The Saint on TV

1

“Taxi, sir?”

Simon Templar, who had just closed the door of his house in Upper Berkeley Mews, stopped flat-footed and stared at the driver. He had seen the cab as he came out and assumed that it must be parked there on business with some neighbor. Upper Berkeley Mews was not the sort of street where any enterprising London cabman would wait in the hope of picking up a fare. For one to go even further and obtrude himself with a direct solicitation was simply not even plausible. And although he had come out with every intention of taking a taxi, he had not survived all those years of important buccaneering by dint of such naiveties as taking cabs which tried so crudely to thrust themselves upon him.

Relaxed but hair-triggered as a watchful leopard, he treated the driver to a lifted eyebrow that came somewhere between wariness and weariness.

“Really, chum,” he protested. “Is my diaper showing? Whatever booby-trap you’ve got in that hack, you shouldn’t insult me by being so unsubtle about it.”

“You are Mr Templar, aren’t you?” said the driver. “The chap they call the Saint?”

The Saint saw no point in an empty denial.

“I have been called that.”

The driver climbed down from his seat and came towards him, holding a folded piece of paper in his hand. Simon watched him come without moving, except for shifting a little more weight invisibly on to his toes. There was the faintest hint of a smile on his bronzed pirate’s face which might have suggested that he was not only ready but almost hoping for the approach to turn into an attack.

“I have a message for you, sir,” the man said.

“My telephone is in order, and so is the national postal service, I think,” the Saint said pleasantly. “My friends are getting awfully snobbish if they won’t use either one.”

“It was a man what wouldn’t give his name,” said the driver, who was small and ugly and cheerful-looking. “Came up to me by Piccadilly and give me this.”

Simon unfolded the paper and saw typed there a name and an address.

“Never heard of him,” he said. “And it’s not much of a message, either.”

But in the faint electric chill which ran along his bones he knew that fate and his reputation as an outlaw who preyed on the lawless were trying to involve him again in one of those adventures which had made his life a legend.

“I was told to ask you to let me take you there, sir,” the driver said. “This bloke says it would be well worth your while — something you’d never want to miss — and the fare is all paid in advance, including wherever you’d like to go afterwards.” The driver grinned his ugly cheerful grin. “He was most generous with me. I told him I’d do me best.”

The Saint let his blue eyes dwell thoughtfully on the other’s face for a moment, and then he looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. He had no engagements for the evening, other than a cocktail party where he could show up at any time, or not at all. In such a convenient state of availability, Simon Templar could no more have passed up such a challenge than a prospector could have ignored a glittering vein of raw gold suddenly revealed by a cave-in.

“It’s still a pretty vague invitation,” he said. “But let’s give it a whirl.”

The cabby opened the door for him, and they were on their way.

“Who was this fellow who hired you?” the Saint asked.

The driver turned his head half way and spoke over his shoulder.

“Never saw him before. Kind of young and with light hair. Well dressed. But he said that’s not his name in the note.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“That’s it. I figured you might know something about it yourself, sir.”

Simon decided to ignore the implied question and sit back in his seat and enjoy the rest of the ride. One of the secrets of happy buccaneering was the ability to relax completely when not actually engaged in combat or the chase, and to waste no energy on futile speculation. As far as the state of his nerves was concerned, the Saint might have been off to a movie instead of a rendezvous with the unknown.

“Here we are, sir. I’ll wait.”

They were a block and a half up a turning off the King’s Road.

“Never mind,” Simon said. “You’ve spent enough time on this job.”

He stepped out on to the sidewalk, and the cab pulled away. The Saint stood for a moment to get the feel of the neighborhood. The long summer evening was still bright and the only distinct sign of the hour was the smell of cooking food, heavily dominated by garlic, which apparently is favored by artists throughout the civilized world. And this Chelsea district was definitely populated by artists of all kinds — mostly, Simon was afraid, by the kinds whose masterworks exist only in dreams.

A miniskirted girl hurried past him with an outsized portfolio clutched to her bosom. A longhaired creature of indeterminate gender strode across the little-traveled street with a pile of thin volumes in his, her, or its hands. A gaunt bearded type in blue jeans and sleeveless T-shirt trudged along the gutter with a bunch of bananas in one hand and a guitar under his arm; Simon wondered if the bananas were to eat or for smoking.

Number 54 Pinter Street was very much like the other numbers. It was a narrow, two-storied house with a sharply peaked roof, shoulder to shoulder with its neighbors on either side. Simon went up the shallow flight of steps which led to the front door and read the card tacked above the bell. On it, in a strong and ornate hand, was penned the name Perry Loudon.

The Saint, whose experience with the doorbells of possible enemies had not instilled in him any great trust, pressed the button with one end of his rolled newspaper. There was no sound, as far as he could hear, and when a second try brought no response he pushed open the door, which was already several inches ajar. From upstairs he could hear heavy thumping sounds. As he stepped into the hallway the thumping stopped and was replaced by a faint hissing noise.

“Hullo!” Simon called. “Anybody homer?”

“Come on up, whoever you are,” was the reply, in deep masculine tones which had no particular quality of friendliness.

The hissing continued as the Saint climbed the stairs. It originated in the room to the right of the landing.

Looking in, he at first had the impression that he had come on some monstrous junk yard. The entire space was cluttered with tangles of metal and glass — some of them taller than Simon’s head, a few no larger than a potato. A door, slightly ajar, led on to the flat kitchen roof at the rear of the house. A stool and straight chair were the only furniture besides a heavy table. In among the sculptures was a black-maned apparition in blue goggles and a leather apron. In his hairy strong hand was the source of the hissing sound — a welder’s torch spurting blue flame.

He looked up from his work, which consisted of fusing a new contortion of steel to one of the larger metal constructions, and turned his opaque goggles on the Saint. His stocky body seemed to undergo a shift from relaxed indifference to tense defensiveness. He shut off the welding torch.

“I told you never to come back here,” he snarled.

The Saint stood in the doorway for a moment, and then strolled casually into the forest of drooled and twisted metal.

“That’s odd,” he said. “I was under the impression I’d just been asked to call.”

The sculptor made an empty threatening gesture with his dead torch and then flung it on the floor.

“No playing games any more,” he said furiously. “Get out! Beat it! And take your bloody portrait with you!”

He turned to the nearest wall and yanked down a foot-square plaque. Then he came toward the Saint and threw it to him. There was something like a distorted human face faintly discernible in the tangle of dark steel.

“Am I supposed to recognize this?” Simon asked. “Or is this just your peculiar way of trying to make a sale?”

“It’s on the back — just so you don’t forget.”

The Saint turned over the plaque. There was lettering cut into the metal.

The sculptor had already gone back to his welding. Simon had reached the limit of his patience, and he took the metal plaque and threw it to the floor so close to the other man’s feet that only his excellent aim prevented a double amputation. The artist whirled angrily and shut off his torch again.

“That’s enough,” he said, crouching into a fighting stance. “You’re asking for it.”

Simon was ready for anything, though to an unastute observer he might have seemed as nonchalant as a bored spectator at a flower show.

“I’m asking for a little information,” he said. “Are you Perry Loudon?”

“Who the hell do you think I am — Michelangelo?”

“Not for a minute,” said the Saint candidly.

“Out!” yelled Loudon.

“I’ll be only too glad to leave,” Simon replied, “but I’d like to get a few things straight first.”

“They’re straight now. If you think you can run off with Janet and then wander back in here whenever you feel like it, you deserve the worst I can give you.”

Loudon picked up a heavy wooden mallet from a jumble of his tools.

“I’ve never heard of Janet,” Simon said, standing his ground. “And I’ve never heard of you either.”

The directness of those denials got through to Loudon and momentarily held him where he was.

“Are you telling me you aren’t Simon Templar?” he asked.

“I’m telling you I am Simon Templar, and that I’ve never seen you before in my life, unless somebody I used to know is hiding behind those goggles and a false name.”

Loudon clutched the mallet more tightly.

“You’re the only liar in this room, Templar. And the only cheat, too. You ran away with my girl two days ago, and now you’ve got the nerve to come back and joke about it. What kind of a fool do you think I am?”

He lunged at the Saint, who sidestepped and sent his attacker stumbling against one of the metal sculptures.

“A clumsy one,” Simon replied to the question.

As Loudon got ready to charge again, Simon looked for room to maneuver and put his back to the partly open door which led to the outside roof. When the sculptor came at him, the Saint broke the downward swing of the mallet with a karate chop to Loudon’s arm. The mallet flew through the air and bounced from the wall. Simon blended his defense into a whirling motion that caught Loudon off balance and brought his back up hard against the door jamb.

He was temporarily stunned, and the Saint used his advantage to jerk the goggles from the sculptor’s eyes.

“Before this goes any further,” he said, “take a good look.”

Loudon blinked and for a moment was so shaken by what he saw that he could not speak.

“You’re... not Simon Templar,” he finally said incredulously. “But you’re so much...”

Loudon’s expression changed. His words were choked off in a sudden constriction of his throat. His body arched and he dropped forward onto his knees. Then he sprawled heavily at Simon’s feet.

A long, slender chisel protruded from the center of his back.

The sculptor’s falling revealed two men on the flat roof just outside the door. They stepped toward the Saint, each pointing a pistol at him. They were large and solemn, and dressed in immaculate suits, like clerks at a men’s shop, or undertaker’s helpers. They both wore gloves. The only thing which really distinguished them from one another was the color of their hair: the head of the one on the left was light brown; the other was pitch black and wavy. The face of the black-haired one was oily and looked red in the setting sun.

“Not a sound,” he said. “Raise your hands.”

“Turn around,” said the other quietly.

The manner was professional. Neither man showed any trace of haste or nervousness, though they both kept wary eyes on possible points of danger — the roof behind them, the door from Perry Loudon’s studio to the hall and staircase.

Simon did not obey at once, not only because he was reluctant to expose his back to a couple of characters who had already demonstrated such a pronouncedly unpleasant way of treating that part of the human anatomy, but also because he wanted to memorize the faces as thoroughly as possible for future reference — if there was any future in store for him. He was defenseless against two guns in skilled hands, both held safely out of his reach.

“Turn around,” the brown-haired one repeated.

The Saint turned, facing into the studio, and the crimson-orange light that fell directly through the door over his shoulders made the metal statuary glow as if it were heated to the melting point.

He braced himself for the jolting stab just below his shoulder blades, which would mean that one man at least had come within reach, if he could still turn and get him. Then the glowing steel sculpture seemed to explode, the metal fracturing through the whole universe in a meteor shower of sparks which drifted down into total blackness.

But in that warped bit of time between the explosion and the darkness the Saint had time to know one thing; he had not been stabbed or shot; be had been struck on the head.

2

He woke up with a smell of blood in his nose and what felt like a painful throbbing split from the center of his forehead to the nape of his neck. The Saint had the invaluable gift of being able to adapt immediately to the most extreme circumstances, and in a situation which might leave another man groggy and confused for several minutes he would find his faculties operating at peak levels within a few seconds.

So Simon did not lie groaning uselessly, or wondering whether he was waking up in his own bed or not. With the first stirring of consciousness he recalled vividly what had happened at the roof doorway of Perry Loudon’s studio, and his first thought was to determine whether he had been tied up or not.

He was relieved to find that he was free, and that the tentative movement of his hands did not bring on a harsh warning from one of the men who had slugged him — or worse, another blow to his head. He was even more relieved to find, on gingerly examination, that his skull had not, in fact, been cracked down the center like a melon bounced onto the highway from the back of a truck, but that the sensation was illusory, and his cranium was as solid as ever.

His next move was to sit up and look around the studio. It was only then that he realized he was not lying where he had fallen, but that he had been moved directly alongside Perry Loudon, who now clutched in his fingers the mallet he had dropped earlier. The sculptor was definitely dead, but the blood which had stained the back of his shut was still wet and sticky. The chisel still jutted from a point near the junction of his ribs and his spine, expertly placed to penetrate the heart. There was no sign of the experts who had placed it there.

The Saint did not need to ponder at length to grasp the possible implications of what had happened. He had been brought here for some purpose, manifestly not by Perry Loudon, and manifestly not just so that somebody could enjoy the simple pleasure of bopping him in the head. It seemed to him that he was being treated to a close-up view of the biggest frame in London outside the Tate Gallery.

He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and carefully smeared any fingerprints which his assailants might have put on the chisel by wrapping his hand around it after he was knocked unconscious. Then he got to his feet, smoothed back his dark hair and brushed off his clothes, and went across the crowded studio — to one of the windows which looked out from the front of the house down on to the street.

Whether it was intuition or uncanny timing born of long experience, he somehow knew exactly what he would see when he looked out of the window. The accuracy of his prescience sent a brief chill down his spine. A police car was just pulling up in front of Loudon’s house.

The Saint turned quickly, checking to see that he had not inadvertently dropped anything, and hurried back across the room to the open door which led to the roof, from which the two mysterious attackers had come. It was at the back of the house, facing similar kitchen roofs across a narrow alleyway. To the left was the solid and unscalable brick wall of a taller building next door. To the right, however, the flat ground-floor roof adjoined with no more than a gutter break the identical roof of the house next door. A head-high picket fence had been constructed there to give a certain amount of privacy, since both Loudon and his neighbor — unlike the tenants of the houses across the alley — apparently used their kitchen roofs as sun decks. But the fence was not a real barrier, since it did not reach quite to the back of the roof. There was a space of several inches which would give a man easy footing as he swung around the end of the fence from one roof to the next. From there Simon imagined he could find some way to continue until he was far enough from the police to descend and walk inconspicuously away.

But he had to reckon with more thoroughness on the part of the Metropolitan Police than he had hoped they would think necessary. As he approached the fence and got a glimpse of the ground below, he saw the blue helmets of two constables bobbing up the alley toward the back door of Loudon’s house. There was no way to get around the fence to the next roof without moving into their field of view — and to be discovered making an acrobatic escape from the scene of the crime would have a prima facie implication of guilt.

Without a moment of hesitation, Simon dashed back into Loudon’s studio. He had noticed before that there was a trapdoor in the ceiling. It was one of those types which, when pulled down with a hanging cord, automatically lowers a kind of folding stairway — as the Saint verified to his relief when he tested it.

