by Otto Penzler
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 agonisingly 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’ 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 policeman—and we’ll see whether the boy friend can make them believe 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 the 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’ 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 realised. 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 conventionalised 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 plain-clothes 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 its 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 y
oung 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 Chase 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 imperturbability left the sergeant visibly nonplused. 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 scrutinising 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?”
“Of course. She was one of my father’s personal secretaries,” said the dark girl; and the Saint suddenly felt as if the last knot in the tangle had been untied.
V
He listened with tingling detachment while Rosemary Chase talked and answered questions. The dead girl’s father was a man who had known and helped Marvin Chase when they were both young, but who had long ago been left far behind by Marvin Chase’s sensational rise in the financial world. When Prescott’s own business was failing, Chase had willingly lent him large sums of money, but the failure had still not been averted. Illness had finally brought Prescott’s misfortunes to the point where he was not even able to meet the interest on the loan, and when he refused further charity Chase had sent him to Switzerland to act as an entirely superfluous “representative” in Zurich and had given Nora Prescott a job himself. She had lived more as one of the family than as an employee. No, she had given no hint of having any private troubles or being afraid of anyone. Only she had not seemed to be quite herself since Marvin Chase’s motor accident….
The bare supplementary facts clicked into place in the framework that was already there as if into accurately fitted sockets, filling in sections of the outline without making much of it more recognizable. They filed themselves away in the Saint’s memory with mechanical precision; and yet the closeness which he felt to the mystery that hid behind them was more intuitive than methodical, a weird sensitivity that sent electric shivers coursing up his spine.
A grey-haired ruddy-cheeked doctor arrived and made his matter-of-fact examination and report.
“Three stab wounds in the chest—I’ll be able to tell you more about them after I’ve made the post-mortem, but I should think any one of them might have been fatal. Slight contusions on the throat. She hasn’t been dead much more than an hour.”
He stood glancing curiously over the other faces.
“Where’s the ambulance?” said the sergeant grumpily.
“They’ve probably gone to the house,” said the girl. “I’ll send them down if I see them—you don’t want us getting in your way any more, do you?”
“No, miss. This isn’t very pleasant for you, I suppose. If I want any more information I’ll come up and see you in the morning. Will Mr. Forrest be there if we want to see him?”
Forrest took a half step forward.
“Wait a minute,”he blurted. “You haven’t—”
“They aren’t suspicious of you, Jim,” said the girl with a quiet firmness. “They might just want to ask some more questions.”
“But you haven’t said anything about Templar’s—”
“Of course.” The girl’s interruption was even firmer. Her voice was still quiet and natural, but the undercurrent of determined warning in it was as plain as a siren to the Saint’s ears. “I know we owe Mr. Templar an apology, but we don’t have to waste Sergeant Jesser’s time with it. Perhaps he’d like to come up to the house with us and have a drink—that is, if you don’t need him any more, Sergeant.”
Her glance only released the young man’s eye after it had pinned him to perplexed and scowling silence. And once again Simon felt that premonitory crisping of his nerves.
“All this excitement certainly does dry out the tonsils,” he remarked easily. “But if Sergeant Jesser wants me to stay….”
“No sir.” The reply was calm and ponderous. “I’ve made a note of your address, and I don’t think you could run away. Are you going home tonight?”
“You might try the Bell first, in case we decide to stop over.”
Simon buttoned his coat and strolled toward the door with the others; but as they reached it he stopped and turned back.
“By the way,” he said blandly, “do you mind if we take our lawful artillery?”
The sergeant gazed at him and dug the guns slowly out of his pocket. Simon handed one of them to Mr. Uniatz and leisurely fitted his own automatic back into the spring holster under his arm. His smile was very slight.
“Since there still seems to be a
murderer at large in the neighborhood,” he said, “I’d like to be ready for him.”
As he followed Rosemary Chase and Jim Forrest up a narrow footpath away from the river, with Hoppy Uniatz beside him and the butler bringing up the rear, he grinned inwardly over that delicately pointed line and wondered whether it had gone home where he intended it to go. Since his back had been turned to the real audience, he had been unable to observe their reaction; and now their backs were turned to him in an equally uninformative reversal. Neither of them said a word on the way, and Simon placidly left the silence to get tired of itself. But his thoughts were very busy as he sauntered after them along the winding path and saw the lighted windows of a house looming up through the thinning trees that had hidden it from the river-bank. This, he realised with a jolt, must be the New Manor, and therefore the boathouse where Nora Prescott had been murdered was presumably a part of Marvin Chase’s property. It made no difference to the facts, but the web of riddles seemed to draw tighter around him….
They crossed a lawn and mounted some steps to a flagged terrace. Rosemary Chase led them through open french windows into an inoffensively furnished drawing room, and the butler closed the windows behind him as he followed. Forrest threw himself sulkily into an armchair, but the girl had regained a composure that was just a fraction too detailed to be natural.
“What kind of drinks would you like?” she asked.
“Beer for me,” said the Saint with the same studied urbanity. “Scotch for Hoppy. I’m afraid I should have warned you about him—he likes to have his own bottle. We’re trying to wean him, but it isn’t going very well.”
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….