convenient. Well, so he knew she'd got in touch with me, and he'd made up his mind to kill her. Then why not kill her before she even got to the Bell ? She might have talked to me there, and he couldn't have stopped her—could he ? Was he betting that she wouldn't risk talking to me in public? He could have been. Good psychology, but the hell of a nerve to bet on it. Did he find out she'd written to me ? Then I'd probably still have the letter. If I found her murdered, he'd expect me to go to the police with it. Dangerous. And he knew I'd find her. Then why——'
The Saint felt something like an inward explosion as he realized what his thoughts were leading to. He knew then why half of his brain had never ceased to listen—searching for what intuition had scented faster than reason.
Goose-pimples crawled up his spine on to the back of his neck.
And at the same moment he heard the sound.
It was nothing that any other man might have heard at all. Only the gritting of a few tiny specks of gravel between a stealthy shoe sole and the board stage outside. But it was what every nerve in his body had unwittingly been keyed for ever since he had seen the dead girl at his feet. It was what he inevitably had to hear, after everything else that had happened. It spun him round like a jerk of the string wound round a top.
He was in the act of turning when the gun spoke.
Its bark was curt and flat and left an impression of having been curiously thin, though his ears rang with it afterwards. The bullet zipped past his ear like a hungry mosquito; and from the hard fierce note that it hummed he knew that if he had not been starting to turn at the very instant when it was fired it would have struck him squarely in the head. Pieces of shattered glass rattled on the floor.
Lights smashed into his eyes as he whirled at the door, and a clear clipped voice snapped at him: 'Drop that gun! You haven't got a chance!'
The light beam beat on him with blinding intensity from the lens of a pocket searchlight that completely swallowed up the slim ray of his own torch. He knew that he hadn't a chance. He could have thrown bullets by guesswork; but to the man behind the glare he was a target on which patterns could be punched out.
Slowly his fingers opened off the big Luger, and it plonked on the boards at his feet.
His hand swept across and bent down the barrel of the automatic which Mr Uniatz had whipped out like lightning when the first shot crashed between them.
'You too, Hoppy,' he said resignedly. 'All that Scotch will run away if they make a hole in you now.'
'Back away,' came the next order.
Simon obeyed.
The voice said: 'Go on, Rosemary—pick up the guns. I'll keep 'em covered.'
A girl came forward into the light. It was the dark slender girl whose quiet loveliness had unsteadied Simon's breath at the Bell.
III
SHE BENT over and collected the two guns by the butts, holding them aimed at Simon and Hoppy, not timidly, but with a certain stiffness which told the Saint's expert eye the feel of them was unfamiliar. She moved backwards and disappeared again behind the light.
'Do you mind,' asked the Saint ceremoniously, 'if I smoke ?'
'I don't care.' The clipped voice, he realized now, could only have belonged to the young man in the striped blazer. 'But don't try to start anything, or I'll let you have it. Go on back in there.'
The Saint didn't move at once. He took out his cigarette case first, opened it, and selected a cigarette. The case came from his breast pocket, but he put