Down at the front of the house the police had begun knocking at the door — patiently, at first.

Simon quickly lifted the body from the floor and saw that the blood which had not been absorbed by the fabric of the shirt had pooled in the leather apron. He managed to clasp the apron tightly enough as he backed up the ladder carrying Loudon that not even one drop splattered down on the bare floor.

There was no time, though, for any further precautions, once he had pulled his burden up into the attic. The police had given up knocking, and he could hear their steps inside the house on the ground floor. He did not actually climb down the ladder. He slid from the stuffy heat of the attic down the handrails and sent the apparatus up through the ceiling again with a single strong shove. Then, as he heard steps ascending the stairs, he snatched Loudon’s goggles from the floor, sprinted to the welding machine, and ignited the torch with the flint and steel device lying on the fuel cylinders.

When the official visitors arrived, he was leaning intently over one of Loudon’s unfinished sculptures, sending dribbles of metal down one of the irregular twisted outcroppings. “Mr Loudon?”

Simon pretended not to hear the voice, and went on with his doodling.

“I beg your pardon, Mr Loudon.”

The Saint straightened up and turned his blue goggles toward the stout figure in the hall doorway.

“If you’re the plumber,” he said, “the stopped-up drain is in the...”

The tone of the voice which interrupted him was considerably less polite than it had been a moment before. “What’re you doing in that getup, Templar?” Simon raised the goggles from his eyes and peered at the abundant form of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard.

The detective looked overheated and damp, but triumphant. This was one of the few occasions in the long history of his frustrating contacts with Simon Templar when he might reasonably have expected his appearance to come as a complete surprise. For that reason, if for no other, the Saint showed no surprise at all.

“Oh, hullo, Claud,” he said offhandedly. “I thought you were the plumber.”

Teal made an effort not to swell or change color. He had often dreamed of imitating the perfect self-possession of his legendary nemesis, but when the moment of truth came he always found himself wanting.

“Where is Perry Loudon?” he blared. The Saint looked around the room.

“He must have popped out. I’ve been so absorbed in my work that I hardly notice what’s happening around me.”

“When did he leave?” Teal persisted doggedly.

“Now, Claud, I just told you I didn’t notice. That’s why you’ve never been anything but a plodding gumshoe all your dreamy life. You don’t remember things people tell you.”

“Why didn’t I see him leave?” Simon laughed, almost incredulously. “Claud,” he said, “now you’re really asking for it.”

“If you were with Loudon here, you must have some idea where he went.”

“Probably to get some beer. He ran out, and I believe he said something about being thirsty a few minutes ago. This torch, and all this heat you know.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“Dear, old skeptic, you can’t blame me for what goes on in that thing you call your train. Look around. You won’t find a single can of beer in this room.”

Teal did not look around the room for beer. Instead he turned to the door and called down the stairs. “Did you men find him?”

“No, sir.”

The fat detective, his hands jammed in his jacket pockets, which had developed capacious bulges to match his jowls because of months and possibly years of such mistreatment, devoted his attention to the Saint again.

“I have reason to believe that something has happened to Perry Loudon.”

“What reason?” asked Simon.

“A phone call.”

“Who from?”

“Uh... anonymous.”

The Saint shook his head.

“Really, Claud Eustace, for such an old bloodhound you certainly are easy to fool. I suppose tomorrow you’ll be out trying to find a left-handed screwdriver.”

“The caller claimed to be one of the neighbors. Said you and this sculptor were fighting, and they heard somebody scream.”

“Loudon has a lot of weirdo friends,” said Simon. “Probably one of them was just playing a joke.”

“And how do you explain the fact that you’re here?” the detective asked.

The Saint cocked his head thoughtfully as he considered the question.

“How do I explain the fact that I’m here,” he repeated. “Claud, you’re getting almost metaphysical in your declining years.”

Teal opened his mouth, but Simon waved him lightly into continued silence and sat back to rest his hip gracefully on top of one of Loudon’s more smoothly rounded creations.

“We could start with cogito ergo sum, I suppose. Or maybe ‘existence precedes essence’ if Sartre is more up your alley — although that’s a blind alley I’d rather stay out of. Get it, Claud? No Exit. Or does your taste run to modern drama?”

Inspector Teal was standing there stoically like a silent film comedian being showered with whipped cream.

“Why are you in Loudon’s house?” he asked.

“I’ve taken up sculpting. You know what a sedentary life I’ve always led. I figured a little creative activity might give me something to do between meals and solving crimes for you.”

“So you claim you’re taking lessons from Loudon?”

The Saint winked approvingly and raised a finger.

“Astute, Claud. You’re coming right along.”

“And you claim you weren’t fighting with him?”

Simon shook his head.

“Not a bit of it. If that was a neighbor who called, he probably heard this.”

The Saint picked up a hammer and began banging on one of the sculptures until Teal held his hands over his ears and backed toward the .door. A uniformed policeman appeared behind him and Simon stopped his noise in order to hear the report which was obviously about to be made.

“I spoke to an old lady across the street, sir,” the policeman said. “She’s been by her window all afternoon. She saw one fellow come in, but no one came out.”

Teal looked at the Saint.

“Well, Templar, how do you explain that?”

“Possibly he went out that door,” Simon answered, nodding toward the roof.

“Where does it go?”

“Claud, must you depend on me for all your information? I’m glad to help whenever, I can, but there are limits. I don’t know where that door goes to because I don’t live here. I only take lessons.”

Teal motioned to the constable to follow him. “Let’s have a look.”

Simon followed the two men out on the roof. If the old lady’s report was accurate, it aroused his curiosity as to where Loudon’s murderers had gone after leaving the studio. There seemed only one way — around the fence which divided the two roofs, and from there to points unknown.

Inspector Teal looked at the single route a man might plausibly take in leaving Loudon’s kitchen roof, and then he looked at the Saint.

“Are you seriously telling me a man going out for beer would climb around that fence?”

“Who can tell about artists? Maybe it’s a short cut to the nearest pub.”

Simon went to the fence and facing the end of it swung around on to the next roof. “See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

Teal followed in the Saint’s steps, but failed to take into account the much greater expanse of his own belly. As he tried to ease himself after Simon, allowing as little as possible of his capacious anatomy to sag out over empty space, his paunch scooped against the fence and his jacket hung on some splinters. The pickets were quivering and swaying dangerously under that unaccustomed strain, and Simon on one side and the constable on the other each grasped one of the detective’s elbows and eased him to safety on the far side of the fence.

Teal did not make any comment, and Simon considered it tactful under the circumstances not to make any either.

“Wait for us,” Teal said to the policeman. “We’ll have a look over here.”

“Just what is it we’re looking for?” Simon asked.

“I don’t think I need to answer that,” Teal said gruffly.

“I don’t think you could,” Simon said. “I think you’re just scared to go back around that fence, again.”

He strolled across the roof, which was exactly like Loudon’s, except that it was furnished with a folding canvas lounge chair. The next roof was accessible beyond it.

The detective looked at him, his face scrunched into a purpling mask of exasperation, “Saint, I’ve had enough from you.”

“That’s good,” Simon drawled. “So now maybe you’ll stop picking on me.”

“I know you’re up to something,” Teal grumbled, “and this time I’ll see you get what you deserve.”

“A seat in the heavenly choir?” suggested the Saint seraphically.

Teal lumbered over to the half-open door which led from the roof to the inside of the house. The sun was just disappearing behind the chimneypots in the west, and the room — which corresponded in its position to Loudon’s studio — was so dim that it was impossible to see any details of what was inside.

Teal knocked on the door, which swung a little wider open under his knuckles.

“I doubt that he cut down through somebody else’s home even if he did come this way,” said the Saint. “He probably went on to the next roof. If you’d looked over the edge back there, you’d’ve seen a sort of iron ladder, probably meant for a fire escape, running down to the alley.”

Teal knocked again.

“The whole idea of people running around roofs looking for beer is idiotic. I’m going to see if anybody in here heard the noise of you fighting with Loudon.”

Simon gave a martyred sign and did not answer. Neither did the inhabitants — if there were any — of the house at whose back door the detective was knocking.

Teal stepped inside and the Saint followed him and looked around. The place was furnished with all the discomforts of a one-room flat: chairs, tables, washstand, hot plate, bookshelves, divan beds — jumbled together with easels, paints, piles of cotton wadding, and rolls of paper and plastic. The divan beds were opened and appeared to be occupied. No heads were visible, but the sheets were bulging.

Teal knocked on the wall and coughed loudly, but still there was no response. Simon thought he was going to leave then, but the fat detective’s eye fell on an arm which projected stiffly and entirely unnaturally from beneath the sheets on the other side of the first bed. He turned to look at the Saint and received a noncommittal shrug.

“Hullo, there,” Teal said, and now he could not keep a tremor of incipient triumph out of his voice.

It was obvious from the peculiar static quality of the human arm he was addressing that he would be very unlikely ever to receive any answer from its owner. Quickly he stepped forward and whipped away the sheet.

Lying on the bed was a lifesized male dummy dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans — so realistic that in the very dim light it could easily have been mistaken momentarily for a real person.

“What kind of a game is this?” Teal muttered wrathfully.

He stepped around to the next bed and hauled the sheet off it in the same cavalier fashion.

There were only two important differences between the first figure and the next one he uncovered. The second one was a female. And it was alive.

3

The girl’s face was half covered by a black sleeping mask, and rubber plugs were visible in her ears. She was young and blonde, and she wore thin cotton pajamas, that clung with understandable affection to a distractingly pneumatic torso and what must have been the longest pair of legs in Chelsea.

When she had groped the mask away from her eyes she blinked at Teal in the semi-darkness and screamed.

The detective executed something like a comic dance routine as he stumbled backward to the door, holding both hands palm outward in front of his face as if he could both ward off her piercing squeal and hold it inside the room.

“I’m from Scotland Yard!” he babbled desperately. “There’s no need to be alarmed!”

His swift retreat and the fact that he stopped in the doorway with Simon instead of fleeing in a guilty manner across the rooftop, apparently reassured the girl. She looked more angry than frightened as she tore the plugs from her ears.

“Well?” she said. “What was it? The excuse?”

“I’m... I’m most terribly sorry,” stammered Teal. “Really I had no idea.”

“Is this the way you get your kicks — poking around people’s beds?”

“I’m a police officer. From Scotland Yard.” The girl tilted back her head.

“Ha!” she said derisively. “No wonder the country’s got problems.”

Simon laughed in the background. “And who are you?” she called at him. “Just one of the Inspector’s perennial suspects.” Teal extended his identification card to the girl, who looked at it with total disbelief.

“I’ve seen things like that for sale in joke shops,” she remarked. “So get lost.”

“He really is a police officer,” said the Saint. “Can’t you tell? Look at his feet.”

The girl obligingly leaned to the side of her bed, turned on a lamp, and inspected the inspector’s shoes.

“They’re the right size,” she agreed. “Now what do we all do — go and arrest somebody?”

“My name is Teal...”

“Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal,” Simon elaborated brightly. “The pride of Scotland Yard. And I am Simon Templar.”

Teal tried to silence him with a glare that would have stopped a herd of stampeding buffalo in their tracks.

“We’re investigating... that is I am investigating a complaint from one of the neighbors.”

“About what?” inquired the girl sweetly. “Men tramping around over the roofs?”

“About a fight. Have you heard or seen anything unusual in the past half hour or forty-five minutes?”

“Have I! Two men broke into my studio, stripped the bedclothes off me, trotted out the wackiest excuse, and...” The detective reddened. “Yes. Well... I’m very sorry, Miss...”

“Lane,” she said. “Cassie Lane. And that’s George.” She indicated the dummy in the other bed, and Teal was so flustered that he half-nodded to it before he caught himself. “That’s Caspar,” Cassie Lane continued.

She pointed to another dummy, a very lifelike one, propped in a sitting position in the corner beyond where she was lying. It was dressed in Bermuda shorts, a straw hat, and sandals. Simon moved in for a closer look.

“These are — er — friends of yours?” he asked.

“My best friends,” said Cassie Lane, looking fondly at Caspar. “In fact, my only real friends.”

Teal looked more disturbed than ever. He backed towards the roof.

“Well, Miss Lane, I appreciate your cooperation.”

The girl looked at Simon with an expression which showed that she found him much more potentially sympathetic than the detective.

“Don’t think I’m a complete nut,” she said. “I’m an artist. I make these dummies.”

“Must be fascinating work,” said the Saint. “Has Scotland Yard taken an option on all your output?”

“You’re nice,” she said. “Get rid of your fat friend, and I’ll tell you about it.”

“I might do that.”

“Come along, Templar,” snarled Teal from the doorway.

“You mean I don’t even get a parking ticket for sleeping in my own bed?” the girl said with feigned relief.

“You’re on your own property,” answered the Saint.

“Really? I thought it was becoming a public highway.”

She and Simon grinned at one another. Teal closed the door and led the way back across the roof toward Loudon’s house. There was still an orange glow in the western sky, but lights had been turned on in some of the houses whose backs were visible up and down the alley. Teal stripped the wrapper from a stick of chewing gum and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Constable!” the Saint called when they had come to the fence. “Time to moor the blimp.”

Teal, in seething eagerness to prove his agility, almost ended his long war against the Saint by dropping on to his head in the lane below. But once again Simon and the policeman combined their efforts to prolong his life. As he was about to topple backward from the end of the fence they caught his arms on either side and whipped him from the edge of disaster to a sitting position on the late Perry Loudon’s roof. He assumed the position with such force and lack of grace that the whole adjacent area of the building trembled, and Inspector Teal swallowed his chewing gum.

As he coughed and choked, Simon helpfully pounded his back until the breathing passages were unclogged again, and Teal jerked petulantly away and wiped his streaming tears with a handkerchief. The constable looked solemnly off at a cluster of television antennae in the middle distance.

“That was a narrow escape, Claud,” said the Saint with great concern. “Almost done in by a wedge of Spearmint. Maybe you really should take up something safe like plumbing. It pays better than this daredevil stuff, too, and when senility isn’t too far up the road a man has to think of practical considerations.”

“Clark!” Teal roared to the constable. “See what Perth has found out, if anything, and report back up here as fast as possible.”

