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anything to anyone about your scheme. Consequently, you don’t know what’s happened since you left Headquarters. Which is this. Shortly after the secretary female called for the police, Comrade Enderby himself returned to the office, the shemozzle was explained to him, he explained the shemozzle, and the long and the short of it was that the insurance agent was found to be perfectly genuine, the whole misunderstanding was cleared up, the whole false alarm exposed; and it was discovered that there was nothing to arrest anybody for-least of all me.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    Simon took in a lungful of tobacco smoke, and inhaled through his nose with a slight smile. What made him think that? It was obvious. It was the fundamental formula on which fifty per cent, of his reputation had been built up.
    A man was robbed. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, the fact was never published at all. But if ever, through some misguided agent, or during a spasm of temporary but understandable insanity on the part of the victim himself, the fact happened to be published, that same victim, as soon as he discovered the accident or came to his senses, was the first and most energetic on the field to explain away the problem with which Scotland Yard had been faced-for the simple reason that there would be things much harder to explain away if the robber were ever detected.
    And the bereavement of Mr. Enderby was so perfectly on all fours with the formula that, with the horns of the dilemma touched in, it would have looked like a purple cow. There was no answer to it. So Mr. Enderby had been robbed of some jewels? Well, could he give a description of the jewels, so that if they were recovered … How did the Saint know? He smiled, with unusual tolerance.
    “Just the same old clairvoyant gift-working overtime for your special benefit, Desmond. But I’ll back it for anything you like to bet-even including that perfectly repulsive shirt you’re wearing. If you only got wise to yourself, you’d find that nobody wanted me arrested any more; and it’d save both of us no end of trouble. Now, why don’t you get on the ‘phone to Headquarters, and bring yourself up to date? Let me do it for you; and then you can save your twopence to buy yourself a bar of milk chocolate on the way home… .”
    He picked up the telephone on the porter’s desk, and pushed his forefinger persuasively into the initial V of the Victoria exchange. It was all ancient history to the Saint, an old game which had become almost stereotyped from many playings, even if with this new victim it had the semblance of a new twist to it. It hadn’t seriously occurred to him that the routine could be very different.
    And then something hard and compact jabbed into his chest, and his eyes shifted over with genuine surprise from the telephone dial. There was a nickel-plated little automatic in Junior Inspector Pryke’s hand-the sort of footling ladylike weapon, Simon couldn’t help reflecting, which a man with that taste in clothes must inevitably have affected, but none the less capable of unpleasant damage at contact range. His gaze roamed up to the detective’s flaming eyes with a flicker of pained protest that for once was wholly spontaneous and tinged with a glitter of urgent curiosity.
    “Put that telephone down,” said Pryke sizzlingly.
    Simon put the telephone down. There was something in the other’s rabid glare which told him that disobedience might easily make Pryke do something foolish-of which the Saint had no desire to suffer the physical effects.
    “My dear old daffodil,” he murmured, “have you stopped
to think that that dinky little pop-gun–––”
    “Never mind what I think,” rasped the detective, whose range of repartee seemed to make up in venom what it lacked in variety. “If there’s any truth in what you’re saying, we can verify it when we get you to the station. But you aren’t going to run away until it has been verified.