II

How Lady Valerie� Complained about

Heroes, and Mr Fairweather Dropped

His Hat

"SEEING that time is flying," said Peter Quentin, "and since you have to attend an inquest this morning, I suppose you could use some extra nourishment."

"How right you are," said the Saint. "Some people have no respect for anything. It's a gloomy thought. Even when you're dead, you're liable to be lugged out of the morgue at the squeak of dawn to have your guts poked over by some revoltingly healthy jury of red-faced yokels."

"I like getting you up early," said Patricia. "It seems to lend a sort of ethereal delicacy to your ideas."

Simon Templar grinned and watched Peter nipping the caps from a row of bottles of Carlsberg. As a matter of fact it was nearly ten o'clock, and for half an hour after breakfast they had been sitting in the sun on the porch out�side Peter's dining room. Two days had gone by since the fire, and it would have been hard to identify the supremely elegant Saint who sprawled in Peter's most comfortable deck chair with the blistered smoke-blackened scarecrow who had arrived there in the small hours of a certain morning with his grim foreboding.

He took the tall glass that Peter handed him and eyed fit appreciatively.

"And while we're soothing our tender nerves with this ambrosia," he said, "I suppose we'd better just run over what we've found out about these people who roast their week-end guests."

"I might have known I should be let in for this," Peter said moodily. "I ought to have known better than to ask you down. This was the most peaceful place in England before you came near it, but wherever you go something unpleasant happens." He lifted his glass and drank. "How�ever, as usual, I've been doing your dirty work. Our local gossip writer has been snooping and eavesdropping, and will now present his report�such as it is."

He returned to his chair and lighted a cigarette before he went on.

"As you know, the house that provided the fireworks was called Whiteways. The owner is Mr A. S. Fairweather, a gentleman of wealth who is highly respected in local circles. For fifteen years he warmed a seat in the House of Commons as Conservative M.P. for Hamborough, and for one year just before he retired he held the job of secretary of state for war. His abilities must have impressed some people more than they impressed the other members' of that cabinet, because as soon as he retired he was offered a place on the board of the Norfelt Chemical Company, where he has sat ever since. He has a town house in Grosvenor Square, a Rolls Royce, and he has recently subscribed five hundred pounds toward the restoration of our local parish church�which means that he either has, or has not, a ripe sense of humour."

Down by the bottles something stirred. It was something that looked rather like a reconstruction of the Piltdown Man might have looked if it had been first badly mauled with a sledge hammer and then encased in a brilliant check suit.

"I know a guy once what has a chemical factory," announced Hoppy Uniatz, with the happy interest of a big-game hunter who hears the conversation veering round to the subject of big game. "He makes any kind of liquor. Just say de woid, an' it's rye or boigundy wit' all de labels an' everyting." A thought appeared to strike him in a vital spot. "Say, maybe we got someting, boss. Maybe dis guy Fairwedder is in de same racket."

The Saint sighed.

Between Simon and Peter there was the understanding of men who had fought shoulder to shoulder in many bat�tles. Between Simon and Hoppy Uniatz there was no such bond, since Nature, by some unfortunate oversight, had neglected to provide Mr Uniatz with any more gray matter than was required for the elementary functions of eating, drinking and handling firearms. He was at once the joy and despair of Simon's life; but his dumb devotion to what he regarded as the positively supernatural genius of the Saint was so wistful that Simon had never had the heart to let him go.

"No, Hoppy," he said. "That stuff only burns your throat. The Norfelt product burns you all over."

"Chees," said Mr Uniatz admiringly. "Where do ya git dis stuff?"

"It's dropped from aeroplanes," explained Peter. "In large containers weighing about six hundred pounds each."

Mr Uniatz looked worried.

"But what happens when dey hit de ground?"

"They break," said Peter. "That's the whole idea. Think it over, Hoppy, while I go on with my gossip column."

He refreshed himself again and continued:

"Brigadier-General Sir Robert Sangore has stayed with Fairweather before. During his last visit he delivered a stirring address to the Church Lads' Brigade, in which Com�rade Fairweather takes a benevolent interest. He warned them particularly against Socialists, Communists, and Paci�fists, and told them that the Great War was a glorious spree for everyone who fought in it. He graduated from Sand�hurst in the year Dot, served all over the place, got into the War Office in 1917 and stayed there until 1930, when he retired to become a director of the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company. He is an officer, a gentleman and a member of the Cavalry Club."

"Lady Valerie Woodchester," said Patricia, "is the spoiled darling of London Society. She uses Mond's Van�ishing Cream, Kissabel Lipstick, and Charmante Skin Tonic. She goes to all the right places at all the right times, and she has her photograph in the Bystander every week. She has also stolen all my best clothes."

"Don't worry about that, darling," said the Saint reas�suringly. "I'll take them off her."

Pat made a face at him.

"That wouldn't surprise me a bit," she said calmly.

"The young hero who rescued Lady Valerie," resumed Peter, when order had been restored, "is Captain Donald Knightley of the Dragoon Guards. He has a fine seat on a horse and a set of membership cards to all the best night clubs. That's all I could find out about him. . . . And that only leaves John Kennet, the man who didn't fit in any�where."

"Yes," said the Saint thoughtfully. "The man who didn't fit in. And he seems to have been the most important one of all."

Patricia made a sharp restless movement.

"Are you sure?" she said, as if she was still fighting against conviction. "After all, if Fairweather has been in Parliament, he may have got friendly with Kennet's father��"

"I wouldn't argue. The old man may be a bit bothered about his aitches now and again, and he may still pretend that he belongs to the Labour party, but he joined the national government at the right time so of course all the duchesses love him because they know his heart must be in the right place. If it had been the old man, it might have been all right. But it wasn't. It was young Kennet. And young Kennet was a pacifist, an anti-blood-sporter, an anti-capitalist, an anti-Fascist and the Lord knows what not; and he once said publicly that his father had proved to be the arch-Judas of the working classes. Well, there may be all sorts of harmless reasons why a fellow like that should have been invited to join that congregation of worshippers of the golden calf, but you must admit that he still looks like the ideal burnt offering."

There was a silence, in which the only interruption was the sound of Mr Uniatz cautiously uncorking his private bottle of Vat 69, while their thoughts went on.

Peter said: "Yes. But that isn't evidence. You've been very mysterious all this time, but you must have something more definite than that."

"I'll give you four things," said the Saint.

He stood up and leaned against one of the pillars of the porch, facing them, very tall and dark and somehow deadly against the sunlit peace of the garden. Their eyes were drawn as if by a magnet.

"One: Kennet's door was locked."

Patricia stared at him.

"So you mentioned," Peter said slowly. "But if everybody who locked a door��"

"I can only think of two kinds of people who'd lock their bedroom doors when they were staying in a private house," said the Saint. "Frightened virgins and�frightened men."

"Maybe he was expecting a call from Lady Valerie," suggested Patricia half heartedly.

"Maybe he was," agreed the Saint patiently. "But if that made him lock his door, he must have been a very undiscriminating young man. And in any case, that's only half of it. He not only locked his door, but he took the key out of the lock. Now, even assuming that anyone might lock a door, there's only one reason for taking the key out of the lock. And that's when you realize that an expert might be able to turn the key from the outside�in other words, when you're really thinking hard along the lines of a pretty determined attempt to get at you."

"He might have been tight when he went to bed," Peter pointed out. "That would account for almost any weird thing he did. And besides that, it might account for him not hearing the fire alarm."

"It might," said the Saint bluntly. "But while you're at it, why don't you think of the other possibility? Suppose he didn't lock the door at all. Suppose somebody else did ?"

They were silent again.

"Go on," said Patricia.

Simon looked at her.

"Two: during all the time we were there, did you see any signs of a servant?"

"It might have been their night out."

"Yes. And with a house that size, there must have been several of them. And Fairweather let them all go out together, on a Saturday night, when he had a house full of week-end guests. And Valerie Woodchester cooked the dinner, and Lady Sangore washed the dishes. Why don't we make up some more brilliant theories? Maybe the servants were all burnt in the fire, too, only nobody thought of mentioning it."

Peter sipped his beer abstractedly.

"What else?"

"Three: when we arrived, every door and window that I could see on the ground floor was wide open. Let me try and save your brains some of this fearful strain. Maybe that was because everybody who heard the alarm rushed out through a different window. Or maybe it was because they always went to bed with the ground-floor windows open so that if any burglars wanted to drop in they wouldn't have to break the glass. Of course that's much more likely than that somebody wanted a good draught to make sure that the fire would burn up nice and fast."

This time there was no comment.

"Point four," said the Saint quietly, "is only Luker. The man who ties Sangore and Fairweather together. And the man who perfectly represents the kind of bee that Kennet had in his bonnet. . . . Do you really think I'm insane, or doesn't it all seem like too many coincidences even to you?"

They didn't answer. Incredulity, a traditional habit of mind, even in spite of the years that they had spent in wild pursuit of the fantastic visions that steered the Saint's iconoclastic path, struggled desperately against the impli�cations of belief. It would have been so much easier, so much more soothing, to let suspicion be lulled away by the uncritical rationalizations of ingrained convention, when to accept what the Saint argued meant something so omi�nous and horrible that the mind instinctively recoiled from dwelling on it. But it seemed as if the unclouded sunlight darkened behind the Saint's tall, disturbing figure while the echoes of his last words ran on through their protesting brains.

Mr Uniatz removed the neck of the bottle from his mouth with a faint squuck. The intermediate stages of the conversation had left as dim a blur on his consciousness as a discourse on the quantum theory would have left on an infants' class in arithmetic; but he had been told to think something over and he had been bravely obeying orders, even though thinking was an activity which always gave him a dull pain behind the eyes.

"Boss," he said, in a sudden wild bulge of inspiration, "I got it. It's some temperance outfit."

Simon blinked at him. There were occasions when the strange processes that went on inside the skull of Mr Uniatz were too occult even for him.

"What is?" he asked fearfully.

"De guys in de aeroplanes."

Simon clutched his head.

"What guys?"

"De guys," explained Mr Uniatz proudly, "who break de bottles of liquor."

2

The inquest was to be held at the Assembly Rooms in Anford, a largish building which served at various times for dances, whist drives, auctions and a meeting place for the Boy Scouts. When Simon arrived a small crowd had already started to gather, and three or four policemen were on duty to keep them back. Among the policemen Simon recognized the constable who had taken his arm on the night of the fire. He strolled across to him.

"Hullo, Reginald," he murmured. "What's new?"

"Oh, it's you, sir." The policeman lowered his voice confidentially. "Well, it all seems quite simple now. The pore devil never left 'is bed�'e come down, bed and all, right through into the libry. Shocking sight 'e was, too. But there, he couldn't 've felt nothing. He must 've bin spifli�cated by the smoke before ever the fire reached 'im." He went on looking at the Saint with a certain amount of awe. "I didn't know 'oo you was till after you'd gorn, sir," he said apologetically.

"I'm sorry," said the Saint gravely. "But you can still arrest me now if you want to, so there's no harm done."

"Arrest you?" repeated the policeman. "Wot�me?" A beaming grin split his face almost in half. "Why, I've read everythink they ever printed about you, and fair larfed myself sick sometimes, the way you put it over on those smart alecks at Scotland Yard. But I never thought I'd 'ave the pleasure of meeting you and not know it�though I did wonder 'ow you knew my name the other night."

"Your name?" said the Saint faintly.

"Yes sir. Reginald. That was pretty good, that was. But I suppose you've got pretty near the 'ole police force of the country taped, haven't you?"

The Saint swallowed. He searched unavailingly for an adequate reply.

Fortunately his anguished efforts were cut short by the blessed advent of two large cars that rolled up to the steps at the entrance of the building, and a spontaneous move�ment of the crowd drew the policeman back to his job. The Saint took out his cigarette case with a feeling of precarious relief and watched the cars disgorge the digni�fied shapes of Luker, Fairweather, Sir Robert and Lady Sangore, and Lady Valerie Woodchester.

"It must be wonderful to be famous," remarked Peter Quentin reverently.

"Get yourself some reflected glory," said the Saint. "Take Pat inside�I'm going to float around for a bit."

He waited while they disappeared, and presently fol�lowed them in. Immediately inside the entrance was a fair-sized hall in which a number of people were standing about, conversing in cathedral mutters. There were single doors on each side, and a double pair facing the entrance which opened into the main room where the inquest was to take place. Near these farther doors Lady Valerie was standing alone, waiting, rather impatiently tapping the ground with one trim-shod foot. Simon went over to her.

"Good morning," he said.

She turned languidly and inspected him, one finely arched eyebrow slightly raised. She had lovely eyes, large and dark and sparkling, shaded by very long lashes. Her dark hair gleamed with a warm autumn richness. The poise of her exquisitely modelled head, the angle of her childishly tip-tilted nose, the curl of her pretty lips, proclaimed her utter and profound disinterest in Simon Templar.

"What's happened to Luker and the others?" Simon asked. "I saw them come in with you just now."

"They're in the office talking to the coroner, if you want them," she said indifferently. Then suddenly she lost some of her indifference. "Are you a reporter?"

"No," said the Saint regretfully. "But I could get you one. May I compliment you on your taste in clothes. I always did like that dress."

He knew the dress very well, since he had helped Patricia to choose it.

Lady Valerie stared at him hard for a moment and then her expression changed completely. It ceased altogether to be cold and disdainful: her features became animated with eagerness.

"Oh," she said. "How silly of me! Of course I remember you now. You're the hero, aren't you?"

"Am I?"

She frowned a little.

"Not that I really hoot a lot about this hero business," she went on. "I daresay it's all very fine for great he-men to go rushing about dripping with sweat and doing noble things, but I think there ought to be special places set apart for them to perform in."

"You were rescued yourself the other night, weren't you?" said the Saint pleasantly.

"Rescued? My good man, I was simply thrown about like an old sack. When the fire alarm went off I didn't realize what it was for a moment, and then when Don Knightley came charging into my room with his hair stand�ing on end and his eyes sticking out and his ears absolutely flapping with the most frightful emotion I merely thought I was in for a fate worse than death, and believe me I was. I mean, all's fair in love and war and all that sort of thing, but to be heaved up by one arm and one leg and slung over a man's bony shoulder, and then to be galloped about over miles of lawn with your only garment flapping up around your neck . . ."

She seemed to be expecting sympathy.

Simon laughed.

"It must have been rather trying," he admitted. "I haven't seen my rival today. By the way, where is he?"

"He had to go and change the guard, or something dreary. But it doesn't matter. It's nice to see you again."

She might almost have meant it.

"Next time you want rescuing, you must drop me a line," said the Saint. "I'm told I have a very delicate touch with damsels in distress. Maybe I could give you more satis�faction."

She glanced sideways at him, out of the corners of her eyes. Her lips twitched slightly.

"Maybe you could," she said.

"All the same," Simon continued resolutely, "it would have been even more trying if you'd been left in your room, wouldn't it?"

Again her expression changed like magic; in a moment she looked utterly woebegone.

"Yes," she said in a low voice. "Like�like John."

She turned wide, distressed eyes on him.

"I�I can't think what could have happened," she said tremulously. "He�he must have heard the alarm, and I �I know he wasn't drunk or anything like that. He couldn't have committed suicide, could he? Nobody would commit suicide like�like that."

She seemed to be begging him to reassure her that Kennet had not committed suicide; there were actually tears in her eyes. Simon was puzzled.

"No, he didn't commit suicide," he answered. "I'll bet anything on that. But why should you think of it?"

"Well, we did have the most awful row," and�and I swore I'd never speak to him again, and he seemed to take it rather to heart. Of course I didn't really mean it, but I was getting awfully fed up with the whole silly business, and he was being terribly stupid and awkward and unreason�able."

"Were you engaged to him, or something like that?"

"Oh no. Of course he may have thought . . . But then, nobody takes those things seriously. Oh, damn! It's all so hopelessly foul and horrible, and all just because of a silly bet."

"So he may have thought you were in love with him. You'd let him think so. Is that it?" Simon persisted.

"Yes, I suppose so, if you put it that way. But what else could I do?"

She stared at him indignantly, as if she were denying a thoroughly unjust accusation.

