"Hullo. Is that you, Claud ?. . . Well, I want you. . . . Yeah-for the first time in my life I'll be glad to see you. Come right over, and bring as many friends as you like. ... I can't tell you on the phone, but I promise it'll be worth the trip. There's any amount of dead bodies in the house, and . . . Well, I suppose I can find out for you. Hold on."
He clamped a hand over the mouthpiece and looked across the table.
"What's the address, Jones?"
"You'd better go on finding out," retorted the big man sullenly.
"Sure." The Saint's smile was angelic. "I'll find out. I'll go to the street corner and see. And before I go I'll just kick you once round the hall-just to see my legs are functioning."
He lounged round the table, and their eyes met.
"This is 208, Meadowbrook Road," said the man grimly.
"Thanks a lot." Simon dropped into his chair again and picked up the telephone. "Two-o-eight, Meadow-brook Road, Hampstead-I'll be here when you come. . . . O.K., Eustace."
He rose.
"Let's climb stairs again," he said brightly.
He took over the gun and shepherded the party aloft. The show had to be seen through, and his telephone call to Chief Inspector Teal had set a time limit on the action that could not be altered. It was a far cry from that deserted house to the hotel in Paris where Brian Quell had died, and yet Simon knew that he was watching the end of a coherent chain of circumstances that had moved with the inscrutable remorselessness of a Greek tragedy. Fate had thrust him into the story again and again, as if resolved that there should be no possibility of a failure in the link that bore his name; and it was ordained that he should write the end of the story in his own way.
The laboratory upstairs stood wide open. Simon pushed the big man in and followed closely behind. Patricia Holm came last: she saw the professor huddled back against his machine with his face still distorted the ghastly grimace that the death agony of high-voltage electricity had stamped into his features, and bit her lip. But she said nothing. Her questioning eyes searched the Saint's countenance of carved brown granite; and Simon backed away a little from his captive and locked the door behind him.
"We haven't a lot of time, Jones," he remarked queitly; and the big man's lips snarled.
"That's your fault."
"Doubtless. But there it is. Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal is on his way, and we have one or two things to settle before he comes. Before we start, may I congratulate you?"
"I don't want any congratulations."
"Never mind. You deserve them." The Saint fished out his cigarette case with his left hand. Quite naturally he extracted and lighted a cigarette, and stole a glance at his wrist watch while he did so. His brain worked like a taximeter, weighing out miles and minutes. "I think I've got everything taped, but you can check me up if I go wrong anywhere. Somehow or other-we won't speculate how-you got to know that Dr. Quell had just perfected a perfectly sound commercial method of transmuting metals. It's been done already, on a small scale, but the expense of the process ruled it right out as a get-rich-quick proposition. Quell had worked along a new line, and made it a financial cinch."
"You must have had a long talk with him," said the big man sardonically.
"I did. . . . However-your next move, of course, was to get the process for yourself. You're really interesting, Jones-you work on such original lines. Where the ordinary crook would have tried to capture the professor and torture him, you thought of subtler methods. You heard of Quell's brother, a good-for-nothing idler who was always drunk and usually broke. You went over to Paris and tried to get him in with you, figuring that he could get Sylvester's confidence when no one else could. But Brian Quell had a streak of honesty in him that you hadn't reckoned with. He turned you down-and then he knew too much. You couldn't risk him remembering you when he sobered up. So you shot him. I was there. A rotten shot, Jones-just like the one you took at me this evening, or that other one last night. Gunwork is a gift, brother, and you simply haven't got it."
The big man said nothing.
"You knew I knew something about Brian Quell's murder, so you tried to get me. That talk about an 'envoy' of yours was the bunk-you were playing the hand alone, because you knew there wasn't a crook on earth who could be trusted on a thing as big as this." The Saint never paused in his analysis; but his eyes were riveted to the prisoner's face, and he would have known at once if his shot in the dark went astray. Not the faintest change of expression answered him, and he knew he was right. Jones was alone. "By the way, I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me exactly how you knew something had gone wrong in Paris ?"
"If you want to know, I thought I heard someone move in the corridor outside, and I went out to make sure. The door blew shut behind me, on an automatic lock. I had to stand outside and listen. Then someone really did come along the passage --"
"And you had to beat it," Simon nodded. "But I don't think you rang me up this morning just to make out how much I heard. What you wanted was to hear my voice, so that you could imitate it."
"He did it perfectly," said Patricia.
The Saint smiled genially.
"You see, Jones? If you couldn't have made your fortune as a gun artist, you might have had a swell career as a ventriloquist. But you wouldn't have it. You wanted to be a Master Mind, and that's where the sawdust came out. My dear old borzoi, did you think we'd never heard of that taxi joke before ? Did you think poor little Patricia, with all her experience of sin, was falling for a gag like that? Jones, that was very silly of you-quite irreparably silly. We let you have your little joke just because it seemed the easiest way to get a close-up of your beautiful whiskers. If you'd left us your address before you rang off this morning we'd have been saved the trouble, but as it was --"
"Well, what are you getting at?" grated the big man..
"Just checking up," said the Saint equably. "So you know how we got here. And I found that King's Messenger in the other room-that's what first confirmed what we were up against. Anyone making gold is one of the things the Secret Service sits and waits for all year round: one day the discovery is going to be genuine, and the first news of it would send the international exchanges crazy. There'd be the most frightful panic in history, and any government has got to be watching for it. That King's Messenger had the news- you were lucky to get him."
The big man was silent again, but his face was pale and pasty.
"Two murders, Jones, that were your very own handiwork," said the Saint. "And then-the professor. Accidental, of course. But very unfortunate. Because it means that you're the only man left alive who knows this tremendous secret."
Simon actually looked away. But he had no idea what he looked at. The whole of his faculties were concentrated on the features which were still pinned in the borders of his field of vision, watching with every sense in his body for the answer to the question that he could not possibly ask. That one thing had to be known before anything else could be done, and there was only one way to know it. He bluffed, as he had bluffed once before, without a tremor of his voice or a flicker of his eyes. ...
And the most expressive thing about the big man's expression was that it did not change. The big man took the Saint's casual assertion into his store of knowledge without the slightest symptom of surprise. It signified nothing more to him than one more superfluous blow on the head of a nail that was already driven deep enough. He glared at the Saint, and the gun in the Saint's hand, without any movement beyond a mechanical moistening of his lips, intent only on watching for the chance to fight that seemed infinitely improbable. . . . And the Saint tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at the big man again.