VII
"Yes, I checked up on her," said Peter Quentin, sipping his whisky and soda. "She lives in Welbeck Street, and she runs one of those ultra dress shops in Bond Street. You know the kind of thing — an enormous window with nothing in it but a chromium-plated whatnot with one evening wrap hanging on it and no price tickets."
"It all fits in," said the Saint soberly. "That load of dresses and whoosits that we knocked off a fortnight ago — that's where they would have gone. She probably took a trip to Paris herself and spent a gorgeous week getting them together. What about Lasser?"
"Nothing that isn't public property anyway. But I found out from Lloyd's that he's the owner of a 300-ton steam yacht called the Valkyrie. He's also the owner of a house on Gad Cliff, and if you look at the map you'll see that it overlooks Brandy Bay. It's supposed to have been unoccupied and left in charge of a caretaker for about a couple of years, but we don't have to take the caretaker too seriously."
Peter Quentin had been a rather serious young man since the Saint had told him the complete story over the telephone that morning, and curiously enough he had refrained from making any of the obvious gibes which Simon had been fully prepared for. He had arrived late in the afternoon after what clearly could not have been an idle morning.
The Saint moved up and down the long living room of the Old Barn for a moment with the silent restlessness and pent-up energy of a caged tiger.
"I've been going over all that we had from Pargo," he said, "and all the things we'd been trying to get sorted out before. And it all seems so simple now that it almost makes you howl."
Peter didn't interrupt him; and the Saint took another turn round the room and went on:
"What we've been up against all the time was that there seemed to be three separate gangs without any connecting link. There was one gang that brought the stuff across the Channel in some sort of ship. The stuff was brought ashore in small boats and handed over to the shore gang, and none of 'em ever saw the ship that brought it in daylight. The ship always had her lights out, and they could never even find out the first thing about her. Pargo was one of the shore gang, and I'm beginning to think now that he ought to have known where the stuff was stored; but probably he was holding out on us to get as much money as he could. Anyway all the rest he knew was that the shore gang drove trucks to London and parked them wherever they'd been told to and went away, and somebody else came along later and picked up the truck and took it wherever it was going. That, presumably, was the third gang — the distributing gang. And none of the three gangs met anywhere except at the top, which we couldn't get near."
"Unless they all met at the same top."