The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

vs Scotland Yard

By LESLIE CHARTERIS

FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK

Copyright, 1932 by Leslie Charteris. Published by Arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

CONTENTS

PART I—The Inland Revenue

PART II—The Million Pound Day

PART III—The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal

PART I

The Inland Revenue

Chapter I

Before the world at large had heard even one lonely rumour about the gentleman who called himself, among other things, the Scorpion, there were men who knew him in secret. They knew him only as the Scorpion, and by no other name; and where he came from and where he lived were facts that certain of them would have given much to learn.

It is merely a matter of history that one of these men had an unassailable legal right to the name of Montgomery Bird, which everyone will agree was a very jolly sort of name for a bloke to have.

Mr, Montgomery Bird was a slim and very dapper little man; and although it is true he wore striped spats there were even more unpleasant things about him which were not so noticeable but which it is the chronicler's painful duty to record. He was, for instance, the sole proprietor of a night club officially entitled the Eyrie, but better and perhaps more appropriately known as the Bird's Nest, which was a very low night club. And in this club, on a certain evening, he inter­viewed the Scorpion.

That Simon Templar happened to be present was almost accidental.

Simon Templar, in fact, having for some time past cherished a purely businesslike interest in the affairs of Mr. Montgomery Bird, had decided that the time was ripe for that interest to bear its fruit.

The means by which he became a member of the Eyrie are not known. Simon Templar had his own private ways of doing these things. It is enough that he was able to enter the prem­ises unchallenged. He was saluted by the doorkeeper, climbed the steep stairs to the converted loft in which the Eyrie had its being, collected and returned the welcoming smile of the girl at the reception desk, delivered his hat into the keeping of a liveried flunkey, and passed on unquestioned. Outside the glass doors that separated the supper-room from the lounge he paused for a moment, lighting a cigarette, while his eyes wan­dered lazily over the crowd. He already knew that Mr. Bird was in the habit of spending the evening among his guests, and he just wanted to make sure about that particular evening. He made sure; but his subsequent and consequent movements were forced to diverge slightly from schedule, as will be seen.

Mr. Bird had met the Scorpion before. When a waiter came through and informed him that a gentleman who would give no name was asking to speak to him, Mr. Bird showed no surprise. He went out to the reception desk, nodded curtly to the visitor, signed him under the name of J. N. Jones, and led the way into his private office without comment.

He walked to his desk; and there he stopped and turned.

"What is it now?" he asked shortly, and the visitor shrugged his broad shoulders.

"Must I explain?"

Mr. Bird sat down in his swivel chair, rested his right ankle on his left knee, and leaned back. The fingers of one carefully manicured hand played a restless tattoo on the desk.

"You had a hundred pounds only last week," he said.

"And since then you have probably made at least three hundred," replied the visitor calmly.

He sat on the arm of another chair, and his right hand remained in the pocket of his overcoat. Mr. Bird, gazing at the pocket, raised one cynical eyebrow.

"You look after yourself well."

"An elementary precaution."

"Or an elementary bluff."

The visitor shook his head.

"You might test it—if you are tired of life."

Mr. Bird smiled, stroking his small moustache.

"With that—and your false beard and smoked glasses—you're an excellent imitation of a blackguard," he said.

"The point is not up for discussion," said the visitor smoothly. "Let us confine ourselves to the object of my presence here. Must I repeat that I know you to be a trader in illicit drugs? In this very room, probably, there is enough material evidence to send you to penal servitude for five years. The police, unaided, might search for it in vain. The secret of your ingenious little hiding-place under the floor in that corner might defy their best efforts. They do not know that it will only open when the door of this room is locked and the third and fifth sections of the wainscoting on that wall are slid upwards. But suppose they were anonymously informed——"

"And then found nothing there," said Montgomery Bird, with equal suavity.

"There would still be other suggestions that I could make," said the visitor.

He stood up abruptly.

"I hope you understand me," he said. "Your offences are no concern of mine, but they would be a great concern of yours if you were placed in the dock to answer for them. They are also too profitable for you to be ready to abandon them—yet. You will therefore pay me one hundred pounds a week for as long as I choose to demand it. Is that sufficiently plain?"

"You——"

Montgomery Bird came out of his chair with a rush.

The bearded man was not disturbed. Only his right hand, in his overcoat pocket, moved slightly.

"My—er—elementary bluff is still waiting your investi­gation," he said dispassionately, and the other stopped dead.

With his head thrust a little forward, he stared into the tinted lenses that masked the big man's eyes.

"One day I'll get you—you—swine."

"And until that day, you will continue to pay me one hundred pounds a week, my dear Mr. Bird," came the gentle response. "Your next contribution is already due. If it is not troubling you too much——

He did not bother to complete the sentence. He simply waited.

Bird went back to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out an envelope and threw it on the blotter.

"Thank you," said the visitor.

His fingers had just touched the envelope when the shrill scream of a bell froze him into immobility. It was not an ordinary bell. It had a vociferous viciousness about it that stung the eardrums—something like the magnified buzzing of an infuriated wasp.

"What is that?"

"My private alarm."

Bird glanced at the illuminated clock on the mantelpiece; and the visitor, following the glance, saw that the dial had turned red.

"A police raid?"

"Yes."

The big man picked up the envelope and thrust it into his pocket.

"You will get me out of here," he said.

Only a keen ear would have noticed the least fraying of the edges of his measured accents; but Montgomery Bird noticed it, and looked at him curiously.

"If I didn't——

"You would be foolish—very foolish," said the visitor quietly.

Bird moved back, with murderous eyes. Set in one wall was a large mirror; he put his hands to the frame of it and pushed it bodily sideways in invisible grooves, revealing a dark rec­tangular opening.

And it was at that moment that Simon Templar, for his own inscrutable reasons, tired of his voluntary exile.

"Stand clear of the lift gates, please," he murmured.

To the two men, wheeling round at the sound of his voice like a pair of marionettes whose control wires have got mixed up with a dynamo, it seemed as if he had appeared out of the fourth dimension. Just for an instant. And then they saw the open door of the capacious cupboard behind him.

"Pass right down the car, gents," he murmured, encourag­ingly.

He crossed the room. He appeared to cross it slowly, but that, again, was an illusion. He had reached the two men before either of them could move. His left hand shot out and fastened on the lapels of the bearded man's coat—and the bearded man vanished. It was the most startling thing that Mr. Montgomery Bird had ever seen; but the Saint did not seem to be aware that he was multiplying miracles with an easy grace that would have made a Grand Lama look like a third-rate three-card man. He calmly pulled the sliding mirror back into place, and turned round again.

"No—not you, Montgomery," he drawled. "We may want you again this evening. Back-pedal, comrade."

His arm telescoped languidly outwards, and the hand at the end of it seized the retreating Mr. Bird by one ear, fetching him up with a jerk that made him squeak in muted anguish.

Simon steered him firmly but rapidly towards the open,cup­board.

"You can cool off in there," he said; and the next sensations that impinged upon Montgomery Bird's delirious conscious­ness consisted of a lot of darkness and the sound of a key turning in the cupboard lock.

The Saint straightened his coat and returned to the centre of the room.

He sat down in Mr. Bird's chair, put his feet on Mr. Bird's desk, lighted one of Mr. Bird's cigars, and gazed at the ceiling with an expression of indescribable beatitude on his face; and it was thus that Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal found him.

Some seconds passed before the detective recovered the use of his voice; but when he had done this, he made up for lost time.

"What," he snarled, "the blankety blank blanking blank-blanked blank——

"Hush," said the Saint.

"Why?" snarled Teal, not unreasonably.

Simon held up his hand.

"Listen."

There was a moment's silence; and then Teal's glare re­calorified.

"What am I supposed to be listening to?" he demanded violently; and the Saint beamed at him.

"Down in the forest something stirred—it was only the note of a bird," he explained sweetly.

The detective centralised his jaw with a visible effort.

"Is Montgomery Bird another of your fancy names?" he inquired, with a certain lusciousness. "Because, if it is——"

"Yes, old dear?"

"If it is," said Chief Inspector Teal grimly, "you're going to see the inside of a prison at last."

Simon regarded him imperturbably.

"On what charge?"

"You're going to get as long as I can get you for allowing drinks to be sold in your club after hours—

"And then——?"

The detective's eyes narrowed.

"What do you mean?"

Simon flourished Mr. Bird's cigar airily.

"I always understood that the police were pretty bone-headed," he remarked genially, "but I never knew before that they'd been reduced to employing Chief Inspectors for ordi­nary drinking raids."

Teal said nothing.

"On the other hand, a dope raid is quite a different matter," said the Saint.

He smiled at the detective's sudden stillness, and stood up, knocking an inch of ash from his cigar.

"I must be toddling along," he murmured. "If you really want to find some dope, and you've any time to spare after you've finished cleaning up the bar, you ought to try locking the door of this room and pulling up bits of wainscoting. The third and fifth sections—I can't tell you which wall. Oh, and if you want Montgomery, he's simmering down in the Frigi­daire. . . . See you again soon."

He patted the crown of Mr. Teal's bowler hat affectionately, and was gone before the detective had completely grasped what was happening.

The Saint could make those well-oiled exits when he chose; and he chose to make one then, for he was a fundamentally tactful man. Also, he had in one pocket an envelope purport­ing to contain one hundred pounds, and in another pocket the entire contents of Mr. Montgomery Bird's official safe; and at such times the Saint did not care to be detained.

Chapter II

Simon Templar pushed back his plate.

"Today," he announced, "I have reaped the first-fruits of virtue."

He raised the letter he had received, and adjusted an imag­inary pair of pince-nez. Patricia waited expectantly.

The Saint read:

"Dear Mr: Templar,

"Having come across a copy of your book 'The Pirate' and having nothing to do I sat down to read it. Well, the impression it gave me was that you are a writer with no sense of proportion. The reader's sympathy owing to the faulty setting of the first chapter naturally goes all the way with Kerrigan, even though he is a crook. It is not surprising that this book has not gone to a second edition. You do not evidently understand the mentality of an English reading public. If instead of Mario you had se­lected for your hero an Englishman or an American, you would have written a fairly readable and a passable tale— but a lousy Dago who works himself out of impossible difficulties and situations is too much. It is not convincing. It does not appeal. In a word it is puerile.

"I fancy you yourself must have a fair amount of Dago blood in you——"

He stopped, and Patricia Holm looked at him puzzledly.

"Well?" she prompted.

"There is no more," explained the Saint. "No address—no signature—no closing peroration—nothing. Apparently words failed him. At that point he probably uttered a short sharp yelp of intolerable agony, and began to chew pieces out of the furniture. We may never know his fate. Possibly, in some distant asylum——"

He elaborated on his theory.

During a brief spell of virtue some time before, the Saint had beguiled himself with the writing of a novel. Moreover, he had actually succeeded in finding a home for it; and the adventures of Mario, a super-brigand of South America, could be purchased at any bookstall for three half-crowns. And the letter that he had just read was part of his reward.

Another part of the reward had commenced six months previously.

"Nor is this all," said the Saint, taking another document from the table. "The following billet-doux appears to close some entertaining correspondence:

"Previous applications for payment of the undermen­tioned instalment for the year 1931-1932, due from you on the 1st day January, 1932, having been made to you with­out effect, PERSONAL DEMAND is now made for pay­ment, and I HEREBY GIVE YOU FINAL NOTICE that if the amount be not paid or remitted to me at the above address within SEVEN DAYS from this date, steps will be taken for recovery by DISTRAINT, with costs.

"LIONEL DELBORN, COLLECTOR."

In spite of the gloomy prognostications of the anonymous critic, The Pirate had not passed utterly unnoticed in the spate of sensational fiction. The Intelligence Department ("A beautiful name for them," said the Saint) of the Inland Revenue had observed its appearance, had consulted their records, and had discovered that the author, the notorious Simon Templar, was not registered as a contributor towards the expensive extravagances whereby a modern boobocracy does its share in encouraging the survival of the fattest. The Saint's views about his liabilities in this cause were not invited: he simply received an assessment which presumed his income to be six thousand pounds per annum, and he was invited to appeal against it if he thought fit. The Saint thought fit, and declared that the assessment was bad in law, erroneous in principle, excessive in amount, and malicious in intent. The discussion that followed was lengthy and diverting; the Saint, conducting his own case with remarkable forensic ability and eloquence, pleaded that he was a charita­ble institution and therefore not taxable.

"If," said the Saint, in his persuasive way, "you will look up the delightful words of Lord Macnaghten, in Income Tax Commissioners v. Pemsel, 1891, A.C. at p. 583, you will find that charitable purposes are there defined in four principal divisions, of which the fourth is 'trusts for purposes beneficial to the community, not falling under any of the preceding heads.' I am simply and comprehensively beneficial to the community, which the face of the third Commissioner from the left definitely is not."

We find from the published record of the proceedings that he was overruled; and the epistle he had just quoted was final and conclusive proof of the fact.

"And that," said the Saint, gazing at the formidable red lettering gloomily, "is what I get for a lifetime of philanthropy and self-denial."

"I suppose you'll have to pay," said Patricia.

"Someone will," said the Saint significantly.

He propped the printed buff envelope that had accompa­nied the Final Demand against the coffee-pot, and his eyes rested on it for a space with a gentle thoughtfulness—amaz­ingly clear, devil-may-care blue eyes with a growing glimmer of mischief lurking somewhere behind the lazily drooping lids.

And slowly the old Saintly smile came to his lips as he contem­plated the address.

"Someone will have to pay," repeated the Saint thoughtfully; and Patricia Holm sighed, for she knew the signs.

And suddenly the Saint stood up, with his swift soft laugh, and took the Final Demand and the envelope over to the fireplace. On the wall close by hung a plain block calendar, and on the mantelpiece lay an old Corsican stiletto. "Che la mia ferita sia mortale," said the inscription on the blade.

The Saint rapidly flicked over the pages of the calendar and tore out the sheet which showed in solid red figures the day on which Mr. Lionel Delborn's patience would expire. He placed the sheet on top of the other papers, and with one quick thrust he drove the stiletto through the collection and speared it deep into the panelled overmantel.

"Lest we forget," he said, and turned with another laugh to smile seraphically into Patricia's outraged face. "I just wasn't born to be respectable, lass, and that's all there is to it. And the time has come for us to remember the old days."

As a matter of fact, he had made that decision two full weeks before, and Patricia had known it; but not until then had he made his open declaration of war.

At eight o'clock that evening he was sallying forth in quest of an evening's innocent amusement, and a car that had been standing in the darkness at the end of the cul-de-sac of Upper Berkeley Mews suddenly switched on its headlights and roared towards him. The Saint leapt back and fell on his face in the doorway, and he heard the plop of a silenced gun and the thud of a bullet burying itself in the woodwork above his head. He slid out into the mews again as the car went past, and fired twice as it swung into Berkeley Square, but he could not tell whether he did any damage.

He returned to brush his clothes, and then continued calmly on his way; and when he met Patricia later he did not think it necessary to mention the incident that had delayed him. But it was the third time since the episode chez Bird that the Scor­pion had tried to kill him, and no one knew better than Simon Templar that it would not be the last attempt.

Chapter III

For some days past, the well-peeled eye might at inter­vals have observed a cadaverous and lantern-jawed individual protruding about six and a half feet upwards from the cobbled paving of Upper Berkeley Mews. Simon Templar, having that sort of eye, had in fact noticed the apparition on its first and in all its subsequent visits; and anyone less well-informed than himself might pardonably have suspected some connection be­tween the lanky boulevardier and the recent disturbances of the peace. Simon Templar, however, was not deceived.

"That," he said once, in answer to Patricia's question, "is Mr. Harold Garrot, better known as Long Harry. He is a moderately proficient burglar; and we have met before, but not professionally. He is trying to make up his mind to come and tell me something, and one of these days he will take the plunge."

The Saint's deductions were vindicated twenty-four hours after the last firework display.

Simon was alone. The continued political activities of a certain newspaper proprietor had driven him to verse, and he was covering a sheet of foolscap with the beginning of a minor epic expressing his own views on the subject:

Charles Charleston Charlemagne St. Charles

Was wont to utter fearful snarls

When by professors he was pressed

To note how England had progressed

Since the galumptious, gory days

Immortalised in Shakespeare's plays.

For him, no Transatlantic flights,

Ford motor-cars, electric lights,

Or radios at less than cost

Could compensate for what he lost

By chancing to coagulate

About five hundred years too late.

Born in the only days for him

He would have swung a sword with vim,

Grown ginger whiskers on his face,

And mastered, with a knobbly mace,

Men who wore hauberks on their chests

Instead of little woolen vests,

And drank strong wine among his peers

Instead of pale synthetic beers.

At this point, the trend of his inspiration led the Saint on a brief excursion to the barrel in one corner of the room. He replenished his tankard, drank deeply, and continued:

Had he not reason to be glum When born in nineteen umpty-um?

And there, for the moment, he stuck; and he was cogitating the possible developments of the next stanza when he was interrupted by the zing! of the front door bell.

As he stepped out into the hall, he glanced up through the fanlight above the door at the mirror that was cunningly fixed to the underneath of the hanging lantern outside. He recog­nised the caller at once, and opened the door without hesita­tion.

"Come in, Harry," invited the Saint cordially, and led the way back to the sitting-room. "I was busy with a work of art that is going to make Milton look like a distant relative of the gargle, but I can spare you a few minutes."

Long Harry glanced at the sheet half-covered with the Saint's neat handwriting.

"Poetry, Mr. Templar? We used to learn poetry at school," he said reminiscently.

Simon looked at him thoughtfully for two or three seconds, and then he beamed.

"Harry, you hit the nail on the head. For that suggestion, I pray that your shadow may always be jointed at the elbows. Excuse me one moment."

He plumped himself back in his chair and wrote at speed. Then he cleared his throat, and read aloud:

"Eton and Oxford failed to floor

The spirit of the warrior;

Though ragged and bullied, teased and hissed,

Charles stayed a Medievalist;

And even when his worldly Pa

(Regarding him with nausea)

Condemned him to the dismal cares

Of sordid trade in stocks and shares,

Charles, in top-hat and Jaeger drawers,

Clung like a limpet to his Cause,

Believing, in a kind of trance,

That one day he would have his Chance."

He laid the sheet down reverently.

"A mere pastime for me, but I believe Milton used to sweat blood over it," he remarked complacently. "Soda or water, Harry?"

"Neat, please, Mr. Templar."

Simon brought over the glass of Highland cream, and Long Harry sipped it, and crossed and uncrossed his legs awkwardly.

"I hope you don't mind my coming to see you, sir," he ventured at last.

"Not at all," responded the Saint heartily. "Always glad to see any Eton boys here. What's the trouble?"

Long Harry fidgeted, twiddling his fingers and corrugating his brow. He was the typical "old lag," or habitual criminal, which is to say that outside of business hours he was a per­fectly ordinary man of slightly less than average intelligence and rather more than average cunning. On this occasion he was plainly and ordinarily ill at ease, and the Saint surmised that he had only begun to solve his worries when he mustered up the courage to give that single, brief, and symptomatic ring at the front door bell.

Simon lighted a cigarette and waited impassively, and pres­ently his patience reaped its harvest.

"I wondered—I thought maybe I could tell you something that might interest you, Mr. Templar."

"Sure." The Saint allowed a thin jet of smoke to trickle through his lips, and continued to wait.

"It's about . . . it's about the Scorpion, Mr. Templar."

Instantaneously the Saint's eyes narrowed, the merest fraction of a millimetre, and the inhalation that he drew from his cigarette was long and deep and slow. And then the stare that he swivelled round in the direction of Long Harry was wide blue innocence itself.——'

"What Scorpion?" he inquired blandly.

