To PATRICIA CHARTERIS Hoping She May Meet a Saint Some Day

Part One

The Spanish War

I

Simon Templar folded his newspaper with a sigh and laid it reverently to rest in the wastebasket.

"We live in a wonderful country," he observed. "Did you read how two policemen and one policewoman practically lived in a night club in Brighton for about three weeks, drawing their wages from the ratepayers all the time and drinking gallons of champagne at the ratepayers' expense, until they finally managed to lure some poor fathead into the place and get him to buy them a drink after time? And that's what we pay taxes for. Our precious politicians can go to Geneva and swindle the Abyssinians with all the dignity of a gang of bucket-shop promoters and slap the poor deluded Spaniard on the back and tell him he's just dreaming about Italians and Germans helping the rebels in his so-called civil war; but the honour of England has been vindicated. A bloke is fined fifty quid for selling a whisky and soda at half past eleven and another bloke is fined a fiver for drinking it; two policemen and one policewoman have had a wonderful free jag and helped themselves towards promotion, and the world has been shown that England respects the Law. Rule Britannia."

Patricia Holm smiled tolerantly.

"I love you when your gorge rises," she said; and the Saint chuckled.

"It's a beautiful gorge, darling," he answered. "And talking about the Law, it seems a long time since we saw anything of dear old Chief Inspector Teal."

"He doesn't go abroad very much," Patricia pointed out. "If you stayed at home for a bit I expect you'd see plenty of him."

Simon nodded.

"There's plenty of him to see," he agreed, "and I suppose we'll be seeing it. I can't go on being respectable indefinitely."

He got up from the breakfast table and stretched himself lazily by the open windows. The spring sunshine lay in pools between the trees of the park and twinkled on the delicate green of the young leaves that were still too freshly budded for the London air to have dulled their colour; and the same sunshine twinkled in the smile with which the Saint looked back at Patricia. It was a smile that made any disclaimer of respectability seem almost superfluous. Respectability was a disease that could never have attacked a man with a smile in which there was so much unconquerable devilment; it couldn't have found a foothold anywhere in any one of the seventy-two inches of slimly muscular length that separated his crisp black hair from the soles of his polished shoes. And with that smile laughing its Irresistible way into her eyes Patricia felt again as fresh and ageless as if she were only meeting it then for the first time, the gay, disreputable magic of that incomparable buccaneer whom the newspapers had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime and whom the police and the underworld alike had called by many worse names.

"I suppose you can't," she said resignedly and knew that she was stating one of the few immutable certainties of this unsettled world.

Simon lighted a cigarette with an impenitent grin and turned to the door as Orace's walrus face poked itself into the room.

"Someone wantin' to see yer," said Orace; and the Saint raised his eyebrows.

"Does he look like a detective?" he asked hopefully.

Orace shook his head.

"Nossir. 'E looks like a gentleman."

Simon went through into the living room and found his visitor standing by the table flicking over the pages of the New Yorker. He dropped the magazine and turned quickly as the Saint came in. He was a youngish man with brown curly hair and a lantern jaw and rimless glasses. The Saint, whose life had depended more than once on his gift for measuring up strangers with a casual glance, guessed that Orace's diagnosis was probably correct and also that his visitor was slightly agitated.

"Mr Templar? I've never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I've seen your picture and read about you in the papers. I've really got no business to come and take up your time, but—"

The Saint nodded. He was used to people who really had no business to come and take up his time — it was one of the penalties of fame, but it had often turned out to be a profitable penalty. He held out his cigarette case.

"Sit down and let's hear what's on your mind," he said soothingly. "I've never met you either, so anyway we start square."

"My name's Graham — Geoffrey Graham," The young man took a cigarette and sat on the arm of a chair as if he expected to bounce off at any moment.

"I don't know how much you want to know about me — I'm an articled pupil in an architect's office, and I live in Bloomsbury — my family live in Yorkshire, and they aren't very well off—"

"Have you murdered somebody?" asked the Saint gravely.

"No. No, I haven't done that—"

"Or burgled a bank?"

"No, but—"

"It might have been quite exciting if you had," said the Saint calmly. "But as things are, suppose you tell me what the trouble is first, and then we'll decide how far back to go into the story of your life."

"Well—"

The expectation was justified. The young man did bounce off the chair. He pulled a bundle of large folded papers out of his pocket, disengaged one of them and held it out.

"Well, look," he said. "What d' you think this is?"

Simon unfolded the document. It was printed on crisp heavy paper and very beautifully engraved; it looked as if it might have been valuable, but most men would have studied it for some time before venturing to define it. Simon held it up to the light, rubbed it between his fingers and flipped it back onto the table.

"It seems to be one of the new American government short-term loan thousand-dollar bearer bonds," he said in much the same way as he might have said, "It seems to be a bus ticket to Wimbledon"; but his blue had settled into a quiet and rather watchful interestedness.

Graham pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

"My God," he said. He breathed heavily once or twice. "Well, that's what I'd come to the conclusion it was, only I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd better make sure. You know, I've read about those things in stories, like everybody else, but I'd never seen one before. My God!"

He blinked down at the handful of papers which he was still clutching and threw them down on the table beside the specimen.

"Look," he said in an awe-stricken voice. "There's thirty-four more of 'em. That's thirty-five thousand dollars — seven thousand pounds — isn't it?"

Simon picked up the collection and glanced through them.

"It was when I was at school," he said. "Are you making a collection or something?"

"Well, not exactly. I got them out of a fellow's desk."

"There must be money in architecture," said the Saint encouragingly.

