He knew that he had almost everything in his hands now. At least, he had as much as he was likely to get. The rest of it lay with his own judgment and perception and choice. He had to read character and motive and physical possibility right. He had to take apart the things people had said, and distinguish the sinister from the stupid, and be a razor edge of separation between the stupid things that looked sinister and the sinister things that looked stupid. He had to eschew all red herrings and perceive only the one true fish.
And he couldn't sit there for ever while he made up his mind, lie had to move. He had to move swiftly and rightly, before there was another murder to be solved, and another sacrifice to be accounted to the dull golden gods who had declared themselves for the enemy.
And at that perfect point he raised his eyes and saw Milton Ourley standing at the entrance of the dining room.
10
It is a simple fact that the Saint was not even surprised. The appearance of Mr Ourley was merely the natural and inevitable slipping of a link in a chain that had been forming for some time, a chain that must ultimately be so solid and inescapable that the failure of one link to make its appearance would have dissolved every other materialising loop. And this link was so ineluctable that it was uncannily like seeing a revival of some half-remembered play, rather than meeting a new and sudden complication.
He said: "Don't look now, but I think your husband is joining us."
Mrs Ourley did look, of course; but she did not come out with the squeak of coy consternation which one might reasonably have expected from her past performance in her own hallway at Oyster Bay. Instead, her carmined nails dug into the tablecloth so hard that they left furrows in the linen, and her complexion paled under its crust of powder until she looked like a fat frostbitten ghost. The sheer coagulation of her face was a distillate of all that unearthly majestic austerity that wins battles in the committee meetings of women's clubs.
"Let me take care of this," she said ominously, and stood up.
She moved with surprising swiftness for her bulk, and she met Milton Ourley halfway down the room. Once again she was like a stately galleon ploughing through a cluttered harbor. Milton might have been compared with a squat broad fussy tug, except that it was the galleon which took him in tow. Simon could hear something like a hoarse spluttering "dabbity dab dab", like a rumble of distant thunder, but it made just as little difference to the general flow of motion. Mr Ourley might actually have made a great physical effort to struggle towards the Saint's table, but the achievements of his kampf were not readily discernible. Borne like a cockleshell upon his spouse's regal bow wave, he was washed back into the lobby, still booming like a frustrated foghorn, and disappeared from the scene.
Simon kept his head down while he examined and signed the check that was already on the table, and then he caught the eye of the maitre d'hotel and brought him over with a mere wisp of a gesture.