The Saint Steps In

After that there was a study lined with ponderous and well-worn books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal movable furni­ture. It was fairly messy, in a healthy haphazard way.

Simon went to one of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer at random. The folders looked regular enough, to any­one who hadn't lived with the system.

He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda, abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.

'How does it look to you?' he asked.

'About the same as usual.'

'You must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?'

She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on the desk. After that she still looked blank and helpless.

'I couldn't possibly say. He's so hopelessly untidy when he isn't being fanatically neat.'

Simon stared at the desk. He didn't know Calvin Gray's habits, or anything about his work and interests. He knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a cyclone had gone through it.

Anyway, what would anyone have been searching for? No­body would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched between tax demands and seed catalogs on top of a desk . . . And still he had that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn't explain itself or didn't connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would have accom­modated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.

'Let's see everything,' he said shortly.

They went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray's room. Calvin Gray's room. A couple of guest rooms. Bath­rooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly. It was a nice well-kept house.

'So he isn't here,' said the Saint. 'There's no blood and no smashed windows and no dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn't he go out and leave the lights on?'

He didn't know whether he was trying to console her or whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in his ribs and said 'Come for a walk, pal,' and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.

'There's still the laboratory,' she said in a small voice; and he caught at that for the moment's reprieve.

'Why didn't you show me that before?'

She took him out of the house, and they walked by a wind­ing path through tall slender trees whose delicate upper branches lost themselves in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.

The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly in a shadowy clear­ing—a long white modernistic building with a faint glow from inside outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that stood ajar on one side disclosed tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.

Beyond the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking bright gleams from glass tubes and retorts and long shelves of neatly labeled bottles and porcelain- topped benches and stranger pieces of less describable apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.

'Does this look all right too?' he asked.

'Yes.'

He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other lay­man would have surveyed a chemical laboratory. If you were going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn't. He wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.

'You could make rubber here?' he said.

'Of course.'

There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant to have there, or else he just looked blank because he was thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her mind busy along other lines.

'I could show you now,' she said.

It didn't seem important, but it was another escape.

'Show me,' he said.

She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them were unlabeled. She measured things in beakers and test tubes. She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity of sawdust from an old coffee can into a glass bowl, lighted a burner under it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a seasoned cook mixing pancakes.

The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.

It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it. He had more than the average background of ordinary chem­istry, as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things went on in this production line that were utterly out of his depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bub­bling in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitat­ing, and finally flowing into a small peculiar encased engine that looked as if it might house some kind of turbine, from which came a low smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the other end of this engine projected a long narrow troughed belt running over an external pulley; and over this belt began to creep a ribbon of the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in the dining room of the Shore-ham. She tore off the strip when there was about a couple of feet of it, and gave it to him; and he felt it between his fingers and stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and smelled a little like wet leather and scorched wool.

'It seems like a wonderful thing,' he said. 'But it looks a lit­tle more complicated than the bathtub proposition you were talking about.'

She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning off burners.

'Not really,' she said. 'In terms of a big industrial plant, it's almost so simple that a village plumber could put it together.'

'But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of money. Does your father want the WPB to go into production on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?'

'We aren't quite as rich as that. But if the Government went into it they'd give us a loan, and it wouldn't be any problem to raise the private capital. In fact, we'd probably have to hire guards to keep the investors away.' She smiled at him wanly. 'It's too bad I didn't meet you before, isn't it? You could have come in on the ground floor and made a fortune.'

'I can just see myself at any board meeting,' he said.

Then they were really looking at each other again, and the fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any more.

'What do you think has happened?' she asked; and he straightened up and trod on the butt of his cigarette.

'Let's go back to the house,' he said roughly.

They went out, putting out the lights and closing the door after them.

As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again her hand slid into the crook of his elbow, and he pressed it a little against his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking coldly and from quite a distance. He said: 'Did you lock the door?'      

'I don't have the key.'

'When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?'     

'I just went in. The door wasn't locked.'