The butler's puffy eyes hesitated over actuality and recollection.
"It could have been, sir. I wouldn't like to be too definite, but this man was built a bit similar."
You could feel the weakness ebbing out of Fernack like the fluidity of setting concrete. He turned on his heels to face the Saint again, and his jaw was tightening up again like a trap.
"Well," he said, "you were going to tell your story. Go on with it."
Simon found a rim of floor that was clear of the late Mr Linnet's beautiful carpet, and studiously trod the stub of his cigarette out on it. In the same leisured tempo, he lighted another to replace it. He had a sense of incipient anticlimax, just the same.
It was, admittedly, a little bit on the hammy side to have tried to talk himself through his contract without showing any trumps; but as a challenge to professional vanity the temptation had been irresistible. He only resigned himself to quit because he realised that time was marching on, and fun might be fun but it had to take second place to the ultimate exigencies of the clock. He could certainly have played a lot longer, but there were more urgent things to do.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said, "but it's really dreadfully simple. Somebody else knew I was coming here tonight. Somebody didn't want Comrade Linnet to sing to me, and the same person wanted to stop me doing any arias of my own. It all went together into the pretty picture you sec before you. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even supposed to be caught here at all. That was just a little too tight for practical timing. But I actually was waylaid on the doorstep by a very ornamental piece of grommet, and I took her to dinner, and then the stall was to lure me to her apartment for some soft music and hard practice; and then I was supposed to have no alibi at all for these vital moments."
"That's interesting," Fernack said unyieldingly. "Go on."
"Unfortunately for the ungodly," said the Saint, "I was much cleverer than they expected me to be, and I ditched my waylayer and came back here in a hurry. I got here in what the most original writers call the nick of time. As a matter of fact, the bright boy who actually garroted Comrade Linnet was on his way out at the moment. Then he sort of collided with a door, and got tired and went to sleep, so I tied him up and kept him for you. You'll probably even find some fresh remains of chalk on his fingertips to clinch it for you."
Fernack's face underwent a series of gradual and well-rounded reconstructions that were fascinating to watch. Each phase was a complete and satisfying production in its own right, so rich and full-bodied that only the most niggling critic would have complained that their climax was something very like a simple incredulous gape.