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door at
all. Suppose somebody else did ?”
    They were silent again.
    “Go on,” said
Patricia.
    Simon looked at her.
    “Two: during all the
time we were there, did you see any signs of a
servant?”
    “It might have been
their night out.”
    “Yes. And with a
house that size, there must have been several of them. And
Fairweather let them all go out together, on a Saturday
night, when he had a house full of week-end guests. And
Valerie Woodchester cooked the dinner, and Lady Sangore
washed the dishes. Why don’t we make up some more
brilliant theories? Maybe the servants were all burnt
in the fire, too, only nobody thought of mentioning it.”
    Peter sipped his beer
abstractedly.
    “What else?”
    “Three: when we
arrived, every door and window that I could see on the
ground floor was wide open. Let me try and
save your brains some of this fearful strain. Maybe that
was because everybody who heard the alarm rushed out
through a different window. Or maybe it was because they
always went to bed with the ground-floor windows open
so that if any burglars wanted to drop in they wouldn’t have to break the glass. Of course that’s much more likely than that somebody wanted a good draught to make sure that the fire would burn up nice and fast.”
    This time there was no
comment.
    “Point four,”
said the Saint quietly, “is only Luker. The man
who ties Sangore and Fairweather together. And the man who perfectly represents
the kind of bee that Kennet had in his bonnet… .
Do you really think I’m insane, or doesn’t it all seem like
too many coincidences even to you?”
    They didn’t answer.
Incredulity, a traditional habit of mind, even in spite
of the years that they had spent in wild pursuit
of the fantastic visions that steered the Saint’s iconoclastic
path, struggled desperately against the impli cations
of belief. It would have been so much easier, so much more soothing, to
let suspicion be lulled away by the uncritical
rationalizations of ingrained convention, when to accept what the Saint argued meant something so omi nous and horrible that the mind instinctively
recoiled from dwelling on it. But it seemed as if the unclouded sunlight darkened behind the Saint’s tall, disturbing
figure while the echoes of his last
words ran on through their protesting brains.
    Mr Uniatz removed the neck
of the bottle from his mouth with a faint squuck.
The intermediate stages of the conversation had left as
dim a blur on his consciousness as a discourse on the quantum theory would have
left on an infants’ class in arithmetic; but he had been told
to think something over and he had been bravely
obeying orders, even though thinking was an activity which always gave him a
dull pain behind the eyes.
    “Boss,” he said,
in a sudden wild bulge of inspiration, “I got it. It’s some temperance
outfit.”
    Simon blinked at him. There
were occasions when the strange processes that
went on inside the skull of Mr Uniatz were too occult
even for him.
    “What is?” he
asked fearfully.
    “De guys in de
aeroplanes.”
    Simon clutched his head.
    “What guys?”
    “De guys,”
explained Mr Uniatz proudly, “who break de
bottles of liquor.”
     
     
    2
    The inquest was to be held
at the Assembly Rooms in Anford, a largish building
which served at various times for dances, whist drives,
auctions and a meeting place for the Boy Scouts. When Simon
arrived a small crowd had already started to gather,
and three or four policemen were on duty to keep them
back. Among the policemen Simon recognized the
constable who had taken his arm on the night of the
fire. He strolled across to him.
    “Hullo,
Reginald,” he murmured. “What’s new?”
    “Oh, it’s you,
sir.” The policeman lowered his voice confidentially.
“Well, it all seems quite simple now. The pore
devil never left ‘is bed—‘e come down, bed and all, right
through into the libry. Shocking sight ‘e was, too. But there, he couldn’t ‘ve felt nothing. He must