Simon chatted genially and emptily, with faintly mocking calm. He had shown his claws once, and now it was up to the other side to take up the challenge in their own way. The one thing they could not possibly do was ignore it, and he was ready to wait with timeless patience for their lead. Under his pose of idle carelessness he was like an arrow on a drawn bow with ghostly fingers balancing the string.
Forrest excused himself as they left the dining-room. Quintus came as far as the drawing-room, but didn't sit down. He pulled out a large gold watch and consulted it with impressive deliberation.
"I'd better have another look at the patient," he said. "He may have settled down again by now."
The door closed behind him.
Simon leaned himself against the mantelpiece. Except for the presence of Mr Uniatz, who in those circumstances was no more obtrusive than a piece of primitive furniture, he was alone with Rosemary Chase for the first time since so many things had begun to happen. And he knew that she was also aware of it.
She kept her face averted from his tranquil gaze, taking out a cigarette and lighting it for herself with impersonal unapproachability, while he waited. And then suddenly she turned on him as if her own restraint had defeated itself.
"Well?" she said, with self-consciously harsh defiance. "What are you thinking, after all this time ?"
The Saint looked her in the eyes. His own voice was contrastingly even and unaggressive.
"Thinking," he said, "that you're either a very dangerous crook or just a plain damn fool. But hoping you're just the plain damn fool. And hoping that if that's the answer, it won't be much longer before your brain starts working again."
"You hate crooks, don't you?"
"Yes."
"I've heard about you," she said. "You don't care what you do to anyone you think is a crook. You've even—killed them."
"I've killed rats," he said. "And I'll probably do it again. It's the only treatment that's any good for what they've got."
"Always ?"
Simon shrugged.
"Listen," he said, not unkindly. "If you want to talk theories we can have a lot of fun, but we shan't get very far. If you want me to admit that there are exceptions to my idea of justice, you can take it as admitted; but we can't go on from there without getting down to cases. I can tell you this, though. I've heard that there's something crooked being put over here; and from what's happened since, it seems to be true. I'm going to find out what the swindle is and break it up if it takes fifty years. Only it won't take me nearly as long as that. Now, if you know something that you're afraid to tell me because of what it might make me do to you or somebody else who matters to you, all I can say is that it'll probably be a lot worse if I have to dig it out for myself. Is that any use ?"
She moved closer towards him, her brown eyes searching bis face.
"I wish——"
It was all she had time to say. The rush of sounds that cut her off hit both of them at the same time, muffled by distance and the closed door of the room, and yet horribly distinct, stiffening them both together as though they had been clutched by invisible clammy tentacles. A shrill incoherent yell, hysterical with terror but unmistakably masculine. A heavy thud. A wild shout of "Help!" in the doctor's deep thundery voice. And then a ghostly inhuman wailing gurgle that choked off into deathly silence.
VII
BALANCED ON a knife-edge of uncanny self-control, the Saint stood motionless, watching the girl's expression for a full long second before she turned away with a gasp and rushed at the door. Hoppy Uniatz flung himself after her like a wild bull awakened from slumber: he could have remained comatose through eons of verbal fencing, but this was a call to action, clear and unsullied, and such simple clarions had never found him unresponsive. Simon started the thin edge of an instant later than either of them; but it was his hand that reached the doorknob first.
He threw the door wide and stepped out with a smooth combination of movements that brought him through the opening with a gun in his hand and his eyes streaking over the entire scene outside in one whirling survey. But the hall was empty. At the left and across from him, the front door was closed; at the opposite end, a door which obviously communicated with the service wing of the house was thrown open to disclose the portly emerging figure of the butler with the white frightened faces of other servants peering from behind him.
The Saint's glance swept on upwards. The noises that had brought him out had come from upstairs, he was certain: that was also the most likely place for them to have come from, and it was only habitual caution that had made him pause to scan the hall as he reached it. He caught the girl's arm as she came by him.
"Let me go up first," he said. He blocked Hoppy's path on his other side, and shot a question across at the butler without raising his voice. "Are there any other stairs, Jeeves?"
"Y-yes, sir——"
"All right. You stay here with Miss Chase. Hoppy, you find those back stairs and cover them."
He raced on up the main stairway.
As he took the treads three at a time, on his toes, he was trying to find a niche for one fact of remarkable interest. Unless Rosemary Chase was the greatest natural actress that a generation of talent scouts had overlooked, or unless his own judgment had gone completely cockeyed, the interruption had hit her with the same chilling shock as it had given him. It was to learn that that he had stayed to study her face before he moved: he was sure that he would have caught any shadow of deception, and yet if there had really been no shadow there to catch it meant that something had happened for which she was totally unprepared. And that in its turn might mean that all his suspicions of her were without foundation. It gave a jolt to the theories he had begun to put together that threw them into new and fascinating outlines, and he reached the top of the stairs with a glint of purely speculative delight shifting behind the grim alertness of his eyes.
