"You didn't have to hit him so hard that he'd get concussion and lose his memory."
Simon rubbed his chin.
"There's certainly something in that, darling. But it was all very difficult. It was too dark for me to see just what I was doing, and I was in rather a rush. However, it does turn out to be a bit of a snag."
He had discovered the calamity the night before, after he had unloaded Verdean at his country house at Weybridge — he had chosen that secluded lair as a destination partly because it was only about five.miles from Chertsey, partly because it had more elaborate facilities for concealing captives than his London apartment. The bank manager had taken an alarmingly long time to recover consciousness; and when he eventually came back to life it was only to vomit and moan unintelligibly. In between retchings his eyes wandered over his surroundings with a vacant stare into which even the use of his own name and the reminders of the plight from which he had been extracted could not bring a single flicker of response. Simon had dosed him with calomel and sedatives and put him to bed, hoping that he would be back to normal in the morning; but he had awakened in very little better condition, clutching his head painfully and mumbling nothing but listless uncomprehending replies to any question he was asked.
He was still in bed, giving no trouble but serving absolutely no useful purpose as a source of information; and the Saint gazed out of the window at the morning sunlight lancing through the birch and pine glade outside and frowned ruefully over the consummate irony of the impasse.
"I might have known there'd be something like this waiting for me when you phoned me to come down for breakfast," said Patricia stoically. "How soon are you expecting Teal?".The Saint chuckled.
"He'll probably be sizzling in much sooner than we want him — a tangle like this wouldn't be complete without good old Claud Eustace. But we'll worry about that when it happens. Meanwhile, we've got one consolation. Comrade Verdean seems to be one of those birds who stuff everything in their pockets until the stitches begin to burst. I've been going over his collection of junk again, and it tells quite a story when you put it together."
Half of the breakfast table was taken up with the potpourri of relics which he had extracted from various parts of the bank manager's clothing, now sorted out into neat piles. Simon waved a spoon at them.
"Look them over for yourself, Pat. Nearest to you, you've got a couple of interesting souvenirs. Hotel bills. One of 'em is where Mr Robert Verdean stayed in a modest semiboardinghouse at Eastbourne for the first ten days of July. The other one follows straight on for the next five days; only it's from a swank sin-palace at Brighton, and covers the sojourn of a Mr and Mrs Jones who seem to have consumed a large amount of champagne during their stay. If you had a low mind like mine, you might begin to jump to a few conclusions about Comrade Verdean's last vocation."
"I could get ideas."
"Then the feminine handkerchief — a pretty little sentimental souvenir, but rather compromising."
Patricia picked it up and sniffed it.
"Night of Sin," she said with a slight grimace.
"Is that what it's called? I wouldn't know. But I do know that it's the same smell that the blonde floozie brought in with her last night. Her name is Angela Lindsay; and she has quite a reputation in the trade for having made suckers out of a lot of guys who should have been smarter than Comrade Verdean."
She nodded.
"What about the big stack of letters. Are they love-letters?"
"Not exactly. They're bookmaker's accounts. And the little book on top of them isn't a heart-throb diary — it's a betting diary. The name on all of 'em is Joseph Mackintyre. And you'll remember from an old adventure of ours that Comrade Mackintyre has what you might call an elastic conscience about his bookmaking. The story is all there, figured down to pennies. Verdean seems to have started on the sixth of July, and he went off with a bang. By the middle of the month he must have wondered why he ever bothered to work in a bank. I'm not surprised he had champagne every night at Brighton — it was all free. But the luck started to change after that. He had fewer and fewer winners, and he went on plunging more and more heavily. The last entry in the diary, a fortnight ago, left him nearly five thousand pounds in the red. Your first name doesn't have to be Sherlock to put all those notes together and make a tune."
Patricia's sweet face was solemn with thought.
"Those two men," she said. "Dolf and Kaskin. You knew them. What's their racket?"
"Morrie was one of Snake Canning's sparetime boys once. He's dangerous. Quite a sadist, in his nasty little way. You could hire him for anything up to murder, at a price; but he really enjoys his work. Kaskin has more brains, though. He's more versatile. Confidence work, the old badger game, living off women, protection rackets — he's had a dab at all of them. He's worked around racetracks quite a bit, too, doping horses and intimidating jockeys and bookmakers and so forth, which makes him an easy link with Mackintyre. His last stretch was for manslaughter. But bank robbery is quite a fancy flight even for him. He must have been getting ideas."
Patricia's eyes turned slowly towards the morning paper in which the holdup at Staines still had a place in the headlines.
"You mean you think—"
"I think our guardian angel is still trying to take care of us," said the Saint; and all the old impenitent mischief that she knew too well was shimmering at the edges of his smile. "If only we knew a cure for amnesia, I think we could be fifteen thousand pounds richer before bedtime. Add it up for yourself while I take another look at the patient."
He got up from the table and went through to the study which adjoined the dining-room. It was a rather small, comfortably untidy room, and the greater part of its walls were lined with built-in bookshelves. When he went in, one tier of shelving about two feet wide stood open like a door; beyond it, there appeared to be a narrow passage. The passage was actually a tiny cell, artificially lighted and windowless, but perfectly ventilated through a grating that connected with the air-conditioning system which served the rest of the house. The cell was no more than a broad gap between the solid walls of the room on either side of it, so ingeniously squeezed into the architecture of the house that it would have taken a clever surveyor many hours of work with a footrule to discover its existence. It had very little more than enough room for the cot, in which Verdean lay, and the table and chair at which Hoppy Uniatz was dawdling over his breakfast — if any meal which ended after noon, and was washed down with a bottle of Scotch whisky, could get by with that name.
Simon stood just inside the opening and glanced over the scene.
"Any luck yet?" he asked.
Mr Uniatz shook his head.
"De guy is cuckoo, boss. I even try to give him a drink, an' he don't want it. He t'rows it up like it might be perzon."
He mentioned this with the weighty reluctance of a psychiatrist adducing the ultimate evidence of dementia praecox.
Simon squeezed his way through and slipped a thermometer into the patient's mouth. He held Verdean's wrist with sensitive fingers.
"Don't you want to get up, Mr Verdean?"
The bank manager gazed at him expressionlessly.
"You don't want to be late at the bank, do you?" said the Saint. "You might lose your job."
"What bank?" Verdean asked.
"You know. The one that was robbed."
"I don't know. Where am I?"
"You're safe now. Kaskin is looking for you, but he won't find you."
"Kaskin," Verdean repeated. His face was blank, idiotic. "Is he someone I know?"
"You remember Angela, don't you?" said the Saint. "She wants to see you."
Verdean rolled his head on the pillows.