“You tell them, Alvin,” Simon suggested; and with a side-step as swift and light as a ballet dancer he made way for Mrs Wingate to plough into a berth between them, and vanished through the door he had originally been heading for before the detective had the remotest chance of circumnavigating Mrs Wingate’s bulk to intercept him.
Simon raced up the stairs to the ground floor and from there to the second without interference. There were four doors back of the stairs, and he flung each of them open in turn. None of them was locked. Two of the rooms were six-bed dormitories, empty, but smelling rancidly of habitation. In the third room a very old man with a pock-marked face looked up with an idiotic grin from a game of solitaire.
The fourth room was empty — not only empty, but so cleaned out that it had the same prison bareness that he had found in the room he himself had occupied the night before. There were rumples in the bed that didn’t follow the same contours as careless bed making, and he saw that the opaque window glass contained the same fused-in-netting as his own window had had, even before his nostrils detected the mustiness of the air, a clear fragrance that could only be Monica...
Kearney caught up with him there a moment later and stuck a gun into his ribs.
“All right, Mr Saint,” he grated. “Don’t try anything else, or I’ll blast you.”
“You blathering nitwit,” said the Saint, with icy calm. “Why couldn’t you stay downstairs and make sure they wouldn’t smuggle her out?”
“From where?” Kearney jeered.
“From here. Frankie told me the truth. She was in this room. Don’t you smell anything?”
The detective sniffed.
“It smells lousy to me.”