From the head of the staircase the landing opened off in the shape of a squat long-armed T. All the doors that he saw at first were closed; he strode lightly to the junction of the two arms, and heard a faint movement down the left-hand corridor. Simon took a breath, and jumped out on a quick slant that would have been highly disconcerting to any marksman who might have been waiting for him round the corner. But there was no marksman.
The figures of two men were piled together on the floor, in the middle of a sickening mess; and only one of them moved.
The one who moved was Dr Quintus, who was groggily trying to scramble up to his feet as the Saint reached him. The one who lay still was Jim Forrest; and Simon did not need to look at him twice to see that his stillness was permanent. The mess was blood—pools and gouts and splashes of blood, in hideous quantity, puddling on the floor, dripping down the walls, soddening the striped blazer and mottling the doctor's clothes. The gaping slash that split Forrest's throat from ear to ear had almost decapitated him.
The Saint's stomach turned over once. Then he was grasping the doctor's arm and helping him up. There was so much blood on him that Simon couldn't tell what his injuries might be.
"Where are you hurt ?" he snapped.
The other shook his head muzzily. His weight was leaden on Simon's supporting grip.
"Not me," he mumbled hoarsely. "All right. Only hit me—on the head. Forrest——"
"Who did it?"
"Dunno. Probably same as—Nora. Heard Forrest . . .yell——"
"Where did he go?"
Quintus seemed to be in a daze through which outside promptings only reached him in the same form as outside noises reach the brain of a sleepwalker. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to retain some sort of consciousness, but his eyes were half closed and his words were thick and rambling, as if he were dead drunk.
"Suppose Forrest was—going to his room—for something. . . . Caught murderer—sneaking about. . . . Murderer —stabbed him.... I heard him yell. ... Rushed out. ... Got hit with—something.... Be all right—soon. Catch him——"
"Well, where did he go?"
Simon shook him, roughly slapped up the sagging head.
The doctor's chest heaved as though it were taking part in his terrific struggle to achieve coherence. He got his eyes wide open.
"Don't worry about me," he whispered with painful clarity. "Look after—Mr Chase."
His eyelids fluttered again.
Simon let him go against the wall, and he slid down almost to a sitting position, clasping his head in his hands.
The Saint balanced his Luger in his hand, and his eyes were narrowed to chips of sapphire hardness. He glanced up and down the corridor. From where he stood, he could see the length of both passages which formed the arms of the T-plan of the landing. The arm on his right finished with a glimpse of the banisters of a staircase leading down— obviously the back stairs whose existence the butler had admitted, at the foot of which Hoppy Uniatz must already have taken up his post. But there had been no sound of disturbance from that direction. Nor had there been any sound from the front hall where he had left Rosemary Chase with the butler. And there was no other normal way out for anyone who was upstairs. The left-hand corridor, where he stood, ended in a blank wall; and only one door along it was open.
Simon stepped past the doctor and over Forrest's body, and went silently to the open door.
He came to it without any of the precautions that he had taken before exposing himself a few moments before. He had a presentiment amounting to conviction that they were unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness that the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he entered the house. Therefore anyone who wanted to could have shot at him from outside long ago. No one had shot at him. Therefore—
He was looking into a large white-painted airy bedroom. The big double bed was empty, but the covers were thrown open and rumpled. The table beside it was loaded with medicine bottles. He opened the doors in the two side-walls. One belonged to a spacious built-in cupboard filled with clothing; the other was a bathroom. The wall opposite the entrance door was broken by long casement windows, most of them wide open. He crossed over to one of them and looked out. Directly beneath him was the flat roof of a porch.
The Saint put his gun back in its holster, and felt an unearthly cold dry calm sinking through him. Then he climbed out over the sill on to the porch roof below, which almost formed a kind of blind balcony under the window. He stood there recklessly, knowing that he was silhouetted against the light behind, and lighted a cigarette with leisured, tremorless hands. He sent a cloud of blue vapour drifting towards the stars; and then with the same leisured passivity he sauntered to the edge of the balustrade, sat on it, and swung his legs over. From there it was an easy drop on to the parapet which bordered the terrace along the front of the house, and an even easier drop from the top of the parapet to the ground. To an active man, the return journey would not present much more difficulty.
He paused long enough to draw another lungful of night air and tobacco smoke, and then strolled on along the terrace. It was an eerie experience, to know that he was an easy target every time he passed a lighted window, to remember that the killer might be watching him from a few yards away, and still to hold his steps down to the same steady pace; but the Saint's nerves were hardened to an icy quietness, and all his senses were working together in taut-strung vigilance.
He walked three-quarters of the way round the building, and arrived at the back door. It was unlocked when he tried it; and he pushed it open and looked down the barrel of Mr Uniatz's Betsy.
"I bet you'll shoot somebody one of these days. Hoppy," he remarked; and Mr Uniatz lowered the gun with a faint tinge of disappointment.
"What ya find, boss ?"
"Quite a few jolly and interesting things." The Saint was only smiling with his lips. "Hold the fort a bit longer, and I'll tell you."