As the policeman hurried off, Teal ignored his helpfully offered hand and laboriously clambered to his feet.

“Irrational loss of temper with subordinates,” clucked Simon. “Another sign of deterioration.”

Teal ignored that bit of analysis and strode into the sculptor’s studio. He turned on the light and looked around at the grotesque metal shapes.

“If you want to learn to make these things, you’re welcome to it,” he growled. “But I don’t believe a word you’ve said, and I particularly don’t think that Loudon went out for beer. He’d have been back long before this.”

“Claud, isn’t this getting a little bit silly? We’ve been squabbling here for at least half an hour over whether some artist went out for beer or not, while all over London citizens are getting robbed, murdered, and otherwise misused as a direct consequence of your neglect of your proper duties.”

The detective opened his mouth, but the Saint went on.

“It might occur to anybody with more brain than a policeman that an eccentric like Loudon can pop out for beer one minute, disappear, and show up three weeks later with a suntan and a performing troupe of African elephants.” Simon walked toward the door. “Now, as far as I’m concerned I’ve had enough of this nonsense, and I’d like to finish up my sculpting session so I can go to dinner.”

Teal’s pink jowls quivered with the strangulated earthquake that they were containing. He reached for another stick of chewing gum, thought better of it, and stepped heavily toward the door.

It was then that Simon saw a small drop of dark reddish liquid splatter against the metallic intricacies of one of Loudon’s sculptures. His eye darted up to confirm his suspicion of the source, and he saw another drop forming for the plunge at one corner of the trapdoor. Fortunately the open work in the interior of the sculpture, which resembled a large family of snakes in the midst of a festive reunion, had dispersed the blood which had already fallen and kept it from making a puddle on the floor.

There had never been a time in his life when the Saint was more anxious for Chief Inspector Teal to complete an exit.

“I’ll check back on this,” the latter said. “If anything has happened to this fellow Loudon you’ll hear from me.”

Another globule of blood gathered enough weight to fall from the corner of the trapdoor and splash into the tortured recesses of the sculpture. Simon interposed himself between Teal and that unpleasant sight and manufactured a story which he hoped would speed the detective’s departure. “I’m sure I’ll hear from you, Claud, and just to show how cooperative I am I’ll tell you I’ve just remembered a pub Loudon mentioned. The Crown, I think it was.”

“Where is that?”

“Now how many times have I reminded you that I can’t do everything for you?” Simon answered a little irritably. “I don’t know where this one is, but there must be dozens of them in London. You’ve only got to go through them methodically, starting in this neighborhood.”

Any gratitude that Teal might have wished to express for that information had to be contained while the constable he had sent away a few minutes before came trotting excitedly up the stairs.

“Found something there, sir,” he said. “Down on the front hall table among some bills and letters.”

Teal turned to the head of the stairs to take the small square of paper the constable handed him, and the Saint used the opportunity to join them outside the door of the studio.

Looking over Teal’s shoulder he had the sudden peculiar sensation that he was living in a dream, and that he would do best to wrench himself to full consciousness before things got any worse. For in the stout detective’s hand was a snapshot of Simon Templar and Perry Loudon on a river bank, looking in a holiday mood, with a gorgeous doll in a minimal bikini standing between them.

4

It was not a very good picture. Whoever had taken it had adjusted the lens slightly off focus — a common failing of shot-snappers, but in this case possibly done for good reason. Because Simon positively did not recognize the doll, much as he would have liked to, and he knew that he had never seen Perry Loudon before that afternoon; and yet there he appeared to be posing with what it would seem obvious — in one case at least — to call bosom friends. Therefore a certain fuzziness of focus might have been designed to make a passable facsimile of the Saint less easily detectable for the impersonation that it had to be.

Chief Inspector Teal, however, was not conditioned to pause to perceive such subtleties. He turned with such an expression of fiendish elation distorting his pudgy face that any sharp movie mogul would have signed him on the spot for a series of horror films, and thrust the photograph under Simon’s nose. The Saint removed it to a more suitable distance and simply stood there looking Teal in the eye.

“Well?” whopped the detective. “What do you call this?”

“That’s something called a photograph, Claud,” the Saint explained kindly. “I doubt that you could ever grasp the complexities of the process, but it basically consists of an image formed by light on a sensitive emulsion.”

“Do you still claim you’re just a student of Loudon’s?”

“Before I answer that, is it against the law to be more than a student of Loudon’s?”

“Just give me a straight answer,” Teal barked.

“No,” said the Saint blithely.

Teal’s momentary exultation began to ripen again into an apoplectic tint of carmine.

“What did you say?”

“I said no,” the Saint repeated. “Your hearing’s going too, Claud. No it is not against the law to be more than a student of Loudon’s.”

“You’ll cooperate or you’ll find yourself in serious trouble,” the detective said.

He apparently intended his words to carry weight and dignity, but they came out in the form of a loud squeak which caused the two plain-clothes men waiting in the ground floor hall to peer puzzledly up the stairs.

“Now, Claud,” the Saint said in a very low voice, “I don’t want to embarrass you in front of your minions.”

He extended a long forefinger and pushed it lightly into the center of Teal’s stomach.

“I’m not a cruel man,” he continued. “But I’m a just man, particularly where my own rights are concerned. The fact that I claim a few rights that the yahoos have gladly given up for their bread and circuses is to my own credit, I think, whether you like it or not. And one of the rights I claim is to be where I please when I please without some insufferable bureaucratic slob shuffling up and asking me a lot of impertinent questions.”

The steely finger jabbed more vehemently into Teal’s midriff and forced him to retreat a half step in order to maintain his balance. The Saint’s voice was a little louder, and had developed a razor edge.

“Of all the routine complaint calls you get every day,” he said, “you find it necessary to trot out half the strength of Scotland Yard on the one that mentions my name. Somebody drops a hammer in the building where I’m taking a lesson in the noble art of Phidias and Michelangelo, and suddenly it’s a riot. Some beatnik goes around the corner for a beer and suddenly he’s the biggest case since Dreyfus. You haven’t found a trace of a crime or a body or even a drop of blood, but you have the gall to threaten me with all kinds of sinister consequences if I don’t ‘cooperate’ — which I suppose means confessing to something I haven’t done.”

Now the Saint’s prods to Teal’s belly were more frequent and powerful, and they forced little puffs of air from between the detective’s lips.

“Do you know what that is, Claud Eustace? That’s harassment and persecution. And if you carry it any further I’m going to see that you’re kicked so far downstairs at Scotland Yard that you’ll need a rocket to get up to the basement.”

Teal struggled for several long seconds to muster some reply. He started to raise the photograph above waist level as some sort of banner under which to continue the battle, but he seemed to realize its uselessness. The solid ground on which he had thought he was standing had turned into a quicksand and he knew it.

He turned away from Simon and started quickly down the stairs, tucking the picture into his jacket pocket as he went. “That’s stealing, Claud,” the Saint reminded him politely. Teal, without a pause in his trudging descent, pulled the picture out of his pocket again and handed it over his shoulder to the constable who was following him. When they were at the bottom of the stairs the constable took the picture and put it on the table from which it had been taken.

“Bye-bye,” Simon called cheerily. “If I’m still here when Loudon comes home, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

Teal did not look around. He marched sullenly out of the house to the dark street, and the last of the three men to follow him shut the door quietly behind them.

The Saint hurried down the stairs, bolted the door on the inside, and took the steps two at a time on his return trip to Loudon’s studio. He closed the door to the roof but could not lock it because there was no key in sight. A glance through the front window showed the police car driving away.

Simon went to the cord which hung from the overhead trapdoor, and a moment later the ladder had descended to the floor. He was halfway up it when the door from the roof opened and a voice called. “Hold it!”

The fact that it was a female voice, and one that Simon recognized, kept him from doing anything more drastic than turning his head with bland unconcern. Cassie Lane was standing just inside the studio, no longer dressed in her pajamas but in jeans and a man’s white shirt, holding up her hand as if she could freeze the Saint with a gesture.

“I knew it!” she cried. “The moment I laid eyes on you! You’re ideal.”

“I agree,” said Simon, “but would you mind admiring me later? I’m busy.”

“Absolutely perfect. How could I leave?”

“Do you want something specific?” he asked her.

He was painfully aware that only her excitement had kept her from noticing the bloodstains on the trapdoor and the corner of its opening.

“I want you!” she announced dramatically.

“I’m flattered. Maybe I can return the compliment when I get through with my work here.”

Cassie Lane’s enthusiasm was apparently unquenchable.

“Lithe!” she declaimed. “Fantastically balanced! Coordination like a cat. Would you mind stripping to the waist?”

Simon took a step down the ladder and regarded her more interestedly.

“No,” he said. “Would you?”

When she tried to meet the blue eyes which gazed at her with just a trace of mockery from the impossibly handsome face, she faltered for the first time.

“I want you for a model,” she said earnestly.

He would have agreed to pose as Laocoon with a hungry boa constrictor to get rid of her at that moment.

“That could be arranged, I guess, but right now I’m terribly busy. I’ll come over when I’ve finished.”

“I’ll just watch. Go right ahead. I like to study my models in motion for hours before I hit on the right pose for them.”

Cassie came to him, looking up into his face and putting her hand on his shoe.

“Please,” she begged. “Couldn’t I just watch?”

Suddenly she looked vaguely puzzled and glanced down at her hand. Splotched on the white skin of its back was a drop of blood.

“Don’t scream,” said Simon.

He managed to drop from the ladder and get some fingers over her mouth before any loud sounds emerged.

“Promise not to scream?” he said. “I’ll explain this completely.”

She nodded and he tentatively freed her head, still holding her body close to his.

“Oh, dear,” she breathed. “Is that... blood?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You’ve murdered somebody? You’ve murdered Perry. Is that it? No... don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’d rather not know anything.”

She put her hands over her ears, and Simon waited patiently until she was ready to listen again.

“I haven’t murdered anybody,” he said. “I...”

“Are you going to murder me?” she asked breathlessly, but with reasonable calm. “You can tell me that. I might as well know. I mean, that’s something that can’t get me involved.”

“It can get you pretty uninvolved, in fact,” said the Saint.

Cassie Lane pointed up the ladder toward the dark attic, from which another drop of blood had just fallen on to one of the rungs of the ladder.

“Somebody murdered somebody,” she said feebly. “Is that right?”

“Yes. Perry Loudon was murdered — this afternoon. I hope you weren’t...”

She shook her head.

“No. I hardly knew him. I hardly know anybody. I’m not going to feel sorry. I’m just going to...”

“Going to what?”

“Faint.”

He had loosened his grip, but his arms were still around her, so that it was no effort at all to ease her into a wooden chair nearby. She showed no signs of waking up immediately, so Simon used the welcome silence to put his thoughts in order.

Several things seemed obvious or at least highly probable. He was the victim of an elaborate effort to stick him with a murder charge. Only the fact that he had awakened so soon from the blow on his head had kept him from being discovered with his hand all but gripping the chisel which had killed Perry Loudon. Teal’s caller had mentioned the Saint’s name specifically. Even Loudon had been prepared for Simon’s visit, the apparent photograph seemed to affirm their acquaintanceship, and the bikini babe in the photo was probably the apex of a triangle which was supposed to provide the motive for murder.

The plot was almost insanely refined. The next obvious question was, who would want to do such a thing, and who would be capable of such a baroque way of doing it? Not many of the criminals on whom the Saint had preyed and from whose spoils he had built his fortune remained alive or free after their encounters with him, but a few did, and there could be others who would like to see him eliminated as a matter of simple prudence, in the same way that people get typhoid shots before they find they have actually contracted the disease. And the chances of a major felon meeting his doom at the hands of the Saint were considerably greater than his chances of dying of old age.

But there was no clue as yet to who was behind the scheme, and for the moment there were more pressing problems.

The mere fact that the frame-up had not resulted in Simon’s immediate arrest on suspicion of murder was hardly enough cause for uninhibited jubilation. His temporary freedom was due only to Scotland Yard’s failure to demonstrate that there actually had been a murder. Now, in addition to the perpetrators of the crime, who would be most willing to confirm Perry Loudon’s demise to the police, there was Cassie Lane, a direct witness to the corpus delicti.

The combination of circumstances meant that physical escape from the scene would be no more than a delaying action. Simon would have to do a lot more than that. He would have to keep the police mystified as long as possible simultaneously tracking down the real murderers. It was a challenge that only a man with the ice-cold nerves and resilient resourcefulness of the Saint could hope to meet.

There was a telephone half buried under some rubble in one corner of the room. Simon located it because of the numbers scrawled in pen, pencil, and crayon all over the wall in its vicinity. He brushed away the debris and dialed a number he had carried in his head for years — the home of an acquaintance who, in the old days of the Saint’s more piratical exploits, had always been available for the clandestine transportation of bulky objects, and purportedly still was.

“Bert,” he said to the gravel-crusher voice which answered. “This is Simon Templar. I hope your rates haven’t gone up too much, because I have a job for you.”

Bert, after expressing his pleasure at renewing an old friendship, wanted to reminisce, but Simon had to cut him off. “It’s a rush job,” he said. “Large, heavy metal statue to be moved to your warehouse right away. Yes, I’m aware that it’s dinner time, but I can’t wait. Can you get a couple of men over here right away — 54 Pinter Street?”

Bert said that it would be possible, but only at great effort and fantastic expense.

“Yes,” said Simon. “All right. I figured on that. Overtime. Naturally. Don’t bother to explain it all to me, just get over here double quick. If anybody wants to know what you’re doing, tell them it’s an order put in by Perry Loudon some time ago.”

Simon repeated the address and hung up. Cassie Lane’s eyelids had started to flutter during the last part of his conversation, and now she sat up in her chair and looked at him with dazed turquoise eyes.

“Good morning,” said the Saint.

The girl stood up, supporting herself dizzily with one hand on the chair.

“I’ll see you again some time,” she said.

“Probably not,” Simon replied. “The police will question you, you’ll tell them you saw me with Perry Loudon’s body, and they’ll take me away and hang me while the real murderers go free.”

She looked at him miserably.

“I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “Couldn’t we just... forget the whole thing?”

“You can, I suppose. Meanwhile I’ll be tracked down like a mad dog. While you’re hiding away over there in your nest staying uninvolved the forces of evil will triumph, and it’ll all be your fault.”

