It was all so transparent that the Saint could analyse Lauber's mental processes as accurately as if they had been printed on the wall in front of his eyes. And it was proved-proved up to the hilt by the announcement he had heard Lauber making which had almost knocked him off his feet as he entered Graner's house the night before.
Only that the others hadn't been quite so credulous as Lauber had expected. Lauber's statement had clearly come in the middle of an argument in which he was being accused of double-crossing, and it was probably the same argument that had gone on far into the night. In the end, Lauber must somehow have managed to get himself acquitted for the time being; otherwise it was doubtful whether he would have been taking breakfast. Almost certainly he would have been searched, but certainly he would have contrived to hide the ticket by that time, which would have gone some way towards blocking a definite verdict against him. So for a while he had at least managed to get himself left alone, although his conscience might be making him feel less confident about choosing a moment for his getaway than he had anticipated.
But the idea he had started hadn't finished there. The seed must have taken root in either Palermo's or Aliston's imagination; and on the way down to the town that morning one of them would have made a proposition. If there was going to be any double-crossing, they might as well look after themselves. Joris was still a key man in the situation, wherever the lottery ticket was. If they found him, why should they be in a hurry to share him out before they knew how the rest of the deal was going? There was still time to locate the ticket, whether or not they had been wrong about Lauber-and in any case a fifty-fifty division was twice as good as a four-way split. . . .
The Saint's glow of delight deepened as the colours and details developed in the picture. When he had inwardly labelled the party a thieves' picnic a few moments ago he hadn't realised what a perfect summary of the situation it was.
"In that case, I suppose Joris and his pal have gone off to cash the ticket," he said, principally because he felt that he had to say something after all that time.
"If they have done that, they will have been intercepted," answered Graner. "I have had one of my servants posted outside the shop where the ticket was bought ever since it opened this morning. The ticket cannot be cashed anywhere else."
And the gorgeous complications of the tangle went on tracing their fantastic convolutions in the Saint's mind.
Lauber knew where the ticket was; but he didn't know what had happened to Joris and Christine, and he knew that for the present it certainly wasn't safe for him to try and cash it. Palermo and Aliston knew where Joris was; but they didn't know what had happened to the ticket or to Christine. Graner knew where Christine was, and he might hope to find something out from her; but he didn't know yet what had happened to Joris and the ticket. Every one of them held some of the cards, and every one of them was completely in the dark about the others. And presumably every one of them was prepared to cut anybody else's throat to fill his own hand or keep what he already held. The intrusion of that two-million-dollar scrap of paper had blown the esprit de corps of the gang to smithereens and opened up the way for what must have been one of the wildest and most unscrupulous free-for-all, dog-eat-dog dissensions that the history of crime could ever have known. ...
"Your servant doesn't know what this pal of Joris' looks like," Simon pointed out. "Or does he?"
Graner's slit of a mouth almost smiled.
"He would scarcely need to. If anyone presented that ticket for payment, the whole street would know about it."
Not, Simon was reflecting, that he had too much to crow about himself. He held tantalising portions of all the cards, and didn't have a single complete one to himself. He knew that Lauber had got the ticket, but he didn't know where; he knew that Palermo and Aliston had got Joris and Hoppy, but he didn't know what they had done with them; he knew that Christine was there beside him, but he knew that Graner was just as much there. And within something like the next ten seconds he had got to plan out a definite campaign sequence that would take in all those points."
"Joris won't be there, and you know it," said Christine. "Because he hasn't got the ticket."
"You mean you have it?" Graner said slowly.
"Neither of us has got it, I told you. It was st --"
"Wait a minute," interrupted the Saint. "Let's take this in order. What did happen last night?"
She looked at him sullenly.
"You ought to know."
"Not me, darling," said the Saint easily. "I'm a new recruit. I wasn't in that party."
"Who were these other two men who interfered?" said Graner.
She didn't answer at once, and Graner turned to the Saint.
"We're wasting time here," he snapped. "The car's outside-we had better take her back to the house at once. When we get there we shall be able to make her answer questions."
"Try and take me there," she said.
She had had time to recover from her first terror, and the hard jaunty pose of which Simon had seen a glimpse the night before was beginning to cover her again. It was as if a brittle shell formed over her that shut out all the other side of her nature which he had seen when she wept over Joris. She seemed to gather herself together with an effort to shake off the spell of Graner's pitiless beady eyes. Suddenly she took a step away from the wall, and Graner's hand shot out and caught her wrist.
"If you try to stop me," she said steadily, "I'll make enough noise to bring everyone in the hotel up here."
Graner glanced at the Saint. Simon knew exactly what the glance was intended to convey. He had demonstrated his resourcefulness in a similar situation before, and it was his cue to repeat the performance. But just as he had known what he was doing then, he knew what he was doing now.
He got up off the bed; but it was Graner's wrist that he took hold of, closing his fingers on it in a ring of steel that numbed the nerves and sinews. He laid the flat of his hand on Graner's face and pushed him back against the door.
"You mind your own business, Reuben," he said paternally.
He had turned round with the movement so that his back was towards Christine, and as he spoke his left eyelid drooped in a broad wink.
"And I'll have your gun-in case you're still feeling nasty," he added.
He took the weapon out of Graner's pocket and transferred it to his own, and as he did so he glared at him warningly and winked again. Graner stared back at him without a change in the venomous glitter of his eyes, but the Saint took no notice. He locked the door and took out the key and gave it to Christine.
"Listen," he said. "You've got nothing to worry about. This punk won't lay a hand on you again while I'm around. We'll peel him off the door and let you out any time you want to go. But I wish you'd stop and talk for a few minutes more. I'm just working round to a proposition that might interest you." She hesitated. The Saint's back was towards Graner now, and he gave Christine the same encouraging wink and pushed her gently towards the bed.
"Sit down and have a drink," he said. "You look as if you needed one. And just let me talk for three minutes. You can still scream your head off if anyone tries to stop you going out after that."
"You can't say anything that I want to listen to."
"Don't be too sure, darling. I have beautiful ideas sometimes."
He left her and went across the room to rummage in one of his suitcases. It yielded a bottle of whiskey -and something which no one else saw him pick up.
"It's like this," said the Saint, as he poured out three glasses. "You say you've lost your lottery ticket. Well, things like that do happen. People lose jewelry, and so forth. They don't often lose two million bucks' worth at one go, but that doesn't alter the general principle. When they lose something and they want it back, they mostly offer a reward."