"No, it wasn't at the office. This was a fellow who lived in the same boardinghouse with me when I was living in Bayswater. You see—"

The Saint studied him thoughtfully. His uninvited callers in the past had included more than one optimistic gentleman who had tried to sell him a machine for making diamonds or turning water into lubricating oil, and he was always glad to listen to a new story. But although the opening he had just listened to might well have served as a prelude to one of those flights of misdirected ingenuity which were the Saint's perennial joy and occasional source of income, there seemed to be something genuine about the young man in front of him which didn't quite fit in with the Saint's shrewdly discriminating suspicions.

"Why not start at the beginning and go on to the end?" he suggested.

"It's quite simple, really," explained Graham as if he didn't find it simple at all. "You see, about six months ago I lent this fellow a tenner."

"What fellow?"

"His name's David Ingleston. I knew him quite slightly, the way you know people in a boardinghouse, but he seemed all right, and he said he'd pay me back in a week. He hasn't paid me back yet. He kept promising to pay me back, but when the time came he'd always have some excuse or other. When I moved my digs to Bloomsbury it got worse — if I rang up or went to see him he'd be out or he'd have been sent abroad by his firm or something, and if I wrote to him he didn't answer, and so on. I'm not very well off, as I told you, and a tenner means quite a bit to me. I was getting pretty fed up with it."

The young man stared resentfully at the sheaf of bonds on the table, as if they personified the iniquity of their owner.

"Well, the other day I found out that he was back in England and that he'd moved into a flat in Chelsea. That made it seem worse, because I thought if he could afford to move into a flat he could afford to pay me my ten quid. I rang him up, and I happened to catch him at home for once, so I told him what I thought of him. He was very apologetic, and he asked me to go round and have a drink with him last night and he'd pay me the tenner then. I was there at half past eight, and he was out, but the maid said I could wait. I kicked my heels for half an hour, and then I began to get angry. After I'd waited an hour I was thoroughly furious. I guessed that he'd forgotten the appointment, or he just wasn't going to keep it, and I could see I'd be waiting another ten years before I got my tenner back. The only thing I could think of was to take it out of him some other way. I couldn't see anything worth pinching that was small enough for me to sneak out under my coat, so I pulled open a drawer of the desk, and I saw those things."

"So you borrowed them for security."

"I didn't really stop to think about it. I didn't know what they were, but they looked as if they might be valuable, so I just shoved them into my pocket. Then the maid came in and said she was going home because she didn't sleep in the flat, and she didn't think she'd better leave me there alone. I was just boiling by that time, so I told her she could tell Ingleston I'd have something to say to him later and marched off. When I got home and had another look at what I'd pinched I began to get the wind up. I couldn't very well take the things into a bank and ask about them, but I thought that you… Well, you know, you—"

"You don't have to feel embarrassed," murmured the Saint kindly. "I have heard people say that they thought my principles were fairly broad-minded. Still, I'm not thinking of sending for the police, although for an amateur burglar you do seem to have got off to a pretty good start."

The young man's lantern jaw became even longer and squarer.

"I don't want Ingleston's beastly bonds," he said, "but I do want my tenner."

"I know," said the Saint sympathetically. "But the Law doesn't allow you to pinch things from people just because they owe you money. It may be ridiculous, but there it is. Hasn't Ingleston rung you up or anything since you pushed off with his bonds?"

"No; but perhaps he hasn't missed them yet."

"If he had you'd probably have heard from him — the maid would have told him you'd been waiting an hour for him last night. Let's hope he hasn't missed them, because if he felt nasty you might have had the police looking for you."

Graham looked slightly stunned.

"But I didn't mean to keep the things—"

"You pinched them," Simon pointed out. "And the police don't know anything about what people mean. Do you realize that you've committed larceny on a scale that'd make a lot of professionals jealous and that you could be sent to prison for quite a long time?"

The other's mouth fell open.

"I hadn't thought of it like that," he said feebly. "It was all on the spur of the moment — I hadn't realized — My God, what am I going to do?"

"The best thing you can do, my lad," said the Saint sensibly, "is to put them back before there's any fuss."

"But—"

There was something so comical about the young man's blankly horrified paralysis that Simon couldn't help taking pity on him.

"Come on," he said. "He can't eat you, and the sooner he gets his bonds back the less likely he is to try. Look here — I'll drive over with you if you like and see that he behaves himself, and we'll take a tenner off him at the same time."

"It's awfully good of you," Graham began weakly; and the Saint grinned and stood up.

"We always try to oblige our customers," he said.

He picked up the bundle of bonds and stuffed them into his own pocket. On the way out he looked in at the dining room to wrinkle his nose at Patricia.

"You'll have to button your own boots," he said. "I'm tottering out for an hour or so to do my Boy Scout act. Where's my bugle?"

He thought of it no more seriously than that, as a mildly amusing interlude to pass the morning between a late breakfast and a cocktail before lunch. The last idea in his head was that he might be setting out on an adventure whose brief intensity would rank with the wildest of his many immortal escapades; and perhaps if it had not been for all those other adventures he might have missed this one altogether. But the heritage of those other adventures was an instinct, the habit of a lifetime, a sixth sense too subtle to define, that fell imperceptibly and unconsciously into tune with the swift smoky rhythm of danger; and that queer intuition caught him like an electric current as the long shining Hirondel purred close to the address that Graham had given him. It caught him quicker than his mind could work — so quickly that before he could analyze his thoughts he had smacked the gear lever down into second, whipped the car behind the cover of a crawling taxi and whirled out of sight of the building around the next corner.

II

"That was the house," Graham protested. "You just passed it."

"I know," said the Saint.

He locked the hand brake as the car pulled in to the curb, and turned to look back at the corner they had just taken. The movement was automatic, although he knew that he couldn't see the entrance of the house from where they had stopped; but in his memory he could see it as clearly as if the angle of the building which hid it from his eyes had been made of glass — the whole little tableau that had blazed those high-voltage danger signals into his brain.

