Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'But if you will not allow me to assist you —'

'I'll let you know when I want any help.'

The giant's huge shoulders lifted in deprecating acquiescence. He turned again to Lessing.

'In that case, Sir Isaac,' he remarked, 'I am unfortunately deprived of my proof that Miss Delmar is not in this house.'

'So you got her away on that ship, did you?' said Roger very quietly.

'What ship?'

'I see. . . . And did you meet the Saint?'

'I have seen none of your gang.'

Slowly Roger sank down to the arm of a chair, and the hand that held the gun was as cold and steady as an Arctic rock. The knuckle of the trigger finger was white and tense; and for a mo­ment Rayt Marius looked at death with expression­less eyes.. . .

And then the giant addressed Lessing again without a change of tone.

'You will observe, Sir Isaac, that our impetuous young friend is preparing to shoot me. After that, he will probably shoot you. So neither of us will ever know his motive. It is a pity—I should have been interested to know it. Why, after his gang have abducted your fiancee for some mysterious reason, they should have elected to make such a crude and desperate attempt to make you believe that I was responsible—unless it was nothing but an elaborate subterfuge to trap us both simultan­eously in this house, in which case I cannot under­stand why he should continue with the accusation now that he has achieved his end.. . . Well, we are never likely to know, my dear Sir Isaac. Let us en­deavour to extract some consolation from the re­flection that your butler will shortly be informing the police of our fate.'

3

ROGER'S FACE was a mask of stone; but behind that frozen calm two thoughts in concentric circles were spinning down through his brain, and noth­ing but those thoughts sapped from his trigger fin­ger the last essential milligram of pressure that would have sent Rayt Marius to his death.

He had to know definitely what had happened to the Saint; and perhaps Marius was the only man who could tell him.

Nothing else was in doubt. Marius's brilliantly urbane cross-examination of Lessing had been turned to its double purpose with consummate skill. In a few minutes, a few lines of dialogue, in­nocently and unobtrusively, Marius had gained all the information that he needed—about their num­bers, about the police, about everything. . . . And at the same time, in the turning of those same questions, he had attacked the charge against him with the most cunning weapon in his armoury— derision. Inch by inch he had gone over it with a distorting lens, throwing all its enormities into high relief, flooding its garish colours with the cold, merciless light of common, conventional sense; and then, scorning even to deny, he had sim­ply stepped back and sardonically invited Lessing to form his own conclusions.. . .

It was superb—worthy in every way of the strategic genius that Roger remembered so well. And it had had its inevitable effect. The points that Marius had scored, with those subtly mocking rhe­torical question marks in their tails, had struck home one after another with deadly aim. And Lessing was wavering. He was looking at Roger steadily, not yet in downright suspicion but with a kind of grim challenge.

And there was the impasse. Roger faced it. For Lessing, there was a charge to be proven: and if Marius was not bluffing, and Sonia Delmar had really left the house, how could there be any proof? For Roger himself, there was an unconscious man down by the gates who would not re­main permanently unconscious, and another in the hall who might be discovered even sooner; and be­fore either of them revived Roger had got to learn things—even as Marius had had to learn things. Only Roger was not Rayt Marius.. . .

But the tables were turned—precisely. In that last speech, with murder staring him in the face, the giant had made a counter-attack of dazzling audacity. And Sir Isaac Lessing waited. . . .

It was Roger's cue.

A queer feeling of impotence slithered into the pit of his stomach. And he fought it down—fought and lashed his brains to match themselves against a man beside whom he was a newborn babe.

'Still the same old Angel Face!'

Roger found his voice somehow, and levelled it with all the dispassionate confidence at his com­mand, striving to speak as the Saint would have spoken—to bluff out his weakness as the Saint would have bluffed. And he caught a sudden glit­ter in the giant's eyes at the sound of that very creditably Saintly drawl, and gathered a new surge of strength.

He turned to Lessing.

'Perhaps,' he said, 'I didn't make it quite plain enough that in the matter of slipperiness you could wrap Angel Face in sandpaper and still have him giving points to an eel. But I'll put it to you in his very own words. If I only wanted to trap you both here, why should I keep up the deception?'

'I believe I discarded that theory as soon as I had propounded it,' said Marius imperturbably.

Roger ignored him.

'On the other hand, Sir Isaac, if I wanted to bring any charge against Marius—well, he generous enough to say that I was competent. Don't you think I might have invented something a little more plausible? And when I had invented something, wouldn't you have thought I'd have taken steps to see that I had some evidence— faked, if necessary? But I haven't any, except my own word. D'you think a really intelligent crook would try to put over anything like that?'

'I said our young friend was competent,' mur­mured the giant; and Lessing looked at him.

'What do you mean?'

'Merely that he is even more competent than I thought. Consider it, Sir Isaac. To—er—fake evi­dence is not so easy as it sounds. But boldly to ad­mit that there is no evidence, and then brazenly to adduce that confession as evidence in itself—that is a masterpiece of competence which can rarely have been equalled.'

Roger laughed shortly.

'Very neat, Angel Face,' he remarked. 'But that line is wearing a little thin. Now, I've just had a brain wave. You know a lot of things which I cer­tainly don't know, and which I very much want to know—where Sonia Delmar has gone, and what's happened to the Saint, for instance. And you won't tell me—yet. But there are ways of making people talk, Angel Face. You may remember that the Saint nearly had to demonstrate one of those ways on you a few months ago. I've always been sorry that something turned up to stop him, but it mayn't be too late to put that right now.'

'My dear young friend ——'

'I'm talking,' said Roger curtly. 'As I said, there are ways of making people talk. In the general circumstances I'm not in a position to apply any of those methods single-handed, and Sir Isaac won't help me unless he's convinced. But you're going to talk, Angel Face—in your proper turn— you've got to be made to. And therefore Sir Isaac has got to be convinced, and that's where my brain wave comes in.'

Marius shrugged.

'So far,' he said, 'you have not been conspicu­ously successful, but I suppose we cannot prevent your making further efforts.'

Roger nodded.

'You don't mind, do you?' he said. 'You're quite ready to let me go on until somebody comes in to rescue you. But this will be over very quickly. I'm going to give you a chance to prove your inno­cence—smashingly. Sir Isaac will remember that in my very competent story I mentioned other names besides yours—among them, one Heinrich Dussel and a certain Prince Rudolf.'

'Well?'

' Do you deny that you know them?''

'That would be absurd.'

'But you say they know absolutely nothing of this affair?'

'The suggestion is ridiculous. They would be as astonished as I am myself.'

'Right.' Roger drew a deep breath. 'Then here's your chance. Over in that corner there's a telephone—with a spare receiver. We'll ring up Heinrich or the Prince—whichever you like—and as soon as they answer you'll give your name, and you'll say: 'The girl has got away again'—and let Sir Isaac hear them ask you what you're talking about!'