"Yeah," said Mr Uniatz brightly. "De wren."
Having contributed his share of illumination, he relapsed into benevolent silence. This, his expectant self-effacement appeared to suggest, was not his affair. It appeared to be something which required thinking about; and Thinking was a job for which the Saint possessed an obviously supernatural aptitude which Mr Uniatz had come to lean upon with a childlike faith that was very much akin to worship.
The Saint was thinking. He was thinking with a level and passionless detachment that surprised even himself. The girl was dead. He had seen plenty of men killed before, sometimes horribly; but only one other woman. Yet that must not make any difference. Nora Prescott had never meant anything to him: he would never even have recognized her voice. Other women of whom he knew just as little were dying everywhere, in one way or another, every time he breathed; and he could think about it without the slightest feeling. Nora Prescott was just another name in the world's long roll of undistinguished dead.
But she was someone who had asked him for help, who had perhaps died because of what she had wanted to tell him. She hadn't been just another twittering fluffhead going into hysterics over a mouse. She really had known something — something that was dangerous enough for someone else to commit murder rather than have it revealed.
'One of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted…'
The only phrase out of her letter which gave any information at all came into his head again, not as a merely provocative combination of words, but with some of the clean-cut clarity of a sober statement of fact. And yet the more he considered it, the closer it came to clarifying precisely nothing.
And he was still half listening for a noise that it seemed as if he ought to have heard. The expectation was a subtle nagging at the back of his mind, the fidget for attention of a thought that still hadn't found conscious shape.
His torch panned once more around the interior of the building. It was a plain wooden structure, hardly more than three walls and a pair of double doors which formed the fourth, just comfortably roomy for the three boats which it contained. There was a small window on each side, so neglected as to be almost opaque. Overhead, his light went straight up to the bare rafters which supported the shingle roof. There was no place in it for anybody to hide except under one of the boats; and his light probed along the floor and eliminated that possibility.
The knife lay on the floor near the girl's knees — an ordinary cheap kitchen knife, but pointed and sharp enough for what it had had to do. There was a smear of blood on the handle; and some of it must have gone on the killer's hand, or more probably on his glove, and in that way been left on the doorknob. From the stains and rents on the front of the girl's blouse, the murderer must have struck two or three times; but if he was strong he could have held her throat while he did it, and there need have been no noise.
"Efficient enough," the Saint summed it up aloud, "for a rush job."
He was thinking: "It must have been a rush job, because he couldn't have known she was going to meet me here until after she'd written that note at the Bell. Probably she didn't even know it herself until then. Did he see the note? Doesn't seem possible. He could have followed her. Then he must have had the knife on him already. Not an ordinary sort of knife to carry about with you. Then he must have known he was going to use it before he started out. Unless it was here in the boathouse and he just grabbed it up. No reason why a knife like that should be lying about in a place like this. Bit too convenient. Well, so he knew she'd got in touch with me, and he'd made up his mind to kill her. Then why not kill her before she even got to the Bell? She might have talked to me there, and he couldn't have stopped her — could he? Was he betting that she wouldn't risk talking to me in public? He could have been. Good psychology, but the hell of a nerve to bet on it. Did he find out she'd written to me? Then I'd probably still have the letter. If I found her murdered, he'd expect me to go to the police with it. Dangerous. And he knew I'd find her. Then why—"
The Saint felt something like an inward explosion as he realized what his thoughts were leading to. He knew then why half of his brain had never ceased to listen — searching for what intuition had scented faster than reason.
Goose-pimples crawled up his spine on to the back of his neck.
And at the same moment he heard the sound.
It was nothing that any other man might have heard at all. Only the gritting of a few tiny specks of gravel between a stealthy shoe sole and the board stage outside. But it was what every nerve in his body had unwittingly been keyed for ever since he had seen the dead girl at his feet. It was what he inevitably had to hear, after everything else that had happened. It spun him round like a jerk of the string wound round a top.
He was in the act of turning when the gun spoke.
Its bark was curt and flat and left an impression of having been curiously thin, though his ears rang with it afterwards. The bullet zipped past his ear like a hungry mosquito; and from the hard fierce note that it hummed he knew that if he had not been starting to turn at the very instant when it was fired it would have struck him squarely in the head. Pieces of shattered glass rattled on the floor.
Lights smashed into his eyes as he whirled at the door, and a clear clipped voice snapped at him: "Drop that gun! You haven't got a chance!"
The light beam beat on him with blinding intensity from the lens of a pocket searchlight that completely swallowed up the slim ray of his own torch. He knew that he hadn't a chance. He could have thrown bullets by guesswork; but to the man behind the glare he was a target on which patterns could be punched out.
Slowly his fingers opened off the big Luger, and it plonked on the boards at his feet.
His hand swept across and bent down the barrel of the automatic which Mr Uniatz had whipped out like lightning when the first shot crashed between them.
"You too, Hoppy," he said resignedly. "All that Scotch will run away if they make a hole in you now."
"Back away," came the next order.
Simon obeyed.
The voice said: "Go on, Rosemary — pick up the guns. I'll keep 'em covered."
A girl came forward into the light. It was the dark slender girl whose quiet loveliness had unsteadied Simon's breath at the Bell.
III
She bent over and collected the two guns by the butts, holding them aimed at Simon and Hoppy, not timidly, but with a certain stiffness which told the Saint's expert eye the feel of them was unfamiliar. She moved backwards and disappeared again behind the light.
"Do you mind," asked the Saint ceremoniously, "if I smoke?"
"I don't care." The clipped voice, he realized now, could only have belonged to the young man in the striped blazer. "But don't try to start anything, or I'll let you have it. Go on back in there."
The Saint didn't move at once. He took out his cigarette case first, opened it, and selected a cigarette. The case came from his breast pocket, but he put it back in the pocket at his hip, slowly and deliberately and holding it lightly, so that his hand was never completely out of sight and a nervous man would have no cause to be alarmed at the movement. He had another gun in that pocket, a light but beautifully balanced Walther; but for the time being he left it there, sliding the cigarette case in behind it and bringing his hand back empty to get out his lighter.
"I'm afraid we weren't expecting to be held up in a place like this," he remarked apologetically. "So we left the family jools at home. If you'd only let us know—"
"Don't be funny. If you don't want to be turned over to the police you'd better let me know what you're doing here."