VIII
S
IMON CARRIED
her into
the drawing-room and laid her
down on the sofa. He stood gazing at her
introspectively
for a moment; then he bent over her again quickly and
stabbed
her in the solar plexus with a stiff forefinger. She
didn’t stir a muscle.
The
monotonous
cheep-cheep
of a telephone bell ringing
somewhere
outside reached his ears, and he saw the butler
starting to move
mechanically towards the door. Simon
passed him, and saw the instrument
half hidden by a curtain
on the other side of the hall. He took the
receiver off the
hook and said: “Hullo.”
“May
I speak to Mr Templar, please ?”
The Saint
put a hand on the wall to save himself from
falling over.
“Who
wants him ?”
“Mr
Trapani.”
“Giulio!”
Simon exclaimed. The voice was familiar now,
but its complete
unexpectedness had prevented him from
recognizing it before. “It seems
to be about sixteen years
since I saw you—and I never came back for
dinner.”
“That’s
quite all right, Mr Templar. I didn’t expect you,
when I knew what had
happened. I only called up now
because it’s getting late and I didn’t know
if you would want
a room for tonight.”
The Saint’s
brows drew together.
“What
the hell is this?” he demanded slowly. “Have you
taken up
crystal-gazing, or something?”
Giulio
Trapani chuckled.
“No,
I am not any good at that. The police sergeant stop
ped here on his way
back, and he told me. He said you had
got mixed up with a murder, and Miss
Chase had taken you
home with her. So, of course, I knew you would be very
busy. Has
she asked you to stay ?”
“Let
me call you back in a few minutes, Giulio,” said the
Saint.
“Things have been happening, and I’ve got to get
hold of the police
again.” He paused, and a thought struck
him. “Look, is
Sergeant Jesser still there, by any chance ?”
There was
no answer.
Simon
barked: “Hullo.”
Silence.
He jiggled the hook. The movements produced
no corresponding
clicks in his ear. He waited a moment
longer, while he realized that the stillness of the
receiver was
not the stillness of a broken
connection, but a complete inanimate muteness that stood for something less
easily
remedied than that.
He hung
the receiver up and traced the course of the wiring
with his eyes. It ran
along the edge of the wainscoting to the frame of the front door, and
disappeared into a hole bored at
the edge of the wood. Simon turned right round with another
abrupt realization. He was alone in the hall—the
butler was
no longer in sight.
He slipped
his pencil flashlight out of his breast pocket
with his left hand,
and let himself out of the front door. The
telephone wires ran
up outside along the margin of the door
frame, and continued
up over the exterior wall. The beam of
his torch followed
them up, past a lighted window over the
porch from which he
had climbed down a few minutes ago, to where they were attached to a pair of
porcelain insulators
under the eaves. Where the wires leading on
from the insulators might once have gone was difficult to decide: they
dangled
slackly downwards now, straddling the balcony and
trailing away into the darkness of the
drive.
The Saint switched off his
light and stood motionless.
Then.he flitted
across the terrace, crossed the drive, and
merged himself into the shadow of a big clump of laurels on
the edge of the lawn. Again he froze into
breathless immo
bility. The blackness
ahead of him was Stygian, impenetrable,
even to his noctambulant eyes, but hearing would serve his
temporary purpose almost as well as sight. The
night had
fallen so still that he
could even hear the rustle of the distant
river; and he waited for minutes that seemed like hours to
him, and must have seemed like weeks to a guilty
prowler who could not have travelled very far after the wires were
broken.
And while he waited, he was trying to decide at
exactly what point in his last speech the break had occurred.
It could easily have happened at a place where
Trapani would
think he had finished
and rung off… But he heard nothing while he stood there—not the snap of a
twig or the rustle of
a leaf.
He went back to the
drawing-room and found the butler
standing
there, wringing his hands in a helpless sort of
way.
“Where
have you been?” he inquired coldly.
The man’s loose bloodhound
jowls wobbled.
“I
went to fetch my wife, sir,” He indicated the stout red-
faced
woman who was kneeling beside the couch, chafing
the girl’s nerveless
wrists. “To see if she could help Miss
Chase.”
Simon’s
glance flickered over the room like a rapier blade,
and settled pricklingly on an open french
window.
“Did
you have to fetch her in from the garden?’ he
asked
sympathetically.
“I—I
don’t understand, sir.”
“Don’t you? Neither do I.
But that window was closed when I saw it last.”
“I
opened it just now, sir, to give Miss Chase some fresh
air.”
The Saint
held his eyes ruthlessly, but the butler did not
try to look away.
“All
right,” he said at length. “We’ll check up on that
presently.
Just for the moment, you can both go back to the
kitchen.”
The stout woman got to her feet
with the laboured mo
tions of a rheumatic
camel.
”
‘Oo do you think you are,” she demanded indignantly,
“to
be bossing everybody about in this ‘ouse ?”
“I
am the Grand Gugnunc of Waziristan,” answered the
Saint pleasantly.
