Lauber stood and glared sombrely after it until it turned the next corner and disappeared. Simon tapped him on the shoulder.
"Now," he said, "we will go upstairs and have a little chat."
Lauber transferred the same sultry glare to the Saint. And then, with a renewed clamping of his thick lips, he turned abruptly, thrust past him without a word and stumped heavily back up the stairs.
Simon drifted into the room after him and returned to his favourite perch on the edge of the table. He opened his cigarette case and held it out, but Lauber ignored it. He seemed to be labouring under the stress of some great emotion.
"You might as well make the best of it," said the Saint amiably. "After all, I've done you a good turn."
"You have?" Lauber ground out.
"Sure. I hope you're not going to try and kid me now, sweetheart. You'll only be wasting your breath. Christine told me you'd taken the ticket, and Joris told me the same thing-quite independently. And you just about admitted it when you stopped calling me a liar just now. I know you've got it, so you might as well come clean. Be a big-business man and take it philosophically. That's what I'm doing. I started as one of the crowd with an eighth share. Then Christine offered a fifth, so I went for that. Palermo and Aliston bid a third, which might have been even better if they'd behaved themselves. Now you're going to come through with a half, which will knock all the opposition back on their heels. You ought to be congratulating yourself."
"I ought to be congratulating myself, did I?"
The Saint nodded placidly.
"I don't know about your grammar, but your ideas are right. What did you do with the ticket, Lauber?"
Lauber's face seemed to be turning purple. The veins stood out on his forehead, and his eyes started to look as if they had been recently boiled.
"What did I do with the ticket?" he almost shouted.
"That's all I want you to tell me," said the Saint comfortably. "So you'd better get used to the idea. You've got to let me in with you, Lauber. Because I've got Christine, and I've got Joris, and I've got the other guy; and if I let them loose they can raise such a shindy about the ticket being stolen that you'd find yourself in the calaboose the minute you tried to cash it. You haven't any choice, my lad, so you'd better talk fast. And if you don't, I'll make you."
The last words made no visible impression on Lauber at all. He appeared to be paying too much attention to trying to prevent himself choking to hear what he was listening to very clearly.
"I haven't got the ticket," he groaned; and the Saint's eyes narrowed.
"You'll have to think faster than that"
"I haven't got it, I tell you." Lauber's voice exploded in a hoarse roar through the obstruction in his throat. "You fool-it was in the car!"
The Saint dropped off the table as if he had been swept off it. It didn't take him the fraction of an instant to convince himself that Lauber could never have put over a lie like that. Everything led up to it. The Saint's awakened eyes glinted like chips of ice.
"What?"
"I hid it in the car last night," Lauber said suffocatingly. "It was the only thing I could do. I've been trying to get at it all day. And you let Graner go off with it!"
3 Simon took hold of himself with an effort.
"You left it in the car?"
"What else could I do? One of those swine last night hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out. I woke up in the car going home. It was the first thing that came into my head. I knew there 'd be trouble about it, and I had to do something."
"How d'you know it's still there?"
"It must be. Nobody else would look for it where I put it."
"What about the chauffeur?"
"He only cleans the car once a week-on Mondays. Even then, he only washes the outside. He's one of these local men. He wouldn't think of turning out the inside until it was too filthy to sit in."
"But suppose he had found it."
"He'd have said something. I've been afraid of that all day, but I couldn't find an excuse to go to the garage or take the car out. Graner watches everything you do. When that girl rang up I tried to make him let me come here alone, but he had to come as well. I could have got the ticket back if he'd sent me to the house with Palermo, but you didn't help me and I couldn't go on arguing."
The Saint remembered his cigarette and inhaled with a quiet concentration which he achieved with difficulty. He didn't by any means share Lauber's conviction that anyone who had found the ticket would have talked about it-the competition in double-crossing and double-double-crossing was getting too intense on every side for anything to be certain.
"Palermo and Aliston had some other old car when they picked me up," he said. "Which car did they use this morning when they came down to look for Joris?"
"I don't know."
Simon didn't remember either. He was trying to recall if anything had happened which might have given him a clue. But whichever car they had used, they would have gone to the garage; and it might have occurred to them to make a hurried search.
"Which car did the chauffeur use when he went out again last night?"
"I think that was the Buick."
Still there was nothing definite enough to found an assumption on, either way. Even Graner himself . . .
"Where did you hide the ticket?" Simon asked.
Lauber was getting control of himself again. He might even have been starting to regret having said so much. A glitter of cunning twisted across his eyes.
"That's my business. You find a way to get at the car, and I'll find the ticket."
"Couldn't you have found it while you were putting Palermo in?"
"Would I have left it there if I could?"
Simon considered him dispassionately. It seemed unlikely, but he didn't care to leave anything to chance.
"We'll just look you over, and make sure," he said.
"You'd better not try," replied Lauber belligerently.
His hand went to the pocket where he had put away his gun, and a comical expression of disbelief and dismay warped itself over his face when his hand came out empty again. His gaze returned furiously to the Saint: Simon was lazily twiddling the gun around by the trigger guard, and he was smiling.
"I forgot to tell you I used to be a pickpocket," he apologised solemnly. "Put your hands up and be a good boy while I run you over."
Lauber had no useful argument to offer. He stood scowling churlishly while the Saint's practised hands worked over him with an efficiency that wouldn't have left even a postage stamp undiscovered. If Lauber had had the ticket on him, Simon would have found it; but it wasn't there. When the Saint stepped back from his examination he was assured of it.
"D'you want your toy back?" he asked carelessly when he had finished, and held out the automatic.
Lauber took it gingerly, as if he half expected it to sting him. The brazen impudence of the gesture left him nonplussed, as it had left Graner.
But the Saint wasn't even paying any attention to Lauber's reception of it. All the mental energy he possessed was taken up with this new angle on the ticket. But there was no process of logic by which the angle could be defined-or if there was, he couldn't find it. The only certain fact was that Lauber hadn't got the ticket. None of the other possibilities could be ruled out. Palermo might have it. Or Aliston might have it. Or Manoel might have it. Or Graner might have it, or find it at any moment, if he suspected enough to make him search for it and decided to join in the popular movement and paddle his own canoe in the buccaneers' regatta. Or it might still be in the car and stay there-a possibility which made the Saint's hair stand on end when he thought how completely and catastrophically the problem might be solved if Graner had an accident on the way home and the car caught fire.