Something was going wrong. Something was going as immortally cockeyed as it was possible to go. It was taking him a perceptible space of time to grope for a bearing in the reeling void. Somewhere the scenario had gone as paralysingly off the rails as if a Wagnerian soprano had bounced into a hotcha dance routine in the middle of Tristan.
"Look," he said. "Let's be quite clear about this. Is your story going to be that you thought I took a shot at you?"
"I don't have to think," retorted the other. "I heard the bullet whizz past my head. Go on—get back in that boat-house."
Simon dawdled back.
His brain felt as if it was steaming. The voice behind the light, now that he was analysing its undertones, had a tense unsophistication that didn't belong in the script at all. And the answers it gave were all wrong. Simon had had it all figured out one ghostly instant before it began to happen. The murderer hadn't just killed Nora Prescott and faded away, of course. He had killed her and waited outside, knowing that Simon Templar must find her in a few minutes, knowing that that would be his best chance to kill the Saint as well and silence whatever the Saint knew already and recover the letter. That much was so obvious that he must have been asleep not to have seen it from the moment when his eyes fell on the dead girl. Well, he had seen it now. And yet it wasn't clicking. The dialogue was all there, and yet every syllable was striking a false note.
And he was back inside the boathouse, as far as he could go, with the square bow of a punt against his calves and Hoppy beside him.
The man's voice said: "Turn a light on, Rosemary."
The girl came round and found a switch. Light broke out from a naked bulb that hung by a length of flex from one of the rafters, and the young man in the striped blazer flicked off his torch.
"Now," he started to say, "we'll——"
"Jim!"
The girl didn't quite scream, but her voice tightened and rose to within a semitone of it. She backed against the wall, one hand to her mouth, with her face and her eyes dilated with horror. The man began to turn towards her, and then followed her wide and frozen stare. The muzzle of the gun he was holding swung slack from its aim on the Saint's chest as he did so, it was an error that in some situations would have cost him his life, but Simon let him live. The Saint's head was whirling with too many questions, just then, to have any interest in the opportunity. He was looking at the gun which the girl was still holding, and recognizing it as the property of Mr Uniatz.
"It's Nora," she gasped. "She's——"
He saw her gather herself with an effort, force herself to go forward and kneel beside the body. Then he stopped watching her. His eyes went to the gun that was still wavering in the young man's hand—
"Jim," said the girl brokenly, "she's dead!"
The man took a half step towards the Saint.
"You swine!" he grunted. "You killed her——"
"Go on," said the Saint gently. "And then I took a pot at you. So you fired back in self-defence, and just happened to kill us. It'll make a swell story even if it isn't a very new one, and you'll find yourself quite a hero. But why all the playacting for our benefit ? We know the gag."
There was complete blankness behind the anger in the other's eyes. And all at once the Saint's somersaulting cosmos stabilized itself with a jolt—upside down, but solid.
He was looking at the gun which was pointing at his chest, and realizing that it was his own Luger.
And the girl had got Hoppy's gun. And there was no other artillery in sight.
The arithmetic of it smacked him between the eyes and made him dizzy. Of course there was an excuse for him, in the shape of the first shot and the bullet that had gone snarling past his ear. But even with all that, for him out of all people in the world, at his time of life—
"Run up to the house and call the police, Rosemary," said the striped blazer in a brittle bark.
"Wait a minute," said the Saint.
His brain was not fogged any longer. It was turning over as swiftly and smoothly as a hair-balanced flywheel, registering every item with the mechanical infallibility of an adding machine. His nerves were tingling.
His glance whipped from side to side. He was standing again approximately where he had been when the shot cracked out, but facing the opposite way. On his right quarter was the window that had been broken, with the shards of glass scattered on the floor below it—he ought to have understood everything when he heard them hit the floor. Turning the other way, he saw that the line from the window to himself continued on through the open door.
He took a long drag on his cigarette.
