Hoppy inspected the exhibit again, dispassionately.
'No,' he admitted. He seemed mystified. Then a solution dawned dazzlingly upon him. 'Maybe she has her face lifted, boss,' he suggested luminously.
'Or maybe she isn't anybody's aunt,' Simon pointed out.
This kind of extravagant speculation was too much for Mr Uniatz. He was unable to gape effectively on account of the handkerchief over his mouth,, but the exposed area between the bridge of his nose and the brim of his hat hinted that the rest of his face was gaping.
'And maybe we've run into something,' said the Saint.
The rest of his mind was paying no attention to Hoppy's problems. He was not even taking much notice of the maid's panic-stricken eyes as they widened still further in mute terror at the conversation that was passing over her head. He was listening intently to the music that still racketed stridently in his eardrums, three times louder now that he was inside the house. There had been a time in the history of his multitudinous interests when he had had a spell of devotion to grand opera, and his ears were as analytically sensitive as those of a trained musician. And he was realizing, with a melodramatic suddenness that prickled the hairs on the nape of his neck, that the multisonous shrillness of the 'Ride of the Valkyries' had twice been mingled with a brief high-pitched shriek that Wagner had never written into the score.
His fingers closed for an instant on Hoppy's arm.
'Stay here a minute,' he said.
He went on past the trussed housemaid, out of the door on the far side of the kitchen. The screeching fanfares of music battered at him with redoubled savagery as he opened the door and emerged into the cramped over-furnished hall beyond it. Aside from its clutter of fretwork mirror-mountings, spindly umbrella stands and etceteras, and vapid Victorian chromos, it contained only the lower end of a narrow staircase and three other doors, one of which was the front entrance. Simon had subconsciously observed a serving hatch in the wall on his left as he opened the kitchen door, and on that evidence he automatically attributed the left-hand door in the hallway to the dining-room. He moved towards the right-hand door. And as he reached it the music stopped, in the middle of a bar, as if it had been sheared off with a knife, leaving the whole house stunned with stillness.
The Saint checked on one foot, abruptly conscious even of his breathing in the sudden quiet. He was less than a yard from the door that must have belonged to the living-room. Standing there, he heard the harsh rumble of a thick brutal voice on the other side of the door, dulled in volume but perfectly distinct.
'All right,' it said. 'That's just a sample. Now will you tell us what you did with that dough, or shall we play some more music?'
III
SIMON LOWERED his spare foot to the carpet, and bent his leg over it until he was down on one knee. From that position he could peer through the keyhole and get a view of part of the room.
Directly across from him, a thin small weasel-faced man stood over a radiogram beside the fireplace. A cigarette dangled limply from the corner of his mouth, and the eyes that squinted through the smoke drifting past his face were beady and emotionless like a snake's. Simon placed the lean cruel face almost instantly in his encyclopedic mental records of the population of the underworld, and the recognition walloped into his already tottering awareness to register yet another item in the sequence of surprise punches that his phenomenal resilience was trying to stand up to. The weasel-faced man's name was Morris Dolf; and he was certainly no kind of guest for anyone with the reputation of Ebenezer Hogsbotham to entertain.
The Saint's survey slid off him on to the man who sat in front of the fireplace. This was someone whom the Saint did not recognize, and he knew he was not Mr Hogsbotham. He was a man with thin sandy hair and a soft plump face that would have fitted very nicely on somebody's pet rabbit. At the moment it was a very frightened rabbit. The man sat in a stiff-backed chair placed on the hearthrug, and pieces of clothesline had been used to keep him there. His arms had been stretched round behind him and tied at the back of the chair so that his shoulders were hunched slightly forward by the strain. His shirt had
