As for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast train — ignoring such delays as phone calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in, or the traveling to and from railroad stations and the inconsiderate tendency of railroads not to have trains waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.
He had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.
"If anything has happened to Daddy," she said now, "there were people there already."
"Then whatever happened has happened already," he said, "and nobody on earth could have caught up with it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn't have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town Police, but what could we have told them? So the telephone doesn't answer. They'd have said the same as I said. By the time we'd gotten through all the arguing and rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got started. If they ever got started."
"Maybe I'm just imagining too much," she said.
He didn't know. He could just as easily have been imagining too much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind straight.
He said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud: "The trouble it that we don't even know who the Ungodly are, or what they're working towards… Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth a fortune. They'd want to get the formula — just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they could threaten your father with all kinds of frightful things that might happen to you if he didn't give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him."
He felt her flesh tighten beside him.
"But there have also been these accidents you told me about. Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It's a nice exciting word. But where would it get them — in the end?"
She said: "If they were spies—"
"If they were spies," he said, "they wouldn't be blowing up a laboratory. They might break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn't destroy it, because they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a formula out of you with horsewhips and hot Irons — they'd have tried it long before this. You wouldn't have been hard to snatch."
"Well," she said, "they could just be saboteurs. They warned me not to try and see Mr. Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere."
"Then both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time," he said coldbloodedly. "Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class of political and philosophical killers you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That's the whole thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of punches — this bush league milquetoast skullduggery?"
He went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that brought them to a stone gateway and through that up a short trim drive to the front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green shingled roofs and gables as the taxi's headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the curtains. For a moment her hand was on his arm, and he put his own hand over it, but neither of them said anything.
She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path of light to the hall and joined her there.
She called: "Daddy!"
They could hear the taxi's wheels crunching out off the gravel, and the hum of its engine fading down the lane, leaving them alone together in the stillness.
"Daddy," she called.
She went through an open door into the living-room, and he put the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.
She went out again quickly.
He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between interior decorating and masculine comfort. There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over. There was a pipe in one of the ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.
A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear line. Just to make sure, he dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a gruffly sleepy male voice that said "Yes?"
"This is Joe," said the Saint momentously. "You'd better start thinking fast. Your wife has discovered everything."
He hung up, and turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.
"The phone is working," he said casually. "There's nothing wrong with the line."
"Come with me," she said.
He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining room, sedate and barren like any dining room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a ticking clock on a shelf.
"I've been here," she said.
"Would he have had dinner?"
"I couldn't tell."
"What about servants?"
"We haven't had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren't going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn't have been bothered with interviewing them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got married and lives quite close by. She could have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home."
After that there was a study lined with ponderous and well-worn books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal movable furniture. It was fairly messy, in a healthy haphazard way.
Simon went to one of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer at random. The folders looked regular enough, to anyone who hadn't lived with the system.
He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda, abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.
"How does it look to you?" he asked.
"About the same as usual."
"You must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?"
She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on the desk. After that she still looked blank and helpless.
"I couldn't possibly say. He's so hopelessly untidy when he isn't being fanatically neat."
Simon stared at the desk. He didn't know Calvin Gray's habits, or anything about his work and interests. He knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a cyclone had gone through it.
Anyway, what would anyone have been searching for? Nobody would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched between tax demands and seed catalogs on top of a desk… And still he had that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn't explain itself or didn't connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would have accommodated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.