The Saint Steps In

He went back to his own room.

He finished dressing with his tie and coat, picked up the remains of his ruminative bottle of Peter Dawson, and started back towards the elevators. Inevitably, a loitering cub, detailed to guard the flank, intercepted him before he got there.

'Mr. Templar, may I ask you a question?'

'Ask me anything you like,' said the Saint liberally. 'I'm just a perambulating ouija board.'

'Are you helping the police in this case, or are they trying to pin something on you?'

Simon deposited the bottle carefully in his hands.

'The whole solution of the mystery,' he said, 'is probably contained in this sample of the saliva of a dromedary which was found eating the stuffing out of Imberline's mattress. And if you want the truth,' he added hollowly, 'Naval Intelligence has a theory that Fernack himself poisoned both of them.'

The assistant manager twittering still more anxiously, cre­ated enough diversion for the Saint to catch a descending car and make a solitary exit.

Simon regulated his bill at the desk with sublime sangfroid, since it was a most ethical hermitage, and he might want to use it again, and it was no fault of the management if careless guests asked to be slaughtered in its upper regions, and left its portals without a smudge on his credit rating or any visible objection to the cloud of sleuths who might have been follow­ing him like a smokescreen of bees on the scent of the last wilting clover blossom of the season.

He went to Grand Central, enjoyed a shave at the Terminal Barber Shop, and was driven from there by the pangs of purely prosaic hunger to the Oyster Bar, where he took his time over the massacre of several inoffensive molluscs. It was after lunch that he became highly inconsiderate of the convenience of possible shadows. His method, which need not be followed in detail, involved some tricky work around subway turnstiles, some fast zigzagging in the Commodore Hotel, and a short excursion through a corner drug store; and when he re- entered Grand Central through the Biltmore tunnel he was quite sure that he would have shaken off anyone who wasn't attached to him with a rope. He found a train leaving for Stamford in five minutes, stopped to buy a newspaper, and settled in with it.

The paper called itself an Extra, but the only thing extra about it was the size of the headlines. They said RUBBER DIRECTOR MURDERED, and that was approximately what the story consisted of. The city editor had done his best to give it a big lead with a lot of 'Mystery surrounds' and 'It is sus­pecteds,' but his reporter had been able to put very few bones into it at that point. A prefabricated sketch of Frank Imber­line's life and career ran alongside under a double-column head and tried to make the story look good.

Simon glanced through the war news, the comics, and the baseball scores, and put the paper down.

He wondered what story Fernack would give out when they cornered him. He wondered whether he should have asked Jet­terick to ask Fernack to keep any connection with the Angert murder and the Gray kidnaping out of it, or whether Jetterick would have done that on his own. He decided that this was probably unnecessary wondering. There wasn't any real need to bring those links in, except to give a bigger splash to the case; and Fernack wasn't the type of officer who went in for that.

He opened the paper again, on a second thought, and went through it item by item to find out whether anything about Angert and/or Gray had been printed and pushed into obscur­ity by the big local break; but there wasn't a word. Jetterick and Wayvern had been able to achieve that much anyhow. But how much longer they would be able to keep it up was ex­tremely problematical.

Then he decided that that wouldn't matter much longer. The Ungodly might have been misled for a while; but sooner or later, if they were as efficient as he thought they were, they would investigate Stamford again, just for luck. But he might have gained several hours, which had made his trip to New York easier; and now he was on his way back to Madeline. Now they could find her there, and he would be looking for­ward to it.

He checked the new disposition again in his mind.

The Ungodly would know now that the heat was on for keeps. They would have been afraid of it from Morgen's story, and even more perturbed when Andrea Quennel reported that the Saint was staying at the Savoy Plaza—where Imberline was. They would have had no more doubt after they spoke to Im­berline. That was how Imberline earned his obituary. But they had hoped to break out of the web by throwing suspicion on to the Saint with the inviting circumstances which must have seemed ready-made for them. Now, very soon now, through a newspaper or otherwise, they would learn that Simon Templar had been questioned by the police and released. They would know that something had gone wrong again. And they would know that they had very little time.

Then it was all a balance of imponderables again.

How much would they think the Saint had told? How much, for that matter, did they believe the Saint knew?

Simon couldn't hazard the second question. It depended a little, perhaps not too much, on Andrea's version of the previous night. And that was something that it was impossible to guess, for many reasons.

But they would be afraid that the Saint knew something And he hoped that they would be good enough psychologists to figure that he would keep the best of it to himself. He thought they would. He was gambling more than he cared to measure on that.

They had to argue that if he knew too much he knew that they had Calvin Gray. Therefore his object would be to recover that hostage. He, on the other hand, had Madeline Gray, who was just as important. Each of them held one trump at par. It was a deadlock. The only difference was that they could threaten to do vicious things to Calvin Gray, and be wholly unmoved even if the Saint fantastically threatened reprisals on Madeline. But they could well doubt whether in the last extrem­ity even the Saint would let himself be intimidated by that. Therefore, before the game could end, one side would have to hold both trumps. The difference there was that the Saint could wait; he had a minuscule advantage in time. They hadn't.

Simon hoped that was how it was.

He had nothing to do but play chords on that until the train stopped at Stamford.

He secured a taxi in company with a young sergeant on furlough and a stout woman with three Siamese cats in a wicker basket who must ineluctably have been some hapless individ­ual's visiting aunt, and began to fume inwardly for the first time while they were dropped off at nearer destinations. After that, it seemed almost like another superfluous delay when he recognized Wayvern and another man in a dark sedan that met and passed them out on Long Ridge Road. But Wayvern recognized him at the same time, so the Saint stopped his driver, and the two cars slowed down a few yards past each other and backed up until they could talk.

'What goes?' Simon asked.

'I was just taking my man home,' Wayvern told him. 'Jer­terick phoned me and said it was all clear now.'

'And about time,' said the collector of butterflies, yawning. 'I ain't had a night's sleep since Christmas.'

The Saint didn't know why the earth seemed to stand still.

'Where've you been?' Wayvern asked him.

'On a train coming back from New York.'

'Then I guess he couldn't get in touch with you. Better phone him.' Wayvern put his car in gear again and stirred the engine. 'He said he might be coming over. If I see him first, I'll tell him you're back.'

Simon nodded, and told his driver to go on.

He could give no reason for it, and certainly there was noth­ing he could have said to Wayvern, but his premonition was so sure that it was like extrasensory knowledge. It sat just below his ribs with a leaden dullness that made the plodding taxi seem even slower. He insulted himself in a quiet monotonous way; but that did no good except to pass the time. What had happened couldn't be altered. And he knew what had happened, so positively, so inevitably, that when he went into the house and called Madeline, and she didn't answer, it wasn't a shock or an impact at all, but only a sort of draining at his diaphragm, as if he had been hit in the solar plexus without feeling the actual blow.