“We didn’t know. You mightn’t have fallen for that note. Anything might have happened. You mightn’t have gotten home at all last night—”
“But you knew I’d received the note and fallen for it,” said the Saint coldly. “You saw me drop April Quest and go home. Your car drove by when we were saying goodnight.” It was another fragment of the jigsaw that fitted accurately into place now. “After that you saw me arrive at Ufferlitz’s. That was when you phoned the police. But you still didn’t think I was in a jam.”
Kendricks made a helpless movement.
“You’re getting me tied up,” he said. “Just like a lawyer. The whole truth is that we didn’t know what had happened to you. You’ve got a great reputation for getting out of jams — you might have dodged that one. We didn’t know. But we couldn’t come out and say anything, because if the cops knew we’d framed you like that they’d naturally think what you thought — that we’d murdered Ufferlitz and tried to make it look like it was you. We were in the hell of a jam ourselves. It was a gag that fate took a hand in, or something. And we were stuck with it. We just had to shut up and hope something would happen.”
“But you weren’t in the house yourselves.”
“Not once.”
“Then how,” Simon asked very placidly, “did you know, when you wrote that note, that the front door would be unlocked?”
There was stillness a third time, a stillness that had the explosive quality of a frenzied struggle gripped in immovable chains. Lazaroff finally made a frustrated gesture, as if his hand had turned into lead.
“It sounds worse and worse, but we just happened to know.”
“How?”