Not that there had been anything sensational about it, anything that would have had that instantaneous and dynamic effect on the average man's reactions. Just seven or eight assorted citizens of various but quite ordinary and unexciting shapes and sizes, loafing and gaping inanely about the pavement, with the door of the house which Simon had been making for as a kind of vague focus linking them roughly together. A constable in uniform standing beside the door, and a rotund, pink-faced man in a bowler hat who had emerged from the hall to speak to him at the very moment when the Saint's eye was grasping the general outlines of the scene. Nothing startling or prodigious; but it was enough to keep the Saint sitting there with his eyes keen and intent while he went over the details in his mind. Perhaps it was the memory of that round man with a face like a slightly apoplectic cherub, who had come out to speak to the policeman…

Graham was staring at him perplexedly.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

The Saint looked at him almost without seeing him, and a faint aimless smile touched his lips.

"Nothing," he said. "Can you drive a car?"

"Fairly well."

"Drive this one. She's a bit of a handful, so you'd better take it easy. Don't put your foot down too quickly, or you'll find yourself a mile or two ahead of yourself."

"But—"

"Go back to my place. You'll find a girl there — name of Patricia Holm. I'll phone her and tell her you're on your way. She'll give you a drink and prattle to you till I get back. I'd like to pay this call alone."

"But—"

Simon swung his legs over the side and pushed himself off onto the pavement.

"That seems to be quite a favourite word of yours," he remarked. "On your way, brother. You can tell me all about it presently."

He stood and watched the Hirondel take a leap forward like a goosed antelope and then crawl on up the road with a very mystified young man clinging grimly to the steering wheel; and then he turned into a convenient tobacconist's and put a call through to Patricia.

"I'm sending my Boy Scout material back for you to look after," he said. "Feed him some ginger ale and keep him happy till I get back. I wouldn't flirt with him too much, because I think he's a rather earnest soul. And if there should be any inquiries tell Orace to hide him in the oven and don't let anybody know we've got him."

"Does this mean you're getting into trouble again?" she demanded ominously. "Because if you are—"

"Darling, I am about to have a conference with the vicar about the patterns for the next sewing bee," said the Saint and hung up the receiver.

He lighted a cigarette as he sauntered down to the corner and across the street towards the house which he had been meaning to visit. The scene was still more or less the same, one or two new idle citizens having joined the small accumulation of inquisitive loafers, and one or two of the old congregation having grown tired of gaping at nothing and moved off. The policeman still stood majestically by the door, although the man in the bowler hat no longer obstructed the opening. The policeman moved a little to do some obstructing of his own as the Saint ambled up the steps.

"Do you live here, sir?"

"No," said the Saint amiably. "Do you?"

The constable gazed at him woodenly.

"Who do you want to see?"

"I should like to see Chief Inspector Teal," Simon told him impressively. "He's expecting me."

The policeman studied him suspiciously for a moment; but the Saint was very impressive. He looked like a man whom a chief inspector might have been expecting. He might equally well have been expected by a prime minister, a film actress or a man who trained budgereegahs to play the trombone; but the constable was not a sufficiently profound thinker to take this universal view. He turned and led the way into the house, and Simon followed him. They went through the hall, which had the empty and sanitary and freshly painted air common to all houses which have been recently converted into flats, and through the half-open door of a ground-floor flat a strip of curl-papered female goggled at them morbidly as they went by. At the top of the empty and sanitary and freshly painted stairs the door of another flat was ajar, with another policeman standing beside it.

"Someone to see the inspector," said the first policeman and, having discharged his duty, went downstairs again to resume his vigil.

The second policeman opened the door, and they went into the hall of the flat. Almost opposite the entrance was the open door of the living room; and as the Saint reached it he saw four men moving about. There was a man fiddling with a camera on a tripod near the door, and across the room another man was poring over the furniture with a bottle of grey powder and a camel-hair brush and a magnifying glass. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking man with a large notebook stood a little way apart, sucking the end of a pencil; and the man with the bowler hat and the figure like an inverted egg whom Simon had seen from his car was peering over his shoulder at what had been written down.

It was on the last of these men that the Saint's eyes rested as he entered the room. He remained indifferent to the other stares that swivelled round to greet him with bovine curiosity, waiting until the bowler hat tilted towards him. And as it did so a warm and friendly smile established itself on the Saint's face.

"What ho, Claud Eustace," he said affably.

The china-blue eyes under the brim of the bowler hat grew larger and rounder as they assimilated the shock of identification. In them even a man with the firmest intentions of believing nothing but good of his fellow men would have found it hard to discern any of that spontaneous cordiality and cheer with which a well-mannered wanderer in the great wilderness of life should have returned the greeting of a brother voyager. To be precise they looked as if their owner had just discovered that he was in the act of absentmindedly swallowing a live toad.

A rich tint of sun-kissed plum mantled the face below the eyes; and the man seemed to quiver a little, like a volcano seeking for some means of self-expression. After one or two awful seconds he found it.

"What the hell are you doing here?" blared Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

III

It must be admitted in Mr Teal's defence that he was not normally a man who blared or whose eyes tended to perform strange antics. Left to himself he would have been a placid and even-tempered soul, with all the sluggish equanimity appropriate to his girth; and as a matter of fact he had, during his earlier years with the Criminal Investigation Department, developed a pose of exaggerated sleepiness and perpetual boredom of which he was extremely proud. It was the advent of the Saint on Mr Teal's halcyon horizon which had changed all that and made the detective an embittered and an apoplectic man.