"It kind of spoils the scene," he said quietly, "but I'm afraid we've both been making the same mistake. You thought I fired at you——"
"I don't have——"
"All right, you don't have to think. You heard the bullet whizz past your head. You said that before. You're certain I shot at you. Okay. Well, I was just as certain that you shot at me. But I know now I was wrong. You never had a gun until you got mine. It was that shot that let you bluff me. I'd heard the bullet go past my head, and so it never occurred to me that you were bluffing. But we were both wrong. The shot came through that window—it just missed me, went on out through the door, and just missed you. And somebody else fired it!"
The other's face was stupid with stubborn incredulity.
"Who fired it?"
"The murderer."
"That means you," retorted the young man flatly. "Hell, I don't want to listen to you. You see if you can make the police believe you. Go on and call them, Rosemary. I can take care of these two."
The girl hesitated.
"But, Jim——"
"Don't worry about me, darling. I'll be all right. It either of these two washouts tries to get funny, I'll give him plenty to think about."
The Saint's eyes were narrowing.
"You lace-pantie'd bladder of hot air," he said in a cold even voice that seared like vitriol. "It isn't your fault if God didn't give you a brain, but he did give you eyes. Why don't you use them ? I say the shot was fired from outside, and you can see for yourself where the broken window-pane fell. Look at it. It's all on the floor in here. If you can tell me how I could shoot at you in the doorway and break a window behind me, and make the broken glass fall inwards, I'll pay for your next marcel wave. Look at it, nitwit ——"
The young man looked.
He had been working closer to the Saint, with his free fist clenched and his face flushed with wrath, since the Saint's first sizzling insult smoked under his skin. But he looked. Somehow, he had to do that. He was less than five feet away when his eyes shifted. And it was then that Simon jumped him.
The Saint's lean body seemed to lengthen and swoop across the intervening space. His left hand grabbed the Luger, bent the wrist behind it agonizingly inwards, while the heel of his open right hand settled under the other's chin. The gun came free; and the Saint's right arm straightened jarringly and sent the young man staggering back.
Simon reversed the automatic with a deft flip and held it on him. Even while he was making his spring, out of the corner of his eye he had seen Hoppy Uniatz flash away from him with an electrifying acceleration that would have stunned anyone who had misguidedly judged Mr Uniatz on the speed of his intellectual reactions; now he glanced briefly aside and saw that Hoppy was holding his gun again and keeping the girl pinioned with one arm.
"Okay, Hoppy," he said. "Keep your Betsy and let her go. She's going to call the police for us."
Hoppy released her, but the girl did not move. She stood against the wall, rubbing slim wrists that had been bruised by Mr Uniatz's untempered energy, looking from Simon to the striped blazer, with scared desperate eyes.
"Go ahead," said the Saint impatiently. "I won't damage little Jimmy unless he makes trouble. If this was one of my murdering evenings, you don't think I'd bump him and let you get away, do you ? Go on and fetch your policemen— and we'll see whether the boy friend can make them beli
eve his story!"
IV
THEY HAD to wait for some time....
After a minute, Simon turned the prisoner over to Hoppy and put his Luger away under his coat. He reached for his cigarette case again and thoughtfully helped himself to a smoke. With the cigarette curling blue drifts past his eyes, he traced again the course of the bullet that had so nearly stamped finale on all his adventures. There was no question that it had been fired from outside the window— and that also explained the peculiarly flat sound of the shot which had faintly puzzled him. The cleavage lines on the few scraps of glass remaining in the frame supplied the last detail of incontrovertible proof. He devoutly hoped that the shining lights of the local constabulary would have enough scientific knowledge to appreciate it.
Mr Uniatz, having brilliantly performed his share of physical activity, appeared to have been snared again in the unfathomable quagmires of the Mind. The tortured grimace that had cramped itself into his countenance indicated that some frightful eruption was taking place in the small core of grey matter which formed a sort of glutinous marrow inside his skull. He cleared his throat, producing a noise like a piece of sheet iron getting between the blades of a lawn mower, and gave the fruit of his travail to the world.
