Follow the Saint

tomorrow——'

The Saint shook his head, and his eyes were glacially blue.

'You had your chance, and you passed it up. I shall help myself to the money.' He saw the other's eyes shift fraction­ally to the safe in the corner, and laughed softly. 'Give me the keys, Henry.'

The Baron hesitated a moment before he moved.

Then he put his hand slowly into his trouser pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys on a platinum chain. He detached them and threw them on to the desk.

'You have the advantage, Mr Templar,' he said smoothly. 'I give you the keys because you could easily take them yourself if I refused. But you're very foolish. There are only about three thousand pounds in the safe. Why not be sensible and wait until the morning ?'

'In the morning you'll be too busy trying to put up a defence at the police court to think about me,' said the Saint coldly.

He moved towards the desk; but he did not pick up the keys at once. His eyes strayed to the sheet of paper in the typewriter; and yet they did it in such a way that the Baron still knew that the first move he made would call shattering death out of the trim unwavering automatic,

Simon read:

In conjunction with numbers 4, 10, and 16 you will proceed at once to Cheltenham and establish close watch on Sir Roland Hale who is on holiday there. Within 24 hours you will send report on the method by which urgent War Office messages—

Simon's eyes returned to the Baron's face.

'What more evidence do you think Chief Inspector Teal will need ?' he said.

'With a name like mine?' came the scornful answer. 'When I tell them that you held me at the point of a gun while you wrote that message on my typewriter——'

'I'm sure they'll be very polite,' said the Saint. 'Especially when they find that yours are the only fingerprints on the keys.'

'If you made me write it under compulsion——'

'And the orders in the packets of Miracle Tea which numbers six, fourteen, and twenty-seven are going to buy tonight came from the same machine.'

The Baron moistened his lips.

'Let us talk this over,' he said.

The Saint said: 'You talk.'

He picked up the telephone and dialled 'O'.

He said: 'I want to make a call to France—Radio Cal­vados.'

The Baron swallowed.

'Wait a minute,' he said desperately. 'I——'

'Incidentally,' said the Saint, 'there'll be a record that you had a call to Radio Calvados this evening, and probably on lots of other evenings as well. And I'm sure we shall find that Henry Osbett moustache of yours somewhere in the house—not to mention the beard you wore when you were dealing with Red McGuire. I suppose you needed some thug outside the organization in case you wanted to deal drastically with any of the ordinary members, but you picked the wrong man in Red. He doesn't like hot curling-irons.'

Inescu's fists clenched until the knuckles were bleached. His face had gone pale under its light tan.