The corners of her pretty mouth turned down and her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, no,” she wailed. “How can you say that? I haven’t done a thing!”

“You’ve seen,” said the Saint a little ominously. “You’re involved whether you like it or not. It’s just lucky for you that I’m not a killer, or I’d have to eliminate you and dispose of your poor crushed young body along with this one up here.”

He gestured toward the trapdoor.

“You really didn’t kill Perry, did you?” she asked.

She was wiping away her tears, apparently trying to resign herself to her fate.

“No,” Simon said, “I didn’t. But two men did kill him, while I was here. They hit me on the head and tried to make it seem I’d had a fight with Loudon that ended with my stabbing him in the back. The fact is, I’d never seen him before. That’s as much as I can tell you because I have to hurry.”

He was standing in front of her, and he took both her hands in his. She was like a small frightened animal, and he knew, without modesty, that there was a magnetism and restrained strength in his touch which would calm and reassure her more than any number of words.

“Now,” he said quietly. “Will you help me?”

She stared at him as if mesmerized.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good.”

He steered her toward the door to the roof.

“You want me to leave?” she asked.

“Just long enough to get your paints ready to use. And if you have some plaster of Paris, would you please mix some?”

“What for?” she asked weakly.

“I’ll show you in a minute.”

The Saint went to the head-high piece of sculpture on which Loudon had been working just before he was killed. Cassie Lane watched as he put on the goggles, lit the welding torch, and turned the thin javelin-point of blue flame onto the metal, cutting slowly through it.

“Oh!” said Cassie Lane, with sudden comprehension.

Then she ran off across the roof toward her own flat.

5

When Bert the mover (who had never been reputed to possess a surname) arrived with two husky cohorts, Simon was putting the finishing touches to the rewelded seams he had made in the side of Loudon’s last creation. It was fairly obvious that the giant metal beehive had been opened up and closed again, but one of the reasons for Bert’s long success at his vocation was his total lack of inquisitiveness. He was an iron-grey man with the neck of a rhinoceros and the handshake of a grappling hook.

“Good to see you,” he rumbled to Simon.

He looked at Cassie Lane, who was sitting benumbed on a stool, and pretended not to have noticed her.

“Is this it?” he asked, nodding toward the sculpture.

“Yes,” Simon answered. “And remember — it’s Perry Loudon who asked to have it moved.”

“Right.”

One of Bert’s men trundled in a dolly, the sculpture was heaved on to it, and within a minute it was on its way downstairs.

The Saint took a deep breath of satisfaction and stretched his arms. Cassie Lane burst into tears. “I could kill you,” she sobbed. “We’ve had enough of that here today.”

“You’ve ruined everything!” she went on. “My life — I had it so well worked out. Now I’m involved in your beastly affairs right up to my neck.”

“Well, you can’t expect to live your whole life in an airtight box with a couple of make-believe boy friends.”

“I could try! It was working very well until you came along.”

“Never mind. If we’re caught, I’ll ask my friend Inspector Teal to put you in a quiet private cell. Solitary confinement. Wouldn’t that be ducky?”

The thought failed to comfort her, so Simon stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders and found once more that physical contact had a much better effect than verbal persuasion. She stopped blubbering and was soon breathing with something not terribly unlike contentment.

“Just try to calm down,” he murmured. “I’ll be out of here in a minute.”

“You’re not going to leave me here?” the girl cried. Simon went over to the telephone and began scanning the numbers which Loudon had noted on the wall.

“It’s up to you. I’d enjoy your company if you’d like to come along with me.”

She got up and looked over his shoulder. He was scrutinizing one of the barely legible pencil scrawls. “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m not sure yet. Look.”

He indicated the name and number he had been inspecting. “Simon,” it said. “BEL3344.”

“That’s you,” Cassie exclaimed.

“One of me,” said Simon. “I think I’ll take advantage of this rare opportunity to talk to myself while I’m in two different places.”

He took up the receiver and began dialing the number.

“You think somebody actually made Perry Loudon think he was you?” Cassie said.

“Exactly. There’s even a photograph downstairs with someone in it who looks remarkably like me.”

There was an answer at the other end of the line.

“Hullo?”

“Is Simon Templar there, please?” asked the Saint.

“Simon Templar speaking.”

“I’m a friend of a friend of yours, and I have an important message that has to be delivered in person. Could you meet me somewhere, or give me your address?”

There was a moment of hesitation.

“Who is this please?”

The voice resembled the Saint’s, but only roughly. No one who knew him well would have been fooled by it.

“I’ll explain when I see you,” Simon said.

It was more a feeling than anything else, but abruptly he knew that the man who had been speaking to him was no longer there; He waited a few seconds and there was only silence.

“Will you meet me, then?” he said.

The emptiness was finally broken by a single click as the receiver at the other end of the connection was put back into its cradle.

“Did he hang up?” Cassie asked.

“He did. Or somebody did.”

Simon was dialing again.

“Are you calling back?”

“No. Trying to get the address that goes with that number. You can’t get it from information, but I’ve got a friend in the right department.”

“Then are you going there?”

“Yes,” said Simon.

“May I come with you?”

“Getting brave?”

The girl shrugged.

“Just resigned, I guess.”

“That’s a sign of progress, anyway.”

When Simon had obtained the information he wanted, which turned out to be an address in Kensington, he led Cassie down the stairs and out on to the sidewalk, leaving Perry Loudon’s studio as nearly as possible as it had been before the murder.

“See over there?” said the Saint. “That dark blue car parked down the block? That’s one of Chief Inspector Teal’s sleuths.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s a special gift I have, from years of abstinence and yoga.”

“I don’t really understand what you are exactly,” Cassie said.

“A lot of people have that problem.”

“What’ll he think of me coming down from Perry’s place with you?”

“Does it matter? Come to think of it, it’s an advantage. You could easily account for what I’ve been doing up there all this time.” He gave her an appraising look. “Very easily.”

Suddenly, before she could reply, the girl realized that he was taking her directly over to the dark blue car that he had pointed out.

“What are you doing?” she gasped, clutching his hand.

“Having fun.”

The Saint sauntered up to the driver’s window and leaned down to look in. The single occupant of the car, a thirtyish man with black beetling brows, was sitting embarrassedly upright, looking straight ahead.

“Hullo there, Longbottom,” Simon hailed him cheerfully. “Going our way?”

Longbottom — which actually was the name of this particular specimen of Teal’s personnel — could no longer ignore the Saint’s proximity. He turned to look at the lean pirateer’s face with a kind of humiliated indignation.

“I don’t think I know you,” he said.

“Oh, come now, Longbottom, I never forget a face — particularly a funny one. How about giving the lady and me a lift? I don’t have my car along, and I’m sure we’re all headed for the same destination. This way you won’t run any risk of losing us in the traffic.”

Without waiting for a reply, Simon opened the back door and handed Cassie in, then slipped in beside her.

“Longbottom, this is Miss Lane, one of London’s outstanding artists. Miss Lane, Mr Longbottom of Scotland Yard.”

“How do you do?” said Cassie.

“Fine,” mumbled the plain-clothes man. “But honestly, I can’t—”

“Of course you can,” said the Saint, leaning back in his seat and crossing his long legs. “You’re assigned to follow me, and I’m making it as easy for you as possible. But neither I nor Miss Lane will tell on you. Isn’t that right?”

“Of course,” responded Cassie.

For the first time she not only did not look depressed, but actually showed signs of enjoying herself. Longbottom, on the other hand, showed distinct signs of not enjoying himself at all, but he had been thrown so off balance by the Saint’s gambit that he apparently could think of nothing better to do than go along with it. After all, it could not be disputed that he was faithfully carrying out his orders, albeit in a somewhat unorthodox manner. But the fact that he would arrive at the Saint’s next stop a couple of feet ahead of the Saint instead of half a block behind him seemed a small enough technicality to be overlooked for the time being.

“Forty-four Newkirk Road,” Simon said. “You can drop us around the nearest corner, if you don’t want to be too obviously with us.”

Longbottom did not say a word during the short drive, which took them through a northward zigzag to a small square somewhere behind Barker’s. He stopped there without parking or shutting off the engine of his car.

“Just around the next turning on the left,” he said, without looking around.

He seemed to be trying out a theory that not looking at his passengers would somehow nullify their presence.

Simon stepped out and helped Cassie to join him, folded his long frame down to speak to the glum driver.

“We’ll be back again shortly. Have a cigarette or something if you like, but don’t leave the car.”

Longbottom made no audible comment, and the Saint and Cassie strolled the few yards to Newkirk Road.

“Just what are you going to say to this man who’s been doubling for you?” asked the girl.

“It depends a bit on what he says to me. He’s probably no professional crook. If you wanted to find an imposter, where would you go?”

Cassie thought for a second.

“I’d look in the Actors’ Directory.”

“Right. If we...”

They had just rounded the corner, and Simon kept on walking, holding Cassie’s arm, but his voice was cut off by the inescapable premonition that leapt to his mind from what he saw ahead.

About halfway along the block a small crowd had gathered, and two policemen were holding open a path from the front of one of the apartment buildings — someone’s venerable town house converted to flats — to the open rear doors of an ambulance. The cause of the assembly lay on a stretcher beside the steps of the building, and one of the ambulance attendants was working over him with oxygen equipment.

The Saint made his way through the gawkers with Cassie Lane clinging to his hand. He arrived at the stretcher in time to see the ambulance attendant make a hopeless gesture and shut down his apparatus.

“What happened?” Simon asked one of the bystanders.

“Chap fell from a top window. Suicide, they reckon.”

Although the Saint was partially prepared for what he would see when the breathing mask was taken away from the dead man’s face, the sight still came as a shock. While the man was not his double, the likeness was good enough to pass at a casual glance — or to provide a snapshot that would be identifiable as Simon Templar with the help of a slightly out of focus camera.

Cassie gasped as she looked, and Simon turned to see Longbottom sharing her astonishment. The police car was parked at the corner, and the plain-clothes man had left it to come and join the spectators. A minute later the ambulance doors closed off the last view of the body, and the crowd began reluctantly to disperse.

“What do you make of that?” Longbottom asked. And without waiting for an answer he went on: “Is that the man you came here to see?”

“You’re getting warm, chum,” said the Saint. “Keep guessing.”

Longbottom, who was a short-legged man, bad to break into a semi-canter in order to keep up with the subject of his interrogation. Simon was striding easily toward the opposite end of the block from the one where they had arrived, and Cassie was skipping and jumping along at his side.

“You know this chap?” the detective asked. “Why were you coming here to see him?”

The intersecting street led to Kensington High Street, and traffic was plentiful. Simon, as he hailed an approaching cab, gave Longbottom a pitying look.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I give interviews only on Tuesdays and Fridays. But I am glad we came here together — you’ll be able to testify that my twin had already taken his dive when I got here, so I couldn’t have pushed him.”

Longbottom was still searching for an appropriate reply when Simon helped Cassie into the cab and started to follow her himself.

“You might tell Chief Inspector Teal,” he said, “that even though you lost sight of Miss Lane and me as we were hurrying off to our supper, your intuition tells you we’ll be available back at her flat after a while. If there’s any faith at all left in the world, that should eliminate the necessity of general alarms and roadblocks. Buckingham Palace,” he told the driver.

He slid into the taxi and locked the door behind him as Longbottom cast vainly about for another cab in which to follow and then sprinted frantically back toward his official car. Long before he could have reached it, Simon and Cassie had been swept away in the stream of traffic.

Cassie, with a doubtful glance at the glass partition between them and the driver, whispered in Simon’s ear.

“They killed that man so he couldn’t talk, didn’t they?”

The Saint nodded.

“That seems pretty likely. We’ll discuss that later. Right now, since I don’t think they’re really expecting me at the Palace we’d better think of some other place to have dinner. Do you eat, or do you subsist on the fumes of glue and paint?”

Cassie smiled.

“I eat. Ordinarily I don’t get up quite this early, and I have brunch around midnight, but since you and that policeman woke me up—”

Simon’s head tilted back a fraction as he looked at her with enthralled incredulity.

“Brunch around midnight?” he repeated. “Of course. I sleep all day and have my day at night while everybody else is sleeping. It’s lovely like that. No crowds, no traffic, no interruptions...”

“No nothing,” concluded Simon. “Just you and George and Caspar sailing away in a pea green dream-world.” This time her smile was positively dazzling. “You do understand, don’t you?”

Simon’s expression achieved a kind of determined tolerance.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s get you some breakfast, then.” He glanced down at her bare feet, at her jeans and wrinkled white shirt.

“Oh, don’t mind the way I’m dressed,” she said. “I know a perfect spot.”

Cassie’s perfect spot turned out to be the nearest member of one of those mass-production food chains which have lately riddled London like an invasion of termites in the beams of a noble house. Simon almost ended his relationship with Cassie at first sight of the steamy windows emblazoned with chartreuse and purple announcements of the day’s special treats. Within, at a vinyl-topped table lavishly arrayed with the smeared remnants of the previous diners’ stew, their every whim was as thoroughly ignored as possible by a continuously loping waitress whose genetic heritage appeared to have stemmed from some ill-starred mating of a snapping turtle and a mentally deficient hyena.

Surrounded by addicts of dog-food hamburgers, pasteboard beef, instant mashed potatoes, wallpaper-paste gravies, and artificial fruit drinks, the Saint managed to stab a few times at some greasily fried halibut before conceding defeat and trying to sustain himself on thoughts of the Epicurean supper he might order somewhere later on.

Cassie, now that she was wide awake and not in the immediate presence of any dead bodies, was showing a mannerism of jiggling up and down in her chair with nervous exuberance like a vibrating machine, even while she was eating.

“Great, isn’t it?” she chirped.

She was scraping up the last of some presumably canned beans. Simon made a despairing but bravely ambiguous sound, and Cassie glanced at his almost untouched plate.

“You don’t eat much, do you?” she said.

“Like a bird.”

“May I?”

Her fork was already across the table, so he slid the halibut to her and pulled some folded papers and a bank book from his pocket. For the first time he was starting to wonder if this evening and night would yield any enjoyable dividends at all.

“No checks,” sneered the waitress as she galloped by.