"Boss," he said, "I dunno how dese mugs t'ink dey can get away wit' it."
"How which mugs think they can get away with what?" asked the Saint somewhat vacantly.
"Dese mugs," said Mr Uniatz, "who are tryin' to take us for a ride, like ya tell me in de pub."
Simon had to stretch his memory backwards almost to breaking point to hook up again with Mr Uniatz's train of thought; and when he had finally done so he decided that it was wisest not to start any argument.
"Others have made the same mistake," he said casually, and hoped that would be the end of it.
Mr Uniatz nodded sagely.
"Well, dey all get what's comin' to dem," he said with philosophic complacency. "When do I give dis punk de woiks ?"
"When do you——What?"
"Dis punk," said Mr Uniatz, waving his Betsy at the prisoner. "De mug who takes a shot at us."
"You don't," said the Saint shortly.
The equivalent of what on anybody else's face would have been a slight frown carved its fearsome corrugations into Hoppy's brow.
"Ya don't mean he gets away wit' it after all ?"
"We'll see about that."
"Dijja hear what he calls us ?"
"What was that?"
"He calls us washouts."
"That's too bad."
"Yeah, dat's too bad," Mr Uniatz glowered disparagingly at the captive. "Maybe I better go over him wit' a paddle foist. Just to make sure he don't go to sleep."
"Leave him alone," said the Saint soothingly. "He's young, but he'll grow up."
He was watching the striped blazer with more attention than a chance onlooker would have realized. The young man stood glaring at them defiantly—not without fear, but that was easy to explain if one wanted to. His knuckles tensed up involuntarily from time to time; but a perfectly understandable anger would account for that. Once or twice he glanced at the strangely unreal shape of the dead girl half hidden in the shadows, and it was at those moments that Simon was studying him most intently. He saw the almost conventionalized horror of death that takes the place of practical thinking with those who have seen little of it, and a bitter disgust that might have had an equally conventional basis. Beyond that, the sullen scowl which disfigured the other's face steadily refused him the betraying evidence that might have made everything so much simpler. Simon blew placid and meditative smoke rings to pass the time; but there was an irking bafflement behind the cool patience of his eyes.
It took fifteen minutes by his watch for the police to come, which was less than he had expected.
They arrived in the persons of a man with a waxed moustache, in plain clothes, and two constables in uniform. After them, breathless when she saw the striped blazer still inhabited by an apparently undamaged owner, came Rosemary Chase. In the background hovered a man who even without his costume could never have been mistaken for anything but a butler.
Simon turned with a smile.
"Glad to see you, Inspector," he said easily.
"Just 'Sergeant'," answered the plainclothes man, in a voice that sounded as if it should have been "sergeant-major."
He saw the automatic that Mr Uniatz was still holding, and stepped forward with a rather hollow but courageous belligerence.
"Give me that gun!" he said loudly.
Hoppy ignored him, and looked inquiringly at the only man whom he took orders from; but Simon nodded. He politely offered his own Luger as well. The Sergeant took the two guns, squinted at them sapiently, and stuffed them into his side pockets. He looked relieved, and rather clever.
"I suppose you've got licences for these firearms," he said temptingly.
"Of course," said the Saint, in a voice of saccharine virtue.
He produced certificate and permit to carry from his pocket. Hoppy did the same. The sergeant pored over the documents with surly suspicion for some time before he handed them to one of the constables to note down the particulars. He looked so much less clever that Simon had difficulty in keeping a straight face. It was as if the Official Mind, jumping firmly to a foregone conclusion, had spent the journey there developing an elegantly graduated approach to the obvious climax, and therefore found the entire structure staggering when the first step caved in under his feet.
A certain awkwardness crowded itself into the scene.
