevolence to him. It is a regrettable fact that Mr. Teal's soul was not at that moment overflowing with courtesy and goodwill towards men; and Mr. Uniatz had crossed his path on another unfortunate occasion.

"I've seen you before," Teal said abruptly. "Who are you?"

"Tim Vickery," replied Hoppy promptly, with an air of triumph.

"Yes?" barked the detective. "You're the forger, eh?"

There was something so consistently unfriendly in his china-blue gaze that Hoppy reached around nervously for the whisky bottle. He had been let down. This was not what the Saint had told him. He had to think, and that always gave him a pain somewhere between his ears.

"I ain't no forger, boss," he protested. "I'm a fairy."

"You're what?" blared the detective.

"A bootlegger," said Mr. Uniatz, gulping hastily. "I mean, de udder business is my perfession. I got an accent like a nightingale—"

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal grabbed at the scattering fragments of his temper with both hands. If only he could master the art of remaining tranquil under the goad of that peculiar form of baiting in which not only the Saint indulged, but which seemed to infect all his associates like a malignant disease, he might yet be able to score for law and order the deciding point in that ancient feud. He had missed points before by letting insult and injury get under his skin — the Saint's malicious wit had stung him, ragged him, baited him, rattled him, tied him up in a series of clove hitches and stood him on his head and rolled him over again, till he had no more chance of victory than a mad bull would have had against an agile hornet.

But this man in front of him, whose calloused throat apparently allowed whisky to flow through it like milk, was not the Saint. The style of badinage might be similar — in fact, it is interesting to record that, to Teal's overwrought imagination, the style was almost identical — but the man behind it could not conceivably be the same. In any one century, two men like the Saint could not plausibly have been born. The earth could not have survived it.

And Mr. Teal had a point to make. The man with the whisky bottle had given it to him, open-handed. It was a point which annihilated all the routine plans he had made for that raid on which he had barely started to embark — a point so free and brazen that Mr. Teal's respiratory system went haywire at the sight of it.

"Your name's Vickery, is it?" he said, in the nearest he could get to his normal sleepy voice; and Mr. Uniatz, after an appealing glance at Patricia, nodded dumbly. "Then why is it," Teal flung at him suddenly, "that when Miss Holm tried to ring you up a quarter of an hour ago, she was told that you were in bed and asleep?"

Mr. Uniatz opened his mouth, and, finding that nothing at all would come out of it, decided to put something in and hope for the best. He pushed the neck of the whisky bottle between his teeth and swallowed feverishly; and Patricia spoke for him.

"That was a mistake," she explained. "Mr. Vickery came in just a minute or two after I telephoned."

"Dat's right, boss," agreed Mr. Uniatz, grasping the point with an injudicious speed which trickled a couple of gills of good alcohol waste-fully down his tie. "A minute or two after she telephones, I come in."

Mr. Teal gazed at him balefully.

"Then why is it," he rasped, "that the man I had waiting outside the front gate while I was at the telephone exchange didn't see you?"

"I come in de back door," said Hoppy brightly.

"And the man I had at the back door didn't see you either," said Chief Inspector Teal.

Hoppy Uniatz sank down into the nearest chair and tacitly retired from the competition. His brow was ploughed into furrows of honest effort, but he was out of the race. He had a resentful feeling that he was being fouled, and the referee wasn't doing anything about it. He had done his best, but that wasn't no use if a guy didn't get a break.

"It sounds even funnier," Mr. Teal said trenchantly, "when I tell you that another Tim Vickery was pulled in for questioning just before I left London, and he hasn't been let out yet." His sharp glittering eyes between the pink creases of fat went back to Patricia Holm. "I'll be interested to have a look at this third Tim Vickery who's asleep at Hawk Lodge," he said. "But if the Saint isn't here, I can make a good guess at who he's going to be!"

"You do your guessing," answered Patricia, as the Saint would have answered; but her heart was thumping.

"I'll do more than that," said the detective grimly.

He turned on his heel and waddled out of the room; and his silent companion followed him. Patricia went after them to the front door. There was a police car standing on the drive, and Teal stopped beside it and called two names. After a slight interval, two large overcoated men materialized out of the dark.

"You two stay here," commanded Teal. "Inside the house. Don't let anyone out who's inside, or anyone else who comes in while I'm away — on any excuse. I'll be back shortly."

