There was no time or reason for more testing or delay. Grasping the rope tightly, he climbed to a sitting position on the window sill and then let his body swing out into space. With the trained, perfectly conditioned muscles of an acrobat he drew himself up, hand over hand, until he had reached the edge of the balcony. Then he transferred his grip to the wrought iron fence on which his hook had caught, and with two powerful heaves of his arms and a lithe upswing of his hips and legs he sailed over the rail and landed like a cat on to the gratifyingly firm paving of the roof garden.
He was on a terrace about ten feet wide at that point, just outside a pair of closed sliding glass doors which led into one room of the penthouse. Because of the lack of light inside, he could see only enough through the doors to judge that it seemed to be some kind of den or library. Around the nearest corner, the terrace was much wider, with planter boxes and porch chairs arranged about it and there were lights in some of the windows farther along that side — apparently the Timonaides menage was not yet all in bed. But on the side where the Saint had arrived, all was quiet and dark. Simon detached the hook from the railings, retrieved and coiled the rope, and went back to the dark sliding doors. They slid easily at his touch. Whatever precautions might have been taken to prevent unexpected guests from arriving by conventional routes, it had apparently never occurred to those inside that anything more worrisome than a bird could arrive by way of the terrace. Then he moved stealthily into the study, or whatever it was.
It proved to be precisely that. The beam of his pocket flashlight showed him banks of built-in bookshelves, filing cabinets, a sound-and-television console, overstaffed masculine leather armchairs, and an open brick fireplace, also a massive semicircular desk with three telephones of different colors and banks of push-buttons, from which a man ensconced in the central swivel chair behind it might feel that he had the controls of an empire at his finger-tips — as indeed, in a way, Kuros Timonaides probably did have.
The desk was locked but had no keyholes in the drawers. The Saint recognized the style, and within a few seconds he had determined that a pair of immovable silver inkwells built into the top of the desk were the means by which it was opened. A little experimentation was necessary, but shortly he had tried turning both inkwells in a clockwise direction simultaneously, and all the drawers in the desk suddenly slid open two inches.
Inside one of the largest and deepest drawers were neatly stacked rows of boxes such as Cassie had described seeing the courier from the van leave with the clerk below. Several of them, as Simon could see with the beam of his flashlight, were labelled THORPE-JONES. Others bore various labels, many of them names which appeared frequently in headlines or on the society pages of newspapers, and all were carefully indexed in some complicated numerical and alphabetical system. These boxes of film and tape were obviously some of the material of Kuros Timonaides’ latest blackmail organization. He did not need to investigate any further before he studied the telephone and pushbutton system and selected the combination most likely to give him an outside line. He dialed the special number of Teal’s department at Scotland Yard.
“This is a message for Chief Inspector Teal,” he said in the lowest possible voice that the instrument would transmit. “You must get it to him at once, wherever he is, even if he’s asleep. It’s about the Saint. Tell him that it isn’t another of those anonymous messages he’s been getting lately. This is Simon Templar himself speaking. Tell him that I’ve discovered that Perry Loudon really was murdered, and I know all about it He must come here at once and see the evidence. This is the address...”
He gave the location twice, making certain that it was correctly taken down, and then hung up, refusing to answer any questions.
There were two doors in the study. Simon went to the first one his eye chose, opened it silently, and looked out into what seemed to be the central hallway of the penthouse. It was bright with ingenious panel lighting, and although there were no windows there were many doors, including one with a different trim and pattern which singled it out as obviously belonging to the private elevator, beside which a small square waist-high panel glowed discreetly pink. Simon crossed to it and touched the button beside it, and the panel turned delicately green. He was satisfied that he had released the exclusive elevator, and that it would now be available to Cassie’s crowd below whenever they got around to using it He went back to the study and surveyed it again. On top of the audio-video console, there were a couple of tape boxes, unlabelled, which could reasonably be assumed to be that night’s delivery from the Thorpe-Jones monitoring operation. At any rate, there could be little harm in subtracting them from Teal’s possible confusions, which he proceeded to do by opening them in the fireplace and igniting some loosened ends of tape with his pocket lighter. Hopefully, that might expunge the record of his earlier visit to the Mayfair gambler’s establishment. He added a few more spools from the desk drawer for luck, to preclude suspicion that he might have been searching for any particular reel, and also to help the blaze. He added his helpful rope with the hook still attached to it to the bonfire: the hook at least would survive, and if any policeman were so thorough as to sift through the ashes it would be an additional relict for Timonaides to have to explain.
Then he turned his attention to the filing cabinets, which also proved to be locked. But his time was running out, as he had known all along that it would; and the noise he was making and which he had become increasingly careless of, combined with the spit and crackle of highly combustible materials in the fireplace, finally brought an interruption to his activities.
The second door was abruptly flung open, and the flickering reflections of flame on walls and ceiling, which had already enabled him to dispense with the aid of his flashlight, were suddenly wiped out in a blaze of overhead light as a main switch was snapped on.
The lighter haired of the two men whom he had met in Loudon’s studio stood in the entrance, a pistol with a silencer in his hand at hip level, and just behind him was Timonaides, in a rich wine-colored brocade dressing-gown with unbuttoned white shirt and regular trousers showing above and below, obviously disturbed only partly on his way to bed. The room behind them, from the lighted slice of it which could be seen past them, seemed to be the formal living room of the suite.
“Come on in,” said the Saint genially. “Make yourselves at home. After all, it is your home, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” Timonaides croaked. He was not a tall man, but he was massive, and despite his in-between costume he was able to retain an aura of vastly founded power and menace. Simon, who had seen him before in the full suavity of total command, had to admit that he stood up to potential catastrophe with an evil distinction which, after all, could only have been essential to cresting the ambiguous heights which his career had achieved.