Long Harry frowned.

"I thought you'd 've known about the Scorpion, of course,Mr. Templar, you being——"

"Yeah?"

Simon drawled out the prompting diphthong in a honeyed slither up a gently persuasive G-string; and Long Harry shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

"Well, you remember what you used to be, Mr. Templar. There wasn't much you didn't know in those days."

"Oh, yes—once upon a time. But now—"

"Last time we met, sir——"

The Saint's features relaxed, and he smiled.

"Forget it, Harold," he advised quietly. "I'm now a respect­able citizen. I was a respectable citizen the last time we met, and I haven't changed. You may tell me anything you like, Harry—as one respectable citizen to another—but I'd recom­mend you to forget the interview as you step over the front door mat. I shall do the same—it's safer."

Long Harry nodded.

"If you forget it, sir, it'll be safer for me," he said seriously.

"I have a hopeless memory," said the Saint carefully. "I've already forgotten your name. In another minute, I shan't be sure that you're here at all. Now shoot the dope, son."

"You've got nothing against me, sir?"

"Nothing. You're a professional burglar, housebreaker, and petty larcenist, but that's no concern of mine. Teal can attend to your little mistakes."

"And you'll forget what I'm going to say—soon as ever I've said it?"

"You heard me."

"Well, Mr. Templar——" Long Harry cleared his throat, took another pull at his drink, and blinked nervously for some seconds. "I've worked for the Scorpion, Mr. Templar," he said suddenly.

Simon Templar never moved a muscle.

"Yes?"

"Only once, sir—so far." Once having left the diving-board, Long Harry floundered on recklessly. "And there won't be a second time—not if I can help it. He's dangerous. You ain't never safe with him. I know. Sent me a message he did, through the post. Knew where I was staying, though I'd only been there two days, an' everything about me. There was five one-pound notes in the letter, and he said if I met a car that'd be waiting at the second milestone north of Hatfield at nine o'clock last Thursday night there'd be another fifty for me to earn."

"What sort of car was it?"

"I never had a chance to notice it properly, Mr. Templar. It was a big, dark car, I think. It hadn't any lights. I was going to tell you—I was a bit suspicious at first, I thought it must be a plant, but it was that talk of fifty quid that tempted me. The car was waiting for me when I got there. I went up and looked in the window, and there was a man there at the wheel. Don't ask me what he looked like—he kept his head down, and I never saw more than the top of his hat. 'Those are your instructions,' he says, pushing an envelope at me, he says, 'and there's half your money. I'll meet you here at the same time tomorrow.' And then he drove off. I struck a match, and found he'd given me the top halves of fifty pound notes."

"And then?"

"Then—I went an' did the job, Mr. Templar."

"What job?"

"I was to go to a house at St. Albans and get some papers. There was a map, an' a plan, an' all about the locks an' everything. I had my tools—I forgot to tell you the first letter said I was to bring them—and it was as easy as the orders said it would be. Friday night, I met the car as arranged, and handed over the papers, and he gave me the other halves of the notes."

Simon extended a lean brown hand.

"The orders?" he inquired briefly.

He took the cheap yellow envelope, and glanced through the contents. There was, as Long Harry had said, a neatly-drawn map and plan; and the other information, in a stu­diously characterless copperplate writing, covered two more closely written sheets.

"You've no idea whose house it was you entered?"

"None at all, sir."

"Did you look at these papers?"

"Yes." Long Harry raised his eyes and looked at the Saint sombrely. "That's the one reason why I came to you, sir."

"What were they?"

"They were love-letters, sir. There was an address—64 Half Moon Street. And they were signed —'Mark'."

Simon passed a hand over his sleekly perfect hair.

"Oh yes?" he murmured.

"You saw the Sunday papers, sir?"

"I did."

Long Harry emptied his glass, and put it down with clumsy fingers.

"Sir Mark Deverest shot 'imself at 64 'Alf Moon Street, on Saturday night," he said huskily.

When he was agitated, he occasionally lost an aspirate, and it was an index of his perturbation that he actually dropped two in that one sentence.

"That's the Scorpion's graft, Mr. Templar—blackmail. I never touched black in my life, but I'd heard that was his game. An' when he sent for me, I forgot it. Even when I was looking through those letters, it never seemed to come into my head why he wanted them. But I see it all now. He wanted 'em to put the black on Deverest, an' Deverest shot himself instead of paying up. And—I 'elped to murder 'im, Mr. Templar.Murder, that's what it was. Nothing less. An' I 'elped!" Long Harry's voice fell to a throaty whisper, and his dull eyes shifted over the clear-etched contours of the Saint's tanned face in a kind of panic of anxiety. "I never knew what I was doing, Mr. Templar, sir—strike me dead if I did——"

Simon reached forward and crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray.

"Is that all you came to tell me?" he asked dispassionately; and Long Harry gulped.

"I thought you'd be laying for the Scorpion, sir, knowing you always used to be ——"

"Yeah?"

Again that mellifluous dissyllable, in a voice that you could have carved up with a wafer of butter.

"Well, sir, what I mean is, if you were the Saint, sir, and if you hadn't forgotten that you might ever have been him, you might——"

"Be hunting scorpions?"

"That's the way I thought it out, sir."

"And?"

"I was hanging around last night, Mr. Templar, trying to make up my mind to come and see you, and I saw the shoot­ing."

"And?"

"That car—it was just like the car that met me out beyond Hatfield, sir."

"And?"

"I thought p'raps it was the same car."

"And?"

Simon prompted him for the fourth time from the corner table where he was replenishing Long Harry's glass. His back was turned, but there was an inconspicuous little mirror just above the level of the eyes—the room was covered from every angle by those inconspicuous little mirrors. And he saw the twitching of Long Harry's mouth.

"I came because I thought you might be able to stop the Scorpion getting me, Mr. Templar," said Long Harry, in one jerk.

"Ah!" The Saint swung round. "That's more like it! So you're on the list, are you?"

"I think so." Long Harry nodded. "There was a shot aimed at me last night, too, but I suppose you wouldn't 've noticed it."

Simon Templar lighted another cigarette.

"I see. The Scorpion spotted you hanging around here, and tried to bump you off. That's natural. But, Harry, you never even started hanging around here until you got the idea you might like to tell me the story of your life—and still you haven't told me where that idea came from. Sing on, Harry— I'm listening, and I'm certainly patient."

Long Harry absorbed a gill of Maison Dewar in comparative silence, and wiped his lips on the back of his hand.

"I had another letter on Monday morning, telling me to be at the same place at midnight tomorrow."

"And?"

"Monday afternoon I was talking to some friends. I didn't tell 'em anything, but I sort of steered the conversation around, not bringing myself in personal. You remember Wil­bey?"

"Found full of bullets on the Portsmouth Road three months ago? Yes—I remember."

"I heard—it's just a story, but I heard the last job he did was for the Scorpion. He talked about it. The bloke shot himself that time, too. An' I began thinking. It may surprise you, Mr. Templar, but sometimes I'm very si-chick."

"You worked it out that as long as the victims paid up, everything was all right. But if they did anything desperate, there was always a chance of trouble; and the Scorpion wouldn't want anyone who could talk running about without a muzzle. That right?"

Long Harry nodded, and his prominent Adam's apple flick­ered once up and down.

"Yes, I think if I keep that appointment tomorrow I'll be— what's that American word?—on the spot. Even if I don't go——" The man broke off with a shrug that made a feeble attempt at bravado. "I couldn't take that story of mine to the police, Mr. Templar, as you'll understand, and I wondered——"

Simon Templar settled a little deeper into his chair and sent a couple of perfect smoke-rings chasing each other up towards the ceiling.

He understood Long Harry's thought processes quite clearly. Long Harry was a commonplace and more or less peaceful yegg, and violence was not among the most prominent inter­ests of his life. Long Harry, as the Saint knew, had never even carried so much as a life-preserver. . . . The situation was obvious.

But how the situation was to be turned to account—that required a second or two's meditation. Perhaps two seconds. And then the little matter of spoon-feeding that squirming young pup of a plan up to a full-sized man-eating carnivore hopping around on its own pads .... maybe five seconds

more. And then ——

"We deduce," said the Saint dreamily, "that our friend had arranged for you to die tomorrow; but when he found you on the outskirts of the scenery last night, he thought he might save himself a journey."

"That's the way I see it, Mr. Templar."

"From the evidence before us, we deduce that he isn't the greatest snap shot in the world. And so——"

"Yes, Mr. Templar?"

"It looks to me, Harry," said the Saint pleasantly, "as if you'll have to die tomorrow after all."

Chapter IV

Simon was lingering over a cigarette and his last break­fast cup of coffee when Mr. Teal dropped in at half-past eleven next morning.

"Have you breakfasted?" asked the Saint hospitably. "I can easily hash you up an egg or something——"

"Thanks," said Teal, "I had breakfast at eight."

"A positively obscene hour," said the Saint

He went to an inlaid smoking-cabinet, and solemnly trans­ported a new and virginal packet of spearmint into the detec­tive's vicinity.

"Make yourself at home, Claud Eustace. And why are we thus honoured?"

There was a gleaming automatic, freshly cleaned and oiled, beside the breakfast-tray, and Teal's sleepy eyes fell on it as he undressed some Wrigley. He made no comment at that point, and continued his somnambulation round the room. Before the papers pinned to the overmantel, he paused.

"You going to contribute your just share towards the ex­penses of the nation?" he inquired.

"Someone is going to," answered the Saint calmly.

"Who?"

"Talking of scorpions, Teal——"

The detective revolved slowly, and his baby eyes suddenly drooped as if in intolerable ennui.

"What scorpions?" he demanded, and the Saint laughed.

"Pass it up, Teal, old stoat. That one's my copyright."

Teal frowned heavily.

"Does this mean the old game again, Saint?"

"Teal! Why bring that up?"

The detective gravitated into a pew.

"What have you got to say about scorpions?"

"They have stings in their tails."

Teal's chewing continued with rhythmic monotonousness.

"When did you become interested in the Scorpion?" he questioned casually.

"I've been interested for some time," murmured the Saint. "Just recently, though, the interest's become a shade too mu­tual to be healthy. Did you know the Scorpion was an amateur?" he added abruptly.

"Why do you think that?"

"I don't think it—I know it. The Scorpion is raw. That's one reason why I shall have to tread on him. I object to being shot up by amateurs—I feel it's liable to lower my stock. And as for being finally killed by an amateur . . . Teal, put it to your­self!"

"How do you know this?"

The Saint renewed his cigarette at leisure.

"Deduction. The Sherlock Holmes stuff again. I'll teach you the trick one day, but I can give you this result out flat. Do you want chapter and verse?"

"I'd be interested."

"O.K." The Saint leaned back. "A man came and gave me some news about the Scorpion last night, after hanging around for three days—and he's still alive. I was talking to him on the phone only half an hour ago. If the Scorpion had been a real professional, that man would never even have seen me—let alone have been alive to ring me up this morning. That's one point."

"What's the next?"

"You remember the Portsmouth Road murder?"

"Yes."

"Wilbey had worked for the Scorpion, and he was a possible danger. If you'll consult your records, you'll find that Wilbey was acquitted on a charge of felonious loitering six days before he died. It was exactly the same with the bird who came to see me last night. He had also worked for the Scorpion, and he was discharged at Bow Street only two days before the Scor­pion sent for him. Does that spell anything to you?"

Teal crinkled his forehead.

"Not yet, but I'm trying."

"Let me save you the trouble."

"No—just a minute. The Scorpion was in court when the charges were dismissed——"

"Exactly. And he followed them home. It's obvious. If you or I wanted someone to do a specialised bit of crime—say burglary, for instance—in thirty hours we could lay our hands on thirty men we could commission. But the genuine aged-in-the-wood amateur hasn't got those advantages, however clever he may be. He simply hasn't got the connections. You can't apply for cracksmen to the ordinary labour exchange, or adver­tise for them in The Times, and if you're a respectable amateur you haven't any among your intimate friends. What's the only way you can get hold of them?"

Teal nodded slowly.

"It's an idea," he admitted. "I don't mind telling you we've looked over all the regulars long ago. The Scorpion doesn't come into the catalogue. There isn't a nose on the pay-roll who can get a whiff of him. He's something right outside our register of established clients."

The name of the Scorpion had first been mentioned nine months before, when a prominent Midland cotton-broker had put his head in a gas-oven and forgotten to turn off the gas. In a letter that was read at the inquest occurred the words: "I have been bled for years, and now I can endure no more. When the Scorpion stings, there is no antidote but death."

And in the brief report of the proceedings:

The Coroner: Have you any idea what the deceased meant by that reference to a scorpion?

Witness: No.

Is there any professional blackmailer known to the police by that name?—I have never heard it before.

And thereafter, for the general run of respectable citizens from whom the Saint expressly dissociated Teal and himself, the rest had been a suavely expanding blank. . . .

But through that vast yet nebulous area popularly called "the underworld" began to voyage vague rumours, growing more and more wild and fantastic as they passed from mouth to mouth, but still coming at last to the respective ears of Scot­land Yard with enough credible vitality to be interesting. Kate Allfield, "the Mug", entered a railway carriage in which a Member of Parliament was travelling alone on a flying visit to his constituency: he stopped the train at Newbury and gave her in charge, and when her counter-charge of assault broke down under ruthless cross-examination she "confessed" that she had acted on the instigation of an unknown accomplice. Kate had tried many ways of making easy money, and the fact that the case in question was a new one in her history meant little. But round the underworld travelled two words of comment and explanation, and those two words said simply "The Scor­pion".

"Basher" Tope—thief, motor-bandit, brute, and worse—was sent for. He boasted in his cups of how he was going to solve the mystery of the Scorpion, and went alone to his appoint­ment. What happened there he never told; he was absent from his usual haunts for three weeks, and when he was seen again he had a pink scar on his temple and a surly disinclination to discuss the matter. Since he had earned his nickname, ques­tions were not showered upon him; but once again the word went round. . . .

And so it was with half a dozen subsequent incidents; and the legend of the Scorpion grew up and was passed from hand to hand in queer places, unmarked by sensation-hunting jour­nalists, a mystery for police and criminals alike. Jack Wilbey, ladder larcenist, died and won his niche in the structure; but the newspapers noted his death only as another unsolved crime on which to peg their perennial criticisms of police efficiency, and only those who had heard other chapters of the story linked up that murder with the suicide of a certain wealthy peer. Even Chief Inspector Teal, whose finger was on the pulse of every unlawful activity in the Metropolis, had not visualized such a connecting link as the Saint had just forged before his eyes; and he pondered over it in a ruminative silence before he resumed his interrogation.

"How much else do you know?" he asked at length, with the mere ghost of a quickening of interest in his perpetually weary voice.

The Saint picked up a sheet of paper.

"Listen," he said.

"His faith was true: though once misled

By an appeal that he had read

To honour with his patronage

Crusades for better Auction Bridge

He was not long deceived; he found

No other paladins around

Prepared to perish, sword in hand,

While storming in one reckless band

Those strongholds of Beelzebub

The portals of the Portland Club.

His chance came later; one fine day

Another paper blew his way:

Charles wrote; Charles had an interview;

And Charles, an uncrowned jousting Blue,

Still spellbound by the word Crusade,

Espoused the cause of Empire Trade."

"What on earth's that?" demanded the startled detective.

"A little masterpiece of mine," said the Saint modestly. "There's rather an uncertain rhyme in it, if you noticed. Do you think the Poet Laureate would pass patronge and Bridge? I'd like your opinion."

Teal's eyelids lowered again.

"Have you stopped talking?" he sighed.

"Very nearly, Teal," said the Saint, putting the paper down again. "In case that miracle of tact was too subtle for you, let me explain that I was changing the subject."

"I see."

"Do you?"

Teal glanced at the automatic on the table and then again at the papers on the wall, and sighed a second time.

"I think so. You're going to ask the Scorpion to pay your income tax."

"I am."

"How?"

The Saint laughed. He pointed to the desecrated over­mantel.

"One thousand three hundred and thirty-seven pounds, nine­teen and fivepence," he said. "That's my sentence for being a useful wage-earning citizen instead of a prolific parasite, ac­cording to the laws of this spavined country. Am I supposed to pay you and do your work as well? If so, I shall emigrate on the next boat and become a naturalised Venezuelan."

"I wish you would," said Teal, from his heart.

He picked up his hat.

"Do you know the Scorpion?" he asked suddenly.

Simon shook his head.

"Not yet. But I'm going to. His donation is not yet assessed, but I can tell you where one thousand three hundred and thirty-eight pounds of it are going to travel. And that is to­wards the offices of Mr. Lionel Delborn, collector of extortions —may his teeth fall out and his legs putrefy! I'll stand the odd sevenpence out of my own pocket."

"And what do you think you're going to do with the man himself?"

The Saint smiled.

"That's a little difficult to say," he murmured. "Accidents sort of—er—happen, don't they? I mean, I don't want you to start getting back any of your naughty old ideas about me, but——"

Teal nodded; then he met the Saint's mocking eyes seriously.

"They'd have the coat off my back if it ever got round," he said, "but between you and me and these four walls, I'll make a deal—if you'll make one too."

Simon settled on the edge of the table, his cigarette slanting quizzically upwards between his lips, and one whimsically sar­donic eyebrow arched.

"What is it?"

"Save the Scorpion for me, and I won't ask how you paid your income tax."

For a few moments the Saint's noncommittal gaze rested on the detective's round red face; then it wandered back to the impaled memorandum above the mantelpiece. And then the Saint looked Teal in the eyes and smiled again.

"O.K.," he drawled. "That's O.K. with me, Claud."

"It's a deal?"

"It is. There's a murder charge against the Scorpion, and I don't see why the hangman shouldn't earn his fiver. I guess it's time you had a break, Claud Eustace. Yes—you can have the Scorpion. Any advance on fourpence?"

Teal nodded, and held out his hand.

"Fourpence halfpenny—I'll buy you a glass of beer at any pub inside the three-mile radius on the day you bring him in," he said.

Chapter V

Patricia Holm came in shortly after four-thirty. Simon Templar had lunched at what he always referred to as "the pub round the corner"—the Berkeley—and had ambled ele­gantly about the purlieus of Piccadilly for an hour thereafter; for he had scarcely learned to walk two consecutive steps when his dear old grandmother had taken him on her knee and enjoined him to "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday".

He was writing when she arrived, but he put down his pen and surveyed her solemnly.

"Oh, there you are," he remarked. "I thought you were dead, but Teal said he thought you might only have taken a trip to Vladivostok."

"I've been helping Eilen Wiltham—her wedding's only five days away. Haven't you any more interest in her?"

"None," said the Saint callously. "The thought of the approaching crime makes my mind feel unbinged—unhinged. I've already refused three times to assist Charles to select pyjamas for the bridal chamber. I told him that when he'd been married as often as I have——"

"That'll do," said Patricia.

"It will, very nearly," said the Saint.

He cast an eye over the mail that she had brought in with her from the letter-box.

"Those two enevelopes with halfpenny stamps you may exter­minate forthwith. On the third, in spite of the deceptive three-halfpenny Briefmarke, I recognise the clerkly hand of Ander­son and Sheppard. Add it to the holocaust. Item four"—he picked up a small brown-paper package and weighed it calcu­latingly in his hand—"is much too light to contain high explo­sive. It's probably the new gold-mounted sock-suspenders I ordered from Asprey's. Open it, darling, and tell me what you think of them. And I will read you some more of the Hideous History of Charles."

He took up his manuscript.

"With what a zest did he prepare

For the first meeting (open-air)!