He climbed in, and his taciturn equerry took the wheel. In another moment the police car was scrunching down the drive, carrying Claud Eustace Teal on his ill-omened way.

IX

Ivar Nordsten was dead. He must have been dead even before Simon Templar snatched his automatic away from under the lashing tearing claws of the panther and sent two slugs through its heart at point-blank range. He lay on the shining oak close to the door, a curiously twisted and mangled shape which was not pleasant to look at. The maddened beast that had turned on him had wreaked its vengeance with fiendish speed; but it had not wrought neatly…

The Saint straightened up, cold-eyed, and looked across at Erik. The man was staring motionlessly at the black glossy body of the dead panther and at the still and crumpled remains of Ivar Nordsten; and the dull glazed sightlessness had been wiped out of his eyes. His throat was working mutely, and the tears were raining down the yellow parchment of his cheeks.

Footsteps were coming across the hall; and Simon remembered the three shots which had been fired. It was not impossible that they might have been mistaken for cracks of the whip; but the end of the panther's savage snarling had begun a sudden deep silence which would demand some explanation. With a quick deliberate movement Simon opened the door and stood behind it. He raised his voice in a muffled imitation of Nordsten's:

"Trusaneff!"

The butler's footsteps entered the room. The Saint saw him come into view and stop to stare at the man Erik. Very gently he pushed the door to behind the unsuspecting man, reversed his gun, and struck crisply with the butt…

Then he completed the closing of the door and took out his cigarette case. For the moment there was no reason why he shouldn't. Certainly the battle-scarred gladiator with the passionate interest in antirrhinums remained, together with heaven knew how many more of Nordsten's curious staff; but to all outward appearances Ivar Nordsten was closeted with his butler, and there was no cause for anyone else to be inquisitive. In fact, Simon had already gathered that inquisitiveness was not a vice in which Nordsten's retainers had ever been encouraged.

He lighted a cigarette and looked again at the financier's erstwhile prisoner.

"Erik," he said quietly.

The man did not move; and Simon walked across and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Erik," he repeated, and the man's tear-streaked face turned helplessly. "Was Ivar your brother?"

"Yes."

The Saint nodded silently and turned away. He went over to the desk and sat in the chair behind it, smoking thoughtfully. The demise of Ivar Nordsten meant nothing to him personally — it was all very unfortunate and must have annoyed Ivar a good deal, but Simon was dispassionately unable to feel that the amenities of the world had suffered an irreparable loss. He had it to thank for something else, which was the shock that had probably saved Erik's reason. Equally well, perhaps, it might have struck the final blow at that pitifully tottering brain; but it had not. The man who had looked at him and answered his questions just now was not the quivering half-crazed wretch who had looked up into the beam of his flashlight out of that medieval dungeon under the floor: it was a man to whom sanity was coming back, who understood death and illogical grief — who would presently talk, and answer other questions. And there would be questions enough to answer.

Simon was too sensible to try to hurry the return. When his cigarette was finished he got up and found his torch and went down into the pit. It was only a small brick-lined cellar, with no other outlet, about twelve feet square. There was a rusty iron bedstead in one corner, and a small table beside it. On the table were a couple of plates on which were the remains of some food, and the table top was spotted with blobs of candle wax. Under the table there was an earthenware jar of water and an enamel mug. A small grating high up in one wall spoke for some kind of ventilating system, a gutter along one side for some kind of drainage, but the filth and smell were indescribable. The Saint was thankful to get out again.

When he returned to the library he found that Erik had taken down one of the curtains to cover up the body of his brother. The man was sitting in a chair with his head in his hands, but he looked up quite sanely as the Saint's feet trod on the parquet.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't understand you just now."

Simon smiled faintly and went for his cigarette-case again.

"I don't blame you, brother," he said. "If I'd spent two years in that rat hole, I guess I should have been a bit scatty myself."

The man nodded. His eyes roved involuntarily to the huddled heap under the rich curtain and returned to the Saint's face.

"He was always clever," he said, as if reciting an explanation which had been distilled through his mind so often during those dreadful years of darkness that nothing was left but the starkest essence, pruned to the barest minimum of words, to be spoken without apology or preface. "But he only counted results. They justified the means. His monopoly was built upon trickery and ruthlessness. But he was thorough. He was ready to be found out. That's why he kept me — down there. If necessary, there was to be a tragic accident. Ivar Nordsten would be killed by his panther. But I was to have been the body, and he had another identity to step into."

