Templar was coming down the stairs, lighting a cigarette, mocking and immaculate and quite obviously unharmed.
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 exposure, 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
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 hypnotized 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.