With what a glee he fastened on

His bevor and his morion,

His greaves, his ventail, every tace,

His pauldrons and his rerebrace!

He sallied forth with martial eye,

Prepared to do, prepared to die,

But not prepared—by Bayard! not

For the reception that he got.

Over that chapter of the tale

It would be kind to draw a veil:

Let it suffice that in disdain,

Some hecklers threw him in a drain,

And plodding home——

"Excuse me," said the Saint.

His right hand moved like lightning, and the detonation of his heavy automatic in the confined space was like a vindictive thunderclap. It left the girl with a strange hot sting of powder on her wrist and a dull buzzing in her ears. And through the buzzing drifted the Saint's unruffled accents:

"And plodding home, all soaked inside,

He caught pneumonia—and died."

Patricia looked at him, white-faced.

"What was it?" she asked, with the faintest tremor in her voice.

"Just an odd spot of scorpion," answered Simon Templar gently. "An unpleasant specimen of the breed—the last time I saw one like that was up in the hills north of Puruk-jahu. Looks like a pal of mine has been doing some quick travelling, or ... Yes." The Saint grinned. "Get on the phone to the Zoo, old dear, and tell 'em they can have their property back if they care to send round and scrape it off the carpet. I don't think we shall want it any more, shall we?"

Patricia shuddered.

She had stripped away the brown paper and found a little cardboard box such as cheap jewellery is sometimes packed in. When she raised the lid, the tiny blue-green horror, like a miniature deformed lobster, had been lying there in a nest of cotton-wool; while she stared at it, it had rustled on to her and . . .

"It—wasn't very big," she said, in a tone that tried to match the Saint's for lightness.

"Scorpions run to all sizes," said the Saint cheerfully, "and as often as not their poisonousness is in inverse ratio to their size in boots. Mostly, they're very minor troubles—I've been stung myself, and all I got was a sore and swollen arm. But the late lamented was a member of the one and only sure-certain and no-hokum family of homicides in the species. Pity I bumped it off so quickly—it might have been really valuable stuffed."

Patricia's finger-tips slid mechanically around the rough edges of the hole that the nickel-cased .45 bullet had smashed through the polished mahogany table before ruining the carpet and losing itself somewhere in the floor. Then she looked steadily at the Saint.

"Why should anyone send you a scorpion?" she asked.

Simon Templar shrugged.

"It was the immortal Paragot who said: 'In this country the unexpected always happens, which paralyses the brain'. And if a real man-sized Scorpion can't be expected to send his young brothers to visit his friends as a token of esteem, what can he be expected to do?"

"Is that all?"

"All what?"

"All you propose to tell me."

The Saint regarded her for a moment. He saw the tall slim lines of reposeful strength in her body, the fine moulding of the chin, the eyes as blue and level as his own. And slowly he screwed the cap on his fountain pen; and he stood up and came round the table.

"I'll tell you as much more as you want to know," he said.

"Just like in the mad old days?"

"They had their moments, hadn't they?"

She nodded.

"Sometimes I wish we were back in them," she said wistfully. "I didn't fall in love with you in a pair of Anderson and Sheppard trousers——"

"They were!" cried the Saint indignantly. "I distinctly remember ——"

Patricia laughed suddenly. Her hands fell on his shoulders.

"Give me a cigarette, boy," she said, "and tell me what's been happening."

And he did so—though what he had to tell was little enough. And Chief Inspector Teal himself knew no more. The Scorpion had grown up in darkness, had struck from the dark­ness, and crawled back deeper into the dark. Those who could have spoken dared not speak, and those who might have spoken died too soon . . .

But as he told his tale, the Saint saw the light of all the mad old days awakening again in Patricia's eyes, and it was in a full and complete understanding of that light that he came to the one thing that Chief Inspector Teal would have given his ears to know.

"Tonight, at nine——"

"You'll be there?"

"I shall," said the Saint, with the slightest tightening of his lips. "Shot up by a bloody amateur! Good God! Suppose he'd hit me! Pat, believe papa—when I pass out, there's going to be a first-class professional, hall-marked on every link, at the thick end of the gun."

Patricia, in the deep armchair, settled her sweet golden head among the cushions.

"What time do we start?" she asked calmly. For a second, glancing at him sidelong. She saw the old stubborn hardening of the line of his jaw. It happened instinc­tively, almost without his knowing it; and then suddenly he swung off the arm of the chair in the breath of an even older Saintly laughter.

"Why not?" he said. "It's impossible—preposterous—unthinkable—but why not? The old gang have gone—Dicky, Archie, Roger—gone and got spliced on to women and come over all bowler-hat. There's only you left. It'd make the vicar's wife let out one piercing squawk and swallow her knitting-needles, but who cares? If you'd really like to have another sniff at the old brew——"

"Give me the chance!"

Simon grinned.

"And you'd flop after it like a homesick walrus down a water-chute, wouldn't you?"

"Faster," she said.

"And so you shall," said the Saint. "The little date I've got for tonight will be all the merrier for an extra soul on the side of saintliness and soft drinks. And if things don't turn out exactly according to schedule, there may be an encore for your especial entertainment. Pat, I have a feeling that this is going to be our week!"

Chapter VI

It was one of the Saint's most charming characteristics that he never hurried and never worried. He insisted on spend­ing an idle hour in the cocktail bar of the May Fair Hotel, and seven-thirty had struck before he collected his car, inserted Patricia, and turned the Hirondel's long silver nose north­wards at an unwontedly moderate speed. They dined at Hatfield, after parking the Hirondel in the hotel garage, and after dinner the Saint commanded coffee and liqueurs and proceeded to incinerate two enormous cigars of a plutocrati­cally delicate bouquet. He had calculated exactly how long it would take to walk out to location, and he declined to start one moment before his time-table demanded it.

"I am a doomed man," he said sombrely, "and I have my privileges. If necessary, the Scorpion will wait for me."

Actually he had no intention of being late, for the plan of campaign that he had spent the nicotinised interval after din­ner adapting to Patricia's presence required them to be at the rendezvous a shade in advance of the rest of the party.

But this the Scorpion did not know.

He drove up slowly, with his headlights dimmed, scanning the dark shadows at the side of the road. Exactly beside the point where his shaded lights picked up the grey-white blur of the appointed milestone, he saw the tiny red glow of a ciga­rette-end, and applied his brakes gently. The cigarette-end dropped and vanished under an invisible heel, and out of the gloom a tall dark shape stretched slowly upwards.

The Scorpion's right hand felt the cold bulk of the auto­matic pistol in his pocket as his other hand lowered the near­side window. He leaned over towards the opening.

"Garrot?"

The question came in a whisper to the man at the side of the road, and he stepped slowly forward and answered in a throaty undertone.

"Yes, sir?"

The Scorpion's head was bent low, so that the man out­side the car could only see the shape of his hat.

"You obeyed your orders. That is good. Come closer. . . ."

The gun slipped silently out of the Scorpion's pocket, his forefinger curling quickly round the trigger as he drew it. He brought it up without a sound, so that the tip of the barrel rested on the ledge of the open window directly in line with the chest of the man twelve inches away. One lightning glance to left and right told him that the road was deserted.

"Now there is just one thing more——"

"There is," agreed Patricia Holm crisply. "Don't move!"

The Scorpion heard, and the glacial concentration of dispas­sionate unfriendliness in her voice froze him where he sat. He had not heard the noiseless turning of the handle of the door behind him, nor noticed the draught of cooler air that trickled through the car; but he felt the chilly hardness of the circle of steel that pressed into the base of his skull, and for a second he was paralysed. And in that second his target vanished.

"Drop that gun—outside the car. And let me hear it go!"

Again that crisp, commanding voice, as inclemently smooth as an arctic sea, whisked into his eardrums like a thin cold needle. He hesitated for a moment, and then, as the muzzle of the gun behind his neck increased its pressure by one warning ounce, he moved his hand obediently and relaxed his fingers. His automatic rattled on to the runningboard, and almost immediately the figure that he had taken for Long Harry rose into view again, and was framed in the square space of window.

But the voice that acknowledged the receipt of item, Colts, automatic, scorpions, for the use of, one, was not the voice of Long Harry. It was the most cavalier, the most mocking, the most cheerful voice that the Scorpion had ever heard—he noted those qualities about it subconsciously, for he was not in a position to revel in the discovery with any hilariously whole­hearted abandon.

"O.K. . . . And how are you, my Scorpion?"

"Who are you?" asked the man in the car.

He still kept his head lowered, and under the brim of his hat his eyes were straining into the gloom for a glimpse of the man who had spoken; but the Saint's face was in shadow. Glancing away to one side, the Scorpion could focus the head of the girl whose gun continued to impress his cervical vertebrae with the sense of its rocklike steadiness; but a dark close-fitting hat covered the upper part of her head, and a scarf that was loosely knotted about her neck had been pulled up to veil her face from the eyes downwards.

The Saint's light laugh answered the question.

"I am the world's worst gunman, and the lady behind you is the next worst, but at this range we can say that we never miss. And that's all you need to worry about just now. The question that really arises is—who are you?"

"That is what you have still to discover," replied the man in the car impassively. "Where is Garrot?"

"Ah! That's what whole synods of experts are still trying to discover. Some would say that he was simply rotting, and others would say that that was simply rot. He might be floating around the glassy sea, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, with his new regulation nightie flying in the breeze behind; or he might be attending to the central heating plant in the basement. I was never much of a theologian myself——"

"Is he dead?"

"Very," said the Saint cheerfully. "I organised the decease myself."

"You killed him?"

"Oh, no! Nothing like that about me. I merely arranged for him to die. If you survive to read your morning paper tomor­row, you may be informed that the body of an unknown man has been fished out of the Thames. That will be Long Harry. Now come out and take your curtain, sweetheart!"

The Saint stepped back and twitched open the door, pocket­ing the Scorpion's gun as he did so.

And at the same moment he had a queer feeling of futility. He knew that that was not the moment when he was destined to lay the Scorpion by the heels.

Once or twice before, in a life which had only lasted as long as it had by reason of a vigilance that never blinked for one split second, and a forethought that was accustomed to skid along half a dozen moves ahead of the opposition performers in every game with the agility of a startled streak of lightning zipping through space on ball bearings with the wind behind it, he had experienced the same sensation—of feeling as if an intangible shutter had guillotined down in front of one vitally receptive lens in his alertness. Something was going to happen —his trained intuition told him that beyond all possibility of argument, and an admixture of plain horse-sense told him what would be the general trend of that forthcoming event, equally beyond all possibility of argument—but exactly what shape that event would take was more than any faculty of his could divine.

A tingling stillness settled upon the scene, and in the still­ness some fact that he should have been reckoning with seemed to hammer frantically upon that closed window in his mind. He knew that that was so, but his brain produced no other response. Just for that fractional instant of time a cog slipped one pinion, and the faultless machine was at fault. The blind spot that roams around somewhere in every human cerebral system suddenly broke its moorings, and drifted down over the one minute area of co-ordinating apparatus of which Simon Templar had most need; and no effort of his could dislodge it.

"Step out, Cuthbert," snapped the Saint, with a slight rasp in his voice.

In the darkness inside the car, a slight blur of white caught and interested Simon's eye. It lay on the seat beside the driver. With that premonition of failure dancing about in his subcon­scious and making faces at his helpless stupidity, the Saint grabbed at the straw. He got it away—a piece of paper—and the Scorpion, seeing it go, snatched wildly but not soon enough.

Simon stuffed the paper into his coat pocket, and with his other hand he took the Scorpion by the neck.

"Step!" repeated the Saint crisply.

And then his forebodings were fulfilled—simply and straight­forwardly, as he had known they would be.

The Scorpion had never stopped the engine of his car—that was the infinitesimal yet sufficient fact that had been strug­gling ineffectively to register itself upon the Saint's brain. The sound was scarcely anything at all, even to the Saint's hypersen­sitive ears—scarcely more than a rhythmic pulsing disturbance of the stillness of the night. Yet all at once—too late—it seemed to rise and racket in his mind like the thunder of a hundred dynamos; and it was then that he saw his mistake.

But that was after the Scorpion had let in the clutch.

In the blackness, his left hand must have been stealthily engaging the gears; and then, as a pair of swiftly growing lights pin-pointed in his driving-mirror, he unleashed the car with a bang.

The Saint, with one foot in the road and the other on the running-board, was flung off his balance. As he stumbled, the jamb of the door crashed agonisingly into the elbow of the arm that reached out to the driver's collar, and something like a thousand red-hot needles prickled right down his forearm to the tip of his little finger and numbed every muscle through which it passed.

As he dropped back into the road, he heard the crack of Patricia's gun.

The side of the car slid past him, gathering speed, and he whipped out the Scorpion's own automatic. Quite casually, he plugged the off-side back tyre; and then a glare of light came into the tail of his eye, and he stepped quickly across to Patricia.

"Walk on," he said quietly.

They fell into step and sauntered slowly on, and the head­lights of the car behind threw their shadows thirty yards ahead.

"That jerk," said Patricia ruefully, "my shot missed him by a yard. I'm sorry."

Simon nodded.

"I know. It was my fault. I should have switched his engine off."

The other car flashed past them, and Simon cursed it fluently.

"The real joy of having the country full of automobiles," he said, "is that it makes gunning so easy. You can shoot anyone up anywhere, and everyone except the victim will think it was only a backfire. But it's when people can see the gun that the deception kind of disintegrates." He gazed gloomily after the dwindling tail light of the unwelcome interruption. "If only that four-wheeled gas-crocodile had burst a blood-vessel two miles back, we mightn't have been on our way home yet."

"I heard you shoot once——"

"And he's still going—on the other three wheels. I'm not expecting he'll stop to mend that leak."

Patricia sighed.

"It was short and sweet, anyway," she said. "Couldn't you have stopped that other car and followed?"

He shook his head.

"Teal could have stopped it, but I'm not a policeman. I think this is a bit early for us to start gingering up our publicity campaign."

"I wish it had been a better show, boy," said Patricia wist­fully, slipping her arm through his; and the Saint stopped to stare at her.

In the darkness, this was not very effective, but he did it.

"You bloodthirsty child!" he said.

And then he laughed.

"But that wasn't the final curtain," he said. "If you like to note it down, I'll make you a prophecy: the mortality among Scorpions is going to rise one unit, and for once it will not be my fault."

They were back in Hatfield before she had made up her mind to ask him if he was referring to Long Harry, and for once the Saint did not look innocently outraged at the sugges­tion.

"Long Harry is alive and well, to the best of my knowledge and belief," he said, "but I arranged the rough outline of his decease with Teal over the telephone. If we didn't kill Long Harry, the Scorpion would; and I figure our method will be less fatal. But as for the Scorpion himself—well, Pat, I'm dread­fully afraid I've promised to let them hang him according to the law. I'm getting so respectable these days that I feel I may be removed to Heaven in a fiery chariot at any moment."

He examined his souvenir of the evening in a corner of the deserted hotel smoking-room a little later, over a final and benedictory tankard of beer. It was an envelope, postmarked in the South-Western district at 11 a.m. that morning, and addressed to Wilfred Garniman, Esq., 28, Mallaby Road, Har­row. From it the Saint extracted a single sheet of paper, written in a feminine hand.

Dear Mr. Garniman,

Can you come round for dinner and a game of bridge on Tuesday next? Colonel Barnes will be making a fourth. Yours sincerely

(Mrs.) R. Venables.

For a space he contemplated the missive with an exasperated scowl darkening the beauty of his features; then he passed it to Patricia, and reached out for the consolation of draught Bass with one hand and for a cigarette with the other. The scowl continued to darken.

Patricia read, and looked at him perplexedly.

"It looks perfectly ordinary," she said.

"It looks a damned sight too ordinary!" exploded the Saint. "How the devil can you blackmail a man for being invited to play bridge?"

The girl frowned.

"But I don't see. Why should this be anyone else's letter?"

"And why shouldn't Mr. Wilfred Garniman be the man I want?"

"Of course. Didn't you get it from that man in the car?"

"I saw it on the seat beside him—it must have come out of his pocket when he pulled his gun."

"Well?" she prompted.

"Why shouldn't this be the beginning of the Scorpion's triumphal march towards the high jump?" asked the Saint.

"That's what I want to know."

Simon surveyed her in silence. And, as he did so, the scowl faded slowly from his face. Deep in his eyes a pair of little blue devils roused up, executed a tentative double-shuffle, and paused with their heads on one side.

"Why not?" insisted Patricia.

Slowly, gently, and with tremendous precision, the Saintly smile twitched at the corners of Simon's lips, expanded, grew, and irradiated his whole face.

"I'm blowed if I know why not," said the Saint seraphically. "It's just that I have a weakness for getting both feet on the bus before I tell the world I'm travelling. And the obvious deduction seemed too good to be true."

Chapter VII

Mallaby Road, Harrow, as the Saint discovered, was one of those jolly roads in which ladies and gentlemen live. Lords and ladies may be found in such places as Mayfair, Monte Carlo, and St. Moritz; men and women may be found almost anywhere; but Ladies and Gentlemen blossom in their full beauty only in such places as Mallaby Road, Harrow. This was a road about two hundred yards long, containing thirty of the stately homes of England, each of them a miraculously pre­served specimen of Elizabethan architecture, each of them ex­actly the same as the other twenty-nine, and each of them surrounded by identical lawns, flower-beds, and atmospheres of overpowering gentility.

Simon Templar, entering Mallaby Road at nine o'clock—an hour of the morning at which his vitality was always rather low—felt slightly stunned.

There being no other visible distinguishing marks or peculi­arities about it, he discovered No. 28 by the simple process of looking at the figures on the garden gates, and found it after inspecting thirteen other numbers which were not 28. He started on the wrong side of the road.

To the maid who opened the door he gave a card bearing the name of Mr. Andrew Herrick and the official imprint of the Daily Record. Simon Templar had no right whatever to either of these decorations, which were the exclusive property of a reporter whom he had once interviewed, but a little thing like that never bothered the Saint. He kept every visiting card that was ever given him and a few that had not been con­sciously donated, and drew appropriately upon his stock in time of need.

"Mr. Garniman is just finishing breakfast, sir," said the maid doubtfully, "but I'll ask him if he'll see you."

"I'm sure he will," said the Saint, and he said it so win­ningly that if the maid's name had been Mrs. Garniman the prophecy would have passed automatically into the realm of sublimely concrete certainties.

As it was, the prophecy merely proved to be correct.

Mr. Garniman saw the Saint, and the Saint saw Mr. Garni­man. These things happened simultaneously, but the Saint won on points. There was a lot of Mr. Garniman.

"I'm afraid I can't spare you very long, Mr. Herrick," he said. "I have to go out in a few minutes. What did you want to see me about?"

His restless grey eyes flittered shrewdly over the Saint as he spoke, but Simon endured the scrutiny with the peaceful calm which only the man who wears the suits of Anderson and Shepphard, the shirts of Harman, the shoes of Lobb, and self-refrigerating conscience can achieve.

"I came to ask you if you could tell us anything about the Scorpion," said the Saint calmly.

Well, that is one way of putting it. On the other hand, one could say with equal truth that his manner would have made a sheet of plate glass look like a futurist sculptor's impression of a bit of the Pacific Ocean during a hurricane. And the inno­cence of the Saintly face would have made a Botticelli angel look positively sinister in comparison.

His gaze rested on Mr. Wilfred Garniman's fleshy prow with no more than a reasonable directness; but he saw the momentary flicker of expression that preceded Mr. Garniman's blandly puzzled frown, and wistfully wondered whether, if he unsheathed his swordstick and prodded it vigorously into Mr. Garniman's immediate future, there would be a loud pop, or merely a faint sizzling sound. That he overcame this insidious temptation, and allowed no sign of the soul-shattering struggle to register itself on his face, was merely a tribute to the persist­ently sobering influence of Mr. Lionel Delborn's official proc­lamation and the Saint's sternly practical devotion to business.

