The repetition choked off in the man's throat. His eyes wavered over Simon's face stupidly; then they dilated with the first and last stunned realization of the truth, only for one horrible dumb second before the end.. . .
Simon read the dead man's name from the tailor's tab inside the breast pocket of his coat and went softly back to his room. The other windows on the courtyard remained shrouded in darkness. If anyone else had heard the shot it must have been attributed to a passing taxi; but there is a difference between the cough of an engine and the crack of an automatic about which the trained ear can never be mistaken. If it had not been for Simon Templar's familiarity with that subtle distinction, a coup might have been inscribed in the annals of crime which would have shaken Europe from end to end-but Simon could not see so far ahead that night.
He left Paris early the following morning. It was unlikely that the murder would be discovered before the afternoon; for it is an axiom of the Quarter that early rising is a purely bourgeois conceit, and one of the few failings of the French hotel keepers is that they feel none of that divine impulse to dictate the manner of life of their clientele which has from time immemorial made Great Britain the Mecca of holiday makers from every corner of the globe. Simon Templar had rarely witnessed a violent death about which he had so clear a conscience, and yet he knew that it would have been foolish to stay. It was one of the penalties of his fame that he had no more chance of convincing any well-informed policeman that he was a law-abiding citizen than he had of being elected President of the United States. So he went back to England, where he was more unpopular than anywhere else in Europe.
If it is true that there is some occult urge which draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime, it must have been an infinitely more potent force which brought Simon Templar back across the Channel to the scene of more light-hearted misdemeanours than Scotland Yard had ever before endured from the disproportionate sense of humour of any one outlaw. It was not so many years since he had first formulated the idea of making it his life work to register himself in the popular eye as something akin to a public institution; and yet in that short space of time his dossier in the Records Office had swollen to a saga of debonair lawlessness that made Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speechless to contemplate. The absurd little sketch of a skeleton figure graced with a symbolic halo, that impudent signature with which Simon Templar endorsed all his crimes, had spread the terror of the Saint into every outpost of the underworld and crashed rudely into the placid meanderings of all those illustrious members of the Criminal Investigation Department who had hitherto been content to justify their employment as guardians of the law by perfecting themselves in the time-honoured sport of persuading deluded shop assistants to sell them a bar of chocolate one minute later than the lawful hours for such transactions. The Robin Hood of Modern Crime they called him in the headlines, and extolled his virtues in the same paragraph as they reviled the C.I.D. for failing to lay him by the heels; which only shows you what newspapers can do for democracy. He had become an accepted incident in current affairs, like Wheat Quotas and the League of Nations, only much more interesting. He stood for a vengeance that struck swiftly and without mercy, for a gay defiance of all dreary and mechanical things.
'It's not my fault, sir,' Chief Inspector Teal stated gloomily, in an interview which he had with the assistant commissioner. 'We aren't in the Saint's class, and some day I suppose we shall have to admit it. If this was a republic we should make him dictator and get some sleep.'
The commissioner frowned. He was one of the last survivors of the old military school of police chiefs, a distinguished soldier of unimpeachable integrity; but he laboured under the disadvantage of expecting professional law breakers to parade for judgment as meekly as the casual defaulters he had been accustomed to dealing with in Pondicherry.
'About two months ago,' he said, 'you told me that the Saint's arrest was only a matter of hours. It was something to do with illicit diamonds, wasn't it?'
'It was,' Teal said grimly.
He was never likely to forget the incident. Neither, it seemed, were his superiors. Gunner Perrigo was the culprit in that case, and the police had certainly got their man. The only trouble was that Simon Templar had got him first. Perrigo had been duly hanged on the very morning of this conversation, but his illicit diamonds had never been heard of again.
'It should have been possible to form a charge,' insisted the commissioner, plucking his iron-grey moustache nervously. He disapproved of Teal's attitude altogether, but the plump detective was an important officer.
'It might be, if there were no lawyers,' said Teal. 'If I went into a witness box and talked about illicit diamonds I should be bawled out of court. We know the diamonds existed, but who's going to prove it to a jury? Frankie Hormer could have talked about them, but Perrigo gave him the works. Perrigo could have talked, but he didn't-and now he's dead. And the Saint got away with them out of England, and that's the end of it. If I could lay my hands on him tomorrow I'd have no more hope of proving he'd ever possessed any illicit diamonds than I'd have of running the Pope for bigamy. We could charge him with obstructing and assaulting the police in the execution of their duty, but what in heaven's name's the use of running the Saint for a milk-and-water rap like that? It'd be the biggest joke that Fleet Street's had on us for years.'
'Did you learn all the facts about his last stunt in Germany ?'
'Yes. I did. And it just came through yesterday that the German police aren't in a hurry to prosecute. There's some big name involved, and they've got the wind up. If I was expecting anything else, I was betting the Saint would be hustling back here and getting ready to dare them to try and extradite him from his own country-he's pulled that one on me before.'
The commissioner sniffed.
'I suppose if he did come back, you'd want me to head a deputation of welcome,' he said scathingly.
'I've done everything that any officer could do in the circumstances, sir,' said Teal. 'If the Saint came back this afternoon, and I met him on the doorstep of this building, I'd have to pass the time of day with him -and like it. You know the law as well as I do. We couldn't ask him any more embarrassing questions than if he had had a good time abroad, and how was his aunt's rheumatism when he last heard from her. They don't want detectives here any longer-what they need is a staff of hypnotists and faith healers.'
The commissioner fidgeted with a pencil.
'If the Saint came back, I should certainly expect to see some change in our methods,' he remarked pointedly; and then the telephone on his desk buzzed.
He picked up the receiver, and then passed it across to Teal.
'For you, Inspector,' he said curtly.
Teal took over the instrument.
'Saint returns to England,' clicked the voice on the wire. 'A report from Newhaven states that a man answering to Simon Templar's description landed from the Isle of Sheppey this afternoon. He was subsequently traced to a hotel in the town --'
