darkening as if curtains were being drawn in quick succession over the sky, and with the change of light the dingy alleys were softening like the faces of old women by the fireside at dusk. But presently, almost to his surprise, he found himself at the right door.
There was a little more life in the street now--a few straggling pedestrians, a few faces peering eerily put of open ground-floor windows in the age-old Spanish pastime of watching life go by, a few upper windows lighted up. But the window of Maria's apartment was not lighted, and Simon saw nobody loafing near the door as he reached it.
He pushed the door experimentally, and found it unlocked. The gloomy hall was almost in complete darkness now, and the Saint took a slim pencil flashlight from his pocket to find his way to the stairs. He moved upwards with the supple noiselessness of a cat, and switched his torch off again as he reached the upper landing.
For some time he stood motionless outside the door of the apartment, as if every nerve in his body was enlisted in the one intense concentration of listening for the slightest sound of movement inside the room which might have given him warning of a trap. He believed that he would have caught even the rustle of a sleeve if a man waiting inside had cautiously moved a cramped arm; but the utter stillness remained unbroken until he felt that he had given it a fair trial. Any further investigations would have to be made by opening the door.
Simon's hand moved instinctively to his pocket before he remembered that he had no gun, and his lips tightened with a momentary mocking grimness. So he would have to do without that asset. . . . He slid his knife out of its sheath and held it by the tip of the blade in his right hand, ready for use. His left hand turned the doorknob, slowly and without a rattle. As soon as he felt the latch clear of its socket, he flung the door wide open.
Nothing happened. Nothing moved in the grey gloom of the room. There was no sound after the door banged wide against the wall.
On the floor between him and the table he saw a shape that looked like a man but that didn't move or speak. The attitude in which it lay offered no promise of speech or movement. Simon went into the room and flashed his torch on its face. It was Manoel, the chauffeur; and there was no doubt that he was extremely dead.
3 The bullet had made a neat round hole where it had entered near the middle of his forehead, but the back of his head was not so neat. Simon touched the man's face: it still held some warmth, and his flashlight showed that the blood on the floor was still wet.
Before he did anything else he went through and searched the bedroom, but there was no one there.
He came back and turned on the lights in the living room. With their help, he made another search that covered every inch of the room, but he found nothing to indicate who had been there. The table was exactly as he had left it, with the remains of food congealing on the plates. The overturned chair that he had been tied in was still overturned. The accumulation of cigarette ends in the ash trays and on the floor yielded nothing, although Simon picked up every one of them separately and examined it. He recognised his own brand, and another equally common-that was all. If there had been a third, it might have been useful; but Palermo had smoked only his cigar, and he did not know what Lauber and Aliston used. There was hardly any doubt that one or the other of them had fired the shot which had ensured that the chauffeur would chauffe no more: Simon had his own firm conviction about which of them it was, but he would have been glad to remove the faint element of uncertainty.
There was no means of doing that except by fingerprints, and he had no apparatus for that. But he remembered that his own prints would be among those present, and he went back to the bedroom for one of the gag cloths and carefully wiped everything that he had touched, including the whiskey bottle and the glass from which he had given Joris a drink, and everything that Hoppy might have touched in the kitchenette during his quest for liquor. The other things he left as they were. If the detective force of Santa Cruz had ever heard of fingerprints they could have a jolly time playing with them, and Graner's gang could do its own worrying.
It wasn't so quiet now. . . .
Simon became aware of the fact almost subconsciously; and then suddenly he was wide awake. He stopped motionless for a second, without breathing, while he sought for an exact definition of the sound which had crept warningly into his brain while he was thinking about other things. In another instant he knew what it was.
Something was happening in the street outside. The symptoms of it, as they reached him through the closed windows, were almost imperceptible; and yet the sixth sense of the outlaw had distinguished them with unerring instinct. As his memory reached back he realised that a car had stopped outside with its engine running, but the other mutters went on-a faint increase in the volume of sound outside, a subtle alteration in the pitch and tempo of the normal noises of the street. Nothing that an ordinary man might have noticed before it was too late, but as unmistakable to the Saint as if the alarm had been sounded with bugles.
In two strides he was at the window, looking down through a corner of one of the smeary yellow panes.
The car, which had stopped at the door, was open, and the last of the party of guardias was getting out -Simon could see three others, and there might have been more of them too close under the wall of the house to be visible to him. A woman was still sitting in the back of the car: he saw the brassy flame of her hair and guessed at once that it was Mr Palermo's fancy lady.
Then he heard the first footfall in the hall below.
The Saint's fighting smile flickered on his lips and was reflected in the blue depths of his eyes. When something less menacing than that had happened not long ago, the thought had flashed through his mind that the upper part of the house was a dead end; and now he was in the very corner that he had avoided before. But last time he had had Joris to take care of.
He went swiftly through to the bedroom, closed the, door behind him and opened the window. Standing outside it with his toes on the sill, he could just reach the shallow parapet of the flat roof above. He drew himself up with the easy grace of a gymnast and wriggled nimbly over the edge.
By that time the last trace of the twilight had vanished altogether, and only a disheartened scrap of moon glimmering between the clouds gave him enough light to pick his way. On either side the roofs of the contiguous houses ran on in a dark plateau broken by occasional low walls. He hurried silently over them, Stopping after every few steps to listen for any warnings of pursuit. A startled milch goat tied to a shed on one of the roofs shied out of his path with a faint bleat that made him jump; and on another roof the hens in a ramshackle chicken run gargled and clucked apprehensively as he passed; Simon wondered, with a twinkle of incorrigible irrelevance, what a snooty New Yorker would think of the way Spaniards treated their penthouses and roof gardens, or conversely what a Spaniard would think of the value which was placed on them in New York.
Then a building higher than the others blocked his way, and he turned in towards the centre of the block. Below him he saw a solid-looking outhouse, and the window which overlooked it was dark. He swung himself over the parapet, hung at the full stretch of his arms, and dropped the last few feet with a prayer that the roof under him was strong. It was. He landed, on his toes with hardly a sound; below him was a sort of courtyard on to which the