Not that there was one single crime on the record, one microscopic molecule of a misdemeanour, for which Chief Inspector Teal could have taken official action against the Saint. That was a great deal of the trouble, and the realization of it did nothing to brighten the skies above the detective's well-worn and carefully laundered bowler. But it sometimes seemed to Mr Teal that all the griefs and misfortunes that had afflicted him in recent years could be directly traced to the exploits of that incredible outlaw who had danced so long and so derisively just beyond Mr Teal's legal reach — who had mocked him, baffled him, cheated him, eluded him, brought down upon him the not entirely justified censure of his superiors and set him more insoluble problems than any other man alive. Perhaps it was some of these acid memories that welled up into the detective's weary brain and stimulated that spontaneous outburst of feeling. For wherever the Saint went there was trouble, and trouble of a kind with which Mr Teal had grown miserably familiar.

"Claud!" said the Saint reprovingly. "Is that nice? Is it kind? Is that the way your dear old mother would like to hear you speak?"

"Never mind my mother—"

"How could I, Claud? I never met her. How's she getting on?"

Mr Teal swallowed and turned towards the policeman who had brought Simon in.

"What did you let him in for?" he demanded in a voice of fearful menace.

The policeman swayed slightly before the blast.

"Richards brought him up, sir. I understood you were expecting him—"

"And so you are, Claud," said the Saint. "Why be so bashful about it?"

Teal stared at him malevolently.

"Why should I be expecting you?"

"Because you always are. It's a habit. Whenever anybody does anything you come and unbosom yourself to me. Whenever any crime's been committed I did it. So just for once I thought I'd come and see you and save you the trouble of coming to see me. Pretty decent of me, I call it."

"How did you know a crime had been committed?"

"It was deduction," said the Saint. "You see, I happened to be ambling along by here when I saw a policeman at the door and a small crowd outside and your intellectual features leering out of the door to say something to the said cop; so I went into a teashop and had a small cup of cocoa while I thought it over. I admit that the first idea that crossed my mind was that you'd been thrown out — I mean that you'd retired from the force and gone in for art, and that you were holding an exhibition of your works, and that the crowd outside was waiting for the doors to open, and that you were telling the cop to keep them in order for a bit because you couldn't find your false beard. It was only after some remarkable brain work that I avoided falling into this error. Gradually the real solution dawned on me—"

"Now you mention it," Teal said ominously, "why did you happen to be ambling along here?"

"Why shouldn't I, Claud? I have to amble somewhere, and they say this is a free country. There are several thousands of other people ambling around Chelsea, but do you rush out into the streets and grab them and ask them why?"

Mr Teal's pudgy fists clenched inside his pockets. It was happening again — the same as it always had. He set out to be a detective, and some evil spirit turned him into a clown. It wasn't his fault. It was the fault of that debonair, mocking, lazily smiling Mephistopheles who was misnamed the Saint, who seemed to have been born with the uncanny gift of paralyzing the detective's trained and native caution and luring him into howling gaucheries that made Mr Teal go hot and cold when he thought about them. And the more often it happened, the more easily it happened next time. There was an awful fatefulness about it that made Mr Teal want to burst into tears.

He took hold of himself doggedly, glowering up at the Saint with a concentrated uncharitableness that would have made a lion think twice before biting him.

"Well," he said with a restraint that made the veins stand out on his forehead, "what do you want here?"

"I just thought I'd drop in and see how you were getting on with your detecting. Quite a jolly little murder it looks, too, if I may say so."

For the first time since the casual glance he had taken round the room when he came in his cool gaze went back to the crumpled shape on the floor.

It lay on the floor, close to the fireplace and a side table on which stood a bottle of whisky and a siphon — the body of what seemed to have been a man of medium size and build, wearing an ordinary dark suit. His hair looked as if it might have been a pale gingery colour; but it was difficult to be sure about that, because there was not much of it that was not clotted with the blood that had flowed from his smashed skull and spread in a pool over the carpet. There was not much of the back of his head left at all, as a matter of fact, for the smashing had been carried out very methodically and with the obvious intention of making sure that there would never be any need to repeat the dose. A little distance away lay the instrument with which the smashing had been done: it looked like an ordinary cheap hammer, and the wooden handle was so clean that it might well have been bought new for the purpose.

The rest of the room was in disorder. Books had been pulled out of their shelves, the carpet was wrinkled as if it had been pulled up to examine the floor underneath, cushions had been taken out of the chairs, and there were gashes in the upholstery. All the drawers of the desk were open; one of them had been pulled right out and left on the floor, and another was upturned on the table. A mass of papers was scattered around like a stage snowfall. A yard from the dead man's right hand a tumbler lay on its side at the edge of a pool of moisture where its contents had soaked into the carpet.

"Quite a jolly little murder," Simon repeated.

Teal went on watching him suspiciously.

"Do you know anything about it?"

"Not a thing," said the Saint honestly. "Do you?"

Chief Inspector Teal dug into his waistcoat pocket and extracted from it a small pink rectangular packet. From this he drew a small pink envelope, unwrapped it and fed the contents into his mouth. There was a short interval of silence, while his salivary glands responded exquisitely to the stimulus and his teeth mashed the strip of gum into a conveniently malleable wodge.

The delay, coupled with the previous pause while the Saint had been studying the scenery, gave him a chance to complete the recovery of his self-possession; and Mr Teal had been making the most of his respite. Some of the rich purple had faded out of his face, and his eyelids had started to droop. His brain was reviving from its first shock and beginning to function again.

"It looks like an ordinary murder and robbery to me," he answered with a gruff straightforwardness which he hoped was convincing. "Hardly in your line, I should say."

"Anything is in my line if it helps you," said the Saint generously, "Mmrn… robbery. The place does look as if it had been taken apart, doesn't it?" He drifted about the room, taking in details. "Couple of nice silver cups on the mantelpiece. Gold cigarette case. Burglars certainly are getting choosey these days, aren't they, Claud? Why, I can remember a time when none of 'em would have turned up their noses at a few odds and ends like that."

"They may have been looking for something more valuable," Teal said temptingly.

The Saint nodded.