"I bet you wouldn't see a thousand-guinea fur coat that you were simply aching to have go slipping away just because you couldn't make a bit of an effort with a man," she said vehemently. "And it was in a good cause, too."

The Saint smiled sympathetically. He still hadn't much idea what she was talking about, but he knew with a tumul�tuous certainty that he was getting somewhere. Out of all that confusion something clear and revealing must emerge within another minute or two�if only luck gave him that other minute. He was aware that his pulses were beating a shade faster.

"Was John going to give you a fur coat?" he inquired.

"John? My dear, don't be ridiculous. John would never have given me a fur coat. Why, he never even took me anywhere in a taxi."

She paused.

"He wasn't mean," she added quickly. "You mustn't think that. He was terribly generous, really, even though he didn't have much money. But he used to spend it all on frightfully earnest things, like books and lectures and Brotherhood of Man leagues and all that sort of thing." She shook her head dejectedly. "He used to work so hard and study such a lot and have such impossible ideals, and now ... If only he'd had a good time first, it wouldn't seem quite so bad somehow," she said chokingly. "But he just wouldn't have a good time. He was much too earnest."

"He probably enjoyed himself in his own way," said the Saint consolingly. "But about this fur coat. Where was that coming from?"

"Oh, that was Mr Fairweather," she answered. "Of course he's got simply lashings of money; a thousand guineas is simply nothing to him. You see, he thought it would be quite a good thing if John became reconciled with his father and stopped being stupid, and then he thought that if John was engaged to me�only in a sort of unofficial way, of course�I could make him stop being stupid. So he bet me a thousand-guinea fur coat to see if I could do it. So of course I had to try."

"Did you have any luck?"

She shook her head.

"No. He was terribly obstinate and silly. I wanted him to have a good time and forget all his stupid ideas, but he just wouldn't. Instead of enjoying himself like an ordinary person he'd just sit and talk to me for hours, and some�times he'd bring along a fellow called Windlay that he lived with, and then they'd both talk to me."

"What did they talk about?"

She spread out her hands in a vague gesture.

"Politics�you know, stupid things. And he used to talk about a thing called the Ring, and Mr Luker, and General Sangore, and even his own father, and say the beastliest things about them. And there were newspapers, and factories, and some people called the Sons of France��"

The Saint was suddenly very rigid.

"What was that again?"

"The Sons of France�or something like that. I don't know what it was all about and I don't care. I know he used to say that he was going to upset everything in a few weeks and make things uncomfortable for everybody, and I used to tell him not to be so damned selfish, because after all what's the point in upsetting everybody? Live and let live is my motto, and I wouldn't interfere with other people's private affairs if they'll leave mine alone."

The Saint put another cigarette between his lips and steadied his hands round his lighter.

"Have you any idea what he was going to do that was going to upset everybody so much?" he asked.

The girl shrugged her slim shoulders.

"I don't know. He had a lot of papers that he was going to publish and prove something. And just a week or two ago he was frightfully excited about some photographs that he'd got hold of. I don't know what they were, but both he and Windlay were frightfully worked up about it. But what does it matter, anyway?"�

3

Simon Templar filled his lungs with smoke and let it out again in a trailing streamer that flowed with the unbroken evenness of a deep river. The shock that had brought him to conscious immobility had passed, letting the tenseness ebb out of his muscles to leave his natural lazy imperturba�bility apparently unchanged. But under his effortless and unruffled poise his brain was thrumming like an intoxicated dynamo.

He had fished for clues and he had brought them up in a pail. It didn't matter for the moment how they fitted together. Luker and the Arms Ring; Sangore, formerly of the War Office, how a director of the Wolverhampton Ord�nance Company; Fairweather, sometime secretary of state for war, now on the board of Norfelt Chemicals; Kennet the pacifist, the groping crusader. Papers, exposes, photographs. And the Sons of France. Whichever way you spilled them, they fell into some sort of pattern. The drums he had heard such a short while ago thundered in the Saint's temples; the blaring brass shrieked in his ears. He felt as if he were standing on the brink of a breathless precipice, watching the boiling of a hideously parturient abyss. The keen clear zenithal winds of destiny fanned through his hair.

He was conscious, in a curiously distant way, that the girl was still talking.

"I never used to listen very hard�I was too busy trying to think of ways to stop them. If I hadn't stopped them, they'd have gone on all night. So when I'd had enough of politics I'd say something like 'Let's go to the Berkeley and have a drink,' and then they'd both start talking about the snobbishness of big hotels and how bad drink was for me; and I didn't mind that nearly so much, because I quite like talking about hotels and drink."

The Saint brought himself back to her with a deliberate effort. He could think afterwards; now, precious time was flying, and the inquest was already late. He could have no more than a few seconds to take advantage of what Provi�dence had thrown into his lap.

He said: "But if Kennet hated Luker and Sangore so much, what made him come down here for the week end ?"

"I did. I thought that if he could come down here and see what they were really like, he might have given up his stupid ideas. And I knew they were going to offer him an awfully good job. Algy told me so."

"Who?"

"Algy. Algy Fairweather. Of course you know."

"Of course," said the Saint humbly. "And didn't Kennet appreciate it?"

"No. That's what made me so furious. When we got here he told me he was glad they wanted to see him, because he wanted to see them, too, and instead of them giving him a job he was going to see that theirs were made so uncomfortable that they'd be glad to give them up. So I told him I thought he was a silly, stupid, narrow-minded, bigoted halfwit, and a crashing bore as well, and�and we parted. After dinner he went into the library to talk to them, and I went to the movies with Don Knightley, and I never saw John again." She gazed at the Saint appeal�ingly. "D-do you really think it was my fault that all this happened?"

He considered her without smiling.

"I think you deserve a damned good hiding for leading Kennet up the garden," he said dispassionately. "And if I were Windlay I'd see that you got one."

She pouted. She seemed to be more disappointed that he could think of her like that than seriously annoyed by what he had said. And then, quite unanswerably, a gleeful little twinkle came into her eyes that made her look momen�tarily like a mischievous and very attractive child.

"You wouldn't say that if you knew Windlay," she gig�gled. "He's a very pale and skinny young man with glasses."

Simon gave up the struggle. Actually he felt a colder anger against the men who had used the girl as their tool. The possibility that she might have been something more than an unsuspecting instrument was one which he dis�carded almost at once. She had already told him far too much. And her mind, whatever its obvious failings, could never have worked that way.

"Where did Kennet and Windlay live?" he asked flatly.

"Oh, miles from anywhere, out in Notting Hill, in an awful place called Balaclava Mansions."

"Notting Hill isn't miles from anywhere," said the Saint. "The trouble with you is that you've never heard of any place outside the West End. You've got a brain; why don't you get reckless and try using it?"

She sighed.

"My God," she said. "Now you're going to come over all earnest on me. You think I ought to have a good hiding for the way I treated Johnny. I suppose my intentions weren't serious enough. I oughtn't to have pretended some�thing I didn't mean. Is that it?"

"More or less," he said bluntly.

He wondered what excuse she was going to make for herself.

She didn't make any excuse. She laughed.

"You have the nerve to stand there, in your beautiful clothes, with your dark hair and dashing blue eyes, and tell me that," she said startlingly. "I bet you've made love to heaps of women yourself, hundreds of times, and never meant a word of it."

The Saint stared at her. For a moment he was com�pletely and irrevocably taken aback.

In that moment his first hasty estimate of her underwent a surprising reversal, although it made no difference to his belief in her innocence. But it gave him an insight into her mind which he had not been expecting. She might be feather�brained and spoiled, but she had something more in her head than he had credited her with. For the first time he found himself appreciating her.

"You win, darling," he said. The turn of his lips became impish. "Only I always mean it a little."

Then one of the side doors opened and he saw Lady Sangore surge out like a full-rigged ship putting out from harbour. Behind her, in a straggling flotilla, came Sir Robert, Kane Luker and Mr Fairweather. Fairweather, peering round, caught sight of a ruddy-faced walrus-moustached man who. looked like a builder's foreman dressed up in his Sunday suit, who got up from the bench where he had been sitting as the party emerged. They shook hands, and Fairweather spoke to him for a moment before he shepherded him into the office which they had just left and came puttering back to rejoin the wake of the fleet. Simon noted the incident as he watched the armada catch sight of Lady Valerie and set a course for her.

"My dear, I'm so sorry we've been such a long time," said Lady Sangore as she hove to. "All this bother only makes everything so much worse."

She conveyed the impression that a fire in which some�body was burnt to death would not be nearly so distressing if it were not for the subsequent inconvenience which she personally had to suffer.

"I hope you haven't been too bored, my dear," said Fairweather, puffing through into the foreground.

Lady Valerie smiled.

"Oh no," she said. "I've been very well looked after. You haven't forgotten the hero of the evening, have you?"

Fairweather blinked at the Saint.

"Of course�the gentleman who made that magnificent attempt to rescue poor old Kennet. I ought to have got in touch with you before, but�um�I'm sure you'll forgive us, everything has been so disorganized . . ." He shuffled his feet uneasily. "At any rate, it's a great relief to see that you don't look much the worse for your adventure."

The Saint smiled�and to anyone who knew him well, that smile would have seemed curiously like the smile on the face of a certain celebrated tiger.

He had been amazingly lucky. The return of Luker and Company had been delayed just long enough for him to coax out of Lady Valerie the whole incalculably important story which she had to tell; their reintroduction couldn't have been more desirably timed if he had arranged it him�self. He could look for no more information, but he already had enough to keep his mind occupied for some time. Meanwhile, he could contribute something of his own which might add helpfully to the general embarrassment. He was only waiting for his chance.

"I come from a long line of salamanders," he said cheerfully. "Wasn't that Kennet's father I saw you speaking to just now?"

"Er�yes. I've known him for a long time, of course."

"This inquest isn't being heard in camera by any chance, is it?"

"Er�no. Why should it be?"

"It seems to involve rather a lot of private interviews."

"Urn." Fairweather looked� even more uncomfortable. He seemed to inflate himself determinedly. "I fear I have never had any experience of these things. But of course it's the coroner's job to save as much of the court's time a possible."

Simon toyed gently with his cigarette.

"Lady Valerie and I were just talking it over," he said. "She seemed to have an idea that Kennet might have com�mitted suicide."

"Suicide?" boomed General Sangore with gruff author�ity. "No, no, my dear fellow, that wouldn't do at all. We can't possibly have any sort of scandal. Think what it would mean to the poor chap's father. No. Accidental death is the verdict, eh?"

He spoke as if the matter were all arranged. Fairweather supported him.

"That's the only possible verdict," he said. "We've got to avoid any silly gossip. You know what these beastly newspapers are like�they'd give anything for the chance to make a sensation out of a case like this. Luckily the coroner is a sensible man. He won't stand any nonsense."

"Isn't that splendid?" said the Saint.

They all looked at him at once with a new intentness. The edge in his voice was as fine as a razor, but it cut through the threads of their complacency in a way that left them clammily suspended in an uncharted void. Before that, disarmed by his appearance and accent, they had taken him for granted as a slightly unusual member of a familiar species�their own species. Now they stared at him sus�piciously, as they might have stared at an intruding foreigner.

"Are we to understand that you would disagree with that verdict, Mr Templar?" Luker inquired suavely.

He was the only one who had remained immune to that involuntary stiffening. But he had had a chance to measure the Saint before, when, for one intangible moment, they had crossed swords in the garden during the fire.

Simon's gaze sought him out with a sparkle of wicked sapphire.

"Simon Templar is the full name," he said deliberately. "While you were finding out who I was, you should have talked to one of the policemen. He could have refreshed your memory. When you've read about me in the papers, I've usually been called the Saint."

He might have dropped a bomb under their feet with a short fuse sizzling. There were times when the effects of revealing his identity gave him an indescribable delight, and this was one of them.

Lady Valerie Woodchester let out a little squeal. Lady Sangore's mouth opened and then closed like a trap. The general's florid face added a tint of bright magenta to its varied hues. Fairweather dropped his hat, and it settled on the floor with an ear-splitting ploff. Only Luker remained motionless, with his dark sunken eyes riveted on the Saint.

And the Saint went on smiling.

There was a general eddy towards the entrance of the courtroom, and a red-faced constable took up his position beside the doors and began to intone self-consciously from a tattered piece of paper.

"Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All manner of persons having anything to do at this court, before the king's coroner for this county, touching the death of John Kennet, draw near and give your attendance, and if anyone can give evidence on behalf of our sovereign lord the king, when, how, and by what means John Kennet came to his death, let him come forward and he shall be heard; and you good men of this county summoned to appear here this day to enquire for our sovereign lord the king, when, how, and by what means John Kennet came to his death, answer to your names as they shall be called, every man at first call, on the pains and penalties that may fall thereon. God save the king!"

4

The courtroom was not crowded, in perceptible contrast with the encouraging throng of gapers that Simon had seen outside, so that he knew at once that some steps must have been taken to discourage the influx of the vulgar mob. Those of the public who had been able to gain admittance were accommodated in rows of hard wooden chairs set across the room with an aisle down the centre. Simon located Peter and Patricia among them, but he took a seat by himself on the other side of the gangway. His eyes met Patricia's for a moment of elusive mockery and then went on to take in the rest of his bearings.

The first two rows on the right were occupied by the party from Whiteways, the Sangores, Luker, Fairweather and Lady Valerie, mingled with a few other people of the same obvious class who all seemed to know each other. They had an air of being apart from the remainder of the public, among them, but not of them, a small party of gentlefolk, self‑contained and self-sufficient, only vaguely conscious that there were other people present.

The first two rows on the left had been reserved for the press, and there was not a vacant chair among them. In front of them, and at right angles to the general public, sat the coroner's jury, five good men of the county and two women. There was an attitude of respectful decorum about them, as if they had been in church. The Saint sized them up as being a representative panel of local shopkeepers. Only one of them was markedly different from the others �a little black-bearded scowling man who seemed to resent being in court at all.

The coroner was a well-fed, well-scrubbed looking man with close-cropped gray hair and a close-cropped gray moustache. He wore a dark suit, with a stiff white collar and a blue bow tie with small white spots on it. While the jury was being sworn, he shuffled over a small batch of papers on his table, which occupied the centre of a dais at the very end of the room.

When the jury were seated again, he cleared his throat noisily and addressed them.

"We are here to inquire into the circumstances attending the death of the late John Kennet. It is your duty to listen carefully to the evidence which will be put before you and to return a verdict in accordance with that evidence. The facts concerning which evidence will be given are as follows. On the night of the seventeenth, the house known as Whiteways, the property of Mr Fairweather, was burnt to the ground. Various people were in the house when the fire started, including Mr Fairweather himself, General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady Sangore, Mr Kane Luker, Lady Valerie Woodchester, Captain Donald Knightley and the deceased. All of them except Captain Knightley are in court today. They will tell you that after they had left the build�ing they discovered that John Kennet was missing. An attempt to reach his room was unsuccessful owing to the rapid spread of the fire, and on the following day his charred remains were found in the wreckage of the house."

His manner was brusque and important; quite plainly, nobody could tell him anything about how to run an inquest, and equally plainly he regarded a jury as nothing but a necessary evil, to be kept firmly in its place.

"If you wish to do so you are entitled to view the body. Do you wish to view the body?" He paused perhaps long enough to take another breath, and said: "Very well, then. We shall proceed to hear evidence of how the body was found. Call the first witness."

The sergeant standing behind him consulted a list of names and called out: "Theodore Bream."

A man who looked rather like a retired carthorse lum�bered up on to the dais, sweating profusely, and took the oath. The coroner leaned back in his chair and looked him over like a schoolmaster inspecting a new pupil.

"You are the captain of the Anford Fire Brigade?"

"Yessir."

"On the morning of the eighteenth you examined the ruins of Whiteways."

"Yessir."

"What did you find?"

"In the ruins of the library, among a lot of daybree, I found the body of the deceased."

"Did you find anything else?"

"Yessir. I found bits of a burned-up bedstead�coil springs and suchlike."

"What deductions did you make from the position of the body and the burned fragments of the bedstead?"

"Well, sir, I come to the conclusion that they'd dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms above."

The coroner rubbed his chin.

"I see. You came to the conclusion that the bed, with the deceased in it, had dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms above the library when the floor collapsed in the fire."

