Simon let him go on talking, without paying much attention. The dark girl's name wasn't Nora Prescott, anyhow. That seemed to be the only important item of information— and with it went the last of his hopes. The clock over the bar crept on to twenty minutes past eight. If the girl who had written to him had been as desperate as she said, she wouldn't come as late as that—she'd have been waiting there when he arrived. The girl with the strained blue eyes had probably been suffering from nothing worse than biliousness or thwarted love. Rosemary Chase had happened merely by accident. The real writer of the letter was almost certainly some fat and frowsy female among those he had passed over without a second thought, who was doubtless still gloating over him from some obscure corner, gorging herself with the spectacle of her inhibition's hero in the flesh.
A hand grasped his elbow, turning him round, and a lightly accented voice said: "Why, Mr Templar, what are you looking so sad about ?"
The Saint's smile kindled as he turned.
"Giulio," he said, "if I could be sure that keeping a pub would make anyone as cheerful as you, I'd go right out and buy a pub."
Giulio Trapani beamed at him teasingly.
"Why should you need anything to make you cheerful? You are young, strong, handsome, rich—and famous. Or perhaps you are only waiting for a new romance?"
"Giulio," said the Saint, "that's a very sore point, at the moment."
"Ah! Perhaps you are waiting for a love-letter which has not arrived ?"
The Saint straightened up with a jerk. All at once he laughed. Half incredulous sunshine smashed through his despondency, lighted up his face. He extended his palm.
"You old son-of-a-gun! Give!"
The landlord brought his left hand from behind his back, holding an envelope. Simon grabbed it and ripped it open. He recognized the handwriting at a glance. The note was on a sheet of hotel paper.
Thank God you came. But I daren't be seen speaking to you after the barman recognized you.
Go down to the lock and walk up the towpath. Not very far along on the left there's a boathouse with green doors. I'll wait for you there. Hurry.
The Saint raised his eyes, and sapphires danced in them.
"Who gave you this, Giulio?"
"Nobody. It was lying on the floor outside when I came through. You saw the envelope—Deliver at once to Mr Templar in the bar. So that's what I do. Is it what you were waiting for?"
Simon stuffed the note into his pocket, and nodded. He drained his tankard.
"This is the romance you were talking about—maybe," he said. "I'll tell you about it later. Save some dinner for me. I'll be back." He clapped Trapani on the shoulder and swung round newly awakened, joyously alive again. Perhaps, in spite of everything, there was still adventure to come. . . . "Let's go, Hoppy!"
He took hold of Mr Uniatz's bottle and pulled it down. Hoppy came upright after it with a plaintive gasp.
"Chees, boss——"
"Have you no soul?" demanded the Saint sternly, as he herded him out of the door. "We have a date with a damsel in distress. The moon will be mirrored in her beautiful eyes, and she will pant out a story while we fan the gnats away from her snowy brow. Sinister eggs are being hatched behind the scenes. There will be villains and mayhem and perhaps even moider ..."
He went on talking lyrical nonsense as he set a brisk pace down the lane towards the river; but when they reached the towpath even he had dried up. Mr Uniatz was an unresponsive audience, and Simon found that some of the things he was saying in jest were oddly close to the truth that he believed. After all, such fantastic things had happened to him before. . . .
He didn't fully understand the change in himself as he turned off along the river bank beside the dark shimmering sleekness of the water. The ingrained flippancy was still with him—he could feel it like a translucent film over his mind— but underneath it he was all open and expectant, a receptive void in which anything might take shape. And something was beginning to take shape there—something still so nebulous and formless that it eluded any conscious survey, and yet something as inescapably real as a promise of thunder in the air. It was as if the hunch that had brought him out to the Bell in the first place had leapt up from a whisper to a great shout; and yet everything was silent. Far away, to his sensitive ears, there was the ghostly hum of cars on the Maidenhead road; close by, the sibilant lap of the river, the lisp of leaves, the stertorous breathing and elephantine footfalls of Mr Uniatz; but those things were only phases of the stillness that was everywhere. Everything in the world was quiet, even his own nerves, and they were almost too quiet. And ahead of him, presently, loomed the shape of a building like a boathouse. His pencil flashlight stabbed out for a second and caught the front of it. It had green doors.
