He had just finished breakfast in his room when there was a knock on his door.
For anyone else, he reflected as he opened the door, it would probably have been only a waiter to take away the tray. For him, it had to be a woman. She was no more than thirty, beautiful in a dark classical way, like a Florentine painting, with a full figure that nullified the discretion of an expensive black dress. The deep shadows under her eyes were not out of a jar.
She said, with very little accent, “Mr Tombs — may I talk to you? I am Mrs Ravenna.”
“Of course.”
She came in and sat down. Simon poured himself another cup of coffee and offered her a cigarette. She shook her head, and he lighted it for himself.
“I feel terribly guilty about your husband,” he said. “I might have saved him. I just wasn’t thinking fast enough.”
“At least you tried to catch the men who killed him. The police told me. I wanted to thank you.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t more successful. But if the police catch them, I may be able to identify them. I suppose you haven’t any ideas about them?”
“I have none. Filippo was a good man. I didn’t think he had any enemies. No. Never.”
“Did he have business rivals?”
“I can’t think of any. We were quite rich, but he was successful without hurting anyone. In any case, he had got rid of his interests.”
“What were they?”
“He manufactured shoes. It was a good business. But Europe today is an uncertain place. There is always fear — of war, of inflations, of unstable governments. So, we were going to America. Our quota number had just come through.”
“I know. And he was going to start a new business there?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” said the Saint, “the police think it was just an ordinary robbery, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you?”
She twisted her fingers nervously together.
“I don’t know what to think.”
The Saint stared at a plume of smoke drifting towards the ceiling. He tried half-heartedly not to recognize that his blood was suddenly running faster, in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the young woman’s appealing beauty. But it was no use. He knew, only too well, the symptoms of the almost psychic reflex that told him that he was in it again — up to the ears...
“I’m thinking,” he said slowly, “these muggers didn’t just pick your husband by accident. They knew what they were after. They didn’t even try to look in his pockets. They just grabbed his briefcase and ran. Therefore, they knew what was in it. What was that?”
“Some business papers, perhaps?”
“A shoe manufacturer would hardly be likely to have any trade secrets that would be worth going to those lengths to steal.”
“You talk like a detective.”
“Heaven forbid,” said the Saint piously. “I’m only curious. What did he have in that briefcase?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“It must have been something very valuable. And yet you know nothing about it?”
“No.”
She was lying, it was as obvious as the Alps, but he tried not to make it so obvious that he saw it.
“Why did you come here,” he asked, “when you were just getting ready to move to America?”
“There were a few places we wanted to see before we left, because we didn’t know if we would ever come back.”
“And yet, on a simple vacation trip like that, your husband brought along something so valuable that he could be murdered for it — and never even mentioned it to you?”
Her black eyes flashed suddenly hard like jet. “You ask more questions than the police! Are you insulting me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I was only trying to help. If we knew what was in that briefcase, we might have a clue to the people who stole it.”
She looked down at the twisting of her hands, and made a visible effort to hold them still.
“Forgive me,” she said in a lowered voice. “I am on edge. It has been such a shock... You are right. The briefcase is important. And that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. Those men — they did get it, didn’t they?”
“Why, yes. I was chasing the man who had it. I brought him down, but he kicked me in the face and got away.”
“I thought, perhaps, he might have dropped it.”
“I didn’t see it again.”
“Did the police search for it?”
“I don’t think anyone would have. Even if the man dropped it, he had plenty of time to pick it up again while I was knocked half silly. Anyway, it wasn’t around. And if the police had found it, they’d certainly have returned it to you.”
Her eyes examined him uncertainly.
“If anyone found it... anyone... I would pay a large reward.”
“If I knew where to lay my hands on it,” said the Saint, a little frigidly, “you wouldn’t have to ask for it back, or pay any reward.”
She nodded.
“Of course. I’m being stupid. It was a foolish hope. Excuse me.” She stood up abruptly. “Thank you for letting me talk to you — and again for what you tried to do. I must not bother you anymore.”
She held out her hand, and was gone. Simon Templar stood where she had left him and slowly lighted another cigarette. Then he walked to the window. From the balcony outside he was offered a superb panorama of mountains rolling down to the sparkling blue foreground of the lake, where an excursion steamer swam like a toy trailing a brown veil of smoke, but irresistibly his eye was drawn downwards and to the right, towards the corner outside the gardens where he had tackled the stocky man.
He could have persuaded himself that it was only an illusion that he could see something from where he stood, but the echoes of the false notes that the Signora Ravenna had struck were less easy to dismiss.
He put on his jacket and went downstairs. After only a short search in the bushes near where he had tangled with the stocky man, he found the briefcase.
3
He figured it out as he took it upstairs to his room. The briefcase had indeed flown out of the stocky man’s grasp when the Saint tackled him. It had fallen in among the rhododendrons. Then Kleinhaus had come along, shouting. The stocky man had been too scared to stop and look for it. He had scrammed the hell out of there. The police hadn’t looked for it, because they assumed it was gone. And the stocky man hadn’t come back to look, either because he was afraid to, or because he assumed the police would have found it.
And now the Saint had it.
He stood and looked at it for quite a while, behind his locked door. He only had to pick up the telephone — he presumed that Signora Ravenna was staying in the same hotel — and tell her to come and get it. Or perhaps the more correct procedure would be to call the police. But either of those moves called for a man devoid of curiosity, a pillar of convention, a paragon of deafness to the siren voices of intrigue — which the Saint was not. He opened it.
It required no instruments or violence. Just a steady pull on a zipper. It opened flat, exposing its contents in one dramatic revelation, as if they had been spread out on a tray.
Simon enumerated them as dispassionately as a catalog, while another part of his mind fumbled woozily over trying to add them into an intelligible total.
Item: one chamois pouch containing a necklace of pink pearls, perfectly graduated. Item: one hotel envelope containing eight diamonds and six emeralds, cut but unset, none less than two carats, each wrapped in a fold of tissue paper. Item: a cellophane envelope containing ten assorted postage stamps, of an age which suggested that they might be rare and valuable. Item: a book in an antique binding, which from the title pages appeared to be a first edition of Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione, published in Milan in 1521. Item: a small oil painting on canvas without a frame, folded in the middle to fit the briefcase but apparently protected from creasing by the bulk of the book, signed with the name of Botticelli. Item: a folded sheet of plain notepaper on which was typed, in French: