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."