it back in the pocket at his hip, slowly and deliberately and holding it lightly, so that his hand was never completely out of sight and a nervous man would have no cause to be alarmed at the movement. He had another gun in that pocket, a light but beautifully balanced Walther; but for the time being he left it there, sliding the cigarette case in behind it and bringing his hand back empty to get out his lighter.
'I'm afraid we weren't expecting to be held up in a place like this,' he remarked apologetically. 'So we left the family jools at home. If you'd only let us know——'
'Don't be funny. If you don't want to be turned over to the police you'd better let
The Saint's brows shifted a fraction of an inch.
'I don't see what difference it makes to you, brother,' he said slowly. 'But if you're really interested, we were just taking a stroll in the moonlight to work up an appetite for dinner, and we happened to see the door of this place open
'So that's why you both had to pull out guns when you heard us.'
'My dear bloke,' Simon argued reasonably, 'what do you expect anyone to do when you creep up behind them and start sending bullets whistling round their heads ?'
There was a moment's silence.
The girl gasped.
The man spluttered: 'Good God you've got a nerve! After you blazed away at us like that—why, you might have killed one of us!'
The Saint's eyes strained uselessly to pierce beyond the light. There was an odd hollow feeling inside him, making his frown unnaturally rigid.
Something was going wrong. Something was going as immortally cockeyed as it was possible to go. It was taking him a perceptible space of time to grope for a bearing in the reeling void. Somewhere the scenario had gone as paralysingly off the rails as if a Wagnerian soprano had bounced into a hotcha dance routine in the middle of
'Look,' he said. 'Let's be quite clear about this. Is your story going to be that you thought I took a shot at you?'
'I don't have to think,' retorted the other. 'I heard the bullet whizz past my head. Go on—get back in that boat-house.'
Simon dawdled back.
His brain felt as if it was steaming. The voice behind the light, now that he was analysing its undertones, had a tense unsophistication that didn't belong in the script at all. And the answers it gave were all wrong. Simon had had it all figured out one ghostly instant before it began to happen. The murderer hadn't just killed Nora Prescott and faded away, of course. He had killed her and waited outside, knowing that Simon Templar must find her in a few minutes, knowing that that would be his best chance to kill the Saint as well and silence whatever the Saint knew already and recover the letter. That much was so obvious that he must have been asleep not to have seen it from the moment when his eyes fell on the dead girl. Well, he had seen it now. And yet it wasn't clicking. The dialogue was all there, and yet every syllable was striking a false note.
And he was back inside the boathouse, as far as he could go, with the square bow of a punt against his calves and Hoppy beside him.
The man's voice said: 'Turn a light on, Rosemary.'
The girl came round and found a switch. Light broke out from a naked bulb that hung by a length of flex from one of the rafters, and the young man in the striped blazer flicked off his torch.
'Now,' he started to say, 'we'll——'
