able to pick a few awkward holes in this one. But don't begin thinking we've got rid of him for keeps. He's just gone away now to see if he can stop up the holes again and put some more iron in the evidence, and he's sore enough to work overtime at it. He's going to be three times as dangerous from now on. Worse than that, he's not so dumb that he isn't going to put two and two together about all this commotion around Verdean coming right on top of the robbery. You can bet the Crown Jewels to a showgirl's virtue that he's already figured out that Verdean was mixed up in it in some way. While we're stuck with Verdean, and Verdean is stuck with amnesia.' The Saint closed the front door with sombre finality. 'Which is the hell of a layout from any angle,' he said. 'Tell Orace to bring me a large mug of beer, darling, because I think I am going to have a headache.'
His headache lasted through a lunch which Orace indignantly served even later than he had served breakfast, but it brought forth very little to justify itself. He had gone over the facts at his disposal until he was sick of them, and they fitted together with a complete and sharply focused deductive picture that Sherlock Holmes himself could not have improved on, without a hiatus or a loose end anywhere— only the picture merely showed a plump rabbit-faced man slinking off with fifteen thousand pounds in a bag, and neglected to show where he went with it. Which was the one detail in which Simon Templar was most urgently interested. He was always on the side of the angels, he told himself, but he had to remember that sanctity had its own overhead to meet.
Verdean showed no improvement in the afternoon. Towards five o'clock the Saint had a flash of inspiration, and put in a long-distance call to a friend in Wolverhampton.
'Dr Turner won't be back till tomorrow morning, and I'm afraid I don't know how to reach him,' said the voice at the other end of the wire; and the flash flickered and died out at the sound. 'But I can give you Dr Young's number——'
'I am not having a baby,' said the Saint coldly, and hung up.
He leaned back in his chair and said, quietly and intensely: 'God damn.'
'You should complain,' said Patricia. 'You Mormon.'
She had entered the study from the hall, and closed the door again behind her. The Saint looked up from under mildly interrogative brows.
'I knew you adored me,' he said, 'but you have an original line of endearing epithets. What's the origin of this one?'
'Blonde,' she said, 'and voluptuous in a careful way. Mushy lips and the-old-baloney eyes. I'll bet she wears black lace undies and cuddles like a kitten. She hasn't brought the baby with her, but she's probably got a picture of it.'
The Saint straightened.
'Not Angela?' he ventured breathlessly.
'I'm not so intimate with her,' said Patricia primly. 'But she gave the name of Miss Lindsay. You ought to recognize your own past when it catches up with you.'
Simon stood up slowly. He glanced at the closed section of the bookcase, beyond which was the secret room where Hoppy Uniatz was still keeping watch over Mr Verdean and a case of Vat 69; and his eyes were suddenly filled with an unholy peace.
'I do not recognize her, darling, now I think about it,' he said. 'This is the one who had the twins.' He gripped her arm, and his smile wavered over her in a flicker of ghostly excitement. 'I ought to have known that she'd catch up with me. And I think this is the break I've been waiting for all day....'
He went into the living-room with a new quickness in his step and a new exhilaration sliding along his nerves. Now that this new angle had developed, he was amazed that he had not been expecting it from the beginning. He had considered every other likely eventuality, but not this one; and yet this was the most obvious one of all. Kaskin and Dolf knew who he was, and some of his addresses were to be found in various directories that were at the disposal of anyone who could read: it was not seriously plausible that after the night before they would decide to give up their loot and go away and forget about it, and once they had made up their minds to attempt a comeback it could only have been a matter of time before they looked for him in Weybridge. The only thing he might not have anticipated was that they would send Angela Lindsay in to open the interview. That was a twist
