by Otto Penzler
The butler bowed and oozed out.
The girl took a cigarette from an antique lacquer box, and Simon stepped forward politely with his lighter. He had an absurd feeling of unreality about this new atmosphere that made it a little difficult to hide his sense of humour, but all his senses were vigilant. She was even lovelier than he had thought at first sight, he admitted to himself as he watched her face over the flame—it was hard to believe that she might be an accomplice to wilful and messy and apparently mercenary murder. But she and Forrest had certainly chosen a very dramatic moment to arrive….
“It’s nice of you to have us here,” he murmured, “after the way we’ve behaved.”
“My father told me to bring you up,” she said. “He seems to be quite an admirer of yours, and he was sure you couldn’t have had anything to do with—with the murder.”
“I noticed—down in the boathouse—you knew my name,” said the Saint thoughtfully.
“Yes—the sergeant used it.”
Simon looked at the ceiling.
“Bright lads, these policemen, aren’t they? I wonder how he knew?”
“From—your gun licence, I suppose.”
Simon nodded.
“Oh yes. But before that. I mean, I suppose he must have told your father who I was. Nobody else could have done it, could they?”
The girl reddened and lost her voice; but Forrest found his. He jerked himself angrily out of his chair.
“What’s the use of all this beating about the bush, Rosemary?” he demanded impatiently. “Why don’t you tell him we know all about that letter that Nora wrote him?”
The door opened, and the butler came back with a tray of bottles and glasses and toured the room with them. There was a strained silence until he had gone again. Hoppy Uniatz stared at the newly opened bottle of whiskey which had been put down in front of him, with a rapt and menacing expression which indicated that his grey matter was in the throes of another paroxysm of Thought.
Simon raised his glass and gazed appreciatively at the sparkling brown clearness within it.
“All right,” he said. “If you want it that way. So you knew Nora Prescott had written to me. You came to the Bell to see what happened. Probably you watched through the windows first; then when she went out, you came in to watch me. You followed one of us to the boathouse—”
“And we ought to have told the police—”
“Of course.” The Saint’s voice was mild and friendly. “You ought to have told them about the letter. I’m sure you could have quoted what was in it. Something about how she was being forced to help in putting over a gigantic fraud, and how she wanted me to help her. Sergeant Jesser would have been wild with excitement about that. Naturally he’d’ve seen at once that that provided an obvious motive for me to murder her, and none at all for the guy whose fraud was going to be given away. It really was pretty noble of you both to take so much trouble to keep me out of suspicion, and I appreciate it a lot. And now that we’re all pals together, and there aren’t any policemen in the audience, why don’t you save me a lot of headaches and tell me what the swindle is?”
The girl stared at him.
“Do you know what you’re saying?”
“I usually have a rough idea,” said the Saint coolly and deliberately. “I’ll make it even plainer, if that’s too subtle for you. Your father’s a millionaire, they tell me. And when there are any gigantic frauds in the wind, I never expect to find the Big Shot sitting in a garret toasting kippers over a candle.”
Forrest started toward him.
“Look here, Templar, we’ve stood about enough from you—”
“And I’ve stood plenty from you,” said the Saint without moving. “Let’s call it quits. We were both misunderstanding each other at the beginning, but we don’t have to go on doing it. I can’t do anything for you if you don’t put your cards on the table. Let’s straighten it out now. Which of you two cooled off Nora Prescott?”
He didn’t seem to change his voice, but the question came with a sharp stinging clarity like the flick of a whip. Rosemary Chase and the young man gaped at him frozenly, and he waited for an answer without a shift of his lazily negligent eyes. But he didn’t get it.
The rattle of the door handle made everyone turn, almost in relief at the interruption. A tall cadaverous man, severely dressed in a dark suit and high old-fashioned collar, his chin bordered with a rim of black beard, pince-nez on a loop of black ribbon in his hand, came into the room and paused hesitantly.
