The Saint Steps In

let him know we're coming. But they say there's no answer.'

Simon relaxed on the bed and flipped cigarette ash on the carpet.

'Maybe he's gone to a movie, or he's out with the boys analys­ing alcohol in one of the local saloons.'

'He never goes out in the evening. He hates it. Besides, he knew I was going to phone tonight. I was going to talk to him as soon as I'd seen Imberline. Nothing on earth would have dragged him out until he knew about that. Or do you think you've scared me too much?'

The Saint lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling cold needles tiptoeing up his spine and gathering In spectral con­clave on the nape of his neck.

4

Simon Templar checked his watch mechanically as the Beechcraft sat down on the runway at Armonk airport. One hour and fifteen minutes from Washington was good traveling, even with a useful tail wind, and he hoped that his haste hadn't ground too much life out of the machinery.

The pilot who was to take the ship back, who hadn't asked a single question all the way because he had been taught not to, said: 'Good luck.' Simon grinned and shook hands, and led Madeline Gray to the taxi that he had phoned to meet them.

As they turned east towards Stamford he was still consider­ing the timetable. They could be at Calvin Gray's house in twenty minutes. Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes longer than one of the regular airlines would have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same time. Furthermore, he had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination. They couldn't have intercepted him at any point, because they couldn't have discovered his route before it was too late.

As for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast train—ignoring such delays as phone calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in, or the traveling to and from railroad sta­tions and the inconsiderate tendency of railroads not to have trains waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.

He had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.

'If anything has happened to Daddy,' she said now, 'there were people there already.'

'Then whatever happened has happened already,' he said, 'and nobody on earth could have caught up with it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn't have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town Police, but what could we have told them? So the telephone doesn't answer. They'd have said the same as I said. By the time we'd gotten through all the arguing and rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got started. If they ever got started.'

'Maybe I'm just imagining too much,' she said.

He didn't know. He could just as easily have been imagining too much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind straight.

He said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud: 'The trouble it that we don't even know who the Un­godly are, or what they're working towards . . . Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth a fortune. They'd want to get the formula—just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they could threaten your father with all kinds of frightful things that might happen to you if he didn't give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him.'

He felt her flesh tighten beside him.

'But there have also been these accidents you told me about. Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It's a nice exciting word. But where would it get them—in the end?'

She said: 'If they were spies——'

'If they were spies,' he said, 'they wouldn't be blowing up a laboratory. They might break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn't destroy it, because they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a formula out of you with horsewhips and hot Irons—they'd have tried it long before this. You wouldn't have been hard to snatch.'

'Well,' she said, 'they could just be saboteurs. They warned me not to try and see Mr. Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere.'

'Then both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time,' he said coldbloodedly. 'Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class of political and philosophical killers you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That's the whole thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of punches— this bush league milquetoast skullduggery?'

He went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that brought them to a stone gateway and through that up a short trim drive to the front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green shingled roofs and gables as the taxi's headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the curtains. For a moment her hand was on his arm, and he put his own hand over it, but neither of them said anything.

She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path of light to the hall and joined her there.

She called: 'Daddy!'

They could hear the taxi's wheels crunching out off the gravel, and the hum of its engine fading down the lane, leaving them alone together in the stillness.

'Daddy,' she called.

She went through an open door into the living-room, and he put the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.

She went out again quickly.

He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between interior decorating and mas­culine comfort. There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over. There was a pipe in one of the ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.

A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear line. Just to make sure, he dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a gruffly sleepy male voice that said 'Yes?'

'This is Joe,' said the Saint momentously. 'You'd better start thinking fast. Your wife has discovered everything.'

He hung up, and turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.

'The phone is working,' he said casually. 'There's noth­ing wrong with the line.'

'Come with me,' she said.

He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining room, sedate and barren like any dining room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a ticking clock on a shelf.

'I've been here,' she said.

'Would he have had dinner?'

'I couldn't tell.'

'What about servants?'

'We haven't had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren't going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn't have been bothered with interviewing them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got married and lives quite close by. She could have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home.'