"Yessir."

"That seems quite plain. Did you find anything to suggest what might have been the cause of the fire?"

"No sir. It might 've bin anything. The place was burned out so bad there wasn't enough left to show how it started."

The coroner turned to the jury.

"Have you any questions to ask this witness?"

Hardly giving them any time to answer, he turned again to the sergeant.

"Next witness, please."

"Algernon Sidney Fairweather."

Fairweather went up on to the platform and took the oath. The coroner's manner became less peremptory. He clearly regarded it as a pleasant relief to be able to examine a witness of his own class.

"You are the owner of Whiteways, Mr Fairweather?"

"I am."

"The deceased was a guest in your house on the night of the seventeenth ?"

"He was."

"Which room was he occupying?"

"The end bedroom in the west wing, directly above the library."

"So that in the event of the collapse of the floor of his room, his bed would fall through into the library?"

"It would."

The coroner glanced at the jury triumphantly, as much as to say: "There you are, you see." Then he turned back to Fairweather even more deferentially.

"Would you give us your account of what occurred on the night of the fire, Mr�Fairweather?"

Fairweather clasped his hands in front of him, frowning seriously with the expression of a man who is carefully and conscientiously marshalling his memories.

"We had dinner a little early that night�at about seven o'clock�because Captain Knightley and Lady Valerie were going to the cinema. They left immediately after dinner, and shortly afterwards Lady Sangore went to her room to write some letters. The rest of us sat and talked in the library until about half-past ten, when Kennet went to bed. That was the last time any of us saw him. At about a quarter past eleven Captain Knightley and Lady Valerie returned, and I should think we stayed up for not more than another quarter of an hour. Then we all went to bed.

"Some time later�I should imagine it was about half-past twelve�I was awakened by the clanging of the fire alarms. I put on a pair of trousers and left my room. At once it became obvious to me that the fire was serious. There was a great deal of smoke on the stairs, and from the sound of the flames and the light they gave I could see that the fire must have taken a firm hold on the ground floor.

"You must understand that I had just been suddenly woken up, and I was somewhat bewildered. As I hesitated, I saw Captain Knightley come along the passage carrying Lady Valerie. Then I heard General Sangore's voice out�side shouting 'Hurry up and get out, everybody!' I started to follow Captain Knightley, and I was halfway down the stairs when I met Mr Luker coming up. He said 'Oh, that's all right�I was afraid you hadn't heard. The others are all out.' "

"And then?"

"I ran out into the garden with him. That's about al' I can remember. It all happened so quickly that my recol�lections are a trifle hazy. I still don't know how we came to forget Kennet until it was too late, but I can only imagine that in the excitement Mr Luker and myself mutually mis�understood each other to have accounted for the people we had not seen. It was a tragic mistake which has haunted me ever since."

The coroner wagged his head sympathetically, as if he could feel everything that Fairweather must have suffered.

"I'm sure that we all appreciate your feelings," he said. He turned the papers on his table, and went on, as though apologizing for bringing back any more painful memories: "Have you any idea as to how the fire could have started?"

"None. It may have been a faulty piece of electric wiring, or a cigarette end carelessly dropped somewhere. It must have been something like that."

"Thank you, Mr Fairweather," said the coroner. "Next witness, please."

There was an interruption. Before the sergeant could call out the next name the little black-bearded juryman opened his mouth.

" 'Arf a mo," he said. "I've got some questions I'd like to ask."

The coroner stared at him as though he had been guilty of some indecency. He seemed to find it extraordinary that a member of the jury should wish to ask a question.

The little juryman returned his stare defiantly. He had the air of Ajax defying the lightning.

"And what is your question?" asked the coroner, in a supercilious patronizing tone.

"Didn't the witness 'ave no servants?"

"Er�several," Fairweather said mildly. "But I had given them all leave to attend a dance in Reading, and they did not get back until the fire was practically over. The only one left was my chauffeur, who lives in the lodge, about three hundred yards away from the main building."

"Didn't nobody try to put the fire out?"

"It was hardly possible. It spread too rapidly, and we had nothing to tackle it with."

"Thank you," said the coroner. "Next witness, please."

He contrived to be mildly apologetic and contemptuously crushing at the same time. He seemed to apologize to Fairweather for the trouble and distress he had been caused in answering two altogether ridiculous and irrelevant ques�tions, and simultaneously to point out the little juryman as a pest and a nuisance who would be well advised to shut up and behave himself.

"Kane Luker," called the sergeant.

Luker gave his evidence in a quiet precise voice. He had been sitting up reading when he heard the fire alarm. He left his room and went downstairs, where he discovered that the fire appeared to have started in the library, but it was already too fierce for him to be able to get near it. He opened the front door, and while he was doing so Sir Robert and Lady Sangore came downstairs. He told them to get outside and shout up at the bedroom windows. He started to go down to the lodge to telephone for the fire brigade. He met the chauffeur on the way and sent him back to make the call, and himself returned to the house. As he reached it, Knightley carried Lady Valerie out. He went in and started to climb the stairs, where he met Fairweather. He was sure that everyone must have heard the alarms.

"I said 'Do you know if the others are all out?' and I thought he gave some affirmative answer. It's only since then that I've realized that he must have missed my first words and thought that I said 'The others are all out.' But I agree with him that it will be hard for us to forgive ourselves for the tragic results of our misunderstanding."

"I don't think that any blame can be attached to you," observed the coroner benignly. "All of us have made simi�lar mistakes even in normal circumstances, and in a moment of excitement like that they are still more understandable. The tragic results of the mistake were due to a combination of causes for which you and Mr Fairweather can scarcely be held responsible."

He turned pointedly and challengingly towards the jury.

"Any questions?" he barked.

He seemed to be daring them to ask any questions.

"Yus," said the black-bearded little man.

The coroner discovered him again with fresh evidence of distaste. His brows drew together ominously, as if it had just occurred to him to wonder who had been responsi�ble for including such an impossible person in the quorum, and as if he were making a mental note to issue a severe reprimand to the party concerned. He tapped impatiently on the table with his finger tips.

"Well?"

"I suppose you all 'ad wine with your dinner, and when you went into the libry you 'ad more drinks," said the little juryman. " 'Ow many drinks did you 'ave and 'ow many did Mr Kennet 'ave?"

Luker shrugged.

"Some of us had a little wine with dinner, certainly; and after dinner there was whiskey and soda in the library. I can't say exactly how much we had, but it was certainly a very moderate amount."

"Kennet wasn't drunk, was 'e?"

"Certainly not."

"Then why didn't 'e 'ear the alarm?"

Luker looked appealingly at the coroner, who said: "That is hardly a question which the witness can be expected to answer."

He looked at the jury as if inviting them to dissociate themselves from their one discreditable member; and the foreman, a smeary individual with a lock of hair plastered down over his forehead, said ingratiatingly: "He might 've been a heavy sleeper."

"From the evidence, that seems to be the only reasonable explanation," said the coroner firmly. "Thank you, Mr Luker."

General Sangore and his wife briefly corroborated what had been told before. They had been wakened by the fire alarms, they left the house, and it was not until later that they realized that Kennet was missing. Lady Valerie gave evidence of being rescued by Captain Knightley and of being the first to notice that Kennet was not outside. The chauffeur gave evidence of having met Luker on the drive and of having gone back to call the fire brigade. He had had a lot of difficulty in getting through, and consequently had been detained too long to see much of what went on at the house.

None of these witnesses were questioned. The black-bearded juryman, temporarily discouraged, had relapsed into frustrated scowling.

The coroner shuffled his papers again with an air of returning equanimity. No doubt he was feeling that he had now got the situation well in hand.

"Next witness, please."

"Simon Templar," called the sergeant.

III

How Simon Templar Drove to London,

and General� Sangore� Experienced� an

Impediment in His Speech

THERE was a stir of excitement in the press seats as Simon Templar walked up on to the platform and took the oath. Even if the party from Whiteways had failed to recognize his name, there was no such obtuseness among the reporters. The Saint had provided them with too many good stories in the past for them to forget him, and their air of profes�sional boredom gave way to a sudden and unexpected alert�ness. A subdued hum of speculation swept over them and spread to one or two other parts of the room where the name had also revived recollections. The black-bearded little juryman sat forward and stared.

While Simon was taking the oath, he noticed that the coroner was poring intently over a scrap of paper which had somehow come into his hands. When he raised his eyes from it, they came to rest on the Saint with a new wariness. He folded the note and tucked it away in his breast pocket without shifting his gaze; and his manner became very brisk again.

"I understand, Mr Templar, that you arrived on the scene of the fire some time after it had started."

"I have no idea," said the Saint carefully. "I only saw it a very short time before I got there. And I was there in time to hear Lady Valerie say that Kennet was missing."

The coroner rubbed his chin. He seemed to be weighing his words with particular circumspection.

"Then you went into the house to try to get him out."

"Yes."

"In what condition was the house when you entered it? I mean, how far had the fire progressed?"

"The whole place was blazing," Simon answered. "It was worst in the part which I now gather was called the west wing. There was fire in the hall, and the stairs had begun to burn. Part of the passage I had to go down to reach Kennet's room was also alight."

"I take it that with all that fire there would be a great deal of smoke and fumes."

"There was quite a bit."

"I understand that you were quite�er�groggy when you came out."

"Only for a moment. It passed off very quickly."

"But I take it that if you had stayed in the house any longer than you did, you would inevitably have been over�come by the smoke and fumes and lost consciousness."

"I suppose so, eventually."

"To look at you, Mr Templar, one would certainly get the impression that your physical condition was exceptionally good."

"I've always got around all right."

There was a pause. The coroner turned to the jury.

"Mr Templar modestly tells us that he gets around all right," he stated. "You can see for yourselves that he has the build and bearing of an unusually strong and athletic man. You will therefore agree that his powers of resistance to such things as smoke and fumes are probably higher than the average, and certainly immeasurably greater than those of a slightly built sedentary type such as the late Mr Kennet, whose constitution, I am told, was always some�what delicate. I want you to bear this in mind a little later on."

He turned back to the Saint.

"You appear to have acted with singular courage, Mr Templar," he said. "I'm sure that that is quite obvious to all of us here in spite of the modest way in which you have told your story. I should like to compliment you on your extremely gallant attempt to save this unfortunate young man's life. Next witness, please."

A glint of steel came into the Saint's eyes. He knew that the coroner had had a good talk with the party from Whiteways, and it had been evident from the start of the proceed�ings that everything was laid out to lead up to a verdict of accidental death with as little fuss as possible. That was all very well; and the Saint had quite enjoyed himself while he was waiting for his turn. But now he realized that he was not intended to have a turn. His own evidence had been adroitly manoeuvred towards bolstering up the desired verdict; and the coroner, warned about him in time, was getting rid of him with a pontifical pat on the back before he had a chance to derange the well-oiled machinery. Which was not by any means the Saint's idea.

"Haven't the jury any questions?" he asked breezily.

He turned towards them and looked hard at the black-bearded little man, who was sitting slumped disconsolately in his chair. There was something compelling about his direct gaze.

The black-bearded little man's figure straightened and an eager light came into his eyes. He rose.

"Yus," he said defiantly. "I've got some questions."

The coroner's hands tightened together.

"Very well," he snapped. "Go on and ask your questions."

The way in which he spoke explained to the entire audi�ence that the questions could only be a pointless waste of their time as much as his own.

The little man turned to Simon.

"You're the chap they call the Saint, ain't you?" he said. "You've 'ad a lot of experience of crime�murders, and that sort o' thing."

Before Simon could answer the coroner intervened.

"Mr Templar's past life .and any nickname by which he may be known to the public are not subjects which we have to consider at this inquiry. Kindly confine your questions to facts relevant to the case."

There was an awkward pause. The little juryman's atti�tude was still undaunted, but he didn't seem to know what to say next. He looked about him desperately, as if search�ing the room for inspiration. Finally he spoke.

"Do you think there was something fishy about this fire?" he demanded.

"Mr Templar's personal opinions are not matters which concern this court," interrupted the coroner sternly.

The Saint smiled. He looked at the little juryman, and spoke very clearly and distinctly.

"Yes," he said. "I think there were a lot of very fishy things about it."

There was a moment of silence so heavy that it seemed almost solid. And then it broke in a babble of twittering speculation that surged over the room as if a swarm of bees had been turned loose. There was a craning of necks all over the court, a quick rustling of notebooks among the reporters.

Simon stood at his ease, absorbing the pleasant radia�tions of the sensation he had created. Well, he reflected, he had certainly done it now. He glanced at the rows of seats where the party from Whiteways was sitting. Luker's expression had not changed: he wore his usual cold stony mask. Fairweather looked acutely unhappy: he could not meet the Saint's gaze. The General and Lady Sangore had adopted an indignant pose of having nothing to do with what was going on: they sat as if red-hot pokers had been inserted into their backs and they were pretending not to notice it.

Simon's glance travelled on and found the faces of Peter and Patricia among the scatter of pink blobs that were turned up to him. He held their eyes for a moment with a message of impenitent devilry.

The jury were goggling at him openmouthed, with the sole exception of the small black-bearded man, who had taken up a Napoleonic posture with his arms proudly folded and a radiance of anarchistic joy on his face. The coroner had gone slightly purple; he banged on the table in front of him.

"Silence!" he shouted. "Silence, or I'll have the court cleared!"

He turned angrily on Simon.

"We are not interested in your theories, Mr Templar, and you had no right to make such a statement. You will please remember that this is a court of law."

"I'm trying to," said the Saint unflinchingly. "I thought I was summoned here to give evidence. I haven't had the chance to give any yet. I'm not offering theories. I'm trying to draw attention to one or two very curious and even fishy facts which I have not been allowed to mention."

"What are they?" chirped the little juryman exultantly, before the coroner could speak again.

"For instance," said the Saint, "there is the fact which I noticed, which the lady who was with me noticed, and which even the police who were on the scene must have noticed, that every ground-floor window in sight was open, producing a draught which must have materially helped the growth of the fire."

Fairweather stood up.

"I could have explained that if it had been brought up before," he said. "It is true that most of the windows were probably open. It was a warm evening, and they had been open all day. It has always been the butler's duty to lock up the house before he retires, and it had completely escaped my attention that he was not there to do it that night when we went to bed. He would, of course, have locked up as soon as he came in; but unfortunately the fire started before that."

"Thank you, Mr Fairweather."

The coroner shifted the papers on his desk again with two or three aimless, jerky movements, as if to gain time to re-establish his domination. Then he leaned back again and put his finger tips together and went on in a more trenchant voice.

"This is a regrettable but instructive example of the danger of jumping to rash conclusions. It is one very good reason why the personal opinions of witnesses are not admissible in evidence. There are some people whose warped minds are prone to place a malicious interpretation on anything of which the true explanation is beyond their limited intelligence. There are also persons whose desire for cheap notoriety leads them to distort and exaggerate without restraint when they find themselves temporarily in the public eye, in the hope of attracting more attention to themselves. It is the duty of a court to protect the reputa�tions of other witnesses, and the open-mindedness of the jury, from the harm which may be done by such irresponsible insinuations. In this case, an insignificant fact which is not contested has been brought up with much ado. But so far from supporting the suggestion that there is something 'fishy' involved, to any normal and intelligent person it merely confirms the chain of mischances through which the deceased lost his life."

"All right," said the Saint, through his teeth. "Then why was Kennet's door locked?"

The coroner lost his head for a moment.

"How do you know it was locked?"

"Because I saw it. I got as far as his room, and I could have got him out if I could have got in. But it was locked, and it was too strong to break down. I went back to get an axe, but the floor of the corridor caved in before I could get back."

"Well, supposing his door was locked�what of it?" demanded the coroner in an exasperated voice. "Why shouldn't he lock his door?"

Simon spoke very gently and evenly.

"I imagine he had every reason for locking it," he replied. "When a man goes to stay in a house full of his bitterest enemies, people whom he's fighting with all the resources at his command, people to whom wholesale slaughter is merely a matter of business, he's a fool if he doesn't lock his door. But it hasn't been proved that he did lock it. I simply said that his door was locked; and I might add that the key was not in it."

