"Supposing it had really been me?" said Beatrice Avery with a shudder. "I shouldn't have had the Saint to help me."
"Well, you've got him now," said Patricia. "So you can stop worrying. The Saint's after the Z-Man, and that means that the Z-Man will have so much on his mind that he won't have time to think about you."
"But why are we going to Scotland?"
"We're not going to Scotland."
"When we were on our way out your said you always preferred to motor to Scotland at night because the roads were clearer—"
"That was just for the benefit of the commissionaire," Patricia explained.
The car stopped outside a handsome new apartment house in Berkeley Square. Patricia went up to Irene Cromwell's extravagant flat. The exotic star of Pyramid Pictures was not in.
"I think she had better be," said Patricia to the scared-looking maid who had answered the door. "Tell her that Miss Holm, of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard, wishes to see her on a matter which affects her personal safety."
The maid, duly impressed, discovered that her mistress was in after all. She left Patricia in the little hall for only a minute and then ushered her into a gorgeous boudoir which only a five-hundred-pound-a-week film star could dream of maintaining. Irene Cromwell looked surprisingly frail and timid, wrapped in a trailing, feather-trimmed chiffon negligee.
"You are from Scotland Yard?" she asked, her eyes round and big.