Follow the Saint

'This is easy,' he said. 'We'll just batter the door down and walk in.'

He was not quite as blatant as that, but very nearly. He was careful enough to circle the house to the back door; and whether he would actually have battered it down remained an unanswered question, for he had no need to use any violence on it at all. It opened when he touched the handle, and he stepped in as easily as he had entered the garden.

Perhaps it was at that point that he first realized that the unplanned embryo of his adventure was taking a twist which he had never expected of it. It was difficult to pin down the exact moment of mutation, because it gathered force from a series of shocks that superimposed themselves on him with a speed that made the separate phases of the change seem somewhat blurred. And the first two or three of those shocks chased each other into his consciousness directly that un­latched back door swung inwards under the pressure of his hand.

The very fact that the door opened so easily to his explor­ing touch may have been one of them; but he could take that in his stride. Many householders were inclined to be absentminded about the uses of locks and bolts. But the following blows were harder to swallow. The door opened to give him a clear view of the kitchen and that was when the rapid sequence of impacts began to make an impression on his powers of absorption.

To put it bluntly, which is about the only way anything of that kind could be put, the door opened to give him a full view of what appeared to be quite a personable young woman tied to a chair.

There was a subsidiary shock in the realization that she appeared to be personable. Without giving any thought to the subject, Simon had never expected Mr Hogsbotham to have a servant who was personable. He had automatically credited him with a housekeeper who had stringy mouse-coloured hair, a long nose inclined to redness, and a forbid­ding lipless mouth, a harridan in tightlaced corsets whose egregiously obvious virtue would suffice to strangle any gossip about Mr Hogsbotham's bachelor menage—Mr Hogsbotham had to be a bachelor, because it was not plaus­ible that any woman, unless moved by a passion which a man of Mr Hogsbotham's desiccated sanctity could never hope to inspire, would consent to adopt a name like Mrs Hogs­botham. The girl in the chair appeared to be moderately young, moderately well-shaped, and moderately inoffensive to look at; although the dishcloth which was knotted across her mouth as a gag made the last quality a little difficult to estimate. Yet she wore a neat housemaid's uniform, and therefore she presumably belonged to Mr Hogsbotham's domestic staff.

That also could be assimilated—with a slightly greater effort. It was her predicament that finally overtaxed his swallowing reflexes. It was possible that there might be some self-abnegating soul in the British Isles who was willing to visit with Mr Hogsbotham; it was possible that Mr Hogs­botham might be deaf; it was possible that he might be care­less about locking his back door; it was possible, even, that he might employ a servant who didn't look like the twin sister of a Gorgon; but if he left her tied up and gagged in the kitchen while he entertained his guests with ear-shattering excerpts from Wagner, there was something irregular going on under his sanctimonious roof which Simon Templar wanted to know more about.

He stood staring into the maid's dilated eyes while a galaxy of fantastic queries and surmises skittered across his brain like the grand finale of a firework display. For one long moment he couldn't have moved or spoken if there had been a million-dollar bonus for it.

Mr Uniatz was the one who broke the silence, if any state of affairs that was so numbingly blanketed by the magnified blast of a symphony orchestra could properly be called a silence. He shifted his feet, and his voice grated conspira­torially in the Saint's ear.

'Is dis de old bag, boss?' he inquired with sepulchral sangfroid; and the interruption brought Simon's reeling imagination back to earth.

'What old bag?' he demanded blankly.

'De aunt of Patricia's,' said Mr Uniatz, no less blank at even being asked such a question, 'who we are goin' to bump off.'

The Saint took a firmer grip of material things.

'Does she look like an old bag ?' he retorted.