With a businesslike briskness that was only a trifle too elaborate, the sergeant went over to the body and brooded over it with portentous solemnity. He went down on his hands and knees to peer at the knife, without touching it. He borrowed a flashlight from one of the constables to examine the floor around it. He roamed about the boathouse and frowned into dark corners. At intervals, he cogitated. When he could think of nothing else to do, he came back and faced his audience with dogged valour.
"Well," he said, less aggressively, "while we're waiting for the doctor I'd better take your statements." He turned. "You're Mr Forrest, sir?"
The young man in the striped blazer nodded.
"Yes."
"I've already heard the young lady's story, but I'd like to hear your version."
Forrest glanced quickly at the girl, and almost hesitated. He said: "I was taking Miss Chase home, and we saw a light moving in here. We crept up to find out what it was, and one of these men fired a shot at us. I turned my torch on them and pretended I had a gun too, and they surrendered. We took their guns away; and then this man started arguing and trying to make out that somebody else had fired the shot, and he managed to distract my attention and get his gun back."
"Did you hear any noise as you were walking along ? The sort of noise this—er—deceased might have made as she was being attacked?"
"No."
"I - did - not hear - the - noise - of - the - deceased - being -attacked," repeated one of the constables with a notebook and pencil, laboriously writing it down.
The sergeant waited for him to finish, and turned to the Saint.
"Now, Mr Templar," he said ominously. "Do you wish to make a statement? It is my duty to warn you—"
"Why?" asked the Saint blandly.
The sergeant did not seem to know the answer to that.
He said gruffly: "What statement do you wish to make?"
"Just what I told Comrade Forrest when we were arguing. Mr Uniatz and I were ambling around to work up a thirst, and we saw this door open. Being rather inquisitive and not having anything better to do, we just nosed in, and we saw the body. We were just taking it in when somebody fired at us; and then Comrade Forrest turned on the spotlight and yelled 'Hands up!' or words to that effect, so to be on the safe side we handed up, thinking he'd fired the first shot. Still, he looked kind of nervous when he had hold of my gun, so I took it away from him in case it went off. Then I told Miss Chas
e to go ahead and fetch you. Incidentally, as I tried to tell Comrade Forrest, I've discovered that we were both wrong about that shooting. Somebody else did it from outside the window. You can see for yourself if you take a look at the glass."
The Saint's voice and manner were masterpieces of matter-of-fact veracity. It is often easy to tell the plain truth and be disbelieved; but Simon's pleasant imperturbality left the sergeant visibly nonplussed. He went and inspected the broken glass at some length, and then he came back and scratched his head.
"Well," he admitted grudgingly, "there doesn't seem to be much doubt about that."
"If you want any more proof," said the Saint nonchalantly, "you can take our guns apart. Comrade Forrest will tell you that we haven't done anything to them. You'll find the magazines full and the barrels clean."
The sergeant adopted the suggestion with morbid eagerness, but he shrugged resignedly over the result.
"That seems to be right," he said with stoic finality. "It looks as if both you gentlemen were mistaken." He went on scrutinizing the Saint grimly. "But it still doesn't explain why you were in here with the deceased."
"Because I found her," answered the Saint reasonably. "Somebody had to."
The sergeant took another glum look around. He did not audibly acknowledge that all his castles in the air had settled soggily back to earth, but the morose admission was implicit in the majestic stolidity with which he tried to keep anything that might have been interpreted as a confession out of his face. He took refuge in an air of busy inscrutability, as if he had just a little more up his sleeve than he was prepared to share with anyone else for the time being; but there was at least one member of his audience who was not deceived, and who breathed a sigh of relief at the lifting of what might have been a dangerous suspicion.
"Better take down some more details," he said gruffly to the constable with the notebook, and turned to Rosemary Chase. "The deceased's name is Nora Prescott—is that right miss ?"
"Yes."
"You knew her quite well ?"
Follow the Saint s-20 Page 10
