"Allen — no!"
"Yes, my dear," Uttershaw said. "I'm afraid he was perfectly right."
Simon Templar took a deep breath.
"Speaking of being put in positions," he said clearly, "how will you like your position on the broiler at Sing Sing if you do this?"
"I'm not very worried about that," Uttershaw said with the same unreal removal from emotion. "You see, I was careful enough to take the elevator to two floors above this, and I walked down here. I also found a fine little back stairway, with an openable window that leads out on to a fire escape. Apparently the management of this hotel trusts its guests. So I'll have plenty of time for any other arrangements I may think of to account for what I've been doing during this time. And I shall certainly take your lecture to heart, and try not to be too brilliant… I'm sorry, but it wouldn't be fair to leave you any false hopes."
The Saint looked at him with a face of stone.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Barbara Sinclair also, still crouched on the floor, speechless and rigid and chalky in a trance of the real horror that she had so immutably refused to see.
But those choices were over now, for her as they were for Uttershaw.
And as they might be over for him too, if he had been so preoccupied with other excessive cleverness that he had overdone his own, after all.
He said: "This makes quite a curtain."