In the middle of that snowy expanse, the little man looked queerly black and twisted.
The ivory hilt of a stiletto stood out starkly from the stained cloth of his shirt, and his upturned eyes were wide and staring. Even as they looked at him, his right hand sagged lower over the side of the bed, and the attache case that dangled from his wrist settled on the floor with a dull thud.
II. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS UNREPENTANT,
AND THE PARTY WAS CONSIDERABLY
PEPPED UP
SIMON unlocked the handcuffs and dropped them into his pocket. He was far too accustomed to the sight of sudden and violent death to be disturbed in any conventional way by what had happened; but even so, a parade of ghostly icicles was crawling down his spine. Death that struck so swiftly and mercilessly was just a little more than he had expected to encounter so early in the festivities. It was a threat and a challenge that could not be misunderstood.
'How did it happen?' Patricia asked, breaking the silence in its sixth second; and the Saint smiled.
'In the simplest possible way,' he said. 'A member of the ungodly trailed us home, and let himself in here while we were gargling in the next room. Whoever he was, his sleuthing form is alpha
The actual physical demise of the little man left him unmoved. They had not known each other long enough to become devoted comrades; and it was doubtful, in any case, whether the little man would ever have been inclined to permit such an affection to burgeon in his breast. The Saint, whose assessment of character was intuitive and instantaneous, judged him to be a bloke whose passing would leave the world singularly unbereaved.
And yet that same unimportant murder wrote a sentence into the story which the Saint could read in any language.
Across the bed, his clear blue gaze levelled into the eyes of Monty Hayward with a glimmer of new mockery, and that reckless half smile still rested on his lips. Onto his last speech he tacked one crackling question:
'Anyone say I wasn't right?'
'Right about what?' Monty snapped.
'About abducting Stanislaus,' came the Saint's crisp reply. 'You both thought I was crazy—thought I was jumping to conclusions, and jumping a damned sight too far. But since there was nothing else you could do, you gave the jump a trial. Now tell me I haven't given you the goods!'
Monty shrugged.
'The goods are there all right,' he said. 'But what are we supposed to do with them?'
'Get on with what's left of our sound notion,' said the Saint. 'Carry on finding out as much as we can about Stanislaus— then we may have some more to talk about.'
Already he was examining the little man's attache case. His first glance showed him that the leather had been half ripped away, doubtless by some other sharp instrument in the hands of the recent visitor; and then he saw what was inside, and grasped the reason for the bag's extraordinary weight. The little attache case was nothing but a flimsy camouflage: inside it was a blued steel box, and it was to this box itself that the chain was riveted through a neat circular hole cut in the leather covering. A couple of shrewd slits with a penknife fetched the covering away altogether, and the metal box was comprehensively revealed—one of the compactest and solidest little portable safes that the Saint had ever seen.
Simon ran over its smooth surface with an expertly pessimistic eye. The lid fitted down so perfectly that it required the perspicacity of a lynx to spot the join at all. The edge of a razor couldn't have sidled into that emaciated fissure—much less the claw of the finest jemmy ever made. The only notable break that occurred anywhere in that gleaming case-hardened rhomboid was the small square panel in one side where the combination lock showed narrow segments of its four milled and lettered chrome-steel wheels—and even those were matched and balanced into their aperture so infrangibly that a bacillus on hunger strike would have felt cramped between them.
'Can you open it?' asked Monty; and the Saint shook his head.