Simon mentally reduced her tip to a penny and started thumbing through the bank book. Cassie, bouncing up and down as energetically as ever, peered at him over a forkful of fish.

“Counting your money?” she asked.

“Counting Perry Loudon’s.”

Her eyes grew wider. The fish remained suspended.

“You stole that?”

“I confiscated it, as material vital to my investigation of this case. Does that satisfy your moral scruples?”

Cassie shrugged and popped the fish into her mouth.

“Oh, I don’t have any moral scruples.”

Simon glanced up at her with a quizzical glint in his eyes.

“We’ll test that out later.” He went on talking to her as he studied the bank book. “My personal theory is that you’re a phony.”

“A phony?” squealed Cassie.

“Yes. An escapist who’d run off and hide from any tough situation at the first chance she got.”

Simon stole a quick look to see whether his use of reverse psychology was having the intended effect. Cassie had stopped bouncing, and her mouth was compressed with outrage.

“Also,” the Saint said, “I imagine your sophomoric braggadocio about moral scruples is just that: you’d probably crumple up and start crying if I so much as nibbled your ear.”

“I... I’m still with you, aren’t I?” she demanded.

He gave her a charming smile.

“I haven’t nibbled your ear, yet.”

“Well, I could have run away a long time ago.”

“That’s true, and I’m proud of you. Keep it up, because the worst is yet to come.”

She pushed her plate away and watched him with worried, clouded-turquoise eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve found something interesting here.” He tapped the bank book. “And I don’t just mean the exorbitant prices people paid Loudon for those metal doodles of his.”

“Well, tell me,” said Cassie, starting to jiggle again.

“I will. In the meantime we’ll be on our way to pay a visit.”

“Where?”

“To a patron of the arts.”

6

Simon hailed a cab and directed it to Upper Berkeley Mews. He was not expecting that Longbottom or one of his confreres would be waiting to pick up his trail there, because that was exactly where they would not expect him to have the cool insolence to go. He anticipated a good deal of travelling that night, and he would prefer the facilities of his own car. Cassie wanted to see the inside of his house, but he had rarely felt the pressure of time more urgently. He only let her into the downstairs garage, and in a matter of seconds they were on their way again, in the white Volvo which was his latest acquisition.

As he turned out of the Mews, he gave her the bank book he had taken from Perry Loudon’s apartment and suggested that she look at it with a flashlight he always kept in the glove compartment.

Her first reaction, after a few seconds of scrutiny, was a low whistle.

“I had no idea he was so rich,” she said. “I knew he was supposed to be a genius, but so are half the people on the same block. Here’s seven hundred pounds. Five hundred pounds.” Her voice became more excited. “Two thousand pounds.”

“If you’ll notice,” said the Saint, “he’s written the names of 140 people against the checks he deposited, presumably for various chunks of that scrap metal of his. Those are the payments that are in the hundreds. But look at those large payments. There aren’t any names by them,” Cassie said. “They’re all shown as cash.”

“Yes. But do you notice that those big entries always seem to follow right after a certain purchaser’s name?” Cassie studied the book. “Yes,” she said. “Is it Finlay Thorpe-Jones?”

“He’s the one.”

“Here’s five thousand pounds. Another two thousand. Three thousand. What is it? Do you figure this Finlay Thorpe-Jones was paying him extra for some reason?”

“Possibly.”

“But why? And even if he did, nothing’s wrong with that, is there?”

“No,” Simon agreed. “But it’s odd, wouldn’t you agree? To pay somebody by check for art works, and then slip the really big money to him in cash. Of course if Loudon hadn’t been murdered it wouldn’t be any of my business how he got paid for what. But since I’m already suspected of having done something violent to him, I have an avid interest in all his affairs — particularly in the ones involving money, the ones that might motivate somebody to knock him off.”

They had made the one-way circuit of Berkeley Square, and were heading westward on Charles Street. “I have an idea,” Cassie said.

She turned excitedly to Simon, who had to admit to himself inwardly that he had little confidence in her inspirations. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Maybe Perry Loudon was a blackmailer. Maybe he had something on this Thorpe-Jones character and this was his way of collecting payments. You know — give the man a chunk of steel he doesn’t really want and charge him five thousand pounds for it?”

The Saint’s opinion of his companion went up a little. “Quite a nice theory,” he admitted. “I’d wonder, though, why he didn’t make it look more respectable by having the whole amount paid by check. Unless — it might have been a dodge to make most of the money look tax-exempt.” Cassie put away the bank book and the flashlight.

“How?”

“Like gambling winnings, for instance... But among the many things I’ve learned in a long and virtuous life is not to try to build bridges until you have enough spans. Why waste our time theorizing until we have more to go on? Especially when in just a few minutes I’ll be able to talk to Mr Finlay Thorpe-Jones in person.”

Cassie looked startled in the light of a street lamp they were passing.

“You know who he is? Are we going to his house? I didn’t know you’d looked up his address.”

“I don’t need to,” said Simon. “He has what you might call a business address. He owns a gambling club. One of the plushest in London.”

“You’ve been there?”

Simon smiled at the surprise in Cassie’s question.

“I have. I’ve been almost everywhere. That’s because I chose not to spend my life holed up in a garret as a plaster Saint.”

She chose to ignore the dig. With one leg tucked under her, she was starting to vibrate up and down with nervous enthusiasm.

“Is this Thorpe-Jones a crook?”

“Not that I know of,” Simon said. “No more than most people who’ve managed to grab a good share of what the world has to offer. A man with the house percentage of roulette wheels and blackjack tables in his favor doesn’t need to be a crook.”

The Saint stopped his car opposite one of several formerly private mansions just off the upper end of Park Lane.

“This is it,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

Cassie looked alarmed.

“Can’t I come?”

“I’m afraid you’re not dressed in quite the approved fashion.”

“You’re ashamed of me!”

She was pouting, glaring at the floor.

“No, I’m not. But they have certain rules in these places. You don’t have to sit in the car, but don’t go far away, please. I have enough to do without hunting you.”

He was standing by the car now, looking in at her. She softened slightly.

“You’d hunt for me?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She looked sullenly suspicious again.

“Why? Because I might go tell on you?”

Simon shook his head amiably.

“Not a bit. You couldn’t tell on me, because you’re an accomplice after the fact. Of course for turning in your partner — me — they might cut your sentence down a few years, especially considering your youth and good looks.”

She emitted a helpless, mare-like sound and furiously folded her arms.

“You wouldn’t hunt for me because you liked me,” she called after him. “You hate me. You’re ashamed of me!”

Simon resisted the impulse to put his hands over his ears as he walked away. He was beginning to wonder whether an isolated garret might not be an ideal spot for Cassie Lane after all.

The open doorway of Thorpe-Jones’ establishment was embellished in stone bas-relief and lighted by an ornate iron lamp on either side. A doorman recognized Simon immediately and ushered him into the thickly carpeted entrance hall. A number of ultra-modern metal and stone sculptures lined the area.

“I’d like to see Mr Thorpe-Jones, please,” the Saint said.

“One moment, Mr Templar. I’ll see if it’s possible.”

While he waited in the foyer, Simon glanced into the gambling rooms, where the dominant sounds were the click of chips and the occasional whir and clatter of the ball in a turning wheel. The players were pressed close around the tables, and suspense made them almost completely silent. Until Simon looked, he might have thought the building almost deserted.

The doorman came hurrying back past the sculptures, whose variety and number seemed to attest to the genuineness of Thorpe-Jones’ interest in that sort of art, and asked the Saint to follow him.

Thorpe-Jones’ private office was a superb room panelled in walnut decorated with more modern sculpture, and beautifully furnished in a somehow vaguely feminine way. Thorpe-Jones himself, who rose to greet the Saint cordially, was an erect, thin man of middle years, with long strands of brown hair from the still-flourishing area at the back of his head combed wetly forward in an effort to cover the bald spaces at the front. He wore a tuxedo, with lace showing at the cuffs of his shirt, and he was redolent of cologne. His smile was both aristocratic and ingratiating.

“Mr Templar,” he said, extending an elegant hand. “I hope you have no complaints, but it’s men with your standards who keep us up to the mark.”

Simon coolly returned the smile.

“No complaints at all. In fact, I only just came in. I came about something else.”

Thorpe-Jones nodded and waited, and Simon decided to let him wait. His keen blue eyes wandered over the sculptures, and he recognized in several the style of Perry Loudon.

“Impressive collection,” he said. “Which one is Perry Loudon’s latest masterpiece?”

“Behind you,” answered Thorpe-Jones.

The Saint turned to look at a very large and massive heap of metal which seemed to dominate the whole room. Interwoven with the metal was delicately twisted neon tubing which glowed with strange effect down in the cavernous recesses and passages of the sculptures.

“Unusual,” said the Saint.

“No one else has ever used the technique of combining neon and metal so effectively, as far as I know. Loudon’s an original mind. I think he has a great future.”

“I’m afraid he hasn’t.”

Thorpe-Jones bridled with aristocratic restraint and looked at Simon with slightly offended pale-grey eyes.

“Are you an art critic among your many other accomplishments?” he asked the Saint.

“Possibly; but that wasn’t my meaning. I intended that as a piece of information, assuming you didn’t know it already. Perry Loudon is dead. He was murdered this afternoon.”

Thorpe-Jones’ astonishment seemed real. Simon was expert at assessing such reactions, and neither did Thorpe-Jones go too far in the direction of tears and lamentations.

“Are you serious?” he asked in a shocked voice.

Simon nodded.

“Anyway, the police think so. But the motive is obscure.”

Thorpe-Jones frowned and paced the floor.

“These bohemian types, you know,” he said. “Jealousies and quarrels. Many of them take dope now. I suppose such things are bound to happen, but it’s a great loss.”

Simon went to the huge sculpture of neon and steel which towered over everything else in the office. He ran his fingers lightly over some of the surfaces.

“I suppose this will put up the price of your collection?”

Thorpe-Jones stopped abruptly and stared at him, “Are you suggesting that I...”

The Saint raised a reassuring hand.

“No, I wasn’t. But a dead sculptor is worth more than a live one to the people who own his works.”

“A few hundred pounds more, maybe,” said Thorpe-Jones. “Loudon is no big name. It would hardly have been worth my while to kill him for what I could make here in a night. Besides Mr Templar, I don’t kill people, and I resent the implication that I do.”

Simon gave a slight bow which might have been interpreted as politely apologetic.

“I’m sure you don’t, Mr Thorpe-Jones. You make enough killings with your wheels.”

Thorpe-Jones smiled thinly.

“If my clients wish to commit a highly enjoyable and more or less socially acceptable form of suicide, the least I can do is to oblige them.”

The Saint touched the large sculpture again.

“May I ask what this cost?”

Thorpe-Jones raised his eyebrows.

“Is that your standard of artistic value, Mr Templar?” he asked condescendingly. “Surely that can’t be all you came to see me about?”

“Believe it or not, it is. My business has to do with the price of the pieces you bought from Perry Loudon. Would I be far off if I guessed that this latest one cost in the neighborhood of two thousand pounds?”

“You would be far off,” the other replied stiffly. “Nothing I’ve bought from Loudon even came to a thousand.”

“Did he play the tables here and win a lot?”

“Anyone will tell you, Mr Templar, that this club has an inviolable rule never to discuss the accounts of its members.”

“Would you have made large payments to Loudon for any other reason?”

“I’d ask you to leave, Mr Templar, but I’m intrigued enough by your questions to want to know more. For what reason would I make payments of thousands of pounds to Perry Loudon?”

“Blackmail?” hazarded the Saint.

Thorpe-Jones gave a dignified snort.

“Blackmail?” he repeated starchily. “On what possible grounds?”

Simon shook his head innocently.

“I wouldn’t know, of course.”

His host, who no longer showed much semblance of the friendliness he had displayed when Simon had first come in, walked to the door.

“Your insinuations are quite out of line,” he said coldly. “I can give you only one answer. If I were a killer — if I had killed Perry Loudon, and you had accused me of it as you have tonight, you would not walk out of this room.”

He opened the door, and Simon passed into the foyer.

“You see?” said Thorpe-Jones. “You’re quite free to go, and the worst you’ll get from me, if you keep up this kind of talk in public, is a slander suit.”

“If you’re telling the truth,” the Saint said, “you’ll never have any reason to worry about trouble with me.”

“I’m so glad to know.”

“I thought you’d be pleased. Good night.”

“Goodnight, Mr Templar.”

When Simon had walked along the carpet and out of the building between the double lamps at the door, he saw Cassie Lane jumping up and down on the corner half a block away, waving violently to get his attention. She came running down the sidewalk to meet him.

She clutched his arm tugging him in the direction from which she had come. She was gasping so hard for breath that she could get out only one sentence.

“I heard you in there,” she said.

7

“You heard me?” the Saint asked. “In the gambling club?”

“Yes,” Cassie panted. “I heard you talking. Come on, hurry!”

She dragged him towards an alley, a short block from Thorpe-Jones’ building. It seemed to be a dead end. There was a van parked in it, its front facing the street. There was no one in the driver’s seat or anywhere near the truck.

“There!” Cassie announced, pointing at it.

Simon looked at the perfectly ordinary vehicle, whose sides advertised it as a carrier of imported Grecian table delicacies. He looked back at Cassie.

“I see the van, dear,” he said with elaborate patience. “Shall we go now?”

“No,” she whispered. “Listen. This is where I heard your voice.”

She pulled him to the side of the van. He stood quietly for a moment. Ghostly voices seemed to come to his ears from no discernible source. One of them sounded like Thorpe-Jones, and the other was unknown.

“Does the sum of two thousand pounds mean anything to you, in connection with Perry Loudon?” the voice of Thorpe-Jones was asking.

After a pause, the second voice answered. Though the sounds were weak, the words were distinct.

“Not a thing, guv’nor. You never paid that much money for these statues, did you?”

Simon moved stealthily around to the back of the truck and put his eye to a crack between the closed doors, from which came a thin line of light. Not only could he hear Thorpe-Jones more clearly, but he could see him too. The van was a mobile television monitoring station, and at the front end of the enclosed part, facing Simon’s vantage point, was a screen showing a large section of the office he had just left a few minutes before. With the owner of the gambling club was a hulk of a man with wavy blond hair and gigantic shoulders which must have required special tailoring even for undershirts. Simon, on previous visits to the club, had seen the man, who was called Bonnie and was Thorpe-Jones’ personal body guard.

