Simon's blood ran a shade faster--he had been half expecting such a call.
"When and where?" he asked crisply.
"If you can be at the second traffic light going north in Central Park in an hour's time, sir--she'll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away."
"Tell her I'll be there," said the Saint.
He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement a man paced wearily up and down, as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.
But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth's existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Fifty-second Street and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered thoroughfare, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming headwaiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the late floor show for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth,'noting with a practised eye that he had still left three quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a check, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom, after half an hour he began to sweat, and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn't remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn't in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago because he had left him two dollars to pay the waiter.
An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint's address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o'clock he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy; but by then it was too late.
Inspector Fernack's eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe's drawing room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Earl of Eastridge, an assortment of servants and the night guard from Ingerbeck's.
"I might have known what to expect," he complained savagely. "You wouldn't help me to prevent anything like this happening but after it's happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It 'd serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now----"
He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.
The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture--sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banter-ingly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl and smiled over the rest of the congregation.
"Hullo, souls," he murmured. "I heard I'd won my bet, so I toddled over to make sure."
For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrifaction, and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.
"There you are," he burst out incoherently. "You come here--you----There's your man, Inspector. Arrest him!"
Fernack's mouth clamped up again.
"You don't have to tell me," he said grimly.
"And just why," Simon inquired lazily, as the detective moved towards him, "am I supposed to be arrested?"
"Why?" screamed the millionaire. "You--you stand there and ask why? I'll tell you why! Because you've been too clever for once, Mr Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you've done it-- and now you're going to prison where you belong!"
The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Fernack was dragging from his pocket. '
"Those are harsh words, Comrade," he remarked reproachfully. "Very harsh. In fact, I'm not sure that they wouldn't be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?"
"I'll tell you why." Fernack spoke. "Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while." He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. "When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase and taken about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn't resist leaving his signature." He jerked out a piece of Vascoe's own note-paper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. "You wouldn't recognize it, would you?" Fernack jeered sarcastically.
Even so, his voice was louder than it need have been. For, in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn't make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint's critical eyes rest on the drawing.
"Oh yes," said the Saint patiently. "I can see what it's meant to be. And now I suppose you'd like me to give an account of my movements last night."
"If you're thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis," Fernack said incandescently, "let me tell you before you start that I've already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you--just about the time that this job was done."
Simon nodded.
"You see," he said, "I had a phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently and I was to meet her at the second traffic light going north in Central Park."
The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.
"But Simon--I didn't----"
Her hand flew to her mouth.
Fernack's eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.
"That's fine," he said exultantly. "And Miss Vascoe doesn't know anything about it. So who else is going to testify that you spent your time waiting there--the man in the moon?"
"No," said the Saint. "Because I didn't go there."
Fernack's eyes narrowed with the fog that was starting to creep into his brain.
"Well, what----"
"I was expecting some sort of call like that," said the Saint. "I knew somebody was going to knock off this exhibition--after the bet I'd made with Vascoe, the chance of getting away with it and having me to take the rap was too good to miss. I meant it to look good --that's why I made the bet. But of course our friend had to be sure I wouldn't have an alibi, and he was pretty cunning about it. He guessed that you'd be having me shadowed, but he knew that a message like he sent me would make me shake my shadow. And then I'd have a fine time trying to prove that I spent an hour or so standing under a traffic light in Central Park at that hour of the night. Only I'm pretty cunning myself, when I think about it, so I didn't go. I came here instead."
Fernack's mouth opened again.
"You----"
"What are we wasting time for?" snorted Vascoe. "He admits he was here----"
"I was here," said the Saint coolly. "You know how the back of the house goes practically down to the East River, and you have a little private garden there and a landing stage? I knew that if anything was happening, it 'd happen on that side--it'd be too risky to do anything on the street frontage, where anybody might come by and see it. Well, things were happening. There was a man out there, but I beat him over the head and tied him up before he could make a noise. Then I waited around, and somebody opened the window from inside and threw out a parcel. So I picked it up and took it home. Here it is."