Free The Saint Bids Diamonds by Leslie Charteris Page B

when he was downstairs. Even now they might be talking about it.
    He put the thought firmly out of his mind again. If they suspected him, they suspected him. But if it had been more than suspicion, he doubted whether he would have been sent to bed so peacefully. And if there was any suspicion, a lot of things could happen before it became certainty.
    Meanwhile there were more urgent things to think about. Joris and Christine Vanlinden were still at the hotel, and he could do nothing about them. The only help they had was Hoppy Uniatz, and the Saint smiled a little wryly as he computed how much help Mr Uniatz was likely to be.
    He undressed himself slowly, visualising every other angle of the situation that he could think of.
    He was about ready for bed when he heard the noise of a car that sounded as if it stopped very close to the house, and he went to the window again and looked out. But he was on the side of the house farthest from the road, and he could see nothing. The sound of a door slamming certainly came from within the grounds. He stood there listening, and presently the car started up again. It came slowly round the corner of the house and passed underneath his window on its way to the garage; but although he waited for several minutes longer he could discover nothing else. The voices went on downstairs, and they were still talking when he fell asleep.
    His problems were still unsolved when he was awakened by his door opening. Lauber put an unshaven face into the room.
    “Time to get up,” he said shortly, and went out again.
    The sky outside, which had apparently not been informed of what the guidebooks were saying about it, was leaden and overcast, and there was a damp chill in the air that smelt like impending rain. Still, with all its defects, it was a new day; and the Saint was prepared to be hopeful about it. He went along to the bathroom, where he found and borrowed somebody else’s razor; and he had just finished dressing when Lauber came in again.
    “I’ll show you the dining room.”
    “Is the weather always like this?” Simon asked as they went down the stairs.
    Lauber’s only response to the conversational opening was a vague mumble; and Simon wondered whether his sulky humour was solely due to the sore head from which he must have been suffering or whether it had some other contributory cause.
    Graner was already in the dining room, sitting up in his prim old-maidish way behind the coffee pot and reading a book. He looked up and said good morning to the Saint, and returned at once to his reading. Palermo and Aliston were not visible.
    Since there was no obvious encouragement to idle chatter, Simon picked up a newspaper that was lying on the table and glanced over it while he tried unsatisfactorily to break his fast with the insipid ration of rolls and butter which the Latin countries seem to consider sufficient foundation for a morning’s work, reflecting that that was probably why they never managed to do a morning’s work.
    Almost as soon as he took up the sheet the headlines leapt to his eye. The press of Tenerife is accustomed to devote three or four columns inside the paper to the inexplicable gyrations of Spanish politicians; a European war can count on two or three paragraphs in the “Information from Abroad”; the front page leads are invariably devoted to a solemn discussion of the military defence of the Canary Islands, which every good Canarian is convinced that other nations are only waiting for an opportunity to seize; and the local red-hot news, the sizzling sensation of the day, rates half a column under the standard heading of “The Event of Last Night”-there never having been more than one event in a day, and that usually being something like the earth-shaking revelation that a couple of citizens started a fight in some tavern and were thrown out. But for once the military defence of the Canary Islands and the prospects of luring more misguided tourists to Tenerife had