"Yes, that's possible. You must have been reading a book or something."

"Have you any idea what that could have been?"

Simon thought for a moment.

"I know," he said suddenly. "It was the plans for the new death ray which the master spy with, the hare lip stole from the War Office in chapter three."

Mr Teal felt the arteries in his neck throbbing, but with a superhuman effort he clung to his precariously rescued sangfroid, chewing fiercely on his blob of spearmint.

"Oh yes," he said with desperate moderation. "But we don't really believe in things like that. They must have thought he had something here that they could get money for—"

" 'They'?" said the Saint as if the point had just occurred to him. "I see — you've already found that there were several blokes involved in it."

"I was saying that to be on the safe side. Of course we haven't found any evidence yet—"

"Nobody would expect you to," Simon encouraged him liberally. "After all, you're only detectives, and that isn't your job. If this had been a night club where the deceased was serving drinks after hours it would have been quite a different matter. But making allowances for that—"

"What would you see?"

Simon pointed.

"There's whisky and a siphon on that small table. And one glass with what looks like whisky in it. Just one. On the floor there's another glass, surrounded by a certain amount of dampness. What happens when a bloke's dishing up a round of drinks? Normally he pours out the whisky into however many glasses he's using. Then he squirts the soda into the glass of the first victim, tells him to say when, hands him his dose of medicine and goes on to the next. And so on."

"So you think there was only one other man here, and the murderer hit him while he was filling the first glass?"

"I didn't say so," responded the Saint airily. "I didn't say 'man', in the first place. It might have been some of these hairy Olympic female champions — some of 'em sling a pretty hefty hammer, I believe. And all the rest of them may have been teetotallers, so they wouldn't be getting a drink."

Teal wedged his gum into a hollow tooth and held it there heroically.

"All the same," he persisted, "you do think it looks as if he, or she, or they, were on fairly friendly terms with…" He hesitated.

"With Comrade Ingleston?" Simon prompted him kindly.

"How did you know that?"

The brassy note was creeping back into Teal's voice, and he tried to strangle the symptom with a gulp that almost ruptured his larynx. The ensuing silence made him feel as self-conscious as if he had blared out like a bugle; but the Saint was only smiling with unaltered affability.

"How did I know they were friendly? Well, after all, when you start pouring out drinks—"

"How did you know his name was Ingleston?"

"I was just guessing," said the Saint apologetically. "I took it that the motive was robbery, going on what you said. Therefore the robberee was the murderee, so to speak. Therefore the corpse was the owner of this flat and all that therein is. Therefore he was the owner of that photo."

The detective blinked at him distrustfully for a second or two and then went back to the mantelpiece and peered at the picture he had indicated. It was a framed photograph of a plump, swarthy man in hornrimmed spectacles, and across the lower part of it was scrawled:

A mi buen amigo D. David Ingleston, con mucho afecto de Luis Quintana

Mr Teal was no linguist, but he scarcely needed to be.

"Just another spot of this deduction business," Simon explained modestly. "Of course these tricks must seem frightfully easy to you professionals, but to an amateur like myself—"

"I was only wondering how you knew," Teal said shortly.

The brassy note was still jangling in his vocal cords, but the texture of it was different. He seemed disappointed. He was disappointed. He bit on his chewing gum with the ferocious energy of a hungry cannibal tasting a mouthful of tough missionary.

"It does look as if the murderer or murderers were on friendly terms with Ingleston," he said presently. "Apart from the glasses, none of the windows seem to have been tampered with, and the front door hasn't been touched."

"How was the murder discovered?"

"When the maid came in this morning. She has her own key."

"You've checked up on Ingleston's friends?"

"We haven't had time to do much in that line yet. But the maid says that a friend of his waited over an hour for him here last night, until she sent him away because she wanted to go home. She says that this fellow seemed to be in a rage about something, and when he went off he said he'd have something to say to Ingleston later, so he may have waited in the street until Ingleston came home and followed him upstairs."

The Saint nodded interestedly.

"Did she know who he was?"

"Oh yes, we know who he was," said Mr Teal confidently. "It won't take long to find him."

His drowsy eyes were fastened unwinkingly on the Saint's face, watching for the slightest betrayal of emotion; but Simon only nodded again with benevolent approval.

"Then there really doesn't seem to be anything for me to do," he drawled. "With that Sherlock Holmes brain of yours and the great organization behind you, I shall expect to read about the arrest in tomorrow morning's paper. And a good job too. These ruffians must be taught that crime will not be allowed to go unpunished so long as there is one honest bowler hat in Scotland Yard. Farewell, old faithful."

He buttoned his coat and held out his hand.

"Is that all you've got to say?" barked the detective; and Simon raised his eyebrows.

"What more can I add? You've got a gorgeous collection of clues, and I know you'll make the most of them. What poor words of mine could compete with the peals of praise that will echo down the corridors from the chief commissioner's office—"

"All right," said Teal blackly. "I'll know where to find you if I want you."

He stood and watched the Saint's broad elegantly tailored back pass out through the door, with a feeling as if he had recently been embalmed in glue. It was Hot the first time that Mr Teal had had that sensation after an interview with the Saint, but many repetitions had never inured him to it. All the peace and comfort had been taken out of his day. He had set out to attend to a nice, ordinary, straightforward, routine murder; and now he had to resign himself to the expectation that nothing about it would turn out to be nice or ordinary or straightforward or routine. Nothing that brought him in contact with the Saint ever did.

He turned wearily round, as if a great load had been placed on his shoulders, to find his subordinates watching him with a kind of smirking perplexity. Mr Teal's eyes glittered balefully.

"Get on with your work!" he snarled. "What d' you think this is — an old maids' home?" He strode across to the telephone and switched his incandescent glare onto the fingerprint expert. "Have you finished with this?"

