by Otto Penzler
He stepped over and bent his light steadily on her face, and knew then that he had been right. It was the girl with the troubled blue eyes. Her eyes were open now, only they were not troubled any more. The Saint stood and looked down at her. He had been almost sure when he saw the curly yellow hair. But she had been wearing a white blouse when he saw her last, and now there was a splotchy crimson pattern on the front of it. The pattern glistened as he looked at it.
Beside him, there was a noise like an asthmatic foghorn loosening up for a burst of song.
“Boss,” began Mr. Uniatz.
“Shut up.”
The Saint’s voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it cut like a razor blade. It cut floppy’s introduction cleanly off from whatever he had been going to say; and at the same moment as he spoke Simon switched off his torch, so that it was as if the same tenuous whisper had sliced off even the ray of light, leaving nothing around them but blackness and silence.
Motionless in the dark, the Saint quested for any betraying breath or sound. To his tautened eardrums, sensitive as a wild animal’s, the hushed murmurs of the night outside were still an audible background against which the slightest stealthy movement even at a considerable distance would have stood out like a bugle call. But he heard nothing then, though he waited for several seconds in uncanny stillness.
He switched on the torch again.
“Okay, Hoppy,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt you, but that blood was so fresh that I wondered if someone mightn’t still be around.”
“Boss,” said Mr. Uniatz aggrievedly, “I was do in’ fine when ya stopped me.”
“Never mind,” said the Saint consolingly. “You can go ahead now. Take a deep breath and start again.”
He was still partly listening for something else, wondering if even then the murderer might still be within range.
“It ain’t no use now,” said Mr. Uniatz dolefully.
“Are you going to get temperamental on me?” Simon demanded sufferingly. “Because if so—”
Mr. Uniatz shook his head.
“It ain’t dat, boss. But you gotta start wit’ a full bottle.”
Simon focused him through a kind of fog. In an obscure and apparently irrelevant sort of way, he became aware that Hoppy was still clinging to the bottle of Vat 69 with which he had been irrigating his tonsils at the Bell, and that he was holding it up against the beam of the flashlight as though brooding over the level of the liquid left in it. The Saint clutched at the buttresses of his mind.
“What in the name of Adam’s grandfather,” he said, “are you talking about?”
“Well, boss, dis is an idea I get out of a book. De guys walks in a saloon, he buys a bottle of scotch, he pulls de cork, an’ he drinks de whole bottle straight down wit’out stopping. So I was try in’ de same t’ing back in de pub, an’ was doin’ fine when ya stopped me. Lookit, I ain’t left more ‘n two-t’ree swallows. But it ain’t no use goin’ on now,” explained Mr. Uniatz, working back to the core of his grievance. “You gotta start wit’ a full bottle.”
Nothing but years of training and self-discipline gave Simon Templar the strength to recover his sanity.
“Next time you’d better take the bottle away somewhere and lock yourself up with it,” he said with terrific moderation. “Just for the moment, since we haven’t got another bottle, is there any danger of your noticing that someone has been murdered around here?”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Uniatz brightly. “De wren.”
Having contributed his share of illumination, he relapsed into benevolent silence. This, his expectant self-effacement appeared to suggest, was not his affair. It appeared to be something which required thinking about; and Thinking was a job for which the Saint possessed an obviously supernatural aptitude which Mr. Uniatz had come to lean upon with a childlike faith that was very much akin to worship.
The Saint was thinking. He was thinking with a level and passionless detachment that surprised even himself. The girl was dead. He had seen plenty of men killed before, sometimes horribly; but only one other woman. Yet that must not make any difference. Nora Prescott had never meant anything to him: he would never even have recognized her voice. Other women of whom he knew just as little were dying everywhere, in one way or another, every time he breathed; and he could think about it without the slightest feeling. Nora Prescott was just another name in the world’s long roll of undistinguished dead.
But she was someone who had asked him for help, who had perhaps died because of what she had wanted to tell him. She hadn’t been just another twittering fluffhead going into hysterics over a mouse. She really had known something—something that was dangerous enough for someone else to commit murder rather than have it revealed.
“… one of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted.”
The only phrase out of her letter which gave any information at all came into his head again, not as a merely provocative combination of words, but with some of the clean-cut clarity of a sober statement of fact. And yet the more he considered it, the closer it came to clarifying precisely nothing.
And he was still half listening for a noise that it seemed as if he ought to have heard. The expectation was a subtle nagging at the back of his mind, the fidget for attention of a thought that still hadn’t found conscious shape.
His torch panned once more round the interior of the building. It was a plain wooden structure, hardly more than three walls and a pair of double doors which formed the fourth, just comfortably roomy for the three boats which it contained. There was a small window on each side, so neglected as to be almost opaque. Overhead, his light went straight up to the bare rafters which supported the shingle roof. There was no place in it for anybody to hide except under one of the boats; and his light probed along the floor and eliminated that possibility.
The knife lay on the floor near the girl’s knees—an ordinary cheap kitchen knife, but pointed and sharp enough for what it had had to do. There was a smear of blood on the handle; and some of it must have gone on the killer’s hand, or more probably on his glove, and in that way been left on the doorknob. From the stains and rents on the front of the girl’s dress, the murderer must have struck two or three times; but if he was strong he could have held her throat while he did it, and there need have been no noise.
