covers the sojourn of a Mr and Mrs Jones who seem to have consumed a large amount of champagne during their stay. If you had a low mind like mine, you might begin to jump to a few conclusions about Comrade Verdean's last vocation.'
'I could get ideas.'
'Then the feminine handkerchief—a pretty little sentimental souvenir, but rather compromising.'
Patricia picked it up and sniffed it.
'Night of Sin,' she said with a slight grimace.
'Is that what it's called? I wouldn't know. But I do know that it's the same smell that the blonde floozie brought in with her last night. Her name is Angela Lindsay; and she has quite a reputation in the trade for having made suckers out of a lot of guys who should have been smarter than Comrade Verdean.'
She nodded.
'What about the big stack of letters. Are they love-letters?'
'Not exactly. They're bookmaker's accounts. And the little book on top of them isn't a heart-throb diary—it's a betting diary. The name on all of 'em is Joseph Mackintyre. And you'll remember from an old adventure of ours that Comrade Mackintyre has what you might call an elastic conscience about his bookmaking. The story is all there,, figured down to pennies. Verdean seems to have started on the sixth of July, and he went off with a bang. By the middle of the month he must have wondered why he ever bothered to work in a bank. I'm not surprised he had champagne every night at Brighton—it was all free. But the luck started to change after that. He had fewer and fewer winners, and he went on plunging more and more heavily. The last entry in the diary, a fortnight ago, left him nearly five thousand pounds in the red. Your first name doesn't have to be Sherlock to put all those notes together and make a tune.'
Patricia's sweet face was solemn with thought.
'Those two men,' she said. 'Dolf and Kaskin. You knew them. What's their racket?'
'Morrie was one of Snake Canning's sparetime boys once. He's dangerous. Quite a sadist, in his nasty little way. You could hire him for anything up to murder, at a price; but he really enjoys his work. Kaskin has more brains, though. He's more versatile. Confidence work, the old badger game, living off women, protection rackets—he's had a dab at all of them. He's worked around racetracks quite a bit, too, doping horses and intimidating jockeys and bookmakers and so forth, which makes him an easy link with Mackintyre. His last stretch was for manslaughter. But bank robbery is quite a fancy flight even for him. He must have been getting ideas.'
Patricia's eyes turned slowly towards the morning paper in which the holdup at Staines still had a place in the headlines.
'You mean you think——'
'I think our guardian angel is still trying to take care of us,' said the Saint; and all the old impenitent mischief that she knew too well was shimmering at the edges of his smile. 'If only we knew a cure for amnesia, I think we could be fifteen thousand pounds richer before bedtime. Add it up for yourself while I take another look at the patient.'
He got up from the table and went through to the study which adjoined the dining-room. It was a rather small, comfortably untidy room, and the greater part of its walls were lined with built-in bookshelves. When he went in, one tier of shelving about two feet wide stood open like a door; beyond it, there appeared to be a narrow passage. The passage was actually a tiny cell, artificially lighted and windowless, but perfectly ventilated through a grating that connected with the air-conditioning system which served the rest of the house. The cell was no more than a broad gap between the solid walls of the room on either side of it, so ingeniously squeezed into the architecture of the house that it would have taken a clever surveyor many hours of work with a footrule to discover its existence. It had very little more than enough room for the cot, in which Verdean lay, and the table
