"Did you hear any noise as you were walking along? The sort of noise this — er — deceased might have made as she was being attacked?"
"No."
"I — did — not hear — the — noise — of — the — deceased — being — attacked," repeated one of the constables with a notebook and pencil, laboriously writing it down.
The sergeant waited for him to finish, and turned to the Saint.
"Now, Mr Templar," he said ominously. "Do you wish to make a statement? It is my duty to warn you—"
"Why?" asked the Saint blandly.
The sergeant did not seem to know the answer to that.
He said gruffly: "What statement do you wish to make?"
"Just what I told Comrade Forrest when we were arguing. Mr Uniatz and I were ambling around to work up a thirst, and we saw this door open. Being rather inquisitive and not having anything better to do, we just nosed in, and we saw the body. We were just taking it in when somebody fired at us; and then Comrade Forrest turned on the spotlight and yelled 'Hands up!' or words to that effect, so to be on the safe side we handed up, thinking he'd fired the first shot. Still, he looked kind of nervous when he had hold of my gun, so I took it away from him in case it went off. Then I told Miss Chase to go ahead and fetch you. Incidentally, as I tried to tell Comrade Forrest, I've discovered that we were both wrong about that shooting. Somebody else did it from outside the window. You can see for yourself if you take a look at the glass."
The Saint's voice and manner were masterpieces of matter-of-fact veracity. It is often easy to tell the plain truth and be disbelieved; but Simon's pleasant imperturbality left the sergeant visibly nonplussed. He went and inspected the broken glass at some length, and then he came back and scratched his head.
"Well," he admitted grudgingly, "there doesn't seem to be much doubt about that."
"If you want any more proof," said the Saint nonchalantly, "you can take our guns apart. Comrade Forrest will tell you that we haven't done anything to them. You'll find the magazines full and the barrels clean."
The sergeant adopted the suggestion with morbid eagerness, but he shrugged resignedly over the result.
"That seems to be right," he said with stoic finality. "It looks as if both you gentlemen were mistaken." He went on scrutinizing the Saint grimly. "But it still doesn't explain why you were in here with the deceased."
"Because I found her," answered the Saint reasonably. "Somebody had to."
The sergeant took another glum look around. He did not audibly acknowledge that all his castles in the air had settled soggily back to earth, but the morose admission was implicit in the majestic stolidity with which he tried to keep anything that might have been interpreted as a confession out of his face. He took refuge in an air of busy inscrutability, as if he had just a little more up his sleeve than he was prepared to share with anyone else for the time being; but there was at least one member of his audience who was not deceived, and who breathed a sigh of relief at the lifting of what might have been a dangerous suspicion.
"Better take down some more details," he said gruffly to the constable with the notebook, and turned to Rosemary Chase. "The deceased's name is Nora Prescott — is that right miss?"
"Yes."
"You knew her quite well?"
"Of course. She was one of my father's personal secretaries," said the dark girl; and the Saint suddenly felt as if the last knot in the tangle had been untied.
V
He listened with tingling detachment while Rosemary Chase talked and answered questions. The dead girl's father was a man who had known and helped Marvin Chase when they were both young, but who had long ago been left far behind by Marvin Chase's sensational rise in the financial world. When Prescott's own business was failing, Chase had willingly lent him large sums of money, but the failure had still not been averted. Illness had finally brought Prescott's misfortunes to the point where he was not even able to meet the interest on the loan, and when he refused further charity Chase had sent him to Switzerland to act as an entirely superfluous 'representative' in Zurich and had given Nora Prescott a job himself. She had lived more as one of the family than as an employee. No, she had given no hint of having any private troubles or being afraid of anyone. Only she had not seemed to be quite herself since Marvin Chase's motor accident…
The bare supplementary facts clicked into place in the framework that was already there, as if into accurately fitted sockets, filling in sections of the outline without making much of it more recognizable. They filed themselves away in the Saint's memory with mechanical precision; and yet the closeness which he felt to the mystery that hid behind them was more intuitive than methodical, a weird sensitivity that sent electric shivers coursing up his spine.
A grey-haired ruddy-cheeked doctor arrived and made his matter-of-fact examination and report.
"Three stab wounds in the chest — I'll be able to tell you more about them after I've made the post-mortem, but I should think any one of them might have been fatal. Slight contusions on the throat. She hasn't been dead much more than an hour."
He stood glancing curiously over the other faces.
"Where's that ambulance?" said the sergeant grumpily.
"They've probably gone to the house," said the girl. "I'll send them down if I see them — you don't want us getting in your way any more, do you?"
"No, miss. This isn't very pleasant for you, I suppose. If I want any more information I'll come up and see you in the morning. Will Mr Forrest be there if we want to see him?"
Forrest took a half step forward.
"Wait a minute," he blurted. "You haven't—"
"They aren't suspicious of you, Jim," said the girl, with a quiet firmness. "They might just want to ask some more questions."
"But you haven't said anything about Templar's—"
"Of course." The girl's interruption was even firmer. Her voice was still quiet and natural, but the undercurrent of determined warning in it was as plain as a siren to the Saint's ears. "I know we owe Mr Templar an apology, but we don't have to waste Sergeant Jesser's time with it. Perhaps he'd like to come up to the house with us and have a drink — that is, if you don't need him any more, Sergeant."
Her glance only released the young man's eye after it had pinned him to perplexed and scowling silence. And once again Simon felt that premonitory crisping of his nerves.
"All this excitement certainly does dry out the tonsils," he remarked easily. "But if Sergeant Jesser wants me to stay—"
"No, sir." The reply was calm and ponderous. "I've made a note of your address, and I don't think you could run away. Are you going home tonight?"
"You might try the Bell first, in case we decide to stop over."
Simon buttoned his coat and strolled towards the door with the others; but as they reached it he stopped and turned back.
"By the way," he said blandly, "do you mind if we take our lawful artillery?"
The sergeant gazed at him, and dug the guns slowly out of his pocket. Simon handed one of them to Mr Uniatz, and leisurely fitted his own automatic back into the spring holster under his arm. His smile was very slight.
"Since there still seems to be a murderer at large in the neighbourhood," he said, "I'd like to be ready for him."
As he followed Rosemary Chase and Jim Forrest up a narrow footpath away from the river, with Hoppy Uniatz beside him and the butler bringing up the rear, he grinned inwardly over that delicately pointed line, and wondered whether it had gone home where he intended it to go. Since his back had been turned to the real audience, he had been unable to observe their reaction; and now their backs were turned to him in an equally uninformative reversal. Neither of them said a word on the way, and Simon placidly left the silence to get tired of itself. But his thoughts were very busy as he sauntered after them along the winding path and saw the lighted windows of a house looming up through the thinning trees that had hidden it from the river bank. This, he realized with a jolt, must be the New Manor, and therefore the boathouse where Nora Prescott had been murdered was presumably a part of Marvin Chase's property. It made no difference to the facts, but the web of riddles seemed to draw tighter around him…