“Me,
sir?”
Simon
couldn’t see the other’s face, but he could imagine
the expression on it
from the tremulous tone of the reply.
He smiled to himself, but his eyes
were busy on the dark void
of the garden.
“Yes,
you. Are you scared?”
“No-no,
sir. But——
”
“I
know what you mean. It’s creepy, isn’t it ? I’d feel the same way myself. But
don’t let it get you down. Have you
ever handled a gun?”
“I had
a little experience during the War, sir.”
“Swell.
Then here’s a present for you.” Simon felt for the butler’s flabby hand
and pressed his own Luger into it. “It’s all loaded and ready to talk. If
anything tries to happen, use
it. And this is something else. I’ll be with
you. You won’t
hear
me and you won’t see me, but I’ll be close by. If anyone
tries to stop you or do anything to you, he’ll get
a nasty surprise. So don’t worry. You’re going to get through.”
He could
hear the butler swallow.
“Very
good, sir. What was the message you wished me to
take?”
“It’s
for Sergeant Jesser,” Simon repeated, with the same
careful
clarity. “Tell him about the murder of Mr Forrest,
and the other things that have
happened. Tell him I sent you.
And tell him
I’ve solved the mystery, so he needn’t bother to
bring back his gang of coroners and photographers and
fingerprint experts and what not. Tell him I’m
getting a con
fession now, and I’ll
have it all written out and signed for
him
by the time he gets here. Can you remember that ?”
“Yes,
sir.”
“Okay,
Jeeves. On your way.”
He slipped
his other automatic out of his hip pocket and
stood there while
the butler crossed the drive and melted into
the inky shadows
beyond. He could hear the man’s softened footsteps even when he was out of
sight, but they kept regu
larly on until they faded in the distance,
and there was no
disturbance.
When he felt as sure as he could hope to be that
the butler was beyond the danger zone, he put the Walther
away again and stepped soundlessly back into the
darkened
hall.
Rosemary
Chase and the doctor stared blankly at him as he re-entered the drawing-room;
and he smiled blandly at
their mystification.
“I
know,” he said. “You heard me tell Jeeves that I was
going to
follow him.”
Quintus
said: “But why—”
“For
the benefit of the guy outside,” answered the Saint
calmly. “If there is a guy
outside. The guy who’s been giving
us so much
trouble. If he’s hung around as long as this, he’s
still around. He hasn’t finished his job yet. He
missed the
balloon pretty badly on
the last try, and he daren’t pull out
and
leave it missed. He’s staying right on the spot, wondering
like hell what kind of a fast play he can work to
save his
bacon. So he heard what I
told the butler. I meant him to. And
I
think it worked. I scared him away from trying to head off
Jeeves with another carving-knife performance.
Instead of that, he decided to stay here and try to clean up before the
police arrive. And that’s also what I meant him to
do.”
The
doctor’s deep-set eyes blinked slowly.
“Then
the message you sent was only another bluff?”
“Partly.
I may have exaggerated a little. But I meant to tickle our friend’s curiosity.
I wanted to make sure that he’d
be frantic to find out more about it. So he
had to know what’s
going on in this room. I’ll bet money that he’s listening
to every word I’m saying now.”
The girl
glanced at the broken window, beyond which the
Venetian shutters hid
them from outside but would not
silence their voices, and then glanced at the
door; and she
shivered. She said: “But then he knows you didn’t go
with the butler——
”
“But
he knows it’s too late to catch him up. Besides, this is much more interesting
now. He wants to find out how
much I’ve really got up my sleeve. And I want
to tell
him.”
“But you said you were
only bluffing,” she protested
huskily.
“You don’t really know anything.”
The Saint shook his head.
“I
only said I was exaggerating a little. I haven’t got a
confession yet, but
I’m hoping to get one. The rest of it is
true. I know
everything that’s behind tonight’s fun and
games. I know why
everything has been done, and who did
it.”
They
didn’t try to prompt him, but their wide-open eyes
clung to him almost as if they had been
hypnotized. It was as if an unreasoned fear of what he might be going to say
made
them shrink from pressing him, while at
the same time they
were spellbound by
a fascination beyond their power to break.
The Saint
made the most of his moment. He made them
wait while he
sauntered to a chair, and settled himself there,
and lighted a cigarette,
as if they were only enjoying an
ordinary casual conversation. The theatrical
pause was deliberate, aimed at the nerves of the one person whom he had to
drive into self-betrayal.
“It’s
all so easy, really, when you sort it out,” he said at length. “Our
criminal is a clever guy, and he’d figured out a
swindle that was so
simple and audacious that it was practically foolproof—barring accidents. And
to make up for the thousandth fraction of risk, it was bound to put millions
into his hands. Only the accident happened; and one accident led
to
another.”
He took
smoke from his cigarette, and returned it through
musingly half smiling lips.
“The
accident was when Nora Prescott wrote to me. She
had to be in on the
swindle, of course; but he thought he
could keep her quiet with the threat
that if she exposed him
her father would lose the sinecure that was
practically keep
ing him alive. It wasn’t a very good threat, if she’s
been a
little more sensible, but it scared her enough to keep her
away from
the police. It didn’t scare her out of thinking that a guy like me might be
able to wreck the scheme somehow
and still save something out of it for her.
So she wrote to
me. Our villain found out about that, but wasn’t able to
stop
the letter.
