The Saint put his hands in his pockets. His face was chiselled bronze masked by the dark.
"I get it," he said softly. "The gold is taken on board that little beauty. And then you go down to the bottom and nobody ever sees you any more.
And then when you turn up again somewhere in South America------"
"We come back here," said Renway. "There are certain reasons why this is one of the last places where anyone would ever expect to find us."
Simon admitted it. From Renway's point of view, it must have loomed out as one of the most cunning certainties of crime. And the Saint was quite cold-bloodedly aware that if he failed to separate himself from the picnic in time, it would still be true.
The party of men in the rowboat had reached the submarine and were climbing out.
"My information is that the gold will be leaving Croydon about eight o'clock," Renway said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Perhaps you'd like to check over your aeroplane--there are one or two things I want to talk over with Petrowitz."
The Saint did not want to check over any aeroplane, but there was something else he very much wanted to do. He found his way back up the stairway with Renway's torch and wriggled out again through the hole in the cliff--the last glimpse he had of that strange scene was the lights glinting on the water far below him and the shadows moving over the dull sheen of the submarine's arched back. Renway had certainly spared no effort or expense to provide all the most modern and sensational accessories of melodrama, he reflected as he retraced his tracks to the house, what with electrified wire fences, stolen aeroplanes landing by night, bombs, secret panels, caves, submarines, and unshaven desperadoes; but he found the actuality less humorous than he would have found the same recital in a book. Simon had long had a theory that the most dangerous criminal would be a man who helped himself to some of the vast fund of daring ingenuity expended upon his problems by hordes of detective-story writers; and Sir Hugo Renway's establishment looked more like a detective story come to life than anything the Saint, had ever seen.
The dawn was lightening as he found his way into the library and went directly to the safe. He knelt down in front of it and unrolled a neat leather wallet which he took from a pocket in his voluminous flying coat--the instruments in that wallet were the latest and most ingenious in the world, and would in themselves have been sufficient to earn him a long term of imprisonment, without any other evidence, if Mr. Teal had caught him with them. The safe was also one of the latest and most useful models, but it was at a grave disadvantage. Being an inanimate object, it couldn't change its methods of defense so nimbly as the Saint could vary his attack. Besides which, the Saint was prepared to boast that he could make any professional peterman look like a two-year-old infant playing with a rubber crowbar when it came to safe-opening. He worked with unhurried speed and had the door open in twenty minutes; and then he carefully rolled up his kit and put it away again before he turned to an examination of the interior.
He had already charted out enough evidence within the thirty-acre confines of March House to have hanged a regiment, but there were still one or two important items missing. He found one useful article very quickly, in a small heap of correspondence on one of the shelves--it was a letter which in itself was no evidence of anything, but it was addressed to Sir Hugo Renway and signed by Manuel Enrique. Simon put it away in his pocket and went on with his search. He opened a japanned deed box and found it crammed with banknotes and bearer bonds: that was not evidence at all, but it was the sort of thing which Simon Templar was always pleased to find, and he was just tipping it out when he heard the rattle of the door handle behind him.
The Saint moved like a cat touched with a high-voltage wire. In what seemed like one connected movement, he scooped the bundle of currency and bonds into his pocket, shoved the deed box back on its shelf, swung the door of the safe, and leapt behind the nearest set of curtains; and then Renway came into the room.
He walked straight across to the safe, fishing out the key from his waistcoat pocket; but the door opened as soon as he touched the handle, and he froze into an instant's dreadful immobility. Then he fell on his knees and dragged out the empty deed box. . . .
Simon stepped quietly out from behind the curtains, so that he was between Renway and the door.
"Don't cry, Mother Hubbard," he said.
IX
RENWAY got to his feet and looked down the barrel of the Saint's gun. His face was pasty, but the lipless gash of a mouth was almost inhumanly steady.
"Oh, it's you," he whispered.
"It is I," said the Saint, with impeccable grammar. "Come here, Hugo--I want to see what you've got on you."
He plunged his left hand swiftly and dexterously into the other's inner breast pocket and found the second thing he had been looking for. It was a cheap pocket diary, and he knew without examining it that it was the one on which his forged trade-marks had been drawn. Renway must have been insanely confident of his immunity from suspicion to keep it on him.
"What ho," drawled Simon contentedly. "Stand back again, Hugo, while I see if you've been compromising yourself."
He stepped back himself and barely had time
to feel the foot of the man behind him under his heel before a brawny arm shot over his shoulder and grasped his gun wrist in a grip like a twisting Clamp of iron. Simon started to turn, but in the next split second another brawny arm whipped round his neck and pinned him.
The wrenching hand on his wrist forced him to drop his gun--it had begun to twist too long before he began resisting. Then he let himself go completely limp, while his left hand felt for the knees of the man behind him. His arm locked round them and he heaved himself backwards with a sudden jerk of his thighs. They fell heavily together, and the grips on his wrist and neck were broken. Simon squirmed over, put a knee in the man's stomach, and sprang up and away; and then he saw that Renway had snatched up the automatic and was covering him.
Simon Templar, who knew the difference between certain death and a sporting chance, put up his hands quickly.
"Okay, boys," he said. "Now you think of a game."
Renway's forefinger weighed on the trigger.
"You fool!" he said almost peevishly.
"Admitted," said the Saint. "Nobody ought to walk backwards without eyes in the back of his Head."
Renway had also picked up the diary, which Simon had dropped in the struggle. He put it back in his pocket.
The Saint's brain was turning over so fast that he could almost hear it hum. He still had Enrique's letter--and the bundle of cash. There was still no reason for Renway to suspect him of anything more than ordinary stealing: his taking of the diary was not necessarily suspicious. And Simon understood very clearly that if Renway suspected him of anything more than ordinary stealing, he could, barring outrageous luck, only leave March House in one position. Which would be depressingly and irrevocably horizontal.
Even then, there might be no alternative attitude; but it was worth trying. Simon had a stubborn desire to hang onto that incriminating letter as long as possible. He took out the sheaf of bonds and banknotes and threw them on the desk.
"There's the rest of it," he said cynically. "Shall we call it quits?"
Renway's squinting eyes wandered over him.
"Do you always expect to clear yourself so easily?" he asked, like a schoolmaster.
"Not always," said the Saint. "But you can't very well hand me over to the police this time, can you? I know too much about you."
In the next moment he knew he had made a mistake. Renway's convergent gaze turned Petrowitz, who was massaging his stomach tenderly.
"He knows too much," Renway repeated.