Quietly, he said: "Nora."
There was no answer, no hint of movement anywhere. And he didn't know why, but in the same quiet way his right hand slid up to his shoulder rig and loosened the automatic in the spring clip under his arm.
He covered the last two yards in absolute silence, put bis hand to the knob of the door, and drew it back quickly as his fingers slid on a sticky dampness. It was queer, he thought even then, even as his left hand angled the flashlight down, that it should have happened just like that, when everything in him was tuned and waiting for it, without knowing what it was waiting for. Blood—on the door.
II
SIMON STOOD for a moment, and his nerves seemed to grow even calmer and colder under an edge of sharp bitterness.
Then he grasped the doorknob again, turned it, and went in. The inside of the building was pitch dark. His torch needled the blackness with a thin jet of light that splashed dim reflections from the glossy varnish on a couple of punts and an electric canoe. Somehow he was quite sure what he would find, so sure that the certainty chilled off any rise of emotion. He knew what it must be; the only question was, who? Perhaps even that was not such a question. He was never quite sure about that. A hunch that had almost missed its mark had become stark reality with a suddenness that disjointed the normal co-ordinates of time and space: it was as if instead of discovering things, he was trying to remember things he had known before and had forgotten. But he saw her at last, almost tucked under the shadow of the electric canoe, lying on her side as if she were asleep.
He stepped over and bent his light steadily on her face, and knew then that he had been right. It was the girl with the troubled blue eyes. Her eyes were open now, only they were not troubled any more. The Saint stood and looked down at her. He had been almost sure when he saw the curly yellow hair. But she had been wearing a white blouse when he saw her last, and now there was a splotchy crimson pattern on the front of it. The pattern glistened as he looked at it.
Beside him, there was a noise like an asthmatic foghorn loosening up for a burst of song.
"Boss," began Mr Uniatz.
"Shut up."
The Saint's voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it cut like a razorblade. It cut Hoppy's introduction cleanly off from whatever he had been going to say; and at the same moment as he spoke Simon switched off his torch, so that it was as if the same tenuous whisper had sliced off even the ray of light, leaving nothing around them but blackness and silence.
Motionless in the dark, the Saint quested for any betraying breath of sound. To his tautened eardrums, sensitive as a wild animal's, the hushed murmurs of the night outside were still an audible background against which the slightest stealthy movement even at a considerable distance would have stood out like a bugle call. But he heard nothing then, though he waited for several seconds in uncanny stillness.
He switched on the torch again.
"Okay, Hoppy," he said. "Sorry to interrupt you, but that blood was so fresh that I wondered if someone mightn't still be around."
"Boss," said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly, "I was doin' fine when ya stopped me."
"Never mind," said the Saint consolingly. "You can go ahead now. Take a deep breath and start again
."
He was still partly listening for something else, wondering if even then the murderer might still be within range.
"It ain't no use now," said Mr Uniatz dolefully.
"Are you going to get temperamental on me?" Simon demanded sufferingly. "Because if so——"
Mr Uniatz shook his head.
"It ain't dat, boss. But you gotta start wit' a full bottle."
Simon focused him through a kind of fog. In an obscure and apparently irrelevant sort of way, he became aware that Hoppy was still clinging to the bottle of Vat 69 with which he he been irrigating his tonsils at the Bell, and that he was holding it up against the beam of the flashlight as though brooding over the level of the liquid left in it. The Saint clutched at the buttresses of his mind.
"What in the name of Adam's grandfather," he said, "are you talking about ?"
