She studied him with a kind of speculative aloofness.
"I like you by daylight. I thought I should."
He returned her survey with equal frankness. She wore a white linen skirt and a cobwebby white blouse, and the lines of her figure were as delicious as he had thought they would be. It would have been easy, effortless, to surrender completely to the blood-quickening enchantment of her physical presence. But between them also was the ghostly presence of Pargo; and a chilling recollection of Pargo's livid distorted face passed before the Saint's eyes as he smiled at her.
"You look pretty good yourself, Brenda," he remarked. "Perhaps it's because that outfit looks a lot more like Bond Street than what you had on last night."
Her poise was momentarily shaken.
"How did you—"
"I'm a detective too," said the Saint gravely. "Only I keep it a secret."
She unlatched the door and swung out her long slender legs. As she was doing so a sleek black sedan swam round the nearest bend, slowing up, and turned in towards the front of the pub. The Saint's right hand stayed in his coat pocket, and his eyes were chips of ice for an instant before the driver got out unconcernedly as the car stopped and walked across to the entrance of the bar. The Saint could almost have laughed at himself but not quite; those reactions were too solidly founded on probabilities to be wholly humorous, and he was still waiting for the purpose of their meeting to be revealed.
The girl didn't seem to have noticed anything. She straightened up as her feet touched the road, flawless as a white statue, with the same impenetrable aloofness. She said: "There's your car. Would you like to take it and drive away? A long way away — to the north of Scotland or Timbuktu or anywhere. At least far enough for you to forget that any of this ever happened."
"The world is so small," Simon pointed out unhappily. "Twelve thousand miles is about the farthest you can get from anything, and that's not very far in these days of high-speed transport. Besides, I don't know that I want to forget. We've still got that date for a stroll in the moonlight—"