Rosemary Chase came slowly out of her trance.
“Oh, Doctor Quintus,” she said in a quiet forced voice. “This is Mr. Templar and … er….”
“Hoppy Uniatz,” Simon supplied.
Dr. Quintus bowed; and his black sunken eyes clung for a moment to the Saint’s face.
“Delighted,” he said in a deep burring bass; and turned back to the girl. “Miss Chase, I’m afraid the shock has upset your father a little. Nothing at all serious, I assure you, but I think it would be unwise for him to have any more excitement just yet. However, he asked me to invite Mr. Templar to stay for dinner. Perhaps later …”
Simon took another sip at his beer, and his glance swung idly over to the girl with the first glint of a frosty sparkle in its depths.
“We’d be delighted,” he said deprecatingly. “If Miss Chase doesn’t object….”
“Why, of course not.” Her voice was only the minutest shred of a decibel out of key. “We’d love to have you stay.”
The Saint smiled his courteous acceptance, ignoring the wrathful half movement that made Forrest’s attitude rudely obvious. He would have stayed anyway, whoever had objected. It was just dawning on him that out of the whole fishy setup, Marvin Chase was the one man he had still to meet.
VI
“Boss,” said Mr. Uniatz, rising to his feet with an air of firm decision, “should I go to de terlet?”
It was not possible for Simon to pretend that he didn’t know him; nor could he take refuge in temporary deafness. Mr. Uniatz’ penetrating accents were too peremptory for that to have been convincing. Simon swallowed, and took hold of himself with the strength of despair.
“I don’t know, Hoppy,” he said bravely. “How do you feel?”
“I feel fine, boss. I just t’ought it might be a good place.”
“It might be,” Simon conceded feverishly.
“Dat was a swell idea of yours, boss,” said Mr. Uniatz, hitching up his bottle.
Simon took hold of the back of a chair for support.
“Oh, not at all,” he said faintly. “It’s nothing to do with me.”
Hoppy looked puzzled.
“Sure, you t’ought of it foist, boss,” he insisted generously. “Ya said to me, de nex time I should take de bottle away someplace an’ lock myself up wit’ it. So I t’ought I might take dis one in de terlet. I just t’ought it might be a good place,” said Mr. Uniatz, rounding off the resume of his train of thought.
“Sit down!” said the Saint with paralysing ferocity.
Mr. Uniatz lowered himself back onto his hams with an expression of pained mystification, and Simon turned to the others.
“Excuse us, won’t you?” he said brightly. “Hoppy’s made a sort of bet with himself about something, and he has a rather one-track mind.”
Forrest glared at him coldly. Rosemary half put on a gracious smile, and took it off again. Dr. Quintus almost bowed, with his mouth open. There was a lot of silence, in which Simon could feel the air prickling with pardonable speculations on his sanity. Every other reaction that he had been deliberately building up to provoke had had time to disperse itself under cover of the two consecutive interruptions. The spell was shattered, and he was back again where he began. He knew it, and resignedly slid into small talk that might yet lead to another opening.
“I heard that your father had a nasty motor accident, Miss Chase,” he said.
“Yes.”
The brief monosyllable offered nothi
ng but the baldest affirmation; but her eyes were fixed on him with an expression that he tried unavailingly to read.
“I hope he wasn’t badly hurt.”
“Quite badly burned,” rumbled the doctor. “The car caught fire, you know. But fortunately his life isn’t in danger. In fact, he would probably have escaped with nothing worse than a few bruises if he hadn’t made such heroic efforts to save his secretary, who was trapped in the wreckage.”
“I read something about it,” lied the Saint. “He was burned to death, wasn’t he? What was his name, now?”
“Bertrand Tamblin.”
“Oh yes. Of course.”
Simon took a cigarette from his case and lighted it. He looked at the girl. His brain was still working at fighting pitch; but his manner was quite casual and disarming now—the unruffled conversational manner of an accepted friend discussing a minor matter of mutual interest.
