But it was
not the sight of the Saint that petrified Mr Teal
into tottering
stillness and bulged his china-blue eyes half
out of their sockets,
exactly as the eyes of all the other men
in the hall were also
bulged as they looked upwards with
him. It was the sight of the girl who
was coming down the
stairs after the Saint.
It was
Angela Lindsay.
The reader
has already been made jerry to the fact that the
clinging costumes
which she ordinarily affected suggested
that underneath them
she possessed an assortment of curves
and contours of exceptionally enticing
pulchritude. This
suggestion was now elevated to the realms of
scientifically
observable fact. There was no further doubt about it, for
practically all of them were open to inspection. The sheer
and
diaphanous underwear which was now their only
covering left nothing
worth mentioning to the imagination. And she seemed completely unconcerned
about the expo
sure,
as if she knew that she had a right to expect a good deal
of admiration for what she had to display.
Mr Teal
blinked groggily.
“Sorry
to be so long,” Simon was saying casually, “but
our pals
left a bomb upstairs, and I thought I’d better put
it out of action.
They left Verdean lying on top of it. But
I’m afraid he didn’t
really need it. Somebody hit him once
too often, and it looks as if he has
kind of passed away….
What’s the matter, Claud ? You look slightly
boiled. The old
turn-turn isn’t going back on you again, is it?”
The
detective found his voice.
“Who
is that you’ve got with you ?” he asked in a hushed
and
quivering voice.
Simon
glanced behind him.
“Oh,
Miss Lindsay,” he said airily. “She was tied up
with the
bomb, too. You see, it appears that Verdean used
to look after this
house when the owner was away—it
belongs to a guy named Hogsbotham—so he had a
key, and when he was looking for a place to cache the boodle, he
thought
this would be as safe as anywhere. Well, Miss
Lindsay was in the
bedroom when the boys got here, so
they tied her up along with Verdean. I
just cut her loose——
”
“You
found ‘er in
‘Ogsbotham’s
bedroom ?” repeated one
of the
local men hoarsely, with his traditional phelgm
battered to limpness
by the appalling thought.
The Saint
raised his eyebrows.
“Why
not?” he said innocently. “I should call her an
ornament to
anyone’s bedroom.”
“I
should say so,” flared the girl stridently. “I never had any
complaints yet.”
The
silence was numbing to the ears.
Simon
looked over the upturned faces, the open mouths,
the protruding
eyeballs, and read there everything that he
wanted to read. One of
the constables finally gave it voice.
Gazing upwards with the stalk-eyed
stare of a man hyp
notized by the sight of a miracle beyond human
expectation,
he distilled the inarticulate emotions of his comrades
into
one reverent and pregnant ejaculation.
“Gor-blimy!”
he said.
The Saint
filled his lungs with a breath of inenarrable
peace. Such moments of
immortal bliss, so ripe, so full, so
perfect, so superb, so flawless and
unalloyed and exquisite,
were beyond the range of any feeble words.
They flooded
every corner of the soul and every fibre of the body, so
that the
heart was filled to overflowing with a nectar of
cosmic content. The
very tone in which that one word had
been spoken was a benediction. It gave
indubitable promise that within a few hours the eyewitness evidence of Ebenezer
Hogsbotham’s depravity would have spread all over
Chertsey,
within a few hours more it would have reached
London, before the
next sunset it would have circulated
over all England; and all the denials
and protestations that
Hogsbotham might make would never restore his
self-made
pedestal
again.
XI
S
IMON TEMPLAR
braked the
Hirondel to a stop in the pool of blackness under an overhanging tree less than
a hun
dred yards
beyond the end of Greenleaf Road. He blinked bis
lights three times, and lighted a cigarette while he waited.
Patricia Holm held his arm tightly. From the back
of the
car came gurgling sucking
sounds of Hoppy Uniatz renew
ing his
acquaintance with the bottle of Vat 69 which he had
been forced by
circumstances to neglect for what Mr Uniatz
regarded
as an indecent length of time.
A shadow
loomed out of the darkness beside the road,
whistling very softly.
The shadow carried a shabby valise
in one hand. It climbed into the back
seat beside Hoppy.
Simon
Templar moved the gear lever, let in the clutch;
and the Hirondel
rolled decorously and almost noiselessly
on its way.
At close
quarters, the shadow which had been added to the passenger list could have been
observed to be wearing
a policeman’s uniform with a sergeant’s
stripes on the
sleeve, and a solid black moustache which obscured the
shape of
its mouth as much as the brim of its police helmet
obscured the exact
appearance of its eyes. As the car got
under way, it was hastily stripping off
these deceptive scenic
effects and changing
into a suit of ordinary clothes piled on
the seat.
Simon spoke
over his shoulder as the Hirondel gathered
speed through the
village of Chertsey.
“You
really ought to have been a policeman, Peter,” he
murmured. “You
look the part better than anyone I ever
saw.”
Peter
Quentin snorted.
“Why
don’t you try somebody else in the part?” he
inquired acidly. “My nerves won’t
stand it many more times.
I still don’t know
how I got away with it this time.”
The Saint
grinned in the dark, his eyes following the
road.
“That
was just your imagination,” he said complacently.
“There wasn’t
really much danger. I knew that Claud
wouldn’t have been allowed to bring his
own team down
from Scotland Yard. He was just assigned to take charge
of the case. He might have brought an assistant of his own, but he had to use
the local cops for the mob work. In the excite
ment, nobody was going
to pay much attention to you. The local men just thought you came down from
Scotland Yard
with Teal, and Teal just took it for granted that you were
one of the local men. It was in the bag—literally and
figuratively.”
“Of
course it was,” Peter said sceptically. “And just what
do you
think is going to happen when Teal discovers that
he hasn’t got the
bag?”
“Why,
what on earth could happen?” Simon retorted
blandly. “We did
our stuff. We produced the criminals, and
Hoppy blew them off,
and Teal got the boodle. He opened the bag and looked it over right here in the
house. And Pat
and Hoppy and I were in more or less full view all the
time.
If he goes
and loses it again after we’ve done all that for him,
can he blame us ?”
Peter
Quentin shrugged himself into a tweed sports
jacket, and sighed
helplessly. He felt sure that there was a
flaw in the Saint’s
logic somewhere, but he knew that it was
no use to argue. The
Saint’s conspiracies always seemed to
work out, in defiance of reasonable
argument. And this episode had not yet shown any signs of turning into an
exception.
It would probably work out just like all the rest.
And there was
unarguably a suitcase containing about
fifteen thousand
pounds in small change lying on the floor of the car at his feet to lend weight
to the probability. The
thought made Peter Quentin reach out for Mr
Uniatz’s
bottle with a reckless feeling that he might as well make
the
best of the crazy life into which his association with the
Saint had
led him.
Patricia
told him what had happened at the house after
he faded away
unnoticed with the bag.
“And
you left her there ?” he said, with a trace of wistfulness
.
“One
of the local cops offered to take her back to town,”
Simon
explained. “I let him do it, because it’ll give her a
chance to
build up the story.
…
I don’t think we shall hear
a lot more
about Hogsbotham from now on.”
“So
while I was sweating blood and risking about five
hundred years in penal
servitude,” Peter said bitterly, “you
were having a grand
time helping her take her clothes off.”
“You
have an unusually evil mind,” said the Saint, and drove on, one part of
his brain working efficiently over the
alibi that Peter was
still going to
need before morning, and all the rest of him singing.