"Well, boss, dis is an idea I get out of a book. De guy walks in a saloon, he buys a bottle of Scotch, he pulls de cork, an' he drinks de whole bottle straight down wit'out stopping. So I was tryin' de same t'ing back in de pub, an' I was doin' fine when ya stopped me. Lookit, I ain't left more 'n two-t'ree swallows. But it ain't no use goin' on now," explained Mr Uniatz, working back to the core of his grievance. "You gotta start wit' a full bottle."
Nothing but years of training and self-discipline gave Simon Templar the strength to recover his sanity.
"Next time, you'd better take the bottle away somewhere and lock yourself up with it," he said, with terrific moderation. "Just for the moment, since we haven't got another bottle, is there any danger of your noticing that someone has been murdered around here ?"
"Yeah," said Mr Uniatz brightly. "De wren."
Having contributed his share of illumination, he relapsed into benevolent silence. This, his expectant self-effacement appeared to suggest, was not his affair. It appeared to be something which required thinking about; and Thinking was a job for which the Saint possessed an obviously supernatural aptitude which Mr Uniatz had come to lean upon with a childlike faith that was very much akin to worship.
The Saint was thinking. He was thinking with a level and passionless detachment that surprised even himself. The girl was dead. He had seen plenty of men killed before, sometimes horribly; but only one other woman. Yet that must not make any difference. Nora Prescott had never meant anything to him: he would never even have recognized her voice. Other women of whom he knew just as little were dying everywhere, in one way or another, every time he breathed; and he could think about it without the slightest feeling. Nora Prescott was just another name in the world's long roll of undistinguished dead.
But she was someone who had asked him for help, who had perhaps died because of what she had wanted to tell him. She hadn't been just another twittering fluffhead going into hysterics over a mouse. She really had known something— something that was dangerous enough for someone else to commit murder rather than have it revealed.
'One of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted. . .'
The only phrase out of her letter which gave any information at all came into his head again, not as a merely provocative combination of words, but with some of the clean-cut clarity of a sober statement of fact. And yet the more he considered it, the closer it came to clarifying precisely nothing.
And he was still half listening for a noise that it seemed as if he ought to have heard. The expectation was a subtle nagging at the back of his mind, the fidget for attention of a thought that still hadn't found conscious shape.
His torch panned once more around the interior of the building. It was a plain wooden structure, hardly more than three walls and a pair of double doors which formed the fourth, just comfortably roomy for the three boats which it contained. There was a small window on each side, so neglected as to be almost opaque. Overhead, his light went straight up to the bare rafters which supported the shingle roof. There was no place in it for anybody to hide except under one of the boats; and his light probed along the floor and eliminated that possibility.
The knife lay on the floor near the girl's knees—an ordinary cheap kitchen knife, but pointed and sharp enough for what it had had to do. There was a smear of blood on the handle; and some of it must have gone on the killer's hand, or more probably on his glove, and in that way been left on the doorknob. From the stains and rents on the front of the girl's blouse, the murderer must have struck two or three times; but if he was strong he could have held her throat while he did it, and there need have been no noise.
"Efficient enough," the Saint summed it up aloud, "for a rush job."
He was thinking: "It must have been a rush job, because he couldn't have known she was going to meet me here until after she'd written that note at the Bell. Probably she didn't even know it herself until then. Did he see the note ? Doesn't seem possible. He could have followed her. Then he must have had the knife on him already. Not an ordinary sort of knife to carry about with you. Then he must have known he was going to use it before he started out. Unless it was here in the boathouse and he just grabbed it up. No reason why a knife like that should be lying about in a place like this. Bit too convenient. Well, so he knew she'd got in touch with me, and he'd made up his mind to kill her. Then why not kill her before she even got to the Bell ? She might have talked to me there, and he couldn't have stopped her—could he ? Was he betting that she wouldn't risk talking to me in public? He could have been. Good psychology, but the hell of a nerve to bet on it. Did he find out she'd written to me ? Then I'd probably still have the letter. If I found her murdered, he'd expect me to go to the police with it. Dangerous. And he knew I'd find her. Then why——"
The Saint felt something like an inward explosion as he realized what his thoughts were leading to. He knew then why half of his brain had never ceased to listen—searching for what intuition had scented faster than reason.
