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place to the ultimate exigencies of the clock. He could certainly have played a lot longer, but there were more urgent things to do.
    “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but it’s really dreadfully simple. Somebody else knew I was coming here tonight. Somebody didn’t want Comrade Linnet to sing to me, and the same person wanted to stop me doing any arias of my own. It all went together into the pretty picture you sec before you. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even supposed to be caught here at all. That was just a little too tight for practical timing. But I actually was waylaid on the doorstep by a very ornamental piece of grommet, and I took her to dinner, and then the stall was to lure me to her apartment for some soft music and hard practice; and then I was supposed to have no alibi at all for these vital moments.”
    “That’s interesting,” Fernack said unyieldingly. “Go on.”
    “Unfortunately for the ungodly,” said the Saint, “I was much cleverer than they expected me to be, and I ditched my waylayer and came back here in a hurry. I got here in what the most original writers call the nick of time. As a matter of fact, the bright boy who actually garroted Comrade Linnet was on his way out at the moment. Then he sort of collided with a door, and got tired and went to sleep, so I tied him up and kept him for you. You’ll probably even find some fresh remains of chalk on his fingertips to clinch it for you.”
    Fernack’s face underwent a series of gradual and well-rounded reconstructions that were fascinating to watch. Each phase was a complete and satisfying production in its own right, so rich and full-bodied that only the most niggling critic would have complained that their climax was something very like a simple incredulous gape.
    “Then why the hell couldn’t you say so before?” he squawked. “Where is he?”
    “You were having such a lovely time sending me to the chair, it seemed a shame to break it up,” said the Saint. “But he ought to be where I left him, in the basement. Would you like to say hullo?”
    He turned and led the way back as he had come in; and Fer-nack followed him without a word.
    They went down the stairs, past the series of pantries, and through the huge kitchen to the place where Simon had left his captive. And that was when the incipient anticlimax suddenly ceased to be incipient at all, and in fact turned a complete somersault and made the Saint’s stomach turn one with it.
    For the cadaverous gent with the cracked forehead wasn’t there any more.
    There was just nothing to argue about in it. He wasn’t there. The entire area of stone flooring at the foot of the back steps was burdened with nothing more substantial than a probable film of New York grime.
    Simon Templar stood and gazed down at it with the utmost restraint for several seconds; until Fernack said impatiently: “Well, where is this man?”
    “This is going to make you very unhappy, Henry,” said the Saint, raising his eyes, “but he doesn’t seem to be here any more. I’m afraid he must have had a boy friend who came back for him. The way I had him tied, he couldn’t possibly have gotten loose by himself. But he’s certainly gone away.”
    The gastric ulcers of innumerable haggard authors bear witness to the awful responsibility of attempting an adequate description of such scenes as this. The present chronicler, however, having much more respect and affection for his mucosa, intends to court no such disaster. He proposes to leave most of the detailed etching to the imagination of the reader, for whose lambent perspicacity he has the very highest regard.
    He will nevertheless go so far as to give a slight lead by mentioning that the calorific swelling of a moderately understandable indignation caused Inspector Fernack’s face to give a startling imitation of an overripe plum which is receiving an unexpected hypodermic from a jet of high-pressure steam.
    “All right,” Fernack