Mr Teal hitched his coat round.
"I'm going," he said, fighting a losing battle with the new crop of gnawing suspicions that were springing up all over the well-fertilized tracts of his unhappy mind. "But get this. If you still think you're putting anything over on me—"
"I know," said the Saint. "I needn't think I can get away with it. How empty the days would be if I couldn't hear that dear old litany! I think I could recite it in my sleep. Come again, Claud, and we'll have some new grey hairs for you." He opened the front door and steered the detective affectionately down the steps. "Take care of Mr Teal, George," he said to the police driver who still sat at the wheel of the car. "He isn't feeling very strong just now."
He patted the detective's bowler hat well down over his ears and went back into the house.
IX
Back in the living room the Saint's air of leisured badinage fell off him like a cloak. He draped himself on the mantelpiece with a cigarette tilting from his mouth and a drink in his hand and started to ask questions. He had a lot to ask.
They were not easy questions, and the answers were mostly vague and unsatisfactory. The subject of the Z-Man was not one that seemed to encourage conversation; but Simon Templar had a knack of his own of making people talk, and what he did learn was significant enough. Two or three months earlier Mercia Landon, dancing and singing star of Atlantic Studios, had been working in the final sequences of a new supermusical when for no apparent reason she had had a breakdown. All work on the production was held up, the overhead mounted perilously, and finally the picture had to be shelved. It was rumoured that Mercia was being threatened by a blackmailer, but nobody knew anything for certain. And then one morning she was found dead in her apartment from the conventional overdose of veronal.
"Accidental death," said the coroner's jury, since there was no evidence to show that the overdose had been deliberately taken; but those "in the know" — people on the inside of the screen world — knew perfectly well that Mercia Landon had taken her own life. And for a good and sufficient reason. Although she was only twenty-two and in perfect health, she had known that her screen career was finished. For when her maid found her there was a deep and jagged cut on her face in the rough zigzag shape of a Z. The upper line crossed her eyebrows, the diagonal crossed her nose, and the lower horizontal gashed her mouth almost from ear to ear. No amount of plastic surgery, no miracles of skin grafting could ever have restored the famous modelling of her face or made it possible for her to smile again that quick sunny smile that had been reflected from a million screens.
"Nobody ever knew who Mercia met that night or even where she went," said Sheila Ireland, her slim white fingers nervously twisting her empty cigarette holder. "I suppose they took her away like — like they thought they were taking Beatrice. Nobody could have blackmailed Mercia. She never had any affairs, and everybody loved her. And she just laughed at the idea of being kidnapped — here in England. When they started demanding money she just laughed at it. She wouldn't even go to the police. All anybody knows about this is that she once said to her maid: 'That idiotic Z-Man who keeps phoning must be an escaped lunatic' And then—" She shivered. "Since then we've all been terrified."
"It's an old racket with a new twist," said the Saint. "The ordinary blackmailer has something on his victim. The Z-Man has nothing — except the threat that he'll disfigure them and ruin their screen careers if they don't come across. I seem to remember that some other actress recently had a nervous breakdown, exactly like Mercia Landon. The picture she was in was shelved, too, and it's still shelved. She went to Italy to recuperate. I take it that she was victim number two. She was threatened, she lost her nerve, and she paid. She saved her good looks, but her bank balance wasn't big enough to go on paying. So Beatrice is probably victim number three."