"Did he hate you very much?"

"I don't think so. He had no reason to. But he had a kink. I was the perfect instrument for his scheme, and so he was ready to use me. Nothing counted against his own power and success."

It was more or less a confirmation of the amazing theory which the Saint had built up in his own mind. But there was one other thing he had to know.

"What is supposed to have happened to you?" he asked.

"My sailing boat capsized in Sogne Fjord. I was supposed to be in it, but my body was never found. Ivar told me."

The Saint smoked for a minute or two, gazing at the ceiling; and then he said: "What are you going to do now?"

Erik shrugged weakly.

"How do I know? I've had no time to think. I've been dead for two years. All this—"

The gesture of his hands concluded what he could not put into words, but the Saint understood. He nodded sympathetically; but he was about to make an answer when the telephone bell rang.

Simon's eyes settled into blue pools of quiet, and he put the cigarette to his lips again rather slowly in a moment's passive hesitation. And then, with an infinitesimal reckless steadying of his lips, he stretched out a lazy arm and lifted the instrument from its rack.

"Hullo," said a girl's voice. "Can't I speak to—"

"Pat!" The Saint straightened up suddenly and smiled. "I was wondering why I hadn't heard from you."

"I tried to get through twice before, but—"

"I guessed it, old darling," said the Saint quickly. He had detected the faint tremor of strain in her voice, and his eyes had gone hard again. "Never mind that just now, lass. I've got no end of news for you, but I think you've got some for me. Let's have it."

"Teal's been here," she said. "He's on his way to Hawk Lodge right now. Are you all right, boy?"

He laughed; and his laughter held all of the hell-for-leather lilt which rustled through it most blithely when trouble was racing towards him like a charging buffalo.

"I'm fine," he said. "But after I've seen Claud Eustace, I'll be sitting on top of the world. Get the whisky away from Hoppy, sweetheart, and hide it somewhere for me. I'll be seein' ya!"

He dropped the microphone back on its perch and stood up, crushing his cigarette into an ashtray, seventy-four inches of him, lean and dynamic and unconquerable, with a dancing light shifting across devil-may-care blue eyes.

"Listen, Erik," he said, standing in front of the man who looked so much like Nordsten, "a little while ago I tried to tell you who I was. Do you think you can take it in now?"

The man nodded.

"I'm Simon Templar. They call me the Saint. If it was only two years ago when Ivar put you away, you must have heard of me."

The other's quick gasp was sufficient answer; and the Saint swept on, with all the mad persuasion which he could command in his voice, crowding every gift of inspired personality which the gods had given him into the task of carrying away the man who looked, like Nordsten on the stride of his own impetuous decision:

"I'm here because I pretended to be a man named Vickery. I pretended to be Vickery because Ivar wanted him for some mysterious job, and I wanted to find out what it was. I heard about that from Vickery's sister, because I got her away last night in London after she'd been arrested by the police. If I hadn't butted in here, Ivar wouldn't have rushed into your murder without a proper stage setting: he wouldn't have been killed, but you would. If you like to look at it that way, you're free and alive at this moment for the very same reason that the police are on their way here to arrest me now."

"I don't understand it altogether, even yet," Erik Nordsten said huskily, "But I know I must owe you more than I can ever repay."

"That's all you need to understand for the next half-hour," said the Saint. "And even then you're wrong. You can repay it — and repay yourself as well."

There was something in the quiet clear power of his voice, some quality of contagious urgency, which brought the other man stumbling up out of his chair, without knowing why. And the Saint caught him by the shoulders and swung him round.

"I'm an outlaw, Erik," he said. "You know that.

But in the end I don't do a lot of harm. You know that, too. Chief Inspector Teal, who's on his way here now, knows it — but he has his duty to do. That's what he's paid for. And he has such a nasty suspicious mind, wherever I'm around, that he couldn't come in here and see — your brother — as things are — without finding a way to want me for murder. And that would all be very troublesome."

"But I can tell him—"

"That it wasn't my fault. I know. But that wouldn't cover what I did last night. I want you to say more than that."

The man did not speak, and Simon went on: "You look like Nordsten. You are Nordsten — with another first name. With a bit of good food and exercise, it'd be hard for anyone to tell the difference who didn't know Ivar very well; and from the look of things I shouldn't think he encouraged very many people', to know him well. You were intended to take his place eventually — why not now?"