"Beg pardon, sir." The captain of the fire brigade stood up at the far end of the room. "I found a door key among the daybree in the libry."

There was a hushed pause.

"Exactly," said the coroner, with sarcastic emphasis. "Kennet locked his door and took out the key. I fail to see any sinister implications in that�in fact, I have fre�quently done it myself."

"And have you frequently held inquests without bringing any evidence to establish the cause of death?" retorted the Saint recklessly.

For an instant he thought that even he had gone too far. When he thought about it afterwards, in cold blood, the consequences that he had invited with it brought him out in a dank sweat. But at that moment he was too furious to care.

The coroner had gone white around the nostrils.

"Mr Templar, you will withdraw that remark at once."

"I apologize," said the Saint immediately. It was the only thing to do. "Of course I withdraw it."

"I have seen the body myself," said the coroner tightly. "And in a straightforward case like this, where there is absolutely no evidence to justify a suspicion of foul play, it is not thought necessary to add to the suffering of the relatives of the deceased by ordering an autopsy."

He moved his hands over his blotter, looking down at them; and then he brought his eyes back to the Saint with grim decisiveness.

"I do not wish to repeat my previous remarks. But I cannot too strongly express the grave view which I take of such wild and unfounded accusations as you have made. I have only refrained from committing you for contempt of court because I prefer not to give you the publicity which you are doubtless seeking. But you had better go back to your seat at once, before I change my mind."

Simon hesitated. Every instinct he had revolted against obedience. But he knew that there was nothing else he could do. He was as helpless as a fly caught in the meshes of a remorseless machine.

He bowed stiffly and walked down from the dais into the midst of a silence in which the fall of a feather would have sounded deafening.

None of the party from Whiteways even looked at him. But he noticed, with one lonely tingle of hope, that Lady Valerie's eyes were narrowed in an expression of intense concentrated thought. She seemed to be considering astound�ing possibilities.

The coroner consulted inaudibly with the police sergeant, and then he cleared his throat again as he had done when the court opened. His well-scoured face wore a more tran�quil expression.

"I don't think that we need to call any more witnesses," he said.

He went on to give his summing up to the jury. He pointed out that fires usually started by accident, and usually from the most trivial and unsuspected causes. He drew their attention to the fact that a number of fortui�tous circumstances, for none of which Mr Fairweather or his guests were to blame, such as the heavily timbered con�struction of the house, and the pardonably forgotten open windows, had contributed to make the fire far more serious than it might otherwise have been. He reminded them that it was by no means unusual for some people to be such sound sleepers that even an earthquake would not waken them, and that in the haste and stress of an emergency a verbal misunderstanding was even less extraordinary than it was in everyday life. And he urged them to dismiss from their minds altogether the fantastic accusations with which the issue had been confused, and to consider the case solely on the very simple and coherent evidence which had been placed before them.

In twenty minutes the seven jurors, including the black-bearded little man, who looked vaguely disappointed, brought back a verdict of death by misadventure.

2

A hungry pack of reporters fell on the Saint as he left the building. They formed a close circle round him.

"Come on, Saint; give us the story!"

"What's the use?" Simon asked grittily. "You couldn't print it."

"Never mind that�tell us about it."

"Well, what do you think?"

One of them pushed his hat on to the back of his head.

"It looks easy enough. Maybe Kennet was dead drunk, but they'd want to keep that dark for the sake of the old man. It doesn't make much difference. It's pretty obvious that the whole lot of them lost their heads and just ran like hares and left him behind; but with a crowd like that it's bound to be hushed up. You couldn't do anything about it. What was the use of asking for trouble?"

For a moment there was sheer homicide in the Saint's eyes. So that was the net result of his desperate fight to block the whitewashing performance that had been put over not only under the very nose of justice but with its vigorous co-operation. That was the entire product of the risks he had taken and the humiliation to which he had exposed himself�so that even a sensation-loving press was inclined to regard him as having for once exhibited a somewhat egregious and unsophisticated stupidity.

And then he realized that that must not only be the press, but the general opinion. Whitewashing was understandable, something to whisper and wink knowingly about; but the truth that Simon Templar was convinced of was too much for them to swallow. Retired generals, great financiers and ex-cabinet ministers couldn't conspire to cover up murder: it was one of those things which simply did not happen.

His flash of rage died into a hopeless weariness.

"Maybe I like trouble," he rasped, and pushed his way out of the group.

He had seen Peter and Patricia coming out. He took their arms, one on each side of him, and led them silently across the road into the pub opposite.

They took their drinks at the bar and carried them over to a quiet corner by the window. The room was deserted, and for a while nobody broke the silence. Patri�cia's face was struggling between thunder and tears.

"You were magnificent, boy," she said at last. "I could have murdered that coroner."

"But what good could you do?" Peter asked helplessly.

Simon took out a cigarette and lighted it with tense, deliberate fingers. The bitterness had sunk deeper into him, condensing and coalescing into one white-hot drop of sear�ing energy from which the savage power of its combustion was driving with transmuted fierceness through every inch of his being. Perhaps he had failed disastrously in the first round; but he was still on his feet, and the marrow of his bones had turned to iron. His first pull of smoke came back between lips that had settled into a relentless fighting line.

"None," he said curtly. "No good at all. But it had to be tried. And that lets us out. The rest of the argument is a free-for-all with no holds barred."

"What did you tell the reporters?" asked Peter.

"Nothing. They didn't want telling. They told me. As far as they're concerned, it was all just a routine set up to gloss over the fact that the Whiteways gang were all too busy saving their own skins to worry about anybody else. It was instructive, too, now I come to think about it. I was wondering how they'd managed to fix that coroner�dumb as he was. I think I can see it now. They let him think he was doing just what the reporters thought he was doing, and of course he was obviously the type who could be counted on to stand by the old school. Not that it matters now, anyway. They got their verdict, and the case is offi�cially closed."

"The fireman said that he found the key," Peter observed.

Simon nodded.

"That was the worst mistake I've made so far�I told Luker the key wasn't in the door when I was trying to get a reaction out of him on the night of the fire. If he'd over�looked that, he'd 've had plenty of chances to sling it in through a window afterwards. But I don't think even that really made much difference."

Peter raised his tankard again and drank moodily.

Patricia emptied her glass.

She said presently: "I saw you get hold of your girl friend, but I didn't see you take my clothes off her."

"It was rather a public place," said the Saint. "But she's a nice girl and never goes out with the same man twice unless he's a millionaire. Or unless a millionaire asks her to. Which is why she was running around with young Kennet. Fairweather was the philanthropist who wanted him led back into the fold, and he was ready to buy a thousand-guinea fur coat to see it done. And Fairweather was the guy who arranged for him to come down for the week end. I got that much�and more."

The first taut-strung intensity of his manner was passing off, giving way before the slow return of the old exhilarant zest of battle which the other two knew so well. What was past was past; but the fight went on. And he was still in it. He began to feel the familiar tingle of impetuous vitality creeping again along his nerves; and the smoke came again through the first tentative glimmer of a Saintly smile.

"We were right, boys and girls," he said. "Our old friends the arms racketeers are on the warpath again: Luker, Fairweather and Sangore, just as we sorted them out, with Luker pulling the strings and Fairweather and Sangore playing ball. The Sons of France are in it, too, though I don't know how. But there's something big blow�ing up; and you can bet that whatever it is the arms manu�facturers are going to end up in the money, even if a few million suckers do get killed in the process. Kennet had a bee about the arms racket; he'd been scratching around after them, and somehow or other he'd got on to some�thing."

"What was it?" asked Patricia.

"I wish I knew. But we'll find out. It was something to do with papers and photographs. Lady Valerie didn't remember. She never paid any attention. The whole thing bored her. But it provides the one thing we didn't have before�the motive. Whatever it was, it was dynamite. It was big enough to mean that Kennet was too dangerous to be allowed to go on living. And he just wasn't smart enough or tough enough. They got him."

"Somehow," said Peter, "I can't see Fairweather doing a job like that."

"Maybe he didn't. Maybe Sangore didn't, either. But Kennet died�very conveniently. They knew about it. Prob�ably Luker did it himself. I can just see him telling them� 'Leave it to me.' "

"He was taking a big risk."

"What risk? It would have been a cinch; except for the pure fluke that I happened to come along. You saw how the inquest went. There were a dozen ways he could have done it. Kennet could have been poisoned, or strangled, or had his throat cut or his skull cracked: almost anything short of chopping him up would have left damned little evidence on a body that had been through a fire like that. He could even have been just knocked out and locked in his room and left there for the fire to do the rest. We'll never know exactly how it was done, and we'll never be able to prove anything now; but I know that they murdered him. And I'm going to carry on from where Kennet left off. You can take your own choice, but I'm in this now�up to the neck."

They sat looking at him, and in their ears echoed the faint trumpets of the forlorn ventures in which they had followed him without question so many times before.

Patricia smiled.

"All right, boy," she said; "I'm with you."

"If he's made up his mind to get murdered, I suppose you can't stop him," Peter said resignedly. "Anyway, if they put him in another fire we shan't have to pay for a cremation. But what does he think he's going to do ?"

Simon stood up and looked at the clock on the wall.

"I'm going to London," he said. "I found out from the girl friend that Kennet lived with another Bolshevik named Windlay, who was in on the party with him. So I'm going to try and get hold of him before anyone else has the same idea. And I've wasted enough time already. If you two want to be useful, you can try and keep tabs on the Whiteways outfit while I'm away. Be good, and I'll call you later."

He waved to them and was gone, in a sudden irresistible urge of action, and the room seemed curiously drab and lifeless after he had gone. They had one more glimpse of him, at the wheel of the Hirondel, as the great car snaked past the window with a spluttering roar of power; and then there was only the fading thunder of his departure.

The Saint drove quickly. When he was in a hurry, speed limits were merely a trivial technicality to him; and he was in a hurry now. He did not like to dwell too much on the thought of how desperate his hurry might really be. His effortless touch threaded the car through winding roads and obstructing traffic with the deftness of an engraver etching an intricate pattern; the rush of the wind beating at his face and shoulders assuaged some of his hunger for primitive violence; the deep-throated drone of the exhaust was an elemental music that matched his mood. The clean-cut activity of driving, the concentration of judgment and the ceaseless play of fine nerve responses absorbed the fore�front of mechanical consciousness, so that another part of his mind seemed to be set free, untrammelled by dimension, outside of time, to roam over the situation as he knew it and to try to probe into the future where it was leading. It was ninety-five miles from Anford to Notting Hill, and the clock on the dashboard told him that he made the distance in one hour and twenty-five minutes; but the ground that his mind covered in the same time would have taken much longer to account for.

The arrival in Notting Hill brought him back to reality. He stopped beside a postman who directed him to Bala�clava Mansions, and when he caught sight of the building he was obliged to admit to himself that he might have been unduly harsh with Lady Valerie. It actually did look like an Awful Place, being one of those gloomy and architec�turally arid concoctions of sooty stucco to which the London landlord is so congenially prone to attach the title of "Mansions," presumably in the hope of persuading the miserable tenant that luxury is being poured into his humble lap. Just inside the front door a number of grubby and almost indecipherable scraps of paper pinned and pasted to the peeling wall gave instructions for locating those of the inhabitants who were still sufficiently optimistic to believe that anyone might have any interest in finding them. From one of those pathetically neglected emblems of stub�born survival Simon ascertained that John Kennet and Ralph Windlay had been the joint occupants of the rear ground-floor flat on the right.

He went through the cheerless dilapidated hall and raised his hand to knock on the indicated door. And in that posi�tion he stopped, with his knuckles poised, for the door was already ajar.

The Saint scarcely paused before he pushed it open with his foot and went in.

"Hullo there," he called; but there was no answer. It did not take him any time to discover why. He had come through into the one all-purpose room of which the habita�ble part of the flat was composed; and when he saw what was in it he knew that his fear had been justified, that he had indeed wasted too much time. Ralph Windlay was already dead.

3

A bullet fired at close range had helped to shorten his life, and had done it without making a great deal of mess. He lay flat on his back hardly a yard inside the doorway, with his arms spread wide and his mouth stupidly open. Lady Valerie's description of him was quite recognizable. He still wore his glasses. He couldn't have been much more than twenty-five, and his pale thin face looked as if it might once have been intellectual. The only mark on it was a black-rimmed hole between the eyes; but his head lay in the middle of a sticky dark red mess on the threadbare carpet, and Simon knew that the back of his skull would not be nice for a squeamish person to look at.

The room had been ransacked. The two divans had been ripped to pieces and the upholstery of the chairs had been cut open. Cupboards were open and drawers had been pulled out and left where they fell. A shabby old rolltop desk in one corner looked as if a crowbar had been used on it. The table and the floor were strewn with papers.

Simon saw that much; and then there was a sound of tramping footsteps in the hall. Automatically he pushed the door to behind him, subconsciously thinking that it would only be some other occupants of the building passing through; his brain was too busy with what he was looking at to think very hard. Before he realized his mistake the footsteps were right behind him and he was seized roughly from behind.

He whirled round with his muscles instantly awake and one fist driving out instinctively as he turned. And then, with some superhuman effort, he checked the blow in mid-flight.

In that delirious instant his brain reversed itself with such fantastic speed that everything else seemed to have a nightmare slowness by comparison. He watched the trajectory of his hand as if from a vast distance; and it was exactly like sitting in a car with catastrophe leaping up ahead, with the brakes already jammed on to the limit and nothing left to do but to hold on and hope that they would do their work in time. And with a kind of hysterical relief he saw his zooming fist slow up and stop a bare inch from the round red face of the man who had grabbed him. For another split second he simply stood blankly staring; and then suddenly he went weak with laughter.

"You shouldn't give me these shocks, Claud," he said. "My nerves aren't what they used to be."

The man on the other side of his fist went on gaping at him, with his baby-blue eyes dilating with a ferment of emotions which whole volumes might be written to describe. And a tinge of royal purple crept into his plump, cherubic visage.

The reasons for that regal hue were only distantly con�nected with the onrush of that pile‑driving fist which had been so miraculously held back from its mark. To Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, a man who had never set any exaggerated value on his beauty, a punch on the nose would only have been a more or less unpleasant incident to be endured with fortitude in the execution of his duty, and in that stoical spirit he had in his younger days suffered more drastic forms of assault and battery than that. A punch on the nose, indeed, would have been almost a joyous and desirable experience compared with the spasm of unmiti�gated woe that speared through Mr Teal's cosmogony when he saw the face of the Saint. It was a pang that summed up, in one poignant instant, all the years through which Chief Inspector Teal had fought his hopelessly losing battle with that elusive buccaneer, all the disappoint�ments and disasters and infuriating bafflements, all the wrath and sarcasm that his efforts had brought down upon him from his superiors, all the impudent mockeries of the Saint himself, the Saint's disrespectful forefinger prodding the rotundity of his stomach and the assistant commissioner's acidulated sniff. It was a sharp stab of memory that brought back all the occasions when Mr Teal had seen triumph dangling in front of his nose only to have it jerked away by invisible strings at the very moment when he thought his hands were closing round it; and with it came a revival of the barren desolation that had followed so many of those episodes, when Mr Teal had felt that he was merely the dumb quarry of an unjust destiny, doomed to be harried through eternity with the stars themselves conspiring against him. And at the same time it was pervaded with the realization that the identical story was starting all over again.

All these accumulated indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal's intestines in one corrosive moment of appalling stillness before he finally wrenched a response out of his vocal cords.

"How the hell did you get here?" he glurked.

It was not, perhaps, the most fluent and comprehensive speech that Mr Teal had ever made. But it conveyed, with a succinctness which more rounded oratory might well have failed to achieve, the distilled essence of what was seething through the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much of that flutelike clarity which is favoured by the cognoscenti of the science of elocution. It sounded in fact, as if his throat were full of hot porridge.

Simon smiled at him rather thoughtfully. He also had his memories; and the prime deduction which they offered him was that the unexpected intrusion of Chief Inspector Teal, at that particular moment of all moments, was defi�nitely an added complication in an affair that was already complicated enough. But the sublimely bantering slant of his brows never wavered.

"I might ask you the same," he murmured. "But I see that your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose you're still wearing them down."

