“I drove him into it,” said the Saint. “I was just blundering on, annoying everybody and waiting for a fish to rise. Well, Orlando rose. I knew Ufferlitz must have had something on him, since that seems to have been Ufferlitz’s technique with almost everybody, and I just bluffed it out of him. It was something quite ugly, so we don’t need to feel sorry for him. But I let him think that Ufferlitz had pretty well broadcast it with one of those voice-from-the-grave messages. It was something that would have sold him out of pictures for good and all. So — he just rang his own curtain down. It was a big help, though, because then I was able to come out with a nice solution and make Condor happy and make sure that the case was all tied up and put away.”
She got up and went to the window and looked out, and presently when she came back he knew that the world had begun again for her as if it had never stopped moving.
“There’s no reason why you should do all that for me,” she said.
“I didn’t do it for you,” he said brutally. “I just did it. I like to see puzzles worked out to the right solution. I don’t mean the correct solution. That’s dull pedantic stuff. I mean the right one. Which means the right one for all concerned, as well as I can see it. Don’t try to put too many haloes on me.”
“You’ve already got one, haven’t you?”
He finished his drink, and peeled himself out of the chair, the whole whipcord length of him, and stretched himself with the physical luxury of a cat, so that suddenly it seemed as if his world also began again; only this was a world which began again every day, and would never cease to begin again, and everything in the past was only a holiday. She saw his face dark and debonair in the shaded lamplight, and the ageless amusement in his blue eyes, and already she had the feeling that he was only a legend that had paused for a few hours.
“Don’t ever be sure of it,” he said.
He thought about her some more as he drove west again on Sunset, but there was someone else on his mind too, so that his thought became somewhat confused. Only a little while ago he had been falsely accusing April Quest, and he realised now that once she recovered her poise she had been quietly leading him on — for mischief, or because she had to know what he would propose to do about his belief? Or perhaps some of both... Well, he’d still given the right answer... So now there was a threat of another unwanted halo hanging over his head, and a few more pitfalls between them. But nothing, he hoped, that the drink he had asked her to save for him wouldn’t cure. Or at least the drink after that.
Publication history
The stories in this volume, the twenty-third book, were written specifically for the book and have, unusually for Charteris, very little history outside of this book. They were written at a time when Charteris was well established in America; he’d been there off and on for many years, was living and working on the west coast and was married to his second wife, Barbara, an American.