Follow the Saint

was waiting for. Blood—on the door.

II

SIMON STOOD for a moment, and his nerves seemed to grow even calmer and colder under an edge of sharp bitter­ness.

Then he grasped the doorknob again, turned it, and went in. The inside of the building was pitch dark. His torch needled the blackness with a thin jet of light that splashed dim reflections from the glossy varnish on a couple of punts and an electric canoe. Somehow he was quite sure what he would find, so sure that the certainty chilled off any rise of emotion. He knew what it must be; the only question was, who? Perhaps even that was not such a question. He was never quite sure about that. A hunch that had almost missed its mark had become stark reality with a suddenness that dis­jointed the normal co-ordinates of time and space: it was as if instead of discovering things, he was trying to remember things he had known before and had forgotten. But he saw her at last, almost tucked under the shadow of the electric canoe, lying on her side as if she were asleep.

He stepped over and bent his light steadily on her face, and knew then that he had been right. It was the girl with the troubled blue eyes. Her eyes were open now, only they were not troubled any more. The Saint stood and looked down at her. He had been almost sure when he saw the curly yellow hair. But she had been wearing a white blouse when he saw her last, and now there was a splotchy crimson pattern on the front of it. The pattern glistened as he looked at it.

Beside him, there was a noise like an asthmatic foghorn loosening up for a burst of song.

'Boss,' began Mr Uniatz.

'Shut up.'

The Saint's voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it cut like a razorblade. It cut Hoppy's introduction cleanly off from whatever he had been going to say; and at the same moment as he spoke Simon switched off his torch, so that it was as if the same tenuous whisper had sliced off even the ray of light, leaving nothing around them but blackness and silence.

Motionless in the dark, the Saint quested for any betraying breath of sound. To his tautened eardrums, sensitive as a wild animal's, the hushed murmurs of the night outside were still an audible background against which the slightest stealthy movement even at a considerable distance would have stood out like a bugle call. But he heard nothing then, though he waited for several seconds in uncanny stillness.

He switched on the torch again.

'Okay, Hoppy,' he said. 'Sorry to interrupt you, but that blood was so fresh that I wondered if someone mightn't still be around.'

'Boss,' said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly, 'I was doin' fine when ya stopped me.'

'Never mind,' said the Saint consolingly. 'You can go ahead now. Take a deep breath and start again.'

He was still partly listening for something else, wondering if even then the murderer might still be within range.

'It ain't no use now,' said Mr Uniatz dolefully.

'Are you going to get temperamental on me?' Simon demanded sufferingly. 'Because if so——'

Mr Uniatz shook his head.

'It ain't dat, boss. But you gotta start wit' a full bottle.'

Simon focused him through a kind of fog. In an obscure and apparently irrelevant sort of way, he became aware that Hoppy was still clinging to the bottle of Vat 69 with which he he been irrigating his tonsils at the Bell, and that he was holding it up against the beam of the flashlight as though brooding over the level of the liquid left in it. The Saint clutched at the buttresses of his mind.

'What