He pulled the toothpick out of his teeth, inspected it, and thrust it back. He didn’t seem to be able to make a good exit. His eyes were still watchful, as they always would be, as they would always be searching and challenging, but without the conscience-created menace behind them they were just awkward and lonely and disillusioned. He was just a guy who’d been trying to do a job. And when the job wasn’t there any more he was no more frightening or perhaps just as frightening as a man who had rung the bell to try and sell a vacuum cleaner and been told that there were no customers for vacuum cleaners. He said at last: “Well, next time don’t forget that some of us need medals.”
“I won’t,” said the Saint.
He sat and watched the door close, and drew slowly and introspectively at his cigarette, and waited while Peggy Warden brought him a highball and put it into his hand. He smiled his thanks at her and oscillated the glass gently so that the liquid circulated coolingly around the ice cubes.
She had a drink herself. She sat down opposite him, and he admired her again in his mind, the fresh clean trimness of her, so fearless and clean-cut, and quietly lovely too, with the natural golden brown of her hair and the steady gray of her eyes. It was a face that one would never remember vividly for any unique lines, and yet it had something independent of conformation that would puzzle the memory and yet always be haunting — as it was haunting him now.
“I’ve been very stupid, Peggy,” he said. “But the case is closed now, as you heard Condor say, and it’s all right the way it is. I just lose sleep over loose ends. Tell me why you killed Byron Ufferlitz.”
11
She couldn’t answer at first. It was as if all the answers were there in her mind, but she couldn’t talk.
He helped her after a little while, and his voice and body were very lazy and peaceful, without any urgency or eagerness. They had a hypnotic quality, unassumed and unthinkably comforting.
“It was for Trilby Andrews, wasn’t it?” he said.
Her eyes drew all their life from his face.