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copper.
    “You know what I
mean?” he said. “Kane Luker is probably
the only serious rival that our old friend Rayt Marius
ever had. And now that Angel Face is no longer with
us, Luker stands alone—the kingpin of what somebody once called the
Merchants of Death. It’s interesting to have met him, because I’ve often
thought that we may have to liquidate him
one day.”
    The mists broke in Patricia’s mind, so that for
an instant she could see with a blinding
clarity. It was as if the whole interruption
of the fire had never happened, as if she was still sitting in the car as she had been before, listening to the sounds that came over the radio, without a break,
just as she had been listening. Their
primitive stridency beat in her brain
again as if they had never ceased—the lusting clangour of trumpets, the machinelike prattle of the drums. Brass and drums. And men marching like lines of
ants, their boots thudding like the
tick-tock of some monstrous clock eating up time. Left, right, left. In
time with the brass and drums. And in time, too, now, with the hammer and clang of flaring forges and the deep rolling
reverberation of stu pendous
armouries pouring out the iron tools of war… .
    She looked at the Saint and
was aware of him in the midst of all that, like a
shining light, a bright sword, a clear note
of music in the thunder of brute destruction, following his amazing destiny. But the thunder went on.
    She tried to shut it out.
    She said, almost
desperately: “That fellow who was left —in
there. Why did you ask if he was any relation of the M.P.?”
    “It just occurred to
me. And he was. That’s the funny part. Because unless my memory’s all cockeyed,
he’s a flaming Red and a frightful thorn in the side of his
respecta ble papa. He’s the one part of the
picture that doesn’t fit in. Why should a really
outstanding crop of old and young Diehards like that
ask anyone like John Kennet down for a week end?”
    “He might have amused
them.”
    “Would you credit them
with that much sense of humour?”
    “I don’t know. But if
it was a joke, they must be feeling pretty badly about
it.” She shuddered. “I know it’s all over now,
but I hope—I hope they were right—that the smoke did
put him out before the fire got to him.”
    Simon’s cigarette reddened
again for a long moment before he answered.
    “If there’s one thing
I’m sure of, I’m sure that the fire didn’t hurt
him,” he said; and the way he said it stopped her breath for a moment.
    The noise in her brain
screamed up in an insane cacoph ony.
    “You mean—— ”
    “I mean—murder,”
said the Saint.

 
    II
    How Lady Valerie   Complained about
    Heroes, and Mr Fairweather
Dropped
    His Hat
     
    “S EEING that time is flying,” said Peter Quentin, “and since you have to attend an inquest this morning, I suppose you could use some extra nourishment.”
    “How right you
are,” said the Saint. “Some people have no
respect for anything. It’s a gloomy thought. Even when you’re
dead, you’re liable to be lugged out of the morgue at
the squeak of dawn to have your guts poked over by some revoltingly healthy jury of red-faced yokels.”
    “I like getting you up
early,” said Patricia. “It seems to lend
a sort of ethereal delicacy to your ideas.”
    Simon Templar grinned and
watched Peter nipping the caps from a row of bottles
of Carlsberg. As a matter of fact it was nearly ten o’clock, and for half an
hour after breakfast they had been sitting in the
sun on the porch out side Peter’s dining room.
Two days had gone by since the fire, and it would have
been hard to identify the supremely elegant Saint who
sprawled in Peter’s most comfortable de ck
chair with the blistered smoke-blackened scarecrow who
had arrived there in the small hours of a certain morning with his grim
foreboding.
    He took the tall glass
that Peter handed him and eyed fit appreciatively.
    “And while we’re
soothing our tender nerves with