The detective's face under his staid bowler hat remained a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue eyes were reced�ing fractionally.

"I noticed your car outside," he said.

He was a liar. He had seen it, but not noticed it. That shining cream-and-red monster was something that it would have been almost impossible to overlook in any landscape; but Mr Teal's thoughts had been far away from any subject so disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving in a fool's paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard were allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes committed by ordinary criminals without even a hint of such fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity of their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and recover the majestic dominance from which in the agony of the moment he had so ruinously lapsed.

The Saint dissected his effort with a sardonically generous tolerance that made the detective's collar feel as if it were shrinking into his neck like a garrote.

"Of course, Claud," he said mildly. "Of course you did. I was forgetting what a sleuth you were. And while we're on the subject of sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I don't know whether you've noticed it yet, but there's a dead man on the floor behind me. Without pretending to your encyclopedic knowl�edge of crime I should say that he appears to have been murdered."

"That's right," Teal said raspingly. "And I should say that I knew who did it."

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"I don't want to seem unduly sensitive," he remarked, "but there's something about your tone of voice that makes me feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting��"

"We'll see about that," Teal retorted. He stepped aside out of the doorway. "Search him!" he barked.

Behind him a lanky uniformed sergeant unfolded himself into full view. Somewhat apprehensively he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat pockets. He took out a platinum cigarette case, a wallet, an automatic lighter and a fountain pen; and an expression of outraged astonishment came over his face.

" 'Ere," he said suspiciously. "What 've you done with that gun?"

"What gun?" asked the Saint puzzledly. "You don't think I'd carry a gun in a suit like this, do you? I've got too much respect for my tailor. Anderson would be horri�fied and Sheppard would probably throw a fit."

"Search his hip pockets, you fool," snarled Mr Teal. "And under his armpits. That's where he's most likely to have it."

"And don't tickle," said the Saint severely, "It makes me go all girlish."

Breathing heavily, the sergeant searched as instructed and continued to find nothing.

Simon lowered his arms.

"After which little formality," he said amiably, "let us get back to business. As I was tactfully trying to mention, Claud, there seems to be a sort of corpse lying about on the floor. Do you think we ought to do something about it, or shall we shove it into the bathroom and pretend we haven't seen it?"

Chief Inspector Teal's lower jaw moved in a ponderous surge like the first lurch of the pistons of a locomotive getting under way as he dislodged a forgotten bolus of chewing gum from behind his wisdom teeth. The purple tinge was dying out of his face, allowing it to revert a little closer to its normal chubby pink. The negative results of the sergeant's search had almost thrown him back on his heels, but the shock had something homeopathic in its effect. It had jarred him into taking one wild superhuman clutch at the vanishing tail of his self-control; and now he found himself clinging on to it with the frenzied fervour of a man who has inadvertently taken hold of the steering end of a starving alligator.

Behind him, while the search was proceeding, a number of other persons had sidled cautiously into the room�a melancholy plain-clothes sergeant, a bald-headed man with a camera, a small sandy man with a black bag, a constable in uniform. To the experienced eye, they identified them�selves as the members of a C.I.D. murder squad as unmis�takably as if they had been labelled.

Simon had watched their entrance with interest. He was doing some rapid reconstruction of his own. Mr Teal's advent had been far too flabbergastingly apt to be pure coincidence; and the presence of that compact covey of supporters was extra confirmation of the fact. Even chief inspectors didn't go forth with a retinue of that kind unless they were on a particular and major assignment. And Simon located the origin of the assignment a moment later in the shape of a fat blowzy woman with stringy gray hair who was hovering nervously in the least-exposed part of the background.

Teal turned and looked for her.

"Have you seen this man before ?" he demanded.

She gulped.

"N-no. But I bet 'e done it, just the sime. 'E looks just like one o' them narsty capitalists as pore Mr Windlay was always talkin' abaht."

Simon's gaze rested on her.

"Do you live in these parts?" he inquired politely.

She bridled.

"This 'ere is my property, young man, so you mind yer tongue. I come 'ere every week to collect the rent, not that I 'aven't wasted me time coming 'ere the larst two weeks."

"You came here today and found the body?"

"Yes, I did."

"How long ago was that ?"

"Not 'arf an hour ago, it wasn't. You oughter know."

"And then you went straight out for the police, I sup�pose."

"I went an' phoned Scotland Yard, that's wot I done, knowing as it's their business to catch murderers, an' a good thing, too. They got you, all right."

"You didn't scream or anything?" Simon asked inter�estedly.

The woman snorted.

"Wot, me? Me scream an' 'ave all the neighbours in, an' get me 'ouse a bad nime ? Not likely. This is a respecta�ble place, this is, or it was before you come to it." A twinge of grief shot through her suety frame and made it quiver. "An' now ooze going ter pie me rent, that's wot I wanter know."

The Saint extracted a cigarette from his case. The minor details of the situation were satisfactorily cleared up�the remarkably prompt arrival of the C.I.D. combined with the absence of a crowd outside. The fact that that exceptional conjunction of circumstances had resulted in his present predicament unfortunately remained unaltered; but it was some consolation to know that his first wild surmise was wrong and that Teal hadn't been led there in some fan�tastic way on a definite search for him. It made the odds look rather more encouraging.

"Madam," he said helpfully, "I should think you might do rather well for a while by inviting the public to drop in and charging them sixpence admission. X marks the spot where the body was found, and they can see the original pool of blood on the mat. With Inspector Teal's bowler hat on the mantelpiece in a glass case and a plaster cast of his tummy in the hall���"

Mr Teal thrust himself sizzlingly forward. He signed to his plain-clothes sergeant.

"Take her outside and get her statement," he gritted.

Then he turned back to the Saint. His eyelids drooped as he fought frantically to maintain some vestige of the pose of somnolent boredom which had been his lifelong defence against all calamities.

"And while that's being done, I'd like to hear what you've got to say."

"Say?" repeated the Saint vaguely. He searched for his lighter. "Why, Claud, I can only say that it all looks most mysterious. But I'm sure it 'll all turn out all right. With that brilliant detective genius of yours��"

"Never mind that," Teal said pungently. "I want to hear what you've got to say for yourself. I came here and found you standing over the body."

The Saint shrugged.

"Exactly," he said.

"What do you mean�'exactly' ?"

Mr Teal's voice was not quite so monotonous as he wanted it to be. It tended to slide off its note into a kind of squawk. But that was something that the Saint's ineffa�ble sangfroid always did to him. It was something that always brought Mr Teal to the verge of an apoplectic seizure.

"What do you mean?" he squawked.

"My dear ass," said the Saint patiently, in the manner of one who explains a simple point to a small and dull-witted child, "you said it yourself. You came in and found me standing over the body. You know perfectly well that when I murder people you never come in and find me stand�ing over the body. Now, do you ?"

Mr Teal's eyes boggled in spite of the effort he made to control them. The hot porridge came back into his larynx.

"Are you trying to tell me you're in the clear because I came in and found you bending over the body ?" he yawped. "Well, this is once when you're wrong! Perhaps I haven't done it before. But I've done it now. I've got you, Saint." The superb, delirious conviction grew upon him. "This is the one time you've made a mistake, and I've got you." Chief Inspector Teal drew himself up in the full pride of his magnificent climactic moment. "Simon Templar, I shall take you into custody on a charge of��"

"Wait a minute," said the Saint quietly.

The porridge bubbled underneath Teal's� collar� stud.

"What for?" he exploded.

"Because," said the Saint kindly, "in spite of all the rude ideas you've got about me, Claud, I like you. And it hurts me to see you going off like a damp squib. Didn't you hear the landlady say that she found the body about half an hour ago?"

"Well?"

"Well, I should think we could safely give her the full half-hour�she could hardly have got to a telephone and got you here with all your stooges in much less than that. And we've been talking for some minutes already. And if I murdered this body, you must give me a few minutes to spare at the other end. Let's be very conservative and say that I could have murdered him forty minutes ago." Simon consulted his watch. "Well, it's now exactly a quarter to three."

"Are you starting to give me another of your alibis?"

"I am," said the Saint. "Because at twelve minutes past one I left the Golden Fleece in Anford, which is ninety-five miles from here. Quite a number of the natives and several disinterested visitors can vouch for that�including a member of the local police whose name, believe it or not, is Reginald. And I know I'm the hell of a driver, but even I can't drive ninety-five miles in fifty-three minutes over the antediluvian cart tracks that pass for roads in this country."

Over Chief Inspector Teal's ruddy features smeared the same expression that must have passed over the face of Sisyphus when, having at last heaved his rock nearly to the top of the hill, it turned round and rolled back again to the bottom. In it was the same chaotic blend of dismay, despair, agonized weariness and sickening incredulity.

He knew that the Saint must be telling the truth. He didn't have to take a step to verify it although that would be done later as a matter of strict routine. But the Saint had never wasted time on an alibi that couldn't be checked to the last comma. How it was done, Teal never knew; if he had been a superstitious man he would have suspected witchcraft. But it was done, and had been done, too often for him not to recognize every brush stroke of the tech�nique. And once again he knew that his insane triumph had been premature�that the Saint was slipping through his fingers for what seemed like the ten thousandth time. . . .

He bent his pathetically weary eyes on the body again, as if that at least might take pity on him and provide him with the inspiration for a comeback. And a sudden dull flare of breathless realization went through him.

"Look!" he almost yelped.

The Saint looked.

"Messy sort of business, isn't it ?" he said chattily. "Some of these hoodlums have no respect for the furniture. There ought to be a correspondence course in Good Manners for Murderers."

"That blood," Teal said incoherently. "It's drying . . ."

He went down clumsily on his knees beside the body, fumbled over it, and peered at the stain on the carpet. Then he got slowly to his feet, and his hot, resentful eyes burned on the Saint with a feverish light.

"This man has been dead for from three, to six hours," he said. "You could have gone to Anford and come back in that time!"

"I'm sorry," said the Saint regretfully.

"What for?"

Teal's voice was a hoarse bark.

Simon smiled.

"Because I spent all the morning in Anford."

"What were you doing there?"

"I was at an inquest."

"Whose inquest?"

"Some poor blighter by the name of John Kennet."

"Do you mean the foreign secretary's son�the man who was killed in that country-house fire?" Teal asked sharply.

Simon regarded him benevolently.

"How you do keep up with the news, Claud," he murmured admiringly. "Sometimes I feel quite hopeful about you. It's not often, but it's so cheering when it happens. A kind of warm glow comes over me��"

"What were you doing at that inquest?" Teal said tor�ridly.

The Saint moved his hands.

"Giving evidence. I was the hero of the proceedings, so I got nicely chewed up by the coroner for a reward. You'll read all about it in the evening papers. I hate to disappoint you, dear old weasel, but I'm afraid I've been pretty well in the public eye since about half-past ten."

Simon struck his lighter and made the delayed kindling of his cigarette.

"So what with one thing and another, Claud," he said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to let me go."

Chief Inspector Teal barred his way. The leaden bitter�ness of defeat was curdling in his stomach, but there was a sultry smoulder in his eyes that was more relentless and dangerous than his first unimpeded blaze of wrath. He might have suffered ten thousand failures, but he had never given up. And now there was a grim lourd determination in him that tightened his teeth crushingly on his battered scrap of spearmint.

"You still haven't told me what you're doing here," he said stolidly.

Simon Templar trickled smoke through momentarily sober lips.

"I came to see Windlay," he said. "I wanted to see him before somebody else did. Only I was too late. You can believe that or not as you like. But the late John Kennet shared this place with him."

The detective's eyes went curiously opaque. He stood with a wooden stillness.

"What was the verdict at this inquest?"

"Accidental death."

"Do you think there was anything wrong with that?"

Simon's glance travelled again over the disordered room.

"Someone seems to have been looking for something," he said aimlessly. "I wonder if he found what he was after?"

Casually, as if performing some quite idle action, he leaned forward and picked up a crumpled sheet of news�paper from the litter scattered over the floor. It was a French newspaper five days old, and a passage in it had been heavily marked out in blue pencil.

"Well, well, well," he said. "Listen, Claud. What do you make of this? 'We should like your readers to ask themselves where this criminal association calling itself the Sons of France obtains its funds and the store of arms which Colonel Marteau has so often boasted that he has hidden away for the day when they will be needed. And we ask our readers, how long will they tolerate the existence of this terrorist organization in their midst?' "

He picked up a second scrap of paper from the floor. Again there was a blue-pencilled paragraph.

" 'M. Roquambert, in a vitriolic speech to the Chamber of Deputies last night, urged on the government the neces�sity for a greatly increased expenditure on armaments. "Are we," he demanded, "to suffer the Boche to batter once more on the gates of Paris?" ' " Simon let the cuttings flutter out of his fingers. "I seem to remember that Comrade Roquambert is one of the heads of the Sons of France," he said. "Doesn't that interest you?"

"What was wrong with that verdict?" Teal repeated.

The Saint looked at him, and for once there was no mockery in his eyes.

"I think it would be a good idea if you started investi�gating two murders instead of one," he said.

4

Which was undoubtedly a highly effective and dramatic exit line, Simon reflected, as the Hirondel roared westwards again towards Anford; but how wise it had been was another matter. It had been rather a case of meeting trouble halfway and taking the first smack at it. In the course of his inquiries Teal would inevitably have discovered that Kennet had shared the flat with Windlay, and Simon knew only too well how the detective's mind would have worked on from there directly the inquest headlines hit the stands. The Saint had had no option about taking the bull by the horns, but he wondered now whether he might have achieved the same result without saying quite so much. Chief Inspec�tor Teal's officially hidebound intelligence might sift slowly, but it sifted with a dour and dogged thoroughness. Simon realized at the same time that if he had an adequate alibi for the period during which Windlay might have been killed, Luker and his satellites had an alibi that was abso�lutely identical�it gave him an insight into the efficiency of the machinery that he had tampered with which was distinctly sobering, and he had plenty to think about on the return journey.

Patricia was waiting for him when he stopped the car on Peter's drive. He picked her up and kissed her.

"You look good enough to eat," he said. "And that reminds me, I haven't had any lunch. Where are the troops?"

"Peter's keeping an eye on your menagerie," she told him. "I came back and sent Hoppy over to keep him com�pany. They're all at the Golden Fleece, and when Peter last phoned Hoppy was just starting on his second bottle of whiskey. Did you find Windlay?"

"I found him," said the Saint stonily. "But not soon enough."

In the kitchen, over a plate of cold beef and a tankard of ale, he told her the story in curt dispassionate sentences that brought it all into her mind as vividly as though she had been there herself.

"It only means that we were right, darling," he con�cluded. "Kennet had something that was big enough to commit murder for. There wasn't any accidental-death hokum about Windlay. Somebody knocked on the door and gave him the works the minute he opened it. And the whole flat was torn into small pieces. It must have gone on while we were all footling about at that inquest acquiring beauti�ful alibis�these ungodly are professionals!"

"But did they find what they were looking for?"

"I wish I knew. Bur there's a hell of a good chance that they didn't, since they made a mess like that. I wish I knew exactly what the prize was. It seems to me that it must have been a fair-sized dossier�something that wouldn't be too easy to hide. And unless Kennet was a certifiable lunatic he wouldn't have brought that to Whiteways with�out leaving a duplicate somewhere. Hence the battle of Balaclava Mansions." He pushed his plate away and scowled at it. "If only that damned girl could remember a bit more of the things Kennet told her! He must have spouted like a fountain, and she simply didn't listen."

"Why don't you see her again?" suggested Patricia. "You might be able to jog her memory or something. Any�way, you'd have a good time trying."

Simon looked up at her from under impenitently slant�ing brows.

"Are you insinuating that a man of my unparalleled purity��"

"You'll have to hurry if you want to catch her today," Patricia said practically. "Peter found out from one of the chauffeurs that they're starting back to London at five-thirty."

The Saint stood up restlessly.

"I think I'd better amble over," he said.

Again the Hirondel roared over the Anford road, and a few minutes later it swung to a grinding stop in the small courtyard in front of the Golden Fleece. As Simon stopped the engine and hitched his long legs over the side he glanced around for a glimpse of his confederates. The maternal laws of England being what they were, Hoppy must have been torn away from his second bottle about three hours ago, and it would be another half-hour before he would be allowed to return to it. Simon scanned the landscape for some likely place where the thirsty vigil might have been spent, and he became totteringly transfixed as his eyes set�tled on the window of an establishment on the opposite side of the road, next to the Assembly Rooms, over which ran the legend; Ye Village Goodie Shoppe.

