Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

Quietly, he said: "Nora."

There was no answer, no hint of movement anywhere. And he didn't know why, but in the same quiet way his right hand slid up to his shoulder rig and loosened the automatic in the spring clip under his arm.

He covered the last two yards in absolute silence, put bis hand to the knob of the door, and drew it back quickly as his fingers slid on a sticky dampness. It was queer, he thought even then, even as his left hand angled the flashlight down, that it should have happened just like that, when everything in him was tuned and waiting for it, without knowing what it was waiting for. Blood — on the door.

Simon stood for a moment, and his nerves seemed to grow even calmer and colder under an edge of sharp bitterness.

Then he grasped the doorknob again, turned it, and went in. The inside of the building was pitch dark. His torch needled the blackness with a thin jet of light that splashed dim reflections from the glossy varnish on a couple of punts and an electric canoe. Somehow he was quite sure what he would find, so sure that the certainty chilled off any rise of emotion. He knew what it must be; the only question was, who? Perhaps even that was not such a question. He was never quite sure about that. A hunch that had almost missed its mark had become stark reality with a suddenness that disjointed the normal co-ordinates of time and space: it was as if instead of discovering things, he was trying to remember things he had known before and had forgotten. But he saw her at last, almost tucked under the shadow of the electric canoe, lying on her side as if she were asleep.

He stepped over and bent his light steadily on her face, and knew then that he had been right. It was the girl with the troubled blue eyes. Her eyes were open now, only they were not troubled any more. The Saint stood and looked down at her. He had been almost sure when he saw the curly yellow hair. But she had been wearing a white blouse when he saw her last, and now there was a splotchy crimson pattern on the front of it. The pattern glistened as he looked at it.

Beside him, there was a noise like an asthmatic foghorn loosening up for a burst of song.

"Boss," began Mr Uniatz.

"Shut up."

The Saint's voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it cut like a razorblade. It cut Hoppy's introduction cleanly off from whatever he had been going to say; and at the same moment as he spoke Simon switched off his torch, so that it was as if the same tenuous whisper had sliced off even the ray of light, leaving nothing around them but blackness and silence.

Motionless in the dark, the Saint quested for any betraying breath of sound. To his tautened eardrums, sensitive as a wild animal's, the hushed murmurs of the night outside were still an audible background against which the slightest stealthy movement even at a considerable distance would have stood out like a bugle call. But he heard nothing then, though he waited for several seconds in uncanny stillness.

He switched on the torch again.

"Okay, Hoppy," he said. "Sorry to interrupt you, but that blood was so fresh that I wondered if someone mightn't still be around."

"Boss," said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly, "I was doin' fine when ya stopped me."

"Never mind," said the Saint consolingly. "You can go ahead now. Take a deep breath and start again."

He was still partly listening for something else, wondering if even then the murderer might still be within range.

"It ain't no use now," said Mr Uniatz dolefully.

"Are you going to get temperamental on me?" Simon demanded sufferingly. "Because if so—"

Mr Uniatz shook his head.

"It ain't dat, boss. But you gotta start wit' a full bottle."

Simon focused him through a kind of fog. In an obscure and apparently irrelevant sort of way, he became aware that Hoppy was still clinging to the bottle of Vat 69 with which he he been irrigating his tonsils at the Bell, and that he was holding it up against the beam of the flashlight as though brooding over the level of the liquid left in it. The Saint clutched at the buttresses of his mind.

"What in the name of Adam's grandfather," he said, "are you talking about?"

"Well, boss, dis is an idea I get out of a book. De guy walks in a saloon, he buys a bottle of Scotch, he pulls de cork, an' he drinks de whole bottle straight down wit'out stopping. So I was tryin' de same t'ing back in de pub, an' I was doin' fine when ya stopped me. Lookit, I ain't left more 'n two-t'ree swallows. But it ain't no use goin' on now," explained Mr Uniatz, working back to the core of his grievance. "You gotta start wit' a full bottle."

Nothing but years of training and self-discipline gave Simon Templar the strength to recover his sanity.

"Next time, you'd better take the bottle away somewhere and lock yourself up with it," he said, with terrific moderation. "Just for the moment, since we haven't got another bottle, is there any danger of your noticing that someone has been murdered around here?"

"Yeah," said Mr Uniatz brightly. "De wren."

Having contributed his share of illumination, he relapsed into benevolent silence. This, his expectant self-effacement appeared to suggest, was not his affair. It appeared to be something which required thinking about; and Thinking was a job for which the Saint possessed an obviously supernatural aptitude which Mr Uniatz had come to lean upon with a childlike faith that was very much akin to worship.

The Saint was thinking. He was thinking with a level and passionless detachment that surprised even himself. The girl was dead. He had seen plenty of men killed before, sometimes horribly; but only one other woman. Yet that must not make any difference. Nora Prescott had never meant anything to him: he would never even have recognized her voice. Other women of whom he knew just as little were dying everywhere, in one way or another, every time he breathed; and he could think about it without the slightest feeling. Nora Prescott was just another name in the world's long roll of undistinguished dead.

But she was someone who had asked him for help, who had perhaps died because of what she had wanted to tell him. She hadn't been just another twittering fluffhead going into hysterics over a mouse. She really had known something — something that was dangerous enough for someone else to commit murder rather than have it revealed.

'One of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted…'

The only phrase out of her letter which gave any information at all came into his head again, not as a merely provocative combination of words, but with some of the clean-cut clarity of a sober statement of fact. And yet the more he considered it, the closer it came to clarifying precisely nothing.

And he was still half listening for a noise that it seemed as if he ought to have heard. The expectation was a subtle nagging at the back of his mind, the fidget for attention of a thought that still hadn't found conscious shape.

His torch panned once more around the interior of the building. It was a plain wooden structure, hardly more than three walls and a pair of double doors which formed the fourth, just comfortably roomy for the three boats which it contained. There was a small window on each side, so neglected as to be almost opaque. Overhead, his light went straight up to the bare rafters which supported the shingle roof. There was no place in it for anybody to hide except under one of the boats; and his light probed along the floor and eliminated that possibility.

The knife lay on the floor near the girl's knees — an ordinary cheap kitchen knife, but pointed and sharp enough for what it had had to do. There was a smear of blood on the handle; and some of it must have gone on the killer's hand, or more probably on his glove, and in that way been left on the doorknob. From the stains and rents on the front of the girl's blouse, the murderer must have struck two or three times; but if he was strong he could have held her throat while he did it, and there need have been no noise.