“First, I’ll listen.”
“To what?”
“To glamorous Mary Bannerman’s true life story... of how she lost her baubles and found them again.”
She sighed.
“All right. I ran into debt. I needed money, so I invented the robbery to collect insurance money.”
“Reasonable enough. And then?”
“I couldn’t keep the things here, of course, or tell anybody else, so I checked them at Victoria Station.”
“What about Liskard’s letters?”
“I don’t know. When you asked for them, and I found them gone, I... kind of lost my head. I was afraid of what you might think — because of the blackmail you were talking about and everything — so I just said they’d been stolen too. But I don’t know. I thought they were there.”
Simon let considerably more credence show on his face than he felt in his mind.
“Then you obviously had a real theft here which you didn’t know about,” he said. “Who could have taken those letters? More importantly, who would have wanted them?”
She got up and paced over to the record shelf and began pulling down all the records she had pulled down the evening before.
“Maybe they’re here,” she said a little feverishly. “I’ll find them if...”
“They’re not,” Simon assured her. “I’ve already looked.”
She turned back toward the bed and glared at him.
“You’re a regular sneak, aren’t you?” she snapped.
“No, I’m an extraordinary sneak. I see all and know all. So tell me — did Jeff Peterson take the letters?”
She looked indignant.
“Jeff? Of course not! Why on earth should he?”
“Maybe he’s gotten himself into debt too. Twenty-five thousand pounds is a nice amount of money for an hour or so of playing post office.”
Mary Bannerman looked at him with puzzled anger and began to lose control of her temper.
“Twenty-five thousand pounds? I absolutely do not know what you are talking about, and I’m not interested to know. I happen to be in love with Jeff Peterson, and I’m not going to have you breaking into my apartment and insulting him. Go find the letters yourself, if you’re so full of ideas. But whatever you do, just get out!”
Simon did not raise his voice.
“When and what did you tell Jeff Peterson about Liskard?”
The girl tightened her lips in rage, then shouted at him: “None of your damn business! Now get out before I...”
The Saint was smiling.
“Call the police?” he suggested. “Good. You can save me the trouble.”
Her spirit crumpled again, and she looked hopelessly at the suitcase.
“You’re not going to tell?” she asked. “Why?” She moved closer to him, and her voice was more pleading than angry. “Are you so perfect that you can’t let anybody else get away with anything? What do you care about some old insurance company’s money?”
The sweet scent of the room was concentrated in her clothes and hair and skin, and it was fairly obvious that she expected the effect of her proximity to be devastating.
“I don’t care about the insurance company,” Simon said. “What I care about is...”
She ran the tip of one of her fingers along his lapel.
“Wouldn’t it be more fun to help me spend it than to take it away from me?” she murmured.
“Much more... as soon as you give me those letters.”
She dropped her arms to her sides.
“I don’t have them, I told you!”
“Then the moment of truth has arrived for you, darling.”
Without turning his back on her, he began to repack the contents of the suitcase.
“What do you mean?” she asked,
“I mean you must find those letters and give them to me by ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” said the Saint. “Otherwise I’ll arrange a little tête-à-tête between you and the insurance people. And also with a friend of mine at Scotland Yard who’s starving for a pinch.”
She followed him to the door, ready to grab the suitcase, which he carefully kept just out of her reach.
“I’ve told you I don’t have those letters!”
“If you don’t, your boyfriend does. So get them... And if you release those letters to the papers I’ll do worse than I’ve already promised.” He stopped and looked at her just before he opened the door. “I’m just curious. If you’re after money, why didn’t you say so in the first place when you threatened Liskard? You might have gotten it instead of me.”
“I’m not after anything!” she moaned. “I don’t know anything!”
Simon stepped out into the hall.
“Then how is it you knew I was supposed to be fast asleep somewhere at eight o’clock this evening instead of picking you up here for dinner?”
It was a strictly rhetorical question, which was just as well, since Mary Bannerman was visibly incapable of answering it — at least in the brief interval before Simon closed the door between them and walked away down the hall swinging the suitcase and whistling to himself.
That was the last she saw of him for some time, but he saw her again very shortly. He almost ran to his car and then quickly drove it to a corner which gave him a view of the block where she lived. Within ten minutes her small sports car pulled out from the curb and headed for the Cromwell Road. Simon stayed within sight of her without making himself conspicuous in the moderate traffic. Within ten minutes they were on the M4 motorway heading west. When Mary Bannerman reached the Windsor exit she turned off and took minor winding roads for several more miles. Twice Simon turned off his lights briefly, so that she would be less likely to suspect that the same car was staying behind her on that unlikely route of twisting country lanes.
When the sports car turned off into one of the bordering fields in what could only be the direction of the river, Simon stopped his own car and got out. Along that part of its wandering course, about midway between its youth at Oxford and its maturity in London, the Thames flows quietly through small towns and woods and pastures. What buildings there are on its banks between the towns are private and well spaced, and there are many miles as rural and serene as they must have been at the time of William the Conqueror. Such stretches of the river’s banks are popular with the owners of small cabin cruisers, who simply make fast a couple of lines to the shore and spend the night.
Apparently such a mobile and secluded hideaway was being used by Jeff Peterson and his friends who had entertained Simon in the graveyard. The fact that the Saint had heard the mention of a boat would have been of no particular immediate help if Mary Bannerman had not been thoughtful enough to lead him straight to its current moorings.
The red lights on the rear of her car had faded and disappeared into mists. Now Simon could no longer hear the sound of its engine. The only interruption of the silence was the lowing of a cow in the pasture through which she had driven. Then the cow was quiet again, and Simon moved through the gate and across the uneven soggy ground toward the river. The water was so close that he could smell it, and he decided it was wisest to stick close beside the fence which ran that way so as to be camouflaged by the trees which grew along it on the edge of the meadow.
He moved as quietly as his own shadow, and even so he disliked the degree to which he had to expose himself. If Peterson and his boys were the least bit clever, they would have a man posted to watch all approaches to the boat. So far they had not shown much sign of all that intelligence, but if they had begun to develop some efficiency the Saint might find himself in trouble.
Ordinarily he would never have approached the boat so directly. Ideally, he might have come up to it in another boat, or crossed over from the other side of the river. But he fully expected that Peterson’s first move on hearing from Mary would be to take the boat to another spot on the river as a precautionary measure. The time Simon had in which to board the floating hideout — where he hoped to find not only the blackmailers but also Liskard’s letters — might be limited to the next three or four minutes.