"Scorpion?" repeated Mr. Garniman, frowning. "I'm afraid I don't quite——"

"Understand. Exactly. Well, I expected I should have to explain."

"I wish you would. I really don't know——"

"Why we should consider you an authority on scorpions. Precisely. The Editor told me you'd say that."

"If you'd——"

"Tell you the reason for this rather extraordinary procedure——"

"I should certainly see if I could help you in any way, but at the same time——"

"You don't see what use you could be. Absolutely. Now, shall we go on like this or shall we sing the rest in chorus?"

Mr. Garniman blinked.

"Do you want to ask me some questions?"

"I should love to," said the Saint heartily. "You don't think Mrs. Garniman will object?"

"Mrs. Garniman?"

"Mrs. Garniman."

Mr. Garniman blinked again.

"Are you——"

"Certain——"

"Are you certain you haven't made a mistake? There is no Mrs. Garniman."

"Don't mention it," said the Saint affably.

He turned the pages of an enormous notebook.

" 'Interviewed Luis Cartaro. Diamond rings and Marcel wave. Query—Do Pimples Make Good Mothers? Said——'

Sorry, wrong page. . . . Here we are: 'Memo. See Wilfred Garniman and ask the big—ask him about scorpions. 28 Mallaby Road, Harrow'. That's right, isn't it?"

"That's my name and address," said .Garniman shortly. "But I have still to learn the reason for this—er—"

"Visit," supplied the Saint. He was certainly feeling helpful this morning.

He closed his book and returned it to his pocket.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "we heard that the Saint was interested in you."

He was not even looking at Garniman as he spoke. But the mirror over the mantelpiece was in the tail of his eyes, and thus he saw the other's hands, which were clasped behind his back, close and unclose—once.

"The Saint?" said Garniman. "Really—"

"Are you sure I'm not detaining you?" asked the Saint, suddenly very brisk and solicitous. "If your staff will be anx­ious . . ."

"My staff can wait a few minutes."

"That's very good of you. But if we telephoned them——"

"I assure you—that is quite unnecessary."

"I shouldn't like to think of your office being disorganised——"

"You need not trouble," said Garniman. He moved across the room. "Will you smoke?"

"Thanks," said the Saint.

He had just taken the first puff from a cigarette when Garniman turned round with a carved ebony box in his hand.

"Oh," said Mr. Garniman, a trifle blankly.

"Not at all," said the Saint, who was never embarrassed. "Have one of mine?"

He extended his case, but Garniman shook his head.

"I never smoke during the day. Would it be too early to offer you a drink?"

"I'm afraid so—much too late," agreed Simon blandly.

Garniman returned the ebony box to the side table from which he had taken it. Then he swung round abruptly.

"Well?" he demanded. "What's the idea?"

The Saint appeared perplexed.

"What's what idea?" he inquired innocently.

Garniman's eyebrows came down a little.

"What's all this about scorpions——and the Saint?"

"According to the Saint ——"

"I don't understand you. I thought the Saint had disap­peared long ago."

"Then you were grievously in error, dear heart," murmured Simon Templar coolly. "Because I am myself the Saint."

He lounged against a book-case, smiling and debonair, and his lazy blue eyes rested mockingly on the other's pale plump face.

"And I'm afraid you're the Scorpion, Wilfred," he said.

For a moment Mr. Garniman stood quite still. And then he shrugged.

"I believe I read in the newspapers that you had been pardoned and had retired from business," he said, "so I suppose it would be useless for me to communicate your confession to the police. As for this scorpion that you have referred to several times——"

"Yourself," the Saint corrected him gently, and Garniman shrugged again.

"Whatever delusion you are suffering from "

"Not a delusion, Wilfred."

"It is immaterial to me what you call it."

The Saint seemed to lounge even more languidly, his hands deep in his pockets, a thoughtful and reckless smile playing lightly about his lips.

"I call it a fact," he said softly. "And you will keep your hands away from that bell until I've finished talking. . . . You are the Scorpion, Wilfred, and you're probably the most successful blackmailer of the age. I grant you that—your technique is novel and thorough. But blackmail is a nasty crime. Your ingenuity has already driven two men to suicide. That was stupid of them, but it was also very naughty of you. In fact, it would really give me great pleasure to peg you in your front garden and push this highly desirable residence over on top of you; but for one thing I've promised to reserve you for the hangman and for another thing I've got my income tax to pay, so——Excuse me one moment."

Something like a flying chip of frozen quicksilver flashed across the room and plonked crisply into the wooden panel around the bell-push towards which Garniman's fingers were sidling. It actually passed between his second and third fingers, so that he felt the swift chill of its passage and snatched his hand away as if it had received an electric shock. But the Saint continued his languid propping up of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he did not appear to have moved.

"Just do what you're told, Wilfred, and everything will be quite all right—but I've got lots more of them there missiles packed in my pants," murmured the Saint soothingly, warningly, and untruthfully—though Mr. Garniman had no means of perceiving this last adverb. "What was I saying? . . . Oh yes. I have my income tax to pay——"

Garniman took a sudden step forward, and his lips twisted in a snarl.

"Look here——"

"Where?" asked the Saint excitedly.

Mr. Garniman swallowed. The Saint heard him distinctly.

"You thrust yourself in here under a false name—you behave like a raving lunatic—then you make the most wild and fantastic accusations—you——"

"Throw knives about the place——"

"What the devil," bellowed Mr. Garniman, "do you mean by it?"

"Sir," suggested the Saint mildly.

"What the devil," bellowed Mr. Garniman, "do you mean— 'sir'?"

"Thank you," said the Saint.

Mr. Garniman glared. "What the——"

"O.K.," said the Saint pleasantly. "I heard you the second time. So long as you go on calling me 'sir', I shall know that everything is perfectly respectable and polite. And now we've lost the place again. Half a minute. . . . Here we are: 'I have my income tax to pay'— "

"Will you get out at once," asked Garniman, rather quietly, "or must I send for the police?"

Simon considered the question.

"I should send for the police," he suggested at length.

He hitched himself off the book-case and sauntered leisurely across the room. He detached his little knife from the bell panel, tested the point delicately on his thumb, and restored the weapon to the sheath under his left sleeve; and Wilfred Garniman watched him without speaking. And then the Saint turned.

"Certainly—I should send for the police," he drawled. "They will be interested. It's quite true that I had a pardon for some old offences; but whether I've gone out of business, or whether I'm simply just a little cleverer than Chief Inspector Teal, is a point that is often debated at Scotland Yard. I think that any light you could throw on the problem would be welcomed."

Garniman was still silent; and the Saint looked at him, and laughed caressingly.

"On the other hand—if you're bright enough to see a few objections to that idea—you might prefer to push quietly on to your beautiful office and think over some of the other things I've said. Particularly those pregnant words about my income tax."

"Is that all you have to say?" asked Garniman, in the same low voice; and the Saint nodded.

"It'll do for now," he said lightly. "And since you seem to have decided against the police, I think I'll beetle off and concentrate on the method by which you're going to be in­duced to contribute to the Inland Revenue."

The slightest glitter of expression came to Wilfred Garni­man's eyes for a moment, and was gone again. He walked to the door and opened it.

"I'm obliged," he said.

"After you, dear old reed-warbler," said the Saint cour­teously.

He permitted Garniman to precede him out of the room, and stood in the hall adjusting the piratical slant of his hat.

"I presume we shall meet again?" Garniman remarked.

His tone was level and conversational. And the Saint smiled.

"You might even bet on it," he said.

"Then—au revoir."

The Saint tilted back his hat and watched the other turn on his heels and go up the stairs.

Then he opened the door and stepped out; and the heavy ornamental stone flower-pot that began to gravitate earthwards at the same moment actually flicked the brim of his Stetson before it split thunderously on the flagged path an inch be­hind his right heel.

Simon revolved slowly, his hands still in his pockets, and cocked an eyebrow at the debris; and then he strolled back under the porch and applied his forefinger to the bell.

Presently the maid answered the door.

"I think Mr. Garniman has dropped the aspidistra," he murmured chattily, and resumed, his interrupted exit before the bulging eyes of an audience of one.

Chapter VIII

"But what on earth," asked Patricia helplessly, "was the point of that?"

"It was an exercise in tact," said the Saint modestly.

The girl stared.

"If I could only see it," she begun; and then the Saint laughed.

"You will, old darling," he said.

He leaned back and lighted another cigarette.

"Mr. Wilfred Garniman," he remarked, "is a surprisingly intelligent sort of cove. There was very little nonsense—and most of what there was was my own free gift to the nation. I grant you he added to his present charge-sheet by offering me a cigarette and then a drink; but that's only because, as I've told you before, he's an amateur. I'm afraid he's been reading too many thrillers, and they've put ideas into his head. But on the really important point he was most professionally bright. The way the calm suddenly broke out in the middle of the storm was quite astonishing to watch."

"And by this time," said Patricia, "he's probably going on being calm a couple of hundred miles away."

Simon shook his head.

"Not Wilfred," he said confidently. "Except when he's loos­ing off six-shooters and throwing architecture about, Wilfred is a really first-class amateur. And he is so rapid on the uptake that if he fell off the fortieth floor of the Empire Building he would be sitting on the roof before he knew what had hap­pened. Without any assistance from me, he divined that I had no intention of calling in the police. So he knew he wasn't very much worse off than he was before."

"Why?"

"He may be an amateur, as I keep telling you, but he's efficient. Long before his house started to fall to pieces on me, he'd begun to make friendly attempts to bump me off. That was because he'd surveyed all the risks before he started in business, and he figured that his graft was exactly the kind of graft that would make me sit up and take notice. In which he was darned right. I just breezed in and proved it to him. He told me himself that he was unmarried; I wasn't able to get him to tell me anything about his lawful affairs, but the butcher told me that he was supposed to be 'something in the City'—so I acquired two items of information. I also verified his home address, which was the most important thing; and I impressed him with my own brilliance and charm of person­ality, which was the next most important. I played the perfect clown, because that's the way these situations always get me, but in the intervals between laughs I did everything that I set out to do. And he knew it—as I meant him to."

"And what happens next?"

"The private war will go on," said the Saint comfortably.

His deductions, as usual, were precisely true; but there was one twist in the affairs of Wilfred Garniman of which he did not know, and if he had known of it he might not have taken life quite so easily as he did for the next few days. That is just possible.

On the morning of that first interview, he had hung around in the middle distances of Mallaby Road with intent to in­crease his store of information; but Mr. Garniman had driven off to his righteous labours in a car which the Saint knew at a glance it would be useless to attempt to follow in a taxi. On the second morning, the Saint decorated the same middle distances at the wheel of his own car, but a traffic jam at Marble Arch baulked him of his quarry. On the third morning he tried again, and collected two punctures in the first half-mile; and when he got out to inspect the damage he found sharp steel spikes strewn all over the road. Then, fearing that four consecutive seven-o'clock breakfasts might affect his health, the Saint stayed in bed on the fourth morning and did some thinking.

One error in his own technique he perceived quite clearly.

"If I'd sleuthed him on the first morning, and postponed the backchat till the second, I should have been a bright lad," he said. "My genius seems to have gone off the boil."

That something of the sort had happened was also evi­denced by the fact that during those four days the problem of evolving a really agile method of inducing Mr. Garniman to part with a proportion of his ill-gotten gains continued to elude him.

Chief Inspector Teal heard the whole story when he called in on the evening of that fourth day to make inquiries, and was almost offensive.

The Saint sat at his desk after the detective had gone, and contemplated the net result of his ninety-six hours' cerebration moodily. This consisted of a twelve-line epilogue to the Epic History of Charles.

His will was read. His father learned

Charles wished his body to be burned

With huge heroic flames of fire

Upon a Roman funeral pyre.

But Charles's pa, sole legatee,

Averse to such publicity,

Thought that his bidding might be done

Without disturbing anyone,

And, in a highly touching scene,

Cremated him at Kensal Green.

And so Charles has his little shrine

With cavalier and concubine.

Simon Templar scowled sombrely at the sheet for some time; and then, with a sudden impatience, he heaved the inkpot out of the window and stood up.

"Pat," he said, "I feel that the time is ripe for us to push into a really wicked night club and drown our sorrows in iced ginger-beer."

The girl closed her book and smiled at him.

"Where shall we go?" she asked; and then the Saint suddenly shot across the room as if he had been touched with a hot iron.

"Holy Pete!" he yelled. "Pat—old sweetheart—old angel——"

Patricia blinked at him.

"My dear old lad——"

"Hell to all dear old lads!" cried the Saint recklessly.

He took her by the arms, swung her bodily out of her chair, put her down, rumpled her hair, and kissed her.

"Paddle on," he commanded breathlessly. "Go on—go and have a bath—dress—undress—glue your face on—anything. Sew a gun into the cami-whatnots, find a butterfly net—and let's go!"

"But what's the excitement about?"

"We're going entomo-botanising. We're going to prowl around the West End fishing for beetles. We're going to look at every night club in London—I'm a member of them all. If we don't catch anything, it won't be my fault. We're going to knock the L out of London and use it to tie the Home Secretary's ears together. The voice of the flatfooted periwinkle shall be heard in the land——"

He was still burbling foolishly when Patricia fled; but when she returned he was resplendent in Gents' Evening Wear and wielding a cocktail-shaker with a wild exuberance that made her almost giddy to watch.

"For heaven's sake," she said, catching his arm, "pull your­self together and tell me something!"

"Sure," said the Saint daftly. "That nightie of yours is a dream. Or is it meant to be a dress? You can never tell, with these long skirts. And I don't want to be personal, but are you sure you haven't forgotten to put on the back or posterior part? I can see all your spine. Not that I mind, but . . .Talking of swine—spine—there was a very fine specimen at the Embassy the other night. Must have measured at least thirty-two inches from snout to——They say the man who landed it played it for three weeks. Ordinarily trout line and gaff, you know. . . ."

Patricia Holm was almost hysterical by the time they reached the Carlton, where the Saint had decided to dine. And it was not until he had ordered an extravagant dinner, with appropriate wines, that she was able to make him listen to a sober question. And then he became the picture of innocent amazement.

"But didn't you get me?" he asked. "Hadn't you figured it out for yourself? I thought you were there long ago. Have you forgotten my little exploit at the Bird's Nest? Who d'you think paid for that bit of coloured mosquito-net you're wearing? Who bought these studs I'm wearing? Who, if it comes to that, is standing us this six-course indigestion? . . . Well, some people might say it was Montgomery Bird, but personally——"

The girl gasped. "You mean that other man at the Bird's Nest was the Scorpion?"

"Who else? . . . But I never rumbled to it till tonight! I told you he was busy putting the black on Montgomery when Teal and I butted in. I overheard the whole conversation, and I was certainly curious. I made a mental note at the time to investigate that bearded battleship, but it never came into my head that it must have been Wilfred himself—I'm damned if I know why!"

Patricia nodded.

"I'd forgotten to think of it myself," she said.

"And I must have been fast asleep the whole time! Of course it was the Scorpion—and his graft's a bigger one than I ever dreamed. He's got organisation, that guy. He probably has his finger in half the wicked pies that are being cooked in this big city. If he was on to Montgomery, there's no reason why he shouldn't have got on to a dozen others that you and I can think of; and he'll be drawing his percentage from the whole bunch. I grant you I put Montgomery out of business, but ——"

"If you're right," said Patricia, "and the Scorpion hasn't done a bunk, we may find him anywhere."

"Tonight," said the Saint. "Or, if not tonight, some other night. And I'm prepared to keep on looking. But my income tax has got to be paid tomorrow, and so I want the reunion to be tonight."

"Have you got an idea?"

"I've got a dozen," said the Saint. "And one of them says that Wilfred is going to have an Evening!"

His brain had suddenly picked up its stride again. In a few minutes he had sketched out a plan of campaign as slick and agile as anything his fertile genius had ever devised. And once again he was proved a true prophet, though the proceedings took a slight twist which he had not foreseen.

For at a quarter past eleven they ran Wilfred Garniman to earth at the Golden Apple Club. And Wilfred Garniman cer­tainly had an Evening.

He was standing at the door of the ballroom, sardonically surveying the clientele, when a girl walked in and stopped beside him. He glanced round at her almost without thinking. Having done which, he stayed glancing—and thought a lot.

She was young, slim, fair-haired, and exquisite. Even Wilfred Garniman knew that. His rather tired eyes, taking in other details of her appearance, recognised the simple perfec­tion of a fifty-guinea gown. And her face was utterly innocent of guile—Wilfred Garniman had a shrewd perception of these things also. She scanned the crowd anxiously, as though looking for someone, and in due course it became apparent that the someone was not present. Wilfred Garniman was the last man she looked at. Their glances met, and held for some seconds; and then the faintest ripple of a smile touched her lips.

And exactly one hour later, Simon Templar was ringing the bell at 28, Mallaby Road, Harrow.

He was not expecting a reply, but he always liked to be sure of his ground. He waited ten minutes, ringing the bell at intervals; and then he went in by a ground-floor window. It took him straight into Mr. Garniman's study. And there, after carefully drawing the curtains, the Saint was busy for some time. For thirty-five minutes by his watch, to be exact.

And then he sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette.

"Somewhere," he murmured thoughtfully, "there is a catch in this."

For the net result of a systematic and expert search had panned out at precisely nil.

And this the Saint was not expecting. Before he left the Carlton, he had propounded one theory with all the force of an incontestable fact.

"Wilfred may have decided to take my intrusion calmly, and trust that he'll be able to put me out of the way before I managed to strafe him good and proper; but he'd never leave himself without at least one line of retreat. And that implies being able to take his booty with him. He'd never have put it in a bank, because there'd always be the chance that someone might notice things and get curious. It will have been in a safe deposit; but it won't be there now."

Somewhere or other—somewhere within Wilfred Garniman's easy reach—there was a large quantity of good solid cash, ready and willing to be converted into all manner of music by anyone who picked it up and offered it a change of address. It might have been actually on Wilfred Garniman's person; but the Saint didn't think so. He had decided that it would most probably be somewhere in the house at Harrow; and as he drove out there he had prepared to save time by considering the potential hiding-places in advance. He had thought of many, and discarded them one by one, for various reasons; and his final judgment had led him unhesitatingly into the very room where he had spent thirty-five fruitless minutes . . . and where he was now getting set to spend some more.

"This is the Scorpion's sacred lair," he figured, "and Wilfred wouldn't let himself forget it. He'd play it up to himself for all it was worth. It's the inner sanctum of the great ruthless organisation that doesn't exist. He'd sit in that chair in the evenings—at that desk—there—thinking what a wonderful man he was. And he'd look at whatever innocent bit of interior decoration hides his secret cache, and gloat over the letters and dossiers that he's got hidden there, and the money they've brought in or are going to bring in—the fat, slimy, wallowing slug. . . ."

Again his eyes travelled slowly round the room. The plainly papered walls could have hidden nothing, except behind the pictures, and he had tried every one of those. Dummy books he had ruled out at once, for a servant may always take down a book; but he had tested the back of every shelf—and found nothing. The whole floor was carpeted, and he gave that no more than a glance: his analysis of Wilfred Garniman's august meditations did not harmonise with the vision of the same gentleman crawling about on his hands and knees. And every drawer of the desk was already unlocked, and not one of them contained anything of compromising interest.

