She turned away from him towards a mirror and began to pat her hair into place.
"You are a cad, aren't you?" she said.
Her eyes, seen in the mirror, held the same baffling expression that had puzzled him in the car; but now there was mockery with it. Her lips were stirred by a little smile of almost devilish satisfaction. She had a pleased air of feeling that she had done something very clever.
"I think you're a dangerous woman," he said with profound conviction.
She yawned delicately and rubbed her eyes like a sleepy kitten.
"I don't know what you mean," she said. "Anyway, I'm too tired to argue. But you'll have to go on being nice to me now, won't you? I mean, what would Patricia do if I told her?"
"She'd write your name on the wall," said the Saint, "where we keep all the others. We're making a mural of them."
"Would she? Well, don't forget that I know what you've done with Bravache and those other men. When they've been bumped off, or whatever you call it, I shan't want you to get hanged for it if I go on liking you."
The Saint was grinning as he went out and locked the door. It was the first piece of unalloyed fun that had enriched the day.
At 4 A.M. that morning a young policeman on his beat noticed a suspicious cluster of shapes in a doorway in Grosvenor Square. He flashed his light on them and saw that they were the bodies of three men, with adhesive tape over their mouths and their hands fastened somehow behind them, sprawled against the door in grotesque attitudes. They were stripped to the waist and horrid red stains were smeared across their torsos.