Simon Templar lighted another cigarette with the dispassionate detachment of a machine. He was more cold and grim than the girl had ever seen him, or had ever realized that he could be. He looked up at her with blue eyes that bit with the intolerable glittering cold of interstellar space.
"Come here," he said.
No power of mind that she could conceive could have disobeyed him.
She came over, in spite of herself, like a mindless robot. He took her hand and drew her down on to the bed beside him.
"Is this all there ever was in this package?"
"I–I think so."
"Have you taken anything out?"
"No."
He knew she was telling the truth. As he was then, she could never have made him believe a lie.
"Was the envelope sealed when you put it in the checkroom?"
"Yes."
"It didn't look as if it had been tampered with when you got it out?"
"No."
But there he knew he was on the wrong tack. If Luker and Company had been able to get at the packet, they wouldn't have left any of it. And if they had known where it was, in order to tamper with it, they wouldn't have been going to such lengths to locate it.
This was all that there had ever been. And this was what Kennet and Windlay had died for.
He had expected that that dossier would give him a light that would make clear all mysteries, and instead it had only given him a darker riddle. He stared at that enigmatic last sheet with a glacial and immobile fury. Whatever Kennet and Windlay had been murdered for must be hidden there — he was as sure of that as he could be sure of anything, but that was no help to him… In a sudden uncontrollable defining of his belief he ripped off the rest of the heavy batch of papers and tossed them into her lap.
"There you are," he said. "You can have 'em. If there's anything there that's worth a penny more than the News of the World would pay you for it it'll take somebody a lot cleverer than me to dig it out."
"That's very nice of you," she said. "Anything that's no use, and you don't want, I can have. What's that page you're keeping?"
"I wish I knew."
"May I see it?"
She was sitting straight up, with a curious distant dignity.
He looked at her. In his mind was a nebulous puzzlement that he could not bring into sharp focus. She had not asked for terms then, nor did she go on to ask for them, but he didn't seem to have enough attention to spare for that.
He moved the paper a little, and she read it over his arm.
" 'The twenty-fifth of August — Opening of the Hospital of Memory—' "
" 'The Hostel of Memory, at Neuilly,' " he said. "I've heard something about it. It's an old chateau converted into a sort of Old Soldiers' Home, endowed by the French government for disabled veterans of the Great War to end their days in in reasonably pleasant surroundings."
" 'By Monsieur Chaulage,' " she read. "Isn't he the president, or the premier, or something?"
He nodded, and a recollection struck him like a deadened blow.
"And tomorrow is the twenty-fifth of August," he said.
She stared at him with wide expressionless eyes. There was nothing definable that her eyes could have expressed. She was as nonplussed as himself. They gazed at one another in the barren communion of hopeless bewilderment, knowing that here was something that might make their blood run cold if they could understand it, and yet not knowing what to fear.
Presently she looked at the sheet again.
"What's the rest of it?" She leaned over further to peer at the spidery scrawl across the corner. " 'Remember the—' What is it, Simon? It looks like 'Rinksty.' "
"You're as good a thought reader as I am. Does it mean anything to you?"
"Nothing."
An idea crossed his mind.
"Do you know the handwriting?"
"Of course. It's Johnny's writing."
"Johnny's! Then you must know what it means — you must be able to read it—"
She shook her head.
"But I can't! Nobody ever could, when he wrote like that. Usually he wrote quite neatly, but when he was in a hurry he just scrawled things down like that and if you were lucky and you knew what he was likely to be writing about you could sometimes guess what the words were from the first letters and how long they looked."
"But he meant this for you. He scribbled it on the page to make you think of the point. 'Remember the Rinksty?' — or whatever it is. He thought it would mean something to you. Is it something that he'd told you about before when he was talking? Is it a ship? Is it a hotel? Is it a pet name of your own that you had for some place where you used to meet — some place where he might have told you about this? For God's sake, think!"
The Saint's voice hammered at her with passionate intensity; the grip of his fingers must have been bruising her arm. Somehow he was neither pleading nor commanding, but his fire would have melted stone. She was not stone. She twisted her fingers together and looked here and there, and her face was crumpled with the frantic effort of memory; but her eyes were big and tragic when they came to his face again.