So he followed her to the Bell tonight, planning to kill me as well, because he
figured that once I’d received that
letter
I’d keep prying until I found something. When Nora
led off to the boathouse, it looked to be in the
bag. He fol
lowed her, killed her, and waited to add me to the
collection.
Only on account of another
accident that happened then, he
lost
his nerve and quit.”
Again the Saint paused.
“Still,
our villain knew he had to hang on to me until I
could be disposed
of,” he went on with the same leisured
confidence. “He
arranged to bring me up here to be got rid
of as soon as he knew
how. He stalled along until after
dinner, when he’d got a plan worked
out. He’d just finished
talking it over with his accomplice——
”
“Accomplice?”
repeated the doctor.
“Yes,” said the Saint
flatly. “And just to make sure we
understand
each other, I’m referring to a phoney medico
who goes under the name of Quintus.”
The
doctor’s face went white, and his hands whitened on
the arms of his
chair; but the Saint didn’t stir.
“I
wouldn’t try it,” he said. “I wouldn’t try anything,
brother,
if I were you. Because if you do, I shall smash you
into soup-meat.”
Rosemary
Chase stared from one to the other.
“But—you
don’t mean——
”
“I
mean that that motor accident of your father’s was a lie
from
beginning to end.” Simon’s voice was gentle. “He
needed a
phoney doctor to back up the story of those injuries. He couldn’t have kept it
up with an honest one, and
that would have wrecked everything. It took
me a long time to see it, but that’s because we’re all ready to take too much
for
granted. You told me you’d seen your father since it
happened, so I didn’t ask any more
questions. Naturally, you
didn’t feel you
had to tell me that when you saw him he was
smothered in bandages like a mummy, and his voice was only
a hoarse croak; but he needed Quintus to keep him
that way.”
“You
must be out of your mind!” Quintus roared hol
lowly.
The Saint
smiled.
“No.
But you’re out of a job. And it was an easy one. I
said we all take too much for granted.
You’re introduced as a
doctor, and so
everybody believes it. Now you’re going to
have another easy job—signing the confession I promised
Sergeant Jesser. You’ll do it to save your own
skin. You’ll
tell how Forrest wasn’t quite such a fool as he seemed—how
he listened outside Marvin Chase’s room, and heard you and
your pal cooking up a scheme to have your pal bust
this
window here and take a shot at you, just for effect, and then
kill me and Hoppy when we came dashing into the
fight—how Forrest got caught there, and how he was murdered so
he couldn’t spill the beans——
”
“And
what else ?” said a new voice.
Simon
turned his eyes towards the doorway and the man who stood there—a man
incongruously clad in dark wine-
coloured silk pyjamas and bedroom slippers whose head was
swathed in bandages so that only his eyes were
visible, whose
gloved right hand held
a revolver aimed at the Saint’s chest.
The Saint heard Rosemary come to
her feet with a stifled cry
and answered to
her rather than to anyone else.
“I
told you you were going to be hurt, Rosemary,” he
said. “Your
father was killed a week ago. But you’ll remem
ber his secretary.
This is Mr Bertrand Tamblin.”
XII
“Y
OU’RE
CLEVER
, aren’t
you?” Tamblin said viciously.
“Not
very,” said the Saint regretfully. “I ought to
have
tumbled to it long ago. But as I was saying, we all take
too much
for granted. Everyone spoke of you as Marvin
Chase, and so I
assumed that was who you were. I got thrown off the scent a bit further when
Rosemary and Forrest crashed
into the boathouse at an awkward moment when
you got the
wind up and scrammed. I didn’t get anywhere near the mark
until I began to think of you
as the invisible millionaire—the
guy that
all the fuss was about and yet who couldn’t be seen. Then it all straightened
out. You killed Marvin Chase, burnt
his body in a fake auto crash, and
had yourself brought home
by Quintus in his
place. Nobody argued about it; you had Quintus to keep you covered; you knew
enough about his
affairs to keep your
end up in any conversation—you could
even
fool his daughter on short interviews, with your face
bandaged and talking in the sort of faint
unrecognizable voice that a guy who’d been badly injured might talk in.
And
you were all set to get your hands on as much of Marvin
Chase’s dough as you could squeeze out of banks and bonds
before anyone got suspicious.”
“Yes?”
“Oh,
yes…. It was a grand idea until the accidents began
to happen. Forrest was another accident.
You got some of his
blood on you—it’s on you
now—and you were afraid to
jump back
into bed when you heard me coming up the
stairs. You lost your head again, and plunged into a phoney
kidnapping. I don’t believe that you skipped out
of your window at all just then—you simply hopped into another
room and
hid there till the coast was clear. I wondered about
that when I didn’t hear any car driving off, and nobody took
a shot at me when I walked round the house.”
“Go
on.”
“Then
you realized that someone would send for the police,
and you had to delay
that until you’d carried out your
original plan of strengthening
Quintus’s alibi and killing Hoppy and me. You cut the phone wires. That was
another
error: an outside gang would have done that first and taken no chances,
not run the risk of hanging around to do it after
the job was pulled.
Again, you didn’t shoot at me when I
went out of doors the second time,
because you wanted to
make it look as if Quintus was also being
shot at first. Then when you chose your moment, I was lucky enough to be too
fast for
you. When you heard me chasing round the outside
of the house, you pushed off into the
night for another think.
I’d ‘ve had the
hell of a time catching you out there in the
dark, so I let you hear me talking to the butler because I knew
it would fetch you in.”