Erik Nordsten's breath came in a jerk.

"You mean—"

"I mean — you are Nordsten! You've suffered for him. You've paid for anything you may get out of it a thousand times over. And you're dead. You've been dead for two years. Now you've got another life open for you to step into. You can run his business honestly, or break it up and sell out — whichever you like. I'll give you all the help I can. Nordsten got me here — thinking I was Vickery, who's a very clever forger — to forge national bonds for him. I suppose he was going to deposit them in banks to raise the capital to take over new business. Well, I won't forge for you — I couldn't do it, anyhow — but I'll lend you money and get my dividend out of this that way. What you do in return is to swear white, black, and coloured that you met me in Bond Street at two o'clock yesterday morning and brought me straight down here, and I've been with you ever since. That's the repayment you can make, Ivar — and you've got about thirty seconds to make up your mind whether you care to foot the bill!"

X

Still holding his seething wrath grimly in both hands, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal tramped stolidly up the steps to the front door of Hawk Lodge and jabbed his thumb on the bell. It is not easy for any stranger to find a house on St. George's Hill, especially at night; for that aristocratic address consists of a large area of ground on which nameless roads are laid out with the haphazard abandon of a maze, connecting cunningly hidden residences which are far too exclusive to deface their gates with numbers. Sergeant Barrow had lost his way several times, and the delays had not helped Mr. Teal with his job of two-handed wrath-clutching. But during the ride he had managed it somehow; and it was very unfortunate that he had so little time to consolidate his self-control.

In a very few seconds the door was opened, and Teal pushed past the butler unceremoniously. It would not be true to say that Mr. Teal's heart was singing, but at least he had not yet plumbed the most abysmal caverns of despair.

"I want to see Mr. Vickery," he said; and the butler turned from the door.

"My name is Vickery, sir," he replied.

A spectral shade of ripe muscatel infused itself slowly into the detective's round ruddy face. His eyes protruded slowly, as if they were being gradually inflated by a very small air pump. The wobblings of his rotund body were invisible beneath his clothes, but even without those symptoms there was something about his general aspect which suggested that a piece of tinder laid on his brow would have burst instantly into flame. When at last vocal expression could no longer be denied, his voice cracked. He practically squeaked.

"What?"

"Vickery, sir," repeated the butler. "My name is Vickery."

Mr. Teal had been looking at him more closely.

"Your name is Trusaneff," he said. "You did three years at Parkhurst for robbery with violence."

"Yes, sir," said the butler respectfully. "Nevertheless, sir, I have changed my name to Vickery."

Teal glowered past him at a man with a scarred face who was lounging at the other end of the hall.

"And I suppose his name is Vickery, too?" he said scorchingly.

The butler looked round and nodded.

"Yes, sir. His name is also Vickery."

"How many more Vickerys are there in this house?" Teal howled, with his brain beginning to reel.

"Three, sir," said the butler imperturbably. "Everyone in this house is called Vickery, with the exception of Mr. Nordsten. Even the kitchen-maid," he added with a sigh, "is now known as Vickery. It is highly confusing."

Something that would have made a self-preservative rattlesnake wriggle away to hide itself down the nearest length of gas pipe welled into the detective's bulging glare. There was a strange springy sensation in his legs, as if they had been separately hitched onto two powerful steam tractors and simultaneously extended in all directions, It was, as we have already admitted, very unfortunate. It gave Mr. Teal no chance. He ploughed on doggedly; but his hold on his temper was never again the firm commanding grip of a heavyweight wrestler subduing a recalcitrant urchin it was more akin to the frantic clutch on the pants of a man whose suspenders have come apart.

"I'll see Mr. Nordsten," he announced gratingly; and the saturnine butler bowed.

"This way, sir."

He led the simmering detective to the library; and Mr. Teal followed him in and looked the room over with a pair of eyes in which the habitual affectation of sleepiness had to be induced with a bludgeon. Two men were sitting there, smoking cigars. One of them was a pale and tired-looking Ivar Nordsten — Teal, who made it his business to have at least a sight acquaintance with every important man in the country, had no difficulty in recognizing him — the other man called for no effort of recognition.

"Good-evening, sir," Teal said curtly to Nordsten; and then he looked at the Saint. "You're also Vickery, I take it?"

The Saint smiled.