"It's no good," she said. "It doesn't ring a bell anywhere. It isn't any place we went to, I'm sure of that."
"Or anything he talked about?"
"He used to talk about so many things, but as I told you I never paid any more attention than I could help, because it all seemed so frightfully earnest and important and I'm much too young to start bothering about important things."
She couldn't' have been lying, or trying to keep anything from him. If she had been he must have known.
He stared at the paper as if by sheer physical and mental force he could drag out the secret that was wrapped up in that wandering trail of graphite particles. To have got so far and then to be stopped there was maddening; his brain couldn't accept it. He had never in his life been stopped by a puzzle that filled him with such a sickening feeling of impotence. This was no code or cipher or riddle that wit and patience might eventually solve. There were no invisible inks to develop or clues to put together. The answer was already there in black and white, exactly as Kennet had jotted it down without any intention to conceal it, wrapped up in the skeletal hieroglyphics which to him had been only ordinary hurried writing. Every kink and twist in that long squiggle that might have been "Rinksty" or "Ruckstig" or a dozen other things had stood for a definite letter when Kennet had traced his pencil over them; but he had finished writing and he would not come back to read out what he had written, and all the thought in the world wouldn't make one single kink one atom more distinct.
The Saint glared at it until it blurred under his eyes. "Something happens at Neuilly tomorrow," he said savagely, "and this ought to tell us what it is. This is what Luker and the Sons of France are murdering scared of anybody getting hold of. Johnny must have thought you'd understand. If only you'd listened to him—"
"I know," she gulped. "I know I'm a silly little fool, b-but I'll go on trying to think of it. Is-isn't the photograph any help?"
"You see if it is."
He detached the print from the clip, and as he did so a scrap of celluloid perforated along the edges fluttered away. He picked it up and held it to the light. It was a Leica negative, obviously the original of the print he had been looking at.
He looked at the photograph again, over her shoulder. It was badly underexposed but now he could identify two of the faces. On the left, seated at a desk, with his right profile to the camera, was a man with white hair and a thin underslung jaw; and Simon knew that it was Colonel Marteau, commandant of the Sons of France. In an armchair, further back, almost facing the camera, was Luker's square granitic visage. The man on the right, who faced the desk as though being interviewed, was tall and gangling and shabbily dressed: his face looked coarse and half witted, but that might have been due to the lighting or a slight movement when the picture was taken.
Simon touched him with one finger.
"Do you know him?" he asked.
"No. I'm sure I don't. I've never seen him before."
"You told me that Kennet was excited about a photograph. This must be it. What did he say about it?"
Her forehead was desperately wrinkled.
"I don't know… I told you I never listened. I've got a sort — sort of idea he said it would prove something about how Mr Luker was a murderer, but — Oh, I don't know!"
"Is that all you can remember?"
"Yes. Everything," she said despairingly. "But doesn't it help you? I mean, it's quite a lot for me to remember, really, and you're so clever, you ought to be able to think of something—"
The Saint might have hit her on the nose. He might have taken her neck in his two hands and wrung it out like a sponge. It stands to the credit of his self-control that he did neither of those things.
Instead he did something so free from deliberate thought that it might have been almost instinctive, and yet which afterwards he was tempted to think must have been inspired. He couldn't conscientiously pride himself on thinking so accurately and so far ahead. But he knew that that photograph must be a vital part of the secret, if not the most vital part; and he knew that the negative mattered far more than the print. Of all things, that was what he must retain until he knew its secret. And retaining it might not be so easy. Even then, as he knew, all the police departments of England were hunting him, as well as the anonymous legions of the ungodly. Accidents could always happen, and at any moment one or the other might catch up with him; and then, whichever it was, the first thing that would follow would be that he would be searched. Luckily a Leica negative was not so hard to hide…
That was how he might have worked it out if he had thought so long. But he didn't. He simply got up and strolled over to the dressing table with the negative held between his fingers. There, standing with his back to the girl, he took out his fountain pen, removed the cap, unscrewed the nib end and carefully drew it out with the rubber ink sac attached. Then he rolled the negative gently with his finger and thumb, slid it down into the barrel of the pen and replaced everything. It was not so good as the strong room of a safe deposit, where he would have liked to put it, but it was the best thing he could improvise at the moment; and the restrained mechanical occupation of his hands helped to liberate his struggling thoughts…
"What are you doing?" the girl asked fretfully.
