"Yes," said the Saint thoughtfully. "The man who didn't fit in. And he seems to have been the most important one of all."
Patricia made a sharp restless movement.
"Are you sure?" she said, as if she was still fighting against conviction. "After all, if Fairweather has been in Parliament, he may have got friendly with Kennet's father—"
"I wouldn't argue. The old man may be a bit bothered about his aitches now and again, and he may still pretend that he belongs to the Labour party, but he joined the national government at the right time so of course all the duchesses love him because they know his heart must be in the right place. If it had been the old man, it might have been all right. But it wasn't. It was young Kennet. And young Kennet was a pacifist, an anti-blood-sporter, an anti-capitalist, an anti-Fascist and the Lord knows what not; and he once said publicly that his father had proved to be the arch-Judas of the working classes. Well, there may be all sorts of harmless reasons why a fellow like that should have been invited to join that congregation of worshippers of the golden calf, but you must admit that he still looks like the ideal burnt offering."
There was a silence, in which the only interruption was the sound of Mr Uniatz cautiously uncorking his private bottle of Vat 69, while their thoughts went on.
Peter said: "Yes. But that isn't evidence. You've been very mysterious all this time, but you must have something more definite than that."
"I'll give you four things," said the Saint.
He stood up and leaned against one of the pillars of the porch, facing them, very tall and dark and somehow deadly against the sunlit peace of the garden. Their eyes were drawn as if by a magnet.
"One: Kennet's door was locked."
Patricia stared at him.
"So you mentioned," Peter said slowly. "But if everybody who locked a door—"
"I can only think of two kinds of people who'd lock their bedroom doors when they were staying in a private house," said the Saint. "Frightened virgins and — frightened men."
"Maybe he was expecting a call from Lady Valerie," suggested Patricia half heartedly.
"Maybe he was," agreed the Saint patiently. "But if that made him lock his door, he must have been a very undiscriminating young man. And in any case, that's only half of it. He not only locked his door, but he took the key out of the lock. Now, even assuming that anyone might lock a door, there's only one reason for taking the key out of the lock. And that's when you realize that an expert might be able to turn the key from the outside — in other words, when you're really thinking hard along the lines of a pretty determined attempt to get at you."
"He might have been tight when he went to bed," Peter pointed out. "That would account for almost any weird thing he did. And besides that, it might account for him not hearing the fire alarm."
"It might," said the Saint bluntly. "But while you're at it, why don't you think of the other possibility? Suppose he didn't lock the door at all. Suppose somebody else did?"
They were silent again.
"Go on," said Patricia.
Simon looked at her.
"Two: during all the time we were there, did you see any signs of a servant?"
"It might have been their night out."
"Yes. And with a house that size, there must have been several of them. And Fairweather let them all go out together, on a Saturday night, when he had a house full of week-end guests. And Valerie Woodchester cooked the dinner, and Lady Sangore washed the dishes. Why don't we make up some more brilliant theories? Maybe the servants were all burnt in the fire, too, only nobody thought of mentioning it."
Peter sipped his beer abstractedly.
"What else?"
"Three: when we arrived, every door and window that I could see on the ground floor was wide open. Let me try and save your brains some of this fearful strain. Maybe that was because everybody who heard the alarm rushed out through a different window. Or maybe it was because they always went to bed with the ground-floor windows open so that if any burglars wanted to drop in they wouldn't have to break the glass. Of course that's much more likely than that somebody wanted a good draught to make sure that the fire would burn up nice and fast."
This time there was no comment.
"Point four," said the Saint quietly, "is only Luker. The man who ties Sangore and Fairweather together. And the man who perfectly represents the kind of bee that Kennet had in his bonnet… Do you really think I'm insane, or doesn't it all seem like too many coincidences even to you?"
They didn't answer. Incredulity, a traditional habit of mind, even in spite of the years that they had spent in wild pursuit of the fantastic visions that steered the Saint's iconoclastic path, struggled desperately against the implications of belief. It would have been so much easier, so much more soothing, to let suspicion be lulled away by the uncritical rationalizations of ingrained convention, when to accept what the Saint argued meant something so ominous and horrible that the mind instinctively recoiled from dwelling on it. But it seemed as if the unclouded sunlight darkened behind the Saint's tall, disturbing figure while the echoes of his last words ran on through their protesting brains.
Mr Uniatz removed the neck of the bottle from his mouth with a faint squuck. The intermediate stages of the conversation had left as dim a blur on his consciousness as a discourse on the quantum theory would have left on an infants' class in arithmetic; but he had been told to think something over and he had been bravely obeying orders, even though thinking was an activity which always gave him a dull pain behind the eyes.
"Boss," he said, in a sudden wild bulge of inspiration, "I got it. It's some temperance outfit."
Simon blinked at him. There were occasions when the strange processes that went on inside the skull of Mr Uniatz were too occult even for him.
"What is?" he asked fearfully.
"De guys in de aeroplanes."
Simon clutched his head.
"What guys?"
"De guys," explained Mr Uniatz proudly, "who break de bottles of liquor."
2
The inquest was to be held at the Assembly Rooms in Anford, a largish building which served at various times for dances, whist drives, auctions and a meeting place for the Boy Scouts. When Simon arrived a small crowd had already started to gather, and three or four policemen were on duty to keep them back. Among the policemen Simon recognized the constable who had taken his arm on the night of the fire. He strolled across to him.
"Hullo, Reginald," he murmured. "What's new?"
"Oh, it's you, sir." The policeman lowered his voice confidentially. "Well, it all seems quite simple now. The poor devil never left 'is bed — 'e come down, bed and all, right through into the libry. Shocking sight 'e was, too. But there, he couldn't 've felt nothing. He must 've bin spiflicated by the smoke before ever the fire reached 'im." He went on looking at the Saint with a certain amount of awe. "I didn't know 'oo you was till after you'd gorn, sir," he said apologetically.
"I'm sorry," said the Saint gravely. "But you can still arrest me now if you want to, so there's no harm done."
"Arrest you?" repeated the policeman. "Wot — me?" A beaming grin split his face almost in half. "Why, I've read everythink they ever printed about you, and fair larfed myself sick sometimes, the way you put it over on those Smart Alecks at Scotland Yard. But I never thought I'd 'ave the pleasure of meeting you and not know it — though I did wonder 'ow you knew my name the other night."