"Let's see everything," he said shortly.
They went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray's room. Calvin Gray's room. A couple of guest rooms. Bathrooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly. It was a nice well-kept house.
"So he isn't here," said the Saint. "There's no blood and no smashed windows and no dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn't he go out and leave the lights on?"
He didn't know whether he was trying to console her or whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in his ribs and said "Come for a walk, pal," and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.
"There's still the laboratory," she said in a small voice; and he caught at that for the moment's reprieve.
"Why didn't you show me that before?"
She took him out of the house, and they walked by a winding path through tall slender trees whose delicate upper branches lost themselves in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.
The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly in a shadowy clearing — a long white modernistic building with a faint glow from inside outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that stood ajar on one side disclosed tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.
Beyond the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking bright gleams from glass tubes and retorts and long shelves of neatly labeled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and stranger pieces of less describable apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.
"Does this look all right too?" he asked.
"Yes."
He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other layman would have surveyed a chemical laboratory. If you were going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn't. He wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.
"You could make rubber here?" he said.
"Of course."
There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant to have there, or else he just looked blank because he was thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her mind busy along other lines.
"I could show you now," she said.
It didn't seem important, but it was another escape.
"Show me," he said.
She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them were unlabeled. She measured things in beakers and test tubes. She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity of sawdust from an old coffee can into a glass bowl, lighted a burner under it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a seasoned cook mixing pancakes.
The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.
It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it. He had more than the average background of ordinary chemistry, as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things went on in this production line that were utterly out of his depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bubbling in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitating, and finally flowing into a small peculiar encased engine that looked as if it might house some kind of turbine, from which came a low smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the other end of this engine projected a long narrow troughed belt running over an external pulley; and over this belt began to creep a ribbon of the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in the dining room of the Shore-ham. She tore off the strip when there was about a couple of feet of it, and gave it to him; and he felt it between his fingers and stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and smelled a little like wet leather and scorched wool.
"It seems like a wonderful thing," he said. "But it looks a little more complicated than the bathtub proposition you were talking about."
She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning off burners.
"Not really," she said. "In terms of a big industrial plant, it's almost so simple that a village plumber could put it together."
"But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of money. Does your father want the WPB to go into production on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?"
"We aren't quite as rich as that. But if the Government went into it they'd give us a loan, and it wouldn't be any problem to raise the private capital. In fact, we'd probably have to hire guards to keep the investors away." She smiled at him wanly. "It's too bad I didn't meet you before, isn't it? You could have come in on the ground floor and made a fortune."
"I can just see myself at any board meeting," he said.
Then they were really looking at each other again, and the fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any more.
"What do you think has happened?" she asked; and he straightened up and trod on the butt of his cigarette.
"Let's go back to the house," he said roughly.
They went out, putting out the lights and closing the door after them.
As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again her hand slid into the crook of his elbow, and he pressed it a little against his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking coldly and from quite a distance. He said: "Did you lock the door?"
"I don't have the key."
"When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?"
"I just went in. The door wasn't locked."
"Isn't it ever locked?"
"Hardly ever. Daddy can't be bothered with keys — he's always losing them. Besides why should we lock up? We haven't anything worth stealing, and who'd be prowling around here?"
"You said things had happened to the laboratory before."
"Yes, but it's got so many windows that anybody could break in if they really wanted to."
"So anybody could have walked in on your father at any time tonight."
"Yes."
There wasn't any more to say. They went back into the house, and into the comfortable living-room with the cold pipe in the ashtray, and passed the time. He strummed the piano, and parodied a song or two very quietly, and she sat in one chair after another and watched him. And all the time he knew that there wasn't anything to do. Or to say, at that moment.
It got to be later.
He took their bags upstairs, and put hers in her room and chose himself a guest room opposite, with a door directly facing hers across the corridor. He opened his own bag before he came down again and fixed drinks for both of them. Into her drink he put a couple of drops from a phial that he brought down with him.
Very quickly the hot bright strain went out of her eyes, and she began yawning. In a little while she was fast asleep. He carried her upstairs and put her in her bed, and then he went across to his own room and took off most of his clothes and lay down on the bed with his automatic tucked under the edge of the mattress close to his right hand, and switched off the lights. He didn't think it was at all likely that the Ungodly could get around to organising another routine so soon, but he always preferred to overrate the opposition rather than underrate them. He was awake for a long time; and when he finally let himself sink into a light doze the first pallor of dawn was creeping into the room, and he knew that he had been wrong about the bush-league skullduggery and that Calvin Gray was not coming home unless somebody fetched him.