The canoe slid under the bank, momentarily out of sight: but the Saint's ears carried on the picture of what was happening. He heard the soft rustle of grasses as the side scraped the shore, the plip-plop of tiny drops of water as the wet paddle was lifted inboard, the faint grate of the wood as it was laid down. He sat on under his tree without a stir in his graven stillness, building sound upon sound into a construction of every movement that was as vividly clear to him as if he had watched it in broad daylight. He heard the scuff of a leather shoe-sole on the wood, quite different from the dull grate of the paddle; the rustle of creased clothing; the whisper of turf pressed underfoot. Then a soundless pause. He sensed that the man who had disembarked was probing the night clumsily, looking for some sign or signal, hesitating over his next move. Then he heard the frush of trodden grass again, and a sifflation of suppressed breathing that would have been quite inaudible to any hearing less uncannily acute than his.
A shadow loomed up against the stygian tarnish of the water, half the height of a man, and remained still. The prowler was sitting on the bank, waiting for something which Simon could not divine. There was a longer and more complicated rustling, a tentative scratch and an astonishingly loud sizzle of flame; and the man's head and shoulders leapt up out of the dark for an instant in startlingly crisp silhouette against the glow of a match cupped in his hands.
The Saint moved for the first time. He rolled up silently and smoothly on to his feet, straightening his knees gradually until he came upright. The pulsing of his heart had settled down to a steady acceleration that did nothing to disturb the feline flow of any of his movements. It was only a level beat of excitement in his veins, a throbbing eagerness to complete his acquaintance with that elusive man around whose fanatical seclusion centred so much violence and sudden death.
Simon came up behind him very quietly. The man never knew he was coming, had no warning of danger before two sets of steel fingers closed on his throat. And then it was too late for him to do anything useful. He was not very strong, and he was almost paralysed with the heart-stopping horror of that silent attack out of the dark. The cry that burst involuntarily from his lungs was crushed by the choking grip on his neck before it could come to sound in his mouth, and a heavy knee settled snugly into the small of his back and pinned him helplessly to the ground in spite of all his frantic struggles. It was all over very quickly.
The Saint felt him go limp, and cautiously relaxed the pressure of his hands. Then he slipped his arms under the man's unconscious body and lifted him up. The whole encounter had made very little noise; and Simon was no less attentive to silence than he had been before, while he carried the man down the bank and laid him out in the canoe. A couple of deft sweeps of the paddle sent the craft skimming out into the stream; but the Saint kept it moving until a bend in the river hid the lights of the house before he struck a match and inspected the face of his capture.
It was Ellshaw.
VIII "Now you are going to talk, brother," said the Saint.
He sat facing his trophy over another flickering match, giving the other every facility to recognise him before the light went out. Ellshaw's face was wet with the river water that had been slopped over him to help him back to unhappy consciousness; but there was something else on his face besides water-a pale clammy fright that made his oversized red nose stand out like a full-blown rose against the blanched sickliness of his cheeks.
The match spun from the Saint's fingers into the water with an expiring hiss, dropping the curtain of blackness between them again; and the Cockney's adenoidal voice croaked hysterically through the curtain.
"I carn't tell yer nothing, guv'nor-strike me dead if I can!"
"I shouldn't dream of striking you dead if you can," said the Saint kindly. "But if you can't . . . well, I really shouldn't know what to do with you. I couldn't just let you run away, because then you might begin to think you'd scored off me and get a swollen head, which would be very bad for you. I couldn't adopt you as a pet and take you around with me on a lead, because I don't like your face so much. I couldn't put you in a cage and send you to the Zoo, because the other monkeys might object. And so the question would arise, brother, how would one get rid of you? And of course it would always be so easy to get hold of your skinny neck again for a while, and hold you under water while you blew bubbles."
"Yer wouldn't dare!" panted Ellshaw.
"No?" The Saint's voice was just an infinitely gentle challenge lilting out of the darkness. "Did you get a good look at me when I struck that match, by any chance? You knew me well enough when I dropped in to see you in Duchess Place. And you talked as if you'd heard all about me, too. Did somebody ever tell you there was anything I didn't dare?"
He could hear the racking harshness of the man's breathing.
"Yer wouldn't dare," Ellshaw repeated as if he was only trying to convince himself. "That-that 'ud be murder!"
"Yeah?" drawled the Saint. "I'm not so sure. You tell me the answer, brother, out of that vast general-knowledge fund of yours-is it legally possible to kill a man who's already dead? Because you are dead, aren't you? You were murdered nearly a year ago."
It was a shot literally in the dark, but the sharp catch of the other's breath was as clear an answer to him as if he had had a searchlight focused down the boat. His thumb-nail gritted across another match, and the flame cut the pitiless buccaneering lines of his face out of the gloom for as long as it took him to light a cigarette. And then there was only the red tip of the cigarette glowing in the intensified dark, and his voice coming from behind it: "So how on earth could I murder you again, brother? I could only make you stay dead, and I don't think anybody's ever laid down the law about a crime like that."
"I don't know nothing," persisted Ellshaw hoarsely. "Honest I don't."
"Honest you do," said the Saint persuasively. "But I didn't even ask for your opinion. Just you come through with what's on your mind, and I'll let you know whether I think it was worth knowing."
Ellshaw did not answer at once; and Simon went on quite calmly, with a matter-of-fact detachment that was more deadly than any bullying bluster: "Don't kid yourself, sonny. If I had to toast your feet over a hot fire to make you talk, it wouldn't be the first toasting party I'd been out on. If I ever felt like wiping you off the face of the earth, I'd do it and never have a sleepless night on account of it. But just for this one occasion, I'm liable to be as good as you'll let me. When I came out here to catch a man, I told Chief Inspector Teal I'd bring him back with me, and I'd just as soon bring him back alive. What Teal will do to you when he gets you depends a whole lot on how you open your mouth first. Get wise to the spot you're sitting in, Ellshaw. It isn't everybody's idea of a good time to get himself hanged; but nobody who did a good job of King's Evidence has ever been strung up yet."
"They couldn't do it," said Ellshaw sobbingly. "They couldn't 'ang me. I ain't done nothing------"
"What about your wife?" said the Saint ruthlessly.
"She's all right, guv'nor. I swear she is. Nobody's done 'er no 'arm. I can tell you all abaht that."
"Tell me."
"Well, guv'nor, it was like this. When she spotted me in Duchess Plyce, an' I 'ad to get rid of 'er, we thought afterwards she might go blabbin' abaht 'aving seed me, so we 'ad to keep 'er quiet, see? But she ain't dead. She just got took off to some other place an' kep' there so she couldn't talk. We couldn't 'ave people lookin' for 'er, though, an' kickin' up a fuss; so we 'ad to give out she was dead, see?"