“If anyone found it... anyone... I would pay a large reward.”
“If I knew where to lay my hands on it,” said the Saint, a little frigidly, “you wouldn’t have to ask for it back, or pay any reward.”
She nodded.
“Of course. I’m being stupid. It was a foolish hope. Excuse me.” She stood up abruptly. “Thank you for letting me talk to you — and again for what you tried to do. I must not bother you anymore.”
She held out her hand, and was gone. Simon Templar stood where she had left him and slowly lighted another cigarette. Then he walked to the window. From the balcony outside he was offered a superb panorama of mountains rolling down to the sparkling blue foreground of the lake, where an excursion steamer swam like a toy trailing a brown veil of smoke, but irresistibly his eye was drawn downwards and to the right, towards the corner outside the gardens where he had tackled the stocky man.
He could have persuaded himself that it was only an illusion that he could see something from where he stood, but the echoes of the false notes that the Signora Ravenna had struck were less easy to dismiss.
He put on his jacket and went downstairs. After only a short search in the bushes near where he had tangled with the stocky man, he found the briefcase.
3
He figured it out as he took it upstairs to his room. The briefcase had indeed flown out of the stocky man’s grasp when the Saint tackled him. It had fallen in among the rhododendrons. Then Kleinhaus had come along, shouting. The stocky man had been too scared to stop and look for it. He had scrammed the hell out of there. The police hadn’t looked for it, because they assumed it was gone. And the stocky man hadn’t come back to look, either because he was afraid to, or because he assumed the police would have found it.
And now the Saint had it.