Peter Quentin was stoically reading a magazine; but on the other side of the table, bulging over the top of a choco�late eclair, the froglike eyes of Mr Uniatz ogled Simon through the plate glass with an indescribable expression of anguish and reproach that made the Saint turn hastily into the hotel entrance with his bones melting with helpless laughter.

The first person he saw was Valerie Woodchester her�self. She was sitting alone on the arm of a chair in the lounge, smoking a cigarette and swinging one shapely leg disconsolately, but at the sight of him her face brightened.

"Oh, hullo," she said. "What's the matter?"

"Some things are too holy to talk about," said the Saint, sinking on to the chair opposite. "Never mind. Perhaps you can bring me back to earth. Are you always being left alone?"

"The others are upstairs having a business conference or something." She studied him with fresh and candid inter�est. "Where have you been all the afternoon? You simply seemed to vanish off the face of the globe. I was afraid I should have to go back to town without seeing you again."

"Then why go back to town?" he asked. "You could come over and join us at Peter Quentin's. There's a spare bed and a dart board and plenty to drink, and we could see lots more of each other."

For a moment she looked a little hesitant. Then she shook her head quite decidedly.

"I couldn't do that. After all, two's company and all that sort of thing, you know, and anyhow I don't think it would be good for you to see much more of me than you did when we first met." A little smile touched her lips and gleamed in her dark eyes. "Besides, I'm quite sure Algy Fairweather wouldn't like it. He's been warning me against you. For some reason or other he doesn't seem to approve of you an awful lot."

"You amaze me," said the Saint solemnly. "But does it matter whether Comrade Fairweather approves or not?"

"Well," she said, "a girl has to struggle along somehow, and Comrade Fairweather is a great help. I mean, if he has a man coming to dinner, for instance, and he doesn't want him to concentrate too hard on business, he asks me along and pays me for it. And then I probably have to have a new dress as well, because of course you can't stop a businessman concentrating in an old piece of sackcloth, and I never seem to have any new clothes when I need them."

"In other words, you're his tame vamp, I take it."

She opened her eyes wide at him.

"Do you think I'm tame?"

The Saint surveyed her appraisingly. Again he experi�enced the bafflement of trying to probe beyond that pert childish beauty.

"Maybe not so tame," he corrected himself. "And what would your fee be for dining with a gent if it meant earning Comrade Fairweather's disapproval? For instance, what about having dinner with me on Thursday?"

She didn't answer for a moment. She sat looking down�wards, swinging her leg idly, apparently absorbed in the movement of her foot.

Then she looked up at him and smiled.

"You've fallen for me in quite a big way, haven't you?" she said a little ironically. "I mean, inviting me to dinner and offering to pay me for it."

"I fell passionately in love with you the moment I saw you," Simon declared shamelessly.

She nodded.

"I know. I couldn't help noticing the eager way you dashed off this morning when you thought you'd got all the information you could out of me. I mean, it was all too terribly romantic for anything."

"The audience made me bashful," said the Saint. "Now if we'd only been alone��"

Her dark eyes were mocking.

"Well," she said, "I don't mean that I couldn't put up with having dinner with you if you paid me for it. After all, I've got to have dinner somewhere, and I've been out with a lot of people who weren't nearly so good looking as you are even if they weren't nearly so bashful either. Algy used to pay me twenty guineas for entertaining his important clients."

"That must have helped to make things bearable," said the Saint in some awe.

"Of course," she went on innocently, "I should expect you to pay a bit more than that, because after all I'm only a defenceless girl, and I know you must have some horrible motive for wanting me to have dinner with you."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"You shock me," he said. "What horrible motive could I have for asking you out to dinner? I promise that you'll be as safe with me as you would be with your old Aunt Agatha."

She sighed.

"I know. That's just what I mean. If your eyes were foaming with unholy desire, or anything like that, I prob�ably shouldn't charge you anything at all. After all, brief life is here our portion, and all that sort of thing, and a spot of unholy desire from the right sort of person and in the right sort of way�well, you see what I mean, don't you ? But as things are, I don't think I could possibly let you off with less than fifty guineas."

Simon leaned towards her.

"You know," he said earnestly, "there's something about you�an innocence, a freshness, a sort of girlish appeal that attracts me irresistibly. You're so�so ingenuous and uncal�culating. Will a check do, or shall you want it in cash?"

"Damn," she said in dismay. "I believe you'd have paid a hundred if I'd asked for it. Oh well, I suppose a bargain's a bargain. A check will do."

The Saint grinned.

"Thursday, then, at eight o'clock. At the Berkeley. And since this is a business deal I shall expect you to be punctual. The fee will go down one guinea for every minute I'm kept waiting."

She tossed the stub of her cigarette across the room into the empty fireplace.

"Well, now we've finished talking about business can't we enjoy ourselves? I was hoping we'd have a chance after the inquest, but Algy hustled me away before I could even look round. They were all as mad as hornets, and I can't blame them. After all, you did make rather an ass of yourself, didn't you?"

"Do you really think I was just playing the fool?" he asked curiously.

"I mean trying to make out that Johnny had been mur�dered and Algy set fire to the house and so on. I mean, it was all so ridiculous, wasn't it?"

This time he knew beyond doubt that her artlessness was not so na�ve as it seemed. Her chatter was just a little too quick; besides, he had seen her face at one stage of the inquest.

He paused to consider his reply for a moment. If she knew what he had seen in London, it might startle some�thing out of her. He felt that the move must be made with a fine hand.

He had no chance to make it in that way.

There was a sound of footsteps descending stairs, reach�ing the entrance of the lounge. Simon glanced over his shoulder; and then he rose leisurely to his feet.

"It's time you were getting ready, my dear��"

Fairweather's thinly jovial voice broke off sharply as he realized that there was someone else in the room. He stared at the Saint for a long moment, with his mouth slightly open, while his fat face turned into the likeness of a piece of lard. And then, without any acknowledgment of recog�nition, he turned deliberately back to Lady Valerie.

"We shouldn't have left you so long," he said. "I hope you haven't been annoyed."

"Of course she's been annoyed!" General Sangore's stormy voice burst out without the subtlety of Fairweather's snub. "It's an insult for that feller to speak to any decent person after his behaviour this morning. Damned if I know what he meant by it, anyway."

Simon put his hands in his pockets and relaxed against a cabinet full of hideous porcelain.

"What I meant by it was that I believe Kennet was mur�dered," he said good-humouredly. "Now have I made myself quite clear?"

The general glared at him from under his bushy eye�brows. He seemed to expect Simon to melt like wax.

"By Gad, sir," he said truculently, "you're�you're a bounder! I've never heard such bad form in my life!"

"You mean that if it was murder you'd rather have it hushed up, don't you?" Simon said gently. "You didn't murder him yourself by any chance, did you?"

Sangore's complexion went a rich mottled puce. He tried to speak, but there seemed to be an obstruction in his throat.

Simon went on talking, and his voice was cool and piti�less.

"Last year, when there was a strike at the Pyrford Aviation Works, which is a subsidiary of the Wolverhamp�ton Ordnance Company, you stated publicly that the ring�leaders ought to be put up against a wall and shot. This year, addressing the Easter rally of the Imperial Defence Society, you said: 'A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the horrors of war.' If you would have liked to kill half-a-dozen men for the sake of dividends, and if you think it's a great deal of nonsense to object to people being massacred in millions, I can't help feeling that you qualify as a good suspect. What do you think?"

What General Sangore thought could only be inferred; he was still choking impotently.

Lady Sangore came to his rescue. Her face had gone from white to scarlet, and her small eyes were glittering with vindictive passion.

"The man's a cad," she proclaimed tremblingly. "It's no use wasting words on him. He�he simply isn't a sahib!"

She appeared to be slightly appalled by her temerity, as if she had pronounced the ultimate unspeakable condem�nation.

"It's�it's an outrage!" spluttered Fairweather. "The man is a well-known criminal. We're only lowering ourselves��"

The Saint's cold blue eyes picked him up like an insect on a pin.

"Let me see," he said. "I seem to remember that you played a forward part in getting a change made in the workings of the National Defence Contribution a few years ago. The sales talk was that the tax on excess profits would have paralyzed business enterprise; but the truth is that it would have hit hardest against the firms that were booming on the strength of the new rearmament program�of which, I think, Norfelt Chemicals was by no means the smallest. And you recently stated before a royal commission that 'The armament industry is one which provides employment for thousands of workers. The fact that its products are open to misuse can no more be held against the industry per se than can the production of drugs which would be poisonous if taken without medical advice.' If those are samples of your logic, I don't see why we shouldn't have you on the suspected list�do you?"

Luker stepped forward.

"Surely, Mr Templar," he remarked urbanely, "you aren't going to leave me out of your interesting summary."

The Saint looked at him steadily.

"I can give you some news," he said. "That is, if you haven't heard it already. I spent the afternoon going to London to see if I could catch Ralph Windlay, the man Kennet lived with, before an accident happened to him. I'm sure you'll be cheered to know that everything went off without a hitch and he was already dead when I got there."

There was a dead silence.

And then Lady Valerie Woodchester was tugging uncon�sciously at the Saint's arm. Her full lips were quivering and there was an expression of dazed horror on her face.

"Not Ralph?" she was saying shakily. "No ... no, he can't have been murdered, too!"

The Saint's eyes went to her with an instant's brief compassion.

"I'm afraid so," he said. "Even our coroner here couldn't make out it was an accident. He was shot right between the eyebrows, and his brains were all over the carpet."

"The use of the word 'too' is interesting." Luker's impassive voice came levelly through the stillness. "If Kennet was murdered, somebody killed him and then set fire to the house. Within a few minutes Mr Templar arrives on the scene. It is he who suggests foul play. Then Kennet's friend Windlay is murdered, and again Mr Templar is first on the scene; again it is he who discovers that there has been foul play. It certainly appears to be a coincidence to which the attention of the police should be called."

Simon's bleak gaze took him up.

"Or you might mention it to the Sons of France," he said.

It was a shot in the dark, but it hit a target somewhere. For the first time since he had known him, Simon saw Luker's graven mask slip for a fraction of a second. For that fleeting micron of time the Saint saw the stark soul of a man to whom murder meant nothing.

IV

How Kane Luker Spoke His Mind, and

Hoppy Uniatz Did the Best He Could

with His

"I LIKE THIS PLACE," said Lady Valerie Woodchester, looking smugly around her. "It's one of the few places in London where civilized people can eat civilized food."

The Saint nodded. They had worked their way through three quarters of a menu selected with Simon Templar's own impeccable gastronomic artistry and served with the deference which waiters always instinctively gave him; and he had watched her personality expand and ripen like an exotic flower coming into bloom. Undoubtedly she did the setting no less justice than it did her. Her flawless shoul�ders and deliciously modelled head rose out of a plain but daringly cut evening gown like an orchid rising from a dark stem, with a startling loveliness that turned many envi�ous eyes towards her; she knew it, and she was delighted, like a child who has been taken out on a special treat. A brighter sparkle had crept gradually into her eyes and a faint flush into her cheeks. It was fun, you felt, to be eating a good dinner, and to be in one of the best places among the best people, and to be with a man who was tall and dark and handsome and who could make waiters fuss about obsequiously. Her dazzling flow of gay, senseless prattle had given the Saint no need to make trivial conver�sation while they ate; but now he hardened his heart.

"Yes," he agreed. "The food is good and the atmosphere is right. Also a stitch in time saves embarrassing exposure, and the horse is the noblest of animals. Now you've earned your bread and butter, and you can stop entertaining me. Let's be serious for a minute. Have you seen any of our friends today?"

She didn't answer at once. She was looking down at her plate, drawing idle patterns with her fork. Her expression had become abstracted; her thoughts seemed to be very far away.

"Yes, I've seen them," she said vaguely.

"And how are they making out?"

She looked him suddenly straight in the eyes.

"You remember what Luker said at the Golden Fleece? Well, I suppose if I'd got any sense I'd think the same, seeing what a reputation you've got. I suppose you could have got into the house somehow and killed Johnny, and locked his bedroom door, and started the fire, and got out again, and then come back and pretended to try and rescue him. And then of course you could easily have gone to London and shot Ralph Windlay."

"Easily," said the Saint. "But you don't believe I did, do you? Or do you?"

"I suppose not," she said. "In a way, I wish you had."

She pushed away her plate, and he offered his cigarette case.

"Why do you wish I'd killed them? I didn't have any reason to."

"Well, it would have made everything so much easier. Of course I suppose they'd have had to hang you, but everybody knows you're a criminal so that would have been all right. But then you went and upset it all at the inquest, and you made it sound frightfully convincing to me whatever anybody else thought, only it didn't seem quite real then. I mean, you know, it was all rather like some�thing out of a book. Blazing Mansion Mystery, and all that sort of thing. I was terribly sorry about it all in a way because I was quite fond of Johnny, but I wasn't going to be brokenhearted about it or anything like that. And then when Ralph was killed it wouldn't have made much difference, because he was a nice, well-meaning boy but I never thought very much of him. After all, life's too short for one to be getting brokenhearted all the time, isn't it, and I'm sure it gives you circles under your eyes."

"You were too close up against it then to realize it properly," said the Saint shrewdly. "Now you've got away from it, your nerves are going back on you. I'm afraid I sympathize with you. What you need is another drink."

She pushed her glass forward.

"That's exactly what I do need," she said.

He poured out the last of the wine, and she sipped it and put the glass down again.

"It's not really my nerves," she said, talking very quickly. "We modern girls have nerves of iron, you know, and we only swoon when we think a man needs a little encouragement. The point is, if I'd heard that Johnny had been killed in a railway accident I should have been terribly sorry whenever I thought about it, but I don't suppose I should have thought about it terribly often. You see, that would have been just one of those things that happen, and it would have been all over, and it wouldn't really have been anything to do with me."

"But you invited him down to Whiteways, and that makes it different."

She nodded feverishly.

"Of course, I told you that, didn't I?"

"The idea was that you were to get a fur coat if Johnny could be persuaded to keep his mouth shut," Simon pursued her ruthlessly. "He has been persuaded to keep his mouth shut. Do you get your fur coat?"

Her fingers tightened on the stem of her wineglass. Her face had gone very pale, but her eyes were burning.

"That's a filthy thing to say."

"Murder is a moderately filthy subject," answered the Saint brutally. "You can't play with it and keep your little girlie ribbons clean. Haven't you realized that yet?"

"Yes," she said.

She picked up her glass and drained it at one gulp. Then she sat back and laughed at him with a kind of brittle giddiness.

"Well?" he insisted.

"I'm a nice girl, aren't I?" she chattered. "I do the odd spot of gold digging here and there, and in my spare time I lure men to their deaths. What would the dear vicar say if he knew?"

"I expect he'd say plenty. But that doesn't seem to matter so much as what you say. Do you enjoy luring men to their deaths?"

"I love it!"

"Then of course you'll be wanting another job soon. Why don't you advertise ? There must be plenty of openings if you can produce proof of previous experience."

She sat looking at him, and two scalding tears brimmed in her eyes.

"You swine!" she whispered.

"I'm sorry," he said cynically.

"What have you got to talk about, anyway? I mean, you think Johnny was murdered. Well, why should you care? You've killed dozens of people yourself, haven't you?"

"Only people who really needed it. You know, there are some people who are vastly improved by death."

"If somebody murdered Johnny, perhaps they thought he needed it," she said. "I daresay the people you killed were pretty poisonous one way or another, but then who isn't? I mean, look at me, for instance. Supposing some�body murdered me. I suppose you'd think that was a damned good job."

"I should think it was a great pity," he said with sur�prising gentleness. "You see, you poor little idiot, I happen to like you."

"Isn't that thrilling?" she said; and then she suddenly put her face in her hands.

