"I trust your deductive genius is on the beam, Captain, but at least two other parties have been on that road today already — the victim and the murderers."
"Sergeant," grunted the other. "And I don't know how you come to be on that road yet."
Simon shrugged, and spread his hands slightly to indicate that under the laws of mathematical probability the point was unanswerable. Silence fell as the conversation languished.
Presently there was a noise of cars arriving, and installments of the Law filtered into the house. The sergeant put down his crossword puzzle and stood up to do the honors.
"Hi, Bill…. Howdy, Lieutenant Kinglake…. 'Lo, Yard… Hiyah, Dr Quantry… This is the man who reported that burned corpse. His name is Templar and he's a doodler."
Simon kept his face perfectly solemn as he weighed the men who were taking charge of the case.
Lieutenant Kinglake was a husky teak-skinned individual with gimlet gray eyes and a mouth like a thin slash above a battleship prow of jaw. He looked as if he worked hard and fast and would want to hit things that tried to slow him up. Yard, his assistant, was a lumbering impression from a familiar mould, in plain clothes that could have done nicely with a little dusting and pressing. Dr Quantry, the coroner, looked like Dr Quantry, the coroner. Bill, who wore a leather windbreaker with a deputy sheriff's badge pinned on it, was middle-aged and heavy, with a brick-red face and a moustache like an untrimmed hedge. He had faintly popped light-blue eyes with a vague lack of focus, as if he was unused to seeing anything nearer than the horizon: he moved slowly and spoke even slower when he spoke at all.
It didn't take Kinglake more than a minute to assimilate all the information that the sergeant had gathered, and to examine Simon's identification papers. He stopped over the line drawing which reminded him of the figures of boxers which he used to draw in the margins of successive pages of his Fiske's history and riffle to simulate a sparring match.
"Doodler?" he said in a sharp voice. "I—" He broke off as his eyes widened and then narrowed. "I've seen this picture before. Simon Templar, eh? Are you the Saint?"
"I bow to your fund of miscellaneous information," Simon responded courteously.