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he wants to. Pongo sees me speak to the cop at the door and go in; presently I come out again, so he takes his chance and lets fry.”
    “But why?”
    The Saint shrugged.
    “Maybe he didn’t like my face. Maybe he knew who I was and was scared things might get too hot if I was butting in. Maybe he’d already trailed you here and he’d only just made up his mind what to do about both of us, which would mean you’re next on his list.
    Maybe a lot of things. That’s one of the questions we’ve got to find the answer to.”
    “But what’s it all about?”
    “It appears to be about seven thousand quid’s worth of bearer bonds, which is enough reason for a good many things to happen. What I’d like to know is how a man who couldn’t pay you a tenner collected all that mazuma. What sort of a job was he in?”
    “He was with a firm of sherry importers in the City.”
    “Sherry!”
    The Saint was motionless for a moment, and then he took another cigarette. He couldn’t have explained himself what it was that had struck that sudden new crispness into his nerves—it was as if he was trying to make his conscious mind catch up with a spurt of intuition that had outdistanced it.
    “You told me that Ingleston had been abroad recently,” he said. “Would he have been likely to go to Spain?”
    “I expect so. He’d been sent there several times before. He spoke Spanish very well, you see–-“
    “Did he have a lot of Spanish friends?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “He had one anyway—there was a signed photograph inscribed in Spanish on his mantelpiece. Did you ever hear of Luis Quintana?”
    “No.”
    “He’s a representative that the Spanish Rebels sent over a few weeks ago… .”
    Simon jumped up and moved restlessly across the room. There was a fierce drive of energy in the restrained movements of his limbs that had to reach some hidden objective quickly or burn itself to exhaustion.
    “Sherry,” he said. “Spain. Spanish Rebels. American bearer bonds. And mysterious Pongos cutting loose with hammers and popguns. There must be something to mix them together and make soup.”
    He took the bundle of bonds out of his pocket and studied one of them again more closely. And then he was wrapped in stillness for so long that the others felt as if they were gripped in the same trance, without knowing why.
    At last he spoke.
    “They look genuine,” he said softly. “Engraving, ink, paper, everything. They look all right. You couldn’t say they were fakes without some special tests. And yet they might be… . “But there’s only been one man in our time who could do a forgery like this—if it is a forgery.”
    “Who was that?” said Patricia.
    The Saint met her gaze with blue eyes glinting with lights that held the essence of the mystery which he himself had just been trying to fathom.
    “He was a Pole called Ladek Urivetzky—and I read in the paper that he was executed by a firing squad in Oviedo about a month ago.”
    V
    And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.
    “It doesn’t seem to make sense,” Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.
    “It sings songs to me,” said the Saint.
    But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his