He pushed the pier-glass aside, and touched a switch that illuminated the secret passage. Right at his feet, he saw a charred match-end lying on the felt matting, and his lips tightened. He sped down the corridor, and entered the end house. In front of him, the door of a cupboard, and its false back communicating with the bathroom in 104, Berkeley Square, were both wide open; and he remembered that he had left them ajar behind him on the previous night, in his haste to get home and resume the feud with Chief Inspector Teal. The bathroom door was also ajar; he slipped through it, and emerged on the landing. A tiny glow of light farther down the stairs caught his eye, and vanished immediately.
Then he established a second link between the two parts of the duet that had brought him to where he was and wished he had delayed the chase while he picked up his gun. He crept downwards, and saw a shadow that moved.
'Stay where you are,' he rapped. 'I've got you covered!'
The shadow leapt away, and Simon hurled himself after it. He was still four steps behind when he sprang through the air and landed on the man's shoulders. They crashed down together, rolled down the remaining treads, and reached the bottom with a bump. The Saint groped for a strangle-hold. He had found it with one hand when he saw a dull gleam of steel in the light of a street lamp that flung a faint nimbus of rays through the transom above the front door. He squirmed aside, and the point ripped his pyjamas and thudded into the floor. Then a bony knee picked up into his stomach, and he gasped and went limp with agony. The front door banged while he lay there twisting helplessly.
It was ten minutes before he was able to stagger to his feet and go on a tour of investigation. Down in the basement, he found the cellar door wide open. A hole big enough for a man's arm to pass through had been carved out of it a foot above the massive bolt, and the flagstones were littered with chips of wood. Simon realised that he had been incredibly careless.
He returned to his bedroom and looked at the coat he had been wearing. It had been moved from where he had thrown it down—that had been the cause of the soft rustling that had first disturbed his slumbers. A further investigation showed that Perrigo's passport and tickets were missing from the pocket where Simon had left them. This was no worse than the Saint had expected.
Aching, he went back to bed and slept again. And this time he dreamed a dream.
He was running up the wrong side of a narrow moving stairway. Patricia was in front of him, and he couldn't go fast enough; he had to keep pushing her. He wanted to get past her and catch Perrigo, who was dancing about just out of his grasp. Perrigo was dressed something like an organ-grinder's monkey, in a ridiculous straw hat, a tail coat, and a pair of white flannel trousers. There was an enormous diamond necklace over his collar; and he jeered and grimaced, and bawled: 'Not in these trousers.' Then the scene changed, and Teal came riding by on a giraffe, wearing a pair of plus fours; and he also said: 'Not in these trousers.'
Then the Saint woke up, and saw that it was half-past eight. He jumped out of bed, lighted a cigarette, and made for the bathroom. He soaped his face and shaved, haunted by his dream for some reason that he could not nail down; and he was wallowing in bath salts when the interpretation of it flashed upon him with an aptness that made him erupt out of the water with an almighty splash.
Ten minutes later, gorgeously apparelled in his new spring suit, he tore down the stairs and found bacon and eggs on the table and Patricia reading a newspaper.
'Perrigo has left us,' he said.
The girl looked up with startled eyes, but Simon was laughing.
'He's left us, but I know where he's gone,' said the Saint. 'He collected his papers before he went. I forgot that he carried a knife, and locked him up without fanning him—he spent the night digging his way through the door, and came through here for his passport in the early morning. I was just too slow to catch him. We'll meet him again on the boat train —it leaves at ten o'clock.'
'How do you know he'll be on it?'
'If he didn't mean to do that, why did he come back for his ticket? No—I know exactly what's in his head. He knows that he's only got one way out, now that he's bereaved of Isadore, and he's going to try to make the grade. He's made up his mind that I'm not helping the police, and he's going to take his chance on a straight duck with me—and I'll bet he'll park himself in the most crowded compartment he can find, just to give himself the turn of the odds. And I'll say some more; I know where those diamonds are now!'
'Have you got them?'
'Not yet. But up at Isadore's I spotted that Perrigo's costume was assorted. I thought he'd changed coats with Frankie Hormer, and I went over his jacket twice before Teal buzzed in. Naturally, I didn't find anything.
