did it?'
'Dunno. Probably same as—Nora. Heard Forrest . .
'Where did he go?'
Quintus seemed to be in a daze through which outside promptings only reached him in the same form as outside noises reach the brain of a sleepwalker. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to retain some sort of consciousness, but his eyes were half closed and his words were thick and rambling, as if he were dead drunk.
'Suppose Forrest was—going to his room—for something. . . . Caught murderer—sneaking about. . . . Murderer —stabbed him.... I heard him yell. ... Rushed out. ... Got hit with—something.... Be all right—soon. Catch him——'
'Well, where did he go?'
Simon shook him, roughly slapped up the sagging head.
The doctor's chest heaved as though it were taking part in his terrific struggle to achieve coherence. He got his eyes wide open.
'Don't worry about me,' he whispered with painful clarity. 'Look after—Mr Chase.'
His eyelids fluttered again.
Simon let him go against the wall, and he slid down almost to a sitting position, clasping his head in his hands.
The Saint balanced his Luger in his hand, and his eyes were narrowed to chips of sapphire hardness. He glanced up and down the corridor. From where he stood, he could see the length of both passages which formed the arms of the T-plan of the landing. The arm on his right finished with a glimpse of the banisters of a staircase leading down— obviously the back stairs whose existence the butler had admitted, at the foot of which Hoppy Uniatz must already have taken up his post. But there had been no sound of disturbance from that direction. Nor had there been any sound from the front hall where he had left Rosemary Chase with the butler. And there was no other normal way out for anyone who was upstairs. The left-hand corridor, where he stood, ended in a blank wall; and only one door along it was open.
Simon stepped past the doctor and over Forrest's body, and went silently to the open door.
He came to it without any of the precautions that he had taken before exposing himself a few moments before. He had a presentiment amounting to conviction that they were unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness that the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he entered the house. Therefore anyone who wanted to could have shot at him from outside long ago. No one had shot at him. Therefore—
He was looking into a large white-painted airy bedroom. The big double bed was empty, but the covers were thrown open and rumpled. The table beside it was loaded with medicine bottles. He opened the doors in the two side-walls. One belonged to a spacious built-in cupboard filled with clothing; the other was a bathroom. The wall opposite the entrance door was broken by long casement windows, most of them wide open. He crossed over to one of them and looked out. Directly beneath him was the flat roof of a porch.
The Saint put his gun back in its holster, and felt an unearthly cold dry calm sinking through him. Then he climbed out over the sill on to the porch roof below, which almost formed a kind of blind balcony under the window. He stood there recklessly, knowing that he was silhouetted against the light behind, and lighted a cigarette with leisured, tremorless hands. He sent a cloud of blue vapour drifting towards the stars; and then with the same leisured passivity he sauntered to the edge of the balustrade, sat on it, and swung his legs over. From there it was an easy drop on to the parapet which bordered the terrace along the front of the house, and an even easier drop from the top of the parapet to the ground. To an active man, the return journey would not present much more difficulty.
He paused long enough to draw another lungful of night air and tobacco smoke, and then strolled on along the terrace. It was an eerie experience, to know that he was an easy target every time he passed a lighted window, to remember that
