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Go down to the lock and walk up the towpath. Not very far along on the left there's a boathouse with green doors. I'll wait for you there. Hurry.

The Saint raised his eyes, and sapphires danced in them.

"Who gave you this, Giulio?"

"Nobody. It was lying on the floor outside when I came through. You saw the envelope—Deliver at once to Mr Templar in the bar. So that's what I do. Is it what you were waiting for?"

Simon stuffed the note into his pocket, and nodded. He drained his tankard.

"This is the romance you were talking about — maybe," he said. "I'll tell you about it later. Save some dinner for me. I'll be back." He clapped Trapani on the shoulder and swung round newly awakened, joyously alive again. Perhaps, in spite of everything, there was still adventure to come… "Let's go, Hoppy!"

He took hold of Mr Uniatz's bottle and pulled it down. Hoppy came upright after it with a plaintive gasp.

"Chees, boss—"

"Have you no soul?" demanded the Saint sternly, as he herded him out of the door. "We have a date with a damsel in distress. The moon will be mirrored in her beautiful eyes, and she will pant out a story while we fan the gnats away from her snowy brow. Sinister eggs are being hatched behind the scenes. There will be villains and mayhem and perhaps even moider…"

He went on talking lyrical nonsense as he set a brisk pace down the lane towards the river; but when they reached the towpath even he had dried up. Mr Uniatz was an unresponsive audience, and Simon found that some of the things he was saying in jest were oddly close to the truth that he believed. After all, such fantastic things had happened to him before…

He didn't fully understand the change in himself as he turned off along the river bank beside the dark shimmering sleekness of the water. The ingrained flippancy was still with him — he could feel it like a translucent film over his mind — but underneath it he was all open and expectant, a receptive void in which anything might take shape. And something was beginning to take shape there — something still so nebulous and formless that it eluded any conscious survey, and yet something as inescapably real as a promise of thunder in the air. It was as if the hunch that had brought him out to the Bell in the first place had leapt up from a whisper to a great shout; and yet everything was silent. Far away, to his sensitive ears, there was the ghostly hum of cars on the Maidenhead road; close by, the sibilant lap of the river, the lisp of leaves, the stertorous breathing and elephantine footfalls of Mr Uniatz; but those things were only phases of the stillness that was everywhere. Everything in the world was quiet, even his own nerves, and they were almost too quiet. And ahead of him, presently, loomed the shape of a building like a boathouse. His pencil flashlight stabbed out for a second and caught the front of it. It had green doors.

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

Simon stood for a moment, and his nerves seemed to grow even calmer and colder under an edge of sharp bitterness.

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 disjointed 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 grievance. "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 moderation. "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?"