And that appeared to exhaust the possibilities. He stared speculatively at the fireplace—but he had done that before. It ignored the exterior architecture of the building and was a plain modern affair of blue tiles and tin, and it would have been difficult to work any grisly gadgets into its bluntly bour­geois lines. Or, it appeared, into the lines of anything else in that room.

"Which," said the Saint drowsily, "is absurd."

There remained of course, Wilfred Garniman's bedroom— the Saint had long since listed that as the only feasible alterna­tive. But, somehow, he didn't like it. Plunder and pink poplin pyjamas didn't seem a psychologically satisfactory combination —particularly when the pyjamas must be presumed to sur­round something like Wilfred Garniman must have looked like without his Old Harrovian tie. The idea did not ring a bell. And yet, if the boodle and etceteral appurtenances there­of and howsoever were not in the bedroom, they must be in the study—some blistered whereabouts or what not. . . .

"Which," burbled the Saint, "is absluly' posrous. . . ."

The situation seemed less and less annoying. ... It really didn't matter very much. . . . Wilfred Garniman, if one came to think of it, was even fatter than Teal . . . and one made allowances for detectives. . . . Teal was fat, and Long Harry was long, and Patricia played around with Scorpions; which was all very odd and amusing, but nothing to get worked up about before breakfast, old dear . . .

Chapter IX

Somewhere in the infinite darkness appeared a tiny speck of white. It came hurtling towards him; and as it came it grew larger and whiter and more terrible, until it seemed as if it must smash and smother and pulp him into the squashed wreckage of the whole universe at his back. He let out a yell, and the upper half of the great white sky fell back like a shutter, sending a sudden blaze of dazzling light into his eyes. The lower bit of white touched his nose and mouth damply, and an acrid stinging smell stabbed right up into the top of his head and trickled down his throat like a thin stream of condensed fire. He gasped, coughed, choked—and saw Wilfred Garniman.

"Hullo, old toad," said the Saint weakly.

He breathed deeply, fanning out of his nasal passages the fiery tingle of the restorative that Garniman had made him inhale. His head cleared magically, so completely that for a few moments it felt as if a cold wind had blown clean through it; and the dazzle of the light dimmed out of his eyes. But he looked down, and saw that his wrists and ankles were securely bound.

"That's a pretty useful line of dope, Wilfred," he mur­mured huskily. "How did you do it?"

Garniman was folding up his handkerchief and returning it to his pocket, working with slow meticulous hands.

"The pressure of your head on the back of the chair re­leased the gas," he replied calmly. "It's an idea of my own—I have always been prepared to have to entertain undesirable visitors. The lightest pressure is sufficient."

Simon nodded.

"It certainly is a great game," he remarked. "I never noticed a thing, though I remember now that I was blithering to myself rather inanely just before I went under. And so the little man works off his own bright ideas. . . . Wilfred, you're coming on."

"I brought my dancing partner with me," said Garniman, quite casually.

He waved a fat indicative hand; and the Saint, squirming over to follow the gesture, saw Patricia in another chair. For a second or two he looked at her; then he turned slowly round again.

"There's no satisfying you jazz fiends, is there?" he drawled. "Now I suppose you'll wind up the gramophone and start again. . . . But the girl seems to have lost the spirit of the thing. . . ."

Garniman sat down at the desk and regarded the Saint with the heavy inscrutable face of a great gross image.

"I had seen her before, dancing with you at the Jericho, long before we first met—I never forget a face. After she had succeeded in planting herself on me, I spent a little time assuring myself that I was not mistaken; and then the solution was simple. A few drops from a bottle that I am never without —in her champagne—and the impression was that she became helplessly drunk. She will recover without our assistance, per­haps in five minutes, perhaps in half an hour—according to her strength." Wilfred Garniman's fleshy lips loosened in the travesty of a smile. "You underestimated me, Templar."

"That," said the Saint, "remains to be seen."

Mr. Garniman shrugged.

"Need I explain that you have come to the end of your interesting and adventurous life?"

Simon twitched an eyebrow, and slid his mouth mockingly sideways.

"What—not again?" he sighed, and Garniman's smooth fore­head crinkled.

"I don't understand."

"But you haven't seen so many of these situations through as I have, old horse," said the Saint. "I've lost count of the number of times this sort of thing has happened to me. I know the tradition demands it, but I think they might give me a rest sometimes. What's the programme this time—do you sew me up in the bath and light the geyser, or am I run through the mangle and buried under the billiard-table? Or can you think of something really original?"

Garniman inclined his head ironically. "I trust you will find my method satisfactory," he said. He lighted a cigarette, and rose from the desk again; and as he picked up a length of rope from the floor and moved across to Patricia, the Saint warbled on in the same tone of gentle weariness.

"Mind how you fix those ankles, Wilfred. That gauzy silk stuff you see on the limbs costs about five pounds a leg, and it ladders if a fly settles on it. Oh, and while we're on the subject: don't let's have any nonsense about death or dishonour. The child mightn't want to die. And besides, that stuff is played out, anyway. . . ."

Garniman made no reply.

He continued with his task in his ponderous methodical way, making every movement with immensely phlegmatic de­liberation. The Saint, who had known many criminals, and who was making no great exaggeration when he said that this particular situation had long since lost all its pristine charm for him, could recall no one in his experience who had ever been so dispassionate. Cold-blooded ruthlessness, a granite im­passivity, he had met before; but through it all, deep as it might be, there had always run a perceptible taut thread of vindictive purpose. In Wilfred Garniman there showed noth­ing of this. He went about his work in the same way that he might have gone about the setting of a mouse-trap—with ele­phantine efficiency, and a complete blank in the ideological compartment of his brain. And Simon Templar knew with an eerie intuition that this was no pose, as it might have been in others. And then he knew that Wilfred Garniman was mad.

Garniman finished, and straightened up. And then, still with­out speaking, he picked Patricia up in his arms and carried her out of the room.

The Saint braced his muscles.

His whole body tightened to the effort like a tempered steel spring, and his arms swelled and corded up until the sleeves were stretched and strained around them. For an instant he was absolutely motionless, except for the tremors of titanic tension that shuddered down his frame like wind-ripples over a quiet pool. . . . And then he relaxed and went limp, loos­ing his breath in a great gasp. And the Saintly smile crawled a trifle crookedly over his face.

"Which makes things difficult," he whispered—to the four unanswering walls.

For the cords about his wrists still held him firmly.

Free to move as he chose, he could have broken those ropes with his hands; but bound as he was, he could apply scarcely a quarter of his strength. And the ropes were good ones—new, half-inch, three-ply Manila. He had made the test; and he relaxed. To have struggled longer would have wasted valuable strength to no purpose. And he had come out without Belle, the little knife that ordinarily went with him everywhere, in a sheath strapped to his left forearm—the knife that had saved him on countless other occasions such as this.

Clumsily he pulled himself out of the chair, and rolled the few yards to the desk. There was a telephone there; he dragged himself to his knees and lifted the receiver. The exchange took an eternity to answer. He gave Teal's private number, and heard the preliminary buzz in the receiver as he was connected up; and then Wilfred Garniman spoke behind him, from the doorway.

"Ah! You are still active, Templar?"

He crossed the room with quick lumbering strides, and snatched the instrument away. For a second or two he listened with the receiver at his ear; then he hung it up and put the telephone down at the far end of the desk.

"You have not been at all successful this evening," he re­marked stolidly.

"But you must admit we keep on trying," said the Saint cheerfully.

Wilfred Garniman took the cigarette from his mouth. His expressionless eyes contemplated the Saint abstractedly.

"I am beginning to believe that your prowess was overrated. You came here hoping to find documents or money—perhaps both. You were unsuccessful."

"Er—temporarily."

"Yet a little ingenuity would have saved you from an un­pleasant experience—and shown you quite another function of this piece of furniture."

Garniman pointed to the armchair. He tilted it over on its back, prised up a couple of tacks, and allowed the canvas finishing of the bottom to fall away. Underneath was a dark steel door, secured by three swivel catches.

"I made the whole chair myself—it was a clever piece of work," he said; and then he dismissed the subject almost as if it had never been raised. "I shall now require you to rejoin your friend, Templar. Will you be carried, or would you prefer to walk?"

"How far are we going?" asked the Saint cautiously.

"Only a few yards."

"I'll walk, thanks."

Garniman knelt down and tugged at the ankle ropes. A strand slipped under his manipulations, giving an eighteen-inch hobble.

"Stand up."

Simon obeyed. Garniman gripped his arm and led him out of the room. They went down the hall, and passed through a low door under the stairs. They stumbled down a flight of narrow stone steps. At the bottom, Garniman picked up a candlestick from a niche in the wall and steered the Saint along a short flagged passage.

"You know, Wilf," murmured the Saint conversationally, "this has happened to me twice before in the last six months.

And each time it was gas. Is it going to be gas again this time, or are you breaking away from the rules?"

"It will not be gas," replied Garniman flatly.

He was as heavily passionless as a contented animal. And the Saint chattered on blithely.

"I hate to disappoint you—as the actress said to the bishop— but I really can't oblige you now. You must see it, Wilfred. I've got such a lot more to do before the end of the volume, and it'd wreck the whole show if I went and got bumped off in the first story. Have a heart, dear old Garbage-man!"

The other made no response; and the Saint sighed. In the matter of cross-talk comedy, Wilfred Garniman was a depress­ingly feeble performer. In the matter of murder, on the other hand, he was probably depressingly efficient; but the Saint couldn't help feeling that he made death a most gloomy busi­ness.

And then they came into a small low vault; and the Saint saw Patricia again.

Her eyes were open, and she looked at him steadily, with the faintest of smiles on her lips.

"Hullo, boy.'"

"Hullo, lass."

That was all.

Simon glanced round. In the centre of the floor there was a deep hole, and beside it was a great mound of earth. There was a dumpy white sack in one corner, and a neat conical heap of sand beside it.

Wilfred Garniman explained, in his monotonously apathetic way.

"We tried to sink a well here, but we gave it up. The hole is only about ten feet deep—it was not filled up again. I shall fill it up tonight."

He picked up the girl and took her to the hole in the floor. Dropping on one knee at the edge, he lowered her to the stretch of his arms and let go. . . . He came back to the Saint, dusting his trousers.

"Will you continue to walk?" he inquired.

Simon stepped to the side of the pit, and turned. For a moment he gazed into the other man's eyes—the eyes of a man empty of the bowels of compassion. But the Saint's blue gaze was as cold and still as a polar sea.

"You're an overfed, pot-bellied swamp-hog," he said; and then Garniman pushed him roughly backwards.

Quite unhurriedly, Wilfred Garniman took off his coat, un­fastened his cuff-links, and rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. He opened the sack of cement and tipped out its contents into a hole that he trampled in the heap of sand. He picked up a spade, looked about him, and put it down again. Without the least variation of his heavily sedate stride he left the cellar, leaving the candle burning on the floor. In three or four minutes he was back again, carrying a brimming pail of water in either hand; and with the help of these he continued his unaccustomed labour, splashing gouts of water on his mate­rials and stirring them carefully with the spade.

It took him over half an hour to reduce the mixture to a consistency smooth enough to satisfy him, for he was an inex­perienced worker and yet he could afford to make no mistake. At the end of that time he was streaming with sweat, and his immaculate white collar and shirt-front were grubbily wilting rags; but those facts did not trouble him. No one will ever know what was in his mind while he did that work: perhaps he did not know himself, for his face was blank and tranquil.

His flabby muscles must have been aching, but he did not stop to rest. He took the spade over to the hole in the floor. The candle sent no light down there, but in the darkness he could see an irregular blur of white—he was not interested to gloat over it. Bending his back again, he began to shovel the earth back into the hole. It took an astonishing time, and he was breathing stertorously long before he had filled the pit up loosely level with the floor. Then he dropped the spade and tramped over the surface, packing it down tight and hard.

And then he laid over it the cement that he had prepared, finishing it off smoothly level with the floor.

Even then he did not rest—he was busy for another hour, filling the pails with earth and carrying them up the stairs and out into the garden and emptying them over the flowerbeds. He had a placidly accurate eye for detail and an enormous capacity for taking pains, had Mr. Wilfred Garniman; but it is doubtful if he gave more than a passing thought to the eternal meaning of what he had done.

Chapter X

To Mr. Teal, who in those days knew the Saint's habits almost as well as he knew his own, it was merely axiomatic that breakfast and Simon Templar coincided somewhere be­tween the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.; and therefore it is not surprising that the visit which he paid to 7, Upper Berkeley Mews on one historic morning resulted in a severe shock to his system. For a few moments after the door had been opened to him he stood bovinely rooted to the mat, looking like some watcher of the skies who has just seen the Great Bear turn a back-somersault and march rapidly over the horizon in column of all fours. And when he had pulled himself together, he followed the Saint into the sitting-room with the air of a man who is not at all certain that there is no basin of water balanced over the door to await his entrance.

"Have some gum, old dear," invited the Saint hospitably; and Mr. Teal stopped by the table and blinked at him.

"What's the idea?" he demanded suspiciously.

The Saint looked perplexed.

"What idea, brother?"

"Is your clock fast, or haven't you been to bed yet?"

Simon grinned.

"Neither. I'm going to travel, and Pat and I have got to push out and book passages and arrange for international overdrafts and all that sort of thing." He waved towards Patri­cia Holm, who was smoking a cigarette over The Times. "Pat, you have met Claud Eustace, haven't you? Made his pile in Consolidated Gas. Mr. Teal, Miss Holm. Miss Holm, Mr. Teal. Consider yourselves divorced."

Teal picked up the packet of spearmint that sat sedately in the centre of the table, and put it down again uneasily. He produced another packet from his own pocket.

"Did you say you were going away?" he asked.

"I did. I'm worn out, and I feel I need a complete rest—I did a couple of hours' work yesterday, and at my time of life . . ."

"Where were you going?"

The Saint shrugged.

"Doubtless Thomas Cook will provide. We thought of some nice warm islands. It may be the Canaries, the Balearic or Little by Little ——"

"And what about the Scorpion?"

"Oh yes, the Scorpion . . . Well, you can have him all to yourself now, Claud."

Simon glanced towards the mantelpiece, and the detective followed his gaze. There was a raw puncture in the panelling where a stiletto had recently reposed, but the papers that had been pinned there were gone. The Saint took the sheaf from his pocket.

"I was just going to beetle along and pay my income tax," he said airily. "Are you walking Hanover Square way?"

Teal looked at him thoughtfully, and it may be recorded to the credit of the detective's somnolently cyclopean self-control that not a muscle of his face moved.

"Yes, I'll go with you—I expect you'll be wanting a drink," he said; and then his eyes fell on the Saint's wrist.

He motioned frantically at it.

"Did you sprain that trying to get the last drops out of the barrel?" he inquired.

Simon pulled down his sleeve.

"As a matter of fact, it was a burn," he said.

"The Scorpion?"

"Patricia."

Teal's eyes descended one millimetre. He looked at the girl, and she smiled at him in a seraphic way which made the detective's internal organs wriggle. Previously, he had been wont to console himself with the reflection that that peculiarly exasperating kind of sweetness in the smile was the original and unalienable copyright of one lone face out of all the faces in the wide world. He returned his gaze to the Saint.

"Domestic strife?" he queried, and Simon assumed an expres­sion of pained reproach.

"We aren't married," he said.

Patricia flicked her cigarette into the fireplace and came over. She tucked one hand into the belt of her plain tweed suit, and laid the other on Simon Templar's shoulder. And she continued to smile seraphically upon the detective.

"You see, we were being buried alive," she explained simply.

"All down in the—er—what's-its of the earth," said the Saint.

"Simon hadn't got his knife, but he remembered his cigarette-lighter just in time. He couldn't reach it himself, so I had to do it. And he never made a sound—I never knew till afterwards ——''

"It was a minor detail," said the Saint.

He twitched a small photograph from his pocket and passed it to Teal.

"From the Scorpion's passport," he said, "I found it in a drawer of his desk. That was before he caught me with as neat a trick as I've come across—the armchairs in his study will repay a sleuth-like investigation, Claud. Then, if you pass on to the cellars, you'll find a piece of cement flooring that had only just begun to floor. Pat and I are supposed to be under there. Which reminds me—if you decide to dig down in the hope of finding us, you'll find my second-best boiled shirt somewhere in the depths. We had to leave it behind. I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but I can give you my word that even the most pliant rubber dickey rattles like a suit of armour when you're trying to move quietly."

For a space the detective stared at him.

Then he took out a notebook.

It was, in its way, one of the most heroic things he ever did.

"Where is this place?" he asked.

"Twenty-eight, Mallaby Road, Arrer. The name is Wilfred Garniman. And about that shirt—if you had it washed at the place where they do yours before you go toddling round the night clubs, and sent it on to me at Palma, I expect I could find a place to burn it. And I've got some old boots upstairs which I thought maybe you might like——"

Teal replaced his notebook and pencil.

"I don't want to ask too many questions," he said. "But if Garniman knows you got away——"

Simon shook his head.

"Wilfred does not know. He went out to fetch some water to dilute the concrete, and we moved while he was away. Later on I saw him carting out the surplus earth and dumping it on the gardening notes. When you were playing on the sands of Southend in a pair of pink shrimping drawers, Teal, did you ever notice that you can always dig more out of a hole than you can put back in it? Wilfred had quite enough mud left over to make him happy."

Teal nodded.

"That's all I wanted," he said, and the Saint smiled.

"Perhaps we can give you a lift," he suggested politely.

They drove to Hanover Square in the Saint's car. The Saint was in form. Teal knew that by the way he drove. Teal was not happy about it. Teal was even less happy when the Saint insisted on being escorted into the office.

"I insist on having police protection," he said. "Scorpions I can manage, but when it comes to tax collectors . . . Not that there's a great difference. The same threatening letters, the same merciless bleeding of the honest toiler, the same bleary

"All right," said Teal wearily.

He climbed out of the car, and followed behind Patricia; and so they climbed to the general office. At the high counter which had been erected to protect the clerks from the savage assaults of their victims the Saint halted, and clamoured in a loud voice to be ushered into the presence of Mr. Delborn.

Presently a scared little man came to the barrier.

"You wish to see Mr. Delborn, sir?"

"I do."

"Yes, sir. What is your business, sir?"

"I'm a burglar," said the Saint innocently.

"Yes, sir. What did you wish to see Mr. Delborn about, sir?"

"About the payment of my income tax, Algernon. I will see Mr. Delborn himself and nobody else; and if I don't see him at once, I shall not only refuse to pay a penny of my tax, but I shall also take this hideous office to pieces and hide it in various drains belonging to the London County Council. By the way, do you know Chief Inspector Teal? Mr. Teal, Mr.Veal. Mr. Veal——"

"Will you take a seat, sir?"

"Certainly," said the Saint.

He was half-way down the stairs when Teal caught him.

"Look here, Templar," said the detective, breathing heavily through the nose, "I don't care if you have got the Scorpion in your pocket, but if this is your idea of being funny——"

Simon put down the chair and scratched his head.

"I was only obeying instructions," he said plaintively. "I admit it seemed rather odd, but I thought maybe Lionel hadn't got a spare seat in his office."

Teal and Patricia between them got him as far as the top of the stairs where he put the chair down, sat on it, and refused to move.

"I'm going home," said Patricia finally.

"Bring some oranges back with you," said the Saint. "And don't forget your knitting. What time do the early doors open?"

The situation was only saved by the return of the harassed clerk.

"Mr. Delborn will see you, sir."

He led the way through the general office and opened a door at the end.

"What name, sir?"

"Ghandi," said the Saint, and stalked into the room.

And there he stopped.

For the first time in his life, Simon Templar stood frozen into a kind of paralysis of sheer incredulous startlement.

