'He means your harem candidates,' said Patricia. 'The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn't given way to your manly charms.'
Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.
'She's tough, all right,' he said. 'But I don't know how tough. She'll need all she's got to sit in on this game. She's sitting in, and I'm still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home.'
'You started to get somewhere, then,' said Peter.
The Saint nodded.
'Oh yes, I started. But I didn't finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though—I found that out, even if she didn't admit it. But she's going to play her own hand; and so she'll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult.'
He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.
'God damn it,' he said quietly, 'it's a complete and perfect setup—with only the foundation missing. I've worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have, too. We'll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece.'
'All right,' said Peter. 'You run over it. We like hearing you listen to yourself.'
'Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather—two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respectability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time
'And so soothing,' said Peter. 'Especially for the corpses.'
'Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence —either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie's psychology.'
'I thought we should come to that eventually,' said Patricia.
Simon threw a cushion at her.
'She's not a bad kid, really,' he said. 'But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit—possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She's absent-mindedly gone just a little further than she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she's got
