his perfumed silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket to fan it gently under his nose, and his bright little eyes never shifted from the other's face.
'All right!' Lauber gritted savagely. His sullen stare switched momentarily on to the Saint. 'But if anything goes wrong it's no good blaming me.'
He yanked Palermo round and shoved him roughly out of the door; and Graner put away his handkerchief and picked up his cane. Simon followed him out of the room.
'If Aliston comes back you will use his car to bring him back to the house,' Graner said as they went down the stairs. 'If I have not heard from you in a reasonable time I shall send further instructions.'
Outside, it was still raining. They stood in the doorway and watched Lauber bundle Palermo into the back of the car. It caused no commotion. The inhabitants of the street slept in the daytime, and any chance passers-by there might have been had been driven to cover by the torrential storm. As soon as Lauber had settled the cargo and stepped back, Graner scuttled across the twelve-inch pavement and wriggled into the driving seat. The car swished away through the rivulets that bubbled between the cobblestones.
Lauber stood and glared sombrely after it until it turned the next corner and disappeared. Simon tapped him on the shoulder.
'Now,' he said, 'we will go upstairs and have a little chat.'
Lauber transferred the same sultry glare to the Saint. And then, with a renewed clamping of his thick lips, he turned abruptly, thrust past him without a word and stumped heavily back up the stairs.
Simon drifted into the room after him and returned to his favourite perch on the edge of the table. He opened his cigarette case and held it out, but Lauber ignored it. He seemed to be labouring under the stress of some great emotion.
'You might as well make the best of it,' said the Saint amiably. 'After all, I've done you a good turn.'
'You have?' Lauber ground out.
'Sure. I hope you're not going to try and kid me now, sweetheart. You'll only be wasting your breath. Christine told me you'd taken the ticket, and Joris told me the same thing-quite independently. And you just about admitted it when you stopped calling me a liar just now. I know you've got it, so you might as well come clean. Be a big- business man and take it philosophically. That's what I'm doing. I started as one of the crowd with an eighth share. Then Christine offered a fifth, so I went for that. Palermo and Aliston bid a third, which might have been even better if they'd behaved themselves. Now you're going to come through with a half, which will knock all the opposition back on their heels. You ought to be congratulating yourself.'
'I ought to be congratulating myself, did I?'
The Saint nodded placidly.
'I don't know about your grammar, but your ideas are right. What did you do with the ticket, Lauber?'
Lauber's face seemed to be turning purple. The veins stood out on his forehead, and his eyes started to look as if they had been recently boiled.
'What did I do with the ticket?' he almost shouted.
'That's all I want you to tell me,' said the Saint comfortably. 'So you'd better get used to the idea. You've got to let me in with you, Lauber. Because I've got Christine, and I've got Joris, and I've got the other guy; and if I let them loose they can raise such a shindy about the ticket being stolen that you'd find yourself in the calaboose the minute you tried to cash it. You haven't any choice, my lad, so you'd better talk fast. And if you don't, I'll make you.'
The last words made no visible impression on Lauber at all. He appeared to be paying too much attention to trying to prevent himself choking to hear what he was listening to very clearly.
'I haven't got the ticket,' he groaned; and the Saint's eyes narrowed.
'You'll have to think faster than that'
'I haven't got it, I tell you.' Lauber's voice exploded in a hoarse roar through the obstruction in his throat. 'You fool-it was in the car!'
The Saint dropped off the table as if he had been swept off it. It didn't take him the fraction of an instant to convince himself that Lauber could never have put over a lie like that. Everything led up to it. The Saint's awakened eyes glinted like chips of ice.
'What?'
'I hid it in the car last night,' Lauber said suffocatingly. 'It was the only thing I could do. I've been trying to get at it all day. And you let Graner go off with it!'
3 Simon took hold of himself with an effort.
'You left it in the car?'
'What else could I do? One of those swine last night hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out. I woke up in the car going home. It was the first thing that came into my head. I knew there 'd be trouble about it, and I had to do something.'
'How d'you know it's still there?'
'It must be. Nobody else would look for it where I put it.'
'What about the chauffeur?'
'He only cleans the car once a week-on Mondays. Even then, he only washes the outside. He's one of these local men. He wouldn't think of turning out the inside until it was too filthy to sit in.'
'But suppose he had found it.'
'He'd have said something. I've been afraid of that all day, but I couldn't find an excuse to go to the garage or
