'Giulio!' Simon exclaimed. The voice was familiar now, but its complete unexpectedness had prevented him from recognizing it before. 'It seems to be about sixteen years since I saw you—and I never came back for dinner.'
'That's quite all right, Mr Templar. I didn't expect you, when I knew what had happened. I only called up now because it's getting late and I didn't know if you would want a room for tonight.'
The Saint's brows drew together.
'What the hell is this?' he demanded slowly. 'Have you taken up crystal-gazing, or something?'
Giulio Trapani chuckled.
'No, I am not any good at that. The police sergeant stopped here on his way back, and he told me. He said you had got mixed up with a murder, and Miss Chase had taken you home with her. So, of course, I knew you would be very busy. Has she asked you to stay ?'
'Let me call you back in a few minutes, Giulio,' said the Saint. 'Things have been happening, and I've got to get hold of the police again.' He paused, and a thought struck him. 'Look, is Sergeant Jesser still there, by any chance ?'
There was no answer.
Simon barked: 'Hullo.'
Silence. He jiggled the hook. The movements produced no corresponding clicks in his ear. He waited a moment longer, while he realized that the stillness of the receiver was not the stillness of a broken connection, but a complete inanimate muteness that stood for something less easily remedied than that.
He hung the receiver up and traced the course of the wiring with his eyes. It ran along the edge of the wainscoting to the frame of the front door, and disappeared into a hole bored at the edge of the wood. Simon turned right round with another abrupt realization. He was alone in the hall—the butler was no longer in sight.
He slipped his pencil flashlight out of his breast pocket with his left hand, and let himself out of the front door. The telephone wires ran up outside along the margin of the doorframe, and continued up over the exterior wall. The beam of his torch followed them up, past a lighted window over the porch from which he had climbed down a few minutes ago, to where they were attached to a pair of porcelain insulators under the eaves. Where the wires leading on from the insulators might once have gone was difficult to decide: they dangled slackly downwards now, straddling the balcony and trailing away into the darkness of the drive.
The Saint switched off his light and stood motionless. Then.he flitted across the terrace, crossed the drive, and merged himself into the shadow of a big clump of laurels on the edge of the lawn. Again he froze into breathless immobility. The blackness ahead of him was Stygian, impenetrable, even to his noctambulant eyes, but hearing would serve his temporary purpose almost as well as sight. The night had fallen so still that he could even hear the rustle of the distant river; and he waited for minutes that seemed like hours to him, and must have seemed like weeks to a guilty prowler who could not have travelled very far after the wires were broken. And while he waited, he was trying to decide at exactly what point in his last speech the break had occurred. It could easily have happened at a place where Trapani would think he had finished and rung off. . . But he heard nothing while he stood there—not the snap of a twig or the rustle of a leaf.
He went back to the drawing-room and found the butler standing there, wringing his hands in a helpless sort of way.
'Where have you been?' he inquired coldly.
The man's loose bloodhound jowls wobbled.
'I went to fetch my wife, sir,' He indicated the stout red-faced woman who was kneeling beside the couch, chafing the girl's nerveless wrists. 'To see if she could help Miss Chase.'
Simon's glance flickered over the room like a rapier blade, and settled pricklingly on an open french
