“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 set-up, Marvin Chase was the one man he had still to
meet.
VI
“B
OSS,” 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’s
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 some place 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 on to 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 inter
ruptions. 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 nothing but the baldest
affirmation; but her
eyes were fixed on him with an expres
sion 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 towards 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 only the second ?
All
through dinner his brain echoed the complex reper
cussions of that
explosive idea, under the screen of super
ficial 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 con
trastingly 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 p
lain 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 some
body else who
matters to you, all I can say is that it’ll prob
ably be a lot worse if I have to dig it out for myself. Is that
any use ?”