In its own genre, that moment was the supremely flabber­gasting instant of his life. Battle, murder, and sudden death of all kinds and varieties notwithstanding, the most hectic mo­ments of the most earth-shaking cataclysms in which he had been involved paled their ineffectual fires beside the eye-shriv­elling dazzle of that second. And the Saint stood utterly still, with every shadow of expression wiped from his face, momentarily robbed of even his facile power of speech, simply staring.

For the man at the desk was Wilfred Garniman.

Wilfred Garniman himself, exactly as the Saint had seen him on that very first expedition to Harrow—black-coated, black-tied, the perfect office gentleman with a fifty-two-inch waist. Wilfred Garniman sitting there in a breathless immobil­ity that matched the Saint's, but with the prosperous colour draining from his face and his coarse lips going grey.

And then the Saint found his voice.

"Oh, it's you, Wilfred, is it?" The words trickled very softly into the deathly silence. "And this is Simon Templar speaking —not a ghost. I declined to turn into a ghost, even though I was buried. And Patricia Holm did the same. She's outside at this very moment, if you'd like to see her. And so is Chief Inspector Teal—with your photograph in his pocket. . . . Do you know that this is very tough on me, sweetheart? I've promised you to Teal, and I ought to be killing you myself. Buried Pat alive, you did—or you meant to. ... And you're the greasy swine that's been pestering me to pay your knock-kneed taxes. No wonder you took to Scorping in your spare time. I wouldn't mind betting you began in this very office, and the capital you started with was the things you wormed out of people under the disguise of official inquiries. . . . And I came in to give you one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven pounds, nineteen and fivepence of your own money, all out of the strong-box under that very interesting chair, Wilfred——"

He saw the beginning of the movement that Garniman made, and hurled himself sideways. The bullet actually skinned one of his lower ribs, though he did not know it until later. He swerved into the heavy desk, and got his hands under the edge. For one weird instant he looked from a range of two yards into the eyes of Wilfred Garniman, who was in the act of rising out of his chair. Garniman's automatic was swinging round for a second shot, and the thunder of the first seemed to still be hanging in the air. And behind him Simon heard the rattle of the door.

And then—to say that he tipped the desk over would be absurd. To have done anything so feeble would have been a sentence of death pronounced simultaneously upon Patricia Holm and Claud Eustace Teal and himself—at least. The Saint knew that.

But as the others burst into the room, it seemed as if the Saint gathered up the whole desk in his two hands, from the precarious hold that he had on it, and flung it hugely and terrifically into the wall; and Wilfred Garniman was carried before it like a great bloated fly before a cannon-ball. . . .And, really, that was that. . . .

The story of the Old Bailey trial reached Palma about six weeks later, in an ancient newspaper which Patricia Holm produced one morning.

Simon Templar was not at all interested in the story; but he was vastly interested in an illustration thereto which he dis­covered at the top of the page. The Press photographer had done his worst; and Chief Inspector Teal, the hero of the case, caught unawares in the very act of inserting some fresh chew­ing gum in his mouth as he stepped out on to the pavement of Newgate Street, was featured looking almost libellously like an infuriated codfish afflicted with some strange uvular growth.

Simon clipped out the portrait and pasted it neatly at the head of a large plain postcard. Underneath it he wrote:

Claud Eustace Teal, when overjoyed,

Wiggled his dexter adenoid;

For well-bred policemen think it rude

To show their tonsils in the nude.

"That ought to come like a ray of sunshine into Claud's dreary life," said the Saint, surveying his handiwork.

He may have been right; for the postcard was delivered in error to an Assistant Commissioner who was gifted with a particularly acid tongue, and it is certain that Teal did not hear the last of it for many days.

PART II

The Million Pound Day

Chapter 1

The scream pealed out at such point-blank range, and was strangled so swiftly and suddenly, that Simon Templar opened his eyes and wondered for a moment whether he had dreamed it.

The darkness inside the car was impenetrable; and outside, through the thin mist that a light frost had etched upon the windows, he could distinguish nothing but the dull shadows of a few trees silhouetted against the flat pallor of the sky. A glance at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch showed that it was a quarter to five; he had slept barely two hours.

A week-end visit to some friends who lived on the remote margin of Cornwall, about thirteen inches from Land's End, had terminated a little more than seven hours earlier, when the Saint, feeling slightly limp after three days in the company of two young souls who were convalescing from a recent honey­moon, had pulled out his car to make the best of a clear night road back to London. A few miles beyond Basingstoke he had backed into a side lane for a cigarette, a sandwich, and a nap. The cigarette and the sandwich he had had; but the nap should have lasted until the hands of his watch met at six-thirty and the sky was white and clear with the morning—he had fixed that time for himself, and had known that his eyes would not open one minute later.

And they hadn't. But they shouldn't have opened one min­ute earlier, either. . . . And the Saint sat for a second or two without moving, straining his ears into the stillness for the faintest whisper of sound that might answer the question in his mind, and driving his memory backwards into those last blank moments of sleep to recall the sound that had woken him. And then, with a quick stealthy movement, he turned the handle of the door and slipped out into the road.

Before that, he had realised that that scream could never have been shaped in his imagination. The sheer shrieking horror of it still rang between his eardrums and his brain; the hideous high-pitched sob on which it had died seemed still to be quivering on the air. And the muffled patter of running feet which had reached him as he listened had served only to confirm what he already knew.

He stood in the shadow of the car with the cold damp smell of the dawn in his nostrils, and heard the footsteps coming closer. They were coming towards him down the main road— now that he was outside the car, they tapped into his brain with an unmistakable clearness. He heard them so distinctly, in the utter silence that lay all around, that he felt he could almost see the man who had made them. And he knew that that was the man who had screamed. The same stark terror that had gone shuddering through the very core of the scream was beating out the wild tattoo of those running feet—the same stomach-sinking dread translated into terms of muscular reaction. For the feet were not running as a man ordinarily runs. They were kicking, blinding, stumbling, hammering along in the mad muscle-binding heart-bursting flight of a man whose reason has tottered and cracked before a vision of all the tortures of the Pit. ...

Simon felt the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling. In another instant he could hear the gasping agony of the man's breathing, but he stayed waiting where he was. He had moved a little way from the car, and now he was crouched right by the corner of the lane, less than a yard from the road, com­pletely hidden in the blackness under the hedge.

The most elementary process of deduction told him that no man would run like that unless the terror that drove him on was close upon his heels—-and no man would have screamed like that unless he had felt cold upon his shoulder the clutch­ing hand of an intolerable doom. Therefore the Saint waited.

And then the man reached the corner of the lane.

Simon got one glimpse of him—a man of middle height and build, coatless, with his head back and his fists working. Under the feebly lightening sky his face showed thin and hollow-cheeked, pointed at the chin by a small peaked beard, the eyes starting from their sockets.

He was done in—finished. He must have been finished two hundred yards back. But as he reached the corner the ultimate end came. His feet blundered again, and he plunged as if a trip-wire had caught him across the knees. And then it must have been the last instinct of the hunted animal that made him turn and reel round into the little lane; and the Saint's strong arms caught him as he fell.

The man stared up into the Saint's face. His lips tried to shape a word, but the breath whistled voicelessly in his throat. And then his eyes closed and his body went limp, and Simon lowered him gently to the ground.

The Saint straightened up again, and vanished once more into the gloom. The slow bleaching of the sky seemed only to intensify the blackness that sheltered him, while beyond the shadows a faint light was beginning to pick out the details of the road. And Simon heard the coming of the second man.

The footfalls were so soft that he was not surprised that he had not heard them before. At the moment when he picked them up they could only have been a few yards away, and to anyone less keen of hearing they would still have been inaudi­ble. But the Saint heard them—heard the long-striding ghostly sureness of them padding over the macadam—and a second tingle of eerie understanding crawled over his scalp and glis­saded down his spine like a needle-spray of ice-cold water. For the feet that made those sounds were human, but the feet were bare. . . .

And the man turned the corner.

Simon saw him as clearly as he had seen the first—more clearly.

He stood huge and straight in the opening of the lane, gazing ahead into the darkness. The wan light in the sky fell evenly across the broad black primitive-featured face, and stippled glistening silver high-lights on the gigantic ebony limbs. Except for a loosely knotted loin-cloth he was naked, and the gleaming surfaces of his tremendous chest shifted rhythmically to the mighty movements of his breathing. And the third and last thrill of comprehension slithered clammily into the small of the Saint's back as he saw all these things—as he saw the savage ruthlessness of purpose behind the mere physical pres­ence of that magnificent brute-man, sensed the primeval lust of cruelty in the parting of the thick lips and the glitter of the eyes. Almost he seemed to smell the sickly stench of rotting jungles seeping its fetid breath into the clean cold air of that English dawn, swelling in hot stifling waves about the figure of the pursuing beast that had taken the continents and the centuries in its bare-foot loping stride.

And while Simon watched, fascinated, the eyes of the negro fell on the sprawling figure that lay in the middle of the lane, and he stepped forward with a snarl of a beast rumbling in his throat.

And it was then that the Saint, with an effort which was as much physical as mental, tore from his mind the steely tenta­cles of the hypnotic spell that had held him paralysed for those few seconds—and also moved.

"Good morning," spoke the Saint politely, but that was the last polite speech he made that day. No one who had ever heard him talk had any illusions about the Saint's opinion of Simon Templar's physical prowess, and no one who had ever seen him fight had ever seriously questioned the accuracy of those opinions; but this was the kind of occasion on which the Saint knew that the paths of glory lead but to the grave. Which may help to explain why, after that single preliminary concession to the requirements of his manual of etiquette, he heaved the volume over the horizon and proceeded to lapse from grace in no uncertain manner.

After all, that encyclopedia of all the social virtues, though it had some cheering and helpful suggestions to offer on the subject of addressing letters to archdeacons, placing Grand Lamas in the correct relation of precedence to Herzegovinian Grossherzöge, and declining invitations to open bazaars in aid of Homes for Ichthyotic Vulcaniser's Mates, had never even envisaged such a situation as that which was then up for inspection; and the Saint figured that the rules allowed him a free hand.

The negro, crouching in the attitude in which the Saint's gentle voice had frozen him, was straining his eyes into the darkness. And out of that darkness, like a human cannon-ball, the Saint came at him.

He came in a weird kind of twisting leap that shot him out of the obscurity with no less startling a suddenness than if he had at that instant materialised out of the fourth dimension. And the negro simply had no time to do anything about it. For that suddenness was positively the only intangible quality about the movement. It had, for instance, a very tangible momentum, which must have been one of the most painfully concrete things that the victim of it had ever encountered. That momentum started from the five toes of the Saint's left foot; it rippled up his left calf, surged up his left thigh, and gathered to itself a final wave of power from the big muscles of his hips. And then, in that twisting action of his body, it was swung on into another channel: it travelled down the tautening fibres of his right leg, gathering new force in every inch of its progress, and came right out at the end of his shoe with all the smashing violence of a ten-ton stream of water cramped down into the finest nozzle of a garden hose. And at the very instant when every molecule of shattering velocity and weight was concentrated in the point of that right shoe, the point impacted precisely in the geometrical centre of the negro's stomach.

If there had been a football at that point of impact, a rag of shredded leather might reasonably have been expected to come to earth somewhere north of the Aberdeen Providential So­ciety Buildings. And the effect upon the human target, co­lossus though it was, was just as devastating, even if a trifle less spectacular.

Simon heard the juicy whuck! of his shoe making contact, and saw the man travel three feet backwards as if he had been caught in the full fairway of a high-speed hydraulic battering-ram. The wheezy phe-e-ew of electrically emptied lungs merged into the synchronised sound effects, and ended in a little grunt­ing cough. And then the negro seemed to dissolve on to the roadway like a statue of sculptured butter caught in the blast of a superheated furnace. . . .

Simon jerked open one of the rear doors of the car, picked the bearded man lightly off the ground, heaved him upon the cushions, and slammed the door again.

Five seconds later he was behind the wheel, and the self-starter was whirring over the cold engine.

The headlights carved a blazing chunk of luminance out of the dimness as he touched a switch, and he saw the negro bucking up on to his hands and knees. He let in the clutch, and the car jerked away with a spluttering exhaust. One run­ning-board rustled in the long grass of the banking as he lashed through the narrow gap; and then he was spinning round into the wide main road.

Ten yards ahead, in the full beam of the headlights a uni­formed constable tumbled off his bicycle and ran to the middle of the road with outstretched hands; and Simon almost gasped.

Instantaneously he realised that the scream which had woken him must have been audible for some considerable distance—the policeman's attitude could not more clearly have indicated a curiosity which the Saint was at that moment instinctively disinclined to meet.

He eased up, and the constable guilelessly fell around to the side of the car.

And then the Saint revved up his engine, let in the clutch again with a bang, and went roaring on through the dawn with the policeman's shout tattered to futile fragments in the wind behind him.

Chapter II

It was full daylight when he turned into Upper Berke­ley Mews and stopped before his own front door, and the door opened even before he had switched off the engine.

"Hullo, boy!" said Patricia. "I wasn't expecting you for another hour."

"Neither was I," said the Saint.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, and stood there with his cap tilted rakishly to the back of his head and his leather coat swinging back from wide square shoulders, peeling off his gloves and smiling one of his most cryptic smiles.

"I've brought you a new pet," he said.

He twitched open the door behind him, and she peered puzzledly into the back of the car. The passenger was still unconscious, lolling back like a limb mummy in the travelling rug which the Saint had tucked round him, his white face turned blankly to the roof.

"But—who is he?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said the Saint blandly. "But for the purposes of convenient reference I have christened him Beppo. His shirt has a Milan tab on it—Sherlock Holmes himself could deduce no more. And up to the present, he hasn't been sufficiently compos to offer any information."

Patricia Holm looked into his face, and saw the battle glint in his eye and a ghost of Saintliness flickering in the corners of his smile, and tilted her sweet fair head.

"Have you been in some more trouble?"

"It was rather a one-sided affair," said the Saint modestly. "Sambo never had a break—and I didn't mean him to have one, either. But the Queensberry Rules were strictly observed. There was no hitting below belts, which were worn loosely round the ankles——"

"Who's this you're talking about now?"

"Again, we are without information. But again for the pur­poses of convenient reference, you may call him His Beatitude the Negro Spiritual. And now listen."

Simon took her shoulders and swung her round.

"Somewhere between Basingstoke and Wintney," he said, "there's a gay game being played that's going to interest us a lot. And I came into it as a perfectly innocent party, for once in my life—but I haven't got time to tell you about it now. The big point at the moment is that a cop who arrived two minutes too late to be useful got my number. With Beppo in the back, I couldn't stop to hold converse with him, and you can bet he's jumped to the worst conclusions. In which he's damned right, but not in the way he thinks he is. There was a phone box twenty yards away, and unless the Negro Spiritual strangled him first he's referred my number to London most of an hour ago, and Teal will be snorting down a hot scent as soon as they can get him out of bed. Now, all you've got to know is this: I've just arrived, and I'm in my bath. Tell the glad news to anyone who rings up and anyone who calls; and if it's a call, hang a towel out of the window."

"But where are you going?"

"The Berkeley—to park the patient. I just dropped in to give you your cue." Simon Templar drew the end of a ciga­rette red, and snapped his lighter shut again. "And I'll be right back," he said, and wormed in behind the wheel.

A matter of seconds later the big car was in Berkeley Street, and he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel.

"Friend of mine had a bit of a car smash," he rapped at a sleepy reception clerk. "I wanna room for him now, and a doctor at eleven. Will you send a coupla men out to carry him in? Car at the door."

"One four eight," said the clerk, without batting an eyelid.

Simon saw the unconscious man carried upstairs, shot half-crowns into the hands of the men who performed the trans­portation, and closed the door on them.

Then he whipped from his pocket a thin nickelled case which he had brought from a pocket in the car. He snapped the neck of a small glass phial and drew up the colourless fluid it contained into the barrel of a hypodermic syringe. His latest protégé was still sleeping the sleep of sheer exhaustion, but Simon had no guarantee of how long that sleep would last. He proceeded to provide that guarantee himself, stabbing the nee­dle into a limp arm and pressing home the plunger until the complete dose had been administered.

Then he closed and locked the door behind him and went quickly down the stairs.

Below, the reception clerk stopped him. "What name shall I register, sir?"

"Teal," said the Saint, with a wry flick of humour. "Mr. C. E. Teal. He'll sign your book later."

"Yes, sir. . . . Er—has Mr. Teal no luggage, sir?" "Nope." A new ten-pound note drifted down to the desk. "On account," said the Saint. "And see that the doctor's wait­ing here for me at eleven, or I'll take the roof off your hotel and crown you with it."

He pulled his cap sideways and went back to his car. As he turned into Upper Berkeley Mews for the second time, he saw that his first homecoming had only just been soon enough. But that did not surprise him, for he had figured out his chances on that schedule almost to a second. A warning blink of white from an upper window caught his expectant eye at once, and he locked the wheel hard over and pulled up broadside on across the mews. In a flash he was out of his seat unlocking a pair of garage doors right at the street end of the mews, and in another second or two the car was hissing back into that garage with the cut-out firmly closed.

The Saint, without advertising the fact, had recently become the owner of one complete side of Upper Berkeley Mews, and he was in process of making some interesting structural altera­tions to that block of real estate of which the London County Council had not been informed and about which the District Surveyor had not even been consulted. The great work was not yet by any means completed, but even now it was capable of serving part of its purposes.

Simon went up a ladder into the bare empty room above. In one corner a hole had been roughly knocked through the wall; he went through it into another similar room, and on the far side of this was another hole in a wall; thus he passed in quick succession through numbers 1, 3, and 5, until the last plunge through the last hole and a curtain beyond it brought him into No. 7 and his own bedroom.

His tie was already off and his shirt unbuttoned by that time, and he tore off the rest of his clothes in little more than the time it took him to stroll through to the bathroom. And the bath was already full—filled long ago by Patricia.

"Thinks of everything!' sighed the Saint, with a wide grin of pure delight.

He slid into the bath like an otter, head and all, and came out of it almost in the same movement with a mighty splash, tweaking the plug out of the waste pipe as he did so. In another couple of seconds he was hauling himself into an enormously woolly blue bath-robe and grabbing a towel . . . and he went paddling down the stairs with his feet kicking about in a pair of gorgeously dilapidated moccasins, humming the hum of a man with a copper-plated liver and not one solitary little baby sin upon his conscience.

And thus he rolled into the sitting-room.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, old dear," he murmured; and Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal rose from an arm­chair and surveyed him heavily.

"Good morning," said Mr. Teal.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" agreed the Saint affably.

Patricia was smoking a cigarette in another chair. She should, according to the book of etiquette, have been beguil­ing the visitor's wait with some vivacious topical chatter; but the Saint, who was sensitive to atmosphere, had perceived nothing but a glutinously expanding silence as he entered the room. The perception failed to disturb him. He lifted the silver cover from a plate of bacon and eggs, and sniffed appre­ciatively. "You don't mind if I eat, do you, Claud?" he mur­mured.

The detective swallowed. If he had never been required to interview the Saint on business, he could have enjoyed a tolera­bly placid life. He was not by nature an excitable man, but these interviews never seemed to take the course which he in­tended them to take.

"Where were you last night?" he blurted.

"In Cornwall," said the Saint. "Charming county—full of area. Know it?"

"What time did you leave?"

"Nine-fifty-two pip."

"Did anybody see you go?"

"Everyone who had stayed the course observed my departure," said the Saint carefully. "A few of the male popula­tion had retired hurt a little earlier, and others were still enthusiastic but already blind. Apart from seven who had been ruled out earlier in the week by an epidemic of measles—"

"And where were you between ten and five minutes to five this morning?"