"Y-yes sir," stammered the man hastily. "There's nothing on it except the deceased's own prints—"

Mr Teal was not interested in that. He grabbed off the microphone and dialled Scotland Yard.

"I want somebody to tail Simon Templar, of Cornwall House, Piccadilly," he snapped when he was through to his department. "Put a couple of good men on the job and tell 'em to keep their eyes open. He's a slippery customer, and he'll lose them if they give him the chance. I want to know everything he does for twenty-four hours a day until further notice… Yes, I do mean the Saint — and if he gives them the slip they'll need some saints to pray for them!"

At that moment Simon Templar was not thinking about the possible consequences of being followed night and day by the heavy-footed minions of the C.I.D. His mind was entirely occupied with other consequences which struck him as being far less commonplace.

He had hailed a taxi outside the house, and as he was climbing in he heard a curious sharp crack of sound in front of him. He felt a quick stinging pain like the jab of a needle in his chin, and something like an angry wasp zoomed past his ear. As his head jerked up he saw a new spidery pattern of cracks in the window a couple of feet from his eyes — an irregular star-shaped spangle of lines radiating from a neat hole perforated in the glass, about the size of a 38-calibre bullet.

IV

A split second later the Saint's glinting gaze was raking the street and surrounding pavements instinctively, before he realized the futility of the effort. He realized a moment afterwards that the shot could only have come from another car, which had crept up alongside the taxi so that some philanthropist could fire at him through the offside window as he boarded the cab from the pavement. As he started to search the scenery for the offending vehicle a bus crashed past, shutting off his field of vision like a moving curtain; and as it went on its bulk effectively obliterated any glimpse he might have had of a car making off in the same direction.

Fortunately the gun must have been silenced; and the taxi driver must have taken the accompanying sound effects for a combination of the cough of a passing exhaust and the clumsiness of his passenger, for he had not even looked round. As the Saint settled onto the seat and closed the door through which he had entered he grated the gears together and chugged away without any apparent awareness of the sensational episode that had taken place a few inches behind his unromantic back.

Simon took out a handkerchief and dabbed his chin where it had been nicked by a flying splinter of glass. Then he reached forward, unlatched the damaged door and slammed it again with all his strength. The glass with the bullet hole in it shattered with the impact and tinkled down Into the road.

This time the driver did look round, jamming on his brakes at the same time.

" 'Ere," he protested plaintively, "wot's all this?"

"I'm sorry," said the Saint in distress. "The door wasn't fastened properly, and I must have banged it a bit too hard. I'll have to pay you for it."

"That you will," said the driver. "Free pounds each, them winders cost."

"Okay," said the Saint. "You'll get your three pounds."

"Ar," said the driver.

He ground the gears again and sent the cab spluttering on, slightly mollified by the prospect of collecting double the cost of the repair; and the Saint sat back and took out a cigarette.

As far as he was concerned it was worth the bonus to dispose of a witness who might have inconvenient recollections of a fare who allowed himself to be shot at fru winders; but there were other points less easy to dispose of, and he was still considering them when he opened the door of his flat in Cornwall House.

He found Patricia with her feet up on the settee, smoking a cigarette, while Geoffrey Graham, balanced on springs on the edge of a chair as usual, appeared to be expounding the principles of architecture.

"… You see, it isn't only functional, but the rhythmic balance of mass has to have a definite harmonic correlation—"

"Yippee," said the Saint gravely. "But what about the uncoordinated finials?"

The young man jumped up, turned pink and spilt some beer from the tankard he was clutching. Patricia looked up with a rather wan smile.

"You haven't been very long," she said. "Mr Graham and I were only just getting to know each other."

"I should have said you were getting pretty intimate, myself," murmured the Saint. "When you decide that it isn't only functional and start to get a spot of harmonic correlation into your rhythmic masses—"

"That's enough," said Patricia.

"That's what I thought," said the Saint. "However…"

He grinned and sat down beside her. Even under the mask of irrepressible flippancy which rarely left him she could feel the keyed alertness vibrating within him like a charge of electricity.

"What's been happening?" she asked.

"I've been on a party."

Graham's eyes beamed behind his glasses.

"Did you see Ingleston?"

"Oh yes. And very handsome he looked. You did a lovely job on the back of his head."

"I did a—"

"No, I don't really believe that. But I just wanted to see how you'd take it, to make sure." Simon reached for the cigarette box. "Somebody else did, though. In the course of a long and wide experience I've rarely seen a head bashed in with so much thoroughness. I shouldn't be surprised if they found his brains coming out through his eyes when they turned him over."

The young man's mouth fell slowly open as if his chin was being lowered like a drawbridge.

"You don't say he's — dead?"

"If you're sensitive about it we'll say he has awoken to life immortal. But the one certain thing is that he'll never pay you your tenner now unless he's left it to you in his will. I had an idea something had gone screwy — that's why I sent you back here. It was sheer luck that I happened to see Chief Inspector Teal's tummy bulging out of the front door as we were driving up; otherwise the party might have been even breezier than it was."

Graham seemed to wobble a little as the full meaning of the Saint's words worked into his brain. His face went paler, and he steadied himself against the back of a chair.

"Do you mean he was murdered?"

"That was the idea I was trying to put over," Simon admitted. "Directly I saw Claud Eustace floating around I knew something had blown up — he doesn't go chasing out with his magnifying glass and pedigree bloodhounds because somebody's lost a collar stud. And there he was with his photographers and finger-printers and the body in the library, just like the best detective stories. So we had a cheery little chat."

"I think I need a drink," said Patricia faintly.

She got up and fetched a bottle of sherry and some glasses; and the Saint blew a smoke ring and spoilt it with a chuckle.

"Are you out on bail, or did you just run away?" she enquired. "I mean, I don't want to interfere with you, but it'd be sort of helpful to know."

