BALANCED ON a knife-edge of uncanny self-control, the Saint stood motionless, watching the girl's expression for a full long second before she turned away with a gasp and rushed at the door. Hoppy Uniatz flung himself after her like a wild bull awakened from slumber: he could have remained comatose through eons of verbal fencing, but this was a call to action, clear and unsullied, and such simple clarions had never found him unresponsive. Simon started the thin edge of an instant later than either of them; but it was his hand that reached the doorknob first.
He threw the door wide and stepped out with a smooth combination of movements that brought him through the opening with a gun in his hand and his eyes streaking over the entire scene outside in one whirling survey. But the hall was empty. At the left and across from him, the front door was closed; at the opposite end, a door which obviously communicated with the service wing of the house was thrown open to disclose the portly emerging figure of the butler with the white frightened faces of other servants peering from behind him.
The Saint's glance swept on upwards. The noises that had brought him out had come from upstairs, he was certain: that was also the most likely place for them to have come from, and it was only habitual caution that had made him pause to scan the hall as he reached it. He caught the girl's arm as she came by him.
'Let me go up first,' he said. He blocked Hoppy's path on his other side, and shot a question across at the butler without raising his voice. 'Are there any other stairs, Jeeves?'
'Y-yes, sir——'
'All right. You stay here with Miss Chase. Hoppy, you find those back stairs and cover them.'
He raced on up the main stairway.
As he took the treads three at a time, on his toes, he was trying to find a niche for one fact of remarkable interest. Unless Rosemary Chase was the greatest natural actress that a generation of talent scouts had overlooked, or unless his own judgment had gone completely cockeyed, the interruption had hit her with the same chilling shock as it had given him. It was to learn that that he had stayed to study her face before he moved: he was sure that he would have caught any shadow of deception, and yet if there had really been no shadow there to catch it meant that something had happened for which she was totally unprepared. And that in its turn might mean that all his suspicions of her were without foundation. It gave a jolt to the theories he had begun to put together that threw them into new and fascinating outlines, and he reached the top of the stairs with a glint of purely speculative delight shifting behind the grim alertness of his eyes.
From the head of the staircase the landing opened off in the shape of a squat long-armed T. All the doors that he saw at first were closed; he strode lightly to the junction of the two arms, and heard a faint movement down the left-hand corridor. Simon took a breath, and jumped out on a quick slant that would have been highly disconcerting to any marksman who might have been waiting for him round the corner. But there was no marksman.
The figures of two men were piled together on the floor, in the middle of a sickening mess; and only one of them moved.
The one who moved was Dr Quintus, who was groggily trying to scramble up to his feet as the Saint reached him. The one who lay still was Jim Forrest; and Simon did not need to look at him twice to see that his stillness was permanent. The mess was blood—pools and gouts and splashes of blood, in hideous quantity, puddling on the floor, dripping down the walls, soddening the striped blazer and mottling the doctor's clothes. The gaping slash that split Forrest's throat from ear to ear had almost decapitated him.
The Saint's stomach turned over once. Then he was grasping the doctor's arm and helping him up. There was so much blood on him that Simon couldn't tell what his injuries might be.
'Where are you hurt ?' he snapped.
The other shook his head muzzily. His weight was leaden on Simon's supporting grip.
'Not me,' he mumbled hoarsely. 'All right. Only hit me—on the head. Forrest——'
'Who
