Saint doesn't work that way. No, Inspector. Let him get in. He won't find it so easy to get out again. And then I'll be very glad to send for you.'
Fernack argued, but Vascoe was obstinate. He almost succeeded in convincing the detective of the soundness of his reasoning. There would be no triumph or glory in merely preventing the Saint from getting near the house, but to catch him red-handed would be something else again. Nevertheless, Fernack would have felt happier if he could have convinced himself that the Saint was possible to catch.
'At least, you'd better let me post one of my own men outside,' he said.
'You will do nothing of the sort,' Vascoe said curtly. 'The Saint would recognize him a mile off. The police have had plenty of opportunities to catch him before this and I don't remember your making any brilliant use of them.'
Fernack left the house in an even sourer temper than he had entered it, and if he had been a private individual he would have satisfied himself that anything that happened to Vascoe or his art treasures would be richly deserved. Unfortunately his duty didn't allow him to dispose of the matter so easily. He had another stormy interview with the Assistant Commissioner, who for the first time in history was sympathetic.
'You've done everything you could, Mr Fernack,'
he said. 'If Vascoe refuses to give us any assistance he can't expect much.'
'The trouble is that if anything goes wrong, that won't stop him squawking,' Fernack said gloomily.
Of all the persons concerned, Simon Templar was probably the most untroubled. For two days he peacefully followed the trivial rounds of his normal law-abiding life; and the plain-clothes men whom Fernack had set to watch him, in spite of his instructions, grew bored with their vigil.
At about two o'clock in the morning of the third day his telephone rang.
'This is Miss Vascoe's chauffeur, sir,' said the caller. 'She couldn't reach a telephone herself so she asked me to speak to you. She said that she must see you.'
Simon's blood ran a shade faster--he had been half expecting such a call.
'When and where?' he asked crisply.
'If you can be at the second traffic light going north in Central Park in an hour's time, sir--she'll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away.'
'Tell her I'll be there,' said the Saint.
He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement a man paced wearily up and down, as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.
But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth's existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Fifty-second Street and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered thoroughfare, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming headwaiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the late floor show for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth,'noting with a practised eye that he had still left three quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a check, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom, after half an hour he began to sweat, and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn't remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn't in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago because he had left him two dollars to pay the waiter.
An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint's address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o'clock he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy; but by then it was too late.
Inspector Fernack's eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe's drawing room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Earl of Eastridge, an assortment of servants and the night guard from Ingerbeck's.
'I might have known what to expect,' he complained savagely. 'You wouldn't help me to prevent anything like this happening but after it's happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It 'd serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now----'
He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.
The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture--sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banter-ingly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl and smiled over the rest of the congregation.
'Hullo, souls,' he murmured. 'I heard I'd won my bet, so I toddled over to make sure.'
For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrifaction, and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.
'There you are,' he burst out incoherently. 'You come here--you----There's your man, Inspector. Arrest him!'
Fernack's mouth clamped up again.
'You don't have to tell me,' he said grimly.
'And just why,' Simon inquired lazily, as the detective moved towards him, 'am I supposed to be arrested?'
'Why?' screamed the millionaire. 'You--you stand there and ask why? I'll tell you why! Because you've been too clever for once, Mr Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you've done it-- and now you're going to prison where you belong!'
The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Fernack was dragging from his pocket. '
'Those are harsh words, Comrade,' he remarked reproachfully. 'Very harsh. In fact, I'm not sure that they wouldn't be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?'
'I'll tell you why.' Fernack spoke. 'Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while.' He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. 'When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase and taken about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn't resist leaving his signature.' He jerked out a piece of Vascoe's own note-paper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. 'You wouldn't recognize it, would you?' Fernack jeered sarcastically.
Even so, his voice was louder than it need have been. For, in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn't make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint's critical eyes rest on the drawing.
'Oh yes,' said the Saint patiently. 'I can see what it's meant to be. And now I suppose you'd like me to give an account of my movements last night.'
'If you're thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis,' Fernack said incandescently, 'let me tell you before you start that I've already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you--just about the time that this job was done.'
Simon nodded.
'You see,' he said, 'I had a phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently and I was to meet her at the second traffic light going north in Central Park.'
The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.
'But Simon--I didn't----'
Her hand flew to her mouth.
Fernack's eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.
'That's fine,' he said exultantly. 'And Miss Vascoe doesn't know anything about it. So who else is going to
