Leslie Charteris - The Saint Steps In

"I'm sorry, boys," he said, "but this is the end of the line. Please keep still and put your hands up very slowly."

He saw Quennel and Devan start to turn towards him. and then begin to obey when they saw what he held in his hand. But he was really hardly noticing them at all. His eyes were on Calvin Gray; and he felt as though he had stopped breathing a long time ago.

It was a slightly cosmic thing that he had reckoned without the scientific temperament and the contempt of familiarity.

Calvin Gray settled the flask back on the table as if it had been a soft-shelled egg, and dusted off his hands.

"I'm glad you didn't startle me," he said. "That thing is full of nitroglycerin, and I was just going to drop it"

Jetterick, the FBI man, tried to straighten a limp cigarette and said: "One thing that puzzles me is how Gray could put a bowl of soup like that together with Quennel watching him. If Quennel was a chemist himself once—"

"So far as I know," said the Saint, "he only worked in a drug store. He got out of that racket very soon to be a business man. And there were a lot of unlabeled bottles in the laboratory — I'd noticed that before. Gray, and his daughter knew what they were, but nobody else did. And one solution looks like a lot of others, at a glance. And Quennel was just interested in what he was being told… Anyhow, it doesn't matter a lot now. It didn't quite come to that."

"What about Quennel's daughter?" Jetterick asked.

Simon Templar looked out of the window into the dark.

"See what her story is, and I'll confirm it where I can." His voice was scrupulously commonplace — perhaps too scrupulously. "You can say that she must have been in a tough spot, trying to be loyal to her father and at the same time trying to follow… some other influences. But she did try in her way to keep me out of that Imberline setup. I don't think you can make her an accessory to that. I don't think she ever knew that Imberline was booked for the big voyage. Probably Quennel arid Devan didn't even know it then. But she overheard just enough, and she'd assimilated enough general background, to be sure that the Savoy Plaza could be an unhealthy joint for me to go home to… And she did let us out tonight — otherwise none of us would be talking now… You'll do what the book tells you; but I'd like to see her come out as well as she can."

And he remembered her lips and her eyes and her white shoulders, and all of her asking impossible things.

Jetterick's taciturn stare took its time over him.

"If your evidence holds up, it'll be quite a case."

"It'll hold up. And it will be quite a case. Quennel got to be a damn brilliant lawyer in his day, but he'll have to be more than brilliant to laugh this one off… I'm glad it was this way instead of the other, for more reasons than one. A little fresh air on the subject won't do any harm at all." The Saint stood up. "I'll go back to New Haven with you and help you fill in the picture. And somewhere along the line I've got to call a guy named Hamilton, who's going to be sore as a hangnail if he has to get this story out of his morning paper."

"Come over any time tomorrow," said Jetterick accommodatingly. "You've been through a hell of a lot, and I guess you could do with a rest."

"Let's do it tonight," said the Saint quietly.

He emptied an ashtray into the fireplace, and settled his coat; and it was as if everything began again.

He said: "There's still a war going on, and I don't know enough about tomorrow."

He went out and found Calvin Gray, and said goodnight to him; but Madeline followed him out to the car.

"You will be coming back, won't you?" she said.

"Very soon, I hope."

He had so many meanings in his mind that he couldn't help which one she chose from his voice. He sat beside the FBI man and gazed steadily ahead as the lane swam tortuously at them and swallowed them again. He wanted to believe that he might be going back there some day. There was no harm in hoping.