The Saint's brows shifted a fraction of an inch.
"I don't see what difference it makes to you, brother," he said slowly. "But if you're really interested, we were just taking a stroll in the moonlight to work up an appetite for dinner, and we happened to see the door of this place open
"So that's why you both had to pull out guns when you heard us."
"My dear bloke," Simon argued reasonably, "what do you expect anyone to do when you creep up behind them and start sending bullets whistling round their heads?"
There was a moment's silence.
The girl gasped.
The man spluttered: "Good God you've got a nerve! After you blazed away at us like that — why, you might have killed one of us!"
The Saint's eyes strained uselessly to pierce beyond the light. There was an odd hollow feeling inside him, making his frown unnaturally rigid.
Something was going wrong. Something was going as immortally cockeyed as it was possible to go. It was taking him a perceptible space of time to grope for a bearing in the reeling void. Somewhere the scenario had gone as paralysingly off the rails as if a Wagnerian soprano had bounced into a hotcha dance routine in the middle of Tristan.
"Look," he said. "Let's be quite clear about this. Is your story going to be that you thought I took a shot at you?"
"I don't have to think," retorted the other. "I heard the bullet whizz past my head. Go on — get back in that boat-house."
Simon dawdled back.
His brain felt as if it was steaming. The voice behind the light, now that he was analysing its undertones, had a tense unsophistication that didn't belong in the script at all. And the answers it gave were all wrong. Simon had had it all figured out one ghostly instant before it began to happen. The murderer hadn't just killed Nora Prescott and faded away, of course. He had killed her and waited outside, knowing that Simon Templar must find her in a few minutes, knowing that that would be his best chance to kill the Saint as well and silence whatever the Saint knew already and recover the letter. That much was so obvious that he must have been asleep not to have seen it from the moment when his eyes fell on the dead girl. Well, he had seen it now. And yet it wasn't clicking. The dialogue was all there, and yet every syllable was striking a false note.
And he was back inside the boathouse, as far as he could go, with the square bow of a punt against his calves and Hoppy beside him.
The man's voice said: "Turn a light on, Rosemary."
The girl came round and found a switch. Light broke out from a naked bulb that hung by a length of flex from one of the rafters, and the young man in the striped blazer flicked off his torch.
"Now," he started to say, "we'll—"
"Jim!"
The girl didn't quite scream, but her voice tightened and rose to within a semitone of it. She backed against the wall, one hand to her mouth, with her face and her eyes dilated with horror. The man began to turn towards her, and then followed her wide and frozen stare. The muzzle of the gun he was holding swung slack from its aim on the Saint's chest as he did so, it was an error that in some situations would have cost him his life, but Simon let him live. The Saint's head was whirling with too many questions, just then, to have any interest in the opportunity. He was looking at the gun which the girl was still holding, and recognizing it as the property of Mr Uniatz.
"It's Nora," she gasped. "She's—"
He saw her gather herself with an effort, force herself to go forward and kneel beside the body. Then he stopped watching her. His eyes went to the gun that was still wavering in the young man's hand—
"Jim," said the girl brokenly, "she's dead!"
The man took a half step towards the Saint.
"You swine!" he grunted. "You killed her—"
"Go on," said the Saint gently. "And then I took a pot at you. So you fired back in self-defence, and just happened to kill us. It'll make a swell story even if it isn't a very new one, and you'll find yourself quite a hero. But why all the playacting for our benefit? We know the gag."
There was complete blankness behind the anger in the other's eyes. And all at once the Saint's somersaulting cosmos stabilized itself with a jolt — upside down, but solid.
He was looking at the gun which was pointing at his chest, and realizing that it was his own Luger.
And the girl had got Hoppy's gun. And there was no other artillery in sight.
The arithmetic of it smacked him between the eyes and made him dizzy. Of course there was an excuse for him, in the shape of the first shot and the bullet that had gone snarling past his ear. But even with all that, for him out of all people in the world, at his time of life—
"Run up to the house and call the police, Rosemary," said the striped blazer in a brittle bark.
"Wait a minute," said the Saint.
His brain was not fogged any longer. It was turning over as swiftly and smoothly as a hair-balanced flywheel, registering every item with the mechanical infallibility of an adding machine. His nerves were tingling.
His glance whipped from side to side. He was standing again approximately where he had been when the shot cracked out, but facing the opposite way. On his right quarter was the window that had been broken, with the shards of glass scattered on the floor below it — he ought to have understood everything when he heard them hit the floor. Turning the other way, he saw that the line from the window to himself continued on through the open door.
He took a long drag on his cigarette.
"It kind of spoils the scene," he said quietly, "but I'm afraid we've both been making the same mistake. You thought I fired at you—"
"I don't have—"
"All right, you don't have to think. You heard the bullet whizz past your head. You said that before. You're certain I shot at you. Okay. Well, I was just as certain that you shot at me. But I know now I was wrong. You never had a gun until you got mine. It was that shot that let you bluff me. I'd heard the bullet go past my head, and so it never occurred to me that you were bluffing. But we were both wrong. The shot came through that window — it just missed me, went on out through the door, and just missed you. And somebody else fired it!"
The other's face was stupid with stubborn incredulity.
"Who fired it?"
"The murderer."
"That means you," retorted the young man flatly. "Hell, I don't want to listen to you. You see if you can make the police believe you. Go on and call them, Rosemary. I can take care of these two."
The girl hesitated.
"But, Jim—"
"Don't worry about me, darling. I'll be all right. It either of these two washouts tries to get funny, I'll give him plenty to think about."
The Saint's eyes were narrowing.
"You lace-pantie'd bladder of hot air," he said in a cold even voice that seared like vitriol. "It isn't your fault if God didn't give you a brain, but he did give you eyes. Why don't you use them? I say the shot was fired from outside, and you can see for yourself where the broken window-pane fell. Look at it. It's all on the floor in here. If you can tell me how I could shoot at you in the doorway and break a window behind me, and make the broken glass fall inwards, I'll pay for your next marcel wave. Look at it, nitwit —"
The young man looked.
He had been working closer to the Saint, with his free fist clenched and his face flushed with wrath, since the Saint's first sizzling insult smoked under his skin. But he looked. Somehow, he had to do that. He was less than five feet away when his eyes shifted. And it was then that Simon jumped him.
The Saint's lean body seemed to lengthen and swoop across the intervening space. His left hand grabbed the Luger, bent the wrist behind it agonizingly inwards, while the heel of his open right hand settled under the other's chin. The gun came free; and the Saint's right arm straightened jarringly and sent the young man staggering back.