Follow the Saint

told you,' said the Saint. 'We were looking for Hogs­botham.'

'Why should you be looking for him ?'

'Because he annoyed me. You remember. And we had to do something to pass the evening.'

'You could have gone to a movie.'

'What, and seen a picture about gangsters? You know what a demoralizing influence these pictures have. It might have put ideas into my head.'

'Of course,' she said. 'You didn't have any ideas about Hogsbotham.'

'Nothing very definite,' he admitted. 'We might have just wedged his mouth open and poured him full of gin, and then pushed him in the stage door of a leg show, or some­thing like that. Anyway, it didn't come to anything. We got into the wrong house, as you may have gathered. The bloke who told us the way said 'the fourth house', but it was too dark to see houses. I was counting entrances; but I didn't discover until afterwards that Verdean's place has one of those U-shaped drives, with an in and out gate, so I counted him twice. Hogsbotham's sty must have been the next house on. Verdean's house is called 'The Shutters', but the paint was so bad that I easily took it for 'The Snuggery'. After I'd made the mistake and got in there, I was more or less a pawn on the chessboard of chance. There was obviously some­thing about Verdean that wanted investigating, and the way things panned out it didn't look healthy to investigate him on the spot. So we just had to bring him away with us.'

'You didn't have to hit him so hard that he'd get con­cussion and lose his memory.'

Simon rubbed his chin.

'There's certainly something in that, darling. But it was all very difficult. It was too dark for me to see just what I was doing, and I was in rather a rush. However, it does turn out to be a bit of a snag.'

He had discovered the calamity the night before, after he had unloaded Verdean at his country house at Weybridge— he had chosen that secluded lair as a destination partly because it was only about five .miles from Chertsey, partly because it had more elaborate facilities for concealing cap­tives than his London apartment. The bank manager had taken an alarmingly long time to recover consciousness; and when he eventually came back to life it was only to vomit and moan unintelligibly. In between retchings his eyes wandered over his surroundings with a vacant stare into which even the use of his own name and the reminders of the plight from which he had been extracted could not bring a single flicker of response. Simon had dosed him with calomel and seda­tives and put him to bed, hoping that he would be back to normal in the morning; but he had awakened in very little better condition, clutching his head painfully and mumbling nothing but listless uncomprehending replies to any question he was asked.

He was still in bed, giving no trouble but serving abso­lutely no useful purpose as a source of information; and the Saint gazed out of the window at the morning sunlight lanc­ing through the birch and pine glade outside and frowned ruefully over the consummate irony of the impasse.

'I might have known there'd be something like this waiting for me when you phoned me to come down for breakfast,' said Patricia stoically. 'How soon are you expect­ing Teal?' .The Saint chuckled.

'He'll probably be sizzling in much sooner than we want him—a tangle like this wouldn't be complete without good old Claud Eustace. But we'll worry about that when it happens. Meanwhile, we've got one consolation. Comrade Verdean seems to be one of those birds who stuff everything in their pockets until the stitches begin to burst. I've been going over his collection of junk again, and it tells quite a story when you put it together.'

Half of the breakfast table was taken up with the pot­pourri of relics which he had extracted from various parts of the bank manager's clothing, now sorted out into neat piles. Simon waved a spoon at them.

'Look them over for yourself, Pat. Nearest to you, you've got a couple of interesting souvenirs. Hotel bills. One of 'em is where Mr Robert Verdean stayed in a modest semi­boardinghouse at Eastbourne for the first ten days of July. The other one follows straight on for the next five days; only it's from a swank sin-palace at Brighton, and