Goose-pimples crawled up his spine on to the back of his neck.
And at the same moment he heard the sound.
It was nothing that any other man might have heard at all. Only the gritting of a few tiny specks of gravel between a stealthy shoe sole and the board stage outside. But it was what every nerve in his body had unwittingly been keyed for ever since he had seen the dead girl at his feet. It was what he inevitably had to hear, after everything else that had happened. It spun him round like a jerk of the string wound round a top.
He was in the act of turning when the gun spoke.
Its bark was curt and flat and left an impression of having been curiously thin, though his ears rang with it afterwards. The bullet zipped past his ear like a hungry mosquito; and from the hard fierce note that it hummed he knew that if he had not been starting to turn at the very instant when it was fired it would have struck him squarely in the head. Pieces of shattered glass rattled on the floor.
Lights smashed into his eyes as he whirled at the door, and a clear clipped voice snapped at him: "Drop that gun! You haven't got a chance!"
The light beam beat on him with blinding intensity from the lens of a pocket searchlight that completely swallowed up the slim ray of his own torch. He knew that he hadn't a chance. He could have thrown bullets by guesswork; but to the man behind the glare he was a target on which patterns could be punched out.
Slowly his fingers opened off the big Luger, and it plonked on the boards at his feet.
His hand swept across and bent down the barrel of the automatic which Mr Uniatz had whipped out like lightning when the first shot crashed between them.
"You too, Hoppy," he said resignedly. "All that Scotch will run away if they make a hole in you now."
"Back away," came the next order.
Simon obeyed.
The voice said: "Go on, Rosemary—pick up the guns. I'll keep 'em covered."
A girl came forward into the light. It was the dark slender girl whose quiet loveliness had unsteadied Simon's breath at the Bell.
III
SHE BENT over and collected the two g
uns by the butts, holding them aimed at Simon and Hoppy, not timidly, but with a certain stiffness which told the Saint's expert eye the feel of them was unfamiliar. She moved backwards and disappeared again behind the light.
"Do you mind," asked the Saint ceremoniously, "if I smoke ?"
"I don't care." The clipped voice, he realized now, could only have belonged to the young man in the striped blazer. "But don't try to start anything, or I'll let you have it. Go on back in there."
The Saint didn't move at once. He took out his cigarette case first, opened it, and selected a cigarette. The case came from his breast pocket, but he put it back in the pocket at his hip, slowly and deliberately and holding it lightly, so that his hand was never completely out of sight and a nervous man would have no cause to be alarmed at the movement. He had another gun in that pocket, a light but beautifully balanced Walther; but for the time being he left it there, sliding the cigarette case in behind it and bringing his hand back empty to get out his lighter.
"I'm afraid we weren't expecting to be held up in a place like this," he remarked apologetically. "So we left the family jools at home. If you'd only let us know——"
"Don't be funny. If you don't want to be turned over to the police you'd better let me know what you're doing here."
The Saint's brows shifted a fraction of an inch.
"I don't see what difference it makes to you, brother," he said slowly. "But if you're really interested, we were just taking a stroll in the moonlight to work up an appetite for dinner, and we happened to see the door of this place open
"So that's why you both had to pull out guns when you heard us."
"My dear bloke," Simon argued reasonably, "what do you expect anyone to do when you creep up behind them and start sending bullets whistling round their heads ?"
There was a moment's silence.
The girl gasped.
The man spluttered: "Good God you've got a nerve! After you blazed away at us like that—why, you might have killed one of us!"
The Saint's eyes strained uselessly to pierce beyond the light. There was an odd hollow feeling inside him, making his frown unnaturally rigid.
Follow the Saint s-20 Page 9