He found his way through the kitchen, where the other servants were clustered together in dumb and terrified silence, back to the front hall where Rosemary Chase and the butler were standing together at the foot of the stairs. They jumped as if a gun had been fired when they heard his footsteps ; and then the girl ran towards him and caught him by the lapels of his coat.
"What is it?" she pleaded frantically. "What happened?"
"I'm sorry," he said, as gently as he could.
She stared at him. He meant her to read his face, for everything except the fact that he was still watching her like a spectator on the dark side of the footlights.
"Where's Jim?"
He didn't answer.
She caught her breath suddenly, with a kind of sob, and turned towards the stairs. He grabbed her elbows and turned her back and held her.
"I wouldn't go up," he said evenly. "It wouldn't do any good."
"Tell me, then. For God's sake, tell me! Is he——" She choked on the word—"dead ?"
"Jim, yes."
Her face was whiter than chalk, but she kept her feet. Her eyes dragged at his knowledge through a brightness of unheeded tears.
"Why do you say it like that ? What else is there ?"
"Your father seems to have disappeared," he said, and held her as she went limp in his arms.
VIII
SIMON CARRIED her into the drawing-room and laid her down on the sofa. He stood gazing at her introspectively for a moment; then he bent over her again quickly and stabbed her in the solar plexus with a stiff forefinger. She didn't stir a muscle.
The monotonous cheep-cheep of a telephone bell ringing somewhere outside reached his ears, and he saw the butler starting to move mechanically towards the door. Simon passed him, and saw the instrument half hidden by a curtain on the other side of the hall. He took the receiver off the hook and said: "Hullo."
"May I speak to Mr Templar, please ?"
The Saint put a hand on the wall to save himself from falling over.
"Who wants him ?"
"Mr Trapani."
"Giulio!" Simon exclaimed. The voice was familiar now, but its complete unexpectedness had prevented him from recognizing it before. "It seems to be about sixteen years since I saw you—and I never came back for dinner."
"That's quite all right, Mr Templar. I didn't expect you, when I knew what had happened. I only called up now because it's getting late and I didn't know if you would want a room for tonight."
The Saint's brows drew together.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded slowly. "Have you taken up crystal-gazing, or something?"
Giulio Trapani chuckled.
"No, I am not any good at that. The police sergeant stopped here on his way back, and he told me. He said you had got mixed up with a murder, and Miss Chase had taken you home with her. So, of course, I knew you would be very busy. Has she asked you to stay ?"
"Let me call you back in a few minutes, Giulio," said the Saint. "Things have been happening, and I've got to get hold of the police again." He paused, and a thought struck him. "Look, is Sergeant Jesser still there, by any chance ?"
There was no answer.
Simon barked: "Hullo."
Silence. He jiggled the hook. The movements produced no corresponding clicks in his ear. He waited a moment longer, while he realized that the stillness of the receiver was not the stillness of a broken connection, but a complete inanimate muteness that stood for something less easily remedied than that.
He hung the receiver up and traced the course of the wiring with his eyes. It ran along the edge of the wainscoting to the frame of the front door, and disappeared into a hole bored at the edge of the wood. Simon turned right round with another abrupt realization. He was alone in the hall—the butler was no longer in sight.
He slipped his pencil flashlight out of his breast pocket with his left hand, and let himself out of the front door. The telephone wires ran up outside along the margin of the doorframe, and continued up over the exterior wall. The beam of his torch followed them up, past a lighted window over the porch from which he had climbed down a few minutes ago, t
o where they were attached to a pair of porcelain insulators under the eaves. Where the wires leading on from the insulators might once have gone was difficult to decide: they dangled slackly downwards now, straddling the balcony and trailing away into the darkness of the drive.
The Saint switched off his light and stood motionless. Then.he flitted across the terrace, crossed the drive, and merged himself into the shadow of a big clump of laurels on the edge of the lawn. Again he froze into breathless immobility. The blackness ahead of him was Stygian, impenetrable, even to his noctambulant eyes, but hearing would serve his temporary purpose almost as well as sight. The night had fallen so still that he could even hear the rustle of the distant river; and he waited for minutes that seemed like hours to him, and must have seemed like weeks to a guilty prowler who could not have travelled very far after the wires were broken. And while he waited, he was trying to decide at exactly what point in his last speech the break had occurred. It could easily have happened at a place where Trapani would think he had finished and rung off. . . But he heard nothing while he stood there—not the snap of a twig or the rustle of a leaf.
He went back to the drawing-room and found the butler standing there, wringing his hands in a helpless sort of way.
"Where have you been?" he inquired coldly.
The man's loose bloodhound jowls wobbled.
"I went to fetch my wife, sir," He indicated the stout red-faced woman who was kneeling beside the couch, chafing the girl's nerveless wrists. "To see if she could help Miss Chase."
Simon's glance flickered over the room like a rapier blade, and settled pricklingly on an open french window.
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