“Forty-four Newkirk Road,” Simon said. “You can drop us around the nearest corner, if you don’t want to be too obviously with us.”
Longbottom did not say a word during the short drive, which took them through a northward zigzag to a small square somewhere behind Barker’s. He stopped there without parking or shutting off the engine of his car.
“Just around the next turning on the left,” he said, without looking around.
He seemed to be trying out a theory that not looking at his passengers would somehow nullify their presence.
Simon stepped out and helped Cassie to join him, folded his long frame down to speak to the glum driver.
“We’ll be back again shortly. Have a cigarette or something if you like, but don’t leave the car.”
Longbottom made no audible comment, and the Saint and Cassie strolled the few yards to Newkirk Road.
“Just what are you going to say to this man who’s been doubling for you?” asked the girl.
“It depends a bit on what he says to me. He’s probably no professional crook. If you wanted to find an imposter, where would you go?”
Cassie thought for a second.
“I’d look in the Actors’ Directory.”
“Right. If we...”
They had just rounded the corner, and Simon kept on walking, holding Cassie’s arm, but his voice was cut off by the inescapable premonition that leapt to his mind from what he saw ahead.
About halfway along the block a small crowd had gathered, and two policemen were holding open a path from the front of one of the apartment buildings — someone’s venerable town house converted to flats — to the open rear doors of an ambulance. The cause of the assembly lay on a stretcher beside the steps of the building, and one of the ambulance attendants was working over him with oxygen equipment.
The Saint made his way through the gawkers with Cassie Lane clinging to his hand. He arrived at the stretcher in time to see the ambulance attendant make a hopeless gesture and shut down his apparatus.
“What happened?” Simon asked one of the bystanders.
“Chap fell from a top window. Suicide, they reckon.”
Although the Saint was partially prepared for what he would see when the breathing mask was taken away from the dead man’s face, the sight still came as a shock. While the man was not his double, the likeness was good enough to pass at a casual glance — or to provide a snapshot that would be identifiable as Simon Templar with the help of a slightly out of focus camera.
Cassie gasped as she looked, and Simon turned to see Longbottom sharing her astonishment. The police car was parked at the corner, and the plain-clothes man had left it to come and join the spectators. A minute later the ambulance doors closed off the last view of the body, and the crowd began reluctantly to disperse.
“What do you make of that?” Longbottom asked. And without waiting for an answer he went on: “Is that the man you came here to see?”
“You’re getting warm, chum,” said the Saint. “Keep guessing.”
Longbottom, who was a short-legged man, bad to break into a semi-canter in order to keep up with the subject of his interrogation. Simon was striding easily toward the opposite end of the block from the one where they had arrived, and Cassie was skipping and jumping along at his side.
“You know this chap?” the detective asked. “Why were you coming here to see him?”
The intersecting street led to Kensington High Street, and traffic was plentiful. Simon, as he hailed an approaching cab, gave Longbottom a pitying look.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I give interviews only on Tuesdays and Fridays. But I am glad we came here together — you’ll be able to testify that my twin had already taken his dive when I got here, so I couldn’t have pushed him.”
Longbottom was still searching for an appropriate reply when Simon helped Cassie into the cab and started to follow her himself.
“You might tell Chief Inspector Teal,” he said, “that even though you lost sight of Miss Lane and me as we were hurrying off to our supper, your intuition tells you we’ll be available back at her flat after a while. If there’s any faith at all left in the world, that should eliminate the necessity of general alarms and roadblocks. Buckingham Palace,” he told the driver.
He slid into the taxi and locked the door behind him as Longbottom cast vainly about for another cab in which to follow and then sprinted frantically back toward his official car. Long before he could have reached it, Simon and Cassie had been swept away in the stream of traffic.
Cassie, with a doubtful glance at the glass partition between them and the driver, whispered in Simon’s ear.
“They killed that man so he couldn’t talk, didn’t they?”
The Saint nodded.
“That seems pretty likely. We’ll discuss that later. Right now, since I don’t think they’re really expecting me at the Palace we’d better think of some other place to have dinner. Do you eat, or do you subsist on the fumes of glue and paint?”
Cassie smiled.
“I eat. Ordinarily I don’t get up quite this early, and I have brunch around midnight, but since you and that policeman woke me up—”
Simon’s head tilted back a fraction as he looked at her with enthralled incredulity.
“Brunch around midnight?” he repeated. “Of course. I sleep all day and have my day at night while everybody else is sleeping. It’s lovely like that. No crowds, no traffic, no interruptions...”
“No nothing,” concluded Simon. “Just you and George and Caspar sailing away in a pea green dream-world.” This time her smile was positively dazzling. “You do understand, don’t you?”
Simon’s expression achieved a kind of determined tolerance.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s get you some breakfast, then.” He glanced down at her bare feet, at her jeans and wrinkled white shirt.
“Oh, don’t mind the way I’m dressed,” she said. “I know a perfect spot.”
Cassie’s perfect spot turned out to be the nearest member of one of those mass-production food chains which have lately riddled London like an invasion of termites in the beams of a noble house. Simon almost ended his relationship with Cassie at first sight of the steamy windows emblazoned with chartreuse and purple announcements of the day’s special treats. Within, at a vinyl-topped table lavishly arrayed with the smeared remnants of the previous diners’ stew, their every whim was as thoroughly ignored as possible by a continuously loping waitress whose genetic heritage appeared to have stemmed from some ill-starred mating of a snapping turtle and a mentally deficient hyena.
Surrounded by addicts of dog-food hamburgers, pasteboard beef, instant mashed potatoes, wallpaper-paste gravies, and artificial fruit drinks, the Saint managed to stab a few times at some greasily fried halibut before conceding defeat and trying to sustain himself on thoughts of the Epicurean supper he might order somewhere later on.
Cassie, now that she was wide awake and not in the immediate presence of any dead bodies, was showing a mannerism of jiggling up and down in her chair with nervous exuberance like a vibrating machine, even while she was eating.
“Great, isn’t it?” she chirped.
She was scraping up the last of some presumably canned beans. Simon made a despairing but bravely ambiguous sound, and Cassie glanced at his almost untouched plate.
“You don’t eat much, do you?” she said.
“Like a bird.”
“May I?”
Her fork was already across the table, so he slid the halibut to her and pulled some folded papers and a bank book from his pocket. For the first time he was starting to wonder if this evening and night would yield any enjoyable dividends at all.