“And I said—get back to the kitchen.”
He
followed them back himself, and went on through to find Hoppy Uniatz. The other
door of the kitchen conveni
ently opened into the small rear hall into
which the back stairs
came down and from which the back door also
opened.
Simon locked and bolted the back door, and drew Hoppy into
the
kitchen doorway and propped him up against the jamb. “If you stand
here,” he said, “you’ll be able to cover the
back stairs and this
gang in the kitchen at the same time. And
that’s what I want you to do. None of them
is to move out of your sight—not even to get somebody else some fresh
air.”
“Okay,
boss,” said Mr Uniatz dimly. “If I only had a
drink—”
“Tell Jeeves to buy you
one.”
The Saint
was on his way out again when the butler stopped him.
“Please,
sir, I’m sure I could be of some use——
”
“You
are being useful,” said the Saint, and closed the door
on him.
Rosemary
Chase was sitting up when he returned to the
drawing-room.
“I’m
sorry,” she said weakly. “I’m afraid I fainted.”
“I’m afraid you did,”
said the Saint. “I poked you in the
tummy
to make sure it was real, and it was. It looks as if
I’ve been wrong about you all the evening. I’ve
got a lot of
apologies to make, and
you’ll have to imagine most of them.
Would
you like a drink?”
She
nodded; and he turned to the table and operated with
a bottle and siphon.
While he was doing it, he said with
matter-of-fact naturalness: “How
many servants do you
keep here?”
“The
butler and his wife, a housemaid, and a parlourmaid.”
“Then they’re all rounded
up and accounted for. How long
have you
known them ?”
“Only
about three weeks—since we’ve been here.”
“So
that means nothing. I should have had them corralled
before, but I didn’t
think fast enough.” He brought the
drink over and gave it
to her. “Anyway, they’re corralled
now, under Hoppy’s
thirsty eye, so if anything else happens
we’ll know they
didn’t have anything to do with it. If that’s
any help… . Which
leaves only us—and Quintus.”
“What
happened to him?”
“He
said he got whacked on the head by our roving bogey-man.”
“Hadn’t
you better look after him ?”
“Sure.
In a minute.”
Simon
crossed the room and closed the open window, and
drew the curtains. He
came back and stood by the table to light a cigarette. There had been so much
essential activity
during the past few minutes that he had had no time to do
any constructive thinking; but now he had to get every
possible
blank filled in before the next move was made. He
put his lighter away
and studied her with cool and friendly encouragement, as if they had a couple
of years to spare in
which to straighten out misunderstandings.
She sipped
her drink and looked up at him with dark
stricken eyes from
which, he knew, all pretence and con
cealment had now been wiped away. They were eyes that he
would have liked to see without the grief in them;
and the pallor of her face made him remember its loveliness as he had first
seen it. Her red lips formed bitter words without
flinching.
“I’m
the one who ought to have been killed. If I hadn’t
been such a fool this
might never have happened. I ought to
be thrown in the river with a weight
round my neck. Why
don’t you say so ?”
“That
wouldn’t be any use now,” he said. “I’d rather you
made up for
it. Give me the story.”
She
brushed the hair off her forehead with a weary
gesture.
“The
trouble is—I can’t. There isn’t any story that’s worth
telling. Just that I was—trying to be
clever. It all began when
I read a letter
that I hadn’t any right to read. It was in this
room. I’d been out. I came in through the french windows,
and I sat down at the desk because I’d just
remembered some
thing I had to make a note of. The letter was on the
blotter in front of me—the letter you got. Nora must have just finished
it, and then left the room for a moment, just
before I came in, not thinking anyone else would be around. I saw your
name on it. I’d heard of you, of course. It
startled me so
much that I was
reading on before I knew what I was doing.
And then I couldn’t stop. I read it all. Then I heard Nora
coming back. I lost my head and slipped out
through the
window again without her
seeing me.”
“And
you never spoke to her about it ?”
“I
couldn’t—later. After all that, I couldn’t sort of come
out and
confess that I’d read it. Oh, I know I was a damn
fool. But I was
scared. It seemed as if she must know something dreadful that my father was
involved in. I didn’t know anything about his affairs. But I loved him. If he
was doing
something crooked, whatever it was, I’d have been hurt to
death; but still I wanted to try and protect him. I couldn’t
talk about
it to anybody but Jim. We decided the only thing
was to find out what
it was all about. That’s why we followed
Nora to the Bell, and
then followed you to the boathouse.”
“Why
didn’t you tell me this before?”
She
shrugged hopelessly.
“Because
I was afraid to. You remember I asked you about
how much you hated
crooks ? I was afraid that if my father
was mixed up
in—anything wrong—you’d be even more merciless than the police. I wanted to
save him. But I didn’t
think—all this would happen. It was hard
enough not to say
anything when we found Nora dead. Now that Jim’s been
killed, I
can’t go on with it any more.”