"I was on my way."

"Were you anywhere near Wintney?"

"That would be about it."

"Notice anything peculiar around there?"

Simon wrinkled his brow.

"I recall the scene distinctly. It was the hour before the dawn. The sleeping earth, still spell-bound by the magic of night, lay quiet beneath the paling skies. Over the peaceful scene brooded the expectant hush of all the mornings since the beginning of these days. The whole world, like a bride listening for the footfall of her lover, or a breakfast sausage hoping against hope——"

The movement with which Teal clamped a battered piece of spearmint between his molars was one of sheer ferocity.

"Now listen," he snarled. "Near Wintney, between ten and five minutes to five this morning, a Hirondel with your num­ber-plates on it was called on to stop by a police officer—-and it drove straight past him!"

Simon nodded.

"Sure, that was me," he said innocently. "I was in a hurry. D'you mean I'm going to be summoned?"

"I mean more than that. Shortly before you came past, the constable heard a scream——"

Simon nodded again.

"Sure, I heard it too. Weird noises owls make sometimes. Did he want me to hold his hand?"

"That was no owl screaming—"

"Yeah? You were there as well, were you?"

"I've got the constable's telephoned report—"

"You can find a use for it." The Saint opened his mouth, inserted egg, bacon, and buttered toast in suitable proportions, and stood up. "And now you listen, Claud Eustace." He tapped the detective's stomach with his forefinger. "Have you got a warrant to come round and cross-examine me at this ungodly hour of the morning-—or any other hour, for that matter?"

"It's part of my duty "

"It's part of the blunt end of the pig of the aunt of the gardener. Let that pass for a minute. Is there one single crime that even your pop-eyed imagination can think of to charge me with? There is not. But we understand the functioning of your so-called brain. Some loutish cop thought he heard some­one scream in Hampshire this morning, and because I happened to be passing through the same county you think I must have had something to do with it. If somebody tells you that a dud shilling has been found in a slot machine in Blackpool, the first thing you want to know is whether I was within a hundred miles of the spot within six months of the event. A drowned man is fished out of the ocean at Boston, and if you hear a rumour that I was staying beside the same ocean at Biarritz two years before——"

"I never—"

"You invariably. And now get another earful. You haven't a search-warrant, but we'll excuse that. Would you like to go upstairs and run through my wardrobe and see if you can find any bloodstains on my clothes? Because you're welcome. Would you like to push into the garage and take a look at my car and see if you can find a body under the back seat? Shove on. Make yourself absolutely at home. But digest this first." Again that dictatorial forefinger impressed its point on the preliminary concavity of the detective's waistcoat. "Make that search—accept my invitation—and if you can't find anything to justify it, you're going to wish your father had died a bachelor, which he may have done for all I know. You're becoming a nuisance, Claud, and I'm telling you that this is where you get off. Give me the small half of less than a quarter of a break, and I'm going to roast the hell out of you. I'm going to send you up to the sky on one big balloon; and when you come down you're not going to bounce—you're going to spread your­self out so flat that a shortsighted man will not be able to see you sideways. Got it?"

Teal gulped.

His cherubic countenance took on a slightly redder tinge, and he shuffled his feet like a truant schoolboy. But that, to do him justice, was the only childish thing about his attitude, and it was beyond Teal's power to control. For he gazed deep into the dancing, mocking, challenging blue eyes of the Saint standing there before him, lean and reckless and debonair even in that preposterous bath-robe outfit; and he understood the issue exactly.

And Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal nodded.

"Of course," he grunted, "if that's the way you take it, there's nothing more to be said."

"There isn't," agreed the Saint concisely. "And if there was, I'd say it."

He picked up the detective's bowler hat, dusted it with his towel, and handed it over. Teal accepted it, looked at it, and sighed. And he was still sighing when the Saint took him by the arm and ushered him politely but firmly to the door.

Chapter III

"And if that," remarked the Saint, blithely returning to his interrupted breakfast, "doesn't shake up Claud Eustace from the Anzora downwards, nothing short of an earthquake will."

Patricia lighted another cigarette.

"So long as you didn't overdo it," she said. "Quis s'excuse, s'accuse ——"

"And honi soil qui mal y pense," said the Saint cheerfully. "No, old sweetheart—that outburst had been on its way for a long while. We've been seeing a great deal too much of Claud Eustace lately, and I have a feeling that the Teal-baiting sea­son is just getting into full swing."

"But what is the story about Beppo?"

Simon embarked upon his second egg.

"Oh, yes! Well, Beppo . . ."

He told her what he knew, and it is worth noting that she believed him. The recital, with necessary comment and dec­oration, ran out with the toast and marmalade; and at the end of it she knew as much as he did, which was not much.

"But in a little while we're going to know a whole lot more," he said.

He smoked a couple of cigarettes, glanced over the headlines of a newspaper, and went upstairs again. For several minutes he swung a pair of heavy Indian clubs with cheerful vigour; then a shave, a second and longer immersion in the bath with savon and vox humana accompaniment, and he felt ready to punch holes in three distinct and different heavy-weights. None of which being available, he selected a fresh outfit of clothes, dressed himself with leisurely care, and descended once more upon the sitting-room looking like one consolidated ray of sunshine.

"Cocktail at the Bruton at a quarter to one," he murmured, and drifted out again.

By that time, which was 10:44 precisely, if that matters a damn to anyone, the floating population of Upper Berkeley Mews had increased by one conspicuous unit; but that did not surprise the Saint. Such things had happened before, they were part of the inevitable paraphernalia of the attacks of virulent detectivosis which periodically afflicted the ponderous lucubra­tions of Chief Inspector Teal; and after the brief but compre­hensive exchanges of pleasantries earlier that morning, Simon Templar would have been more disappointed than otherwise if he had seen no symptoms of a fresh outbreak of the disease.

Simon was not perturbed. . . . He raised his hat politely to the sleuth, was cut dead, and remained unperturbed. . . . And he sauntered imperturbably westwards through the smaller streets of Mayfair until, in one of the very smallest streets, he was able to collar the one and only visible taxi, in which he drove away, fluttering his handkerchief out of the window, and leaving a fuming plain-clothes man standing on the kerb glaring frantically around for another cab in which to continue the chase—and finding none.

At the Dover Street corner of Piccadilly, he paid off the driver and strolled back to the Piccadilly entrance of the Berkeley. It still wanted a few minutes to eleven, but the reception clerk, spurred on perhaps by the Saint's departing purposefulness, had a doctor already waiting for him.

Simon conducted the move to the patient's room himself, and had his first shock when he helped to remove the man's shirt.

He looked at what he saw in silence for some seconds; and then the doctor, who had also looked, turned to him with his ruddy face gone a shade paler.

"I was told that your friend had had an accident," he said bluntly, and the Saint nodded.

"Something unpleasant has certainly happened to him. Will you go on with your examination?"

He lighted a cigarette and went over to the window, where he stood gazing thoughtfully down into Berkeley Street until the doctor rejoined him.

"Your friend seems to have been given an injection of scopo­lamine and morphia—you have probably heard of 'twilight sleep'. His other injuries you've seen for yourself—I haven't found any more."

The Saint nodded.

"I gave him the injection myself. He should be waking up soon—he had rather less than one-hundredth of a grain of scopolamine. Will you want to move him to a nursing-home?"

"I don't think that will be necessary, unless he wishes it himself, Mr.——"

"Travers."

"Mr. Travers. He should have a nurse, of course——"

"I can get one."

The doctor inclined his head.

Then he removed his pince-nez and looked the Saint di­rectly in the eyes.

"I presume you know how your friend received his injuries?" he said.

"I can guess." The Saint flicked a short cylinder of ash from his cigarette. "I should say that he had been beaten with a raw-hide whip, and that persuasion by hot irons had also been applied."

The doctor put his finger-tips together and blinked.

"You must admit, Mr. Travers, that the circumstances are— er—somewhat unusual."

"You could say all that twice, and no one would accuse you of exaggerating," assented the Saint, with conviction. "But if that fact is bothering your professional conscience, I can only say that I'm as much in the dark as you are. The accident story was just to satisfy the birds below. As a matter of fact, I found our friend lying by the roadside in the small hours of this morning, and I sort of took charge. Doubtless the mystery will be cleared up in due course."

"Naturally, you have communicated with the police."

"I've already interviewed one detective, and I'm sure he's doing everything he can," said the Saint veraciously. He opened the door, and propelled the doctor decisively along the corridor. "Will you want to see the patient today?"

"I hardly think it will be necessary, Mr. Travers. His dressing should be changed tonight—the nurse will see to that. I'll come in tomorrow morning——"

"Thanks very much. I shall expect you at the same time. Good-bye."

Simon shook the doctor warmly by the hand, swept him briskly into the waiting elevator, and watched him sink down­wards out of view.

Then he went back to the room, poured out a glass of water, and sat down in a chair by the bedside. The patient was sleeping easily; and Simon, after a glance at his watch, pre­pared to await the natural working-off of the drug.

A quarter of an hour later he was extinguishing a cigarette when the patient stirred and groaned. A thin hand crawled up to the bare throat, and the man's head rolled sideways with his eyelids flickering. As Simon bent over him, a husky whisper of a word came through the relaxed lips.

"Acqua. . . ."

"Sure thing, brother." Simon propped up the man's head and put the glass to his mouth.

"Mille grazie."

"Prego."

Presently the man sank back again. And then his eyes opened, and focused on the Saint.

For a number of seconds there was not the faintest glimmer of understanding in the eyes: they stared at and through their object like the eyes of a blind man. And then, slowly, they widened into round pools of shuddering horror, and the Italian shrank away with a thin cry rattling in his throat.

Simon gripped his arm and smiled.

"Non tema. Sono un amico."

It was some time before he was able to calm the man into a dully incredulous quietness; but he won belief before he had finished, and at last the Italian sank back among the pillows and was silent.

Simon mopped his brow and fished out his cigarette-case.

And then the man spoke again, still weakly, but in a different voice.

"Quanti ne abbiamo quest' oggi?"

"Eil due ottobre."

There was a pause.

"Vuol favorire di dirmi il suo nome?"

"Templar—Simon Templar."

There was another pause. And then the man rolled over and looked at the Saint again. And he spoke in almost perfect English.

"I have heard of you. You were called——"

"Many things. But that was a long time ago."

"How did you find me?"

"Well-—I rather think that you found me."

The Italian passed a hand across his eyes.

"I remember now. I was running. I fell down. Someone caught me. . . ." Suddenly he clutched the Saint's wrist. "Did you see—him?"

"Your gentleman friend?" murmured Simon lightly. "Sure I did. He also saw me, but not soon enough. Yes, we certainly met."

The grip of the trembling fingers loosened slowly, and the man lay still, breathing jerkily through his nose.

"Voglia scusarmi," he said at length. "Mi vergogno."

"Non ne val la pena."

"It is as if I had awoken from a terrible dream. Even now——" The Italian looked down at the bandages that swathed the whole of the upper part of his body, and shivered uncontrollably. "Did you put on these?" he asked.

"No—a doctor did that."

The man looked round the room.

"And this ——?"

"This is the Berkeley Hotel, London."

The Italian nodded. He swallowed painfully, and Simon refilled his glass and passed it back. Another silence fell, which grew so long that the Saint wondered if his patient had fallen asleep again. He rose stealthily to his feet, and the Italian roused and caught his sleeve.

"Wait." The words came quite quietly and sanely. "I must talk to you."

"Sure." Simon smiled down at the man. "But do you want to do it now? Hadn't you better rest for a bit—maybe have something to eat——"

The Italian shook his head. "Afterwards. Will you sit down again?" And Simon Templar sat down.

And he listened, almost without movement, while the min­ute hand of his watch voyaged unobserved once round the dial. He listened in a perfect trance of concentration, while the short precise sentences of the Italian's story slid into the atmosphere and built themselves up into a shape that he had never even dreamed of.

It was past one o'clock when he walked slowly down the stairs with the inside story of one of the most stupendous crimes in history whirling round in his brain like the armature of a high-powered dynamo.

Wrapped up in the rumination of what he had heard, he passed out like a sleep-walker into Berkeley Street. And it so happened that in his abstraction he almost cannoned into a man who was at that moment walking down towards Piccadilly. He stepped aside with a muttered apology, absent-mindedly registering a kind of panoramic impression of a brilliantly purple suit, lemon-coloured gloves, a gold-mounted cane, a lavender shirt, spotted tie, and ——

Just for an instant the Saint's gaze rested on the man's face. And then they were past each other, without a flicker of recognition, without the batting of an eyelid. But the Saint knew . . .

He knew that that savagely arrogant face, like a mask of black marble, was like no other black face that he had ever seen in his life before that morning. And he knew, with the same certainty, that the eyes in the black face had recognised him in the same moment as he had recognised them—and with no more betrayal of their knowledge. And as he wandered up into Berkeley Square, and the portals of the Bruton Club received him, he knew, though he had not looked back, that the black eyes were still behind him, and had seen where he went.

Chapter IV

But the smile with which the Saint greeted Patricia was as gay and carefree a smile as she had ever seen.

"I should like," said the Saint, sinking into an armchair, "three large double Martinis in a big glass. Just to line my stomach. After which, I shall be able to deal respectfully with a thirst which can only be satisfactorily slaked by two gallons of bitter beer."

"You will have one Martini, and then we'll have some lunch," said Patricia; and the Saint sighed.

"You have no soul," he complained.

Patricia put her magazine under the table.

"What's new, boy?" she asked.

"About Beppo? . . . Well, a whole heap of things are new about Beppo. I can tell you this, for instance: Beppo is no smaller a guy than the Duke of Fortezza, and he is the acting President of the Bank of Italy."

"He's—what?"

"He's the acting President of the Bank of Italy—and that's not the half of it. Pat, old girl, I told you at the start that there was some gay game being played, and, by the Lord, it's as gay a game as we may ever find!" Simon signed the chit on the waiter's tray with a flourish and settled back again, survey­ing his drink dreamily. "Remember reading in some paper recently that the Bank of Italy were preparing to put out an entirely new and original line of paper currency?" he asked.

"I saw something about it."

"It was so. The contract was placed with Crosby Dorman, one of our biggest printing firms—they do the thin cash and postal issues of half a dozen odd little countries. Beppo put the deal through. A while ago he brought over the plates and gave the order, and one week back he came on his second trip to take delivery of three million pounds' worth of coloured paper in a tin-lined box."

"And then?"

"I'll tell you what then. One whole extra million pounds' worth of mazuma is ordered, and that printing goes into a separate box. Ordered on official notepaper, too, with Beppo's own signature in the south-east corner. And meanwhile Beppo is indisposed. The first crate of spondulix departs in the golden galleon without him, completely surrounded by soldiers, secret service agents, and general detectives, all armed to the teeth and beyond. Another of those nice letters apologises for Beppo's absence, and instructs the guard to carry on; a third letter explains the circumstances, ditto and ditto, to the Bank——"

Patricia sat up.

"And the box is empty?"

"The box is packed tight under a hydraulic press, stiff to the sealing-wax with the genuine articles as per invoice."

"But——"

"But obviously. That box had got to go through. The new issue had to spread itself out. It's been on the market three days already. And the ground bait is now laid for the big haul —the second box, containing approximately one million hundred-lire bills convertible into equivalent sterling on sight. And the whole board of the Bank of Italy, the complete staff of cashiers, office-boys, and outside porters, the entire vigilance society of soldiers, secret service agents, and general detectives, all armed to the teeth and beyond, are as innocent of the existence of that million as the unborn daughter of the Ca­liph's washerwoman."

The girl looked at him with startled eyes.

"And do you mean Beppo was in this?"

"Does it seem that way?" Simon Templar swivelled round towards her with one eyebrow inquisitorially cocked and a long wisp of smoke trailing through his lips. "I wish you could have seen him. . . . Sure he's in it. They turned him over to the Negro Spiritual, and let that big black swine pet him till he signed. If I told you what they'd done to him you wouldn't be in such a hurry for your lunch." For a moment the Saint's lips thinned fractionally. "He's just shot to pieces, and when you see him you'll know why. Sure, that bunch are like brothers to Beppo!"

Patricia sat in a thoughtful silence, and the Saint emptied his glass. Then she said: "Who are this bunch?"

Simon slithered his cigarette round to the corner of his mouth.

"Well, the actual bunch are mostly miscellaneous, as you might say," he answered. "But the big noise seems to be a bird named Kuzela, whom we haven't met before but whom I'm going to meet darn soon."

"And this money—_:—"

"Is being delivered to Kuzela's men today." The Saint glanced at his watch. "Has been, by now. And within twenty-four hours parcels of it will be burning the sky over to his agents in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid. Within the week it will be gravitating back to him through the same channels— big bouncing wads of it, translated into authentic wads of francs, marks, pesetas—while one million perfectly genuine hundred-lire bills whose numbers were never in the catalogue are drifting home to a Bank of Italy that will be wondering whether the whole world is falling to pieces round its ears. ... Do you get me, Pat?"

The clear blue eyes rested on her face with the twist of mocking hell-for-leather delight that she knew so well, and she asked her next question almost mechanically. "Is it your party?"

"It is, old Pat. And not a question asked. No living soul must ever know—there'd be a panic on the international ex­changes if a word of it leaked out. But every single one of those extra million bills has got to be taken by hand and led gently back to Beppo's tender care—and the man who's going to do it is ready for his lunch."

And lunch it was without further comment, for the Saint was like that. ... But about his latest meeting with the Ne­gro Spiritual he did not find it necessary to say anything at all —for, again, the Saint was that way. . . . And after lunch, when Patricia was ordering coffee in the lounge, yet another incident which the Saint was inclined to regard as strictly private and personal clicked into its appointed socket in the energetic history of that day.

Simon had gone out to telephone a modest tenner on a horse for the 3.30, and was on his way back through the hall when a porter stopped him.

"Excuse me, sir, but did you come here from the Berkeley?" The Saint fetched his right foot up alongside his left and lowered his brows one millimetre.

"Yeah—I have been in there this morning."

"A coloured gentleman brought these for you, sir. He said he saw you drop them as you came out of the hotel, but he lost you in the crowd while he was picking them up. And then, as he was walking through Lansdowne Passage, he hap­pened to look up and see you at one of the windows, so he brought them in. From the description he gave me it seemed as if it must have been you, sir——"

"Oh, it was certainly me."

The Saint, who had never owned a pair of lemon-coloured gloves in his life, accepted the specimens gingerly, folded them, and slipped them into his pocket.

"Funny coincidence, sir, wasn't it?" said the porter chattily. "Him happening to pass by, and you happening to be in the window at that time."

"Quite remarkable," agreed the Saint gravely, recalling the care he had taken to avoid all windows; and, turning back, he retired rapidly to a remote sanctuary.

There he unfolded the gloves in an empty washbasin, con­triving to work them cautiously inside out with his fountain pen in one hand and his propelling pencil in the other.

He had not the vaguest idea what kind of creeping West African frightfulness might be waiting for him in those citron-hued misdemeanours, but he was certainly a trifle surprised when he saw what fell out of the first glove that he tackled.

It was simply a thin splinter of wood, painted at both ends, and stained with some dark stain.

For a moment or two he looked at it expressionlessly.

Then he picked it up between two matches and stowed it carefully in his cigarette-case.

He turned his attention to the second glove, and extracted from it a soiled scrap of paper. He read:

If you will come to 85, Vandermeer Avenue, Hampstead, at midnight tonight, we may be able to reach some mutually satisfactory agreement. Otherwise, I fear that the consequences of your interference may be infinitely regrettable.

K.

