thought reader as I am. Does it mean anything to you?'
'Nothing.'
An idea crossed his mind.
'Do you know the handwriting?'
'Of course. It's Johnny's writing.'
'Johnny's! Then you must know what it means—you must be able to read it——'
She shook her head.
'But I can't! Nobody ever could, when he wrote like that. Usually he wrote quite neatly, but when he was in a hurry he just scrawled things down like that and if you were lucky and you knew what he was likely to be writing about you could sometimes guess what the words were from the first letters and how long they looked.'
'But he meant this for you. He scribbled it on the page to make you think of the point. 'Remember the Rinksty?' —or whatever it is. He thought it would mean something to you. Is it something that he'd told you about before when he was talking? Is it a ship? Is it a hotel? Is it a pet name of your own that you had for some place where you used to meet—some place where he might have told you about this? For God's sake,
The Saint's voice hammered at her with passionate intensity; the grip of his fingers must have been bruising her arm. Somehow he was neither pleading nor commanding, but his fire would have melted stone. She was not stone. She twisted her fingers together and looked here and there, and her face was crumpled with the frantic effort of memory; but her eyes were big and tragic when they came to his face again.
'It's no good,' she said. 'It doesn't ring a bell anywhere. It isn't any place we went to, I'm sure of that.'
'Or anything he talked about?'
'He used to talk about so many things, but as I told you I never paid any more attention than I could help, because it all seemed so frightfully earnest and important and I'm much too young to start bothering about important things.'
She couldn't' have been lying, or trying to keep anything from him. If she had been he must have known.
He stared at the paper as if by sheer physical and mental force he could drag out the secret that was wrapped up in that wandering trail of graphite particles. To have got so far and then to be stopped there was maddening; his brain couldn't accept it. He had never in his life been stopped by a puzzle that filled him with such a sickening feeling of impotence. This was no code or cipher or riddle that wit and patience might eventually solve. There were no invisible inks to develop or clues to put together. The answer was already there in black and white, exactly as Kennet had jotted it down without any intention to conceal it, wrapped up in the skeletal hieroglyphics which to him had been only ordinary hurried writing. Every kink and twist in that long squiggle that might have been 'Rinksty' or 'Ruckstig' or a dozen other things had stood for a definite letter when Kennet had traced his pencil over them; but he had finished writing and he would not come back to read out what he had written, and all the thought in the world wouldn't make one single kink one atom more distinct.
The Saint glared at it until it blurred under his eyes. 'Something happens at Neuilly tomorrow,' he said savagely, 'and this ought to tell us what it is. This is what Luker and the Sons of France are murdering scared of anybody getting hold of. Johnny must have thought you'd understand. If only you'd listened to him——'
'I know,' she gulped. 'I know I'm a silly little fool, b-but I'll go on trying to think of it. Is-isn't the photograph any help?'
'You see if it is.'
He detached the print from the clip, and as he did so a scrap of celluloid perforated along the edges fluttered away. He picked it up and held it to the light. It was a Leica negative, obviously the original of the print he had been
