The Saint spun around. Hoppy's chunky outline loomed in the doorway, his massive automatic questing for a target, a pleased warrior smile splitting the lower half of his face. But Kaskin was finding solid ground under his feet again, and his right hand was struggling with his hip pocket. The girl's nickel-plated toy was coming back to aim. And behind him, the Saint knew that Morris Dolf was getting out another gun. Simon had only taken back the automatic he had lost a short while earlier. Morris Dolf still had his own gun. The Saint felt goose-pimples rising all over him.
"The lights, Hoppy!" he yelled. "And scram out the front!"
He dived sideways as he spoke; and darkness engulfed the room mercifully as he did it. Cordite barked malignantly out of the blackness, licking hot orange tongues at him from two directions: he heard the hiss and smack of lead, but it did not touch him. And then his dive cannoned him into the man called Verdean.
It was Verdean that he had meant to reach. His instinct had mapped the campaign with a speed and sureness that deliberate logic still had to catch up with. But all the steps were there. The atmosphere of the moment showed no probability of simmering down into that mellow tranquillity in which heart-to-heart talks are exchanged. The Saint very much wanted a heart-to-heart talk with somebody, if only to satisfy a perfectly normal inquisitiveness concerning what all the commotion was about. But since Messrs Dolf and Kaskin had been asking the questions when he arrived, it appeared that Mr Verdean might know more of the answers than they did. Therefore Mr Verdean looked like the prize catch of the evening. Therefore Mr Verdean had to be transported to an atmosphere where heart-to-heart talking might take place. It was as simple as that.
The Saint gripped Verdean by the arm, and said: "Let's go somewhere else, brother. Your friends are getting rough."
Verdean took one step the way the Saint steered him, and then he turned into a convincing impersonation of a hysterical eel. He squirmed against the Saint's grasp with the strength of panic, and his free arm whirled frantically in the air. His knuckles hit the Saint's cheekbone near the eye, sending a shower of sparks across Simon's vision.
Simon might have stopped to reason with him, to persuasively point out the manifest arguments in favour of adjourning to a less hectic neighbourhood; but he had no time. No more shots had been fired, doubtless because it had been borne in upon the ungodly that they stood a two to one chance of doing more damage to each other than to him, but he could hear them blundering in search of him. The Saint raised his gun and brought the barrel down vigorously where he thought Verdean's head ought to be. Mr Verdean's head proved to be in the desired spot; and Simon ducked a shoulder under him and lifted him up as he collapsed.
The actual delay amounted to less than three seconds. The ungodly were still blinded by the dark, but Simon launched himself at the window with the accuracy of a homing pigeon.
He wasted no time fumbling with catches. He hit the centre of it with his shoulder — the shoulder over which Verdean was draped. Verdean, in turn, hit it with his hams; and the fastening was not equal to the combined load. It splintered away with a sharp crack, and the twin casements flew open crashingly. Verdean passed through them into the night, landing in soft earth with a soggy thud; and the Saint went on after him as if he were plunging into a pool. He struck ground with his hands, and rolled over in a fairly graceful somersault as a fourth shot banged out of the room he had just left.
A gorilla paw caught him under the arm and helped him up, and Mr Uniatz's voice croaked anxiously in his ear.
"Ya ain't stopped anyt'ing, boss?"
"No." Simon grinned in the dark. "They aren't that good. Grab hold of this bird and see if the car'll start. They probably left the keys in it."
He had located Mr Verdean lying where he had fallen. Simon raised him by the slack of his coat and slung him into Hoppy's bearlike clutch, and turned back towards the window just as the lights of the living-room went on again behind the disordered curtains.
He crouched in the shadow of a bush with his gun raised, and said in a much more carrying voice: "I bet I can shoot my initials on the face of the first guy who sticks his nose outside."
The lights went out a second time; and there was a considerable silence. The house might have been empty of life. Behind him, Simon heard an engine whine into life, drop back to a subdued purr as the starter disconnected. He backed towards the car, his eyes raking the house frontage relentlessly, until he could step on to the running-board.
"Okay, Hoppy," he said.
The black sedan slid forward. Another shot whacked out behind as he opened the door and tumbled into the front seat, but it was yards wide of usefulness. The headlights sprang into brilliance as they lurched through an opening ahead and skidded round in the lane beyond. For the first time in several overcrowded minutes, the Saint had leisure to get out his cigarette case. The flame of his lighter painted jubilantly mephistophelian highlights on his face.
"Let's pick up our own car," he said. "Then we'll take our prize home and find out what we've won."
He found out sooner than that. He only had to fish out Mr Verdean's wallet to find a half-dozen engraved cards that answered a whole tumult of questions with staggering simplicity. They said:
Mr Robert Verdean
Branch Manager
City & Continental Bank Ltd
Staines
V
Patricia Holm put two lumps of sugar in her coffee and stirred it.
"Well, that's your story," she said coldly. "So I suppose you're sticking to it. But what were you doing there in the first place?"
"I told you," said the Saint. "We were looking for Hogsbotham."
"Why should you be looking for him?"
"Because he annoyed me. You remember. And we had to do something to pass the evening."
"You could have gone to a movie."
"What, and seen a picture about gangsters? You know what a demoralizing influence these pictures have. It might have put ideas into my head."
"Of course," she said. "You didn't have any ideas about Hogsbotham."
"Nothing very definite," he admitted. "We might have just wedged his mouth open and poured him full of gin, and then pushed him in the stage door of a leg show, or something like that. Anyway, it didn't come to anything. We got into the wrong house, as you may have gathered. The bloke who told us the way said 'the fourth house', but it was too dark to see houses. I was counting entrances; but I didn't discover until afterwards that Verdean's place has one of those U-shaped drives, with an in and out gate, so I counted him twice. Hogsbotham's sty must have been the next house on. Verdean's house is called 'The Shutters', but the paint was so bad that I easily took it for "The Snuggery'. After I'd made the mistake and got in there, I was more or less a pawn on the chessboard of chance. There was obviously something about Verdean that wanted investigating, and the way things panned out it didn't look healthy to investigate him on the spot. So we just had to bring him away with us."