The Saint Steps In

'That's a fair question,' said the Saint. 'I have some quaint reasons of my own for believing that this invention may have more in it than you think. If that's true, I'm as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there's any fake about it, I'm still interested—from another angle. And from that angle, I'd be even more interested if the invention was really good and there was a powerful and well-organized campaign of skullduggery going on to prevent any­thing being done about it.'

'Why?'

'I've told you my name. But perhaps you'd know me better if I said—the Saint.'

Imberline's cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no change of color in the florid face. No—Frank Imberline, with or with­out a guilty conscience, wasn't panicked by shadows. He stared back at the Saint, without blinking, puffing smoke out of the side of his mouth in intermittent clouds.

'You're a crook,' he said.

'If you'd care to put that in writing,' said the Saint calmly, 'I shall be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn't a single legal charge that can be brought against me—other than this little matter of breaking and entering tonight.'

The other made a short impatient gesture.

'Oh, I'm sure you've been clever. And I've read some of that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your methods, sir, are not those which have been set up by our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual has the right to take the law into his own hands. The main­tenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon the subordination of private prejudice to the authorised process of our courts.'

He gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity, paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen audience to subside, and said abruptly: 'However. Your suggestion that, my Department could be influenced by anything but the best interests of the country is insulting and intolerable. I'm going to prove to you that you're talking a lot of crap.'

'Good.'

'You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I'll prove to you that she has a chance to present her case if she's got one.'

Simon could hardly believe his ears,

'Do you mean that?'

'What the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of course I mean it! I'm not condoning your behavior, but I do know how to put a stop to the sort of rumor you're starting.'

'When? Tomorrow?'

'No. I'm leaving first thing in the morning for New York and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get back. In a couple of days. Keep in touch with my office.'

The Saint went on looking at him with a sense of deepening bafflement that had the question marks pounding through his head like triphammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable, but behind the mask of his face that strange perplexity went on. If this was a stall to get him out of there and keep him quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans were concocted, it was still a perfect stall. There was still no way of exposing it except by waiting. Imberline had taken the wind out of his sails. But if it wasn't a stall . . . Simon found his head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it wasn't a stall.

'Now get the hell out of here,' Imberline said defiantly.

There was nothing else to do.

Simon stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough suggestion of postponed menace and loaded sleeves to conceal the com­pletely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt that he hadn't a single answer in him.

'Thank you,' he said, and left the room like that.

He let himself out of the front door, and crossed the lawn diagonally towards the street, moving through the dark patches cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence that was as nat­ural to him as breathing.

He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stum­bled over somebody who had been taken unawares by his cat­like approach. The man he had bumped into straightened, squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But although he disappeared in the time it might take eyelash to meet eyelash in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the funny little man, Sylvester Angert. .

2

Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious al­ways of the movement of shadows about him. He knew he was wide open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody wanted to kill him—yet. They might kill Madeline Gray, and her father, but not before they got the formula from one of the two. He himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly estimated; and the forces that were working against the Grays would hardly want to complicate their problem with a police investigation until they were convinced that there was no al­ ternative.

He was a trifle optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.

Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written down, and he almost laughed at the solemn roundness of her eyes.

'I'm not a returning ghost,' he said. 'Come back down­stairs and I'll buy you another drink.'

They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and a Peter Dawson in her hand.

Then he said, without preface: 'I've just been to see Imber­line.'

Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of amazement and incredulity, and he had time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.

'H-h-how?'

'I burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal, I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to cut out a lot of red tape and heel-cooling.' The Saint grinned a little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying im­pudence; and then without a change of that expression he added bluntly: 'He says your father is a crackpot phony.'

His eyes fastened on hers, and he saw resentment and anger harden the bewilderment out of her face.

'I told you Mr. Imberline has never seen a demonstration of Father's process. He doesn't dare, because of what our inven­tion might do to the natural rubber business after the war.'

'He says he told his staff to investigate it.'

'His staff!' she snorted. 'His stooges! Or maybe just some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn't talk to them after they demanded to see the formula before they'd see a demonstration. I told you he isn't the most tactful person in the world. He suspected Imberline's men from the first, and he made no bones about throwing them out of the laboratory when they came up to Stamford.'

'On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hear­ing himself if I brought you to see him.'

She couldn't be stunned with the same incredulity again, but it was as if she had been jarred again behind the eyes.

'He told you that?'

'Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip that he has to rush off on tomorrow.'

She breathed quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and frantic way.

'Do you think he meant it?'

'He may have. He didn't have to say that. He could have screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police, or told me to go to hell. But he didn't even try.'