The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

south, east to west. Somewhere in the area it covered was a hundred thousand pounds' worth of crystallised carbon, which wouldn't take up much room. A search through the man's pockets would only have taken a few seconds; but the Saint rather liked being clever. And sometimes he had inspira­tions of uncanny brilliance.

'Your trousers and coat don't match,' he said abruptly.

The inspiration grew larger, whizzing out of the back of beyond with the acceleration of something off Daytona Beach, and the jump that Perrigo gave kicked it slap into the immedi­ate urgent present.

'And I'll bet Frankie Hormer's don't, either,' said the Saint.

The words came out in a snap.

And then he laughed. He couldn't help it. His long shot had gone welting through the bull's-eye with point-blank accu­racy, and the scoring of the hit was registered on Perrigo's face as plainly as if a battery of coloured lamps had lighted up and a steam organ had begun to play Down among the Dead Men to celebrate the event.

'What's the joke?' demanded Perrigo harshly; and Simon pulled himself together.

'Let me reconstruct it. Diamonds are precious things—espe­cially when they're the kind about which possession is the whole ten points of the law. If you're packing a load of that variety around with you, you don't take chances with 'em. You keep 'em as close to you as they'll go. You don't even carry them in your pockets, because pockets have their dangers. You sew them into your clothes. Frankie did, anyway. Wait a min­ute!' The Saint was working back like lightning over the ground he knew. He grabbed another thread and hauled it out of the skein—and it matched. 'Why didn't you cut the di­amonds out of Frankie's clothes? If you had time to trade clothes, you had time to do that. Then it must have been because it was dangerous. Why so? Because Frankie was dead! Because you didn't want to leave a clue to your motive. You killed Frankie, and——Hold the line, Perrigo!' The gangster was coming out of his chair, but Simon's gun checked him half-way. 'You killed Frankie,' said the Saint, 'and you changed your coat for his.'

Perrigo relaxed slowly.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' he said.

'You do. You're three minutes late with your bluff. The train has pulled out and left you in the gentleman's cloakroom. Where you have no right to be. Take off that coat!'

Perrigo hesitated for a moment; and then, sullenly, he obeyed.

He threw the garment down at the Saint's feet, and Simon dropped on one knee. With the flat of his hand he went padding over every inch of the coat, feeling for the patch of tell-tale hardness that would indicate the whereabouts of Frankie Hormer's half-million-dollar cargo.

That was the sort of happy harvest that it was an unadulter­ated pleasure for the Saint to reap—the kind in which you just winked at the ears, and they hopped down off their stalks and marched in an orderly fashion into the barn. It made him feel at peace with the world. . . . Down the sleeves he went, with tingling fingers, and over the lapels. . . . Almost like lifting shoe-laces out of a blind beggar's tray, it was. ... He went along the bottom of the coat and up the back. He turned the pockets inside out, and investigated a wallet which he found in one of them.

And then, with a power-driven vacuum pump starting work on his interior, he turned the coat over and began again.

He couldn't have been mistaken. He'd been as sure of his deductions as any man can be. The aptness of them had been placarded all over the place. And never in his life before had one of those moments of inspiration led him astray. He had grown to accept the conclusions they drew and the procedures they dictated as things no less inevitable and infallible than the laws of Nature that make water run downhill and moun­tains sit about the world with their fat ends undermost. And now, with a direct controversion of his faith right under his groping hands, he felt as if he was seeing Niagara Falls squirt­ing upwards into Lake Ontario, while the Peak of Teneriffe perambulated about on its head with its splayed roots waving among the clouds.

For the first search had yielded nothing at all.

And the second search produced no more.

'Is—that—really—so!' drawled the Saint.

He stared at Perrigo without goodwill, and read the sneer in the other's eyes. It touched the rawest part of the Saint's most personal vanity—but he didn't tell the world.

'Thinking again?' Perrigo gibed.

'Why, yes,' said the Saint mildly. 'I often do it.' He stood up unconcernedly, fishing for his cigarette-case, and lighted another