“Efficient enough,” the Saint summed it up aloud, “for a rush job.”
He was thinking: “It must have been a rush job, because he couldn’t have known she was going to meet me here until after she’d written that note at the Bell. Probably she didn’t even know it herself until then. Did he see the note? Doesn’t seem possible. He could have followed her. Then he must have had the knife on him already. Not an ordinary sort of knife to carry about with you. Then he must have known he was going to use it before he started out. Unless it was here in the boathouse and he just grabbed it up. No reason why a knife like that should be lying about in a place like this. Bit too convenient. Well, so he knew she’d got in touch with me, and he’d made up his mind to kill her. Then why not kill her before she even got to the Bell? She might have talked to me there, and he couldn’t have stopped her—could he? Was he betting that she wouldn’t risk talking to me in public? He could have been. Good psychology, but the hell of a nerve to bet on it. Did he find out she’d written to me? Then I’d probably still have the letter. If I found her murdered, he’d expect me to go to the police with it. Dangerous. And he knew I’d find her. Then why—”
The Saint felt something like an inward explosion as he realised what his thoughts were leading to. He knew then why half of his brain had never ceased to listen—searching for what intuition had scented faster than reason.
Goose pimples crawled up his spine onto the back of his neck.
And at that same moment he heard the sound.
It was nothing that any other man might have heard at all. Only the gritting of a few tiny specks of gravel between a stealthy shoe sole and the board stage outside. B
ut it was what every nerve in his body had unwittingly been keyed for ever since he had seen the dead girl at his feet. It was what he inevitably had to hear, after everything else that had happened. It spun him round like a jerk on the string wound round a top.
He was in the act of turning when the gun spoke.
Its bark was curt and flat and left an impression of having been curiously thin, though his ears rang with it afterwards. The bullet zipped past his ear like a hungry mosquito; and from the hard fierce note that it hummed he knew that if he had not been starting to turn at the very instant when it was fired it would have struck him squarely in the head. Pieces of shattered glass rattled on the floor.
Lights smashed into his eyes as he whirled at the door, and a clear clipped voice snapped at him: “Drop that gun! You haven’t got a chance!”
The light beat on him with blinding intensity from the lens of a pocket searchlight that completely swallowed up the slim ray of his own torch. He knew that he hadn’t a chance. He could have thrown bullets by guesswork; but to the man behind the glare he was a target on which patterns could be punched out.
Slowly his fingers opened off the big Luger, and it plonked on the boards at his feet.
His hand swept across and bent down the barrel of the automatic which Mr. Uniatz had whipped out like lightning when the first shot crashed between them.
“You too, Hoppy,” he said resignedly. “All that scotch will run away if they make a hole in you now.”
“Back away,” came the next order.
Simon obeyed.
The voice said: “Go on, Rosemary—pick up the guns. I’ll keep ‘em covered.”
A girl came forward into the light. It was the dark slender girl whose quiet loveliness had un-steadied Simon’s breath at the Bell.
III
She bent over and collected the two guns by the butts, holding them aimed at Simon and Hoppy, not timidly, but with a certain stiffness which told the Saint’s expert eye that the feel of them was unfamiliar. She moved backwards and disappeared again behind the light.
“Do you mind,” asked the Saint ceremoniously, “if I smoke?”
“I don’t care.” The clipped voice, he realised now, could only have belonged to the young man in the striped blazer. “But don’t try to start anything, or I’ll let you have it. Go on back in there.”
The Saint didn’t move at once. He took out his cigarette case first, opened it and selected a cigarette. The case came from his breast pocket, but he put it back in the pocket at his hip, slowly and deliberately and holding it lightly, so that his hand was never completely out of sight and a nervous man would have no cause to be alarmed at the movement. He had another gun in that pocket, a light but beautifully balanced Walther; but for the time being he left it there, sliding the cigarette case in behind it and bringing his hand back empty to get out his lighter.
“I’m afraid we weren’t expecting to be held up in a place like this,” he remarked apologetically. “So we left the family jools at home. If you’d only let us know—”
“Don’t be funny. If you don’t want to be turned over to the police, you’d better let me know what you’re doing here.”
The Saint’s brows shifted a fraction of an inch.
“I don’t see what difference it makes to you, brother,” he said slowly. “But if you’re really interested, we were just taking a stroll in the moonlight to work up an appetite for dinner, and we happened to see the door of this place open—”
“So that’s why you both had to pull out guns when you heard us.”
“My dear bloke,” Simon argued reasonably, “what do you expect anyone to do when you creep up behind them and start sending bullets whistling round their heads?”
There was a moment’s silence.
The girl gasped.
The man spluttered: “Good God, you’ve got a nerve! After you blazed away at us like that— why, you might have killed one of us!”
The Saint’s eyes strained uselessly to pierce beyond the light. There was an odd hollow feeling inside him, making his frown unnaturally rigid. 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 boathouse.”
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 white and her eyes dilated with horror. The man began to turn toward 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 toward 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 play acting 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 realising 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 pol
ice, 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 look 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 even 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. If either of these two washouts tries to get funny, I’ll give him plenty to think about.”