16 The Saint Overboard

He had sat at a table close to the Saint's at lunch-time, arriving a few moments later and calling for his bill in unison— exactly as he was sitting in the foyer now, with an aloof air of having nothing important to do and being ready to do it at a minute's notice.

The Saint paid for his calls and the use of the room, and saun­tered out. He took a roundabout route to his destination, turned three or four corners, without once looking back, and paused to look in a shop window in the Rue du Casino. In an angle of the plate glass he caught a reflection—of pale brick-red socks.

Item Two. ... So Vogel's affability had not been entirely unpremeditated. Perhaps it had been carefully planned from the start. It would have been simplicity itself for the sleuth to pick him up when he was identified by sitting with Vogel and Yule at the cafe.

Not that the situation was immediately serious. The pink-hosed spy might have discovered that Simon Templar had rented a room and made some telephone calls, but he wasn't likely to have discovered much more. And that activity was not funda­mentally suspicious. But with Vogel already on his guard, it would register in the score as a fact definitely to be accounted for. And the presence of the man who had observed it added its own testimony to the thoroughness with which the fact would doubtless be scrutinised.

The Saint's estimation of Kurt Vogel went up another grim notch. In that dispassionate efficiency, that methodical examina­tion of every loophole, that ruthless elimination of every factor of chance or guesswork, he recognised some of the qualities that must have given Vogel his unique position in the hierarchy of racketeers—the qualities that must have been fatally underestimated by those three nameless scouts of Ingerbeck's, who had not come home. . . .

And which might have been underestimated by the fourth.

The thought checked him in his stride for an almost imper­ceptible instant. He knew that Loretta Page was ready to be told that she was suspected, but was she ready for quite such an inquisitorial surveillance as this?

He turned into the next tobacconist's and gained a breathing space while he purchased a pack of cigarettes. To find out, he had to shake off his own shadow. And it had to be done in such a way that the shadow did not know he was being intentionally shaken off, because an entirely innocent young man in the role Simon had set himself would never discover that he was being shadowed anyway.

He came out and walked more quickly to the corner of the Rue Levasseur. A disengaged taxi met him there, almost as if it had been timed for the purpose, and he stopped it and swung on board without any appearance of undue haste, but with a move­ment as swift and sure as an acrobat's on the flying trapeze.

'A la gare,' he said; and the taxi was off again without having actually reached a standstill.

Looking back through the rear window, he saw the pink socks piling into another cab a whole block behind. He leaned forward as they rushed into the Place de la Republique.

'Un moment,' he said in the driver's ear. 'Il faut que j'aille premierement a la Banque Boutin.'

The driver muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath, trod on the brakes, and spun the wheel. By his limited lights, he was not without reason, for the Banque de Bretagne and Travel Agency of M. Jules Boutin are at the eastern end of the Rue Levasseur—in exactly the opposite direction from the station.

They reeled dizzily round the corner of the Rue de la Plage, with that sublime abandon of which only French chauffeurs and suicidal maniacs are capable, gathered speed, and hurtled around another right-hand hairpin into the Boulevard Feart. Simon looked back again, and saw no sign of the pursuit. There were three other possible turnings from the hairpin junction which they had just circumnavigated; and the Saint had no doubt that his pink-socked epilogue, having lost them completely on that sudden swerve out of the Place de la Republique, and not ex­pecting any such treacherous manoeuvre, was by that time franti­cally exploring routes in the opposite direction.

They turned back into the Rue Levasseur; and to make abso­lutely certain the Saint changed his mind again and ordered an­other twist north to the post office. He paid off the driver and plunged into a telephone booth.

She was in. She said she had been writing some letters.

'Don't post 'em till I see you,'