The Saint lighted a cigarette and watched her. She sat quite still, without sobbing. He knew that this was what he had been working for, the success of his relentless drive to break her down; and yet he felt sorry for her. An impulse of tenderness moved him that it was not easy to fight down. But he knew that on this moment might hang things too momentous to be thought about. His brain had to be cold, accurate, making no mistakes, even if he wanted to be kind.

"All right," she said huskily. "Damn you."

She put her hands down abruptly and looked at him, dry-eyed.

"But what's the use?" she said. "It's done now, isn't it? I did it. Well, that's all about it. If I were the right sort of girl I suppose I'd go and jump in the river, but I'm not the right sort of girl."

"That wouldn't help anybody very much." His voice was quiet now, understanding, not taunting. "It's done, but we can still do things about it. You can help me. We can go on with what Johnny was doing. But we've got to find out what it was all about. You've got to think. You've got to think back�think very hard. Try to remember what Johnny told you about Luker and Fairweather and Sangore. Try to remember what he'd got that was going to upset them all. You must remember something."

He tried to hammer his words into her brain with all the urgency that was in him, to awaken her with the warmth of his own intense sincerity. She must tell him now if she was to help him at all.

Her eyes stayed on him and her hands opened and closed again.

She shook her head.

"I don't," she replied. "Really. But ..."

She stopped, frowning. He held his breath.

"But what?" he prompted.

"Nothing," she said.

Simon turned the ash from his cigarette on to the edge of a plate with infinite restraint. The reaction had emptied him so that he had to make the movement with a deliber�ate effort.

A waiter bustled up to the table and asked if they wanted coffee.

Simon felt as if a fire in him had been put out. He felt as if he had been led blindfold to the top of a mountain and then turned back and sent down again without being given a glimpse of the view. While he mechanically gave the order he wondered, in an insanely cold-blooded sort of way, what would happen if he stood up and shot the waiter through the middle of his crisp, complacent shirt front. Probably it had made no ultimate difference, but it seemed as if that crowning clash of the banal had inscribed an irrevocable epilogue of frustration. The mood that might have meant so much was gone. Nothing would bring it back.

He sat without moving while coffee and balloon glasses were set before them.

Lady Valerie Woodchester stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and lighted another. She tasted her brandy.

"It's a hard life," she observed moodily. "I suppose if one can't get exactly what one wants the next best thing is to have bags of money. That's what I'm going to do."

"Who are you going to blackmail?" Simon inquired steadily.

Her eyes widened.

"What do you mean?" she asked in astonishment.

"Just that," he said.

She laughed. Her laughter sounded a trifle false.

She emptied her coffee cup and finished her brandy. She began to be very busy collecting her accoutrements and dab�bing powder on her nose.

"You do say the weirdest things," she remarked. "I'm afraid I must go now. Thanks so much for the dinner. It's been a lovely evening�most of it."

"This is rather early for your bedtime, isn't it?" said the Saint slowly. "Don't you feel well, or are you a little bit scared?"

"I'm scared of getting wrinkles," she said. "I always do when I stay up late. And then I have to spend a small fortune to have them taken out, and that doesn't help a bit, what with one thing and another. But a girl's got to keep her looks even if she can't keep anything else, hasn't she?"

She stood up.

The Saint's hands rested on the arms of his chair. A dozen mad and utterly impossible urges coursed through his mind, but he knew that they were all futile. The whole atmosphere of the place, which had brought her once to a brief fascinating ripeness, was arraigned against him.

A lynx-eyed waiter ceremoniously laid a plate with a folded check on it in front of him.

Simon rose to his feet with unalterable grace and spilled money on to it. He followed her out of the room and out of the hotel, and waited while the commissionaire produced a taxi and placed it before them with the regal gesture of a magician performing a unique and exclusive miracle.

"It's all right," she said. "You needn't bother to see me home."

Through the window of the cab, with the vestige of a sardonic bow, he handed her a sealed envelope.

"You forgot something," he murmured. "That isn't like you, I'm sure."

"Oh yes," she said. "That."

She took the envelope, glanced at it and put it in her bag. It didn't seem to interest her particularly.

She put out her hand again. He held it.

"If��" she began, and broke off raggedly.

"If what?" he asked.

She bit her lip.

"No," she said. "It wouldn't be any good. There's always the But."

"I'll buy it," said the Saint patiently. "What's the answer?"

She smiled at him rather wistfully.

"There isn't any answer. One just thinks, 'If something or other,' and then one thinks, 'But something else,' which makes it impossible," she explained lucidly. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking that you and I would make a mar�vellous combination."

"And why not?"

She made a little grimace. At that moment, even more inescapably than at any other, she looked as if she was on the point of bursting into tears.

"Oh, go to hell!" she said.

Her hand slipped through his fingers and she sank back into the corner of the cab. It moved away.

Simon Templar stood and watched it until the stream of traffic swallowed it up. And then he said "Hell and damna�tion!" with a meticulous clarity which caused the commis�sionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected sym�pathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production of taxis.

2

After which various things happened that Simon Tem�plar would have been very edified to know about.

Mr Algernon Sidney Fairwearher was sitting in the smoke room of his paralyzingly respectable and conserva�tive club finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate post-prandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate post-�prandial conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambas�sador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet, when he was summoned to the telephone.

"This is Valerie," said the voice on the wire. "I'm fright�fully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice about something. Do you mind terribly? It's about Johnny."

"What exactly do you want my advice about?" asked Mr Fairweather uncomfortably. "That man Templar hasn't been pestering you again, I hope?"

"No�at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."

Fairweather cleared his throat.

"The man is becoming a perfect nuisance," he said imperially. "But I think we can deal with him soon enough. I'm glad you told me about it. I'll have a word with the commissioner of police in the morning and see that he's taken care of."

"Oh no, you mustn't do that," she said quickly. "I can . take care of myself all right, and it's rather thrilling to be pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn't what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your advice about something Johnny left with me."

"Something Kennet left with you ?"

"Some papers he gave me to read only a week or two ago�a great thick wad of them."

Mr Fairweather experienced the curious sensation of feeling the walls close in on him while at the same time the floor and the ceiling began to draw together. Since he was at that moment in a booth which had very little space to spare after enveloping his own ample circumference, the sensation was somewhat horrifying.

It had caught him so completely unprepared that for a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his voice. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.

"Papers?" he got out hoarsely. "What papers? What were they about?"

"I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were ter�ribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them."

The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.

"You didn't read them?" he echoed weakly. "Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once."

"But that wouldn't be any good," she said miserably. "You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about."

The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.

"You haven't got them?" he bleated shrilly. "Then who has got them?"

"Nobody. At least�it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row�the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he sud�denly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day."

"How do you mean, you dumped it?" squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. "You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?"

"That's just what I don't know," she said. "Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere."

Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.

"Then you. must have a ticket for it," he pointed out with heart-rending logic. "Why don't you look for the ticket?"

"But I can't," she said plaintively. "It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things."

"But��" said Fairweather.

The word "but" is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathema�tician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fal�lacy in his proof that two and two make four�all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word "but."

"I wondered if it might be a good scheme to get Mr Templar to help me," Valerie went on. "I mean, he seems to have quite a crush on me, so he'd probably be glad to do it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting about and detecting things."

"Grrr," said Mr Fairweather.

If possible, he improved on his performance with the word "but." This time, in one primitive ululation, he added to his symphonic integration of emotions the despairing dolour of the camel whose backbone is just giving way under the final straw, the shuddering panic of the hunted hyena which feels the tiger's fangs closing on its throat, the pitiful expiring gasp of the goldfish which has just been neatly hooked from its bowl by a hungry cat.

"Of course I've been cursing myself for not thinking of it before," said Lady Valerie penitently. "I mean, if those papers really were terribly important, I suppose I ought to have said something about them at the inquest. That's where I'd like your advice. Do you think I ought to ring up Scotland Yard and tell them about it?"

Mr Fairweather had no new depths to plumb. He was a man who had already done all the gamut running of which he was capable.

"Listen," he said with frightfully muted violence. "You must put that idea out of your head at once. The police have no discretion. Think�think of how it might hurt poor Johnny's father. And whatever happens, you mustn't say a word to Templar. You haven't told him about those papers yet, have you?"

"No, not definitely. But you know, I believe he guesses something about them. He's terribly suspicious. Two or three times this evening he asked me if Johnny had ever given me anything to keep for him, or if I knew where Johnny might have kept his private papers. But he can't do anything to me, because I thought I'd better be on the safe side and so I've taken plenty of precautions. You see, Celia Mallard probably knows where I left those papers, and I've written to her about them. She's at Cap d'Ail now, but I'll probably hear from her in a day or two."

"Celia Mallard knows where they are?" moaned Fair-weather. "How the devil does she know?"

"Well, I seem to remember that she was with me when I dumped them, and she's got a perfectly marvellous mem�ory, so she'll probably remember all about it. I told her in my letter that they were worth thousands of pounds, and that the Saint was after them, and so if anything happened to me she was to go straight to the police. That ought to stop the Saint doing anything really awkward, oughtn't it?"

Mr Fairweather's mouth opened. After all his other vicissitudes, he underwent the culminating sensation of having been poured out of a frying pan into an ice-cold bath. The contrast steadied him for a moment; but he shivered.

"I suppose it might," he said. "But what made you say the papers were worth thousands of pounds?"

"I don't know. But I thought, if they really are terribly important, they're bound to be worth a lot of money to somebody, aren't they?" she said reasonably.

"That doesn't follow at all," Fairweather said firmly. "But�er�you know that I'd see you didn't lose by it, in any case. Now, will you let me know directly you hear from Celia Mallard, or as soon as you remember what you did with them? And�um�well, if it's a matter of money, you did tell me once that you needed a car to go with that fur coat, didn't you ?"

"How could you ?" she said pathetically. "To talk about that fur coat now, and remind me of poor Johnny . . . Please don't talk to me about it any more; I don't think I can ever bear to hear it mentioned again. You're making me feel dreadfully morbid, Algy, and I've had such a tiring day. I think I'd better ring off now before I break down altogether. Good-bye."

The receiver clicked.

"Wait a minute," Fairweather said suddenly.

There was no answer.

Lady Valerie Woodchester was walking back across the bright modernistic sitting room of her tiny apartment on Marsham Street. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and picked up the drink that she had put down when she telephoned. Over the rim of the glass she looked across to a small book table where there was propped up the cheap unframed photograph of a dark and not unhappily serious young man.

"Poor old Johnny!" she said softly. "It was a lousy trick they played on you, my dear . . ."

Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather jiggled the receiver hook. He took a coin out of his pocket and poised it over the slot; and then he hesitated, and finally put it back in his pocket. He left the booth and made his way to the bar, where he downed a double brandy with very little dilution of soda. His plump cheeks seemed to have gone flabby and his hands twitched as they put down the glass.

Twenty minutes later he was waddling jerkily up and down the carpet of a luxurious room overlooking Grosvenor Square, blurting out his story under a coldly observant scru�tiny that made him feel somehow like a beetle under a searchlight.

"Do you believe Her when she says that she's lost this cloakroom ticket?" Luker asked.

He was as calm as Fairweather was agitated. He sat imperturbably behind the huge carved oak desk where he had been writing when Fairweather blundered in and toyed with his fountain pen. The expression in his eyes was faintly contemptuous.

"I don't know what to believe," said Fairweather dis�tractedly. "I�well, thinking it over, I doubt it. I've had enough dealings with her to know what her methods are, and personally I think she's fishing to see how much we're prepared to pay."

"Or how much Templar is prepared to pay," said Luker phlegmatically. "Did you know that she had dinner with him tonight at the Berkeley?"

Fairweather blinked as if he had been smacked on the nose.

"What?" he yelped. His voice had gone back on him again. "But I particularly told her to have nothing more to do with him!"

"That's probably why she did it," Luker replied unsym�pathetically. "I had an idea that something like this might happen�that's why I've been having them watched. For all you know, he may have put her up to this."

Fairweather swallowed.

"How much do you think she'll want?"

"I don't know. I don't think I care very much. It doesn't seem to be very important. Money is a very temporary solution�you never know how soon you may have to repeat the dose. This cloakroom story may be a myth from beginning to end. She might easily have these papers in her dressing-table drawer. She might easily have no papers at all. Her attitude is the thing that matters; and with this man Templar in the background it would be unwise to take chances." Luker shrugged. "No, my dear Algy, I'm afraid we shall have to take more permanent steps to deal with both of them."

"W-what sort of steps?" stammered Fairweather feebly. "H-how can we deal with them?"

That seemed to amuse Luker. The ghost of a smile dragged at the corners of his mouth.

"Do you really want to know?" he asked interestedly.

"You mean . . ." Fairweather didn't seem to know how to go on. His collar appeared to be choking him. He tugged at it in spasmodic efforts to loosen it. "I�I don't think so," he said. "I . . ."

Luker laughed outright.

"There's a sort of suburban piousness about you and Sangore that verges on the indecent," he remarked. "You're just like a couple of squeamish old maids who hold shares in a brothel. You want your money, but you're determined not to know how it's obtained. If anything unpleasant or drastic has to be done, that's all right with you so long as you don't have to do it yourselves. That's how you felt about getting rid of Kennet. Now it's Templar and Lady Valerie. Well, they've got to be murdered, haven't they?"

Fairweather wriggled, as if his clothes were full of ants. His face was glistening with sweat.

"I��Really, I don't��"

"I expect you think I'm excessively vulgar," Luker con�tinued mercilessly. "I've got such a shockingly crude way of putting things, haven't I? I suppose you felt just the same when I offered you a place on the board of Norfelt Chemicals in return for certain items of business when you were secretary of state for war. That's quite all right, my dear fellow. Go home and hare a nice cup of tea and forget about it. There's no need for me to tell you to keep your mouth shut, is there? I know you're a worm, and you know you're a worm, but we won't let anybody else know you're a worm."

Fairweather gobbled.

"Really, Luker," he spluttered indignantly, "I�I��"

"Oh, go away," said Luker. "I've got work to do."

He spoke without impatience; if his voice carried any particular inflection, it was one of good-humoured tolerance. But there was no further argument. Fairweather went.

Luker remained sitting at the great carved desk after he had gone. Fairweather's emotional antics had made no impression on him at all. He had no illusions about his associates. He had long been familiar with the partiality that politicians, generals and captains of industry have for squirming out of uncomfortable situations, with an air of being profoundly shocked by what has happened, and leav�ing somebody else to face the music. But that failing had its own compensation for him. Once started, the more dras�tic the measures he had to take, the stronger became his hold on them and the more blindly they would have to support him in whatever he did, as his safety became the more necessary to their own safety. The problems that he was considering were purely practical. He sat there, idly turning his fountain pen between his strong square fingers, until he had thought enough; and then he picked up the telephone and began to issue terse, incisive orders.

3

"Did you have a nice dinner?" asked Patricia Holm. "And how was the new candidate for your harem?"

Simon Templar peeled off his coat, unbuttoned his shirt to the waist and deposited himself at a restful angle on the chesterfield under the open windows. Through the curtains came the ceaseless grind of Piccadilly traffic and a stir of sultry air tainted with petrol fumes and grime, too thick and listless to be properly termed a breeze; but in spite of that the spacious apartment in Cornwall House which was the Saint's London headquarters attained an atmo�sphere of comparative peace and freshness.

"There are mugs of all kinds, but there are very special and superlative mugs who do their mugging in London; and we are it," he said gloomily. "I had a beautiful dinner, thanks. The truites au bleu were magnificent, and the pigeons truff�s in aspic were a dream. The candidate was looking her best, which is pretty good. She went home early. Since then I've been drowning my sorrows at the Cafe Royal."

Patricia contemplated him discerningly.

"The dinner was beautiful, and the candidate was look�ing her best, and she went home early," she repeated. "What was the matter with her?"

"She wanted her beauty sleep," said the Saint. "After you with that barley water, Hoppy."

He stretched out a long arm and retrieved the bottle of scotch from Mr Uniatz' jealous grasp.

"What Hoppy needs is compressed whiskey, so he could get a bottle into a wineglass," he commented.

"Was it your scintillating conversation that made her yawn?" inquired Peter Quentin. "Or did she have the wrong kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?"

Simon splashed soda into his glass and drank medi�tatively.