“I just remembered something you said to the sergeant a little while ago, Miss Chase—about your having noticed that Nora Prescott seemed to be rather under a strain since Tamblin was killed.”
She looked back at him steadily, neither denying it nor encouraging him.
He said in the same sensible and persuasive way: “I was wondering whether you’d noticed them being particularly friendly before the accident—as if there was any kind of attachment between them.”
He saw that the eyes of both Forrest and Dr. Quintus turned toward the girl, as if they both had an unexpectedly intense interest in her answer. But she looked at neither of them.
“I can’t be sure,” she answered, as though choosing her words carefully. “Their work brought them together all the time, of course. Mr. Tamblin was really Father’s private secretary and almost his other self, and when Nora came to us she worked for Mr. Tamblin nearly as much as Father. I thought sometimes that Mr. Tamblin was—well, quite keen on her—but I don’t know whether she responded. Of course I didn’t ask her.”
“You don’t happen to have a picture of Tamblin, do you?”
“I think there’s a snapshot somewhere….”
She stood up and went over to an inlaid writing table and rummaged in the drawer. It might have seemed fantastic that she should do that, obeying the Saint’s suggestion as if he had hypnotized her; but Simon knew just how deftly he had gathered up the threads of his broken dominance and woven them into a new pattern. If the scene had to be played in that key, it suited him as well as any other. And with that key established, such an ordinary and natural request as he had made could not be refused. But he noticed that Dr. Quintus followed her with his hollow black eyes all the way across the room.
“Here.”
She gave Simon a commonplace Kodak print that showed two men standing on the steps of a house. One of them was apparently of medium height, a little flabby, grey-haired in the small areas of his head where he was not bald. The other was a trifle shorter and leaner, with thick smooth black hair and metal-rimmed glasses.
The Saint touched his forefinger on the picture of the older man.
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
It was a face without any outstanding features, creased in a tolerant if somewhat calculating smile. But Simon knew how deceptive a face could be, particularly in that kind of reproduction.
And the first thought that was thrusting itself forward in his mind was that there were two people dead, not only one—two people who had held similar and closely associated jobs, who from the very nature of their employment must have shared a good deal of Marvin Chase’s confidence and known practically everything about his affairs, two people who must have known more about the intricate details of his business life than anyone else around him. One question clanged in the Saint’s head like a deep jarring bell: Was Nora Prescott’s killing the first murder to which that unknown swindle had led, or the second?
All through dinner his brain echoed the complex repercussions of that explosive idea, under the screen of superficial conversation which lasted through the meal. It gave that part of the evening a macabre spookiness. Hoppy Uniatz, hurt and frustrated, toyed halfheartedly with his food, which is to say that he did not ask for more than two helpings of any one dish. From time to time he washed down a mouthful with a gulp from the bottle which he had brought in with him, and put it down again to leer at it malevolently, as if it had personally welshed on him; Simon watched him anxiously when he seemed to lean perilously close to the candles which lighted the table, thinking that it would not take much to cause his breath to ignite and burn with a blue flame. Forrest had given up his efforts to protest at the whole procedure. He ate most of the time in sulky silence, and when he spoke at all he made a point of turning as much of his back to the Saint as his place at the table allowed: plainly he had made up his mind that Simon Templar was a cad on whom good manners would be wasted. Rosemary Chase talked very little, but she spoke to the Saint when she spoke at all, and she was watching him all the time with enigmatic intentness. Dr. Quintus was the only one who helped to shoulder the burden of maintaining an exchange of urbane trivialities. His reverberant basso bumbled obligingly into every conversational opening, and said nothing that was worth remembering. His eyes were like pools of basalt at the bottom of dry caverns, never altering their expression, and yet always moving, slowly, in a way that seemed to keep everyone under ceaseless surveillance.
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 toward him, her brown eyes searching his 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 ghastly 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.