"Claud," he said penitently, "I'm afraid we've been pulling your leg."

Mr. Teal's tonsils came up into his mouth, and he gulped them back. The effort brought his complexion two or three shades closer to the tint of the sun-kissed damson.

"Pulling my leg," he repeated torridly. "Yes, I suppose you were."

"You see, Claud," Simon explained frankly, "when I heard you were on your way round here looking for a bloke named Vickery, I thought it would be rather priceless if you beetled in and found that the place was simply infested with Vickerys. I could just see your patient frog-like face—"

"Could you?" Teal's voice was thick and curdled with the frightful tension of his restraint. "Well, I'm not interested in that. What I want to hear from you is why you've been going under the name of Vickery yourself." Nordsten cleared his throat. "I suppose," he remarked coldly, "you consider that you have some right to come in and behave like this, Mr. — er—"

"Teal is my name, sir," said the detective tersely. "Chief Inspector Teal." "Inspects anything," said the Saint. "Gas meters, drains, hen roosts—"

"I'm from Scotland Yard," Teal almost shouted. "Where the Highlanders hang out their washing," Simon explained.

Mr. Teal's collar strained on its studs; and Nordsten nodded.

"That need not prevent you stating your business in a proper manner," he said stiffly. "What is all this fuss about?"

"That man," said the detective, with a sweltering glance at the Saint, "is a well-known criminal. His real name is Simon Templar; and I want to know what he's doing in this house pretending to be Vickery!"

"I can easily tell you that," answered Nordsten promptly. "Mr. Templar is an intimate friend of mine. I know his reputation, though I should hardly go so far as to call him a criminal. But he is certainly well known, and of course servants will always talk. I think he exaggerates the powers of gossip, but whenever he comes to stay with me he always insists on calling himself Vickery to save me from any embarrassment."

"And how long has he been staying with you this time, sir?" Teal inquired roughly.

"Since last night — or perhaps I should say yesterday morning."

"Can you remember the time exactly?"

"It must have been a few minutes after two o'clock. I met him in Bond Street, and he had just left the Barnyard Club. I was driving home rather late from a dinner, and I asked Mr. Templar to come down with me."

It may be confessed at once that Chief Inspector Teal had never been kicked in the stomach by a sportive mule. But if that sublime experience had ever befallen him, it is safe to affirm that the expression on his face would have been practically indistinguishable from the one which came over it as he gaped speechlessly at Nordsten. Twice he attempted to force words through his larynx, which appeared to have become clogged with glue; and at the third attempt he succeeded.

"You tell me," he said, "that you met Templar in Bond Street at two o'clock yesterday morning and brought him straight down here?"

"Of course," answered Nordsten shortly. "Why not?"

Mr. Teal took in a mouthful of air and wedged his bouncing tonsils down with it. Why not? When a taxi driver had been found that very afternoon who said that a man whom he identified from Simon Templar's photograph had paid him five hundred pounds for his taxi, his overcoat, and his cap, shortly after two o'clock. It was true that this man had said that he wanted the taxi for a museum…

"Did he have a taxi with him?" Teal blurted sudorifically.

"As a matter of fact, he had," said Nordsten with faint surprise. "He had just bought it because he wanted to present it to a museum. We had to take it to a garage before we drove down."

"How on earth did you guess that, Claud?" asked the Saint admiringly.

Mr. Teal's pudgy fists clenched.

"Guess it?" he yapped and cleared his obstructed throat. There were so many other things he wanted to say. How did he guess it? Words failed him. It was true that no one had been able to take the number of the taxi in which that particular train of trouble had begun, on account of its defective rear light; it was true that no one could positively identify the taxi, which was exactly the same as any other standard cab of prewar vintage; it was true that no one could positively identify the man who had driven it; but there was a limit to coincidences. The Saint had met Mr. Teal outside the club and seen him go in. The Saint had bought a taxi. Mr. Teal had ridden in a taxi shortly afterwards and sustained adventures such as only the Saint's evil genius could have originated. How did he guess it? Mr. Teal's protruding eyes turned glassily back to the Saint; but what court in the kingdom would accept his description of Simon's smile of gentle mockery as evidence? Teal swung round on Nordsten again. "How long had he had this taxi when you met him?" he croaked.

"It can't have been many minutes," said Nordsten. "When I came down Bond Street he was standing beside it, and he pointed out the driver walking away and told me what had happened.'

