'I'll send a man over as soon as I get back to the station,' said Oldwood, and stood up. 'You might give me a lift, Doctor, if it isn't taking you out of your way. There's nothing more we can do tonight.'
Irelock saw them out, and then went back up the stairs to look in on Ripwell; and the Saint lighted another cigarette and stretched out his legs under the table. There was a train of thought shunting about in the half-intuitive sidings of his mind, backing and puffing tentatively, feeling its way breathlessly over a dark maze of lines with only one dim signal to guide it; but something about the way it was moving sent that weird sixth-sense tingle coursing again over his thoracic vertebrae. Teal trudged about over a minute area of carpet with his jaws oscillating rhythmically, and his sleepy eyes kept returning to the inscrutable immobility of the Saint's brown face.
'Well, what do you make of it now?' he said at last.
Simon came far enough out of his trance to put his smouldering cigarette back between his lips.
'I think it was magnificently staged,' he said.
'How do you mean-magnificently? To try something like this only an hour or two after we get here, and make a success of it---'
'I like the organisation,' said the Saint dreamily. 'Think it over, Claud. A bloke pushes his face against the window, and there's a first-class scare. The gathering breaks up and goes dashing out in the dark through three separate doors. There are five of us milling around in all directions, and yet it only takes a few seconds to sort out the right people and make a job of it. The bullet that hit Ripwell may have been meant for either him or me, but we were the two who got the bombs to begin with. Young Nulland is snatched off-a member of the same family-but nobody seems to have tried to grab Irelock when he was knocked out. And nobody tries to damage that beautiful stomach of yours.'
'That may only be because they didn't have time.'
'Or else because you don't know enough to be dangerous.'
Mr. Teal scowled.
'Nulland's car was only a two-seater, wasn't it?' He stared at the curtained windows, working at the problem in his own slow methodical way. 'We ought to have tried the river. . . . These people are clever.'
'How many have you counted up to?'
'Ellshaw's the only one we know personally, but you saw another man in Duchess Place when you went there. I don't know how many more there are, but Ellshaw couldn't do it all alone. I know that man, and I'd swear he wasn't a killer.'
The door opened and Irelock returned, bringing a bottle and glasses on a tray.
'What are the four motives that might make anyone a killer?' asked the Saint.
Teal's heavy lids settled more wearily over his eyes.
'Revenge? Nobody whom he's attacking ever seems to have met him before, except his wife. Jealousy?'
'Of what?'
'The fear of being found out?' suggested Irelock.
'We haven't anything against him,' answered the detective. 'And I don't know how to believe that he's done anything before that would be big enough to give him such a guilty conscience. He's the type that makes the usual whine about persecution when he's caught, but he always goes quietly.'
Simon nodded.
'So that only leaves the best motive of all. Money. Big money.'
'Extortion?' queried Teal sceptically.
'It has been done,' said the Saint mildly. 'But it doesn't meet all the facts this time. What's he going to extort from Mrs. Ellshaw and me? And how can we know anything that might spoil the racket before Nulland's even been kidnapped -much less before anyone's put in the bill for ransom? And how the hell could you get a ransom out of Lord Ripwell if he was dead? Don't forget that he was on the bumping-off list before tonight.'
Chief Inspector Teal breathed audibly.
'Well, if you've got a theory of your own, I'd like to hear it. All you've done yet is to make it more complicated.'
'On the contrary,' said the Saint, with that intangible intuitive train of thought still shuffling through the untracked subconscious labyrinths of his imagination, 'I think it's getting simpler.'
'You've got a theory?' Irelock pressed him eagerly.
The Saint smiled.
'For the first time since all the excitement started, I've got more than a theory,' he answered softly. 'I've got a fact.'
'What is it?' demanded Teal, too quickly; and the Saint grinned gently, and got up with a swing of his long legs.
'You'd like to know, wouldn't you? Well, how do you know you don't?'
Mr. Teal swallowed the last faint scrap of flavour out of his gum, and blinked at him.
'How do I know'
'How do you know you don't? Because you do.' Simon Templar flattened the stump of his cigarette in an ashtray, and laughed at him soundlessly. He put his hand on Teal's cushy shoulder. 'It's all there waiting for you, Claud, if you figure it out. Think back a bit, and work on it. Who's supposed to be the detective here-you or me?'
'Do you mean you know who's responsible?' asked Irelock.
