Send for the Saint by Leslie Charteris, Peter Bloxsom

impersonating himself. What a show! And I was the leading player — in the audience!”
    The Patroclos empire was in disarray and confusion; with the consent of the Greek government the American Navy, acting for the United Nations, had intercepted the other five ships and seized all the cargoes. Simon was resigned to staying around for a few days longer in Athens to make further statements to the police; Ariadne was similarly resigned to helping to sort out the loose ends in the office; and both had made up their minds to enjoy the enforced stay.
    “That poor girl,” mused Ariadne. “He was her boss, and she stayed loyal to him. I feel sorry for her.”
    “So do I,” agreed the Saint. “He exploited her as he exploited everyone else. She played her part magnificently, right down to the tears when the news of the plane crash came in.”
    The girl toyed with her glass reflectively. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that they had shared a need to recapitulate and review some of the complications of the extraordinary conspiracy which the late Diogenes Patroclos had developed without sharing any of its threads completely with anyone.
    “I’m still puzzled about the codebook,” she said. “I don’t see why he pretended not to know you’d taken it.”
    Simon lounged back in his chair.
    “The codebook was a very interesting, not to say a crucial part of the whole set-up. And of course, it was partly the codebook, in the end, that gave the game away. Remember that what he had in mind when he first briefed me was to get me into contact with his supposed impersonator for just long enough to convince me that there was a double. My main job was to get the codebook back. That gave me a specific goal — and it gave him the perfect pretext for hauling me off the job before I got too nosey. Once I’d delivered it, he could tell me to quit — “
    “Of course,” broke in the girl. “And that’s why he faked the telegram from Athens — or I suppose he had my namesake send it — and made sure you saw it.”
    Simon nodded.
    “Exactly.”
    ” But why did he commission you anyway — I mean the second time, in London — and then insist you stayed in the house?”
    “That was an absolute master-stroke. It was a plausible enough move anyway, ‘in the interests of security’ as he put it, but his real reason was simply to make it easy for me to pinch the codebook. And he knew I’d bite.”
    “So where did he go wrong?”
    “Apart from the weak basic premise, and my scepticism, there was something else. His own vanity — and a kind of melodramatic cloak-and-dagger streak. He did keep just one copy of the codebook as I figure it — “
    “Yes, as far as I know. He always took it with him when he went away or out of the house for more than a few hours.”
    “Well,” Simon continued, “When I stole it from his safe, he wanted me to think I’d succeeded in getting it to Athens. But he also wanted it there in London — because he was stuck without it. He could have had it sent back, of course, but he preferred to play games by following me at a distance and bringing it back the same night. But I spotted the car behind, and that was when I really started putting the picture together.”
    “But what about the photos? A’lucky accident, you said?”
    He nodded.
    “That was one piece of circumstantial evidence he didn’t manufacture himself. There were two photos — press photos, remember? — with the dates stamped on the back. Both the tenth of June. Dio, presenting a yachting trophy in the Bahamas — that was late afternoon — and Dio at a party in Lisbon that same night, maybe six or eight hours later. Or at least, I assumed it was that same night. And with the time difference, he’d have had to travel almost instantaneously to get there. And it’s three thousand miles.”
    “So how can the photos be explained?” she asked.
    ” By the fact that the Lisbon one was taken first. I saw the