with the gar-roting cord which he had been twisting around his hands for a good purchase. Without even bothering to reverse the gun that he had taken from Varetti, Simon bonged him firmly on his already tender brow, and once again Mr Walsh passed into slumber-land. . . .
The Saint lighted himself another and less stimulating cigarette, and paused for a bare moment's thought. His mind was still gyrating with questions that he had still had no chance to ask, and which now seemed condemned to further postponement on account of the magnificent lethargy of the potential respondents. On the other hand, after such a promising introduction, Miss Sinclair's interesting and unusual apartment should be at least worth a little more detailed survey. But there was no telling how soon some other interruption might crop up in such an unconventional menage; and whatever form it might take, it seemed fair to assume that the presence of a pair of unconscious bodies on the living-room floor would do nothing to facilitate coping with it.
In order to dispose of that difficulty first, he took the two bodies by the collar, one in each hand, and dragged them into the bedroom; in which process he nearly tripped headlong over a rawhide suitcase which someone had thoughtfully left out in the middle of the floor. He was still rubbing an anguished shin when he heard the rattle of a key in the front door lock and went back hopefully into the living-room.
'Hullo, Barbara,' he said blandly. 'I was afraid I'd missed you.'
6 In her street clothes, she looked just as exotic and exciting as she had the night before. Her tailored suit had obviously been conceived by a Scottish sheep, born on a hand loom north of the Tweed, and lovingly reared by a couturier with a proper admiration for the seductive curves of her figure. The inevitable hatbox which is the badge and banner of the New York model dangled from one gloved hand; but you would still have een her as a model without it, if only because such a sheer physical-perfection as hers simply demanded to be pictured. Simon observed, with dispassionate expertness, that even broad daylight could find no flaw in the clear olive smoothness of her skin.
Another and less simple observation was that she seemed at first too surprised and angry to be afraid.
'Well I'm damned,' she said. 'How did you get in here?'
'I burgled the joint,' said the Saint candidly.
'You've got a nerve,' she said. 'On top of what you did to me last night.'
The act looked quite terrific. But the lift of the Saint's right eyebrow was only mildly impudent.
'Did they make you wash a lot of dishes?' he inquired inter-estedly.
The flare in her eyes was like lightning reflected in pools of jet. She was Certainly wonderful. And it was no help to her at all that anger only cleared her beauty of the magazine-cover sugariness and gave it a more vivid reality.
'So you're damned smart,' she said in a frozen voice that came like icicles out of a blast furnace. 'You make a fool out of me in front of half the waiters in New York. You stick me with a dinner check for about thirty dollars----'
'But you must admit it was a good dinner.'
'And then you have the gall to break into my apartment and try to be funny about it.' Her voice thawed out on the phrase, as if she was coming out of a momentary trance into the full spoken realisation of what he had actually done; and then it sizzled like oil on hot coals. 'Well, we can soon settle that----'
'Not so fast, darling.'
His arm shot out almost lazily, and he hardly seemed to have moved towards her at all, but her wrist was caught in fingers of steel before she had taken more than one full step towards the telephone.
He stopped her without any apparent effort at all, and calmly disengaged the hatbox and tossed it into the nearest armchair.
'Before you add half the cops in New York to half the waiters, in this audience of yours,' he said, 'I think we should talk some more.'
'Let me go!' she blazed.
'After all,' he continued imperturbably, 'it is a pretty nice apartment. And you did invite me here originally, if you remember. There must be some handy dough in this modeling racket for you to be able to keep up a pied-d- terre like this. Or, if it isn't rude question, who else is contributing at the moment?'
Her ineffectual struggle almost ceased for a moment; and then, when it sprang up again, for the first time it had the wild flurry of something close to the delayed panic that should have been there long before.
'You must be crazy! You're hurting me----'
'And that,' said the Saint, nodding towards a veneered cabinet against the wall, without any change either in the steel of his grip| or the engaging velvet of his voice, 'is presumably the radio whose| dulcet tones were to beguile me last night--while I was being cosily framed into the neatest murder rap that I've had to answer for a long time.'
'You crazy lunatic . . .'
Her voice faded out just like that. And the fight faded out of her in exactly the same way, abruptly and completely, so that she was like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut.
'What do you mean,' she whispered, 'murder?'
Simon let go her wrist and put his cigarette to his mouth again, gazing down at her with eyes of inexorable blue ice. His mind was clear and passionless like the mind of a surgeon in an operating room. In the back of his mind he could hear the whirr of wheels in a production line, and again he could remember candlelight and soft music and rich food and wine in a penthouse hideaway, and still behind that in his mind was the rumble of tanks and the drone of airplanes and the numbing thunder of shells and bombs, and men sweating and cursing in the smoke of hell; and the war was there in that room, he could feel it as fierce and vital as the hush in a front-line trench before an attack at dawn, and he knew that even in those incongruous and improbable settings he was fighting not one battle but many battles.
He repeated passionlessly: 'I said murder.'
'Who?'
'It's in the papers. But you wouldn't need to read about it.'
Her eyes were pleading.
'I don't understand. Honestly. Who are you talking about?'
'The linnet will sing no more,' Simon said. 'And if I hadn't been a calloused skeptic and walked out on you last night, I'd be doing my own singing in a very minor key and a most undecorative cage.'
She stared at him in utter stupefaction.
'Mr Linnet? You mean he's been murdered?'
'Very thoroughly.'
'I can't believe it.'
'Nobody seems to believe anything these days,' Simon re-marked sadly. 'But it's still no thanks to you that a lot of large and unfriendly policemen aren't showing me their incredulity right now with a piece of rubber hose.'
Half of her mind still seemed to be unreached by his meaning.
'Who did it?'
'I think one of the gentlemen in your bedroom might be able to tell you.'
'The what?'
'One of the men in your bedroom. I ran into him at the scene of the crime last night; but he got away. However, it's all right now. It was quite a jolly reunion.'
'Are you still raving?'
'Come and see for yourself.'
He took her arm and pushed her into the bedroom, kicking the door open with his foot. She stopped with a faint gasp on the threshold, her mouth open and one hand going to her throat.
'Who are they?' she begged.
'Friends of yours, I take it. Anyway, they were here when I arrived, and they seemed to feel very much at home.'
'You're joking!'
'I am not joking, darling. Neither were they. In fact, they were proposing to do some very serious and unpleasant things to me. It's rather lucky I was able to discourage them. But I must say I take a poor view of your choice of playmates.'