“Well,” Thorpe-Jones was saying, “if there’s something in this that implicates me, I want to know about it.”

“Should I check it?” Bonnie asked.

“Not yet. The best way to invite suspicion would be to show too much interest. Let’s hold off overnight at least and see what develops.”

Bonnie left the room, and Thorpe-Jones went to his desk and began looking through some papers. Simon’s view of the interior of the van was so limited that he could see only straight down the center. A figure moved between him and the screen. He could not tell if there was more than one man in the listening station or not.

“What is it?” whispered Cassie.

“First, let’s get away from here,” he cautioned her.

He did not answer her question until they had walked a safe distance from the van.

“Somebody has managed to get a television camera into Thorpe-Jones’ office. From that van, they’re watching every move he makes, and probably recording it, too.”

“But why?”

“Blackmail, most probably. And maybe not just blackmail of Thorpe-Jones. He’s a friend of a lot of high-up people, and all sorts of interesting things may go on in that mansion of his.”

The Saint led the way to his car as he was speaking to Cassie. He helped her in, got in the driver’s seat, and drove a few yards in the direction of the side street where the van was parked. When he stopped he was in a position to see just the nose of the van.

“How could they get a television camera into his office?” Cassie asked.

“I’m sure it took a lot of ingenuity,” Simon said. “Can’t you guess?”

Cassie shook her head.

“It’s in one of Perry Loudon’s sculptures,” he told her. “I’ve just been in that room, and I know exactly where the camera would have to be placed in order to give that particular view. It’s in a big steel and neon monstrosity — the last thing Thorpe-Jones bought from Loudon.”

Cassie was stupefied. She was sitting bolt upright staring at him.

“Then Perry was in with crooks,” she said. “Is that it?”

“More or less. I think Thorpe-Jones was on the level when he told me he’d never paid Loudon as much as a thousand pounds for one of those heaps. Which means that those big payments in Loudon’s bank book must have come from the people who wanted microphones and television cameras incorporated into his creations.” Cassie flopped back in her seat.

“Nobody ever offered me two thousand pounds to incorporate anything into my creations.”

The Saint patted her knee sympathetically. “Well, cheer up. There’s a good side to it. You’re not dead, and Perry Loudon is.”

She thought about that for a while, and before she could make a comment Simon suddenly turned the ignition key and started the engine. A man had just appeared from around the van and was walking briskly, carrying a fat briefcase, towards a grey Mini parked a hundred feet or so in front of the Saint’s. The van stayed where it was as the Mini pulled away from the curb and headed towards North Audley Street.

“If you follow him,” said Cassie, “we’re liable to end up like Perry Loudon — dead!”

“If I don’t follow him,” the Saint retorted, “I’m very likely to end up in jail, which is a prospect I don’t fancy at all. I’ve got to catch Perry Loudon’s real killers within the next two or three hours, and you’re going to have the privilege of a front-row seat for the show.”

Cassie moaned, let her head fall back, and closed her eyes. “I wish I were at home with my dummies,” she whispered, as if in prayer.

The Mini went north at a moderate speed and crossed over Oxford Street, with Simon following only a few lengths behind it. Traffic was now sparse, and there were few turns. It was one of the easier jobs of tail-light dogging the Saint had ever attempted, and it was over before the driver of the automobile he was following had any reason to become suspicious. The end of the line was an elegant apartment building eight stories high, overlooking Regent’s Park in an even more obviously mink-poodle-RolIs Royce neighborhood than Finlay Thorpe-Jones’ gambling club had been, where even the sidewalks seemed to exude an air of staid and irreproachable status.

“Follow him in,” Simon said. “He might recognize me.” Before Cassie could protest, he had stopped his car, leaned across her to open the door on her side, and firmly propelled her out on to the street. “Hurry,” he said.

She obeyed, and probably was taken by the red-uniformed guardian of the apartment building’s thick glass doors as the errant daughter of some millionaire. The doorman undoubtedly knew, as do the proprietors of the most exclusive shops, that the sloppiest looking client may very well be the richest. Cassie was inside within fifteen seconds after the man from the cream-colored car had gone through the same doors. In less than half a minute the same man emerged again, and Cassie strolled out with apparent indifference as he drove away. Then she ran across the street to Simon’s window.

“I saw him give some boxes to the desk clerk,” she gasped, all out of breath.

“What kind of boxes?”

“Like cigarette boxes, only bigger.”

“Probably video or voice tapes from the van,” Simon said. “Did either of them say anything while he was making the delivery?”

“The man from the car just said ‘Usual routine’ and then turned around and walked away. The desk clerk used the telephone — I think to call one of the apartments, because he didn’t dial a regular number. He said something like, ‘The usual packages have arrived, sir.’ That was it.”

“Wait here,” said the Saint.

He left her standing by the car as he hurried across the street, had the glass doors opened for him by their red-clad attendant, and went straight to the desk. He hoped that if the boxes were to be picked up by someone living in the building he would be in time to watch the transaction. His eyes flickered towards the two elevators as the clerk came to speak to him. By watching the floor indicators above the elevator doors, he could possibly gain some idea where the boxes would be taken. The elevator for general use, its indicator dial bearing the numbers one through seven, was idle. The second, labeled PENTHOUSE ONLY, was descending.

“Good evening, sir,” said the clerk. “May I help you?”

“I’m not sure I have the right building. I’m looking for a Mr Steinberger.”

“No, sir. Not here. I’m sorry.”

“It might be Bergstein.”

“I’m afraid not.” The clerk, who was a waxen-looking little figure anyway, like something off a wedding cake, was becoming perceptibly more rigid all the time.

“Just plain Stein?” the Saint offered plaintively.

“No,” said the clerk.

The doors of the penthouse elevator slid open and Simon instantly turned his head and moved towards the street exit. The man he glimpsed was the lighter haired of the two who had killed Perry Loudon. But the man had not recognized him and was intent only on taking the boxes from the clerk. As Simon went out through the glass doors, he was debating the relative advantages of subterfuge and immediate open attack. The pleasure of flattening one murderer’s nose was not worth the possible loss of a whole nest of related rodents, and the Saint did not think for a moment that the man who had come from the elevator played more than a subordinate role in the plot which had already taken at least two lives. Some preparations would be necessary before the denouement.

Besides, Simon had seen something in a lighted niche of the private elevator which told him more even than he really needed to know about the occupant of the penthouse. In the niche was a statue of a porpoise, black, carved in obsidian.

8

As he drove back towards Chelsea, Simon explained the significance of the black porpoise to the girl at his side.

“The last time I saw it,” he said, “was on a yacht off the coast of Grand Bahama Island. It was a kind of emblem or trademark of the man who owned the boat, and it was painted on the hull. He also had it on a flag which was flying over a resort he was building at that end of the island.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

Simon smiled grimly.

“No. I was fouling up some large-scale blackmail plans of his, and he did his best to have me hunted down and killed. Naturally I not only fouled up his plans, but I also refused to be killed, and ended up sailing away in his yacht.”

“Who is he?” Cassie asked.

“Kuros Timonaides is his name. A Greek. He’s one of the most vicious crooks on earth — more so because he uses every trick in the book to stay out of trouble with the law. He’s downright respectable as far as most people know. Always getting his grinning mug in the papers with some celebrity or other he’s entertaining. But underneath it all he’s one of the most rotten pillars any society ever had to put up with. I thought of him the instant I realized what that van was doing near the gambling club. Who else but the man who made blackmail and extortion an industry with profits running in the millions would have gone to those lengths?”

Cassie suddenly gave a sigh of relief.

“Well,” she said, “now that we know, we can call the police, and they can arrest him, and we can...”

“We can do nothing of the kind,” the Saint said. “We’ve no concrete evidence. Claud Eustace Teal wouldn’t arrest a kid for stealing hub-caps just on my say-so. I’m going to arrange a very special kind of party at Timonaides’ penthouse, and dear old Claud is going to be the guest of honor.”

They were still a number of blocks from Cassie’s flat when a police car darted out from a corner behind them, light flashing.

“Or maybe old Claud is arranging a party for me,” said the Saint, unperturbed.

He pulled over to the curb and stopped. A uniformed police officer climbed out of the official car, walked up to Simon’s window, and regarded him with a certain amount of reverence.

“Chief Inspector Teal issued an all-cars order to watch for you, Mr Templar,” he said.

“That’s nice,” murmured the Saint. “He’s so awfully fond of me that he just can’t bear to have me out of his sight for more than an hour. Or am I under arrest?”

“Oh, not at all,” the officer said hurriedly. “But it’s urgent that you meet Inspector Teal at...”

“The Coningsby Warehouse in Battersea?” Simon concluded for him.

The policeman gawked.

“That’s it,” he said, consulting a note pad in order to be sure. “How did you know?”

“I understand the workings of pathetically logical little minds. Shall we be on our way? I presume you’ll be our escort.”

“We’ll follow,” said the officer, tactfully.

Teal was waiting excitedly in front of the concrete walls of the warehouse like some weird parody of the Biblical father - anticipating the arrival of the prodigal son. He was chewing gum double-time and occasionally rubbing his hands together. His plump face gleamed with perspiration as Simon walked up to him with Cassie close behind.

“Nice place you have here, Claud,” Simon said. “I always wondered where you hung up your hat after a hard day’s work. Which crate do you sleep in?”

“This way,” said Teal, refusing to let his elation be spoiled.

Near the center of the great high-ceilinged room stood the sculpture which Simon had arranged for his old acquaintance Bert to remove from Perry Loudon’s studio. Beside it stood a man in shirtsleeves, with goggles on his forehead, holding an unlighted cutting torch. Bert the mover was chatting with him; when Bert saw Simon he hurried over.

“I’m sorry, Mr Templar,” he said. “It was nothing we done wrong. They called me in after we finished up and went home. And I don’t even know why.”

“It’s okay,” said Simon. “No problem.”

Teal turned on him exuberantly.

“No problem?” he crowed. “No problem? We’ll see about that. Go ahead, boys.”

His last words were addressed to the men around the metal sculpture. Valves were turned, a match struck, and the cutting torch spat into life. The Saint looked at Teal sadly.

“Poor old Claud Eustace,” he said. “What paranoiac fantasy of yours is this all about?”

“I had another phone call,” Teal said.

“You are getting popular,” congratulated the Saint. “Think of that— Anonymous again?”

Teal nodded.

“The information about your having the statue moved was very interesting,” he said, “but this time I knew it was accurate, because the man I had staked out at Loudon’s place had already reported the same thing. We’ve got you this time, Templar, and there’s no way out!”

The torch had been turned on the sculpture and was following the seams left by Simon’s use of a torch earlier in the evening. Teal perspired with anticipation, and Cassie took Simon’s hand and squeezed it as the point of flame ate into the metal. When at last the cutting was finished the workman looked to Teal for approval and then inserted a crowbar into one of the cuts. With a heave he pried out the whole loosened segment of metal and sent it clattering loudly to the concrete floor.

All those who had been watching and waiting leaned forward eagerly.

There was nothing inside.

Teal went unbelievingly over and put his head in the hollow space and looked up and looked down. He turned around and his chin began to tremble.

“I don’t know what that was supposed to prove,” said the Saint, “but if you can’t stick it back together again that’s six months of your precious salary gone up the spout.”

He took Cassie’s arm.

“Shall we go?” he said to her. “I think our party should be a lot more interesting than this.”

He turned back at the door and looked at Teal, whose eyes had taken a strange glaze and whose jaw was working soundlessly even though he was chewing no gum.

“If we seem unappreciative about the show, Claud, don’t feel bad. You can’t expect us laymen to comprehend all the deeper mysteries of police work.”

As soon as he and Cassie were in his car, the Saint became all seriousness.

“That penthouse is going to be no easy fortress to attack,” he said.

“What do we do?” Cassie asked. “Hire an army?”

“I had in mind something like that.”

They were on the road again, continuing their interrupted journey towards Cassie’s flat.

“As soon as we get to your place,” Simon said, “call all the weirdo people you can think of — you must know plenty — and invite them to a big party at Timonaides’ penthouse. Say he’s your rich uncle or something, and he’s giving away free booze by the gallon. Say you’re celebrating a sale he’s arranged for some of your dummies. You can also say that the doorman and clerk are terribly stuffy and suspicious of people they don’t know, so you should all meet on the sidewalk here and then go to the apartment house en masse so you’ll be given a pleasant reception. Right?”

“I guess so. But why?”

“To give me a cover, and for other reasons I’ll explain later. Can you do that? Can you find enough people?”

Cassie grinned.

“All I’d have to do on Pinter Street is whisper ‘free booze’ behind my hand and there’d be a riot.”

Pinter Street, whatever its riot potential, showed few signs even of life when the Saint parked his car in front of the house where Cassie lived. It was nearly midnight, and only a sprinkling of lighted windows up and down the block indicated that some of the creative inhabitants of the area were still awake smoking pot or — hopefully — doing their artistic bit for western culture.

Cassie hesitated at the front door of the house with her key in the lock.

“I don’t want to go up,” she said soberly.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I’ll be right beside you,” he said. “Anybody who can live up there with those dummies can take anything.”

He took an encouraging grip on her arm, and she opened the door. A tiny bulb showed the way upstairs. Unlike Perry Loudon’s home next door, which had been a single unit, this house had been divided into small flats. Cassie stopped beside the door at the foot of the stairs and banged on it loudly. A moment later a shaggy dark head, with long beard, like an illustration from Robinson Crusoe, protruded blearily into the hall.

“Say, Sam,” said Cassie, with forced enthusiasm, “my rich uncle’s giving a party, with all the free booze you can drink. Everybody’s invited.”

It was impossible to determine visually what Sam’s reaction was, since there was no skin discernible under the hair, but his eyes seemed to glitter more wildly in the undergrowth, and with a sound undoubtedly connoting pleasure and gratitude he turned and vanished into his rooms.

“Do you think he’s coming or not?” Simon asked.

He and Cassie hurried up the stairs.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s just going to get some clothes on, I imagine. He generally never wears any.”