Simon Templar held the message at arm's length, well up to the light, and gazed at it wall-eyed.

"And whales do so lay eggs," he articulated at last, when he could find a voice sufficiently impregnated with emotion.

And then he laughed and went back to Patricia.

"If Monday's Child comes home, you shall have a new hat," he said, and the girl smiled.

"What else happens before that?" she asked.

"We go on a little tour," said the Saint.

They left the club together, and boarded a taxi that had just been paid off at the door.

"Piccadilly Hotel," said the Saint.

He settled back, lighting a cigarette.

"I shook off Teal's man by Method One," he explained. "You are now going to see a demonstration of Method Two. If you can go on studying under my supervision, all the shad­owers you will ever meet will mean nothing to you. . . . The present performance may be a waste of energy"—he glanced back through the rear window—"or it may not. But the wise man is permanently suspicious."

They reached the Piccadilly entrance of the hotel in a few minutes, and the Saint opened the door. The exact fare, plus bonus, was ready in the Saint's hand, and he dropped it in the driver's palm and followed Patricia across the pavement—with­out any appearance of haste, but very briskly. As he reached the doors, he saw in one glass panel the reflection of another taxi pulling in to the kerb behind him.

"This way."

He steered the girl swiftly through the main hall, swung her through a short passage, across another hall, and up some steps, and brought her out through another door into Regent Street. A break in the traffic let them straight through to the taxi rank in the middle of the road.

"Berkeley Hotel," said the Saint.

He lounged deep in his corner and grinned at her.

"Method Two is not for use on a trained sleuth who knows you know he's after you," he murmured. "Other times, it's the whelk's knee-cap." He took her bag from her hands, slipped out the little mirror, and used it for a periscope to survey the south side pavement as they drove away. "This is one of those whens," he said complacently.

"Then why are we going to the Berkeley?"

"Because you are the nurse who is going to look after Beppo. His number is 148, and 149 is already booked for you. Incidentally, you might remember that he's registered in the name of Teal—C. E. Teal. I'll pack a bag and bring it along to you later; but once you're inside the Berkeley Arms you've got to stay put so long as it's daylight. The doctor's name is Branson and mine is Travers, and if anyone else applies for admission you will shoot him through the binder and ring for the bell-hop to remove the body."

"But what will you be doing?"

"I am the proud possessor of a Clue, and I'm going to be very busy tying a knot in its tail. Also I have an ambition to be humorous, and that will mean that I've got to push round to a shop I know of and purchase one of those mechanical jokes that are said to create roars of laughter. I've been remem­bering my younger days, and they've brought back to me the very thing I need. . . . And here we are."

The cab had stopped at its destination, and they got out. Patricia hesitated in the doorway. "When will you be back?" she asked.

"I shall be along for dinner about eight," said the Saint. "Meanwhile, you'll be able to get acquainted with Beppo. Really, you'll find him quite human. Prattle gently to him, and he'll eat out of your hand. When he's stronger, you might even be allowed to sing to him—I'll ask the doctor about that tomorrow. ... So long, lass!"

And the Saint was gone.

And he did exactly what he had said he was going to do. He went to a shop in Regent Street and bought a little toy and took it back with him to Upper Berkeley Mews; and a certain alteration which he made to its inner functionings kept him busy for some time and afforded him considerable amusement.

For he had not the slightest doubt that there was going to be fun and games before the next dawn. The incident of those lemon-coloured gloves was a distinct encouragement. It showed a certain thoroughness on the part of the opposition, and that sort of thing always gave the Saint great pleasure.

"If one glove doesn't work, the other is expected to oblige," he figured it out, as he popped studs into a snowy white dress shirt. "And it would be a pity to disappoint anyone."

He elaborated this latter idea to Patricia Holm when he rejoined her at the Berkeley, having shaken off his official watcher again by Method Three. Before he left, he told her nearly everything.

"At midnight, all the dreams of the ungodly are coming true," he said. "Picture to yourself the scene. It will be the witching hour. The menace of dark deeds will veil the stars. And up the heights of Hampstead will come toiling the pitiful figure of the unsuspecting victim, with his bleary eyes bulging and his mouth hanging open and the green moss sprouting behind his ears; and that will be Little Boy . . ."

Chapter V

Some men enjoy trouble; others just as definitely don't. And there are some who enjoy dreaming about the things they would do if they only dared-—but they need not concern us.

Simon Templar came into Category A—straight and slick, with his name in a panel all to itself, and a full stop just where it hits hardest.

For there is a price ticket on everything that puts a whizz into life, and adventure follows the rule. It's distressing, but there you are. If there was no competition, everything would be quite all right. If you could be certain that you were the strongest man in the world, the most quick-witted, the most cunning, the most keen-sighted, the most vigilant, and simulta­neously the possessor of the one and only lethal weapon in the whole wide universe, there wouldn't be much difficulty about it. You would just step out of your hutch and hammer the first thing that came along.

But it doesn't always pan out like that in practice. When you try the medicine on the dog, you are apt to discover some violent reactions which were not arranged for in the prescrip­tion. And then, when the guns give tongue and a spot of fur begins to fly, you are liable to arrive at the sudden and soul-shattering realisation that a couple of ounces of lead travelling with a given velocity will make precisely as deep an impression on your anatomical system as they will on that of the next man.

Which monumental fact the Saint had thoroughly digested a few days after mastering his alphabet. And the effect it had registered upon his unweaned peace of mind had been so near to absolute zero that a hair-line could not have been drawn between them—neither on the day of the discovery nor on any subsequent day in all his life.

In theory . . .

In theory, of course, he allowed the artillery to pop, and the fur to become volatile, without permitting a single lock of his own sleek dark hair to aberrate from the patent-leather disci­pline in which he disposed it; and thereby he became the Saint. But it is perfectly possible to appreciate and acknowl­edge the penetrating unpleasantness of high-velocity lead, and forthwith to adopt a debonairly philosophical attitude towards the same, without being in a tearing hurry to offer your own carcase for the purpose of practical demonstration; this also the Saint did, and by doing it with meticulous attention con­trived to be spoken of in the present tense for many years longer than the most optimistic insurance broker would have backed him to achieve.

All of which has not a little to do with 85, Vandemeer Avenue, Hampstead.

Down this road strolled the Saint, his hands deep in the pockets of knife-edged trousers, the crook of his walking-stick hooked over his left wrist, and slanting sidelong over his right eye a filbustering black felt hat which alone was something very like a breach of the peace. A little song rollicked on his lips, and was inaudible two yards away. And as he walked, his lazy eyes absorbed every interesting item of the scenery.

"Aspidistra, little herb,

Do you think it silly

When the botaniser's blurb

Links you with the lily?"

Up in one window of the house, he caught the almost imperceptible sway of a shifting curtain, and knew that his approach had already been observed. "But it is nice," thought the Saint, "to be expected." And he sauntered on.

"Up above your window-ledge

Streatham stars are gleaming:

Aspidistra, little veg,

Does your soul go dreaming?"

A low iron gate opened from the road. He pushed it wide with his foot, and went up the steps to the porch. Beside the door was a bell-push set in a panel of polished brass tracery.

The Saint's fingers moved towards it . . . and travelled back again. He stooped and examined the filigree more closely, and a little smile lightened his face.

Then he cuddled himself into the extreme houseward corner of the porch, held his hat over the panel, and pressed the button with the ferrule of his stick. He heard a faint hiss, and turned his hat back to the light of a street lamp. A stained splinter of wood quivered in the white satin lining of the crown; and the Saint's smile became blindingly seraphic as he reached into a side pocket of his jacket for a pair of tweezers. ...

And then the door was opening slowly.

Deep in his angle of shadow, he watched the strip of yellow light widening across the porch and down the short flagged passage to the gate. The silhouette of a man loomed into it and stood motionless for a while behind the threshold.

Then it stepped out into full view—a big, heavy-shouldered close-cropped man, with thick bunched fists hanging loosely at his sides. He peered outwards down the shaft of light, and then to right and left, his battered face creasing to the strain of probing the darkness of either side. The Saint's white shirt-front caught his eye, and he licked his lips and spoke like an automaton.

"Comin' in?"

"Behind you, brother," said the Saint.

He stepped across the light, taking the bruiser by the elbows and spinning him adroitly round. They entered the house in the order of his own arrangement, and Simon kicked the door shut behind him.

There was no machine-gun at the far end of the hall, as he had half expected; but the Saint was unashamed.

"Windy?" sneered the bruiser, as the Saint released him; and Simon smiled.

"Never since taking soda-mint," he murmured. "Where do we go from here?"

The bruiser glanced sideways, jerking his head.

"Upstairs."

"Oh, yeah?"

Simon slanted a cigarette into his mouth and followed the glance. His eyes waved up the banisters and down the separate steps of the stairway.

"After you again," he drawled. "Just to be certain."

The bruiser led the way, and Simon followed discreetly. They arrived in procession at the upper landing, where a second bruiser, a trifle shorter than the first, but even heavier of shoulder, lounged beside an open door with an unlighted stump of cigar in his mouth.

The second man gestured with his lower jaw and the cigar.

"In there."

"Thanks," said the Saint.

He paused for a moment in the doorway and surveyed the room, one hand ostentatiously remaining in the pocket of his coat.

Facing him, in the centre of the rich brown carpet, was a broad flat-topped desk. It harmonised with the solid simplicity of the book-cases that broke the panelling of the bare walls, and with the long austere lines of the velvet hangings that covered the windows—even, perhaps, with the squat square materialism of the safe that stood in the corner behind it. And on the far side of the desk sat the man whom the Saint had come to see, leaning forward out of a straight-backed oak chair.

Simon moved forward, and the two bruisers closed the door and ranged themselves on either side of him.

"Good evening, Kuzela," said the Saint.

"Good evening, Mr. Templar." The man behind the desk moved one white hand. "Sit down."

Simon looked at the chair that had been placed ready for him. Then he turned, and took one of the bruisers by the lapels of his coat. He shot the man into the chair, bounced him up and down a couple of times, swung him from side to side, and yanked him out again.

"Just to make quite certain," said the Saint sweetly. He beamed upon the glowering pugilist, felt his biceps, and patted him encouragingly on the shoulder. "You'll be a big man when you grow up, Cuthbert," he said affably.

Then he moved the chair a yard to one side and sat in it himself.

"I'm sure you'll excuse all these formalities," he remarked conversationally. "I have to be so careful these days. The most extraordinary things happen to me. Only the other day, a large spotted hypotenuse, overtaking on the wrong side——"

"I have already observed that you possess a well-developed instinct of self-preservation, Mr. Templar," said Kuzela suavely.

He clasped his well-kept hands on the blotter before him, and studied the Saint interestedly.

Simon returned the compliment.

He saw a man in healthy middle age, broad-shouldered and strongly built. A high, firmly modelled forehead rose into a receding setting of clipped iron-grey hair. With his square jaw and slightly aquiline nose, he might have posed for a symboli­cal portrait of any successful business man. Only his eyes might have betrayed the imposture. Pale blue, deep-set, and unwinking, they levelled themselves upon the object of their scrutiny in a feline stare of utter ruthlessness. . . . And the Saint looked into the blue eyes and laughed.

"You certainly win on the exchange," he said; and a slight frown came between the other's eyebrows.

"If you would explain ——?"

"I'm good-looking," said the Saint easily, and centred his tie with elegance.

Kuzela leaned back.

"Your name is known to me, of course; but I think this is the first time we have had the pleasure of meeting."

"This is certainly the first time you've had the pleasure of meeting me," said the Saint carefully.

"Even now, the responsibility is yours. You have elected to interfere with my affairs——"

Simon shook his head sympathetically.

"It's most distressing, isn't it?" he murmured. "And your most strenuous efforts up to date have failed to dispose of the interference. Even when you sent me a pair of gloves that would have given a rhinoceros a headache to look at, I survived the shock. It must be Fate, old dear."

Kuzela pulled himself forward again.

"You are an enterprising young man," he said quietly. "An unusually enterprising young man. There are not many men living who could have overcome Ngano, even by the method which you adopted. The mere fact that you were able to enter this house is another testimony to your foresight—or your good luck."

"My foresight," said the Saint modestly.

"You moved your chair before you sat down—and that again showed remarkable intelligence. If you had sat where I in­tended you to sit, it would have been possible for me, by a slight movement of my foot, to send a bullet through the centre of your body."

"So I guessed."

"Since you arrived, your hand has been in your pocket several times. I presume you are armed ——"

Simon Templar inspected the finger-nails of his two hands.

"If I had been born the day before yesterday," he observed mildly, "you'd find out everything you wanted to know in approximately two minutes."

"Again, a man of your reputation would not have communicated with the police——"

"But he would take great care of himself." The Saint's eyes met Kuzela's steadily. "I'll talk or fight, Kuzela, just as you like. Which is it to be?"

"You are prepared to deal?"

"Within limits—yes."

Kuzela drummed his knuckles together.

"On what terms?"

"They might be—one hundred thousand pounds."

Kuzela shrugged.

"If you came here in a week's time——"

"I should be very pleased to have a drink with you," said the Saint pointedly.

"Suppose," said Kuzela, "I gave you a cheque which you could cash tomorrow morning——"

"Or suppose," said the Saint calmly, "you gave me some cash with which I could buy jujubes on my way home."

Kuzela looked at him with a kind of admiration.

"Rumour has not lied about you, Mr. Templar," he said. "I imagine you will have no objection to receiving this sum in— er—foreign currency?"

"None whatever," said the Saint blandly.

The other stood up, taking a little key from his waistcoat pocket. And the Saint, who for the moment had been looking at the delicately painted shade of the lamp that stood on one side of the desk, which was the sole dim illumination of the room, slewed round with a sudden start.

He knew that there was going to be a catch somewhere— that, with a man of Kuzela's type, a man who had sent those gloves and who had devised that extremely ingenious bell-push on the front door, a coup could never be quite so easy. How that last catch was going to be worked he had no idea; nor was he inclined to wait and learn it. In his own way, he had done as much as he had hoped to do; and, all things considered——

"Let me see that key!" he exclaimed.

Kuzela turned puzzledly.

"Really, Mr. Templar——"

"Let me see it!" repeated the Saint excitedly.

He reached over the desk and took the key out of Kuzela's hands. For a second he gazed at it; and then he raised his eyes again with a dancing devil of mischief glinting out of their blueness.

"Sorry I must be going, souls," he said; and with one smash­ing sweep of his arm he sent the lamp flying off the desk and plunged the room into inky blackness.

Chapter VI

The phrase is neither original nor copyright, and may be performed in public without fee or licence. It remains, however, an excellent way of describing that particular phe­nomenon.

With the extinction of the single source of luminance, the darkness came down in all the drenching suddenness of an unleashed cataract of Stygian gloom. For an instant, it seemed to blot out not only the sense of sight, but also every other active faculty; and a frozen, throbbing stillness settled between the four walls. And in that stillness the Saint sank down without a sound upon his toes and the tips of his fingers. . . .

He knew his bearings to the nth part of a degree, and he travelled to his destination with the noiseless precision of a cat. Around him he could hear the sounds of tensely restrained breathing, and the slithering caress of wary feet creeping over the carpet. Then, behind him, came the vibration of a violent movement, the thud of a heavy blow, a curse, a scuffle, a crashing fall, and a shrill yelp of startled anguish . . . and the Saint grinned gently.

"I got 'im," proclaimed a triumphant voice, out of the dark void. "Strike a light, Bill."

Through an undercurrent of muffled yammering sizzled the crisp kindling of a match. It was held in the hand of Kuzela himself, and by its light the two bruisers glared at each other, their reddened stares of hate aimed upwards and downwards respectively. And before the match went out the opinions of the foundation member found fervid utterance.

"You perishing bleeder," he said, in accents that literally wobbled with earnestness.

"Peep-bo," said the Saint, and heard the contortionist effects blasphemously disentangling themselves as he closed the door behind him.

A bullet splintered a panel two inches east of his neck as he shifted briskly westwards. The next door stood invitingly ajar: he went through it as the other door reopened, slammed it behind him, and turned the key.

In a few strides he was across the room and flinging up the window. He squirmed over the sill like an eel, curved his fingers over the edge, and hung at the full stretch of his arms. A foot below the level of his eyes there was a narrow stone ledge running along the side of the building: he transferred himself to it, and worked rapidly along to the nearest corner. As he rounded it, he looked down into the road, twenty feet below, and saw a car standing by the kerb.

Another window came over his head. He reached up, got a grip of the sill, and levered his elbows above the sill level with a skilful kick and an acrobatic twist of his body. From there he was able to make a grab for the top of the lower sash. . . . And in another moment he was standing upright on the sill, pushing the upper sash cautiously downwards.

A murmur of dumbfounded voices drifted to his ears.

"Where the 'ell can 'e 'ave gorn to?"

"Think 'e jumped for it?"

"Jumped for it, yer silly fat-'ead? . . ."

And then the Saint lowered himself cat-footed to the carpet on the safe side of the curtains in the room he had recently left.

Through a narrow gap in the hangings he could see Kuzela replacing the shattered bulb of the table-lamp by the light of a match. The man's white efficient hands were perfectly steady; his face was without expression. He accomplished his task with the tremorless tranquility of a patient middle-aged gentleman whom no slight accident could seriously annoy—tested the switch . . .

And then, as the room lighted up again, he raised his eyes to the convex mirror panel on the opposite wall, and had one distorted glimpse of the figure behind him.

Then the Saint took him by the neck.

Fingers like bands of steel paralysed his larynx and choked back into his chest the cry he would have uttered. He fought like a maniac; but though his strength was above the average, he was as helpless as a puppet in that relentless grip. And almost affectionately Simon Templar's thumbs sidled round to their mark—the deadly pressure of the carotid arteries which is to crude ordinary throttling what foil play is to sabre work. . . .

It was all over in a few seconds. And Kuzela was lying limply spread-eagled across the desk, and Simon Templar was fitting his key into the lock of the safe.

The plungers pistoned smoothly back, and the heavy door swung open. And the Saint sat back on his heels and gazed in rapture at what he saw.

Five small leather attaché cases stood in a neat row before his eyes. It was superb—splendiferous—it was just five times infinitely more than he had ever seriously dared to hope. That one hundred million lire were lying around somewhere in London he had been as sure as a man can be of anything— Kuzela would never have wasted time transporting his booty from the departure centre to the country house where the Duke of Fortezza had been kept—but that the most extempore bluff should have led him promptly and faultlessly to the hiding-place of all that merry mazuma was almost too good to be true. And for a few precious seconds the Saint stared en­tranced at the vision that his everlasting preposterous luck had ladled out for his delight. ...

And then he was swiftly hauling the valises out on to the floor.

He did not even have to attempt to open one of them. He knew. . . .

Rapidly he ranged the bags in a happy little line across the carpet. He picked up his stick; and he was adjusting his hat at its most effective angle when the two men who had pursued him returned through the door. But there was a wicked little automatic pivoting round in his free hand, and the two men noticed it in time.

"Restrain your enthusiasm, boys," said the Saint. "We're going on a journey. Pick up your luggage, and let's be moving."

He transferred one of the bags to his left hand, and his gun continued to conduct the orchestra. And under its gentle su­pervision the two men obeyed his orders. The delirious prog­ress of events during the past couple of minutes had been a shade too much for their ivorine uptakes: their faces wore two uniformly blank expressions of pained bewilderment, vaguely reminiscent of the registers of a pair of precocious goldfish photographed immediately after signing their first talking-pic­ture contract. Even the power of protest had temporarily drained out their vocal organs. They picked up two bags apiece and suffered themselves to be shepherded out of the room in the same bovine vacuity of acquiescence.