cigarette, still allowing nothing to distract the relentless aim of his automatic.
Somewhere there was a leak in the pipe, and his brain was humming out to locate it.
From Elberman there was nothing to be learned—he sat placidly where the Saint had roped him, outwardly unperturbed by what was happening, apparently satisfied to leave what small chance there was of effective opposition in the hands of Perrigo. And Elberman probably knew no more than the Saint, anyhow.
No—the secret was locked up behind the narrowed glinting eyes of Perrigo. Somewhere in the mind of that tough baby was stored the sole living human knowledge of the fate of the biggest packet of illicit diamonds ever brought into England in one batch; and Simon Templar was going to extract that knowledge if he had to carve it out with dynamite and rock-drills.
Chapter III
'I heard you were clever.' Perrigo spoke again, rasping into the breach in a voice that was jagged with spiteful triumph. 'Got a reputation, haven't you? I'll say you must have earned it.'
'Sure I did,' assented the Saint, with a gaze like twin pinpoints of blue fire.
And then a thunder of knocking on the front door drummed up through the house and froze the three of them into an instant's bewildered immobility.
It was, if the Saint had but known it at that moment, the herald of an interruption that was destined to turn that exceedingly simple adventure into the most riotous procession that the chronicler has yet been called upon to record. It was the starting-gun for the wildest of all wild-goose chases. It was, in its essence, the beginning of the Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal. If the Saint had known it, he would have chalked up the exact time on the wall and drawn a halo round it. But he did not know.
He stiffened up like a pointer, with his head cocked on one side and two short vertical lines etching in between his eyebrows. The clamorous insistence of that knocking boded no welcome visitor. There was nothing furtive or sympathetic about it—nothing that one could associate with any possible client of a receiver of stolen goods. It hammered up the stairway in an atmosphere of case-hardened determination. And then it stopped, and grimly awaited results.
Simon looked from Elberman to Perrigo, and back again. He intercepted the glances that passed between them, and gathered from them a joint nescience equal to his own. In Perrigo's eyes there was suspicion and interrogation, in Elberman's nothing but an answering blank.
'Throwing a party?' murmured the Saint.
In silence he inhaled from his cigarette, and flicked it backwards into the fire. Listening intently, he heard through the window on his left the single sharp pip of a motor-horn sounding on a peculiar note. And the knocking below started again.
There was no doubt about its intentions this time. It signified its uncompromising determination to be noticed, and added a rider to the effect that if it wasn't noticed damned quickly it was perfectly prepared to bust down the door and march in regardless.
'So you've brought the cops, have you?' grated Perrigo.
He came recklessly out of his chair.
The obvious solution had dawned upon him a second after it dawned upon the Saint, and he acted accordingly. His interpretation was all wrong, but his reasoning process was simple.
To the Saint, however, the situation remained the same, whatever Perrigo thought. With the police outside, his gun was temporarily as useless as a piece of scrap-iron. And besides, he wanted further converse with Perrigo. Those three hundred carats of compact mazuma were still somewhere in Perrigo's charge, and Simon Templar was not going home without them. Therefore the bluff was called. Perrigo had got to stay alive, aesthetically distressing as his continued existence might be.
Simon pocketed his gun and stood foursquare to the fact. He slipped his head under Perrigo's smashing fist, and lammed into the gangster's solar plexus a half-arm jolt that sogged home like a battering-ram punching into a lump of putty. Perrigo gasped and went down writhing, and the Saint grinned.
'Sing to him, Isadore,' he instructed hopefully, and went briskly out on to the landing.
That toot on the horn outside the window had been Patricia's signal to say that something troublesome was looming up and that she was wide awake; but the first item of information was becoming increasingly self-evident. As Simon went down the stairs, the clattering on the front door broke out again, reinforced by impatient peals on the bell, and the door itself was shaking before an onslaught of ponderous shoulders as the Saint turned out the light and drew the bolts.
