Simon stepped past the doctor and over Forrest's body, and went silently to the open door.
He came to it without any of the precautions that he had taken before exposing himself a few moments before. He had a presentiment amounting to conviction that they were unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness that the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he entered the house. Therefore anyone who wanted to could have shot at him from outside long ago. No one had shot at him. Therefore—
He was looking into a large white-painted airy bedroom. The big double bed was empty, but the covers were thrown open and rumpled. The table beside it was loaded with medicine bottles. He opened the doors in the two side-walls. One belonged to a spacious built-in cupboard filled with clothing; the other was a bathroom. The wall opposite the entrance door was broken by long casement windows, most of them wide open. He crossed over to one of them and looked out. Directly beneath him was the flat roof of a porch.
The Saint put his gun back in its holster, and felt an unearthly cold dry calm sinking through him. Then he climbed out over the sill on to the porch roof below, which almost formed a kind of blind balcony under the window. He stood there recklessly, knowing that he was silhouetted against the light behind, and lighted a cigarette with leisured, tremorless hands. He sent a cloud of blue vapour drifting towards the stars; and then with the same leisured passivity he sauntered to the edge of the balustrade, sat on it, and swung his legs over. From there it was an easy drop on to the parapet which bordered the terrace along the front of the house, and an even easier drop from the top of the parapet to the ground. To an active man, the return journey would not present much more difficulty.
He paused long enough to draw another lungful of night air and tobacco smoke, and then strolled on along the terrace. It was an eerie experience, to know that he was an easy target every time he passed a lighted window, to remember that the killer might be watching him from a few yards away, and still to hold his steps down to the same steady pace; but the Saint's nerves were hardened to an icy quietness, and all his senses were working together in taut-strung vigilance.
He walked three-quarters of the way round the building, and arrived at the back door. It was unlocked when he tried it; and he pushed it open and looked down the barrel of Mr Uniatz's Betsy.
"I bet you'll shoot somebody one of these days. Hoppy," he remarked; and Mr Uniatz lowered the gun with a faint tinge of disappointment.
"What ya find, boss?"
"Quite a few jolly and interesting things." The Saint was only smiling with his lips. "Hold the fort a bit longer, and I'll tell you."
He found his way through the kitchen, where the other servants were clustered together in dumb and terrified silence, back to the front hall where Rosemary Chase and the butler were standing together at the foot of the stairs. They jumped as if a gun had been fired when they heard his footsteps; and then the girl ran towards him and caught him by the lapels of his coat.
"What is it?" she pleaded frantically. "What happened?"
"I'm sorry," he said, as gently as he could.
She stared at him. He meant her to read his face, for everything except the fact that he was still watching her like a spectator on the dark side of the footlights.
"Where's Jim?"
He didn't answer.
She caught her breath suddenly, with a kind of sob, and turned towards the stairs. He grabbed her elbows and turned her back and held her.
"I wouldn't go up," he said evenly. "It wouldn't do any good."
"Tell me, then. For God's sake, tell me! Is he—" She choked on the word — "dead?"
"Jim, yes."
Her face was whiter than chalk, but she kept her feet. Her eyes dragged at his knowledge through a brightness of unheeded tears.
"Why do you say it like that? What else is there?"
"Your father seems to have disappeared," he said, and held her as she went limp in his arms.
VIII
Simon carried her into the drawing-room and laid her down on the sofa. He stood gazing at her introspectively for a moment; then he bent over her again quickly and stabbed her in the solar plexus with a stiff forefinger. She didn't stir a muscle.
The monotonous cheep-cheep of a telephone bell ringing somewhere outside reached his ears, and he saw the butler starting to move mechanically towards the door. Simon passed him, and saw the instrument half hidden by a curtain on the other side of the hall. He took the receiver off the hook and said: "Hullo."
"May I speak to Mr Templar, please?"
The Saint put a hand on the wall to save himself from falling over.
"Who wants him?"
"Mr Trapani."
"Giulio!" Simon exclaimed. The voice was familiar now, but its complete unexpectedness had prevented him from recognizing it before. "It seems to be about sixteen years since I saw you — and I never came back for dinner."
"That's quite all right, Mr Templar. I didn't expect you, when I knew what had happened. I only called up now because it's getting late and I didn't know if you would want a room for tonight."
The Saint's brows drew together.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded slowly. "Have you taken up crystal-gazing, or something?"
Giulio Trapani chuckled.
"No, I am not any good at that. The police sergeant stopped here on his way back, and he told me. He said you had got mixed up with a murder, and Miss Chase had taken you home with her. So, of course, I knew you would be very busy. Has she asked you to stay?"
"Let me call you back in a few minutes, Giulio," said the Saint. "Things have been happening, and I've got to get hold of the police again." He paused, and a thought struck him. "Look, is Sergeant Jesser still there, by any chance?"
There was no answer.
Simon barked: "Hullo."
Silence. He jiggled the hook. The movements produced no corresponding clicks in his ear. He waited a moment longer, while he realized that the stillness of the receiver was not the stillness of a broken connection, but a complete inanimate muteness that stood for something less easily remedied than that.
He hung the receiver up and traced the course of the wiring with his eyes. It ran along the edge of the wainscoting to the frame of the front door, and disappeared into a hole bored at the edge of the wood. Simon turned right round with another abrupt realization. He was alone in the hall — the butler was no longer in sight.
He slipped his pencil flashlight out of his breast pocket with his left hand, and let himself out of the front door. The telephone wires ran up outside along the margin of the doorframe, and continued up over the exterior wall. The beam of his torch followed them up, past a lighted window over the porch from which he had climbed down a few minutes ago, to where they were attached to a pair of porcelain insulators under the eaves. Where the wires leading on from the insulators might once have gone was difficult to decide: they dangled slackly downwards now, straddling the balcony and trailing away into the darkness of the drive.