"Was anyone else with you?"

"My chauffeur."

"You know that your butler is a convicted criminal?"

Nordsten raised his eyebrows.

"I fail to see the connection; but of course I am familiar with his record. I happen to be interested in criminal reform — if that is any concern of yours." Erik was very tired; but the nervous tension of his voice and hands, at that moment was very easily construed as a symptom of rising anger. "If I am to understand that you want my evidence in connection with some criminal charge, Inspector," he said with some asperity, "I shall be glad to give it in the proper place; and I think my reputation will be sufficient support of my sworn word."

Simon Templar eased a cylinder of ash off his cigar and uncoiled his lazy length from the armchair in which he had been relaxing. He stood up, lean and wicked and tantalizing in the silk dressing gown which he had thrown on over his scanty clothing, and smiled at the detective very seraphically.

"Somehow, Claud," he murmured, "I feel that you're shinning up the wrong flagpole. Now why not be a sportsman and admit that you've launched a floater? Drop in again some time, and we'll put on the whole works. There will be a trapdoor in the floor under the carpet and a sinister cellar underneath with two dead bodies in it—"

"I wish one of them could be yours," said Mr. Teal, in a tone of passionate yearning.

"Talking of bodies," said the Saint, "I believe your tummy is getting bigger. When I prod it with my finger—"

"Don't do it!" brayed the infuriated detective.

The Saint sighed.

"I'm afraid you're a bit peevish tonight, Eustace," he said reproachfully. "Never mind. We all have our off moments, and a good dose of castor oil in the morning is a great pick-me-up… And so to bed."

He steered the detective affectionately towards the door; and, having no other instructions, the inarticulate Sergeant Barrow joined in the general exodus. Mr. Teal could not forbid him. Looked at from every angle that Chief Inspector Teal's overheated brain could devise, which included a few slants that Euclid never dreamed of, the situation offered no other exit. And in the depths of his soul Teal wanted nothing better than to go away. He wanted to remove himself into some unfathomed backwater of space and sit there for centuries with a supply of spearmint in his pocket and an ice compress on his head, figuring out how it had all happened. And in his heart was some of the outraged bitterness which must have afflicted Sisera when the stars in their courses stepped aside to biff him on the dome.

"Mind the step," said the Saint genially, at the front door.

"All right," said the detective grittily. "I'll look after myself. You'd better do the same. You can't get away with it for ever. One day I'm going to catch you short of an alibi. One day I'm going to get you in a place that you can't lie yourself out of. One day—"

"I'll be seein' ya," drawled the Saint and closed the door.

He turned round and looked at the butler, Trusaneff, who had come forward when the library door opened; and put his hands in his pockets.

"I gather that you remembered your lines Trotzky," he said.

"Yes, sir," answered the man, with murderous eyes.

Simon smiled at him thoughtfully and moved his right hand a little in his dressing-gown pocket.

"I hope you will go on remembering them," he said, in a voice of great gentleness. "The Vickery joke is over, but the rest goes on. You can leave this place as soon as you like and take any other thugs you can find lying around along with you. But you are the only man in the world who knows that we've had a change of Ivar Nordstens, so that if it ever leaks out I shall know exactly whom to look for. You know who I am; and I have a key to eternal silence."

He went back to the library, and Erik Nordsten looked up as he came in.

"Was I all right?" he asked.

"You were magnificent," said the Saint. He stretched himself and grinned. "You must be just about all in by this time, my lad. Let's call it a day. A hot bath and a night's sleep in clean sheets'll make a new man of you. And you will be a new man. But there's just one other thing I'm going to ask you to do tomorrow."

"What is it?"

"There's a rather pretty kid named Vickery round at my house who put me into the whole thing, if you haven't forgotten what I told you. I can smuggle her out of the country easily enough, but she's still got to live. One of your offices in Sweden might find room for her, if you said the word. I seem to remember you telling Claud Eustace that you were interested in reforming criminals, and she'd be an excellent subject."

The other nodded.

"I expect it could be arranged." He stood up, shrugging himself unconsciously in the unfamiliar feeling of the smart lounge suit which Simon had found for him in Nordsten's wardrobe; and what must have been the first smile of two incredible years flickered momentarily on his tired mouth. "I suppose there's no hope of reforming you?"

"Teal has promised to try," said the Saint piously.