Ingram’s and the girl’s glances met, in a simultaneous reaching towards each other of complete unison.
Ingram looked up again and said, “Thanks for trying to give me a fair break, sir. But neither of us want you to get yourself in Dutch for me. Go ahead and arrest me, if you think you ought to. I’ll prove I didn’t do it, somehow.”
The girl reached up and took his hand as he stood beside her and said, “I know he will, Dad.”
Simon slid another cigarette into his mouth and struck a match. Inwardly he was approaching the same state of baffled frustration as the marshal, even if his purely intuitive inability to visualize Jock Ingram as this kind of murderer was perhaps even greater, but no one could have guessed it from his cool and nerveless exterior. That aura of unperturbed relaxation was the only authority he had to keep everyone answering his questions, but he intended to exploit it to the last second — even though he still seemed to be groping in unalleviated darkness.
“Just one last little detail before we call the paddy wagon,” he intruded. “I said there couldn’t be any argument that Oakridge wrote the letters C-O-P. But from the position of his hand, and the fresh blood on his finger — it looked to me as if he’d dipped it again after he wrote the “P” — I’d say there were good grounds to believe that he was trying to add something more when he passed out. Now, I don’t imagine he wanted to say that everything was copacetic, or put in a dying plug for the Copacabana. But can any of you think of anything else beginning with the same letters that has anything to do with this project here? Have you done any experimenting in a place that could be called a copse?”
“No,” Rand said promptly.
But in spite of themselves they could all be seen gazing into space and trying out tentative syllables.
“Cope,” said the girl. “Copious...”
The words died forlornly, inevitably.
“Copper,” Ingram said, and immediately reddened. “I mean—”
“The metal is used in most electrical work, of course,” Soren said kindly. “It has no unusual significance in what we are doing.
“Copra?” Tanner said.
“A coconut product, I believe,” Rand said witheringly, “which, without asking for any official clearance, I can say that we do not use.”
“Copy,” Soren said.
There was a moment’s breathless hush.
Marjorie Tanner’s hand tightened on Ingram’s fingers, and her father’s baggy eyes began to light up; even Rand pursed his small mouth hesitantly.
“But after all,” Soren said, with sadness in his sonorous bass, “if poor Oakridge was worried about a copy, even of a vital diagram — we have all thought of that motive. He was not telling us anything.”
The room sighed as a multiple of separately inaudible deflations.
“Copulation, anyone?” flipped the Saint.
He should have known better than that. The silence this time was deafening.
“I really think we’re entitled to know the name of your new assistant, Marshal,” Rand said at last, with the smoothness of a wrapped package of razor blades, and Simon decided that the marshal had carried him long enough.
“The name is Templar,” he said. “More often called the Saint.”
He had seen all the conceivable reactions to that announcement so often that they were seldom even amusing any more. This time he only hoped they would be disposed of quickly.
“Did you know this, Marshal?” Rand was the one who finally cracked the new stillness, in a voice of shaky incredulity.
“Yes, Professor,” Tanner said.
“And knowing it, you brought him here and let him pretend to be your assistant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The FBI will be very interested.”
“I don’t think it’ll surprise ’em much,” Tanner said, with the first real satisfaction he had permitted himself. “When I was calling Tucson, I thought to mention that I’d got a fellow named Simon Templar registered at the motel. It turned out the FBI man I was talking to had had something to do with clearing Mr Templar for some special work during the war. He said if I could get the Saint to come out here with me it wouldn’t hurt anything, at least.”
Simon let an embryo smoke ring disintegrate at his lips as he paid Tanner the salute of a half-surprised, half-laughing flicker of his brows and hitched himself with the flowing movement of a gymnast off the table where he had been perched.
“And for the record,” he said, to put all the cards down together, “I don’t think Jock Ingram did it either.”
“Indeed.” Rand had been shaken, but flint sparked behind his prim, scholarly eyeglasses. “According to your analysis, then, you must think it was either Dr Soren or myself, because that’s what you’ve reduced the list of suspects to.”
“Maybe I do,” said the Saint cheerfully. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were reduced to only one other suspect. In detective stories I’ve noticed they like to confuse you with a lot of possibilities, but in real life it isn’t any easier if you only have two alternatives. I mean to pick the right one honestly, for sure, and so that you can make it stick — not taking a fifty-fifty chance on a guess, or flipping a coin.”
He made a slight arresting gesture with his cigarette to forestall the interruptions he could see formulating.
“Let’s reconstruct the crime. It doesn’t seem difficult. Oakridge went into that room and caught somebody doing something he shouldn’t. According to Professor Rand, there was a very important drawing on the board. Very likely someone was photographing it. Not copying” — he gave Soren a nod of acknowledgement — “because that would be easier for this Someone to explain away. It had to be so blatant that Someone knew that his goose was cooked the minute Oakridge got out of the room to tell his story. So Someone picked up the nearest blunt instrument, a soldering iron, and hit Oakridge on the head from behind as he started for the door. The position of the wound on his skull confirms that. Then, wanting to make sure that if Oakridge wasn’t dead he would die quickly, and without being able to talk, and not wanting to do it by hammering away at his skull until he smashed a hole in it — which, if you’ll take my word for it, is a messy and uncertain business for a guy who isn’t a very muscular and physical type — he shoved a screwdriver in through his jugular vein and his throat.”
Simon angled a hand towards Ingram, who stood rather stiffly but unfalteringly at a kind of attention beside Marjorie Tanner’s chair, but with her fingers still firmly locked in his.
“Now I’ll admit that, of all of us here, Jock is one of the most likely to beat a man’s head to a pulp, if he had enough provocation. But that is exactly how Oakridge wasn’t killed. And if any of you can visualize this lad in the rest of the part, the essential part, as the master spy who infiltrates a top-secret project and photographs the priceless plans — even if, with the best will in the world, you believe he could tell a priceless plan from the blueprint for a washing machine—”
“Please, may I butt in?” Soren said, with his sepulchral precision. “All your deductions are dandy, Mr. Templar, but they are all tinted by your own rather melodramatic personality. You could be passing up a much less exciting reconstruction and motive.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t like to bring this up,” Soren said, looking around with his deeply earnest eyes, “and I would not, except in these circumstances. But most of us know that there were other complications about poor Oakridge. The popular picture of a scientist shows him as a kind of disembodied, dedicated priest. Sometimes this is true. But there are exceptions. Oakridge was one. His glands were fully as active as his brains. Not to mince words, he was a wolf. He gave Miss Tanner quite a bit of trouble.”