18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

There was no immediate answer, and after a moment the Saint looked up. Graner was standing at the window with his back to him, looking out.

Simon felt under his left sleeve for the hilt of his little knife. His nerves were quite cool now: he knew exactly what a chance he would be taking, and how much he had to lose. But there might be no other remedy.

And then he realised why Graner was standing there. There was the sound of a car man?uvring outside, and Graner must have been watching it. All at once the hum of the engine rose and died again rap­idly, and Simon knew that it had entered the grounds.

Graner turned away from the window and stepped towards the door.

'Go on with your work,' he said. 'I shall be back in a few minutes.'

The door closed behind him, and Simon Templar sagged back on the bench and wiped his forehead.

A few seconds later, with the irrepressible grin which was the crystallisation of all his philosophy, he took out his cigarette case and lighted a cigarette.

With the smoke going gratefully down into his lungs, he took another look at his position. And the longer he looked at it the less he liked it. The Saint was immune to panic, but he had an unflinching grasp on realities. The reality in this case was that, if one adopted the most optimistic of the two possible theories, Reuben Graner wasn't a bloke who left very much to chance. At the moment his attention was di­vided by the disappearance of Joris Vanlinden and his lottery ticket, and the mysterious comings and goings in the household which were undoubtedly connected with it; but that wouldn't distract him forever. In fact, from the way things had progressed by that early hour of the day, it wasn't likely to be more than a few hours before Graner's investigation of his newly acquired Mr Tombs found the spare half-hour which would be about all the time it needed.

Simon gazed morosely at the closed safe and won­dered if it would relieve his emotions to weep tenderly over it for awhile. The occasion seemed to call for something of the sort. Within its unresponsive steel sides there was enough boodle to satisfy the most am­bitious buccaneer, a collection of concentrated loot that deserved to be ranked with Vanlinden's lottery ticket; but for all the good it seemed likely to do him it might just as well have been a collection of empty beer bottles.

He went to the window and examined it. The bars were set solidly into the concrete of the walls-it might be possible to dig them out, but it would cer­tainly take a good deal of time. And in any case he knew already that there was a sheer drop of thirty feet underneath it. Still, the road ran below. ... It was the first ray of hope he had seen since he entered the house. When he had been in Tenerife before he had made a number of incidental friends who might be useful; although if he met any of them when he was with Graner they might prove more dangerous than helpful. But that would have to be faced when the time came. . . .

He took a piece of paper from his pocket and tore it in half. On one piece he wrote rapidly, in English: Come and stand under the window of Las Mari­posas on the La Laguna road at four o'clock. I will drop a message to you out of the window. If I'm un­able to do this within half an hour, go away and come back at seven. Wait the same time. If nothing happens then, come back at nine-thirty and wait till you hear from me. This is a matter of life and death. Say noth­ing to anyone.

He read the message over again and grinned ruefully. It certainly read like something out of a melodrama; but that couldn't be helped. Maybe it was something out of a melodrama - his stay in Tenerife was beginning to look like that.

He signed his name to it; and on the second scrap of paper he wrote a translation in Spanish. He folded each piece of paper inside a twenty-five-peseta note and put the notes in separate pockets; he had just finished when he heard Graner's footstep again on the stairs.

Graner hardly glanced at his attempts to adjust the diamond in the copper cup under the machine.

'You can leave that for now,' he said. 'We will go down and collect your luggage.'

His voice was sharper than it had been before, and Simon wondered what else had happened to put that grating timbre into it. There were things going on all the time that he knew nothing about, and the strain of trying to make sense of them took half the relief out of this second reprieve. Graner said nothing as they went downstairs; and all that the Saint could deduce of his state of mind had to be more intuitive than logical, which was not much satisfaction.

Through the door of the living room he had a glimpse of Aliston's boneless back while Graner stood in front of the mirror fitting on his purple hat like a woman. Presumably Aliston, and probably the natty Mr Palermo as well, had been out in the car that had returned a little while ago. Possibly it had been one or the other of them who had telephoned Graner during breakfast. It was a fairly obvious deduction that they had been scouring the town for a trace of Joris Vanlinden; and in that case the meaning of what he had overheard of the telephone conversation, and Graner's agitation, became easier to understand. But the Saint still had a queer feeling that there were gaps in the theory somewhere, a feeling that came from some kind of sixth sense for which he could not intelli­gently account, which told him that although the pieces of the jigsaw appeared to fit together so neatly there was something not quite right about the complete picture that they made up.

'Tombs!'

Graner's acrid voice jerked him out of the brown study, and they went outside to where the car was waiting. The chauffeur who stood beside it was unmistakably Spanish, and part of his villainous aspect might have been due to the fact that it was still only Saturday morning and the traditions of his country required him to shave only on Saturday afternoons; but the Saint doubted it. He wondered how many more of Graner's menagerie he had still to meet.

'What hotel did you go to?'

'The Orotava,' answered Simon; and Graner's passionless black eyes rested on him a second or two longer before he passed the order on to the driver.

It was another of those puzzling rough edges in the smooth outline of the Saint's theory.

Simon pulled himself together with an abrupt effort. He told himself that his nerves must have been getting the better of him-he was beginning to imagine threats and suspicions in every trivial incident. After all, there were only about three hotels in Santa Cruz that could be called at all inviting, and the Orotava was the nearest to the harbour and the easiest choice for a man looking vaguely around for some place to stay. Why should the mention of it make any particular impression?

He knew that there could be only one reason, and felt as though a cold wind lapped his spine for a moment before he insisted to himself that it was absurd.