The Saint's Getaway

The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was recovering his self-control again. His face was calm and satirical.

'I believe you once headed an organization which purported to administer a justice above the law,' he said. 'Do I understand that I am assisting at its renaissance?'

'Do you deny the charge?'

'And supposing I admit it?'

'I'm asking a question,' said the Saint, with a face of stone. 'Do you deny the charge?'

A long, tense silence came down on the room. Marcovitch moved again, and Monty's hand caught him round the neck. The significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward's understanding, but the drama of the scene held him spellbound. He also had begun to fall into the error that was deluding the Crown Prince. The Saint's face was as inexorable as a judge's. The humour and humanity had frozen out of it, leaving the rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the eyes were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the depths of the prince's soul, holding him impaled on their merciless gaze like a butterfly on a pin. The tension piled up between them till the very air seemed to grow hot and heavy with it.

'Do you deny the charge?'

Again those five words dropped through the room like sepa­rate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after another with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince's brain. They had about them the adamantine patience of doom itself. And the prince must have known that that question was going to receive a direct answer if it waited till the end of the world. He had come up against a force that he could no more fight against than he could fight against the changing of the tides, a force that would wear through his resistance as the continual dripping of water wears through a rock.

And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly picked up his gun.

'Do you deny the charge?'

The prince stirred slightly.

'No.'

He answered unemotionally, without turning his eyes a fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin in the almost imperceptible lift of his head.

'Does your worship propose to pronounce sentence?' he in­quired mockingly,

The Saint's mouth relaxed in a hard little smile.

Every word had been registered on the ears of the two cap­tive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner cabinet. The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown Prince had fallen at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Mar­ covitch was silenced, and now he had gone white and still. The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward was free. ...

'Your punishment is not in my hands,' said the Saint. 'It will overtake you in the course of legal justice, and I see no need to interfere.'

He ran his fingers again through the heap of jewels, letting them trickle through his fingers in rivulets of coloured splen­dour that caught the light on a hundred cunning facets.

'Pretty toys,' said the Saint, 'but they tempted you. And you could have bought them. You could have had them all for no more trouble than it would have taken you to write a cheque. I shall often wonder why you did it. Was it a kink of yours, Rudolf, that told you you couldn't enjoy them unless they were christened in blood? The Maloresco emeralds—the Ullsteinbach blue diamond——'

'What did you say?'

It was Nina Walden who spoke, starting forward suddenly from her place in the background.

Simon looked at her curiously. He picked up the great blue stone and held it in the light.

'The Ullsteinbach blue diamond,' he said. 'Wedding gift of the late Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc—ac­cording to information in The Times. Josef Krauss tried to tell me something about it before he died, but he didn't get far. Do you know anything about it?'