Quietly, he
said: “Nora.”
There was
no answer, no hint of movement anywhere.
And he didn’t know
why, but in the same quiet way his right
hand slid up to his
shoulder rig and loosened the automatic in the spring clip under his arm.
He covered
the last two yards in absolute silence, put bis
hand to the knob of the door, and drew it
back quickly as his
fingers slid on a sticky
dampness. It was queer, he thought
even
then, even as his left hand angled the flashlight down,
that it should have happened just like that, when
everything
in him was tuned and
waiting for it, without knowing what
it
was waiting for. Blood—on the door.
II
S
IMON STOOD
for a
moment, and his nerves seemed to grow
even calmer and colder under an edge
of sharp bitter
ness.
Then he
grasped the doorknob again, turned it, and went
in. The inside of the
building was pitch dark. His torch
needled the blackness with a thin jet
of light that splashed dim
reflections from the glossy varnish on a
couple of punts and
an electric canoe. Somehow he was quite sure what he
would find, so sure that the certainty chilled off any rise of emotion.
He knew
what it must be; the only question was, who?
Perhaps even that was
not such a question. He was never quite sure about that. A hunch that had
almost missed its
mark had become stark reality with a suddenness that dis
jointed
the normal co-ordinates of time and space: it was as if
instead of
discovering things, he was trying to remember
things he had known
before and had forgotten. But he saw
her at last, almost tucked under the
shadow of the electric
canoe, lying on her side as if she were asleep.
He stepped
over and bent his light steadily on her face,
and knew then that he
had been right. It was the girl with
the troubled blue eyes. Her eyes were
open now, only they
were not troubled any more. The Saint stood and looked
down at her. He had been almost
sure when he saw the curly
yellow hair. But
she had been wearing a white blouse when
he saw her last, and now there was a splotchy crimson pattern
on the front of it. The pattern glistened as he
looked at it.
Beside
him, there was a noise like an asthmatic foghorn
loosening up for a
burst of song.
“Boss,”
began Mr Uniatz.
“Shut
up.”
The Saint’s
voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it
cut like a
razorblade. It cut Hoppy’s introduction cleanly off
from whatever he had
been going to say; and at the same
moment as he spoke Simon switched off
his torch, so that it was
as if the same tenuous whisper had sliced off even the ray of
light, leaving nothing around them but blackness
and
silence.
Motionless
in the dark, the Saint quested for any betraying
breath of sound. To
his tautened eardrums, sensitive as a
wild animal’s, the hushed murmurs of the night outside were
still an audible background against which
the slightest
stealthy movement even
at a considerable distance would have stood out like a bugle call. But he heard
nothing then,
though he waited for
several seconds in uncanny stillness.
He
switched on the torch again.
“Okay,
Hoppy,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt you, but that
blood was
so fresh that I wondered if someone mightn’t still
be around.”
“Boss,”
said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly, “I was doin’ fine when ya stopped me.”
“Never
mind,” said the Saint consolingly. “You can go
ahead now.
Take a deep breath and start again.”
He was still partly listening
for something else, wondering
if even then
the murderer might still be within range.
“It
ain’t no use now,” said Mr Uniatz dolefully.
“Are
you going to get temperamental on me?” Simon
demanded
sufferingly. “Because if so——
”
Mr Uniatz
shook his head.
“It
ain’t dat, boss. But you gotta start wit’ a full bottle.”
Simon
focused him through a kind of fog. In an obscure
and apparently irrelevant sort of way, he
became aware that
Hoppy was still clinging
to the bottle of Vat 69 with which he
he
been irrigating his tonsils at the Bell, and that he was holding it up against
the beam of the flashlight as though brooding over the level of the liquid left
in it. The Saint
clutched at the
buttresses of his mind.
“What
in the name of Adam’s grandfather,” he said, “are you talking about
?”
“Well,
boss, dis is an idea I get out of a book. De guy
walks in a saloon, he
buys a bottle of Scotch, he pulls de cork, an’ he drinks de whole bottle
straight down wit’out
stopping. So I was tryin’ de same t’ing back
in de pub, an’ I
was doin’ fine when ya stopped me. Lookit, I ain’t left
more
‘n two-t’ree swallows. But it ain’t no use goin’ on now,”
explained
Mr Uniatz, working back to the core of his griev
ance. “You gotta
start wit’ a full bottle.”
Nothing but
years of training and self-discipline gave
Simon Templar the
strength to recover his sanity.
“Next
time, you’d better take the bottle away somewhere and lock yourself up with
it,” he said, with terrific modera
tion. “Just for
the moment, since we haven’t got another
bottle, is there any
danger of your noticing that someone has been murdered around here ?”
“Yeah,”
said Mr Uniatz brightly. “De wren.”
