Then he took the bag into his own room, and opened it without much difficulty.
Its weight, when he had lifted it out of the aëroplane, had told him not to expect it to contain clothes; but the most superficially interesting thing about it was that Mr. Lemuel had not possessed it when he left England, and it was simply as a result of intensive pondering over that fact that the Saint had arrived at the scheme that he was then carrying out. And, in view of his hypothesis, and Mr. Lemuel's reaction to the magic word "Croydon," it cannot be said that the Saint was wildly surprised when he found what the bag actually held. But he was very, very interested, nevertheless.
There were rows and rows of neatly packed square tins, plain and unlabelled. Fishing one out, the Saint gently detached the strip of adhesive tape which sealed it, and prised off the lid. He came to a white, crystalline powder . . . but that had been in his mind when he opened the tin. Almost perfunctorily, he took a tiny pinch of the powder between his finger and thumb, and laid it on his tongue; and the Saintly smile tightened a little.
Then he sat back on his heels, lighted a cigarette, and regarded his catch thoughtfully.
"You're a clever boy, Francis," he murmured.
He meditated for some time, humming under his breath, apparently quite unmoved. But actually his brain was seething.
It would have been quite easy to dispose of the contents of the bag. It would have been equally easy to dispose of Mr. Lemuel. For a while the Saint toyed with the second idea. A strong solution of the contents of one of the tins, for instance, administered with the hypodermic syringe which Simon had in his valise . . . Then he shook his head.
"Try to remember, Old Man," he apostrophized himself, "that you are a business organization. And you're not at all sure that Uncle Francis has left you anything in his will."
The scheme which he ultimately decided upon was simplicity itself-so far as it went. It depended solely upon the state of the village baker's stock.
Simon left the Blue Dragon stealthily, and returned an hour later considerably laden.
He was busy for some hours after that, but he replaced Lemuel's grip looking as if it had not been touched, opening the door with Lemuel's own key.
It is quite easy to lock a door from the outside and leave the key in the lock on the inside-if you know the trick. You tie a string to the end of a pencil, slip the pencil through the hole in the key, and pass the string underneath the door. A pull on the string turns the key; and the pencil drops out, and can be pulled away under the door.
And after that the Saint slithered into his pajamas and rolled into bed as the first grayness of dawn lightened the sky outside his bedroom window, and slept like a child.
In the morning they flew on to Hanworth, where Lemuel's car waited to take them back to London.
The Saint was dropped at Piccadilly Circus; and he walked without hesitation into the Piccadilly Hotel. Settling himself at a table within, he drew a sheet of the hotel's notepaper towards him, and devoted himself with loving care to the production of a Work of Art. This consisted of the picture of a little man, drawn with a round blank head and straight-lined body and limbs, as a child draws, but wearing above his cerebellum, at a somewhat rakish angle, a halo such as few children's drawings portray. Then he took an envelope, which he addressed to Francis Lemuel. He posted his completed achievement within the hotel.
At half-past one he burst in upon Patricia Holm, declaring himself ravenous for lunch.
"With beer," he said. "Huge foaming mugs of it. Brewed at Burton, and as stark as they make it."
"And what's Francis Lemuel's secret?" she asked.
He shrugged.
"Don't spoil the homecoming," he said. "I hate to tell you, but I haven't come within miles of it in a whole blinkin' week."
He did not think it necessary to tell her that he had deliberately signed and sealed his own death warrant, for of late she had become rather funny that way.
5
There are a number of features about this story which will always endear it-in a small way to the Saint's memory. He likes its logical development, and the neat way in which the divers factors dovetail into one another with an almost audible click; he likes the crisp precision of the earlier episodes, and purrs happily as he recalls the flawless detail of his own technique in those episodes; but particularly is he lost in speech less admiration when he considers the overpowering brilliance of the exercise in inductive psychology which dictated his manner of pepping up the concluding states of the adventure.
Thus he reviewed the child of his genius: "The snow retails at about sixty pounds an ounce, in the unauthorized trade; and I must have poured about seventy thousand pounds' worth down the sink. Oh, yes, it was a good idea-to fetch over several years' supply at one go, almost without risk. And then, of course, according to schedule, I should have been quietly fired, and no one but Uncle Francis would have been any the wiser. Instead of which, Uncle's distributing organization, whatever that may be, will shortly be howling in full cry down Jermyn Street to ask Uncle what he means by ladling them out a lot of tins of ordinary white flour. Coming on top of the letter which will be shot in by the late post tonight, this question will cause a distinct stir. And, in the still small hours, Uncle Francis will sit down to ponder the ancient problem-What Should 'A' Do?"
This was long afterwards, when the story of Francis Lemuel was ancient history. And the Saint would gesture with his cigarette, and beam thoughtfully upon the assembled congregation, and presently proceed with his exposition: "Now, what should 'A' do, dear old streptococci? . . . Should he woofle forth into the wide world, and steam into Scotland Yard, bursting with information? . . . Definitely not. He has no information that he can conveniently lay. His egg, so to speak, has addled in the oviduct. . . . Then should he curse me and cut his losses and leave it at that? . . . Just as definitely not. I have had no little publicity in my time; and he knows my habits. He knows that I haven't finished with him yet. He knows that, unless he gets his counterattack in quickly, he's booked to travel down the drain in no uncertain manner. . . . Then should he call in a few tough guys and offer a large reward for my death certificate? ... I think not. Francis isn't that type. ... He has a wholesome respect for the present length of his neck; and he doesn't fancy the idea of having it artificially extended in a whitewashed shed by a gentleman in a dark suit one cold and frosty morning. He knows that that sort of thing is frequently happening-sometimes to quite clever murderers. ... So what does he do?"
And what Francis Lemuel did was, of course, exactly what the Saint had expected. He telephoned in the evening, three days later, and Simon went round to Jermyn Street after dinner-with a gun in his pocket in case of accidents. That was a simple precaution; he was not really expecting trouble, and he was right.
The instructions which he actually received, however, were slightly different from the ones he had anticipated. He found Lemuel writing telegrams; and the impresario came straight to the point.
"Einsmann-you remember the fellow who came to dinner?-seems to have got himself into a mess. He's opening a new night club to-morrow, and his prize cabaret attraction has let him down at the last minute. He hasn't been able to arrange a good enough substitute on the spot, and he cabled me for help. I've been able to find a first-class girl, but the trouble is to get her to Berlin in time for a rehearsal with his orchestra."
"You want me to fly her over?" asked the Saint, and Lemuel nodded.
"That's the only way, Old Man. I can't let Einsmann down when he's just on the point of signing a big contract with me. You have a car, haven't you?" "Yes, sir."