“With all that fur, he probably doesn’t need any, but I’m glad he’s going formal tonight.”

Cassie knocked on another door down the hall from her own and delivered her message, and then she and Simon went into her flat. They had scarcely entered and turned on the light when the neighbor just aroused by Cassie came running down the hall and through the door behind them. She was an attractive girl with long brown hair, and she wore a brilliantly flowered shift. Cassie introduced her to Simon as Annie.

“Is it all right if I call Ned?” she asked breathlessly.

“If he doesn’t bring his wolfhound,” Cassie answered.

“Oh, let him bring his wolfhound,” Simon interceded. “Wolfhounds don’t drink much, and your uncle can afford it.”

“He’ll have to have vodka,” giggled the girl. “He’s a Russian wolfhound.”

Suddenly she stared at the wall on the other side of the room, and Simon could sense the terrible tension which gripped Cassie’s body.

“Oh, you’ve made a new one!” the girl exclaimed. “Isn’t that groovy? It... it’s much more real looking than the others ever were.”

She was on her way to examine the object more closely when Cassie cut out the light with the switch beside the door.

“No time for that now,” she said. “My uncle might change his mind if we keep him waiting.”

Annie went back out into the dimly lit hall with a shrug and returned to her own flat. Cassie spoke with a voice calculated to carry.

“Oh, I forgot something!”

She and Simon went back into her flat, locked the door, and turned on the light. Cassie sagged against the wall and closed her eyes. Simon put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

“Quick thinking,” he said.

“I don’t believe I can stand much more,” she moaned.

“You won’t have to. Soon you’ll be in the clear. But the last step is the hardest.”

He went over to the body of Perry Loudon, which sat propped against the wall like a brother of the dummy, Caspar. Loudon’s face was coated white with a smearing of plaster, and his features were painted in. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and there was a straw hat on his head.

Simon indicated an open box nearby.

“These are big sacks for wrapping your dummies, aren’t they?” he asked.

Cassie nodded weakly.

“Fine.” The Saint went to the box and pulled out a bag, holding it up to check the size.

“Do I... have to watch?” asked Cassie.

“No. You’re looking a little green. Some fresh air would do you good. While I’m taking care of this you can run across the roof to Loudon’s studio and bring me back a hook and a rope. You can’t miss them — they’re part of some kind of pulley he had rigged for lifting those sculptures of his.”

Cassie nodded and gratefully headed for the door to the roof.

“Shouldn’t you call some more people, too?” Simon inquired. “We need more than four or five.”

“Don’t worry,” said Cassie. “The word is already travelling. We’ll have more than enough. Believe me.”

As she disappeared into the darkness outside, the Saint wet a cloth at the washbasin and prepared to remove all traces of Cassie’s art from Perry Loudon’s corpse.

Ten minutes later Simon, with Cassie helping to ease a little of the burden, came out on to the sidewalk carrying a bulky bag on his back.

It was then that Simon discovered that Cassie’s assurance about having an adequate number of guests for her fictitious uncle’s party had been very well founded. The formerly quiet street in front of her house had been transformed into open air bedlam. At least two dozen males and females were laughing, shouting, arguing, playing guitars, dancing, or engaging in the early stages of lovemaking. Their costumes proclaimed their eccentricity, or poverty, or both. Sandals were the predominant footwear, and jeans were the most generally popular article of clothing, but the Saint was not unhappy to see that miniskirts had several adherents among the girls.

Naturally his appearance with Cassie set off a storm of shouted questions. The mob surged up around them.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Who’s your boy friend, Cassie?”

“How’re we going to get to this uncle’s pad?”

The last question, put by Robinson Crusoe, seemed the most relevant and practical.

“Somebody go in the house and call some taxis,” Simon suggested. “Cassie’s uncle is paying for everything.”

That precipitated a minor rush for Robinson Crusoe’s flat. A couple of the boys who had not been quite able to weed out every trace of a genteel bourgeois upbringing were polite enough to help Simon get his burden into the trunk of his car.

“Feels like a body,” joked one of them.

“One of Cassie’s dummies,” said the Saint. “A present for her uncle.”

A minute or so later the first cab arrived and was immediately engulfed in a sea of screaming bohemians.

“Hold it here,” Simon shouted to the driver over the babble and the guitar music. “Wait till we’re all ready, and I’ll lead the way.”

Soon another cab arrived, and then another. A bottle smashed in the gutter. All the party-goers were not waiting for the free liquor promised by Cassie’s uncle. A few had arrived staggering drunk in the first place. The uproar was becoming deafening, and several uninvited individuals, attracted by the noise, stumbled from their houses and piled into the fifth and final taxi.

Simon saw that all the drivers had the proper address, and then he started his car. Cassie was in the front seat with him. In back was a blank-faced girl and a pair of boys who were discussing Swedenborgianism. Then up the street, shouting for them to wait, came the possessor of the wolfhound who had been mentioned earlier. The owner in vaguely Edwardian costume, was at least seven feet tall, and the leashed wolfhound, had he been on his hind legs, would not have been much less. Both of them scrambled into the back of the Saint’s car, completely crushing out any lingering thoughts of Swedenborg. The entire ride became a grim battle for survival of the fittest — and there seemed no doubt that the wolfhound would ultimately prove the fittest.

Luckily, though, the drive was not long enough to bring the principles of natural selection into really fatal play, and when they pulled up in front of their destination — the apartment house in which Timonaides had his penthouse — the only dead body in the automobile was still that of Perry Loudon. The blank-faced girl seemed anesthetized against all experience, both pleasant and painful. The two Swedenborgians were only slightly damaged, and Simon had escaped with nothing worse than having his ear repeatedly rasped by the wolfhound’s tongue.

“We’re here,” Simon could say at last. “Everybody out.”

The taxis had kept close behind, and soon the sidewalk in front of the apartment building resembled an assembly point for war refugees. Some of them, curious to inspect the sumptuous lobby, started to move in without waiting for further leadership, and the influx began.

The doorman would certainly have stopped the flood if he could have, but he was almost smothered by two mini-skirted dolls who showed their admiration for his gold-braided scarlet uniform by trying to tear it off him.

Simon held Cassie back for a moment to remind her of her instructions.

“The penthouse elevator won’t come down unless somebody up there lets it go. When I release it you’ll be able to tell by the red indicator. Until then, keep stalling — say you don’t want to start up until you’re sure the whole gang is there, and double-talk any of the staff who want to know who you’ve come to see. I’m counting on you like the cavalry in those old movies.”

Simon opened the trunk of his car and took out Loudon’s burlap wrapped body, now wound and tied with the rope that Cassie had brought him from the studio, and carried it through the mob that was straggling into the building. Some of them were singing, with unwitting aptness, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

The desk clerk’s first reaction was to fall back in panic like a weaponless hunter in front of a herd of charging elephants. Then, gathering courage, he ran around his desk and tried to plead with the throng, who could not hear a word he was saying. The uproar was augmented by the taxi drivers following some of the crowd in to demand their fares.

Using all his fantastic strength, the Saint contrived to swing his burden airily in one hand, so that no one could have imagined it to have the weight of anything like a body — it might as well have been some kind of standard lamp that he was bringing in. And with his Immaculately groomed good looks and unobtrusively expensive elegance of dress, and his air of easy aristocratic assurance, no one could possibly have associated him with the disheveled and hirsute rabble through which he passed — an impression which he took pains to underline by avoiding their proximity with the same kind of pained and shocked regard that any rightful occupant of such a building would have bestowed on them.

He headed straight for the general elevator, and started it up before anyone else could shove in after him. The clamor was quickly cut off as the elevator ascended, leaving only the hiss of its passage up the shaft.

Once more the Saint was on his own.

9

He stopped at the sixth floor and threw the switch which would lock the elevator doors in open position. In that way he not only advertised his presence on a floor where he would not remain, but he also delayed pursuit — probably until somebody could climb six flights of stairs and close the doors again.

The corridor was as beautifully carpeted and elegantly simple as the foyer on the ground floor. The Saint’s footsteps produced no sound as he passed swiftly along the hallway to the marked entrance to the fire-escape stairwell. He climbed the stone steps to the seventh floor, and there further ascent was blocked by a steel-faced door which was locked. No doubt it could be easily opened from the penthouse side, giving access to the escape from upstairs, but was intended to prevent unwelcome entrance from below. For Simon’s purposes, the set-up could not have been more ideal if he had designed it himself.

It took him literally only a few seconds to release the lock by a technique which it would not be in the public interest to describe in detail. He deposited Loudon’s body on the other side and removed the rope, leaving the sackcloth wrapping.

At the top of the last flight of stairs there was another door, this one with a wire-reinforced and frosted glass panel in it through which light came, but the possibility was too high that such a door would be protected by some kind of burglar alarm, and Simon regretfully decided not to chance it. After everything had panned out so miraculously well up to that point, it would be absurd to risk blowing the situation that had been so beautifully created.

He went out through the steel-faced door again, pulling the spring lock shut behind him, and leaving no trace of his visit except the sack-swathed corpse which any investigation would naturally conclude could only have been brought there from the penthouse itself.

He had previously noticed that there was a window for daytime illumination at each end of the carpeted landing corridor, and he walked quickly to the nearest one and opened it on to the cool night air. The lights of London were spread below him as he leaned out, but his interest was directed upwards.

As he had observed before driving away from the building earlier that night, the penthouse was set back several feet from the main profile of the building, so that it was surrounded by terraces with a railing of some kind around their edge.

The Saint uncoiled the rope he was carrying, folded his handkerchief diagonally and wrapped it around the steel hook, securing it with a knot at each end. He let the hook dangle out of the window and lowered it down the side of the building until enough length was available for the next step, which would be the most difficult of all: to swing the hook up through the air so that it would catch on the railing eight feet above. He started it swinging like a pendulum, and then using a strong jerk of his wrist he hurled it upward with a whiplash motion. The hook flew out of sight and clunked softly against metal overhead, the noise of its impact muffled by the handkerchief binding. It did not bounce away and fall down again towards the puddles of light on the street far below, and when he tested the rope, drawing in all the slack, it seemed securely held. As long as the railing itself did not give way, he had it made. If it did, of course, it would provide a crucial test of his ability to bounce off a pavement from a height of about 100 feet...

There was no time or reason for more testing or delay. Grasping the rope tightly, he climbed to a sitting position on the window sill and then let his body swing out into space. With the trained, perfectly conditioned muscles of an acrobat he drew himself up, hand over hand, until he had reached the edge of the balcony. Then he transferred his grip to the wrought iron fence on which his hook had caught, and with two powerful heaves of his arms and a lithe upswing of his hips and legs he sailed over the rail and landed like a cat on to the gratifyingly firm paving of the roof garden.

He was on a terrace about ten feet wide at that point, just outside a pair of closed sliding glass doors which led into one room of the penthouse. Because of the lack of light inside, he could see only enough through the doors to judge that it seemed to be some kind of den or library. Around the nearest corner, the terrace was much wider, with planter boxes and porch chairs arranged about it and there were lights in some of the windows farther along that side — apparently the Timonaides menage was not yet all in bed. But on the side where the Saint had arrived, all was quiet and dark. Simon detached the hook from the railings, retrieved and coiled the rope, and went back to the dark sliding doors. They slid easily at his touch. Whatever precautions might have been taken to prevent unexpected guests from arriving by conventional routes, it had apparently never occurred to those inside that anything more worrisome than a bird could arrive by way of the terrace. Then he moved stealthily into the study, or whatever it was.

It proved to be precisely that. The beam of his pocket flashlight showed him banks of built-in bookshelves, filing cabinets, a sound-and-television console, overstaffed masculine leather armchairs, and an open brick fireplace, also a massive semicircular desk with three telephones of different colors and banks of push-buttons, from which a man ensconced in the central swivel chair behind it might feel that he had the controls of an empire at his finger-tips — as indeed, in a way, Kuros Timonaides probably did have.

The desk was locked but had no keyholes in the drawers. The Saint recognized the style, and within a few seconds he had determined that a pair of immovable silver inkwells built into the top of the desk were the means by which it was opened. A little experimentation was necessary, but shortly he had tried turning both inkwells in a clockwise direction simultaneously, and all the drawers in the desk suddenly slid open two inches.

Inside one of the largest and deepest drawers were neatly stacked rows of boxes such as Cassie had described seeing the courier from the van leave with the clerk below. Several of them, as Simon could see with the beam of his flashlight, were labelled THORPE-JONES. Others bore various labels, many of them names which appeared frequently in headlines or on the society pages of newspapers, and all were carefully indexed in some complicated numerical and alphabetical system. These boxes of film and tape were obviously some of the material of Kuros Timonaides’ latest blackmail organization. He did not need to investigate any further before he studied the telephone and pushbutton system and selected the combination most likely to give him an outside line. He dialed the special number of Teal’s department at Scotland Yard.

“This is a message for Chief Inspector Teal,” he said in the lowest possible voice that the instrument would transmit. “You must get it to him at once, wherever he is, even if he’s asleep. It’s about the Saint. Tell him that it isn’t another of those anonymous messages he’s been getting lately. This is Simon Templar himself speaking. Tell him that I’ve discovered that Perry Loudon really was murdered, and I know all about it He must come here at once and see the evidence. This is the address...”

He gave the location twice, making certain that it was correctly taken down, and then hung up, refusing to answer any questions.

There were two doors in the study. Simon went to the first one his eye chose, opened it silently, and looked out into what seemed to be the central hallway of the penthouse. It was bright with ingenious panel lighting, and although there were no windows there were many doors, including one with a different trim and pattern which singled it out as obviously belonging to the private elevator, beside which a small square waist-high panel glowed discreetly pink. Simon crossed to it and touched the button beside it, and the panel turned delicately green. He was satisfied that he had released the exclusive elevator, and that it would now be available to Cassie’s crowd below whenever they got around to using it He went back to the study and surveyed it again. On top of the audio-video console, there were a couple of tape boxes, unlabelled, which could reasonably be assumed to be that night’s delivery from the Thorpe-Jones monitoring operation. At any rate, there could be little harm in subtracting them from Teal’s possible confusions, which he proceeded to do by opening them in the fireplace and igniting some loosened ends of tape with his pocket lighter. Hopefully, that might expunge the record of his earlier visit to the Mayfair gambler’s establishment. He added a few more spools from the desk drawer for luck, to preclude suspicion that he might have been searching for any particular reel, and also to help the blaze. He added his helpful rope with the hook still attached to it to the bonfire: the hook at least would survive, and if any policeman were so thorough as to sift through the ashes it would be an additional relict for Timonaides to have to explain.

