had remembered the key and used it to find what should have been an unsuspectable hiding place for his booty. He went on talking about it. ...
'He is like dis ever since he wakes up,' Hoppy explained, edging proudly in behind him.
The Saint nodded. He did not feel any pity. Robert Verdean was just another man who had strayed unsuccessfully into the paths of common crime; and even though he he had been deliberately led astray, the mess that he was in now was directly traceable to nothing but his own weakness and cupidity. In such matters, Simon Templar saved his sympathy for more promising cases.
'Put his clothes back on him,' he said. 'We'll take him along too. Your operation was miraculous, Hoppy, but the patient is somewhat liable to die; and we don't want to be stuck with his body.'
Patricia was sitting on the study desk when he emerged again, and she looked at him with sober consideration.
'I don't want to bore you with the subject,' she said, 'but are you still sure you haven't gone off your rocker?'
'Perfectly sure,' he said. 'I was never rocking so smoothly in my life.'
'Well, do you happen to remember anyone by the name of Teal?'
He took her arm and chuckled.
'No I haven't forgotten. But I don't think he'll be ready for this. He may have ideas about keeping an eye on me, but he won't be watching for Verdean, Not here, anyway. Hell, he's just searched the house from top to bottom and convinced himself that we haven't got Verdean here, however much he may be wondering what else we've done with him. And it's getting dark already. By the time we're ready to go, it'll be easy. There may be a patrol car or a motor cycle cop waiting down the road to get on our tail if we go out, but that'll be all. We'll drive around the country a bit first and lose them. And then we will go into this matter of our old age pensions.'
She might have been going to say some more. But she didn't. Her mouth closed again, and a little hopeless grimace that was almost a smile at the same time passed over her lips. Her blue eyes summed up a story that it has already taken all the volumes of the Saint Saga to tell in words. And she kissed him.
'All right, skipper,' she said quietly. 'I must be as crazy as you are, or I shouldn't be here. We'll do that.'
He shook his head, holding her.
'So we shall. But not you.'
'But——'
'I'm sorry, darling. I was talking about two other guys. You're going to stay out of it, because we're going to need you on the outside. Now, in a few minutes I'm going to call Peter, and then I'm going to try and locate Claud Eustace; and if I can get hold of both of them in time the campaign will proceed as follows. . . .'
He told it in quick cleancut detail, so easily and lucidly that it seemed to be put together with no more effort than it took to understand and remember it. But that was only one of the tricks that sometimes made the Saint's triumphs seem deceptively facile. Behind that apparently random improvisation there was the instant decision and almost supernatural foresightedness of a strategic genius which in another age might have conquered empires as debonairly as in this twentieth century it had conquered its own amazing empire among thieves. And Patricia Holm was a listener to whom very few explanations had to be made more than once.
Hoppy Uniatz was a less gifted audience. The primitive machinery of conditioned reflexes which served him for some of the simpler functions of a brain had never been designed for one-shot lubrication. Simon had to go over the same ground with him at least three times before the scowl of agony smoothed itself out of Mr Uniatz's rough-hewn facade, indicating that the torture of concentration was over and the idea had finally taken root inside his skull, where at least it could be relied upon to remain with the solidity of an amalgam filling in a well-excavated molar.
The evening papers arrived before they left, after the hectic preliminaries