"Not a bit of it, darling. It wasn't that sort of chat. He puffed and trumpeted to some extent at the start, but that was only natural. I soothed him with my well-known charm; and then he got awfully cunning. If you've ever seen Claud Eustace being cunning you won't want to go to the circus any more. He opened his heart to me and talked about the case and asked me all kinds of innocent questions, and he was working so hard at being affable that the perspiration was fairly streaming down his face; and every time I gave him an innocent answer his eyes got smaller and brighter and I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. Of course in order to keep the conversation going and bait his traps for me he had to give me a certain amount of information, and I was supposed to drop a few bricks in reply; but it didn't exactly work out that way, and eventually I thought I'd better push off before he had a seizure." The Saint's eyes danced behind the veils of smoke drifting across his face. "However, I didn't do too badly out of the exchange myself; and one of the useful bits of gossip I picked up was the name of the chief current suspect."

"Who's that?" asked Graham feverishly.

"You!"

The word hit Graham in the midriff and almost doubled him up. He gaped at the Saint with his Adam's apple jigging up and down like a yo-yo for some seconds before his voice came back.

"Me?" he croaked.

"Who else? You were the last person in the flat. You were very steamed up about seeing Ingleston. You were fuming when the maid slung you out. The last thing you told her was that you'd have something to say to Ingleston later. It's the sort of clue that even a policeman couldn't miss. They're looking for you now… Which reminds me."

He reached out for the telephone and called the porter's desk downstairs.

"That you, Sam?… Simon Templar speaking. You know that bloke who came to see me earlier this morning, who went out with me?… No, you're wrong. He didn't come back. In fact he never came here at all. You never saw him in your life. Nobody's been to see me today. Have you got that?… Good man."

Graham was still breathing heavily.

"But — but—"

"I know," said the Saint patiently. "But let's take things one at a time. Teal's sure to make enquiries here — in fact I wouldn't mind betting that he's already got a team of flatfeet galumphing along here to pick up my trail. So long as they can't definitely hook you up with me it'll be something in your favour, my reputation being what it is. They'll draw your digs and your office, of course, but that doesn't matter. It's a good job you didn't leave those bonds at home, though, or they'd have had a warrant out for you by this time."

"Wouldn't it be better for him to get back as quickly as possible?" suggested Patricia. "If they think he's trying to dodge them it'll only make it look worse."

"The trouble is there may be people looking for him who'd be a lot more dangerous than poor old Teal," said the Saint.

He spoke quite casually; but there was a shade of meaning in his voice that cut a tiny crease between Patricia's eyebrows and made Graham stiffen up.

Simon opened out his blood-spotted handkerchief and touched the cut in his chin.

"Hadn't any of you noticed the damage to my beauty?" he enquired. "Or did you think I'd been having a shave while I was out?"

They looked at him in perplexity merging into a groping fragment of comprehension. And the Saint smiled.

"I collected that on my way home — just after I left Ingleston's, to be accurate. I was getting into a taxi when some sportsman came by and turned on the tap. All I got hit by was a bit of broken glass, but that wasn't his fault. If he'd been a better shot it would have been the last time I made the headlines."

Complete understanding left them still silent, absorbing the implications according to their different temperaments and backgrounds. The frown smoothed out of Patricia's forehead, to be replaced by an expression of martyred resignation. Graham put down his tankard and mopped his brow with an unsteady hand.

"But who—"

"It's pretty obvious, I think," said the Saint. "Somebody knocked Ingleston off — we know that. For the sake of simplicity let us call him Pongo. Pongo was hanging around last night, waiting for Ingleston to come home, and he saw you come out. He'd have been watching the place pretty closely, so he wouldn't have forgotten your face, even if it didn't mean much to him at the time. Later on Ingleston arrives, Pongo accosts him and goes in with him — the evidence shows that he was somebody Ingleston knew — and while Ingleston is pouring out some drinks Pongo gets to work on him with a hammer he's brought along for the purpose. Then after Ingleston has been removed Pongo gets on with the real business of the evening and starts looking for whatever he came to find. He tears the whole place apart — it looked as if a tribe of monkeys had been through it — but my guess is that he doesn't find what he's looking for because it's already gone."

"You mean those bonds I took?"

"Exactly. So after a while Pongo gives it up and amscrays, muttering curses in his beard. But he isn't ready to quit altogether, so this morning he's back on watch, waiting to see if he can get a line on the lost boodle. And what does he see but a car containing yourself, the bloke who came out of the place last night, and me. We look as if we were going to pull up at the door, and then we suddenly whizz on and stop around the next corner. All very suspicious. Pongo curls his mustachios and lurks like anything. I hop out of the car, and you go on with it. Pongo has one awful moment while he wonders which way he ought to go and whether he can split himself in half, and then he decides to stick to me — (a) because I'm a new factor that might be worth investigating, (b) because I'm obviously going back to the scene of the crime and you aren't, and possibly (c) because he knows who you are and knows he can pick you up again if he wants to. Pongo sees me speak to the cop at the door and go in; presently I come out again, so he takes his chance and lets fry."

"But why?"

The Saint shrugged.

"Maybe he didn't like my face. Maybe he knew who I was and was scared things might get too hot if I was butting in. Maybe he'd already trailed you here and he'd only just made up his mind what to do about both of us, which would mean you're next on his list.

Maybe a lot of things. That's one of the questions we've got to find the answer to."

"But what's it all about?"

"It appears to be about seven thousand quid's worth of bearer bonds, which is enough reason for a good many things to happen. What I'd like to know is how a man who couldn't pay you a tenner collected all that mazuma. What sort of a job was he in?"

"He was with a firm of sherry importers in the City."

"Sherry!"

