drums. And men marching like lines of ants, their boots thudding like the tick-tock of some monstrous clock eating up time. Left, right, left. In time with the brass and drums. And in time, too, now, with the hammer and clang of flaring forges and the deep rolling reverberation of stupendous armouries pouring out the iron tools of war. . . .
She looked at the Saint and was aware of him in the midst of all that, like a shining light, a bright sword, a clear note of music in the thunder of brute destruction, following his amazing destiny. But the thunder went on.
She tried to shut it out.
She said, almost desperately: 'That fellow who was left —in there. Why did you ask if he was any relation of the M.P.?'
'It just occurred to me. And he was. That's the funny part. Because unless my memory's all cockeyed, he's a flaming Red and a frightful thorn in the side of his respectable papa. He's the one part of the picture that doesn't fit in. Why should a really outstanding crop of old and young Diehards like that ask anyone like John Kennet down for a week end?'
'He might have amused them.'
'Would you credit them with that much sense of humour?'
'I don't know. But if it was a joke, they must be feeling pretty badly about it.' She shuddered. 'I know it's all over now, but I hope—I hope they were right—that the smoke did put him out before the fire got to him.'
Simon's cigarette reddened again for a long moment before he answered.
'If there's one thing I'm sure of, I'm sure that the fire didn't hurt him,' he said; and the way he said it stopped her breath for a moment.
The noise in her brain screamed up in an insane cacophony.
'You mean——'
'I mean—murder,' said the Saint.
II
'SEEING that time is flying,' said Peter Quentin, 'and since you have to attend an inquest this morning, I suppose you could use some extra nourishment.'
'How right you are,' said the Saint. 'Some people have no respect for anything. It's a gloomy thought. Even when you're dead, you're liable to be lugged out of the morgue at the squeak of dawn to have your guts poked over by some revoltingly healthy jury of red-faced yokels.'
'I like getting you up early,' said Patricia. 'It seems to lend a sort of ethereal delicacy to your ideas.'
Simon Templar grinned and watched Peter nipping the caps from a row of bottles of Carlsberg. As a matter of fact it was nearly ten o'clock, and for half an hour after breakfast they had been sitting in the sun on the porch outside Peter's dining room. Two days had gone by since the fire, and it would have been hard to identify the supremely elegant Saint who sprawled in Peter's most comfortable deck chair with the blistered smoke-blackened scarecrow who had arrived there in the small hours of a certain morning with his grim foreboding.
He took the tall glass