Then he turned his attention to the filing cabinets, which also proved to be locked. But his time was running out, as he had known all along that it would; and the noise he was making and which he had become increasingly careless of, combined with the spit and crackle of highly combustible materials in the fireplace, finally brought an interruption to his activities.

The second door was abruptly flung open, and the flickering reflections of flame on walls and ceiling, which had already enabled him to dispense with the aid of his flashlight, were suddenly wiped out in a blaze of overhead light as a main switch was snapped on.

The lighter haired of the two men whom he had met in Loudon’s studio stood in the entrance, a pistol with a silencer in his hand at hip level, and just behind him was Timonaides, in a rich wine-colored brocade dressing-gown with unbuttoned white shirt and regular trousers showing above and below, obviously disturbed only partly on his way to bed. The room behind them, from the lighted slice of it which could be seen past them, seemed to be the formal living room of the suite.

“Come on in,” said the Saint genially. “Make yourselves at home. After all, it is your home, isn’t it?”

“What are you doing here?” Timonaides croaked. He was not a tall man, but he was massive, and despite his in-between costume he was able to retain an aura of vastly founded power and menace. Simon, who had seen him before in the full suavity of total command, had to admit that he stood up to potential catastrophe with an evil distinction which, after all, could only have been essential to cresting the ambiguous heights which his career had achieved.

“I thought we might celebrate Thermopylae together, Kuros, old chum,” said the Saint. “We should have some good reminiscences to swap, of battles long ago. How did you get out of that last bind in the Bahamas?”

“Fortunately, I have influential friends there.”

“Whom you know how to influence in your own way?” Timonaides’ dark eyes were flat and humorless. “Everyone has a skeleton in his closet, and Bahamians are no exception. I make it a rule to find the skeleton in an important closet in any place where I am active, so that I can be sure that I have power to use if I should need it.”

“You do have some ingenious skeleton-hunting methods,” Simon conceded. “Like bribing Perry Loudon to bug the bits of sculpture he sold to Finlay Thorpe-Jones, even to the extent of building in a television eye.”

“You detected that, did you? Your reputation has not been exaggerated.” Timonaides compressed his fleshy lips in a momentary grimace of annoyance. “That makes it very necessary to ensure that you don’t have any opportunity to warn him about my devices. He is quite an exceptional man, and what he thinks are his private conversations are often invaluable. But like everyone else he has a chink in his armor — in his case, his passion for modern sculpture.”

“I’m surprised that you were so ready to get rid of such a useful fellow as Loudon.”

“It is a mistake to keep repeating a successful trick. Besides, Loudon was developing Inflated ideas of his own usefulness. And he knew too much already.”

“So by staging his murder so that I would take the rap, you could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

“Exactly.”

The Greek had been regaining his assurance with every passing word and second, as if behind the screen of dialogue his keen intelligence had been sizing up the situation at full depth and considering the logical moves which could be based on it.

“And now that your clever little scheme has fizzled?”

“I must be grateful that you weren’t content just to escape from the frame-up, somehow, but your foolish attempt to retaliate has delivered you back into my hands.” Timonaides walked to the fireplace and gazed expressionlessly at the dying embers for a moment. “You have caused me great inconvenience for a second time, and probably destroyed some priceless evidence which it may be difficult to replace. I shall not waste time trying to get rid of you with any more elaborate plots.” He turned to his light-haired henchman. “Since Mr Templar has broken into my apartment and attacked me, you may shoot him. It will be quite legal.”

“Here?” said the blond man.

Timonaides shrugged.

“I don’t want a mess on the carpet. Take him out in the kitchen. If there is any blood, it will be easier to clean off the floor.”

The blond man made a beckoning sign with his gun.

“Come,” he said.

And at that instant the elevator doors slid open, disgorging about eight humans and a Russian wolfhound. They scattered and staggered about the hallway, opening doors and crying out for liquor and music; some of them found the living room from which Timonaides and his lieutenant had burst in on the Saint, and turned more lights on, while others came towards the study.

The invasion was so utterly unexpected, except by the Saint, that even such a professional as the light-haired thug was thrown off guard, and Simon took advantage of his stupefaction to numb his wrist with a karate chop and then to numb his brain with a follow-up of knuckles to the jaw, before anyone got hurt. The blond went down in a corner, still feebly grasping his pistol: but Timonaides made no move to try to retrieve it. Simon suspected that the Greek was a purely cerebral type, a masterful planner and giver of orders, but one who would always leave the physical dirty work to others. In any case, like his gunman, he was temporarily too utterly dumbfounded to make a coordinated movement.

Cassie spotted the Saint, and ran to throw her arms around him.

“You’re all right?” she cried. “Is everything all right?”

“You couldn’t have timed it better,” said the Saint.

The noise in the living room had risen in pitch. Someone had found a hi-fi stereo installation and turned it on full blast. The wolfhound was barking. A guitar started to twang in opposition, and found some vocal support. Then there were shouts of triumph as a source of liquid refreshment was discovered. There were sounds of popping corks, clinking glass, and some breakage.

The darker of Timonaides’ two messenger goons came stumbling blearily out of a door at the end of the hall, clad in horribly striped pajamas and clutching a revolver, obviously still half befogged with the slumber from which the uproar must have aroused him. But before he could make his arrival tell more offensively, the lift doors opened again and the second carload of hilarious heathens swarmed out. Somewhere among them was a policeman, holding desperately on to his helmet. The desk clerk had also been somehow swept up in this wave, and now crept closely behind the constable, like infantry advancing behind a tank.

Timonaides had been standing all this time as if paralyzed, his main sign of animation being the purpling of his face, which made him look as if he was building up to burst, or to have a stroke, as perhaps he was. For what may well have been the first time in his life, he had been flabbergasted by something so unpredictably and catastrophically beyond his comprehension that he had been robbed even of his lesser reactions and reduced to something like the level of a concussed beetroot But at the sight of the police uniform, the dam broke, and he found his voice at last — even though it was not, perhaps, the commanding kind of voice that would have been desirable.

“This is the man you want!” he screeched, pointing to the Saint.

The wolfhound jumped up on its hind legs and tried to lick his face. Timonaides pushed the dog away and shook both hands towards the Saint in a thoroughly Mediterranean gesture.

“This is the man!” he shrieked. “Not just a housebreaker, but a murderer! Arrest him!”

Simon, assuming a relaxed and graceful stance, let his head move just slightly to one side.

“Did you ever hear that oldie about the pot and the kettle, Kuros?” he asked quietly.

“I have nothing to say to you,” yelled the Greek. “I want you out — all of you out, and under arrest.”

The policeman looked around helplessly. When he spoke his voice was hoarse.

“There’s nothing I can do alone,” he gulped. “They can’t even hear me. I’ve put in a call for help.”

The elevator doors opened yet again, but not to bring help. It was to emit another and even denser contingent of Cassie’s celebrants, who lost no time in adding their assorted forms of din to the pandemonium. Faced with what must have seemed like a combination of earthquake, cyclone, and global insanity, even Timonaides’ surviving arms-bearer was at a loss, for to start shooting in such a mob and before so many witnesses would have been merely lunatic. And Timonaides, to whom he looked for guidance, had lost all capability of giving him a lead.

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” Simon said to the policeman. “If you weren’t, this creep would be having all the rest of us mowed down by his bully boys. He’s had plenty of people killed before.”

“That’s libel, Templar!” Timonaides shouted. “You’re not only going to jail, but you’re getting sued, too!”

He looked around for his men, one of whom was still far from alertly responsive.

“Don’t let him out of here!” he bellowed, pointing to the Saint. “Call Scotland Yard!”

“I have a feeling you’ve been calling poor Inspector Teal off and on all day,” Simon said. “Why don’t you give the switchboard a rest. I’ve already called him anyway.”

The elevator doors opened yet again, and two more policemen emerged and stood appalled for a moment. The clerk managed to get to them and scream a general idea of what was going on.

The uniformed men began moving against the crowd, quietly but firmly. Slowly the storm subsided. Dancers were separated. The record player was unplugged. Unruly beatniks were isolated in various parts of the room. Some of the merry-makers, realizing that the tide had turned, simply sat down on the floor and waited to see what would happen next. A few had fallen asleep, clutching one another, or embracing half-emptied whiskey bottles.

When Chief Inspector Claud Teal arrived, the scene was fairly calm.

“Now then,” he said, “what’s going on here?”

He spoke the words as he stepped from the elevator and swaggered into the living room, bearing a transitory resemblance to Charles Laughton in his celebrated role of Captain Bligh. The policemen respectfully straightened their spines, while Timonaides and his staff glared from one side of the room, and Simon and the party-goers watched from the other.

The clerk began his version of the tale.

“These people broke in, forced their way into the elevators...”

“And they’ve done serious damage to my furniture,” Timonaides interrupted. “I thought England was a civilized country, where a man could go to bed at night without fear of being attacked by screaming savages.”

“There’s going to be damage done to a lot more than your furniture before this is over,” the Saint said quietly.

“You see!” bawled Timonaides. “He threatens me, even now! Please take him away!”

Teal glowered at Simon and raised his hand to gesture for one of the officers. The Saint stepped back and relaxed against the wall.

“You’d like to catch the man who murdered Perry Loudon, wouldn’t you, Claud?”

“I thought you denied he was ever killed?” the detective said.

“I’m not sure I ever said that, but anyway, it turns out now that he has been. He was killed on the orders of Mr. Timonaides, here, who happens to be the man who’s been calling you anonymously. The actual stabbing was done by one of those men over there.”

“Lies!” Timonaides howled. “He is telling all lies! Trying to save his own skin...”

Simon reached into his pocket and produced a box of video tape which he had taken from Timonaides’ desk. He gave it to Teal.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a tape made by a television camera which Timonaides managed to get into the private office of a man named Thorpe-Jones. You’ve probably heard of him.”

“Of course,” said Teal.

The Saint continued.

“The whole thing is a blackmail scheme — Mr Timonaides’ specialty.

“Timonaides bribed Perry Loudon to incorporate cameras and microphones into certain pieces of his sculpture. Then, when Loudon began to ask for too much money, or because he knew too much, Timonaides had him killed. There was also a man who looked rather like me, who was thrown out of a window in Newkirk Street, as your man Longbottom must have told you—”

The Greek managed to control his voice and adopt some semblance of scornful calm.

“Insane,” he said, shaking his head. “There is absolutely no basis for this story. If you will investigate you will probably find that this man Templar had some personal quarrel with this Loudon and killed him himself. Now he’s merely trying to drag in innocent parties in order to throw suspicion off himself.”

“You’ll find at least one television camera in Thorpe-Jones’ club right now,” Simon said. “There’s also a monitoring van involved. I can give you its description and license. I’m sure it shouldn’t be hard for a great detective like you to trace good concrete evidence of that kind to the man who paid for it. And in the desk in the study here, there are video tapes which came from that set-up.”

Teal knew better than to take such detailed and direct accusations lightly when Simon Templar made them. They had proved correct too often in the past. The detective looked at Timonaides, who snorted.

“This is ridiculous,” said the Greek.

“It’s not ridiculous to me,” the Saint said.

His voice had lost any trace of banter and he looked at Timonaides with piercing eyes the color of clear arctic skies.

“As you know, Claud, I’ve been in this snake’s way before,” he continued. “To get revenge, he arranged for someone to impersonate me and steal Loudon’s girl. Possibly he even arranged for the girl to work her way into Loudon’s life to begin with. Then, when Loudon was killed, you were supposed to believe that his old pal Simon Templar murdered him while they were fighting over a woman.”

“This man is insane,” Timonaides said, turning up his palms.

Teal looked at the Saint.

“If Loudon is dead, where’s his body?”

“Somewhere in this apartment, I believe,” said Simon.

Timonaides looked incredulous, faintly worried, and then tremendously relieved. He opened his mouth — threw back his head, and guffawed.

“Where?” Teal asked the Saint.

“Claud,” Simon said reproachfully. “What did I tell you about asking me to do all your work? I don’t know where, but I don’t think they’ve had time yet to get rid of it.”

Teal turned to Timonaides.

“It would be simple to check this,” he said. “Would you mind?”

Timonaides shook his head.

“Not in the least! Please.” He spread his arms. “Search. Look everywhere.”

Teal nodded to the uniformed men, who began dutifully trooping through the penthouse looking into and under things. Simon enjoyed the brief wait. This was one of those mountain-peak moments which belonged just to him, and for which he lived.

“A nice bluff,” Simon said to Timonaides, “pretending not to care if they looked. Too bad it didn’t work.”

“It’s a lie,” the Greek said, hut an awful and uncanny presentiment, born of the Saint’s astounding confidence, seemed to begin to shake him. “If you do find a body, he brought it here. I know nothing about it.”

“If Templar is lying, you have nothing to fear,” Teal said stolidly. “We’ll begin checking on the rest of his story right away.”

There were several more minutes of what to Simon Templar was delicious suspense, before he heard a muffled far-off shout from the direction of the kitchen, and soon after that the first constable came hurrying back, red-faced and almost incoherent with his news.

10

The Saint drove Cassie hack to her flat, and went upstairs with her. She fell on her knees beside Caspar and George, the dummies.

“Oh, my poor boys!” she cried. “Were you worried about Cassie? Well, don’t feel bad. It’s all over now.”

“No, it isn’t,” Simon said.

He pulled her to her feet.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He took her in his arms, and she stared up at him, wide-eyed.

“I mean you’re not going to creep back into that little shell of yours and shut the door,” he said. “Can George or Caspar do this?”

And he kissed her gently on the lips.

She pondered his face for a minute, then slipped her arms around his neck.

Without moving away from him, she reached behind her with one foot and shoved Caspar from his sitting position so that he slumped face down on to the floor.

“Close your eyes, boys,” she said. “You’ve just been replaced.”