The Saint was motionless for a moment, and then he took another cigarette. He couldn't have explained himself what it was that had struck that sudden new crispness into his nerves — it was as if he was trying to make his conscious mind catch up with a spurt of intuition that had outdistanced it.

"You told me that Ingleston had been abroad recently," he said. "Would he have been likely to go to Spain?"

"I expect so. He'd been sent there several times before. He spoke Spanish very well, you see—"

"Did he have a lot of Spanish friends?"

"I don't know."

"He had one anyway — there was a signed photograph inscribed in Spanish on his mantelpiece. Did you ever hear of Luis Quintana?"

"No."

"He's a representative that the Spanish Rebels sent over a few weeks ago…"

Simon jumped up and moved restlessly across the room. There was a fierce drive of energy in the restrained movements of his limbs that had to reach some hidden objective quickly or burn itself to exhaustion.

"Sherry," he said. "Spain. Spanish Rebels. American bearer bonds. And mysterious Pongos cutting loose with hammers and popguns. There must be something to mix them together and make soup."

He took the bundle of bonds out of his pocket and studied one of them again more closely. And then he was wrapped in stillness for so long that the others felt as if they were gripped in the same trance, without knowing why.

At last he spoke.

"They look genuine," he said softly. "Engraving, ink, paper, everything. They look all right. You couldn't say they were fakes without some special tests. And yet they might be… "But there's only been one man in our time who could do a forgery like this — if it is a forgery."

"Who was that?" said Patricia.

The Saint met her gaze with blue eyes glinting with lights that held the essence of the mystery which he himself had just been trying to fathom.

"He was a Pole called Ladek Urivetzky — and I read in the paper that he was executed by a firing squad in Oviedo about a month ago."

V

And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.

"It doesn't seem to make sense," Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.

"It sings songs to me," said the Saint.

But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.

At this particular time, however, neither his eyes nor his smile could have given any information to anyone who might have been watching him, for they were completely hidden by the white beard and moustache and dark glasses which left very little of his face uncovered. He had put on those useful pieces of scenery with some care before he let himself through a panel in the back of a built-in wardrobe in his bedroom which brought him into a similar built-in wardrobe in the bedroom of the adjoining flat, which was occupied by an incurable invalid of great age who rejoiced in the name of Joshua Pond, as any inquisitive person might have discovered from the head porter, Sam Outrell, or the register of tenants. What it would not have been so easy for the inquisitive person to discover was that Mr Pond's existence was entirely imaginary and took concrete form only when it suited the Saint's purposes. Mr Pond rarely went out at all, a fact which was easily explained by his antiquity and failing health.

Securely screened behind his smoked glasses and masses of snowy facial shrubbery, with a white muffler wound round his neck and a black homburg planted squarely on his head, Mr Pond sat in his wheeled chair and was tenderly propelled down the passage by Sam Outrell and a smart young chauffeur in livery. Two men in overalls working on some telephone wiring with a mass of tools spread round them looked up as the door of the flat opened and ignored him as he went by. The chair was pushed into the lift and passed out of their ken. In the lobby downstairs a man reading a newspaper looked up as the lift doors opened and returned automatically to his reading. The chair passed him and was wheeled out into the street, where a sedate black limousine stood waiting. Sam Outrell and the chauffeur each took one of the invalid's elbows and helped him to totter through the door of the car. The chauffeur wrapped a rug round his knees, Sam Outrell closed the door and saluted, the chauffeur took the wheel, and the car whisked away into the night, followed by the disinterested eyes of another large man who stood making a half-hearted attempt to sell newspapers on the opposite side of the street.

"And what exactly," asked the chauffeur as the car streaked westwards along Piccadilly, "are we out for tonight?"

The Saint laughed.

"I'm sorry I had to drag you away from that cocktail party, Peter, old lad, but Claud Eustace is having one of his spasms. Did you see 'em all? Four of 'em — about three square yards of feet all told. That is, if there weren't any more."

He was looking back through the rear window, deciding whether they were being followed. Presently he was satisfied and turned round again.

"Take a cruise through the park, Peter, while I peel off my whiskers."

He stowed the outfit carefully away in a concealed locker in front of him, ready to be put on again when it was required. The venerable black homburg joined it, along with the grey suede gloves; and he took off the lightweight black overcoat and laid it folded on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he was smoothing down his own dark hair and lighting a cigarette.

"What's Teal having a spasm about this time?" demanded Peter Quentin. "And why didn't you let me in on it before?"

"It's only just begun," said the Saint.

He told the story from the beginning, in a synoptic rapid-fire outline which omitted no important details except the connecting links which his own imagination was still working on.

"Sherry, Spain, Spanish Rebels, American bearer bonds, mysterious Pongos with hammers and artillery and a Polish forger who was stood up against a wall in Oviedo," he repeated at the end of it. "And a Spanish civil war still going on and getting bloodier and messier every day, in case you've forgotten it. I've seen a lot of odd things mixed up together in my time, but I think this is in the running for a prize."

"But who's doing what?" said Peter.

"That's what I'm still trying to get straight," said the Saint frankly. "Oviedo's changed hands about half a dozen times, and I don't remember who was holding it when Urivetzky was wiped up. I don't know which side Urivetzky was on or why he should have been mixed up in it at all — except that there seem to be amateurs from half the countries in Europe taking sides in the picnic anyway. But I have got an idea what's in the wind, and I'm going to know some more before I go to bed."

The car slowed up, and Peter said: "Shall I go round again while you're thinking?"

Simon flicked the stub of his cigarette through the window.

"I did all my thinking before I sent for you," he said. "You can cut out here — we're going to Cambridge Square."

"I have heard of it," said Peter with heavy irony. "But not from you. What's it got to do with this party? I thought you said Graham's digs were in Bloomsbury."

"So they are," said the Saint equably. "And Quintana's digs are in Cambridge Square."