The Saint's Getaway

tried to persuade himself was purely mor­bid. He frisked Weissmann's clothes with an almost professional callousness and brought a selection of papers back with him to the sitting room.

'While you're getting your initiative tuned up,' he said, 'it might be helpful if we knew something more about Stanis­laus.'

Patricia came and looked over his shoulder as he ran through the meagre supply of documents. There were a couple of letters on heavily scented pink notepaper, addressed to Heinrich Weissmann at the Dome, Boulevard Montpar­nasse, Paris, which disclosed nothing of interest to anyone wishing to have the strength of ten; a letter of credit for two thousand marks, issued by the Dresdner Bank in Koln; the counterfoil of a sleeping-car ticket from Zurich to Milan; and a receipted bill from a hotel in Basle.

'He certainly did his best to shake off the hue and cry,' said Monty; 'but does it tell us anything else?'

'What about that?' asked Patricia, turning over one of the pink envelopes.

On the flap was a pencilled line of writing:

Zr 12 H Konigshof

'Room Twelve, Hotel Konigshof,' Monty translated promptly. 'Looks as if this was the very place he was making for.'

The girl bit her lip.

'It'd be a frightful coincidence——'

'I don't know. Those squiggly marks in the corner—they're just the sort of pattern a fellow draws at the telephone. Stanislaus would naturally have some note of the place where he was supposed to deliver the boodle. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be here. This is the most slap-up hotel for miles around—the very place that a super crook would make his headquarters——' Monty slewed round in his chair and regarded her expectantly. 'Suppose the Big Noise was sitting right over our heads?'

Patricia jumped up.

'But that's just what he is doing, if that address is right!

Room Twelve is on the first floor. When we came here they offered us Eleven, but Simon wouldn't have it. He tried to get Twelve, which has a fire escape outside, but it was taken yesterday——'

'I don't see that it's anything to get excited about, anyway,' said Monty soothingly. 'If it's true, it only means that another bunch of toughs may be crashing in here at any moment to commit a few more murders.'

'I'm going to run up the fire escape and see if I can see any­thing.'

Monty looked at her in frank amazement.

For the first instant he thought she was bluffing. He had in­stinctively salted down her laconic description of the Saint's inexorable training. And then he saw the recklessness of the smile that parted her fresh lips, the eager vitality of her slim body, the devil-may-care light in her blue eyes; and the ban­tering challenge that trembled on the tip of his tongue went unuttered. There was a living embodiment of Saintliness in her that startled. He smiled.

'If you don't mind my saying so,' he remarked soberly, 'Simon's a damned lucky man. And you won't run up the fire escape, because I'm going to.'

He went out onto the lawn, located the stairway on his left, and groped his way up the narrow iron steps. There was only one window on the first floor which could possibly answer the vague description he had been given, and no light showed through it. He paused on the grating beside it and wondered what on earth he should do next. To scale an awkward species of ladder at that hour of the morning in order to inspect a room, and then to return with the information that it pos­sesses a window constructed of square panes of glass, struck him as being an extraordinarily inane procedure. And he could see nothing inside from where he was. There seemed to be only one alternative, and that was to insert himself sur­reptitiously into the room.

Fortunately one of the casements was ajar, and he opened it wide and clambered over the sill with a silent prayer that he might be able to pretend successfully that he was drunk.

Every movement he made appeared to shake the hotel to its foundations. The loose change clinked in his pockets like a dozen sledge hammers knocking the hell out of a cracked an­vil, his clothes rustled like a forest in a gale, and the sound of his breathing seemed loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The jaws of the prison yawned on every side. He could hear them.

Then his right shin collided with something hard. He felt around for the offending object, and presently discovered