Having
contributed his share of illumination, he relapsed
into benevolent silence. This, his
expectant self-effacement
appeared to suggest,
was not his affair. It appeared to be
something
which required thinking about; and Thinking
was a job for which the
Saint possessed an obviously super
natural
aptitude which Mr Uniatz had come to lean upon
with a childlike faith that was very much akin to worship.
The Saint
was thinking. He was thinking with a level and
passionless detachment that surprised even
himself. The girl
was dead. He had seen
plenty of men killed before, sometimes
horribly;
but only one other woman. Yet that must not make
any difference. Nora Prescott had never meant anything to
him: he would never even have recognized her
voice. Other
women of whom he knew
just as little were dying every
where,
in one way or another, every time he breathed; and he could think about it
without the slightest feeling. Nora
Prescott
was just another name in the world’s long roll of undistinguished dead.
But she
was someone who had asked him for help, who
had perhaps died
because of what she had wanted to tell him.
She hadn’t been just
another twittering fluffhead going into hysterics over a mouse. She really had
known something—
something that was dangerous enough for someone else to
commit murder rather than have it revealed.
‘One of
the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been
attempted…’
The only
phrase out of her letter which gave any informa
tion at all came into his head again, not
as a merely provoca
tive combination of
words, but with some of the clean-cut clarity of a sober statement of fact. And
yet the more he
considered it, the closer
it came to clarifying precisely
nothing.
And he was still half listening
for a noise that it seemed as
if he ought to
have heard. The expectation was a subtle
nagging at the back of his mind, the fidget for attention of a
thought that still hadn’t found conscious shape.
His torch
panned once more around the interior of the
building. It was a
plain wooden structure, hardly more than
three walls and a
pair of double doors which formed the
fourth, just comfortably roomy for the
three boats which it
contained. There was a small window on each
side, so
neglected as to be almost opaque. Overhead, his light went
straight up to the bare rafters which supported the shingle roof. There
was no place in it for anybody to hide except
under one of the
boats; and his light probed along the floor
and eliminated that possibility.
The knife
lay on the floor near the girl’s knees—an ordinary cheap kitchen knife, but
pointed and sharp enough for
what it had had to do. There was a smear of
blood on the
handle; and some of it must have gone on the killer’s
hand,
or more probably on his glove, and in that way been left
on the
doorknob. From the stains and rents on the front
of the girl’s blouse,
the murderer must have struck two
or three times; but if he was strong he
could have held
her throat while he did it, and there need have been no
noise.
“Efficient
enough,” the Saint summed it up aloud, “for
a rush job.”
He was
thinking: “It must have been a rush job, because
he couldn’t have known
she was going to meet me here
until after she’d written that note at the
Bell. Probably she
didn’t even know it herself until then. Did he see the
note ?
Doesn’t seem possible. He could have followed her. Then
he must
have had the knife on him already. Not an ordinary
sort of knife to
carry about with you. Then he must have known he was going to use it before he
started out. Unless it was here in the boathouse and he just grabbed it up. No
reason why
a knife like that should be lying about in a place
like this. Bit too
convenient. Well, so he knew she’d got in touch with me, and he’d made up his
mind to kill her. Then
why not kill her before she even got to the
Bell ? She might have talked to me there, and he couldn’t have stopped her—
could he ?
Was he betting that she wouldn’t risk talking to
me in public? He could
have been. Good psychology, but
the hell of a nerve to bet on it. Did he find
out she’d written
to me ? Then I’d probably still have the letter. If I
found her
murdered,
he’d expect me to go to the police with it. Danger
ous. And he knew I’d find her. Then why——
”
The Saint
felt something like an inward explosion as he
realized what his
thoughts were leading to. He knew then
why half of his brain
had never ceased to listen—searching
for what intuition had scented faster
than reason.
Goose-pimples
crawled up his spine on to the back of his
neck.
And at the
same moment he heard the sound.
It was
nothing that any other man might have heard at all. Only the gritting of a few
tiny specks of gravel between a
stealthy shoe sole and the board stage
outside. But it was
what
every nerve in his body had unwittingly been keyed for
ever since he had seen the dead girl at his feet. It was what he
inevitably had to hear, after everything else that had
happened. It spun him round like a jerk of the
string wound
round a top.
He was in
the act of turning when the gun spoke.
Its bark
was curt and flat and left an impression of having been curiously thin, though
his ears rang with it afterwards.
The bullet zipped past his ear like a
hungry mosquito; and
from the hard fierce note that it hummed he
knew that if he had not been starting to turn at the very instant when it was
fired it would have struck him
squarely in the head. Pieces of
shattered
glass rattled on the floor.
Lights
smashed into his eyes as he whirled at the door, and
a clear clipped voice
snapped at him: “Drop that gun! You
haven’t got a
chance!”
The light
beam beat on him with blinding intensity from the lens of a pocket searchlight
that completely swallowed
up the slim ray of his own torch. He knew
that he hadn’t a
chance. He could have thrown bullets by guesswork; but to
the man behind the glare he was a target on which patterns
could be
punched out.