Then he got up and strolled unhurriedly out of the restaurant.
He strolled past the bar, past the men's room, past the hat-check girl. There was an elevator engorging a flock of satisfied diners. Almost accidentally, it might have seemed, the Saint drifted in on the heels of the last passenger, and was dropped with ear-numbing swiftness to the street.
Ten minutes later he was on the steps of Gabriel Linnet's house again.
This time he rang the bell.
He rang it two or three times, but there was no response.
He felt so still inside that he could hear his own pulses drumming. There might be some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that the house seemed empty. Yet Linnet had dined with the Ourleys the night before; and if he had been planning to close up his house and go away somewhere, Mrs Ourley would almost certainly have mentioned it. And unless Mr Linnet was an eccentric who preferred to sweep his own floors and wash his own dishes, there should have been some servant on duty at that hour in a place that size.
And of course Barbara Sinclair had always been too good to be true…
The Saint wondered if he deserved to be shot. But he was going to find out.
He took a pin from his coat lapel and used it to jam the doorbell on a steady ring, and stepped back. It could have been a major operation to force that entrance, and a street front was not the ideal place for such operations at any time, but he had already noted a narrow alley that ran between the Chateau Linnet and its next-door neighbor, and if such an alley didn't lead to a side entrance he couldn't think of any other reason for it to be there.
There was a side entrance, and like most side entrances it looked much less of a problem than the front door.
The Saint cupped his pencil flashlight vinder his hands for a preliminary diagnosis of the lock.
And as he looked at it, it receded slowly before him.
The movement was so gradual and stealthy that it didn't register instantaneously. At first it could have been only an insignificant hallucination, an effect of the movement of the light in his hands. He had to become at first unthinkingly aware that the continuous pealing of the doorbell which could be heard somewhere inside the building was growing clearer and louder; and at the same time his brain had to consent to recognise the improbable report of his eyes; and then he had to put the two things together; and then the door had unquestionably opened more than an inch, and a gossamer commando of intangible cockroaches raced up from between his snoulder-blades into the roots of his hair.
Somebody was opening the door from within.
It was too late then to switch out the torch and duck — even if there had been anywhere to duck to. The glow of light must have already been distinctively perceptible from inside the opening door. And for final proof of that, the door started to close again.
Simon's shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.
The door traveled some six inches back, and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.
Simon went in and shut the door behind him, flashing his light around even while he did that.
He saw a short flight of steps with the temporary obstacle sprawled at the foot of them. The obstacle was a thin hollow-cheeked man who looked as if he had probably shaved two days before. If he hadn't, he should have. The point, however, was not suitable for immediate discussion, since the only potential source of first-hand evidence was not a good prospect for interrogation at that time. He had a vertical cut in his forehead where the edge of the door had hit him, and he looked very uninterested indeed.
Simon made sure of his continued neutrality by using his necktie to bind his ankles together, and then using the man's shoelaces to tie his wrists behind his back and link them with the Charvet hobble.
Then he went on quickly into the house.
He moved through a huge kitchen, a series of pantries, and up a flight of stairs to the main floor. He found himself in a bare but richly carpeted hall, with the front door facing him and a single onyx bowl of light burning overhead, and turned off his torch.
He didn't need any extra light to see the crudely drawn skeleton figure crowned with a symbolic halo which was chalked on one of the doors on his right.
"What a quaint touch," said the Saint to himself; but he was not smiling to himself at the same time.
The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot, and took the one necessary step into the room. It was a slightly conventional library with built-in bookshelves and warm wood panels and deep comfortable chairs, but all of it unmistakably tinged with the vision of an interior decorator. It seemed regrettable that this was yet another subject that could not be discussed with the person who would normally have been the most likely source of information; but it was a little obvious that there was at least one linnet who would never pipe or sing any more.
Aside from the simple probabilities, there were the initials "G L" embroidered on the breast pocket of the dark brocade dressing gown which the man wore over his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He lay on the floor in the middle of the room in an attitude of curious relaxation. But the piece of blind cord which was knotted around his throat so tightly that it had almost sunk into the skin could never have done his voice any good.
Simon Templar lighted a cigarette very carefully, and stood looking down at the body for a space that must have run into minutes, while he grimly tried to think of himself as a secondhand murderer. And all the time the doorbell was buzzing on one ceaseless monotonous note.
And then, abruptly, it was silent. After which it gave three or four distinct irregular peremptory rasps which could only have been produced by individual action.
The Saint came back into movement as if he had never paused, as if all those moments of intense and ugly thought had been nothing but the gap between the stopping of a cinema projector and the starting up again. In an instant he had flipped off they light switch, and he was crossing to the window. He only had to move the drapes a hair's breadth to peep out on to the doorway porch, and what he saw there enabled him to intellectually discard the effort of doubling back to the side door. He was a great believer in the economy of effort, and he could always tell at a glance when it would be completely wasted.
He switched the library lights on again as he went out into the hall, and opened the front door with his most disarming bonhomie.
"Hullo, there, John Henry," he said. "Come on in and play. Somebody seems to have been trying to frame me for a murder."
4
There was no answering geniality in Inspector Fernack's entrance. He stalked in rather heavily with two plain-clothes men following behind him like a pair of trained dogs, and his tough square-jawed face was as uncompromising as a cliff. His straight stolid eyes drove at the Saint like fists. Then, in a quick glance around, they fell on the childish chalked sketch on the library door, and his mouth set like a ridge of granite.
"Hold him here," he said, and went into the room.
He was gone only a couple of minutes, and when he came back he looked several years older. He spoke to one of his satellites.
"Have you searched him?"
"Yes sir. No weapons."
"Go out and phone for a homicide detail — better not use any of the phones in here. Al, you go upstairs and look over the other rooms, but don't touch anything."
The two men left, and Simon straightened his clothes to restore his natural elegance from the disorder which the rough search of his person had produced. He could never have looked more at case and debonair, as if it had never occurred to him that the most diaphanous cloud of suspicion could ever cast a shadow on his unspotted probity.