"Quite a neat little job, isn't it?" he remarked affably.
Fernack stared up at him, and his gaze was curiously sad.
"If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it," he said. "Simon, what in God's name did you do it for?"
The Saint's brows rose in balanced arcs of shocked incredulity.
"Henry — you couldn't possibly have some doddering notion in your dear gray head that I really did blow Gabriel's horn?"
"Off the record," Fernack said, relentless, "I was hoping against hope that the tip was a phony. But 1 might have known it would be like this one of these days."
"You've known people to try to frame me before."
"I've never seen such a cold case as this against you before."
Simon flipped ashes from the shortening end of his cigarette.
"There was a tip-off, of course," he said languidly. "How did you get it?"
"On the telephone."
"Man or woman?"
"A man."
"Name and address?"
Fernack took a breath.
"I don't know."
"Did you talk to him yourself?"
"Yes. He asked for me."
"Why?"
"People do sometimes. Besides, it's been published quite a bit that I'm the man who's supposed to do something about you."
"Fame is a wonderful thing," said the Saint admiringly. "And what did this anonymous fan of yours have to report?"
"He said: 'I was passing Mr Linnet's house on East Sixty-third Street, and I saw a man who looked as if he was breaking in. He looked just like the pictures of that fellow the Saint. I didn't get it at first, and then when I did I walked back and there were noises | in the house as if there was a fight going on.' "
Simon nodded a number of times with the gravest respect.
"I can see that I shouldn't have underestimated your public," he drawled. "They come from a very talented class. They know' just whose house they're passing on any street in town. With their catlike eyes, they can recognise characters like me in dark corners in a dimout. They can tell at a glance whether I'm trying to break in, or whether I'm just looking for the bell or the right key. And of course they know that you're the only officer in New York to call out on a case like that. They wouldn't dream of losing face by just mentioning it to the first cop they met on his beat."
The detective eased his collar with one powerfully controlled forefinger.
"That's all very clever," he said stubbornly. "But I came here. And Linnet has been murdered. And you're still here."
"Naturally I'm here," said the Saint blandly. "I wanted to see him."
"What for?"
"Because he manufactures electrical gadgets, and he needs iridium, and I heard he'd been buying from the black market. I thought I might persuade him to tell me a thing or two."
"And he wouldn't talk, so you strangled him."
"Yes," said the Saint tiredly. "I tied a string around his larynx to ease his vocal cords."
"And you left your mark on his door."
Simon glanced critically across the hall at the ungainly pattern of chalk lines that Fernack referred to.
"Henry," he said reasonably, "I'm not a hell of an artist, but you've seen some of my early original work. Would you honestly say that that was a typical job of mine? It looks kind of shaky and spavined to me."
The detective glowered at the drawing, and almost wavered. You could see the doubt beginning to curdle and grow heavier inside him, like a complicated meal in a fragile stomach.
"Besides which," Simon mentioned diffidently, "wouldn't it be just a little bit silly of me to leave that trademark around at all in these days, so that you wouldn't even waste a minute before you had the dragnet out for me?"
"I've heard you say something like that before, too," Fernack retorted. "But it isn't my job to throw out evidence just because it looks silly. You give me your story, and we'll start from there."
"Figure it for yourself," Simon persisted inexorably. "Somebody wanted to keep me from talking to Linnet in the worst way. They wanted it badly enough to make quite sure he wouldn't sing. And they thought they could tie it off with the corny slickness of putting me out of action at the same fell swoop. So they must be just a little bit worried about me. And it also suggests that our iridium merchants may have something quite ingenious to put over while I'm presumably languishing in the jug. Now would you like to play their game for them, or shall we try to make sense?"
Fernack studied his face with intractable doggedness. He might have been about to make any comeback, or none at all. It was one of those teetering moments that might have toppled on either side.
And it inevitably had to be that moment when the plain-clothes man called Al appeared at the top of the stairs with another individual who was a stranger to all of them, to whom he was probably trying to give sympathetic assistance, but who looked more as if he were being frogmarched into a back room for a friendly rubber of third degree. This specimen wore the black coat and striped trousers of a conventional butler, and his fleshy face was as distressed as the face of any conventional butler would have been at the humiliation of his production.
"I found 'im," Al announced cheerfully, helping his patient down the stairs with much the same tenderness as he would have helped any old trunk. "The guy slugged 'im when he opened the door, an' tied 'im up an' locked him in a closet."
There was a different and hardening detachment about the way that Fernack waited until the man had been shepherded down to his level, and then said: "Would you know the man who slugged, you if you saw him again?"
"I don't really know, sir. He had his coat collar turned up, and there wasn't much light on the porch, but he seemed to be fairly tall and slim. He had an air-raid warden's armlet on, and I was looking at that mostly, because he was saying we had some lights showing that shouldn't have been; and then he pointed to sortie-thing behind me, and I turned to look, and that's when he must have hit me, because I don't remember anything more."
"Could it have been this man here?" Fernack asked flatly, stabbing his thumb back at the Saint.
The butler's puffy eyes hesitated over actuality and recollection.
"It could have been, sir. I wouldn't like to be too definite, but this man was built a bit similar."
You could feel the weakness ebbing out of Fernack like the fluidity of setting concrete. He turned on his heels to face the Saint again, and his jaw was tightening up again like a trap.
"Well," he said, "you were going to tell your story. Go on with it."
Simon found a rim of floor that was clear of the late Mr Linnet's beautiful carpet, and studiously trod the stub of his cigarette out on it. In the same leisured tempo, he lighted another to replace it. He had a sense of incipient anticlimax, just the same.
It was, admittedly, a little bit on the hammy side to have tried to talk himself through his contract without showing any trumps; but as a challenge to professional vanity the temptation had been irresistible. He only resigned himself to quit because he realised that time was marching on, and fun might be fun but it had to take second place to the ultimate exigencies of the clock. He could certainly have played a lot longer, but there were more urgent things to do.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said, "but it's really dreadfully simple. Somebody else knew I was coming here tonight. Somebody didn't want Comrade Linnet to sing to me, and the same person wanted to stop me doing any arias of my own. It all went together into the pretty picture you sec before you. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even supposed to be caught here at all. That was just a little too tight for practical timing. But I actually was waylaid on the doorstep by a very ornamental piece of grommet, and I took her to dinner, and then the stall was to lure me to her apartment for some soft music and hard practice; and then I was supposed to have no alibi at all for these vital moments."