the lock. And that's when you realize that an expert might be able to turn the key from the outside—in other words, when you're really thinking hard along the lines of a pretty determined attempt to get at you.'
'He might have been tight when he went to bed,' Peter pointed out. 'That would account for almost any weird thing he did. And besides that, it might account for him not hearing the fire alarm.'
'It might,' said the Saint bluntly. 'But while you're at it, why don't you think of the other possibility? Suppose he didn't lock the door at all. Suppose somebody else did ?'
They were silent again.
'Go on,' said Patricia.
Simon looked at her.
'Two: during all the time we were there, did you see any signs of a servant?'
'It might have been their night out.'
'Yes. And with a house that size, there must have been several of them. And Fairweather let them all go out together, on a Saturday night, when he had a house full of week-end guests. And Valerie Woodchester cooked the dinner, and Lady Sangore washed the dishes. Why don't we make up some more brilliant theories? Maybe the servants were all burnt in the fire, too, only nobody thought of mentioning it.'
Peter sipped his beer abstractedly.
'What else?'
'Three: when we arrived, every door and window that I could see on the ground floor was wide open. Let me try and save your brains some of this fearful strain. Maybe that was because everybody who heard the alarm rushed out through a different window. Or maybe it was because they always went to bed with the ground-floor windows open so that if any burglars wanted to drop in they wouldn't have to break the glass. Of course that's much more likely than that somebody wanted a good draught to make sure that the fire would burn up nice and fast.'
This time there was no comment.
'Point four,' said the Saint quietly, 'is only Luker. The man who ties Sangore and Fairweather together. And the man who perfectly represents the kind of bee that Kennet had in his bonnet. . . . Do you really think I'm insane, or doesn't it all seem like too many coincidences even to you?'
They didn't answer. Incredulity, a traditional habit of mind, even in spite of the years that they had spent in wild pursuit of the fantastic visions that steered the Saint's iconoclastic path, struggled desperately against the implications of belief. It would have been so much easier, so much more soothing, to let suspicion be lulled away by the uncritical rationalizations of ingrained convention, when to accept what the Saint argued meant something so ominous and horrible that the mind instinctively recoiled from dwelling on it. But it seemed as if the unclouded sunlight darkened behind the Saint's tall, disturbing figure while the echoes of his last words ran on through their protesting brains.
Mr Uniatz removed the neck of the bottle from his mouth with a faint squuck. The intermediate stages of the conversation had left as dim a blur on his consciousness as a discourse on the quantum theory would have left on an infants' class in arithmetic; but he had been told to think something over and he had been bravely obeying orders, even though thinking was an activity which always gave him a dull pain behind the eyes.
'Boss,' he said, in a sudden wild bulge of inspiration, 'I got it. It's some temperance outfit.'
Simon blinked at him. There were occasions when the strange processes that went on inside the skull of Mr Uniatz were too occult even for him.
'What is?' he asked fearfully.
'De guys in de
