Simon took hold of the back of a chair for support.
"Oh, not at all," he said faintly. "It's nothing to do with me."
Hoppy looked puzzled.
"Sure, you t'ought of it foist, boss," he insisted generously. "Ya said to me, de nex time I should take de bottle away some place an' lock myself up wit' it. So I t'ought I might take dis one in de terlet. I just t'ought it might be a good place," said Mr Uniatz, rounding off the resume of his train of thought.
"Sit down!" said the Saint, with paralysing ferocity.
Mr Uniatz lowered himself back on to his hams with an expression of pained mystification, and Simon turned to the others.
"Excuse us, won't you?" he said brightly. "Hoppy's made a sort of bet with himself about something, and he has a rather one-track mind."
Forrest glared at him coldly. Rosemary half put on a gracious smile, and took it off again. Dr Quintus almost bowed, with his mouth open. There was a lot of silence, in which Simon could feel the air prickling with pardonable speculations on his sanity. Every other reaction that he had been deliberately building up to provoke had had time to disperse itself under cover of the two consecutive interruptions. The spell was shattered, and he was back again where he began. He knew it, and resignedly slid into small talk that might yet lead to another opening.
"I heard that your father had a nasty motor accident, Miss Chase," he said.
"Yes."
The brief monosyllable offered nothing but the baldest affirmation; but her eyes were fixed on him with an expression that he tried unavailingly to read.
"I hope he wasn't badly hurt?"
"Quite badly burned," rumbled the doctor. "The car caught fire, you know. But fortunately his life isn't in danger. In fact, he would probably have escaped with nothing worse than a few bruises if he hadn't made such heroic efforts to save his secretary, who was trapped in the wreckage."
"I read something about it," lied the Saint. "He was burned to death, wasn't he? What was his name now—"
"Bertrand Tamblin."
"Oh, yes. Of course."
Simon took a cigarette from his case and lighted it. He looked at the girl. His brain was still working at fighting pitch; but his manner was quite casual and disarming now — the unruffled conversational manner of an accepted friend discussing a minor matter of mutual interest.
"I just remembered something you said to the sergeant a little while ago, Miss Chase — about your having noticed that Nora Prescott seemed to be rather under a strain since Tamblin was killed."
She looked back at him steadily, neither denying it nor encouraging him.
He said, in the same sensible and persuasive way: "I was wondering whether you'd noticed them being particularly friendly before the accident — as if there was any kind of attachment between them."
He saw that the eyes of both Forrest and Dr Quintus turned towards the girl, as if they both had an unexpectedly intense interest in her answer. But she looked at neither of them.
"I can't be sure," she answered, as though choosing her words carefully. "Their work brought them together all the time, of course. Mr Tamblin was really father's private secretary and almost his other self, and when Nora came to us she worked for Mr Tamblin nearly as much as father. I thought sometimes that Mr Tamblin was — well, quite keen on her — but I don't know whether she responded. Of course I didn't ask her."
"You don't happen to have a picture of Tamblin, do you?"
"I think there's a snapshot somewhere—"
She stood up and went over to an inlaid writing-table and rummaged in the drawer. It might have seemed fantastic that she should do that, obeying the Saint's suggestion as if he had hypnotized her; but Simon knew just how deftly he had gathered up the threads of his broken dominance and woven them into a new pattern. If the scene had to be played in that key, it suited him as well as any other. And with that key established, such an ordinary and natural request as he had made could not be refused. But he noticed that Dr Quintus followed her with his hollow black eyes all the way across the room.
"Here."
She gave Simon a commonplace Kodak print that showed two men standing on the steps of a house. One of them was apparently of medium height, a little flabby, grey-haired in the small areas of his head where he was not bald. The other was a trifle shorter and leaner, with thick smooth black hair and metal-rimmed glasses.
The Saint touched his forefinger on the picture of the older man.
"Your father?"
"Yes."
It was a face without any outstanding features, creased in a tolerant if somewhat calculating smile. But Simon knew how deceptive a face could be, particularly in that kind of reproduction.
And the first thought that was thrusting itself forward in his mind was that there were two people dead, not only one — two people who had held similar and closely associated jobs, who from the very nature of their employment must have shared a good deal of Marvin Chase's confidence and known practically everything about his affairs, two people who must have known more about the intricate details of his business life than anyone else around him. One question clanged in the Saint's head like a deep jarring belclass="underline" Was Nora Prescott's killing the first murder to which that unknown swindle had led, or only the second?
All through dinner his brain echoed the complex repercussions of that explosive idea, under the screen of superficial conversation which lasted through the meal. It gave that part of the evening a macabre spookiness. Hoppy Uniatz, hurt and frustrated, toyed halfheartedly with his food, which is to say that he did not ask for more than two helpings of any one dish. From time to time he washed down a mouthful with a gulp from the bottle which he had brought in with him, and put it down again to leer at it malevolently, as if it had personally welshed on him; Simon watched him anxiously when he seemed to lean perilously close to the candles which lighted the table, thinking that it would not take much to cause his breath to ignite and burn with a blue flame. Forrest had. given up his efforts to protest at the whole procedure. He ate most of the time in sulky silence, and when he spoke at all he made a point of turning as much of his back to the Saint as his place at the table allowed: plainly he had made up his mind that Simon Templar was a cad on whom good manners would be wasted. Rosemary Chase talked very little, but she spoke to the Saint when she spoke at all, and she was watching him all the time with enigmatic intentness. Dr Quintus was the only one who helped to shoulder the burden of maintaining an exchange of urbane trivialities. His reverberant basso bumbled obligingly into every conversational opening, and said nothing that was worth remembering. His eyes were like pools of basalt at the bottom of dry caverns, never altering their expression, and yet always moving, slowly, in a way that seemed to keep everyone under ceaseless surveillance.
Simon chatted genially and emptily, with faintly mocking calm. He had shown his claws once, and now it was up to the other side to take up the challenge in their own way. The one thing they could not possibly do was ignore it, and he was ready to wait with timeless patience for their lead. Under his pose of idle carelessness he was like an arrow on a drawn bow with ghostly fingers balancing the string.
Forrest excused himself as they left the dining-room. Quintus came as far as the drawing-room, but didn't sit down. He pulled out a large gold watch and consulted it with impressive deliberation.
"I'd better have another look at the patient," he said. "He may have settled down again by now."
The door closed behind him.
Simon leaned himself against the mantelpiece. Except for the presence of Mr Uniatz, who in those circumstances was no more obtrusive than a piece of primitive furniture, he was alone with Rosemary Chase for the first time since so many things had begun to happen. And he knew that she was also aware of it.