"She's an attractive wench," he said. "I like her. She's so innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry shark. The trouble is that if she's not careful she's going to wake up one day and find herself left in a dark alley with her throat cut, and that will be a great pity for any�one with a face and figure like hers."

"Say, where do ya get dat stuff?" demanded Mr Uniatz loudly.

He sat forward on the edge of his chair, his hamlike hands practically obliterating his half-empty glass, with a deep frown corrugating the negligible clearance between his eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically rough�cast face chopped into masses of fearsome challenge.

Simon raised his head to stare at him. A criticism like that coming from Mr Uniatz, a man to whom any form of mental exercise was such excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint's godlike ability to think, had something awe-inspiring about it that numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he didn't stop strutting around and get wise to himself. For one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been made that night, and the whiskey which had for years been flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy's asbestos throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden sensitive section of his entrails.

Mr Uniatz reddened bashfully under the stares that impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being the focus of so much attention. But he clung valiantly to his point.

"It sounds like a pipe dream to me, boss," he said.

"Let me get this straight," said the Saint carefully. "I gather that you don't think that Valerie Woodchester runs any risk of getting her throat cut. Is that the idea ?"

Mr Uniatz looked about him in dazed perplexity. He seemed to think that everyone had gone mad.

"I dunno, boss," he said, refusing to be sidetracked. "What I wanna know is where do ya get dat stuff ?"

"What stuff?" asked Peter faintly.

"De compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz.

There was a pregnant silence.

The Saint laid his head slowly back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

"Hoppy," he said solemnly, "I love you. When I die, the word 'Uniatz' will be found written on my heart."

"How about if de goil is selling it, boss?" ventured Mr Uniatz, tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. "Maybe she's in de racket, too, woikin' for de chemical factory where dey make it."

Simon passed him the whiskey bottle.

"Maybe she is, Hoppy," he said. "It's an idea, anyway. Give yourself some more nourishment while we think it over."

"Didn't you get anything useful out of her?" asked Patricia.

"She held out on me," said the Saint ruefully. "I did my best, but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing as it may seem, she wouldn't confide in me. The secrets of her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart so far as I'm concerned."

Peter clicked his tongue.

"You've met her four times now, and she hasn't confided in you," he said in accents of distress. "You must be losing your touch. They don't usually hold out so long."

"What do you mean by 'they'?" demanded the Saint unblushingly.

"He means your harem candidates," said Patricia. "The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn't given way to your manly charms."

Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.

"She's tough, all right," he said. "But I don't know how tough. She'll need all she's got to sit in on this game. She's sitting in, and I'm still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home."

"You started to get somewhere, then," said Peter.

The Saint nodded.

"Oh yes, I started. But I didn't finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though�I found that out, even if she didn't admit it. But she's going to play her own hand; and so she'll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult."

He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.

"God damn it," he said quietly, "it's a complete and perfect setup�with only the foundation missing. I've worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have, too. We'll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece."

"All right," said Peter. "You run over it. We like hear�ing you listen to yourself."

"Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather�two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respec�tability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entra�neuse for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very agile professional pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to sic Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest nicely ham�strung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay again."

"And so soothing," said Peter. "Especially for the corpses."

"Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence �either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie's psychology."

"I thought we should come to that eventually," said Patricia.

Simon threw a cushion at her.

"She's not a bad kid, really," he said. "But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit�possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She's absent-mindedly gone just a little further than she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she's got some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two."

Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

"And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?" he said.

"The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?"

"You tell us," said Patricia.

There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dis�solved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

"I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."

"Before she takes off what?" asked the Saint foggily.

"Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz proudly, "De stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes." Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. "Chees, boss, why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!"

Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.

And at that instant the telephone bell rang.

The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpected�ness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.

Simon picked up the phone.

"Hullo," he said.

"Is that you, Simon darling?" it answered. "This is Valerie."

A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an inde�finable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.

"Hullo, darling," he said evenly. "And how are you?"

"I'm all right, thanks. . . . Listen, Simon, you remem�ber that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?"

Simon drew at his cigarette.

"Of course," he said, without hesitation. "It's quite safe."

"That's good," she said. "You see, I'm afraid I've got to have it back at once. I'm awfully sorry to be such a nuisance, but it's frightfully important. I mean, could you bring it round right away? It's all frightfully thrilling, but I'll tell you all about it when you get here. Can you possibly manage it?"

"Easily," he said. "I was just looking for something useful to do."

"You know where I live, don't you?"

"I should think so. I looked it up in the phone book as soon as I got back to town, and I've just been waiting for an invitation."

"Well, you've got one now. And listen. Nobody must know you're coming to see me. I'll tell you why afterwards."

"No one shall even guess where I've gone," said the Saint, with his eyes on Patricia. "I'll be over in ten minutes."

"Thanks so much, darling," she said. "Do hurry."

"I will."

He laid the phone gently back on its bracket, and stood up. The dance of his blue eyes was as if he had been asleep all the evening and had just become awake. He had no more doubts or problems. All the dammed-up, in-turned energy with which he had been straining was crystallized suddenly into the clean sharp leap of action. He was smiling.

"Did you get that, souls?" he said.

"She wants to see you," said Patricia. "Am I supposed to get excited?"

"She wants more than that," he said. "She wants a cloakroom ticket which she gave me to keep for her�which she never gave me. She wants it at once; and nobody's to know where I've gone. And somebody was listening on the wire all the time to make sure she said all the right things. So I don't see how I can refuse the date." The Saint's smile was dazzlingly seraphic. "I told you something was bound to happen, and it's starting now!"

4

"Excuse me a minute while I get into my shooting clothes," he said.

He vanished out of the nearest door; but the room had hardly had time to adapt itself to his disappearance when he was back again. The Saint could always make a profes�sional quick-change artist look like an elderly dowager dressing for a state ball, and when he was in a hurry he could do things with clothes that bordered on the miracu�lous. He came back in a gray lounge suit whose sober hue had no counterpart in the way he wore it, which was with all the peculiarly rakish elegance that was subtly infused into anything he put on. His fresh shift was buttoned and his tie was tied, and he was feeding a fully charged maga�zine into the butt of a shining Luger.

"You're not really going, are you?" asked Patricia hope�lessly.

She knew when she said it that it was a waste of words, and the scapegrace slant of his brows was sufficient answer.

"Of course not, darling," he said. "These are my new pajamas."

"But you're doing just what they want you to do!"

"Maybe. But do they know that I know it? I don't think so. That phone call was as straightforward as a baby's prayer�to the guy who was checking up on it. Only Valerie knows that she never gave me a cloakroom ticket, and she knows I know it. She's on the spot in her own flat, and that was the only way she could tip me off and call for help. Do you want me to stay home and knit?"

Patricia stood up. She kissed him.

"Be careful, boy," she said. "You know I look terrible in black."

Peter Quentin finished his drink and rose. He buttoned his coat with a deep sigh.

"I suppose this is the end of our chance of a night's rest," he said pessimistically. "I ought to have stayed in Anford." He saluted Patricia. "Will you excuse Hoppy and me if we trot along to take care of the dragons while your problem child is striking attitudes in front of the heroine? We don't want anything to happen to him�it would make life so horribly quiet and peaceful."

Simon stopped at the door.

"Just a minute," he said. "There may be policemen and other emissaries of the ungodly prowling around outside. We'd better not take chances. Will you call down to Sam Outrell, Pat, and tell him to meet me in the garage?"

As they rode down in the elevator he felt the springy elation of the moment spreading its intoxication through his muscles. The lucid swiftness of his mind ran on, constructing a clear objective framework of action in which he moved with unhurried precision with each step unerringly laid out a fraction of time before he reached it.

Down in the basement garage Sam Outrell, the janitor, was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened, with a look of placid expectancy on his pleasant bucolic face. He fell in at the Saint's side as Simon walked across to where the Hirondel stood waiting in its private bay.

"Goin' out on business again, sir?" he queried, with the imperturbation of many years of experience of the Saint's unlawful occasions.

"I hope so, Sam." The Saint cocked his legs over the side while Peter and Hoppy climbed into their own seats. "I don't want to stage a big demonstration, but you might just do a quiet job of obstructing if anyone's waiting for us. Take your own heap and follow me up the ramp, and see that you stick tight on my tail. When I wave my hand, swing across the road and stall your engine. I'll only want two or three minutes."

The exhaust purred as he touched the starter. He pulled the Hirondel out to the foot of the ramp and held it there, warming the engine, until he saw Outrell's car behind him. Then he let in the clutch and roared up the slope, with the other car following as if it were nailed to his rear fenders.

At the top he whipped round in a screaming turn out into the narrow street that ran by the back of Cornwall House. There was a taxi parked close by the garage entrance and a small sports car with a man reading a news�paper in it standing just behind; both of them might have been innocent, but if they were it would do them no harm to be obstructed for a few minutes.

The Saint raised one hand just above his head and made a slight movement.

He heard the squeal of Sam Outrell's brakes behind him, and grinned gently to himself as he locked the wheel for another split-arch turn into Half Moon Street. The snarl of the engine rose briefly, lulled, and then settled into a steady drone as they nosed into Piccadilly, shot across the front of a belated bus and went humming down the west-ward slope towards Hyde Park Corner.

Peter Quentin settled deep into his seat and turned to Hoppy.

"I hope your insurance policies are all paid up, Hoppy," he said.

"I ain't never had none," said Mr Uniatz seriously. "I seen guys what try to sell me insurance, but I t'ought dey was all chisellers." He brooded anxiously over the idea. "Do ya t'ink I oughta get me some, boss?"

"I'm afraid it's too late now," said Peter encouragingly. "But perhaps it doesn't matter. You haven't got a lot of wives and things lying around, have you?"

Mr Uniatz scratched his head with a row of worried fingers.

"I dunno, boss," he said shyly. "Every time I get mar�ried I am not t'inking about it very much. So I never know if I have got married or not," he said, summarizing his problem with a conciseness that could scarcely have been improved upon.

Peter pondered over the exposition until he felt himself getting slightly giddy, when he decided that it would prob�ably be safer to leave it alone. And the Saint spun the wheel again and sent the Hirondel thundering down Grosvenor Place.

"When you two trollops have finished gloating over your sex life," he said, "you'd better try to remember what hap�pens when we get to Marsham Street."

"But we know," said Peter, carefully continuing to refrain from looking at the road. "Don't we, Hoppy? If we ever get there alive, which is very unlikely, we jump about in the foreground and try to attract the bullets while the beauteous heroine swoons into Simon's arms."

Simon squeezed the car through on the wrong side of a crawling taxi which was hogging the centre of the road, and while he was doing it he neatly swiped Peter's cigarette with his disengaged hand.

"That's something like the idea; except that as usual you'll be in the background. I'm just building on probabili�ties, but I think I've got it pretty straight. Two or more thugs will be in possession. When I ring the bell, one of them will come to the door. They can't all open it at once, and at least one of them will probably be busy keeping Valerie quiet, and in any case they won't want any noise that they can avoid. Besides, they'll be expecting me to walk in like a blindfolded lamb. Now, I think it can only break two ways. Either the warrior who opens the door will open it straight on to a gun . . ."

He went on, sketching possibilities in crisp, comprehen�sive lines, dictating move and countermove in quick sinewy sentences that strung the strides of a supreme tactician together into a connected chain on which even Hoppy Uniatz could not lose his grip. It might all seem very simple in the end, but in that panoramic grasp of detail lay the genius that made amazing audacities seem simple.

"Okay, skipper," Peter said soberly, as the car swooped into Marsham Street. "But don't forget you're responsible to Hoppy's widows and my orphans."

Ever since the first few hectic moments of the ride they had been running with the cutout closed, and the dying of the engine was scarcely perceptible as Simon turned the switch.

After the last turn they had slid up practically in silence to their destination, which was one of a row of modern apartment buildings that had not long ago transformed the topography of that once sombre district. One or two other cars were parked within sight, but otherwise the street seemed quiet and lifeless. Simon glanced up at the cross�word design of light and dark windows as he stepped out of the car and crossed the pavement, with some attention to the softness of his footsteps, for he knew well how sounds could echo to the upper windows of a silent street at that hour of the night. He said nothing to the others, for all the ground had been covered in advance in his instructions. He read off the apartment number from the indicator in the empty lobby, and an automatic elevator carried them up to the top floor. The Saint was as cool as chromium, as accurate and self-contained as a machine. He left the elevator doors open and waited until Peter and Hoppy had taken up their positions flattened against the wall on either side of the door; then he put his knuckle against the bell.

There was an interval of perhaps ten seconds, then the door opened.

It opened, according to the Saint's first diagnosis, straight on to an awkward-looking silenced revolver in the hand of the stocky ape-faced man who unfastened the latch.

"Come in," he said.

Blank astonishment, anger and incredulity chased them�selves over the Saint's face�exactly as they were expected to chase themselves.

"What's the idea of this?" he demanded wrathfully. "And who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Come in," repeated the man coldly. "And put your hands up. And hurry up about it, before I give you some�thing."

The Saint put his hands up and went in. But he went in with his shoulder blades sliding along the door, so that the other was momentarily cut off from it. Then the man had to turn his back to the doorway when he started to close the door, so as to keep Simon covered at the same time. And that was part of the clockwork of the Saint's preorgan�ized plan. Simon gave the signal with a gentle cough; and over the man's shoulder appeared the intent face of Peter Quentin, soundlessly, with a stiff rubber blackjack raised. There was a subdued clunk, and the man's eyes went com�ically glassy.

At that instant other things happened with the smooth timing of a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. The Saint's hands dropped like striking falcons on to the ape-faced man's gun, bent the wrist inwards towards the elbow, whipped the revolver out of the suddenly powerless fingers. Simultaneously Peter Quentin was moving aside, to be replaced by Hoppy Uniatz, whose massive paws closed on the man's throat in a gorilla grip faster than Peter himself could have put away his blackjack and taken the same hold. Meanwhile Peter slid round the man's side, received the revolver as Simon detached it and jammed the silencer into the man's ribs. It was all done with a glossy perfection of teamwork that would have dazed the eye of the beholder if there had been any beholder present, all within the space of a scant second; and then the Saint was talking into the man's ear.

"One whisper out of you, and they'll be able to thread you on a flagpole," he said. Then he stepped back a few inches. "Okay, Hoppy�let him breathe."

The crushing grasp of Mr Uniatz fingers slackened just sufficiently to allow a saving infiltration of air. The deli�cately judged blow of the rubber blackjack had deadened the ape-faced man's brain for just long enough to allow the subsequent manoeuvres to take place without stunning him permanently. Now he stared at the Saint with squeezed-out eyes in which there was a pallor of voiceless fear.

"Talk very quietly," said the Saint, in that ghostly into�nation which barely travelled a handbreadth beyond the ears of its intended audience. "What was supposed to hap�pen next?"

"I was to take you in there�there's two chaps want to see you."

Simon's glance had already covered the tiny hall. The three doors that opened off it were all closed; the ape-faced man had indicated the centre one.

"Good enough," said the Saint. "Let's carry on as if nothing had happened."

He passed his own automatic to Peter, took away the silenced revolver, spilled the shells out into his palm and dropped them into Hoppy's pocket, then thrust the empty weapon back into the hand of its owner.

"Cover me with it and carry on," he ordered. "When we go in there, leave the door open. And remember this: my friends will be watching you from outside. If you breathe a word or bat an eyelid to let your reception committee know that everything isn't going according to plan, and any bother starts�you'll be the first dead hero of the evening." The Saint's voice was as caressing as velvet, but it was as cold and unsentimental as a polar sea. "Let's go."

He turned his back and sauntered over to the middle door; and the ape-faced man, urged on by a last remem�brancing prod from the muzzle of the murderous gun which Mr Uniatz had by that time added to the displayed collec�tion of artillery, lurched helplessly after him.

Simon turned the handle and entered the room with his arms raised. On one side Lady Valerie Woodchester was roughly tied to a chair, and one of the two men there was bending over her with a hand clamped over her mouth. The other man stood on the opposite side of the room with a cigarette loosely held in one hand and a small automatic levelled in the other.

The Saint's eyes rambled interestedly over the scene.

"What ho, souls," he drawled. "And how are all the illegitimate sons of France tonight?" .