18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

Simon turned his head and pointed to the blister on his cheek, and then down at the spoon which Palermo had dropped. Graner stepped forward and moved it with his foot. The scrap of carpet on which it had fallen was charred black.

The Saint could see those pieces of circumstantial evidence registering themselves on Graner's face.

'You didn't tell him?'

'He didn't get far enough with the treatment. He'd forgotten to have my feet tied, and I managed to kick him about a bit.' Simon moved his cigarette significantly to indicate the evidence for the accuracy of that statement. 'Then I promised the girl-she was here all the time, by the way, so 1 take it this is where Palermo keeps her-I promised her some money if she'd cut me loose, so she did. Then I sent her off to phone you, and looked around for Joris.'

'He's here?'

The Saint moved his head slowly from left to right and back again.

'He was.'

Simon hitched himself off the table, and Lauber's gun jerked up at him again. Simon went on elaborately ignoring it. He sauntered over to the door of the bedroom and waved his hand towards the interior. Graner and Lauber followed him. They stood there looking in at the rumpled coverlet and the pieces of cloth and cut rope which were scattered on the bed and the floor in silent testimony.

Graner's bright black eyes slid off the scenery and went back to the Saint.

'What happened to them?'

'I let them go,' said the Saint tranquilly.

2 It would give the chronicler, whose devotion to his Art is equalled only by his distaste for work, considerable pleasure to discourse at some length on the overpowering silence which invaded the room and the visible reactions which took place in it-besides bring­ing him several pages nearer to the conclusion of this seventh chapter of the Saint saga. The fusillade of words which one reviewer has so lucidly likened to 'a display of fancy shooting in which all the shots are beautifully grouped on the target an inch away from the bull' tugs almost irresistibly at his trigger finger. The simultaneous distension of Lauber's and Graner's eyes, the precise degree of roundness which shaped it­self into Lauber's heavy lips, the tightening of Gra­ner's thin straight mouth, the clenching of Lauber's fists and the involuntary upward lift of Graner's gun- all these and many other important manifestations of emotion could be the subject of an essay in descriptive prose in which the historian could wallow happily for at least a thousand words. Only his anxious concern for the tired brains of his critics forces him to stifle the impulse and deprive literature of this priceless contribution.

But it was an impressive silence; and the Saint made the most of it. All the time he had been talking, he had known that he would inevitably have to answer Graner's last question: it had been as inescapably foredoomed as the peal of thunder after a flash of light­ning, with the only difference that he had been able to lengthen the interval and give himself time to choose his reply. There had never been more than three posssibilities, and the Saint had worked them out and explored their probable consequences as far, ahead as his imagination would reach in an explosive intensity of concentration that crowded a day's work into a space of minutes.

Now he relaxed for a moment, while the result of the explosion sent the other two spinning through mental maelstroms of their own. He read murder in Graner's eyes, but he knew that curiosity would beat it by a short head.

'You let them go?' Graner repeated, when he had recovered his voice.

'Naturally,' said the Saint, with undisturbed equa­nimity.

'What for?'

Simon raised his eyebrows.

'I'm supposed to be in cahoots with that outfit- or did I misunderstand you when we talked it over?'

'But those two --'

'They haven't got the tickets. I searched every stitch on them. Besides, Christine told me --'

'You're a damned liar!'

It was Lauber who interrupted, with his voice thick and choking. His gun pushed forward at the Saint's chest, and there was a flare of desperate fury in his face that gave the Saint all the confirmation he wanted.

Simon had foreseen it-it was one of the factors that he had weighed one against the other in his feverish analysis of the situation. If the story that Graner had taken back to the house had shaken the world of Palermo and Aliston to its foundations, it must have knocked the foundations themselves from under Lauber's. Simon had been expecting his intervention, even more than Graner's. He knew that for the mo­ment he might have even more to fear from Lauber than from Graner, but he allowed none of his thoughts to move a muscle of his face.

He looked Lauber in the eye and said with a quiet significance which he hoped only Lauber would under­stand: 'It won't hurt you to wait till you've heard what I've got to say before you call me a liar.'

Doubt crept into Lauber's face. He was caught off his balance and didn't know how to go on, like a horse that has been sharply checked in front of a jump. The Saint had made him stop to think, and the pause was fatal. Lauber glared at him, held rigid between fear and perplexity; but he waited.

'What did Christine tell you?' said Graner.

'She told me herself that Joris and the other guy hadn't got the ticket. It's obvious, anyway-otherwise Palermo and Aliston would have had it by this time. They parked it somewhere.'

The Saint glanced at Lauber again, with a measured meaning which could have conveyed nothing to anybody else. On the face of it, it was only the natural action of a man who wanted to keep two people in the conversation at once. But to the recipient it spoke a whole library of volumes. It told Lauber that the Saint was lying, told Lauber that the Saint meant him to know it, told Lauber that the Saint could also come out with the truth if he chose to and invited Lauber to play ball or consider the consequences. And Simon read the complete reception of the message in the way Lauber's gun sagged again out of the horizontal.