"Thinking." He turned round empty handed, the pen back in his pocket. She had seen nothing. "This seems like a good time and place for it." Again his eyes were narrowed on her like keen blades of sapphire probing for the first hint of deception. "And talking of places — what made you pick on this one to come to?"
"Oh, that was something else that I thought was pretty clever of me. I mean, if you hadn't been following me, which was sort of cheating, you'd never have thought of looking for me here, would you? And it all came to me in a flash, just like that, when I was at the cloakroom in Paddington. You see, I had to go somewhere, and I couldn't go to my flat because everybody knows where that is, and I knew you and Algy and the Sons of France and everybody else would be looking for me, so I had to find somewhere to hide, and then I suddenly remembered reading in a detective story once that the best place to hide was the most obvious place, because nobody ever thought of looking in it. So then I thought, well, I was only down here a few days ago, and lots of awkward things were happening down here then, and so nobody would expect me to come back here. So I just got on the first train and came back; and I got hold of a porter just before the train went out and gave him a telegram to send to Algy and told him if he wanted to talk to me any more about these papers he could put an advertisement in the Morning Post… What's the matter?"
The Saint was standing and gooping at her as if he had been hit on the back of the head. It was a few moments before he recovered his voice.
"You sent Fairweather a telegram before the train left?"
"Yes."
"From Paddington?"
"Yes. You see—"
"Never mind what I see. You poor little blithering featherhead, can't you see what you did?"
"Did I do anything wrong?"
The Saint swallowed.
"No, nothing," he said. "You only told him where to look for you. Haven't you realized that your telegram would be marked as handed in at Paddington? And do you think he's had a house here for all these years without knowing that Paddington is the station where you take off for Anford? And don't you think your telegram is going to remind him about it? And don't you think he's ever read any detective stories? And don't you think that that's just the half-witted break he'd credit you with at once from what he knows of you? He can afford the risk of being wrong; but where do you think is the first place he's going to look for you, just for luck? You — you female Uniatz, you've left him a trail a mile wide that leads straight to where you're sitting!"
At any other time her dismay might have been comical. She looked as if she were going to cry.
"D-do you really think he'll think of all that?"
"I know damn well he'll think of it. Has thought of it. There may be plenty of things about him I don't like, but he couldn't be where he is and be that dumb. And besides, he has Luker to help him think." Simon glanced at his watch. "By this time—"
He had no need to go into any further explanations of what might have happened by that time. A heavy knock on the door provided them for him.
The sound went down into the Saint's stomach as if he had swallowed a lump of lead. For an instant he felt as if all the blood stopped circulating in his veins, and his ears roared with the thunder of his own stillness. The knocking was so apt, so uncannily instantaneous on its cue, that for a fraction of a second he seemed to be jarred out of all power of movement.
And then he was very quiet and very cool. His glance whirled over the room: its masses of furniture provided half-a-dozen hiding places but none of them was any good. He took one step aside and looked out of the window. It opened on to the High Street, and the sidewalks were busy with people.
The Saint's eyes went back to Lady Valerie, and they were oddly, incredibly gay. But besides that reckless humour they carried something else that could only be described here in page after page of inadequate words. She stared at him in the frightened continuation of a stupor that had lasted longer than his own, while his eyes spoke to her with that queer vague message that awoke no less formless questions and answers in her brain, and the two of them seemed to be infinitely alone in a strange universe of their own where thoughts passed without words; all of that in an eternity that could only have lasted for a moment before his lips were shaping inaudible syllables:
"Let them in."
She got up, and he moved behind her and stood behind the door as she opened it, with his right hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun inside the breast of his coat.
A voice said: "Lady Valerie? May we come in?"
She stammered something and stepped back. The Saint felt the edge of the bed against his knees and sat down quickly on it. The door, closing again, disclosed him to the arrivals at the same time as it revealed them to him. They were the police sergeant whom he had met before, in plain clothes, and the constable whose name was Reginald.